Marathon Con Traspie

Pants, Shirts, and Scarves oh my!

2012-02-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

So, this is why the rampant vanity sizing plague must be stopped: I am fairly ambivalent about what number is hanging out around the back of the pants I wear. honestly, half the time my underwear is already hanging out the back of my pants, so some little label is fairly well dwarfed by enormous day-glo cotton (hopefully day-glo, since that sort of off-color white granny look is far less stylish). Whether I'm size 10 or size 1+0 is pretty irrelevant to me... in theory. I am not a number; I am a free (wo)man!!!

And I'm sure as h*#ll not a size SIX, damnit!

But over the years, I've been unilaterally downgraded to what seems to average out to be about a size 4 in most marketable brands of clothing. It varies within brand, and I even found a 4 in Gap's long and lean selection to be baggy as all get out while another long and lean 6 fit pretty well... but on average size 4 in today-size-speak. And, therein lies the rub: good luck finding a 4 Long in your average store. After I think size 6, many manufacturers shorten the inseam. It also can make shopping at Goodwill or Value Village (etc.) pretty interesting, because not only do you have the usual challenges of different makes and models of jeans (times one hundred because the store is no longer selling jeans branded towards a typical customer, so there are as many brands as imaginable), but different vintages of your recognizable brands. Is this a Gap last year or twelve years ago? Because I assure you this will matter and it's not always clear just from sight. I guess in a a good day, it makes the whole experience feel like one grand scavenger hunt, but I tend to find clothing shopping to be more draining than invigorating.

But I have prevailed. I went numb, blacked out and split my resources between Fred Meyers and Value Village. I now have pants that fit! For the next few months until I randomly gain/lose weight or wake up with my current body-fat redistributed as per some redistricting law that I hadn't been following closely enough. A standard pair of Banana Republic Jeans, a pair of unfamiliarly branded glittery jeans, and a pair of black jeans that are actually suitable for work.The work pants are a bit odd for me, being straight legged and skinny fit. Most of my pants flare a touch from the calf, which I think is generally more flattering, while these are not quite as neurotically clingy as a pair of jeggings, but still follow the narrowing effect of my legs. Makes my black and pink Sketchers really stand out, let me tell ya. But they do not show off my underwear or other questionably suggestive lady-part-previews, so they are quite full of winning on that regard.

Ok, it's kind of hard to see the skinny leg and the outrageous shoes. In fact, it's hard to self-photograph really at all. But I like to think I've gone artsy enough to make up for that. I can't really demonstrate that actually I am now able to wear many of my tops that cut off a little bit short of my hip, since I don't have the emerging underwear problem to cover up! And yes, I'm flashing some stomach, but how often during my regular working hours do I hoist my arm up over my head? Only like five or six times a day! It is, I assure you, very exciting. Here's another horrifying picture of my joyous leopard print trimmed shirt.

Oh my god, you're taking a photo of me, me? I'm sooooo surprised! Now that's what we call candid photography. But admit it, it's cute.

The downside, of course, is that they are very revealingly tight and this means that Nate - my dance teacher - can see every horrid detail of shoddy leg work when I am wearing them. I suppose this is good for me, but so many things that are good for me are awfully much like cod liver oil sometimes. Of course, he says that to really figure out what looks good while dancing, a dancer must practice in front of a mirror... in his/her underwear!! Oh the horror!

In other fashionable news, I've decided that I am ultimately not bound to wearing suits in order to look professional. Instead I have decided that I can wear pants and shirts and maybe top it off with a nice scarf. Yes, I've decided again that I am a scarf person at work and in play. Which incidentally leads me into another acquisition and completion of a long-standing fashion goal. I now own a hounds tooth scarf! It's long been a dream to own something in hound stooth and finally I do. I am victorious!

And a total narcissist. But I really did enjoy this outfit. I rarely go for full on coordination and most days go for just barely passable - i.e. not covered in food stains and more or less covered in the applicably scandalous areas.

How's Salad Rides Again... to the mall

2012-02-04T12:32:00.000-08:00

It's been an awfully long time since I did a How's Salad post. I occasionally comment on various restaurants elsewhere, but haven't started discussing the restaurant options for somebody of my - er - particular tastes and preferences in Bellingham. And actually there are a decent amount. I have an ongoing google document that I share with my mom so that we can refer quickly and easily to restaurants that will both feed normal folks like her and her boytoy (ok "normal" may be a bit of a stretch for anyone sharing genetic material with yours not-always-entirely-truly, but it's all relative) and people like me.

One of those that has risen to the top for me has been somewhat surprisingly The OLD COUNTRY BUFFET.

Surprising, because it is in many regards a paean to American excess. The majority of the meal is oiled white bread, fried food and meat, with sides of grilled cheese, mac and cheese, pizza and cheese, cheese and cheese, and maybe some sour cream. Then of course there is the dessert wing. And it is a separate wing. Lest we forget, we also have fifteen choices of soda and a slurpee machine in the beverage bar.

Going to the OCB,one will encounter about three categories of people that occasionally intersect: old people, extremely obese people, and Asian people who immigrated to British Columbia but come to the mall for shopping. They are rarely either old or obese. Oh and parents of young children for obvious reasons. I never imagined it as a place I would consider eating, but appearances can be deceiving.

This person, for instance is actually a professional
ballerina with the PNB!

The first time I went there, it was sort of a funny jokey thing to do with an old boyfriend. I guess he had a coupon and I wanted to go to the carnival, which was in the mall parking lot that year. So we thought "ha ha, old people and fat people gumming food... how sociologically interesting." I refuse to call the endeavor ironic in that horrible hipster way, but there were some of those intentions going into it. We were early twenties and our first date had been at a bowling alley, so there was a lot of pressure to top that in terms of the novelty factor.

Color me surprised to discover that they had a salad bar. And not your typical bag-of-iceberg-and-specks-of-cabbage salad bar. A real salad bar. Pretty much any restaurant with a halfway decent salad bar wins my thumbs up and this one is competitively good. When it comes to my rabbit-food dietary preferences, I actually eat a lot of food, but not the kind of food you can usually find at restaurants in any quantity. At an ordinary restaurant you usually have the option of a heaping amount of food with degree of transformative processing that makes the food disagree with me (very few cooking methods add much for my personal tastes - steaming is nice, but even then there can be excessive salting) or a very very small quantity of something edible. This is why I often come home from eating out and immediately make myself something to eat. Honestly, I usually eat out for the experience of being with people far more than for the eating, which is far more easily satisfied when I prep food for myself. But here, it's all I can eat! I can stuff myself with two or three community gardens' worth of food!!! The list goes on. Here's a sampling of my last meal at the OBC:

You'll have to forgive the poor photography, since my camera phone is not exactly genius and I start to get weird looks when I try to frame up better photos. But as you can see: beets, diced tomatoes, onions, cilantro, spinach, romaine, field greens, corn, peas, cucumbers, chopped egg whites, broccoli, and cauliflower all made plate number one. And I don't have to ask for salad dressing "on the side" or for the fancy cheeses and weird meat products to be left off and anticipate the lecture from a particularly self-righteous waitperson about how I could have requested a smaller jar of salad dressing if I didn't really want to have it (this has happened to me twice in the last few years), or the awkward interaction of sending something back when my request has been ignored. In fact, aside from saying "hello" to the bus person and occasionally letting him or her (ok, it's always been a her for whatever reason) take my empty plate, I don't have to interact with anybody in order to get my food... exactly the way I want it.

And they do have some steamed veggies of varying qualities (the corn this time was buttered and thus not great for my stomach, but it often isn't). More beets, because I adore beats, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, onions and greenbeans with a little bit of kidney beans and garbanzo beans.

And of course, for dessert, buffets actually work quite well for me since my eye is far more ambitious than my tongue which is far more ambitious than my stomach. As I may have mentioned I tend to have a tendency to want just a nibble of ... well... everything. But after a nibble, my tongue is done and oversaturated with the sweet or the fatty, and then my stomach kicks in and I am unable to continue. Ordinarily, I get into a mite of trouble reaching across the table to sample each and every dessert on every person's plate. But at buffets, it's actually ok in a way that would otherwise be considered rude, to take just a teeny tiny sample of everything. I cut off bite sized portions of about a third of the fifty billion desserts, taking sips of decaf coffee in between each to cleanse my palate. Completely sidesteps the diminishing marginal returns of an ordinary dessert experience for me. They also shockingly offer sugar free yogurt, sugar free cookies (I guess with old and obese customers being your mainstay, you've got to accommodate for diabetics somewhere along the lines) and reduced sugar pies and puddings. So even if I sample everything, my stomach doesn't start to do the sugary flip flops.

Vanilla pudding, bread pudding, chocolate pudding, banana pudding, apple crisp, reduced sugar apple pie, key lime pie, sugar/fat free vanilla frozen yogurt, ranger cookie, oatmeal cookie, and ... ok I totally forget what's on the upper right hand but I think it was good. I'll admit to not finishing the larger bites on my plate, but at least I didn't feel guilty the way I do when I return a plate to the ktichen ("no box, thanks") that still looks completely full except for one or two bites. Here, my plate comes back to the table looking mostly eaten so there is no judgment. Also, I get to take multiple micro-walks between courses.

The atmosphere is admittedly a little odd at times. There are not necessarily clearly delineated lanes of traffic for circling the various buffet aisles or tables and so inevitably there are many near-misses and people there are often perfectly satisfied being surly and unwilling to recognize that you exist as a person beyond a mere annoyance. We have a few regular bussers who are not the high school kids who are extremely nice and the staff are surprisingly efficient about refilling food between disgruntled diners. If you go on off-hours, the capacity is expansive enough that you can find a good seat far flung from the feeding frenzy in the center. You will likely encounter a screaming toddler at some point, but again, you can usually find a way to avoid them. But for me, what it lacks in ambience is more than made up for in the heaping amount of control I have over what goes onto my plate and the visual satisfaction of infinite dietary possibilities without the commitment of having any of these portioned onto my plate.

not every milonga can have a perfect tanda... and a stab at an actual workweek

2012-01-25T09:35:00.000-08:00

The malaise of holidaze lingers everywhere, really. I suspect that January will simply be a wash, but fortunately it is nearly done and I have good thoughts for February.

This January's milonga is an instance of the sad truth that not every milonga can have a perfect tanda. Or feel quite as personally rewarding as they often do. The cards were simply stacked against such things occurring, I suppose. For one, we had a guest dj this month. I strongly support having guests and I mean no malign against her playlists (since I left early, I couldn't even fairly comment!),but I'll admit to feeling far less of an obligation to stick around or mentally get excited about the milonga when I'm not putting together my perfect playlist. It may also interfere with my plans to reserve partners for said perfect tandas.Then there was the fact that between residual winter vacations, the snow storm, and The Port Townsend Tango Festival, the attendance list whittled itself down to a bare minimum. And as a coup de grace, not only was I under malaise, but I also acquired a migraine earlier than day, which persisted well into the evening.

My migraines are fairly mild, rarely manifesting in the knock-out pain that many experience. I didn't even realize until a few years ago that they were migraines - it's mostly manifested in the aura, in which noises feel echoey, light reverberates about my corneas, and I feel spacey and dizzy. Which is not an ideal way to dance, since doing many turns - or even a few - with one's eyes closed is already slightly dizzying, and I have a very difficult time keeping my eyes open in close embrace. Particularly when the lights are not down that low for whatever reason and any light caught peripherally makes me dizzy as well. I was doing pretty well staying on axis while dancing, particularly (again with the particularly, I know!) in shoes that are too beautiful to chuck but which actually don't fit in the heel very well. But walking off the floor belied the addled state my head was in.

Or maybe my own outfit was the culprit for the dizzies. I've always been proud of how these socks complement each other. I also wore a bright purple sports bra under a slightly low cut top (take that perpetual wardrobe malfunction that is my life!) and a pair of earrings that are particularly pretty and apropos to such an event (ordinarily):

Alas, all my finery could not retrieve an evening destined to fail and I feel a bit like I did on Halloween where I used my totally awesome Elvis costume to go to a party that wasn't much fun and left early. Yes, I'm planning on reusing it again in that case because almost nobody saw it (and you wondered why there were no Halloween pictures... never waste a good outfit).

I hate being so blase, but I virtually abandoned our lesson, which somewhat disjointed due to the fact that there was one complete beginner, one near beginner and a handful of regulars. This means the class was essentially moving too fast for the one beginner and terribly slow for almost every one else. It's an orientation class so it should have been moving more slowly with technique for the more advanced dancers. I ordinarily leap in and try to regulate this balance, but I just didn't have the energy. It may have been the worst class I've taught (or didn't teach) in a good deal of time.

There were a few good dances, mostly with Mr. (W)right and mostly good because I spent the tanda biting his ear or otherwise harassing him, dipping myself, and not trying to dance upright. For "serious" (I'm never all that serious but sometimes I stumble into a reverie or two) dancing, I had two tandas that worked for me: one with a favorite student/practice partner of mine, and one with my Harry Potter partner, who is as always a surprisingly sweet and smooth dancer. I am not familiar enough with him that I will seek out dancing with him when I'm not on my game - I don't want to ruin the positive impression and we're not at the unconditional connection stage in our dance relationship. But he asked me to dance and I could hardly turn him down. I warned him I was feeling lightheaded but we managed quite well. It was not pure tango ecstasy as I really was feeling dizzy and slightly distracted, but it broke through the blarg into at least a very nice.

Beyond tango: We're in my first official workweek of 2012 after a lot of dalliances and inconveniences and days off and the office is feeling the crunch. I am as well in oddly ambivalent modes that are becoming familiar to me. I go back and forth between feeling excited to have three whole clients, a number of files to work through, and a whole 'nother consult just next week(!!) and feeling discouraged that I only have three clients and every one else in the office has soooo much more work to do.. It's all perspective and which expectations I am holding myself up against, at this stage in the new-lawyer process.

There's a part of me that is discouraged at how few consultations I am getting and is wondering if I should be out there more or lowering my rates or... well I don't know exactly, because ultimately most referrals are inevitably word of mouth and nobody really has enough experience with me as an attorney to be spreading that word. And, while occasionally we do get the "I need an attorney" people calling in, most of the time, people call here - to the Law Offices of Pamela E. Englett - because they want Pamela E Englett (and I don't blame them - she's pretty damned good!). The other part of me feels like I am getting a boatload of valuable learning experiences working with and for my mom's official clients and wading into the full fiduciary boatload is a fantastic approach.

There's a part of me that feels like I should have already made any kind of negotiations with other parties, or gone in front of a commissioner or two by now, or just generally be able to do what I'm doing now much faster and more cleanly! Aaaand there's a part that is just totally thrilled at the fact that I can draft set of papers without having to call the Crisis Hotline or locate my security blankie and give fairly decent advice when clients ask. There's a part of me that feels exhausted trying to generate work when every one else is already so in the habit of keeping it for themselves that they don't even realize they're overburdened and I am not. And a part of me that's proud of days l where I scalp a load of it and rush through it, while simultaneously updating case status sheets and reminding people of various case issues and - joy of joys - maybe doing some legal research which is so totally my area.

So, I waffle (Wafflebot HATES PANCAKES!!). Inevitably sometimes feel liike Superlawyer and sometimes feel like lame-o-loafer-lawyer leaching off her mother's goodwill despite my astoundingly excellent credentials. Comes with the territory, I guess. Not that I, as an attorney, am not supposed to embrace my bloodsucking instincts, but I think I would be turning them in the wrong direction at that point. It's at least a comfort in my less optimistic moments that I know all too well that it is only one way of looking at things. And it is even more of a comfort that many times I have felt such anxiety and told myself to just be patient with myself and things have indeed worked out. In hte meantime, I will continue to boggle at the idea that any one would let me have the sort of full on fiduciary duties that I have yet to fully flex on behalf of another human being. It's as if they didn't get the memo about my being a child in disguise as as professional.

Your honor, my client has no memory of the bananas to which
respondent refers!

Is is February Yet? Not on track to get back on track.

2012-01-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

It has been a thoroughly disorienting toe-tipping-wade in 2012 (the year, not the disaster movie) so far. January has yet to be the business-as-usual return from the Holiday insanity of December that I ordinarily expect. I'm not sure I recall the last full week I've worked, but I do think there was one squished in there somewhere. No, actually not in 2012. The first week of January we had Monday off in observance of New Year's. Since I am now on the board of the Whatcom Collaborative Professionals - and this happens to meet on the first Monday - this necessitated a rescheduling to Friday, after which I took off to meet my financial planner (oh my god, I have a lawyer and a financial planner and an ad in the Weekly: barring the fact that I have fewer clients than fingers, I have so totally made it!). The week after that, of course was my delightful deposition (see previous post). And that brings us to this week.

This Monday was MLK day, after which Washington got what has regrettably been called Snowpocalyse (regrettable because the term is tired and I think it played out last year already) and its companion ICESTASTROPHE (or ok, I just made that up - you'll have to look on the polls to figure out our official storm title).

I'll get to weathercondition+disastersuffix in a second, but more about my work weeks that weren't weeks. I have actually been into work many of the days of this week. On Monday, I dropped in to check on messages and get client numbers in case things took a turn for the wintry. I actually did work on Tuesday. And on Thursday of this week. And today! That's three outta five. I even took work "home" (decided to stake out at my mom's house in anticipation of some form of end-of-the-world-Day-After-Tomorrow-with-wolves-and-stuff disaster, so that I could fight wolves and die with loved ones) with me for Wednesday. I didn't really do it, I have to say. I tried many times, but it was ultimately a snow day and we'll not be billing any one for the repeated hours of "oh yeah I should get to Client X... huh oh look snow!"

On Tuesday I even met with a prospective client and everything. It was mildly terrifying, particularly because she had brought her father, and I still feel like I may be a child in disguise. I figure people around my age may be fooled, but doting parents will inevitably out me. Also, given all the snow and wet, I was sporting a rather spiffy pair of leather pants instead of my usual enormous suit pants. I did, however, resist the urge to snap my gum or swear and/or otherwise emulate My Cousin Vinny despite looking appropriate for a female update on the role.

Thursday, I also had a consultation for what could be my first official COLLABORATIVE CASE (yay, hurrah, wheeeee, pleeeeaaase). The great thing about collaborative law for consultations is that CL operates on the level of personal interests, options, opportunities and relationships. The law's still there, but there aren't the abstruse forests of timelines and arcane details over which to quibble while questioning whether the font size of your current pleading meets the local standards. Massaging egos, addressing cognitive biases, rebalancing power differentials, identifying interests etc. is *exhausting* but it's something that I am (1) intuitively inclined towards and (2) well trained to handle. So I feel a lot less like I'm perpetually screwing everything up and committing malpractice because there's a case about what the world "substantial" means in RCW 1034.401.304214 that I haven't read but which is utterly controlling.

Epic struggles with being-a-grown-up aside, it hasn't been a particularly ordinary week. I think next week will be my first full week since mid-December. And, you know, if I could be independently wealthy, I wouldn't mind working part time, I've gotta say. I hope I don't go into some form of shock at the prospect of five whole days in a row!

Honestly, though, I'm looking forward to it. I feel like being so out of any kind of routine leaves me perpetually unsure what day it is and the uncertainty actually makes each individual day seem longer and less like it has a natural rhythm. It doesn't help that my regular excercise/social events have also been on the back burner since some time in December due to a conglomeration of simular circumstances to those already outlined.

Because honestly at the moment, every day is feeling like this!

Oh yeah, weathercondition+disastersuffix: it happened. It was rather a lot like other winter storms that we get. Cities shut down, people were cold, the weather suddenly became the most interestsing topic of conversation and internet obsession ever. I seriously spent a large portion of Wednesday watching the weather coverage on King 5, while reloading my radar map on The Weather Channel, and checking that against wunderground... while staring out the window. It was oddly riveting. This is what my life has been reduced to! I am so disoriented by the lack of time frame reference that all I want to do right now is go home, bundle up in my ugliest sweats and overload myself on the hour to hour details of the weather. No, I don't want to read a book, watch movies, hang out with my loved ones. Loved ones can talk to me about the weather. They can even add their input from their smartphone widgets. But they are mere accessories in my current weather-fantasia. Even right now, I'm dolefully staring out the window wondering "where is my freezing rain? Will there be floods? I wonder what King5 would say about the projected dew point for two hours from now!"

Be still my heart!

Fashunnnn - His and Hers (on loan) Leather Pants

2012-01-14T17:06:00.000-08:00

I like what isn't mine. I guess this is human nature. I never really want dessert, cheese, pasta, but I do want a nibble of somebody else's. Most of my loved ones have learned to accept this to the point that I really have to be careful to remember which people it is and is not acceptable to pick from. I know the day will come where I'll be out with a colleague or friend and meet their horrified gaze as I reach across the table to pick out a particularly attractive piece of tofu, or nibble on a cookie before leaving it back on their plate. I am so lucky to have people who tolerate me on this, because sampling what others have is one of the spices of my life (other spices include turmeric, cayenne, chipotle, cumin...)

I may do the same this with clothes. From time to time, I end up appropriating some item or other of Mr. (W)right's. Maybe it's a pair of pants or a baggy sweater, but it's often something that makes it way from temporary loan to Property of Adella Thompson (goes with the tattoo that I've secretly been inking on his nether regions while he sleeps).

Yesterday, it was his hallowed college-days leather pants. He's worn them a total of once since we've been together and categorically proved to himself in that experience that (1) leather pants were not meant for warm steamy blues dancing, (2) they don't fit him quite like they used to in "the old days" before he developed a little more junk in his trunk since college, due more to a few too many 15% grade hill climbs on a bike than a few too many chocolate cheesecakes, although to be sure the man can put away quite a lot of both steep hill climbs *and* insanely caloric desserts.

At any rate, my pants continue not to fit (see every other blog posting or so I have ever made) and I continue to be a cold blooded animal in a household without much insulation, so they have been my saving grace. Leather pants are warm! Also these stay on me without threatening to fall off. It tends to amuse Andrew when I wear his clothes, and he kept remarking about how differently they fit me than him, so I thought it only fair to do a his and hers FASHUNNNN spread to supplement my intentions of releasing fashion catalogs for super hip-hip-hipster-wannabes:

So that's the "hers." Andrew seemed to think I'd hate the final photo, but I think it's really kind of the most fashion forward of the bunch. I'm feeling a contract with American Outfitters in my disgusted-yet-quirkily-posed look of hepwilderment.

Andrew kind of cheated, so it isn't a fair comparison. Mostly he demurely posed to hide the fact that the pants don't button up on him anymore, or at least not without severely compromising his future fertility and possibly requiring a trip to the ER. Also he limited the control sampling by not wearing my little white tank top or quirky striped socks. But at least he's got the high fashion pout and one-legged posing going on. We could almost be twins (except then we'd be veering into Greek Tragedy land, so maybe not!)

You can't really tell from the photo, but they're really a bit too short on me and were definitely made for men, since they actually have too much room in the quadriceps, which no women's pants ever would do on somebody with my musculature (I am kind of awesomely ripped in the legs).

Anyways, they are on loan to me for now, since I can wear them without risking being arrested in public parks. This plus the pair of (size 4 - yes, we are verging into vanity sizing of even more thrilling proportions! and these proportions are definitely a bit lacking in the inseam division) pants that I bought on sale a few days ago equals a pants wardrobe of two whole pairs that mostly fit but are too short on me!

Thank god my fellow is such a fashionisto (that's the proper masculine form of fashionista right?) so I can pilfer his wardrobe and come out looking spiffier.

For my future catalog collection, we will also be featuring the latest in trendy-trends: cycling wear. It is screaming for a hipster conquest:

I'm really quite excited about heading up the men's pantalon style. Kind of like the women's harem pants, but shinier and poofier.And more likely to be orange, red or yellow! Also who doesn't need one of these hats? I mean you can see this damned thing from space!

Also, after about a week of angsting and miscommunications and sizing mayhem, Andrew has a new rain jacket. I can't really steal that from him ... yet. He's rather attached to it.

As of two twenty today, I have been deposed

2012-01-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

Deposition I say? How exciting! How salacious and legalistic and utterly thrilling and important! I love the smell of Grisham in the morning! "You can't handle the truth!" Etc. etc.

For those who don't know me very well - or are terrifically poor stalkers - I was involved in a four car pile up at the end of my first year of law school. I'd make a witty comment about the experience, but I've already made all of them explaining the story to various people. Suffice to say, it was apparently in April of that year. I'd forgotten when, just that it was a sucky month, but all the legal documents I've seen have said April. It is, or so I hear, the cruelest month, so that makes sense. I do remember "it" nipping at the heels of a half-expected break up over Easter weekend mixed in with about 16 weekend hours of intensive detail-oriented writing homework for a one credit class that made up for being one credit by only lasting two and a half weeks and thus actually requiring roughly a full-time job's worth of attention during its duration, in turn meaning no post-breakup sniffling or margaritas. Oh and I had yet to get back any of my grades really for the entire year so I was fairly certain that I was either failing out of law school or - horror of horrors - stuck there for another endless two years. As an aside, I will say that the following two years felt far shorter than the first half of the first quarter of my first, and far more pleasant, thank goodness. But anyways. Mostly I remember hitting something and sitting at the side of the road laughing, because at a certain point it is just horribly funny and you kind of have to shrug and say "ok, life, you got me."

Needless to say, when I was - three years minus change later - served with papers on my birthday, I was not entirely optimistic about my chances of escaping liability that would then fall to my insurance company to address. For one, I was admittedly at the tail end of a really crappy Country-Western-worthy week at the time, so it wasn't a stretch to imagine I wasn't driving all that brilliant. And lawyers actually are notoriously poor drivers, so imagine how much worse law students are! It's a miracle I wasn't turning every road I drove on into a demolition derby, really! For another, I was at the back of the crash-pack and rear-enders are presumptively at fault in our state. Not to mention that I got a ticket for the whole thing... Damage is pretty much done (har har) to my insurance rating. Once I got the insurance company to engage an attorney, I was pretty much ready to ignore the whole thing, aside from my lingering PTSD panic attacks on the freeway and random rants about people tailgating and how *DANGEROUS* it is. Never ride with somebody who has been in an accident - they are insufferable passengers.

Anyways, car cases are weird and I'm only peripherally involved, so have paid very little attention to the case as its developed since August But it was D-day today! So time to be involved again. I hit the road as is typical of my insane over-preparedness with obscene amounts of time to spare -slightly more than an hour earlier than needed, just to have some "wiggle room" if I got lost. I figured,if all went well, I would wait at the Starbucks for a while. I also figured that I would probably get into some kind of accident on the way day, because well, it would just figure wouldn't it? I figured incorrectly on both. No accident, but no luxurious wait at Starbucks tinkering with my smart phone either.

In fact, I ended up getting there with only two minutes to spare, because - if the accident itself didn't make clear - driving in Seattle is God's punishment to mankind and some car had "stalled out" which for some reason took up two lanes on the freeway in downtown Seattle. It took me forty minutes to get myself from North Seattle to an exit remotely close enough to downtown to wing it and wind my way through the abstruse/obtuse city "grid" of one ways, curving streets, roads to nowhere, and pointless swerving vehicular dervishes that is Seattle traffic.

But, hell, I made it. I found the parking garage. I found guest parking. After wandering a bit, I found the elevator to emerge from the bowels of the earth where the parking garage was located. I found an escort at security.I found a bathroom (thank god!) and I found my deposition room with lots of surprisingly nice attorneys. I then proceeded on to give twenty minutes of perhaps the most worthless testimony under oath in the history of depositions.

Two and a half hours of turmoil and tooth-gnashing to go on record saying "I don't remember anything except that it was really really scary." The attorney for the plaintiff didn't even bother to question me other than to ask what field of law I was in and congratulate me on passing the bar. The attorney for my co-defendant asked some questions but then said she wouldn't need a record of my deposition when the clerk asked. So... it was pretty awesome and I'm sooooo glad I had to take the entire day off to be useless! Yeesh! I can be useless at the office! Har har, just kidding potential clients. I'm super useful, I swear. For one, I look pretty sitting next to you at hearings!

Really your honor, my client is a super
nifty parent! *wink* *wink*

Anyways, I found out why on earth this hasn't settled yet. I guess the plaintiff has no damage to the back of her car. She was second up in the pile up and is claiming my co-defendant pushed her into the car in front of her and then I pushed him into her and this pushed her more into the front car. Or something like that. My co-defendant is pretty sure that she hit the car in front of her and he never actually hit her. And I'm pretty sure that it was pretty scary and I just wanted to go home. Aaaaand apparently there is virtually no evidence of impact in the back of the car, she wouldn't give a straight answer about where she was living, and she was recently fired for stealing from the BGO... I guess her attorney is opting to keep her away from a jury so it will likely go to arbitration instead of trial. Darnit! I was so hoping to pull some kind of exciting Matlock in the courtroom. I can sniff out a murderer and trick him into confession while being sassy and swelly in a grey suit! I just know I can. Family law cases - particularly collaborative cases where there are binding contractual agreements to stay out of court - so rarely go to trial that I'll have to commit a crime to have my moment in court any time soon!

As an incidental update to the treaddesk epidemic - this will tie back to the above story, just bear with me - I still love mine and no, I do not get dizzy or have problems typing etc. etc. It is a little loud to talk on the phone while walking - or at least the quarter mile *beep beep beep* set against the background whirrr of the treadmill starts to make people think that maybe I'm at an airport and a bomb is about to go off. But for basic operational typing, emailing (I have permanently pushed the Do Not Disturb button on my phone, which I will eventually have to redress, but so far so good), and researching, it works well. I should add the proviso that it works well when I am walking. I used the treadmill to run this morning in order to pump myself up for the long drive to Seattle and expectedly even longer sit-and-grill of a deposition (I taste better lightly sauteed, but grilling is a healthy alternative to frying anyways... I'd say I actually emerged from the deposition fairly raw but with a slight smoky taste).

Using a mouse, clicking in little text windows, and things of the like do not work as well when you are running at 7 mph (yeah, I'm not a track star, so that's a good pace for me). In fact, they simply do not work. I have been able to use my smart phone at these speeds, but that little devil has more or less burrowed under my skin and achieved perfect symbiosis with me. I will soon have an app that regulates little details like respiration and digestion so I can free up my brain for more important details... like looking at animated gifs of cute little kitties.

Thank you for your time and patience. I am now going to sit at my boyfriend's house - he is still in class - and stare at a wall while muttering "I took vacation time for this?"

My Twelve Days of Holiday Break - Welcome 2012

2012-01-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

Well happy National Back-to-the-cold-bleak-reality day! I hope all had a wonderful holiday and I look forward to seeing more of you skulking around now that your wild and fabulous fantasies and families have wrapped up for the foreseeable future. In case you missed the play by play, here are my twelve (in honor of 2012) days of holiday break.

Dec 22: Closed the office after a fairly harrowing week of emergencies, etc. and decided to prepare for Christmas at my mom's house. We got out the tree, set up the lights, and watched Scrooged. There was a lot of passing out and low energy, so not the most festive day, but probably necessarily restful, all considered.

Dec 23: Andrew came up and met me at my mom's house. Since he's Jewish, I have started insisting that we have our "Christmas Eve" dinner at Chinese restaurants in his honor, even if it's not really Christmas Eve and other restaurants are open, and he ultimately probably doesn't care. But hey, Chinese food is always good, right. We hit Xing's Panda Palace, which is actually awesome. They have these health plates of just steamed veggies and meat or tofu. I think I'm in love. They also have a gallery of ornamental chopsticks and gigantic koi fish in an appropriately huge aquarium.

Dec 24: Our version of Christmas, take one.

Proof that I am (1) thoughtful and
(2) unable to spell pancakes

Dec 25: Babootie time with my dad. Andrew came back to stay with me for the rest of Christmas break. It's kind of an interesting twilight area for both of us, due to the distance. I'm glad in a lot of ways that circumstances have postponed our eventual living together, since I think that is one of the biggest steps a couple can take, and too many take it far too lightly. That said, because we live so far apart, staying over means that we don't quite have our regular morning routines or private areas and still feel accountable to our roommates for any messes/noises/distractions the other causes or access to our full menagerie of possessions, but that maybe we both have some of our stuff at each other's places and feel some accountability for taking care of ourselves beyond what guests would. Anyways,we inhabited the limited space together well, and I even managed to get a decent amount of sleep. It was nice to have that much regular time to spend together and/or do our own things without that sense of time crunch that can come with weekends-only.

Dec 26: No work for me, so Andrew and I had our first official day off together for a decently long time. Andrew set up his trainer and did some spinning in his insanely bright shorts and new jersey. Instead of the original plan of watching Rocky while he was training, he finished up and we went to see My Week with Marilyn. Michelle Williams is brilliant (and amazingly curvy for her usual frame) in the role, incidentally. Definitely worth a see. In the evening, I hauled Andrew to The Blue Moon Ballroom, where he was a lead in their Crash Course - East Coast Swing edition. I read the book I've been neglecting for months until my phone started to lose battery power.

Team kit- Captain America Edition

Dec 27: Back to work. I had an emergency consult wander in. Her problems were far beyond my depth, which was marginally stressful as I ran back and forth from the room to pssst to my mom "ok, so I told her X, but ___" So I was quite ready for the day to wrap up when Andrew picked me up at about 4. We gloriously went TO THE CHRYSALIS DAY SPA to get the massages I'd purchased for Xmas (making us yuppies - broke yuppies, yes, but yuppies!) I only get one or two massages in a year and a massage is useless to me unless I feel the need to scream "ok, ok, I'll tell you where the weapons are, please just STOP!" I had a different kind of soreness the next day than usual, so I call it kind of a win. Also I drooled in the quiet room for a good period of time. An interesting contrast of pain and relaxation, getting a deep tissue massage at a spa.

Dec 28: Intense morning of hearings beginning with waiting through a protection order hearing with a disturbing paranoid schizophrenic who was in custody at the time for violating the prior order and kept accusing his wife of being sent by the US government to kill him, etc. Danced off some of the uck with Nate, in the karate studio that used to be a church... love that venue. Then in the evening, I dragged Andrew back to The Blue Moon to fill in as a lead for the waltz.While there, I ran into two old friends from Uandme days whom I hadn't seen in years. I gave them both my card, which made me inordinately happy.

Part of my ongoing effort to give Mr. (W)right diabetes

Dec 29: Got most of my work caught up and started on some notice of withdrawal I promised I could handle for Leslie if I had time (to be billed as a paralegal, but hey, at least it was billed... to people who we are likely not representing because they don't get our bills or pay...meh, details!).Drowned in paper and felt pretty AAAAAAAAHHHH by the end of it all. I have to say, it made me feel a lot happier about those three agonizing years in law school. Paralegal work is stressful!! Dragged Andrew back to the Blue Moon for a crash course in salsa, and ended up filling in as a lead, myself. Shockingly, I had a blast, and felt really comfortable leading a dance I rarely do. A couple of women said they could really see me working well as a collaborative lawyer, etc. given how patient and clear I was when sort-of-teaching. Not sure they'll remember my name, but I feel like I'm fulfilling my pre-swearing in mandate to go out and do things I love as the preferrable means of networking.

Dec 30: Got those durned notices of withdrawal handled and we closed the office a little bit early, thank goodness. Dragged Andrew back to the Blue Moon, but this time for his first ever zumba lesson (making us, as Matt aptly pointed out, his middle-aged parents).I had a stupid-good time and he seemed to enjoy it as well, despite or because of the excess estrogen in the room at the time. He was of course the only guy other than Marcus.

Ooooh baby, showin' us some GAMS!!

Dec 31: We got up early to go to the ice skating rink, where they were offering free admission and rentals. It was swarming! About fifteen minutes into the skate, they turned off the overhead lights, pumped up the techno music and put on some black lights and flashing ones... so the closest I will be getting to a New Year's Eve party started up at about 9:30 a.m. and somehow I'm ok with that. After wandering around town attempting to find gas that was neither "a rip off" by some internally defined personal sense of outrage or "a huge long wait," we went to my Dad's house to de-Christmas the house. He took us to dinner and dessert and then we went home and watched the totally un-New-Yearsy Spinal Tap and went to bed early. We are rockers

Jan 1: Resolution Run, baby. Every year there's a run around Lake Padden followed by a massive Polar Bear Dip. We went for hte first part. I'd been tempted to do the dip too, but I woke up in the full throes of a chest cold and figured that would be ill-advised. So we circled Lake Padden and called it good. Then went to see Hugo, which is an amazing film that actually used all of its 2 and change hours to positive effect (shocking!) We checked out a new Chinese Buffet, which was pretty appropriately massive and eclectic - and they had wanton soup which Andrew had just been saying he hadn't had in a long time and wanted to. Then we rented Bridget Jones's Diary, since Netflix didn't have it (perpetual let down is Netflix these days) and it is technically kind of a New Year's Film.

Jan 2 One more Monday off.Andrew finally had to go back to get ready for his first quarter as a fully matriculated graduate student (!!) We had breakfast and he put my new turtle shaped bicycle bell on my bike and drove away. I manned up enough to replenish my completely tapped reserve of groceries and then called it a day, not wanting to handle the inevitable holiday mess of laundry and vacuuming and sorting left at my house. Just to belie my status as a grown-up, I fled to my mommie's house and spent the day on her couch, while she and her boy-toy, David charged in and out with big heavy boxes. As previously mentioned, I work at a treadmill desk. Until recently, this "desk" had just been a plank set across the treadmill with a laptop on top. David made a far more attractive and more permanent desk this last month and it has inspired him, so there will be a tread-desk at my mom's house now as well.

It symbolizes the rat-race/hamster
wheel of modern office work

Anyways, the treadmill desk idea for David began approximately yesterday and has now manifested with a new treadmill, the computer desk entirely gone, and a new flat screen monitor. It will be interesting to see how it works out, now that the option of sitting at the computer upstairs has been eliminated. I take no responsibility for however this might turn out.

Completely random, but blessedly absent
from the holidays

But to bring us back to the twelve days... they ended in a stupor and the days of regular work as work begin again today with a few grunts and groans, but a modicum of optimism. I hope all had fantastic Decembers and find January blizzard-free (Dairy Queen Blizzards excluded) and fairly manageable.

Making More of Me to Love: A New Year's Resolution That is Surprising to Me

2011-12-20T16:27:00.001-08:00

Well, the holidays have commenced, have been had in fact, and continue for the having. Christmas was lovely (see various linked photo albums to supplement the narrative, as I am lazy):

With my mom, we started off some grand traditions - namely setting the ceremonial burrito ablaze, dousing the floor with glass and water, and running backwards around the highschool track. There were also some very fine holiday movies (and some less fine ones, of course), and splendid pumpkin waffles made by me and adapted ad hoc (as always) from a vegan recipe that went back to non-vegan when I realized that I had either left the soymilk at the store or lost it in the caverns of my mother's cupboard. Oh and the cat did not destroy the Christmas tree, so all in all a win!

With my Dad, we spent an - and I realize the term is overused, but this really could have been broken out into chaptered verse and multiple sagas - epic Odyssey around the Christmas tree, trying to get through the Christmas cornucopia of sparkly delights sent by my aunties in New Jersey. They sent over 50 wrapped presents of varying degrees of sheer novelty. I would say that the present portion of our day was roughly four times the length of the previous day's. We also made a very fine babootie (a touch sugary for my tastes, but this of course made it perfect for Andrew and my Dad who would eat sugar flavored butter topped with crisps of fried sugar all day if they could get away from it, and the spice combination was succulent). Blah blah blah tradition, gratitude, warm fuzzy feelings, STUFF!!! Christmas and so on...

Which brings us to New Years. I don't really do New Year's resolutions per se. I often reassess my goals and make incremental changes throughout the year, and prefer to think of my goals as evolving and perpetually being implemented in small steps. I find gradual adaptations preferable and more enduring, which is hardly the New Year's NEW BEGINNINGS schtick. Still, since I don't drink much and don't enjoy staying out late or paying ten times as much to do the same basic things I'd do on any Saturday night, I faintly sometimes attach a goal of a given moment to New Year's, just to fall in line with the flocks... tipsy on champagne and bleating Auld Lange Syne. Mine this year is a little interesting for me: namely, I am "resolving" to gain 5-10 pounds.

I am just not those girls with the tiny frames and lightening fast metabolisms who melt off hamburgers and french fries within seconds of eating them by merely turning their heads. Nor am I really one now, so it's a surprising thing to consider, especially in the season of virulent it's ok, the holidays were tough but you *can* lose weight!! articles everywhere.. I will always have birthing hips and thighs that brush. At the high end of my weight range, I'll carry it well and you'll still be able to count my ribs. At either end of the spectrum, clothes will still be large about the waist and tighter at the ribs and hips. I'm built to carry or not carry weight and damned if I can make aesthetic distinctions between carrying and not-carrying.

I have - through my twenties - officially toured through the entire spectrum of healthy weight from slightly overweight to slightly under-weight. I'm ranging around the 120s, which is just under healthy for somebody of my height. I could claim that some of this is muscle loss from not following my maniacal pilates/running/training schedule - but that might miss the point a little. For practical purposes, it means none of my clothes fit, which is sincerely annoying but honestly when have my clothes ever fit?.For larger implications, well, there's a reason they call it "healthy weight," and I needn't elaborate too far onto something already well documented.

Interestingly, I have followed the same trajectory as my mother and sister of being slightly heavier through adolescence and early twenties and then getting far wirier over time. It makes me wonder about the complexities of set points and how much of this is extrinsic behavioral changes versus something more intrinsically biological. I was always fairly active when I was younger and never particularly gluttonous. There have always been factors - I started dancing a lot, there was law school stress, I started running a lot, then THE BAR, then maybe walking on a treadmill all day punctuated between dancing and pilates and aerobics and having little taste or physical tolerance for salty/fatty/sugary/refined foods/meat... So yes, lifestyle changes, no doubt play a part, but it's easier - especially wading through sensationalist "health" article after article claiming that "POTATOES MAKE YOU FAT" or "IT'S ALL HORMONE XYZ" or "EAT ONLY PROTEIN AND STICKS OF BUTTER LIKE OUR ANCESTORS DID!!!" - to believe that body weight is an unintelligible and contentious issue that rivals religious fervor in strong opinions and ultimate reliance on faith and prayer.

That skepticism aside, I've gone back to calorie monitoring. I had to do this when I was running more heavily to make sure I was getting enough food and it is an interesting exercise (har har). I'm trying to aim for enough calories to gain about half a pound a week for a little while based on a little formula that may or may not be useful (either way, it forces me to be conscious of how much I'm eating and add a little more here and there). It is genuinely difficult to do this with a hint of accuracy, as I am a nibbler/grazer and I am a fidgeter... trying to track either of these into meaningful data is challenging. I'm adding a little something to my main meals and an extra snack break, but I still feel a little unsure how it all comes out in the wash. I've been doing this for about two weeks now, and am not sure if it's working or not. But it's all little adjustments... otherwise I will have to give in and buy new pants that don't fall off and that would involve shopping and that would be a nervous breakdown waiting to happen, so we're gonna go with eating more for now!

Equally difficult is the mental shift. The world we Americans live in is *obsessed* with losing/maintaining/reducing weight and this in turn takes on moral, ethical, social, and personal implications. One can say the words "obscenely thin" as a compliment in our twisted society. I can barely find an article about healthy eating that does not have heavy weight loss undertones. People praise me for "resisting" treats and other temptations, while simultaneously attempting to break what they perceive to be my resolve - temptations in the dessert instead of the desert I suppose.. I hope, but doubt, people understand that I am not abstaining from sugary/fatty/salty foods because of my weight. These genuinely make me feel ill and don't taste good to me beyond a short bite that has more to do with satisfying my psychological associations to certain foods than my taste buds. My declining the offer is neither a moral virtue, nor signs of an eating disorder.

What these moments have taught me is that there's always pressure and always attention. I have had so many unsolicited conversations about my weight as it's changed, I have to recognize that it is always on the radar and will always be a component of how I am perceived for better or worse. And, because I am athletic, I will even guess that being lean (and I am far more lean and dare I say "toned" than emaciated or delicate) gives me a slight aura of credibility as a dancer that may be unwarranted but unshakable. And given how imprecise a science the calories-in-calories out formula really seems to be whenever you start to think about it ... it's hard to wonder what might happen if I gain "too much" even as I recognize that I like myself better a little heavier and will never have habits that would open the FLOODGATES of weight gain in two easy days or whatever. Still, as long as I can abstract it through numbers and little baby goals, I think I can side step my own nerves and hesitancy and do what I objectively understand to be better for me over all.

Otherwise, I guess it is time to break out the bubbly and heap on maybe an extra serving of dark chocolate... should get me on my way to a resolution-accomplished New Year

The Twelve Tangos of Christmas

2011-12-18T17:45:00.000-08:00

My Very Merry Mauve Elephant Tango Setlist

As promised, I dj-ed Tango Popolare's monthly milonga (dubbed the Mauve Elephant Milonga because I decided that everyone would bring tango themed gifts to leave wrapped or unwrapped at a table for the taking and mauve seemed like a far more tangorific color than white for my theoretical elephant).

Here, in case you missed it, is the terrifying graphic that I created for the event page:

Obviously, I missed my calling and should have gone into graphic design. Or terrifying small children...

If only I could monetize wearing whimsical
socks, stilettos and short skirts!

In addition to hosting, I was allowed - lord knows why - to set foot near the dj station again, and I needed to pay proper homage to the privilege. Since it was so close to Christmas, I set about trying to holidayafi (officially a word, date of birth, 12/20.2011) my set-list within an inch of its life. This involved a lot of idle browsing and sampling through music stores, finding tangoable songs of a Christmas theme that could then work with other music that I already had to make a set of sorts. Naturally I cut all new holiday cortinas, but I was far prouder of my holiday tangos. Granted, many of them were only sort of holiday tangos and perhaps the equivalent of a dj's inside joke, but I am inordinately proud of my little tango musical stocking stuffers. To keep you distracted from the music geekery about to teem forth in this post, I will intermittently include photos of the evening, which are very adorable.

1. La Marocha was originally written in a single 24 hour period by Enrique Saborido and premiered on Christmas. The story goes that he went out with some boys on Christmas Eve to a nightclub and inspired by a singer Lola Candales. His companions bet he could not write a song for her, so he rushed home, wrote the song and brought it to her Christmas morning. Apparently she liked it enough to sing it that night and it became one of the epitomes of Argentine Tango as it was exported through Paris in the tango craze. This version was by Di Sarli.Paired with El Recodo, Como Los Nardos En Flor, and Un Lamento.

The Santa of Light and the cutest friggin' bow-tie ever!

2. Navidad Vals is an actual Christmas tango vals written by Osvaldo Pugliese and sung by Jorge Maciel . It's not the most danceable of all valses, but it more or less works and complemented some orphaned valses that haven't really made it into prior sets due to lacking companion valses for a good tanda. One of the valses, Gobbi's La Vieja Derenata, was also sung by Jorge Maciel. This in turn had a transitional quality from the scratchy record classic through Salgan's Motivo de Vals, sung by Angel Diaz who has a similar timbre and sweetness in his voice to Maciel.

3. Que Noche - played by Osvaldo Fresedo's orchestra, since I have a soft spot for Fresedo and wanted to play a set of his anyways. Que Noche was originally written by Bardi on June 22, 1918. That night it actually snowed in Bs As, which is extremely uncommon.The same night, his car broke down a ways away from any auto repair shop. The story goes he began humming this while trying to fix the car and later Arolas saw the score of his new tango and titled it "que noche" (what a night!) Paired with En Mis Noches, Contratiempo, and Apasionado (some of my favorites)

A smashing photo of my back - but I am proud of my hair. Perfect length
nowadays to get trapped in my lead's left hand during an embrace!

4. What's This? played String Tribute Players, it's an ode to the song "What's This" from Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. The song is sung by Jack Skeleton, the king of Halloween when he wanders into Christmas land and discovers snow and santa clause. I had to actually slow the song down considerably and it was still fast to dance to, but went quite well with a set of very strange and fun tangos that I have by Magali, from the delightfully insouciant album Schwenkglenks and the Gringos of Tango. I've wanted to use these for a long time, but they are not too easy to dance to. One of them switches into a milonga mid-way through the song, for instance. I often waffle (Wafflebot hates pancakes!!) on exactly how much the dj gets to play with the dancers and how "challenging" music should be. I feel like many of the absolute beginners will gleefully dance to any music (or, perhaps to put it more bluntly, while any music is playing). And more advanced dancers enjoy a bit of novelty and complexity. I think, while definitely an alternative set, it was a success. There were undeniably some confused intermediates, but two people asked to look at my set list to write down this artist/song. I am assuming because they enjoyed it and not so they can later burn the paper in effigy to purge a horrible set experience.

Although it may have had a disorienting effect.
Office Christmas Party View Setting on the camera works well!

5. Carol of the Bells - I admit that I listened to roughly one hundred versions of this darned carol before finding *the one* on an album that listed the artist as "The Hit Company." I had to include a vals set with The Carol of Bells. It is just dying to be valsed to, given its general pacing and feel. And this was a gorgeous piano version. It immediately reminded me of Yann Tierson's work, and eventually I was able to find the piano version of his Amelie Waltz, which of course has been an alternative vals staple of mine for years. Then, I just had to find one more piano vals, the best of which ended up being Romance de Barrio by Juan Abitabile in an album also appropriately title Tangos en Piano Bar. I was approached later by a woman who apparently knew the performer/artist of my carol of the bells. At least by her story, he is well known, but partially local to the area and she had dated him while he was recording it. It is a distinctive enough version that such an account hardly strains credibility and I really like the small world story so I am choosing to believe it.

Tango isn't tango without a little drama and diabolicism!

6. Anclao in Paris -This is mostly a sad tango about missing Buenos Aires while stuck in Paris. Not exactly or at all Christmas themed, but it was written when it was snowing in Paris and this is featured in the lyrics. Anyhow, the song was made famous when lyricist Cadicamo sold the song to Carlos Gardel, the resident saint of Argentine Tango as far as most Argentines are concerned. This was a version by Litto Nebia and Enrique Cadicamo, another pairing that features some highly danceable and pleasant music that I've been meaning to play anyways.

7-10. All Xmas Tanda: I'm sad to say that my final tanda was virtually ignored, since our class ran late and my tanda list was long in anticipation of the usual hangers on who always complain that we end too early (none of whom actually came this evening). So the set occurred more as incidental music for people scavenging the gift tables and exchanging the requisite goodbye hugs. I started to dance with Andrew, just to make it clear to people that the set was intended as a tango, but finally gave up and decided to delete the last song of the set (for future use) and the Cumparsita. That said, I was fairly proud of the set and think it would inspire dancing in different circumstances. It featured Let it Snow by Paola Aimone from the album A Tango Christmas. I mostly don't enjoy this album, since it is mostly pop holiday singing with a vague accordian humming underneath, but Let It Snow did have a recognizable sense of tango and a chill mood that lent well to I'll Be Home For Christmas, a spanish guitar version by Benise.I'm not sure it was the most exciting piece to dance to, but it was very beautiful and led well into A Christmas Tango with Santa L M Azpiazu. This piece I love. It's almost more American Tango, but has a very showy feel and I think it would be a blast to use it for a performance piece. Not quite as bombastic as an American Tango would be and with a more sultry feel, it would have really delighted a few of the absent dancers. But c'est la vie - it's Christmas season. As a final piece, I found Mia Stigmi Gia Panta, an absolutely stunning operatic piece by Jannos Eolou. Though the holiday connection is less pronounced, it is the opening song on the soundtrack for the Greek film A Christmas Tango which qualified it for my tastes.

Ghosts of Tango Present (and hopefully Future!)

11. My tanda gift to myself: Naturally, my favorite set of the night was actually a stock standard Color Tango set that I through in last minute because a student of mine requested that I do more "post 1960's tangos or something like Pugliese." I have done it a bunch of times, largely because it is such a succulent combination and moves from the fairly playful and wistful Pavadita through heavier rhythms and tones of Malandraca and Zum into the deep and soulful simmering A Evarista Carriego. I managed to schedule another perfect tanda with the same perfect lead, who was only slightly flustered with the pressure of having read my last entry. I also threw in a few favorite sets by Calo with Raul Iriarte, De Angelis, De Caro, and Bianco Bachicha.

Keep telling my cohost to bring fewer snacks so he can
maybe turn a slight profit someday. He continues to bring more instead!

(12).For Cortinas I found a cavalcade of fantastic old Christmas cds and spent a few days with them and my cheapo freeware version of Audacity (I love you Audacity).

They included (Spaced out to make this seem intolerably long but slightly more readable!):

Zat You Santa Claus? Louis Armstrong

I'll Be Home For Christmas - Bing Crosby

Boogie Woogie Hannaukah - Seattle Men's Chorus. One of my all time favorite holiday songs and a toe tapping jitterbug that I would love to do a performance to someday.

Santa baby - Marilyn Monroe.

Jingle Bells - Robbie Hardkiss version

Deck the Hall - Nat King Cole

Christmas in New Orleans - Louis Armstrong

Baby It's Cold Outside - Ray Charles

White Christmas - Bing Crosby

Deck the Halls - 11 Acorn Way

The Christmas Song - Nat King Cole

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Seattle Men's Chorus Performed by Zipper

Jingle Bells - Michael Buble and the Puppini Sisters.

Thanks for reading. Have a Holly Jolly Christmas! And, please, if you have any tangos that work well for the holidays I'd love to add them to my list so drop a comment!!

Workshop Roulette

2011-12-12T11:19:00.000-08:00

Workshops are one of my favorite forms of dance-study, second to private lessons. At their best, they have a carnivalesque quality and offer an utter constellation of revelations and ideas, all of which serve to re-energize my dance and give me fodder for the next two or three months of practice. All the while, they require less commitment than group classes, with a little bit more bang for your inflated dollar, since there isn't the inevitable period of readjusting in each class period. Granted, they have the potential for being an utter waste of time if notes are not taken, lessons are not applied to practice, or too many workshops cause brain-freeze. I've taken to limiting myself to one or two at a time, unless I am at a festival and I have the ulterior motive of meeting potential partners for later milongas and indulging in a little teacher tapas. I try to follow at least a quick notation of what we've covered - really what stuck out to me as new and game-changing - at the end of each workshop. More useful to me is trying to walk myself back through what we covered shortly after the lesson and then again a day or two afterwards. If I do this, usually the lesson material remains on tap for future practice. If I don't, it may all well evaporate until the next time similar material is covered and it all comes rushing back!!

Then, Santa's Elves come and tinker
with you and suddenly you're
the world's best dancer!!

Regular group lessons offer a great shot at consistency - given that students are structured into a routine that reinforces skills from the week before and builds on these progressively with partners who are similarly building (this assumes that you have partners who also can acquire skills at a relatively similar rate to yourself, but we'll assume this for the sake of this paragraph). And I would say that they offer this consistency at a slightly higher rate of efficiency than private lessons, due to the fact that individualized attention may not be optimalized per second but at a certain frequency received between privates and groups.

I do think that private lessons have a point of diminishing marginal returns and this is partially dependent on variables outside of personal control. For my ballroom, I focus almost exclusively on private lessons for the simple fact that there are no local leads who dance at the level that I wish to study. As much as anything, I am paying to practice with a lead who leads the way I need to learn to follow; this is not social leading and the skills I learn there cannot readily be applied to social dancing without hurting most of my leads.

Um, excuse me miss, I seem to have acquired
your leg?

Tango may not have such a dividing line between "social" and what would be more "advanced" and inevitably performance based, but one's ability to progress through practice will be limited by the ability of one's available partners - two to tango and all that rot. I know in tango that I am always a few steps shy of fully committing to moves that require throwing myself into momentum with the use of my partner for the unimpeachable reason that most of my partners wouldn't be able to handle the extra weight and I've acquired bad habits of mimicry over momentum to soften the blow.

When divorced from the partner problem (ooooh did I just think of a great new ad line for my family law practice?? Yeah, I guess not really), I think that private lessons can only improve dance as quickly as the body can adjust to new information. Sometimes I have absolutely all of the feedback I can receive about a certain technique or move and merely need some time to sit with it, let it filter through the various neural corridors and insinuate the habits into my muscles. A private lesson at those points may be no more useful than a long session of personal practice or even a good nap. I've seen this with my own lessons from time to time, as well as with my students. Sometimes walls are hit and breaks or changes of trajectory are needed. Another time when workshops may reintroduce themselves as viable alternatives or supplements.

But, weighing the positives and negatives, I really enjoy workshops as a sporadically placed way to pep up my dance and expose myself to new ideas/partners/teachers/and challenges.

This is my winding up to say that I took advantage of Andrew's weekend-before-finals to treat myself a little bit and take some workshops with Carlos Barrionueva and Mayte Valdes at China Harbor. I had never studied with them, before and some of my local compatriots had expressed less enthusiasm about them. This honestly surprises me in hindsight. I admit to being less drawn to their performance style than some others, but as teachers they are top notch and as human beings, they are awfully attractive (physically and personally).

We totally covered this move!
Also, Mayte has really cute short hair now

I particularly appreciated - as may be expected of me and my rabid need to drill baby drill - our first class, which focused on lead/follow technique by splitting up leads and follows and kicking our respective asses with five inch stilettos. To illustrate the sort of class we were in for: we began without shoes and did a series of exercises I'll admit to recognizing as modified ballet exercises - relevees, plies and battements in various speeds and levels of turn out, with hints of some pilates exercises.

I knew I was at the right place in that despite the fact that I was having far fewer struggles with balance etc. than most of the people in the circle, Mayte still looked at me and told me to point more strongly. Later during some leg work, she came up and twisted my foot even further out and more pointed until every muscle in my foot was cramping. There is nothing more gratifying than certain tweaks from a teacher. I have a natural instinct for avoiding being noticed or inviting critique, but I also have the insane drive to improve myself and the understanding that this requires receiving that critique. I also consider it a sign of respect when a teacher offers it to somebody on a finer point (har har, get it, POINT) and from my years in ballet I feel antsy without some kind of input. If Nate starts only giving positive feedback, I secretly feel that he has gauged my abilities to my performance that day and has deemed me no longer worth pushing...

After breaking into our respective parts, we did some barre work with chairs as substitutions for something sturdier. The first exercise was a dissociation one - pivoting on one leg while varying our levels from straight to deep plie (ok, squats - we were doing heavily stylized fancy squats!). We did a few more chair exercvises, all of which were extremely challenging and vaguely reminiscent of the opening of a lap-dance burlesque or so I would imagine. I can only hope that the leads had a few breaks to enjoy the view while they tried to arm wrestle each other or whatever men-folk do while practicing away from ladies to establish their alpha-male tanguero dominance.

I hate to compare myself, but since classes are driven by the average ability, it is inevitable, and it's interesting to judge one's weaknesses and strengths. We were all flailing a bit, as will happen when the focus gets that heavy and the physical work that laser-pointedly demanding. it is fascinating to watch dancers forced out of their comfort zones through these drills. Some of the follows who looked exquisite during the warm ups were slogging and wheezing through some of the exercises. Naturally whenever you are focusing that much and overriding your own subconscious muscle memory, your natural instincts don't kick in as they should. It is also instructive that people dance to their advantage and learn to highlight their strengths both in how they choose to dance and with whom.

In general, I find that I have relatively stronger skill sets in balance, rhythm and - er - backleading??? Hopefully just kidding on that last one, but we went through a series of songs where we were supposed to "follow" an imaginary partner. This was interesting to attempt, since we were mostly moving backwards without any pair of eyes accustomed to navigating the floor. Needles to say, many lives were lost. But more interestingly was that almost without exception the other follows froze and could not do even simple steps on their own, while I danced on fairly unaffected by the absence of an actual lead. I am hoping this stems from my inclinations for choreography (and thus reverse engineering moves to try to explain) and my experience with leading, but it was amusing to me how utterly undifficult I found this exercise. I may not be the surrendering type of follow... just possibly.

My largest takeaway was that I can focus on my legwork and feet more than I am giving myself credit. There's always a thin line between beautiful professional movements and mine. Something that is difficult to articulate, but which separates the truly beautiful from the slightly awkward. In my upper body, it is often a slight slouch, downturned neck, and minor hesitance. In my lower body, it is largely that although I am pointing my feet and getting the appropriate turn to the ankle, I can do more. It's very subtle, but it makes a huge difference.

For the other classes, I found a partner for the day. This is always the peril and the promise of workshops as well as classes - both rely on rotating partners. This naturally is an important part of the learning process, as dancing with only one partner teaches you how to dance with that partner less than how to dance, period. Particularly during the early learning period, multiple partners increases learning by some sizable percentage. But, it is also a spinning roulette wheel, because abilities and availability of one role varies widely. Finding a partner for a class with whom you can work ensures - especially for the follow - no nasty yanking or hijacking by insouciant leads, a reliable partner that you can trust not to kick off your toenail as you attempt an embellishment, assurances that you will not have to sit out of a rotation due to a gender imbalance, and the possibility of having a person to meet and review with later. I never really arrange for workshop partners in advance, but am happy to have one when an early warm up dance turns out just about right. In fact, I've met some of my all time favorite partners from workshop-pair-ups. Once you've shared the vulnerability of a workshop period and made it work, I think the dancefloor is just destined to feel smooth and magical.

In this case, I met a fellow from Bellevue who had exceptionally beautiful art-nouveau glasses rims and mixed a level of serious dedication to getting his part correct with an appropriate humility. He was quite insistent on getting feedback from me, which was occasionally difficult, as I was focusing on my part to the exclusion of his lead at times, but also useful. I noticed my performance tanguero of last month was also at the class and had similarly captured a follow into pairing up for the duration of the day. It looked like they were having far more earnest discussions and less dancing, so I think I chose correctly. At the end of the day, I gave him my card (I am not over how awesome it is to do this) and we agreed to keep in touch.

I would rate the workshop an aching success, as many muscles felt the work a day and two days later - running right comfortably into the inevitable feeling-it of my private lesson with Nate yesterday and ensuring that I will always be feeling-it somehow. Definitely not an experience I'll need to repeat for a month or two, but possibly I will be ready for another seat kicker just about when Carlos and Mayte are back here again in March.

Adellercrombie and Wrigtch - Fun with Catalogs!

2011-12-11T08:23:00.001-08:00

One of my favorite activities to share over breakfast with my Mr. Wright is going through the myriad catalogs that his early twenties roommate receives. She gets a lot of them and frankly I'm jealous. I love catalogs. When I was a kid, I used to go through them with a pen and comprise entire lives sourced from the photographic materials presented. I was more a fan of the home decor catalogs, but clothing catalogs are pretty fascinating to this day. To me, they are little picture books dedicated to silently selling not the heavily pinned and stylized clothing you are actually putting your credit card down for, but the associated lifestyle. I love the background decor, details like what books they throw into a shoot, what kind of houses, what kind of dogs... And then I love snarking. Because the lifestyle is usually embarrassingly douchey and the clothes - I swear - get uglier and more terrifyingly devoid of style/fashion/etc. each year.

I was so tired of the womyn
(that's foreshadowing by the way)
only liking me for my looks, so I
beat myself with a nerd stick
and so can you!

Still I've learned a lot and think I could really make a go at composing catalogs in the milieu of J. Crew, and American Outfitters and whoever else... the target is "rich person who wants to appear to be a poor thoughtful hipsterish intellectual who is color blind and possibly off her meds, but pretty well read." The great thing about this is that the "disheveled mismatched flaky intellectual (shudder - I hate that word)" thing that these people are putting sooo much effort and money into manufacturing comes naturally to me. It's a miracle when I manage to wake up wearing a matching pair of costume earrings with my olio of cutesy sleep wear layered under men's sweaters and hoodies. These people want to be me (except skinnier, bustier, and with a better line of credit). I really oughta be in catalogs!

I am a fashion god

This is a great modern catalog shot in so many ways. First off, it's in a dirty bathroom and I'm doing something weird (er, quirky,) in it. Granted, I'm smiling, which completely undercuts my claim to hipsterdom, but I feel like the awkward pose makes up for this. Secondly, I'm wearing glasses - it would be better if they were horn rimmed or really big and round. Next, I'm wearing layers and - most importantly - they neither flatter my feminine figure nor match each other at all. Yesterday I was also wearing a teal sweater underneath this ensemble, but I am too busy to recreate perfection for you. Even my robe, which is fairly neutral is just a dirty enough shade of white that it doesn't really go, but I expect that in the reshoot, it would be better served as a dank plaid. Oh and I've got that dweeby hint of overly-intentioned whimsy. Now, for the clothes.

bought at FM for $6, sold to you
for $48

The shirt will need kind of a fancy name. Some word I can't think of paired with blazer I think. It will be on sale for a very reasonable $69.00. The bottoms, I think are Penguin Palazzo Pants. I'd guess they'll run you about $98) or so. and the coat will be a Terry Trench and cost you $256.

Really, I should be wearing a huge hat for sure, and heavy necklace to go with the blazer, but it's a start that at least I'm wearing some pretty heavy and non-matching earrings

I should also be wearing very tall and thick heels, maybe in a patent leather... or ski boots.

Oh don't worry, I'll have menswear too - my boyfriend is, afterall, a fashion deity in his own right:

So again, we have the messy locale with lots of faded out white in the background. We've got the glasses, again, and his are more rectangular so they have even more cred. It's so "genuine" because we see the piles of clothes on the floor, with the subtly placed tool box and laundry. The pretty boy who is trying to hide his prettiness, because pretty is uncool afterall, under a just-slightly-too-well-manicured facial overgrowth and intentionally messy artsy hair. Then of course, the rolled up jeans, the shirt with bleached on fading and hole-punched tatters. And of course, the whimsical neckwear and the "are you really photographing me?" slightly superior smile/sneer. Granted, he should be wearing cute knit socks and tan work boots, but we'll take this.

Sadly, I can't afford the printing costs associated with a real catalog, but if you want to purchase my used flannel pajamas or robe, I promise I will set you up with my paypal and ship 'em right out.

For comparison, here are some actual catalog shots and my brief thoughts on them.

From the people who brought you the boyfriend jean: the girlfriend shirt! Is it just me, or does he need a nice chain of pearls to go with that knit? For when you want to attract women by seeming like a sweet and sensitive guy and talk them into a backrub after they unload their man troubles on you. Ridiculous stubble-beard sold separately.

Call me crazy, but if I were a man, the last thing I want advertised over my naughty bits would be Express... Just saying. I just don't know how that's going to help you in the transition from barely clad (in dayglo brite Captain America boxer briefs, I might add) to where you probably wanted to go with that.

The moral: attractive clean-shaven men of African descent want you to see their socks (see photo above and other photos that I didn't bother posting but which can easily be found for confirmation). I worry that he is standing right on a red X. Is this like in the roadrunner cartoons and he's about to be smashed by an anvil or is there buried treasure?

"So, we were playing around in an old storage closet of Eddie Bauer design samples from the mid-nineties and she threw on this big stuffy sweater that was paired with some khakis and some spanx smoothing pants that were a bit big because they were samples from Lane Bryant... then Clark Kent lent her some glasses and we were in business. Except we needed some ketchupy orange $70 ballet flats! Boooyah. Then the model got cold so one of the crew lent her a coat for the shoot. Perfect!"

She was so confused about whether "Wynter Wonderland" is some kind of feminist spelling (Wynter is PH balanced, just for womyn?) or just poor copy editing that she totally forgot to add pants and just made do with her flannel long underwear.

So she went to a Holiday frat party out in some dude's parent's cabin in the woods... I won't talk about what happened there because it's off-color and possibly illegal. She woke up with a splitting hangover and tons of regret if no clear details, grabbed the decorative hat that frat boy's dad kept on the mantle with the shotgun he never learned to fire but thought was atmospheric, and ran off with her sweater, a bedsheet, and the frat boy's grandmother's bloomers for the walk of shame.

Ok, I am soooo buying the middle girl's entire outfit. I clearly need yak-fur legwarmers for those wintry outdoor milongas in the snow!

Anyways, I could probably do this all day, but perhaps should leave you before your eyes start bleeding with some of the color combinations that are in vogue at the moment. Ok, just one, but I'm not bothering to make it right-side up:

Trust me, it's matted down a bit in the re-photographing. I have spared you some risk of seizures.

Mr. Bowtie thanks me. And I thank him as well. Him and his glaringly white perfect teeth and bone structure that cannot hide behind a little plaid bowtie or bottle rim glasses. At least for the menfolk, they bothered putting glass in the frames.

I'm too sexy for my muscle strains...

2011-12-04T07:34:00.001-08:00

I may have mentioned the time I tried to mountain bike and went blissfully sailing off a ravine back in August. I exaggerate, but such is my prerogative... I didn't exactly sail so much as tumble and I may have been more stunned than blissed out. The pain I caused myself, however, was not an exaggeration - some tear in a muscle that wraps around my lower rib cage and is highly involved with pretty much any core movement. I may not have mention that I suspect this area is more vulnerable due to an old break dancing injury. I mention it now, because the point of this introduction is to make myself sound way more hardcore than I really actually am. Before whining about how I have hurt myself again.

I will note the one breakdancing performance I did was
during a showcase where I was also doing ballroom
hence the makeup, slicked hair and glitter...
but dude, were my shoes not awesome? Metallic pink, baby

Anyways, however it all went down, I snapped or stretched or strained that delicate area, and it had mostly healed until I got a little eager with my reach for boxes on the Black Friday extravaganza clean out. I managed to reawaken memories of laying underneath my bike trying to breathe and thinking "huh, my bike appears to be riding me?? I think I'm doing it wrong!" It didn't seem to be too extreme of an injury at the time, and I managed to go through my regular weekly routines of dance workouts and running with only minor twinges. I even got through *most* of my pilates on Thursday. This is probably because we were targeting arms, legs, glutes, lower abs and not so much that area until - drumroll please - we did a roll up.

Well, "we" didn't exactly do a roll up because once the strained muscle was called upon, the roll up stopped rather abruptly. I stubbornly tried working around it and then did some side ab work that probably wasn't advised either. So naturally I was hurting pretty well before my private lesson on Friday, but not quite enough for my tastes! Our lesson brilliantly consisted of fast east coast swing, heavy on connection. You may never realize just how much of your core really is/should be involved in a proper technique or connection until you dance hurt. Hoooooooo Doctor (literally, I should have one standing by at my lessons, if I'm going to be so intentionally oblivious). Anyways, I learned a cool combination of moves that really really used those muscles and hurt even more.

Saturday, then, there was a dance. A masquerade and I knew well enough - even said well enough - that I should be careful not to dance too much. The advantage of it being a masquerade/formal party was that in theory, it would require a wardrobe that was restrictive enough that the temptation to dance full out would already be limited due to the restrictions of my ensemble. Formal wear is incredibly difficult to dance in - short dresses ride up, long dresses catch on heels, low-cut dresses cut even lower, and nicer materials just don't want to be shimmied around in the style to which we are accustomed. But then I grew lazy and didn't acquire an appropriately formal straight jacket to protect myself. I made our masks last minute while Andrew took a study break that turned into a nap. They lived up to their purposes and are now complementing Christmas wall-tree.

My wall *will* be the awesomest kindergarten school
wall in the land!!!!

After contemplating creative ways to use the rest of my construction paper to make a gown, since the two I own have been danced out to so many events that they require retirement in the hall of dresses, I defaulted a bit on the constrictive ballgown idea. I had earlier donned a pair of grey and black hounds tooth tights and decided in a fit of obstinacy that I was not going to take them off for the party. This rather clashed with the retired gowns and really did go rather well with a pair of swing shoes and the aforementioned grey sweater dress, so... Limiting dance motion was back on my shoulders and out of my shoes.

but seriously, how cute are these?

I was pretty careful, but it still was a landmine. It really brings home both the prior lesson about just how much you use these tiny little muscles (and considering how much I have focused on isolations and latin rhythm) and how truly embodied our cognition is! Andrew is here with me this weekend and in addition to having limitations in generally reaching and lifting and dancing, cuddling/draping/nuzzling/and your general horseplay apparently uses these upper core muscles a shocking amount as well. So there has been a lot of my recoiling from a warm touch or just not being permanently draped over my boyfriend, which is less common. And naturally it's entirely physical, but I think we both feel that little disconnect, as if there's a distance beyond the physical. Frustrating! But fascinating to remember just what physical beings we really are and how much of the etherializing that we do with the term "connection" starts and ends with the physical contact itself.

Psyche and Eros... get it?? Was I like subtle heaven forbid?
Also I don't think this is meant to be pornographic
but it kind of looks like he's grabbing her boob...

At any rate, it's inconvenient and affects my mood to be so limited in my own physical being. I'll be super happy to be fairly healed and I'm guessing it's fortunate that my pilates/workout partner Azita and my private ballroom instructor Nate are married and off together on a cruise next week. Cuts the temptation to keep ripping my damned ribs up.

And speaking of physicality, other than moaning and moping about between episodes of construction paper construction, I attended a mysterious meeting with a local tango musician yesterday. She had messaged me a while back and I finally got ahold of her only to be invited to her house to hear about some exciting tango news.

Yes, there are tango stirrings in the Bellingham air and apparently I count as a "mover and shaker in the Bellingham community..." I tend to think most of my tango-moving and shaking comes from the hip (sell that cortada baby!), but however I move and shake, I qualified for the special meeting. I have been sworn to some simulacrum of secrecy, but I'm not sure about which details exactly. I think I can go so far as to disclose that (1) the organizer/would-be-producer makes lots and lots of pretty tasty desserts when she hold meetings with people, (2) she is also pretty prolific with her ideas, and has everything planned out in detail, (3) it involves what she terms the Anti-Forever Tango, which to her I believe means a tango performance show that is less concerned with world-class virtuosity and perfection as much as being fun, funny and sweet.

The meeting yesterday was sort of a recruitment drive/pitch, but I can't say with utter certainty what I've been recruited for. There are about three pieces written with me in mind, and I'm quite happy to perform. Because I know some of the personalities who are involved or may be involved, I can see just how many conceivable ways this could go sideways as egos ebb and flow against the shore. A few other teachers have been asked to serve as "coaches" (a role that I understand to be "keeping available to help dancers and director if they run into a tricky spot with their choreography or need somebody to tell them where thee lead's foot is supposed to go and make sure it's uniform for the entire chorus of dancers") and I'm fairly happy not to be of their number... hoping to stay that way, although of the potential names, I probably do have the most experience with and propensity for working with choreography and understanding transitions in an articulable fashion (yes, yes, let me stroke my ego and then hide behind the nearest tree - my ego is not one of those that I'd like to be spraying up against rocks in a few months' time). The show itself wouldn't take place for over a year, so there's plenty of time for things to evolve and I am going to remain open. I am not known for passing up any opportunity, request, or faint suggestion to perform in the hammiest and most gregarious fashion possible, so I can hardly fight my nature and start now.

DEATH LASERS IN MY EYES!!

At least for now, the time commitment would not seem to interfere with my other carefully laid plans of hamming it up. I am hoping to do a showcase performance with Nathan next spring. I'd love to do another performance with my dad (pictured above and yes, yes, he is awesome), but that really depends on him. With Nate, I think it may be time that I would be served with a more concrete goal than "I'd like to suck less than I think I do." From my own teaching experience, it can be kind of hard when a student takes regular lessons without a clear short term plan. And I would be well served with a more concrete at this point. But I really just want an excuse to dance something - cha cha or west coast swing - to the song I'm Too Sexy, but Right Said Fred. It needs to be done, and it ought to be done by me.

Still for the time being, I am far too sexy for my stupid rib cage and will be sitting out the next few days with a classic model pucker-scowl.

Coming up next: Adella Decorates with her Daddy and manages to make that somehow exacerbate her injuries!

An Utterly Ungrinchy Welcome to the Xmas Season

2011-11-29T16:16:00.001-08:00

It is officially ADVENT!

Season of Firebending!

Which is another, less terrifying, more denominational, way of saying The Christmas Season!! (AHHHHHHNOOOOOOAAAAAH) I'm actually always excited by the onset of what could well be termed the crazy-time. Despite the crowds, the dearth of good will in shopping malls, the sudden inability to navigate spaces or recognize basic human decency in anyone setting foot near a shopping center of any sort... despite the stress, the cold and the pressure... I'm still a kid at heart and I love Christmas. Which is funny because I'm not the sunniest person, I don't like spending money all the much and I doubly always panic and swear under - or occasionally quite over - my breath when people ask me what I want for Christmas.

Not that I don't enjoy getting gifts, but since when did I have to decide? I can't make basic day to day decisions like what toothpaste I want without majorly long dark tea times of the soul! I know, I know, better I decide than get a day-glo crocheted reindeer sweater with sequined noses and flashing red-eyes (ok, I might actually wear that). But, as intimated, I am historically bad at making decisions for myself - I mean, Homer has written Greek epics about my inability to decide on a simple work shirt and subsequent failure to acquire anything that I would ever consider wearing in public without ten shots of whiskey first - and tend to run from stores in panic after looking at the racks upon racks of possible purchases...

But despite that, the gift-giving has strong sentimental ties to better days of being an obsenely easily pleased child with tolerant parents who pretended her terrifying dollar store purchase presents and half sewn fabric "pillows" were the best gifts ever conceived of by man. So it makes kind of an interesting list of love-hate that gives the season its mulled spicy flavor. Here's my list of things I like about this season starting with

The gift-giving insanity:

Once I get into the picking and choosing and spending mode, I kind of enjoy the frivolous knick-knackery and stuffing of oranges and little foil chocolates into unused leg-wear. And the rare moment when something just screams another person is ever so magical. Of course, it is usually complicated because the person whatever theoretical gift may scream may not be a person I can give a gift to without giving gifts to a bunch of people for which the material world remains mute... oh the balancing involved.

My major gift-giving philosophy is mutli-fold: (1) people get more pleasure from experiences than things, particularly as we get older and our storage spaces more oppressively full (2) useful things that are useful but slightly personalized and last long enough that the recipient is reminded of something positive every time s/he uses these things are always plusses, and (3) sometimes there is nothing better than the thing that somebody clearly wants and could use but would never buy for him/herself.

Going with the experience-over-objects I tend to request these items by default: money towards my dance habit; materials for my dance habit (shoes, a camera to tape myself, specific music or materials for dj-ing); tickets to ballet/opera/theater for me and Mr. Wright; occasionally other items from my amazon list (ok, those heated socks are looking awfully tempting these days); and sometimes just instead of exchanging gifts, we go out together somewhere and foot each other's bills. I'd like to say that gift certificates are great for me, but I inevitably (1) then must go through the deciding and shopping debacle that plagues the other 11 months of the year, and (2) will inevitably lose the damned thing long before utilizing it causing me a vague feeling of guilt.

For giving, I know people are happier when you pick off their list, but I really enjoy doing something a little creative and a little surprising. Call me selfish, but the gift of giving is kind of a literal phrase, isn't it? We get a kick out of pleasing others and reminding them why we're awesome and how we get them. One of my favorite gifts for somebody else last year was a coffee mug and calendar that I designed online for Mr. Wright. The calender featured 12 months of slow lorises (our ongoing relationship totem animal, except I am now a tamarin and he is the loris, as evidenced by our morning paces) and a coffee mug with a picture of a monkey with its head buried in a cup of coffee. I love that he uses both every day. It makes the gift as gratifying for me as for him.

Church/Carols/Singing

Anyways, gifts are sometimes fraught with stress and peril but also gratifying as are most of the holiday-related traditions. I love Advent services at my Dad's church and their Christmas Eve service - it's one of the few times you'll get to hear Palestrina, Gounod, Bach, Verdi, and so on for free in a very satisfying accoustical area. I studied voice fairly seriously back in the day, leaving me at a fairly familiar point of having just enough residual technique to have a booming vibrato and little enough to sight-read or stay particularly on key... church is kind of a safe harbor for loud women with slightly tart warbles. And during the holiday season, it's my place where I can sing songs familiar enough that it isn't a flailing vocal zumba routine (just loud and a little lemony). Moving to music is one of my most gratifying experiences and why dance is my life and obsession. Moving one's vocal chords and becoming part of that music is pretty up there as well.

And man are lights and stained glass pretty

The Frivolous Consumption of Candy, Sparkles and Themed Everything:

Parties... well, I'm not usually a big party person. I will always miss our old neighborhood carroling party that we went to when I was a kid. I tolerate other parties these days, because at least they are full of pretty lights and lots of nummy festive things. Speaking of which, theme candy and goodies are at a peak around this time and I love the novelty (Mint Chocolate M&M's, every variety of little bells, Cherry Cordial Hershey Kisses and Mint Hershey Kisses, peppermint Andes mints, Dark Chocolate everything, cranberry everything, nutmeg/cloves/mace/cinnamon/ginger/spices in everything... at minor peak in hazlenut flavored things, although there really should be more... mmmmm). And of course there are candles and chocolate. The candles appeal to my inner pyromaniac (see photo 1, supra this text) and the chocolate is just... well... chocolate! Behind little tiny doors that I can hunt down and open, proving that I have earned the chocolate. Then more chocolate in socks hiding on the fireplace. And even more in pretty silver bowls.

The food:

And there's the holiday meals, proper. I rarely cook beyond my official status as Empress of the Single Serving Microwave Delicacy (and I can make a mean anything in a microwave). Big meals really do not suit my style of eating a tiny amount every hour or so like a teeny little birdy, and thus I generally tend to prepare food fit for a tiny little birdy stomach and skip the grand preparations and silly formalities like a dinner table.

Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter have been my times to follow complicated and elaborate recipes and share the preparation all the way through with my Dad. It's one of my most meaninful warm-and-fuzzy traditions that we began to share after my parents divorced. Even when I was a plucky and willful teenager asserting my independence left and right through irritatingly avoidant means, we always had that and it was always a moment of perfect harmony between us. Makes cooking on any day have a special feel about it, but the smells of our traditional holiday meals well-up a million memories and immediately connect me to every year of my lifel. It's also the time that we take out the fine china, crystal and silver and sit in my father's ridiculously high end European-Palace dining room with ourselves and perhaps a few others. It's always fairly sedate and very unlike the traditional insanity. Eating in that space from those fine objects gives me an entirely different focus on eating and consuming and a certain epicurean delicacy effervesces through the experience even as my Dad starts groaning because he ate enough to feed a small African village for ten days.

The threat/promise of a White Christmas:

I'm a sap. I know I'll hate the damned dirty snow eventually, but that first fall is so giddy, whirling and fantastic... The world gets that eerie apocalyptic hush and things calm for a second (well assuming you aren't on the freeway, although once the first five accidents happen, the calm of sitting in a dead stop is kind of apropos). Now that I don't live on top of Capital Hill (or as well called it last year, the vertical ice rink), I'm a little more prepared for a day or two of being snowed in in a more moderate fashion.

The five billion holiday movies we must watch every year, because I am stubborn about tradition:

These are basically Scrooged, A Christmas Story, Bad Santa, Die Hard (best Xmas movie ever), maybe Batman Returns, probably inevitably Elf since it plays nonstop on Comedy Central starting in mid-October...and if I'm really being obstinate, the odd Gene Kelly/Fred Astaire sapstravaganza. This year, I am clearly adding A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, because I love Wafflebot and Wafflebot loves me.

The ornaments!

And of course, the tree. As I've mentioned before, the tree and the ornaments hold particular meaning and sentimentality. I am starting a tradition of keeping an ornament to commemorate each year of my adult life. This assumes that my adult life started in my second year of law school, which is more than arbitrary, but there we go. It looks like after this year, I may overburden my apartment-friendly construction paper tree.

On my tree:
* The Skiing Mooses. They're my 2009 memento for the first holiday I spent with my boyfriend. It was a ski trip with his mother and brother. Since I had neither his mother before nor skiied before, it could have gone horribly awry, but blessedly did not. I loved his family, I took to skiing pretty quickly and it was just a really great time.

* The dancer. My 2010 memento is the dancers, because last year was the year that Uandme, my first dance studio officially closed. They had a large going away party and I attended with Andrew. I saw people I hadn't seen since before law school and it re-grounded me and stirred the embers of passion for life and dance out of the 1/2/3L years. I still didn't get to dance much for the rest of my 3L year, but it reminded me of who I was and where I would return.

* The filler red ornaments - of no particular sentimentality, although it makes me all warm and fuzzy to realize they won't break.

* The globe ornament that my Dad brought me back from his place in Hawaii.

** For this year, I'm not entirely decided. Obviously there have been a heaping truckload of momentuous occasions to concievably commemorate. I think I may take the brooch that I wore on my maid of honor dress for my best friend's wedding and try to jigger it onto something else to make an ornament. Possible, attach it to my graduation tassel.

The Post Thanksgiving Cool Down and Warm up:

In some ways, I already have an ornament for this year, which is also an ornament for my whole past. For Black Friday. I spent the entire day cleaning out moderate mountains of mementos, books, and toys from the last thirty to forty years of my family's lives. In the purge was almost as brutal as the many years of dust were to my lungs, but I did keep a little lamb ballerina that I have had for years. It's from my time when I transitioned from a girl who loved frilly tutus and the prettiness of ballet, to one who beamed about how much blood could fill her pointe shoes before she had to stop dancing. It also reminds me of the cleaning out itself - of the fact that I am at a major transition of my life that involves letting go of much of the past to embrace the present. So I may just attach the brooch to the lamb and call it good.

Speaking of blasts from the past in the corners of the basement, we found my mom's old wedding dress. I was highly tempted to go pick Andrew up from the airport while wearing it, but then it was raining out. Naturally I had to try it on. It's pretty spectacularly gorgeous and almost has kind of a period piece feel to it, being entirely *not* the white corset dress that basically every bride wears these days. It was something she had a hand in designing and is french lace. Even though it might not have brought great wedding fortune (although here's to having some awesome children and an admirably civil divorce that jump started salutary metamorphoses of truly epic proportions in both my parents), it has special meaning to her as maybe the first thing that was really entirely her own. Also, it's kind of scratchy so I think she probably wore a slip.

If only I'd found this in time for my
swearing in!

But hey, speaking of those holiday parties, I think I've found my formal dress!

So while the oil of insanity simmers and prepares to erupt from the pot of December into the face of our holidazes, I am ready to ever so tentatively and perhaps foolheartedly say to Christmas and all its attendant rites and rituals: Bring it On! And while you're on the way, could you bring me a double decaff skiny peppermint eggnog mocha with a heaping side of nutmeg and cloves and maybe a caramel covered apple slice encrusted in peanutbrittle? Let's get this holiday spirit going already.

I took my glasses off for this? On necks, butts and our tango totem animals

2011-11-23T16:51:00.000-08:00

This was originally part of my previous post on my perfect tanda, but then I realized that like tandas, sometimes blog posts need to be perfectly balanced in their own little worlds between cortinas.What can I say, I attempt to rhapsodize and end up blabbing about butts and spikey glasses and animals dancing tango. Just another par for the course day. As in dance, all the talent in the world is no rival for a sense of judicious editing. But then again, what's my blog for if not to muddle in at least some self-indulgence? I do consider it an appropriate complement to the previous posts - the bathos that gives oomph to the pathos, perhaps. But I have some sympathy for my readers and their attention spans. So here, look: FUNNY PICTURES! Do I know my audience or what?

This was the tanda I took my glasses off for. I don't particularly like dancing in glasses, I'll admit, and I largely have been doing so recently because I haven't gotten around to getting new contacts. Back in the day, I'd take my glasses off for just about any partner (usually resulting in a post dance-haze grope about the floor as I desperately attempted to relocate them), but I've realized that having that little facial force field has some advantages at times.

Posture in tango is a pretty important thing for me. It, like any technical element, cannot make dancing, but its absence can certainly derail dancing. As spiritual as we wish to wax about dance, at the end of the day the thing that distinguishes it from meditating, listening, thinking, philosophizing, is that it is an extremely physical act. So oddly enough, the physical matters in every detail.

I have two postural pet peeves, both of which I may lapse into from time to time, making my reaction to the visual effect more self-consciously virulent.

The first, I call Duck Butt - where the dancer allows her pelvis to roll out, giving her a bustle effect, scrunching the muscles in the lower back and creating a round extrusion of the abs that my pilates teacher likes to call breadloafing. The effect reminds me of cartoon ducks when they are standing... it's problematic because it disengages the core, breaks up the axis (making the follow heavier and less reactive to energy), and can hurt the lower back.

Credit to Rinus Bakker an awesome G+ Circle Denizen

Of course, there's an exception to every rule and some pros dance with what appears to be just the duck butt posture and look fabulous. There's a bit of discussion on both of my pet peeves between the traditional milonguero and the younger styles. Somebody said one of the most fascinating things about people's walks is that we teach ourselves how to walk so everybody does it just a little bit different. And if you teach yourself to move with certain postures, probably over many years you can become good at moving within that framework. For most dancers, this is not a legacy of years on floors, though. I think people generally, though, see the V milonguero posture and in trying to emulate it, come to this weird position. Alternately, they are double afraid of any suggestion of genital contact that might occur and want to leave a little extra room for Jesus to avoid even the swimming-suit bits' auras. Or maybe they are booty-tooching as my little lunatics on America's Next Top Model would coin (I have no shame - you can't make me!):

The second is my personal albatross and I call it Turtle Back. This is the posture you commonly see increase in severity with age or too much time at a computer. It's created by letting the upper lats curve, sinking the chest, and pushing the neck forward. This is problematic because it absorbs the energy that starts at the solar plexus (particularly problematic for leads), also breaks up the strong axis line and wreaks havoc on dissociation.

And may make you appear depressed

Anyways, Turtle Back can be of varying severity. I tend to keep a straight enough back these days,. but I also have a tendency to finish out that roundness with my neck. I'm very aware of it, because i have a tendency to push my neck forward when I'm engaging with other people - even worse, years of sitting in orchestra audiences where outright dancing is discouraged has given me a small tendency for head-bopping. It's kind of cute to watch me bopping along like a drunk puppy to a perky swing, but in a close dance like tango bopping can become bashing pretty quickly. It was worse when I first began dancing, because I am quite tall even before adding the 4 inch heels. When I began, I would compensate by bending my knees, compressing my spine and - well - hunching. I advise against this as

Cave Man tango!

I still tend to push my neck forward or lean it to the side, although to a degree, I think tango can be more forgiving of this than others. Nonetheless, having your spine out of whack does mean having your axis equally zany and I prefer to keep my zaniness to embellishments and socks.

Adding the close embrace gives even more possibilities for bizarre neck strains. When I first went to Buenos Aires, a friend of a friend who took it upon himself to adopt me decided that my heavy-head was a a tango emergency requiring intervention. It was common in the community for people to take the head-to-head nature of tango a bit far, until the contact was a high pressure neck wrestling exercise. I would enter into embrace, and lean my head to the right, locking heads with my lead. I could literally collapse my neck muscles as if I were taking a nap on my lead's face. Apparently, this is poor form! Who knew?

Dance Partners may be dreamy, but I'm still not allowed to
drool when I pass out on their shoulders.

Having come to grips with my neck as a part of my axis, it was a hard transition back home and the pressure from some of my lead's own heads would push my head clear over to my left shoulder. Over time I managed to counter by turning my head towards my lead. It has certain stylistic pleasures, but it also allowed the pressure of his head to push my head a bit backwards, a direction with far less give. I still enjoy this sometimes, but it also could end with my head twisted completely sideways, making moves to an entire side of my body extremely uncomfortable and the pressure of a heavy head still strains a poor girl's neck.

So, while I don't necessarily mind the face to face contact common in tango, I don't particularly find it necessary and sometimes find it to distracting. Contact is essential, but when the pressure is such that one feels like she's getting a face lead, this really might be a time to back off. Random roaming hand grips and crazy arms are about as much static I can take in a connection! Glasses can render this sort of aggressive head-butting moot, because they are pointy and sharp and extrude from a portion of my face that might ordinarily make contact.

I'm pretty amazed at how many leads will still try to make head contact despite the glasses, often nuzzling their heads into mine at a certain point in the music, like a cat stimulating his scent glands across my forehead. I guess I should be grateful my leads try to mark my with head butts instead of spraying me - which is not to say that sometimes a particularly heavy cologne doesn't do just as much spray-wise. Still, it's uncomfortable, it is definitely not something that I have invited in any fashion, and it often bends and smudges my glasses. Sometimes, this will be accompanied by a tighter embrace, which I suspect is meant to emulate intimacy and passion, but can sometimes feel more like a wrestling pose (you WILL put your head to mine, damnit! Now hold still while I burrow into your skull!). So perhaps what I'm saying is that I need spiked glasses to don for the particularly invasive leads.

But then, there are those times where you are legitimately dancing closely and your shared space is such that your bodies naturally merge into each other's. And at this point, glasses have outworn their welcome and there is little to do with the, but resent them or throw them to the side of the room like a racer does with his empty water bottles. It's not always easy to predict which tandas are a glasses-off affair, but again, when you cherry pick the songs and the partner, you can be pretty darned sure. There's a reason that dancing cheek to cheek earned the designation of heaven... sometimes. With the proper animal.

My Perfect Tanda

2011-11-21T09:46:00.001-08:00

Midway through the perfect tanda with the perfect partner (the joy of dj-ing is making playlists with specific people in mind and knowing when those tandas are coming up), I may have noticed that my dress had twisted free of modesty, revealing the horribly ill-fitting bra that did not match... I may have realized that it would only get worse and could become scandalous if unattended... but there was no way I was breaking the cozy little spell of music-breath-embrace. Not to scratch my face. Not to cough. Not to wipe sweat from our shared brow. No, if there had been a fire, I would have stayed in frame and let him dance me through a window if need be, just so long as the music still played or could play. We were in a trance, absorbing lord knows what hypnotic suggestions and only the cortina could break it smoothly.

It was an alternative set. Our venue attracts folks of all stripes and listening preferences and we try to please them all a bit. So when I dj here, I don't strictly stay with any one format. I do love traditional tango. I am particularly enamored of Angel D'Agostino, Rodriguez, Lomuto, Calo and Fulvio Salamanca at the moment. Ienjoy the fact that they are familiar but not too familiar in the way that some of the stock standards can become when djs with limited budgets stick to the utter classics. Usually this means a handful of traditional tandas of varying rhythmic and tonal distinctions working into one or two tandas of something modern and dramatic, into maybe an electronic set, and finally something never contemplated by our theoretical founding fathers of tango.

This set, to me, breathes. It has an implacable organic quality that is slow and surging, but only under the surface. We talk about the rhythm as a pulse often enough without really imagining our heats beating and lungs expanding only through will of the music, but here the connection is palpable. The pulse courses with the syrupy sapor of morphine as the heart beats against its slowing effects in a muted effort to avoid the inevitable succumbing.

In present tense, as it can only be described: My partner holds me, his body like a light mist encompassing and absorbing me until our molecules are indistinct. The pressure is compression and release, but so elastic that it comes and goes through my body like the moon pulling the tide. We share the same lungs and they expand and contract with the music's heavy respiration. Radiance, by Bruce Cockburn - echoes into space and we dance into the silence with our stillness, breathing together, blending into each other, and vibrating to the memories of final cords. The next song begins - Vuelvo al Sur, by Medialuna Tango Project - and he whispers "nice" almost indistinctly while I shrug with him the faint strain of goosebumps running through our singular nervous system. As it fades into the stillness, I smile, knowing that El Cielo Sabra, by Cirque de Soleil is yet to come. It has the haunting quality of the previous two, but builds into a rapturous crescendo before ebbing into that same eerie and pregnant stillness. We rise to these points, building speed as we land in perfectly rubato pauses. Our dancing hovers on crest of each note, never quite alighting and never quite leaving. The moves aren't terribly complicated - giros, volcadas and the softest of ganchos predominate - but it doesn't matter. They evolve and adapt to the music as well as we and each sequence has a new timbre, danced in a new key as the music inhales and exhales.

When the music faded again, the cortina interjected itself between our mutual physiology. Although I wish it could go on forever, three was the right number for this set. Each song built into the next. Each one was already a five minute contemplation of motion and obsession. And nothing follows Cielo Sabra in my mind. I had originally thought of adding an extra song, but a perfect tanda must be balanced ... between the songs and between our own human abilities of concentration and connection. Connection builds through the first two songs and is strongest near the end, which is why we have the tanda format in the first place. But there is a point of diminishing marginal connections, and it's best to leave it lingering at the strongest point

Cortina literally means "curtain," which is terribly apt. As dancers feel themselves awakening from their mutual dream, it's as if the little chunk of non-tango music is opening a window and letting in the light; letting our private moment become public again as we resume seeing and being seen. As we pull away from that center, we hold on just a little longer and a little tighter, falling from a dance embrace into a bear hug. I don't hear my cohost asking me if that was the last song. It wasn't - I think the cumparsita is still fair warning and it lets me follow a regular one with one of my off-genre ones... this time a mambo cumparsita. I think of my cumparsitas as something akin to the half hour spent sitting on the couch sipping coffee. It's the buffer between the dream and the day, as the brain comes down from the heady drugs our bodies produce in reaction to that much touch. But I would never have danced that last cumparsita with my perfect tanda partner. We had had our perfect tanda leading into our perfect dance and perfect ending, after all.

Adventures in Associate Attorneyship: Time is (and isn't) money

2011-11-16T05:47:00.001-08:00

Lawyering - especially associate lawyering - has become synonymous with the shibboleth of billable hours - racking them, counting them, logging them and obsessing over them. Big firms place immensely unrealistic billable hours goals on the muddled heads of their young 'uns and for understandable, if maniacal reason. Namely, they're the hours you get to bill. And it is hard not to fixate a bit when those magical hours are worth hundreds of dollars. I have to admit to a touch of vertigo reflecting on how my thorough trial preparation day has eaten through a hefty retainer.

But let's be clear that there is another side to this coin (get it - we're talking about money and I used a cliche that involves... har har... sigh). Lay people - lay, not law - people - see these hourly rates and the fact that every tenth of an hour for things like answering their calls or receiving a letter are subject to this rate, and assume that lawyers must all be wildly wealthy (setting aside muttered comments about price gouging etc. aside) after feasting on the bank accounts of their clients. Sadly, this is not the case. And it is isn't because I'm an exploited associated who gets paid an hourly wage that is just over 10% of my hourly rate...

Here's the problem with billable hours - for every billable hour you work, there are non billable working hours. A lot of them, sometimes. This is particularly true for private practice and small firms where up to half o the day may require administrative dealings, none of which is billable. My mom can spend an entire day working herself into the ground and log nothing to charge for. It's just the nature of the beast. Even for lowly associates such as myself, it's a challenge to top six hours in a given day. Well particularly since I'm new and thus do a lot of training type activities like following my mom around. And that's with a lot of work. Given this, it's no wonder that many young associates work 80 hour weeks. In order to reach a high billable hours minimum, they have no other choice. You cannot avoid the non-billable working hour. It is impossible.

My non exclusive list of hours that are pointedly (perhaps regrettably) not-billable:

1. Making Coffee: Considering the wonders it does for my ability to focus on the niggling details of complicated and convoluted life stories against the craggy background of our caselaw and court rules, it really ought to be, but it just isn't.

2. Starting the office up: There are lights to turn on, computers to take an eternity to boot up, copiers and printers to start, and locks to be undone. Mostly, it's the computer and the interminable wait for various necessary programs to start up.This can be doubled into the coffee making fairly well. There is also the morning reorientation involving looking at the work to be done, the work that has been done, and the inevitable mysterious file or piece of paper wedged in between a few recognizable files. I keep an ongoing list on my wall that I consult a number of times a day just to keep my fairly limited tasks manageable.None of that is exactly billable.

3. Preparing for Client Meetings: Preparation includes far more than any legal research, which could be billable. Before a meeting I do the following things: change into my suit jacket, quickly apply makeup (studies also regrettably show that women are deemed infinitely more competent when they are wearing makeup so I swear this is a business investment and not pure narcissism), gel my hair to tame the frizz resulting from walking at my desk all day, move all the confidential files off of their festively strewn schema on the desk, windex said desk, pace back and forth nervously because I am still a new attorney, and run between offices to grab a yellow pad, a pen, the file... oh CRAP WHERE'S THE FILE??... it usually takes about ten minutes to do all of this, but of course there is the very real possibility that the client will not show. In which case, there is a grace waiting period. Technically, the client has agreed to pay a penalty fee for not showing up without 24 hours' notice, but it is rarely pursued. My mom handles this by (1) being cool and confident enough to basically not need to mentally prepare for most cases in elaborate crazy-attorney fashion, and (2) working right up until the client is clearly there and ready.

I'm so pretty, I must know the law!

4. Consultations: Consults come in off the street after setting up an appointment and - in our office - pay a flat fee (heavily discounted) immediately before the consultation begins. Oddly enough, if you do some research beforehand, you will not be able to present the consult with a bill of additional hours worked. The same prep work applies, perhaps even more so because there is no rapport built up between consult and attorney at this point. In the world of lawyer, a consult is really more like a blind date, and if I recall from the days of online dating... well, being stood up is not uncommon. And the likelihood of a no show is significantly higher due to the fact that we don't have anything on them - no signed fee agreement letting us charge them, no deposit, no retainer.

5. Keeping Edumacated: Legal research addressing a specific client's concern is billable as mentioned, but an attorney has more of a generalized duty to know the law anticipatorily. That means following recent cases and legislation. I go to the Washington Supreme Court on an at least weekly basis to check for new cases that might have an effect on future clients. All of us have to take CLEs.

6. Networking: There is no better term for it, but at least one lunch time a month is likely going to be involved in some committee of lawyers. Doing this helps work with attorneys on future cases - rapport between attorneys can go miles towards helping a client's case, but even more importantly, having a place when you can definitely find an attorney (we are notoriously elusive creatures, particularly when other lawyers want to discuss a case with us). This also has to do with keeping current on the law and improving best practices by discussing specific issues and approaches. Oh and it takes time both ways, particularly if you end up in any position of power.

7. Venting, Kibbitzing and/or Gossiping: People are inherently fascinating and infuriating in turn. Family law is a business where you have access to copious salacious details about both people who - due to the nature of the engagement - are rarely on their best behavior. Add to this the fact that our silly Rules of Professional conduct require (1) we don't talk about the representation with any one not impliedly or expressly authorized, (2) we have to let the clients make their own - sometimes - less than brilliant choices, (3) we can't punch the clients in the face when they vent their frustration with the situation on us (on the other hand - we do get to bill them for their venting!) It makes for a bit of a pressure cooker and means occasionally you just have to talk about the crazy client who left his two year old with a crackwhore so he could score some weed and just spent the last hour telling you that you and the GAL are out to get him (also billable)! Because if you don't, some RPCs might get broken. And it's good to listen by the same token. And sometimes, you overhear a case you're not specifically working on and have some input or curiosity enough to drop in and offer your ten cents. Not billable.

8. Filing: Filing is the ultimate Quixotic quest... desperately aimed at keeping an orderly and clean office. It will never be accomplished, but with some effort an attorney may avoid being eaten by paper, like that one scene in Brazil. Not really billable though, despite its propensity to devour one's time and sanity.

9. Rebooting the computer, hitting the copier, screaming at FamilySoft, and long waits on the phone waiting for the Geek Squad to come to the rescue: So, if there are minor technology issues during billable work, maybe a few flitting fixes may be folded into your bill, but when things go seriously sideways... the day goes static. Since there are computer malfunctions of varying severity approximately ever two hours, these little things can add up!

10. Billing itself! Billing is a major pain in the patootie, especially given said software and the propensity for computer glitches. It takes time both at the moment of acting and the moment of entry. Each client and each activity is a separate entry and that adds up. I would so totally love to bill somebody for being billed, but apparently that would be a tad recursive. C'est la vie.

And don't get me started (because 10 is such a nice number for a list) About all the time spent thinking about work done for clients... I don't actually bill for when I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about a client's declaration or when the conversation drifts to what the hearing argument is going to be for a case. I suspect if I were an associate at one of those big-law 50billionbillablehours firms, I might reconsider this practice.

So, it's hard to me to bill a lot of hours, but I'm at the office a lot of hours. And I - as an associate - get paid an hourly wage. Which creates all sorts of weird contradictory feelings of guilt and angst: On the one hand, I feel horribly guilty whenever I bill a client, because I realize that their resources are limited and my work is not lightening fast (and can't be without a bevy of costlier mistakes), but on the other, I feel like a slacker for not billing more.

It's enough to make a person a little batty or maybe:

BANANAS!

And still I stay super sincere looking, don't I? Yay for cards.

There's More Accomplishment to an "Accomplished Dancer" Than Dancing Well...

2011-11-12T09:08:00.001-08:00

I began my tango-evening by falling out of my chair. No, that's inaccurate, I followed my chair rather splendidly in its descent to the floor. To my credit, I did so while continuing to strap my shoe and retained a certain elegant grace about the topple... or so I'd like to tell myself. Considering it was a more formal evening - live music always bring a bit more glitz and decorum than the average practica, it seemed the least I could do. It was an accomplishment.

And really, I should rewind I began the evening ultimately with two far greater accomplishments: (1) getting out of the house; (2) finding parking on the horrific quagmire of Capital Hill. In fact, let me categorize the accomplishments of the evening as a whole!

Accomplishment 1- getting dressed and getting out the door:

When I'm in Seattle, 9:00 p.m. usually means I am already snuggled up under a blanket with my boyfriend feeling particularly cozy. The idea of abandoning my warm and fuzzy robe and going outside after a freak hailstorm to drive to the aforementioned quagmire alone is enough to chill my blood, even if I ultimately know the pleasure will be worth the pain.

It helps that these days I've reached a point in my dance where I no longer feel the need to take or be taken seriously in my wardrobe. I've never gone too far this route, but naturally there is a pressure to dress in a certain style that advertises "I dance tango... and well, damnit" before stepping onto the floor. When I started, I took my fancy in the most gregarious directions to sheer show tango. It took a few years of fishnets snagging in belt straps and odd wardrobe malfunctions for this taste to minimize. I still indulge on occasion, but am increasingly too frugal to plunk down the cash required to maintain such an aesthetic.

As this was around the time that I perhaps caught the ever pestilential Buenos-Airesitis (No, I don't speak Spanish, but my kisses and hugs are sooo much more South American than my paper white complexion and Nordic height might suggest! and when *I* was in Buenos Aires...), it was a convenient time to switch my wardrobe entirely to that style intended to complement your nights taxiing between La Viruta and Club Villa Malcolm. And honestly, this style is far more amenable to dancing and in line with what flatters. It just sometimes smacks of this need to attire oneself in vestiges of authenticity that don't always gel with my particular quirk. I still love my babuchas (wherever they are - stupid move!) and in my defense have never understood those odd diaper turkish pants that seemed en vogue in BsAs at the time... but I was definitely subconsciously attempting some serious signaling. These days, I'm happy to go back to what I would consider more my signature style. Last night it was a grey sweater dress, glasses, a ponytail, and gray socks with bright metallic threads making a plaid pattern. I do wear socks with my stilletos. It's quirky and so am I. Anyways, dressing this way means substantially fewer hours of contacts-makeup-hair-and-ensemble-matching. Which in turn increases the likelihood of making it out.

As a side note, when one of my leads complimented my socks, I responded that they were my "lucky Bar socks"... apparently the capitalization and parenthetical (exam) didn't come to the fore and he looked quite perplexed, thinking that they were the socks I wore to bars when I wanted to get lucky... There was not point to that story, except I may not speak English anymore.... (did I ever really?)

Accomplishment 2 - Parking and getting there
As for parking... well the less said the better. There's a reason that when I actually lived in Seattle, I attended the three milongas within walking distance and left my car parked at my boyfriend's house in North Seattle. A half hour of circling Capital Hill is... such a delight!

Accomplishment 3 - Back to falling

Upon entry, I found some friends who located me the aforementioned broken chair. Upon toppling, I decided it would be safer to stay on the floor for the remainder of the shoe-donning experience. I believe a new chair was fetched, but fortunately I did not need to sit for the remainder of the evening. I do think I have some bruising, but fortunately little of that attached to my ego. The exquisitely dressed wine sippers at the tables surrounding me seemed slightly horrified, but to me, I consider a pre-dance fall to be good luck in that I've gotten gravity and all its snark officially out of my system.

Accomplishment 4 - Straying from my comfort zone

I realize that one of the reasons that tango dancers can come across as cliquish has as much to do with a certain reluctance to face the daunting potentialities of the unknown. Particularly on evenings with packed floors (and that many more wild cards who may or may not feel random urges to drive his/her partner straight into a lurking comme il faut - yes, I have drawn blood personally and shed my proportional share as well). And of course, because it is a dance that is so intensely personal and idiosyncratic and danced in sets of four that could wind you up with a bad connection for up to fifteen minutes... well it can be downright scary to venture towards the unfamiliar.

My unfamiliar partner of note was vaguely familiar to me and an odd experience... He approached me early in the evening and asked where I was from and how long I'd been dancing. Based on my "seven years" he asked me to dance. I hope that it was also based on watching me dance - or liking my socks - since "seven years" can mean just about anything from "seven years of daily privates" to "once every two years over the past seven years... and I am tone deaf." He was a lot of fun and clearly technically accomplished. It was good dancing with him, but it never felt quite like *tango* whatever that means (like pornography and art, my best answer is that I know it when I see it or really feel it).

I was unsurprised to later discover that he was a stage dancer whose form of preferred tango probably harkened back to his stint in Buenos Aires performing for tourists with a ballerina partner. You could almost feel his peripheral peering about for a stray camera or fourth wall. He would comment on moves during the dance in the analytic framework of a practice session, for instance - "nice, most follows don't get that" or "my mistake" or "oh I see this adjustment for your height..." To defy stereotypes, despite this focus, he was genuinely nice and had a decent sense of floorcraft considering the almost Viennese spinning and acrobatic leg work we went through. And his shifts in level were delicious, his sense of musicality was spot on, and he was quite good about leaving me on axis. But it was exhausting in the sense of feeling a pressure to perform for him as well as with him. I was relieved when he told me after a tanda and a half that he was more of a Pugliese guy and this Biagi sort of style the orquestra was taking played against his strengths.I was then distressed to notice that he spent much of the next hour hovering near my chair and watching me, and eventually walked onto the floor after a multi-tanda set with a familiar partner to ask if I would like to dance again.

Accomplishment 5: Surviving the small talk and kind of taking a compliment or fifty

One of the scarier things about the tanda concept is that it means that there are moments of interaction between partners that are not dancing. While it is perfectly acceptable - and preferable - to share a wordless dance and leave all communication to the body during a song, the pause between songs requires interaction. The go to conversation with unfamiliar partners is usually quite scripted: usually something about how long/where/how often do you dance, mixed with a touch of small talk. I have to admit, I rather enjoyed the get out of awkward conversation free card that not speaking Spanish gave me in Buenos Aires (or at least the struggles to communicate in broken Castellano and English filled up the awkwardness with a mutual struggle).

Last night was particularly challenging, because while I can take a compliment, I get a little uncertain how to take an endless barrage of compliments. It was an interesting evening in that aspect. My stage-dancer was particularly relentless - mentioning at least every break and often during the dance that I was a fantastic dancer or his favorite of the evening.... to the exclusion of any other conversational topic. I think once he asked who my teachers were (I boldly replied "nobody at the moment") and we may briefly have discussed our respective forays into ballroom (paso doble for him - which does not surprise), but honestly I couldn't even engineer the conversation to small talk despite a few efforts. I don't think I even know his name or where he's from. My other unfamiliar partners were similarly single track to a lesser extent.

I'm just really unsure how to react to positive feedback from new partners pretty much in any dance. I mean, I know that I do occasionally share mutual effusion with certain partners. But when it is less of a mutual recognition that we just had a moment and more unilateral, I am not always elegant with it. I try to neither deprecate nor preen, but sincerely say "thank you" but this never seems sufficient and there's often a stillness that suggests something more is expected of me. Other strategies I have attempted: (1) reciprocating, which can sometimes feel a little hollow if my actual response is "really? I thought our connection was a little off. Relieved you didn't hold that against me!"; (2) smile and nod and wait for the moment to pass; (3) respond but not ("you have such fast footwork - you spin really well" "oh the spinning is so much fun"); (4) look surprised about something and change the subject ("oh I think the dj is setting up again - must be time for a break!" "OH LOOK A SQUIRREL!"); (5) avoid the potential all together by emphasizing my dreamy rapture in the dance and lingering in the embrace until the next piece comes on. Some day I'll learn to more gracefully accept positive feedback, which would be only fair considering how often I give it.

Accomplishment 6: Surviving the evening injury-free

Maybe it's something about live music, but the floor was a nightmare last night. You know how the closer it gets to Christmas, the more it seems like people in stores cannot navigate space? The stress of the impending holiday apparently effects the part of the brain that handles spatial reasoning would be my theory and suddenly you are caught between ten shopping carts that appeared out of nowhere but have some correlation to screaming babies and particularly holly-unjolly holiday grimaces. (Oh thank god for amazon.com)...

Anyways this same sort of insanity seems to emerge on dance floor from time to time. Like I say, I think that when there's live music, there's a combined effect of larger crowds, more beginners, and more energetic showing off ... all coming together to make the ronda a bit more like bumper cars. I doggedly kept my heels to the ground last night despite myriad attempts to get my legs off the floor and flying. And thank god I did, because I can't tell you how many times the upper part of my heel hit somebody else's heel. I also kept my eyes open and watchful - ever ready with the little follow shoulder-tug to avoid mass-collisions. I have to say, I love the energy of a crowded floor, but so much more when it's a functioning and organic crowded floor. Last night, despite many individually delightful dances was a bit jarring, due to the diminished floor craft.

Failure to Accomplish 7: Proper hydration

I completely failed to take any breaks during the evening for water, despite having the sore-throat harbinger of seasonal malaise. When I got back to Andrew's, it was late, the kitchen faucet was locking jaws with the dishwasher, and every one was asleep... so I am suffering from a fairly substantial dance hangover. Just like those legendary college evenings - I'm a bit woozy, have a headache, and random bruising (from the chair). That's gotta mean it was a good night, right?

2011-11-09T06:55:00.000-08:00

I may have mentioned with much fanfare and in many venues that I was sworn into the Washington Bar Association last Friday. As with many rites of passage, the ritual itself marks a slow transformation that has been happening and continues to happen; it does no actually confer magical lawyer capabilities. Although boy does it change some of the legal repercussions if you allow it to do so. But there's wiggle room on either end - before this, I could do quite a lot of legal work so long as my mom was ultimately responsible for it and now I am still waiting for my WSBA number (no, biking-nut-boyfriend, I still do not mean my Washington State Bicycling Association Number and no I am not planning to compete in any bike races this year despite my obvious aptititude at all kinds of bike handling, such as... well falling mostly and occasionally breaking my chain) in order to enter pleadings and so on.

But that said, it was a momentous occasion and meant far more to me than my graduation from law school (squished as that was between bouts of bar prep assignments, I barely celebrated and didn't really feel like the J.D. alone really indicated the culmination of three pretty tough years, since the end goal was the being-at-work-being-a-lawyer thing). Our final hurdle before the official swearing in involved a full morning of New Lawyer Education. This is half welcoming committee and half "all the practical information you really should have heard during law school." Lawyers have a funny view of law school and I don't blame them. Not only do they have their hazy memories of the trauma involved with what amounts to a form of intellectual boot camp and/or brainwashing, but they also have experienced plenty of young attorneys. And boy are we bright-but-bleary eyed and useless sometimes! I heard a lot of times in a lot of different ways that now that we are out of school and done with the bar we need to remember how to be human beings again - remember our guts, step away from the technicalities, do non-legal activities. Oh and be constantly on watch about recording our hours. God, tell me about it! My time is divided up by the tenth of an hour - try to manage that with today's normal amount of multitasking.

My other favorite tips/moments were:

Figure out how to work with translators, because increasingly you will be needing them and it can raise some very interesting ethical problems. Sometimes talking with them in advance can be extremely helpful. And be aware of cultural ideas that might color the effectiveness of a translator (gender, for instance, or the example of the court translator for a criminal case who just happened to also be the defendant's priest!)
When it comes to networking, make a list of non-legal things that you genuinely love - whatever those may be - and joing some kind of club related to these. Being known socially is often a great way to garner referral sources and not being surrounded by lawyers keeps you sane and in touch with your gut a little bit more.
Figure out what kind of practice you want to have and try to find clients who want that kind of attorney. The best time to avoid issues with clients is when deciding to take them. Because we're young lawyers, people may think we're desperate, but making sacrifices early on in order to build the client roster that allows us to excel will pay off in the long run.
Find one point of non-law connection with every attorney you share a case with and you will be interact with a great deal more perspective and humanity.

Anyways, there was also coffee and pretty decent sandwiches. Oh, and the ringleader - our current bar president - had a rather dashing tie featuring ostriches with their heads buried in the sand.

I think they were meant to be role models
for handling what we're about to get into!

The swearing in itself was blessedly brief. I'm sure that we spent more time waiting outside for the courtroom to open up - me with roughly twenty pounds of flowers from my various awesome admirers (love you mom, Dad, Molly!) For the first time, we got to step "before the bar" which refers to the front - well - pew between the seating area and the judge's bench. Our oath was so long, they gave us a script and we all attempted to read it out in unison. And, like I said, I still don't have my bar number, but I am an attorney damnit! Unless it's all one of those practical jokes where I didn't really pass and they cruelty of it just got a bit out of hand. Anyways, there were about seven other attorneys being sworn in with me. Each had the opportunity of being introduced by an affiliate or friend, but only my mom stepped up. Which was kind of awesome, because she gave this detailed background of the high points of my resume from undergrad until now (including all the awards and scholarships I've gotten as well as work experience). Then the bar president "introduced" the rest by calling their names, one after another in quick succession - after me, how could anyone else be interesting enough to garner comment!

But word of mouth is good - apparently it is now understood that I am "smart" by an olio of family law attorneys who weren't actually present at the swearing in... After Saturday evening (a whole 'nother story, but in short, I went to a fundraiser and I danced for my dinner and attorneys were there and impressed in that really delightful and non-jaded way that only non-dancers can be - way more fun!), I'm sure I've got all kinds of fascinating word of mouth going on!

But hey, pictures:

And yes, this is my dashing $900 Nordstrom's tailored suit that maybe fit a little better before that last year of law school and that bar prep debacle. It's a but less tailored than it used to be, but it still looks pretty good - I mean how could it not, considering *I'm* wearing it.

For the transition, my mom and I have worked out a gradual plan. I have been shadowing her in addition to doing papers and research and projects like that. Starting this week, we are switching off during consultations. For representation, while I'm still learning, we're kind of going off of a law firm model - where she would be the supervising attorney and I would be (surprisingly) the associate. This way our clients get the benefit of the easy legal work done at a lower rate by me and the sophisticated and challenging stuff still handled. So I conduct the consultation with her observing and chiming in where appropriate. Since my first consultation was a crazy emergency mess in a complicated area... well, I'm glad she's there. But I'm also happy to start talking with clients and doing the pre-consultation preparation that will eventually have me nailing things. I know a lot of attorneys are just thrown into the deep end and figure things out, but I really feel that I owe our clients a little better than that. We will eventually move back into her having her clients and me having mine, but I do kind of enjoy that for a while we'll be a team - nothing says family law like a mother and daughter cadre of attorneys!

Putting the FAMILY back in FAMILY LAW

Anyways, first consult is officially attempted, although naturally it was completely peculiar and out of my depth, in addition to being in a serious time-crunch due to the fact that he was a half hour late! But, hey, what matters is that I had a suit on and every once in a while realize that although compared to what a competent practitioner should know, I may not know much right now... there is some effect to that law school indoctrination. I forget just how wide the chasm can be between normal English and legalese (and it's not the heretofore's and the thuslys that laypeople always emulate when attempting to be lawyerly... it's that every single word has a specific and precise meaning and every time period has different import). That was brought home to me both in my recent consult and during a wind down after my exercise session with some girlfriends of mine. We were talking about car accidents we'd been in and I was bemoaning the ongoing lawsuit against me for the accident I was involved in twenty billion years ago and how close to the Statute of Limitations (which does actually well abbreviate to SOL, as I instinctively wanted to do) I had been served. The other girl who had been the plaintiff in a suit said she thought the entire thing had to be settled within the SOL and seemed a little concerned as she had apparently settled her case with that deadline in mind. I am so indoctrinated that I had a hard time imagining the SOL correlating to anything other than the "commencement" of a suit (and yes my brain starts whirring about the tolling periods and procedures for commencement...). So little reality check that maybe my three years of law school did something other than just make all my clothes fit really poorly, add some fancy sounding honors to my resume, and put me in Seattle to meet my cyclo-nut boyfriend!

And that brought home another tip we had covered in my New Lawyer Education - people find us scary - we speak a magical language that controls major aspects of their lives and costs thousands of dollars to sort out. Nothing sums that up better than when our coordinator was explaining that being in court was one of the scariest things a lot of his clients experienced and said "for victims - er - clients, it can be really difficult!"

So, ready to don my suit, find some victims - er clients - and chill the legal koolaide that I've been drinking! Wish me luck and feel free to start the referrals! The crazier the better (no, really, no, I don't mean that!!!)

The J.D.-But-Not-Attorney Party Doesn't Have the Same Ring as Bachelor Party Does It??

2011-11-03T08:11:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I officially get sworn in to the Washington State Bar as an Attorney at Law. That's right, I will no longer just be THE LAW DOCTOR (J.D.'s gotta mean something, right? And I've gotta be obnoxious, don't I??). I will be a tried and true shark authorized to tell people things that my malpractice insurance shall rue twenty years down the road! Yes, this time tomorrow, I will be completely allowed to hold the lives/livelihoods/trust/finances of others in a terrifying fiduciary relationship. Be afraid!! Be very afraid!!

The swearing-in is a ceremony involving oaths given by officials and a major lifetime commitment (that can ended with a fair deal of public embarrassment), so basically it is like getting married to WSBA. It's the culmination of three years of investment, planning, sacrifice and struggle and will be a deeply emotional time marking a milestone in my life. It is also, as mentioned, a commitment full of promises about future behavior and dedication.. Leading to this point was a blood-chilling level of time, emotional energy and money thrown into making this day possible.

Instead of wedding invitations and save the date cards, I have business cards and announcements in the bar news. Instead of a license, I get a WSBA number. Instead of a white dress, I'll probably wear a suit (ok, my getting married won't involve a white dress either because that is *so* not my color). On second thought, maybe I really should wear a wedding dress to my swearing in. Instead of my parents "giving me away," my mom - as mentor and boss - will be "introducing" me. Oh and there will be handshakes and hugs and many congratulations from people I somewhat know, but mostly know of. And well, it's in a courtroom and I'm pretty sure they took all their seating from pews so denominational or not...

So, since today is my last day as a non-lawyer, what I wanna know is: where is my legal equivalent of a bachelor party? Do I get to go out tonight and break every single rule of professional conduct? Draft wills giving myself big legacies for non-family members? Contract for media rights to clients' stories? Make defamatory comments about judges? I just don't know. Or do I celebrate one last day by defying the lifestyle itself - e.g. Not drink heavily, suffer depression and anxiety, or pet my smartphone more than my cat?? Do I dress up as a fairy princess, make completely visceral comments on recent press-covered jury trials, and use the word "clearly" without any kind of "well it depends" qualification?

Also, do I get a bar-swearing-in cake? First dance??

Advice? Suggestions? All will be considered.

Also, I can't seem to cut and paste the official bar announcement with my photo, but this was the announcement my mom published in the Bar News:

LawOffice of Pamela E Englett, PLLC is proud to announcethat Adella Thompson, daughter of Pam Englett, is joining the firm. Adella will be sworn in on November 4, 2011. She graduated with honorsfrom the University of Washington Law School and will be practicing FamilyLaw. She has a couple years of mediation training and practice and hascompleted the Collaborative Law training. She comes with a backgroundthat includes dancing and teaching Argentine Tango and was the Dance SportChampion of the 2007 Star Ball in Seattle. She is accepting new dance students now and will be accepting Family Lawclients after November 4, 2011! J

Sisyphus Tangos? Quantity, Quality, and the Tango Questions I Always Dodge

2011-10-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

When I am called to answer questions such as "are you dancing much these days" or "where do you dance" and so on, there's a little panicky part of me that feels cross-examined. Maybe this is the influence of law school and too many years of the "Socratic" (well Socrates was kind of a jerk, but at least with him, he'd actually answer all his own questions and really just require you to say "It would appear so" a whole lot, which is better than being on the spot for a perfectly worded holding or counter-argument at a second's notice... but I digress). But I suspect there is more to it than merely the litigious environment from whence I've sprung or my inherent caginess.

My pat answer is unwaiveringly "Not as often as I'd like" or "when I can" slurred from my citadel of abstruseness. It's technically accurate. In an ideal world, I would dance tango every night and much of the day at festivals all around the world - of course in that ideal world I would also dance blues every night, compete professionally in ballroom (with a shockingly unorange tan and only a slight resemblance to a drag queen when I put my full kit on) sing in a chorus, take sewing lessons, learn aerials, AND spend plenty of quality time with my family and loved ones while building my career ALL at once because I would be indefatigable and wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

Honestly, in the real world of limited resources and current optionsm I don't dance all that much and I am frequently fine with this. The dirty truth: I haven't taken a tango workshop or regular class in over a year. I teach and I have practice partners, but very casually. I go out maybe once a week and sometimes less. Don't get me started about the dry-spell that was my law school career. And I have to admit, just writing that pains me, but not because I wish I were getting out more exactly. I've seen the same pain in the faces of others bravely admitting the same thing to me.

I suspect that part of this panic stems from the fact that the tango community is a distinct sub-culture in which there are complex rules and rituals to define belonging. Within that subculture, there are inevitably hierarchies of belonging. Admitting less than full investment is in some regards admitting "otherness" into the conversation. I won't tell you the shudders I anticipate when I admit to having studied (deep breath) AmericanTango (AAAAAAHHH) and liking it!

And of course, it isn't a mere hierarchy of belonging, but of ordinal standing of various compenents within a community that is being pre-evaluated by such questions. The way we judge people stems from how we choose to frame our perceptions prior to the actual experience. If a middling dancer convincingly proclaims competence, those inclined to take people at their word (a surprising percentage of the population) will make strident subconscious efforts to see only the competant moments gleaming from the dust of incompetency. And vice versa - if we take a competent person at her word that she is less than comeptent, we will be far more prone to see every flaw, and attribute each happenstance misstep to poor ability instead of circumstance.

It's a fair measuring stick - there is some undeniable correlation between practice, performance and mastery. I see my ballroom teacher move and my body spasms in faint conniptions of envy, simultaneously believing that it can and never could move in such an effortless and exquisite fashion. The dissonance causes distress until I recall that he spends hours every day honing his skill on top of teaching, and I spend a few hours a week lazily drilling the technique we've covered while waiting for my toast. It would be sort of a wash if my body could do all the things that so many more hours and gruel-and-grind earns and sanity demands.

And yet, it bears remembering that as we get closer and closer the the margins of human ability, we fall increasingly into the world of diminishing marginal returns. I am the first to admit that due to life-balance issues, I have sacrificed the practice time necessary to attain a solid advanced-dancer status, but I am constantly surprised at how much less of a decline I've had in my abilities due to the previous two years.This runs true to all dancing. While I've done much less of it, the basic habits remain in my body and some strengths have survived through sheer will power or tended to by other physical pursuits during that time.

Beyond diminishing returns, there is the land of negative returns. I know in running, over-training is considered a significant issue. The key is to push right to the peak of one's physical capacity, but no further. It's not an intuitive concept, exactly, but is easy to grasp once one gives it a little though: If Sisyphus were to stop and prop up against his boulder for a breather, he could actually find himself closer to the top of the hill than if he had kept pushing. I think I found when I was very serious about ballet and later ballroom - that the greatest leaps of improvement may come only after I did take a break. Our body learns in repose and improves while repairing. Too much mental or physical stimulation and the improvement part is impossible. And because inevitably physical learning follows cycles of learning many habits that must be unlearned and relearned correctly along the way, there is a particularly Sisyphean element to the dance world - two steps forward, one crusada back?

I remember the bane of law-school existence being those little lights into the lives of others, and feeling so left behind as status post after email after word of mouth got back to me about the dances, workshops, and practicas that so many acquaintances were attending. As attrition roughened the edges of my sultry stilettos, I fantasized about the world of new and unusual combinations, footwork, technique I had never dared to dream of. And in the end tally, many saw some of this, but it flitted in and then out of their dance repertoire, leaving largely the same defaults as before. Some indeed studied smarter as well as harder and have attained finishing to their world-class statuses. Just as many remain rutted in the same intermediate class (down to the slightly incorrect explainations and struggles with the same steps) with absolutely no cognizable evolution to their dance.

It reminds me very much of another law-school bane: the students who spent every waking hour in the library, treading quicksand and making the rest of us feel mildly panicked and guilty to not be working so hard. To this day, despite having graduated with honors and coifs (The Order of the Coif is sort of a specially exclusive law school honor society with a fairly hilarious name), I still feel this mild edge of inferiority that I was not in the library those Sundays for those hours. Funny that. Of course in both cases, much of the difference comes down to two important considerations: (1) natural ability, about which there is little to be done other than to recognize one's own limits and make peace with that at some point, and (2) efficiency.

Efficiency goes back to the over-training idea in running, goes through the study breaks as more important than grinding hours, and certainly spills over into my dance experiences. I suspect this means approaching learning with some strategy. I have no problem with those who dance for pure joy and make no efforts to alter, evolve, or improve that dance. For those who seek to expand the voice they are giving their soul, to increase their inner-ear for the essence of the music and partner, and just to look good... I feel that many are on the futile path using all available resources and hours stuffing themselves full of experiences they will never have time to process. The key for me is not attending as many opportunities as possible with the biggest names, but finding what works for me and identifying digestible chunks on which to focus.

Some follows probably feel a lot like this!

I generally believe in minimalism for dance and other learning curves. When I practice, I try to pick one thing that I want to focus on from my bag of physical tweaks that need tweaking. Having a teacher observe me can be very helpful, as I've repeatedly found with Nate. Although I know full well that we often have the same lesson (all technique) repeatedly over years, it is him forcing one component of that technique on my while reminding me to be mindful of the others, slowly causing habits to change and even more slowly eventually allowing them to be the defaults that I return to while dancing. I try to think about my body when I'm not dancing - how I stand, how to isolate certain muscles - and continue to correlate motions from one activity to another - pilates, running, walking, different forms of dance are all just different ways of thinking about the same physical mastery that gives the emotional and spiritual part lucidity. And it is all slow. I agree if I did more of it, the breakthroughs may come through slightly faster if I could maintain the clarity to focus on things one-at-a-time.I know at times, progress comes in lurches and and dead stops and that a blast of intense immersion sometimes has pushed me exponentially forward.

I hve recognize that I don't have the answers for myself. I don't know how heavily I could push the rock up that darned hill before it falls. I don't know when the perfect time is for an immersive festival experience that pushes my body into a metamorphosis that takes months to fully manifest. I don't know when a break is good and when other physical disciplines complement and when they detract. But I do have a sense of all these things intuitively, at least as factors.I think that there is something to be said for self-awareness in the learning process, a massive understatement if I ever made one. Mari Johnson recently posted a Marian Edelmen quote recently running along the lines of "Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others." To me, this extends beyond the obvious spiritual component into the physical. When we are struggling and compensating and allowing a cacophony within our bodies and ambitions, the other is drowned out. Too much information and not enough self-listening has the same obfuscating effect to me.

Even more importantly, I want to recognize that there is more to the tango community and experience than some objective measure of aptitude. I tend to recognize "the rules" well enough to break them, but also do buy into the "us" of that community. Being with kin and sharing experiences is the ultimate affirmation of belonging and I imagine that this is as important as any evolution in a person's dance to many who simmer in the social aspect. To that extent, my personality is instinctively withdrawn from too much of that belonging. In tango, as in love, I am the sort of lover who will always need her space, her separate identity, and her girl-cave to which she can retreat. It's an obdurate individualist streak that never quite wants to cleanly fit any one category even at the most enraptured of times. But I do recognize that to others, that sense of pure assimilation is rapturous.

And so, despite any personal philosophizing I do, the question lingers every time I see a fellow tanguero or take a moment's breather during a tanda with a new partner... and I will always blush, stammer and obfuscate to answer. "Not as much as I'd like"

Cycloperatic Weekend Adventures in Seattle!

2011-10-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

Well this weekend was split between various forms of filth - the literal mud of a cyclocross race after rain, followed by the pure operatic audio-visual coitus that is Carmen. And in that vein, I shall begin with my own version of the cyclo-cross parking lot striptease. As mentioned previously, what happens in the cyclocross parking lot stays ... ok, it doesn't because I have a camera. I have seen enough half to fully naked men donning team kits to think that next season I should start a blog on the People of Walmart line of things, called Mostly Nekkid Men of The 'Cross Parking Lot.

spotting the bared flesh is almost a Where's Waldo game here!

But since I am still a little shy about snapping photos of strangers changing, we'll just start with embarrassing my boyfriend:

Andrew got a new hat too!

Anyways, as in previous posts, I took a bit of a hodgepodge of photos, mostly focusing on jerseys I liked, some racing shots and of course cute dogs.

Anyways, it was messy messy "fun" etc. Andrew began the race a little behind as he was wildly attempting to remove his coat. He apparently managed to do so at some point, since we had to go find it later. Fortunately it did not take so long as to make me late for lunch with my friend Jill, after which it was off to the opera!

The drama of the opera was far more in getting somebody to go with me than in the production itself. I love Carmen, of course, although sometimes I feel like as a life long opera fan I should at least pretend not to. At least if I were to be a true afficianado (hipster). It is rather Opera 101 - a little number dripping with sexy-catchy tunes (I swear with the Andalusian elements that Bizet folds into his scores, there's an odd reminiscence of the soundtrack to Disney's Aladdin for me when I hear it!), sexy characters (gypsies, bandits, bull fighters... hello romance novel), a heavy hand of recitative, and well sexy sexiness. It is one of the best intro operas for my tastes, since it is wildly more accessible than your average Bluebeard's Castle, while not verging into the sappiness of your other big names like La Boheme (which I have to admit I am totally over).

Anyways, naturally I go to the opera with my Dad ordinarily, since he is the Season Subscriber and I have achieved a semi-permanent plus one status. But of course he is in Hawaii and probably so over Carmen having seen it like a bajillion times in his long opera-going career. Through a series of Mars/Venus conversations, I kind of thought that Andrew wanted to go and he kind of thought I wanted him to go... except not? I'm not really sure what happened. Suffice to say, my frugal depression-era mentality kind of chafes at the idea of a $150 ticket going for a a very posh nap in McCaw Hall and I sort of suspect that Andrew attends the operas he has with me mostly out of a misdirected sense of duty. After our monthly scheduling session (our lives revolve around google calendar, particularly for planning how we will split the weekends), he said sure he'd come, but then decided since I hadn't invited him on google calendar (see previous parenthetical) that I wasn't really going with him and by the time I mentioned it again, he was non-plussed. In turn of course I was non-plussed because by the time this happened, it was a week away and almost any one I could have given the ticket too was already fully booked. Also because in my brain of allegories and analysis any behavior can be extracted into infinity and now everything he had told me was now suspect and likely said for plactory purposes with no intention of following through and the entire five year plan of the trajectory of our relationship bled and sweated over was a farcical ritual and there was no future but stories and ... did I mention I am still recovering from bar stress. He of course was non-plussed at my non-plussedness as it seemed like a pretty minimal scheduling thing involving a simple choice between cycling and opera that had been fairly well resolved by a prospective "if it's ballet, ok, if it's opera, find a friend." Oh for fun. Needless to say there were some confused and irritable conversations and then the relationship survived. And I even went to the theoretically conflicting bike race that actually conflict (see photos above).

But I want you to WANT TO DO THE DISHES!

In the meantime, I feverishly texted, emailed and called every one who seemed like (1) good company and (2) people who would actually enjoy the experience. Naturally to no avail. Molly had family plans, Ross had to work, Dan had a study group... and yes, I shamefully admit, I finally turned to THE FACEBOOK... DUN DUN DUN... I got a handful of those ambiguous maybes from various people I know by passing acquaintance and finally a definite yes from a Bellingham tanguera. As it turned out, she was the perfect choice insofar as she loved the whole experience and it was in fact her first opera. I don't think I could imagine any one else being more appreciative of the experience, and we had plenty to talk about during intermission.

Of course the course of true opera love never does run smoothly, so she got lost on her way there and had to pick up the extra ticket at the box office and watching the first act from the little close circuit tv they have set up for late comers. This is where the sheer length of opera becomes an advantage: miss an hour and... you haven't missed much. At least, Act 2 of Carmen gives the viewer the most bang for one's buck and Act 3 is where it all gets ooey and gooey and deadly on top of sexy.

All in all, I really enjoyed the performance. Our Carmencita was a tried and true (lower registered) mezzo, which I love. Her voice had a honeyed dolor to it that you just can't find in a pure soprano. It clung to each note waxing alternately breathy and melancholic. Our Escamillo looked darned fine in a toreador's outfit. Done Jose and Micaela were exquisitely voiced. There were many steamy kisses and the dancers - as is always true at the Seattle Opera - were utterly spectacular.

Naturally to show my enthusiasm, I bolted the minute that the curtain went down in order to hot-dog out of the parking lot, run over a few pedestrians and race to the damned freeway. Can't stand Mercer traffic otherwise.

And this morning, I had a professional photographer come to take headshots, which was inevitably traumatic, as always and involved an entire morning (yes, predicting this, I got up at about 5:30 for the extra panic time) of trying on everything that I own and realizing I hate absolutely all of it and my hair is awful and my makeup can do nothing for my hideous face and... so on. But hey, I think it turned out pretty well, don't you:

Run Aqua Shoes, Run!! A Five-Fingered Review

2011-10-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

So, I haven't blogged much about running for a while for a fairly decent recent: I haven't exactly been doing anything blog-worthy with it. Ta da! The end. No, wait, really. When I first started this blog I was working my way up to a half marathon distance, which I accomplished and then the law school schedule made going much further somewhat prohibitive. I still run at varying degrees of seriousness, but mostly it's sporadic and social now.

Probably my main reason for doing less running - other than time commitments - is that I would never run to the dminishment of my already too-sparse dance schedule, and I already walk a lot. Even when I didn't have the current treadmill desk set up (and thus about four to seven hours of extra walking every day), I have tended to prefer walking as the ultimate mode of transportational freedom. Cars need parking, bikes need locking (helmeting, dressing...), busses need passes and waiting... walking means going wherever whenever. And when you spend that much time on your feet, you don't necessarily feel the same urge to spend more time on your feet in a slightly faster and hoppier fashion.

But as I say, I still dabble and I have finally started dabbling in a way that makes said dabbling bloggable: namely, I've sipped the barefoot running Koolaide. I now own a pair of Vibram Five Fingers!! Deveoted readers (hi mom and dad!) may remember my initial interest/skepticism about these bizarre little creatures. Well as an owner of a pair, I'm not sure I'm completely ready to repudiate my hesitancy, but I am an owner. Clearly I'm fully on board with something to do with wearing funny looking shoes (and socks, in my case - the blisters without would be even more painful than the smell of the shoes two days into using them) Sadly, my pair is fairly dull and nothing like I had originally hoped:

I need to be in charge of shoe design immediately

C'est la vie. By all recommendations, the transition from regular running to barefoot running should be cautious and gradual. I've heard incorporating them in with about 10% of your weekly miles... which may be problematic for me given my sparse mileage many weeks ("Ok, I ran ten yards, time to change shoes!!"). I had bought them as much as an alternative walking shoe for my treadmill desk, and have been walking in them. And of course when I walk, I tend to be unable to avoid breaking out into a gallop from time to time (MUST MAKE THE TRAFFIC LIGHT OMG!! Yeah, I'm crazy, what else is new). But aside from the walking, they hadn't been on much of a spin.

But my uber-athletic cyclist boyfriend is making his annual recommitment to running. The joy of his uber-athleticism is that he has a fantastic engine for horribly injuring himself where other new runners would poop out before little defects in form manifested in major tears and strains. So this year, finally and hopefully, he is taking is slowly and begrudgingly approaching the running schtick with the Couch to 5K Plan. This is so absolutely the right way to go - increasing intervals of walking and running - as it allows him to really focus on form and not do the damage that one does when one gets a little tired from trying to run a two minute mile. And it struck me as a great opportunity to use his work outs as my own transition. So, having committed to doing his weekend runs with him in my dusty not-so-new vibrams, I am more on board with the running in vibrams thing over all.

He bought new shoes even, but tragically not these

I also have been running with my Dad, and last night we decided to go on a short and easy run down to Fairhaven. I figured I might as well take the plunge and so I did. Oh yes, I have popped the five finger running cork and five fingered running is effervescing all over the floor (oh boy is it going to be sticky after a few hours!)

Vibrams are interesting. They have a certain novelty factor for casual use. Mostly it feels like you're not wearing shoes. It doesn't feel like you're barefoot... more like you are in slippers or socks or something fairly flimsy. Ok, aqua shoes, since let's face it that's basically what these are with a different tread and the whole toe-thing. Which makes every step outdoors this bizarre mish-mash of contradictory impulses (get back inside you're ruining your slipper! Oh no, it's wet! Agh! Keep running!). They are also far more sensitive to the assorted detritus of your average trail. I can say that I got a full and occasionally fierce reflexology session on my run last night. I also have noticed that there is a much higher danger of toe-stubbing in these for whatever reason. Think I've lost a little skin on my right big toe.

"not" vibrams, really

However, in terms of major complaints, I have none. Form-wise, I have the advantage of coming to running from a dance background. The essential advantage and peril of minimalist running shoes is that they gel well with a front-strike (where the runner's foot lands around the ball of the foot or there-abouts), instead of a heel-strike (you'll never guess where the runner's foot lands with a heel-strike!!). Heel-striking can cause a number of people knee/back/etc. damage and pain over time, because of body placement upon impact and decreased ability to absorb that impact. Traditional running shoes help and hurt in theory, by decreasing the impact with additional heel padding which in turn increases the likelihood of running with a heel-strike.... yadda yadda yadda... I know most of y'all have heard this a hundred times before. Vibrams make it easier to run with a more forward strike, but if you still insist on heel-striking they actually just make it worse. And this takes us back to my sheer fortune: In dance, the dancer's weight is almost always (I said almost, pedants!) centered in the ball of the foot and weight transfers from ball to ball.This enables better balance through the axis, safe pivoting, the ability to be super athletic in skinny little ninja stilletos, and so on. Even when I'm tangoing in practica shoes, I can't help but keep my heels off the floor. It just feels more natural and hydraulic to me.

Also *not* amenable to heel-strike!

When I first started running, I ran like I was taking very fast blues steps. I had to self-consciously correct to a heel-strike, believing this was the proper running form. So going back to a dancier style of running has been no sweat and even less so with the minimalist sole. As such, I haven't noticed the pains in my glutes and calves that others have promised. Mostly it feels like maybe I practiced some tango.

A candid photo of my run last night

In sum, running in vibrams is kind of odd, not too painful, perilously likely to stub toes and much closer to dancing through the tulips (yes, I like to plot my runs through people's gardens whenever possible) than the usual slog, which is more of a tromping the tulips milieu. I will likely still remain conservative and hold off on using the vibrams for longer runs just yet. But I could see working my way into them, particularly on trails. I do love some free pebble-reflexology!

Experience Tango Blogging!

2011-10-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

In the midst of bar acceptance revelry, I took up my first permanent host role as opposed to "guest host" at Tango Popolare's Tango Experience. Or is it Experience Tango? I keep getting them confused. Bellingham also offers a Tango Life, and a Tango By the Bay, and then there's the Tango Cafe that Tango Popolare puts on in Conway... So I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of Tango ___ milonga names. I feel like it sounds a little too promotional Buenos Aires Tourist Package to Disneyland rideish to start calling milongas TANGO ____ (life/experience/journeys/odysseys/adventures/mountain
/It's a Tango World After All!?). I guess I've never had a problem with festival names like Tango Magic, but it just seems more appropriate for a festival somehow.

I generally approve of the tradition of calling milongas by song titles - La Garua, La Milonguita, - as well, probably because it keeps the name punchy and reminds me of songs, which reminds me of happy dancing, which makes me think of tango more than the word tango somehow. I also enjoy references to some aspect of music or dance. Or really just evocative single word names - El Beso anybody?? - feel nice to me. I can also support just going with the name of the location provided that the location itself put some thought into its name. For instance, we used to have Blue Moon Milonga... that sounds pretty decent. Even more, I think the best candidate for Bellingham-names is the unofficial one for the monthly alternative practica at Pure Bliss Desserts. That's because it's commonly referred to as "Bliss" and hell, that is a fantastic name. "Are you going to Bliss tonight?" Ok, sure it sounds like a lead in to cheesy pick-up line ("no? Would you like to??") but it's rather evocative and so totally tango. Ok, I guess Tango by the Bay falls into this category a little bit, which may explain why I mind the name less than the experience/life line. Because, hey, it's tango... by the BAY. And, the Tango Cafe is more often simply referred to as The Muse, which is a pretty decent name as well. The added bonus of this approach is that it increases the likelihood that people will

But really that wasn't my point. It was a random starter rant to an otherwise lovely experience (of tango!):

Yes, that was my celebratory champagne for having passed the bar. Do I know how to party or what??

I'm never sure how to really break a fantastic milonga experience down into words. It's easy to mire oneself in positive synonyms and once I do that I start boring even myself. But it's a little hard not to be super positive after finding out about the Bar Exam. I couldn't help but announce it at the end of class, although thanks to the magic of social networking and the usual dance-community grapevine, all the regulars seemed to already know. My current "student" (the one I'm giving wholesale privates to these weeks) even brought me a card and flowers. Oh and I incurred the joy of what will be a long future of anti-divorce-attorney rants from slightly insane people who are angry that the law allows you to get restraining orders against them when they try to take action against the horrible guy who is stealing your wife away from you... awkward! But a fitting initiation into my future profession.

To maintain some semblance of perspicacity, I'll readily let you insert the various gushing adjectives in between three or four bulleted points that distinguished this gushing post from most post-tango gushing posts.

1. I felt that we made far more success on the co-teaching orientation lesson this time. I don't like long chunks of speech/demo or dancing in a lesson. I also like to keep it fun. There's nothing worse than a lesson that takes itself too seriously when people are already feeling baffled and vulnerable at their own disconnects with movement. My co-teacher may err on the side of prolixity (and a spontaneity that often leaves me scrambling a bit), so frequently if I disagree with a way he's explaining something, it can bring up the "do I stretch out the entire process by talking more or just let it lay?" conundrum. In this case, we managed to minimize that dynamic.

We started with posture, moved to partnering, built on walking and then - something I really liked and which was mostly a great spontaneous redirection of a slightly incorrect explanation of a chest lead for a side step - we added the concept of leading a follower's side step with the lead's torso (circular step around the lead instead of him stepping). I was big on the theme of "this area of the torso is what's leading" so it fell in well. And from there, we added what would have been two steps of molinette, but really was a segue into how to get a follow to do a back cross step. That naturally led into ocho, with a quick "upper-body turns, hips follow, pivot on the feet" breakdown for the follows and some basic understanding of an easy set up for the leads. I felt like it was a nice foundation and also good technical reminders for the more experienced dancers who maybe focused more on the steps and less on the underlying mechanical building blocks. And there was a beginning girl there who had an utterly infectious laugh and smile. This in and of itself made the class feel like a success.

2. I danced with my Harry Potter again. This was my favorite partner from last month's Bliss. I always feel a little nervous when going out for a second tanda with a newly discovered "favorite" as you don't yet know if (1) it's a fantastic all-around connection (2) it was something about the context or the musical style of the prior tanda, or (3) it was entirely a fluke. You have to hope that it's number one, but it can be disappointing to realize the others. In this case, it was even better than the first time. We had some struggles through the first song, partially due to the complexity of the music (heavily dramatic modern orchestra and very unpredictable) and partially because the floor was particularly slick that evening and every one was feeling the balance issues. But, as before, by the third, we had fallen into perfect synchronicity and were breathing as a single unit. His moving foot brushed the arch of my weighted foot as we stepped, something I usually think of as a sign of precision, but in this case, the light brushing contact between his right foot and mine as we walked was more than that: it was this little tiny reassuring moment of tender podiatric intimacy, much like a soft rub of the back or squeeze of the hand. Quite delightful. It's funny, as my favorite partners are not necessarily the best dancers in the room - there are often little gaffes, or maybe they don't look particularly polished from the sidelines... I can only fall back to the breathing together and that simple feeling that we hear the same music.

HP's first tango taught him the beauty of tango shoes!

3. It was interesting how perceptions and impressions can change. There is one dancer who started not long after I did. Somehow I had always thought of him as haughty and somewhat stuck up, particularly for his abilities. This little bias was grounded in nothing tangible, but had until now kept me from making my eyes available for his cabaceo. On Wednesday, he had asked me to dance just as I changed my shoes, and I apologetically promised to find him for a definite dance during the weekend. So, I finally decided to try dancing with him (secretly afraid that he would judge me harshly for his inadequacies in leading... sometimes I get proactively defensive). It was a blast! Less refined or perfectly ethereal. Far more athletic, but fun. And of course he turned out to be a very gentle and genial fellow who also enjoyed dancing with me - evidencing some clear taste! That only took me, what, six years to clear up an incorrect first impression? I will give some credit to the grace that comes with more mastery (hopefully), but I also just have to guess that I was clinging to inaccuracies.

4. On a different theme of less nuanced impressions, I remember seeing a dancer at Bliss who looked intimidatingly good there. Her footwork was quite refined and although I didn't get to see much of her, I raised quite the image of her deific virtuosity in my mind. Again, because the floor was a bit slippery on Saturday, I think many of the more technically impressive follows looked a little shakier (the others just use the leads for balance anyways, so not a huge difference) and little imperfections were magnified. Watching her dance with a wider variety of partners for a longer spell, I came more to understand that we were in similar categories of ability at the very least.

It does make me understand how some people can be so incredibly impressed by people whose style does not do much for me - it all depends on what eye you apply to the dancer in question. I think that there are many ways to view a person who is dancing. When I view my own dancing, I do so with a particularly finely tuned eye that is sensitive to every single flaw (hence, why I sometimes overstate to myself the utter dreckitude - thanks Andre Leon Tally - of my own abilities). When I'm casually watching, I may see none of that, or see certain markers of good technique and develop a more inflated view of a person's ability. When I apply my "would I like to dance with this person" view, yet another image emerges and the focus is far more on partnership and facial expression. And I have yet another eye for teaching - quite balanced to my estimation of what positives are there to develop, how a student looks compared to my estimation of their potential ability, and what habits are most likely to be dislodgeable. And of course if I'm feeling competitive, I have a keen eye for flaws in others as well as myself. The point being a fairly banal conclusion: my opinion of somebody as a dancer is drastically dependent on how I am choosing to look at them.

Are you gazing at me with rapture or did I just trip?
Darn floors!!

At the end of the evening, I came out with many positive adjectives to attach to the night and felt rather a success. I also gave up on waiting for the dance to end and abandoned my co-hosting obligations after the dance went about forty minutes longer than scheduled with no clear discussion from the co-host. I feel a little guilty, but I am good at making myself feel justified on these things!

Today is just a little bit more the first day of the rest of my life

2011-10-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

Shakily leafing through handfuls of ads and bills, I stood in the little cul-de-sac where my mom lives. There it was: "to Adella Thompson, luv the Washington State Bar Association" typed neatly in more official words on the outside. The dreaded envelop of life changing portent! Inside that innocuous white paper lay the key to my career or the agony of at least six more months of bar-angsting agony. I'm not a huge Matrix fan, but standing there, judging the weight to decide if it was heavy enough to be an acceptance letter, I had one of those "red-pill-blue-pill" moments. But it was too late to turn back. Ripping open the outer seal, I saw forms. Forms are good - things to fill out, checks to write... these are good. Anything but a slim sheet of tersely worded "NO" is good. There were demographics surveys. That was good. But there would be no release until I saw those words "We are pleased to inform you..." Surely they wouldn't be pleased to break my heart and crush my dreams. Surely!! Right??? YOU HAVE PASSED THE BAR. Six months of dizzying panic, tears, gnashing of teeth rushed from every pore in a not-entirely-comfortable catharsis. I screamed "oh thank god," startling the children playing near by, and crunch over in a sudden onset of tears. I remember these tears. When the report on my mom's hysterectomy came back with stage ONE (i.e. "highly treatable"), they were the same tears. Sheer and utter relief and the dying thralls of those omnipresent lingering "what ifs" that seep between our human optimism. "IT" was over.

Not wanting to scare my mom - waiting patiently inside - with the teary eyes and staggering shakes that were coursing through me, I took a moment to breathe and compose myself, wandered into the house and nearly whispered "I passed." We hugged. I cried a little bit. I'm pretty sure she cried a little bit. The hug lasted roughly the duration of the Reagan administration. There were forms. Yes, forms. Before telling any one else, there were forms. To make it real. I wrote the licensing check three times in decreasingly chaotic scrawl, still shaking and shaking my head. I filled out each additional form, liberally crossing out the unrush of typos and misinformation that gushed from my pen in the haze of relieved stupor. Envelops? Of course not. But minor details.Finally, I reclaimed my backpack, laden with the Barbri books I was too superstitious to get rid of until I knew I wouldn't be needing them again. Books went into the recycling.

At the end of the day, this is the end of limbo! Even before the end of the day. At the end of mail service. The hold placed on my life this last six months (three years?) has officially been lifted. Now it's business cards, advertisements, malpractice insurance! In two weeks, I will be a sworn in member of the legal profession authorized to "practice" and boy had I better practice, because I am breathless at the kind of responsibility I'm about to acquire in my newly formed fiduciary relationships.

Over the next two weeks, it is slowly going to settle in - those questions and feelings and fears that I might have expected at graduation, but was too busy to reflect upon. For now, though, forget what it means to have the future wide open and to be forming a permanent professional relationship with the same pomp and commitment as the marriages I'm planning to help dissolve (ok, hopefully the marriages that won't need my services)... for now, let it rest merely with this: I never ever ever have to take the bar exam ever again!!!!

Your Literary Moment.

2011-10-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

During our recent ER related excitement, I think I mentioned that I picked up a few books. The first was called Pistols and Pedagogues, which is sort of a mash-up 1960's whimsy between Evylyn Waugh and Dashiel Hammet. I believe it's the only thing that the author published, which would be a shame, because it was quite entertaining. At any rate, these were a few quotes that I found entertaining and which voice my attitudes towards life rather well:

Shopping: I chose a wire market cart and began trundling it down the first long corridor. The shelves were more than head-high, crammed with cans in brightly colored labels, packed with glass jars that showed ingeniously packed olives, pickles, fruits and nuts. There seemed miles and miles of such corridors; thousands of cans and boxes cried out to me to be seized and carried off. I gave in easily, a purposeless mariner glad of the diversion afforded by the siren's flamboyant cried. Lulled by the seductive music that crept from corners, enticed by pictures, by special prices and free gifts, I rapidly filled a wire cart, which I was forced to abandon near the meat counter... A third and fourth cart I filled, until, satiated, I halted. It was bad for me, i realized, to give in to each impulse; I was destroying the tough fiber of the inner man. And I was in danger of clogging the aisles with my abandoned wire carts.

Telephones: No sounds on earth can so wake a sleeper as that of the telephone. I awoke, each nerve jangling inharmoniously, my muscles tensed to leap toward the vile instrument. I fought that impulse. I am one of those rare men who can sit in a room alone with a ringing telephone and refuse to answer it. I am proud to be able to make that statement and I write it with some pride. I can sit in a room alone in a room with a ringing telephone and refuse to answer it... I did it once. Of course, I was almost out of my mind by the time that that ringing stopped. It rang seven and one-half times and my mental condition grew steadily worse throughout the rest of that long ago afternoon. ... I have never discovered who was trying to call me that afternoon... but I can sit in a room alone with a ringing telephone and refuse to answer it.

On a beatnik bar (but rather apropos for your average hipster coffee shop as well): The unlighted sign still swung before the narrow door in the brick wall; within, the same naked and fly-specked light globes illumined the tomby room. What appeared to be the same duffel-coated couples sprawled in what appeared to be the same poses, poses expressive of world-weariness and of careful scrutiny of weekly photo journals that showed the latest fashions in Weltscherz. The young ones who sprawled with such exquisite langour must have felt they were au courant, but I felt on entering the joint for the second time that I was on some great and dreadful treadmill that kept me running, running, running as insipide scenes of Life in Stratford paused shakily by me. I shuffled to a table in the far corner and slumped into an authentic pose. In time the waitress drew near. She expressed great boredom in my presence and an unreadiness to take my order. We exchanged blank looks half-filled with rue.

On Music: There was a sudden whirr, a blast of colored lights that struck my eyes painfully: red, mauve, blue, yellow, green lights whirled across the roof and rafters. There was a sharp metallic sound (the hammer of a gun?) and then the electronic melody of a terribly magnified violin hit me. Some one had plugged in the juke box. "The Little Gypsy Tea Room" hit me, encompassed me with the brisk ululations of Guy Lombardo's regimented musicians. The recording was poor, but I was worse. I sunk shakily into the nearest chair.

On Danger: How does one fend off a bullet? My hands flew to my eyes, my ears, my crotch, my stomach. I crouched forward, twisting awkwardly to the ground. I have never been strong on dignity, and I chose to meet death with great, quivering reluctance.

Seattle, Collaboration and 'Cross

2011-10-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

I am now steps closer to being a Collaborative Attorney (oooooh aaaaaaaaah). This means eventually I will have to start initiating legal actions by finding the respondent's attorney and throwing flaming pitchforks at said attorney screaming "OUT VILE CUR!!!" Darnit! Also, since I'm not an attorney, per se, probably doing so may be a slight issue of unauthorized practice of law (and, uh, ok for old time's sake arson in the the 1st degree, assault in the 1st-2nd, and probably theft of a flaming pitchfork in the 1st degree - thanks Bar Exam for learnin' me some gud law!)

The final hurdle remains hanging in the air in a poor sword of Damocles imitation involving this coming Friday and an increasing anxiety over the mail box. Dammit, Bar results really will get mailed out after this long phase of denial and deferral! And yes, I am having the requisite flashbacks and anxiety dreams. I would like to request that people defer their "oh I'm sure you passed" and "after next week when you're an attorney" support, because it really does just make me feel more anxious and in my typical attorney way, it is more comforting to me to work on my "if I didn't pass" plan in tandem with my "if I did pass" plan and weight them both equally for the time being in terms of likelihood. Ok, enough of that crap. Bleck. Yes, this paragraph is probably liable for Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.

Hanging in legal limbo

BUT, I have my facilitative dispute resolution training more than satisfied and after this weekend also have my actual Collaborative Law training... I'm not sure exactly how much extra I learned on the final training, which may have fared better on the usefulness scale had I been more rutted into the mindset of the "traditional attorney." This was a constant theme - shifting our paradigms, except the paradigm they were assigning to non-collaborative law was simply alien to me. This is not only a result of my other mediation training, but because all of my practical skills classes at UW teach from a client-based/interests-based-negotiations model that is far more akin to the Collaborative Paradigm than the "Litigation Model" that they were touting, in which lawyers are cold, bossy, adversarial, fact-pattern monsters who think they know best and want to duke it out in gladiatorial combat instead of recognizing that emotions play a huge part to an effective resolution of any legal issue.

I will say that - in addition to the copious quantities of free coffee and cookies allotted us trainees - I appreciated the filling in of various blanks about the process itself, which parallels a certain model of co-mediation, but with important exceptions. Mediation itself is such a flexible process that I could argue the differences were not omnipresent. In general, though, collaborative law is fine-tuned to the stages of divorce, and is intended to take place as a transformative process over a long period of time. Over a series of meetings intended to gather information, identify interests, and brainstorm creative solutions, it incorporates a wider net of experts into the team. It also give each party some sense of the traditional advocacy model by keeping them with one attorney who helps his/her client's voice be heard, even if all work as a team.The model we learned also put much more emphasis on the team comprising specialists - financial specialists who are actively involved in the planning process and model possible scenarios; child specialists who are there not to make recommendations but to be a place where the children can become comfortable and speak to a party who can then relate where they are, and help the parents know what to expect from the transition into two households; and divorce coaches, who help the couples transition from the past to the present and from thinking as a couple to thinking as single individuals.

This is probably the part of the process that really resonates with me. Collaborative divorce requires changing the narrative of what divorce is. It isn't failure, it isn't brokenness, it isn't eternal conflict. It's a major life transition, in which there will be fear and grieving, but also unprecedented opportunity to redefine the future for both parties and take agency over the closing of one chapter of their lives. This gels well with my experience of divorce-as-opportunity. I was a little taken aback when a child specialist attending the training told me and another attorney trainee that (1) all children think divorce is their fault, and (2) that even into adulthood, they wish in some part that their parents would get back together. Maybe I did and am suppressing those feelings, but I'm pretty skeptical. I honestly think divorce was one of the best things that happened to my parents during my life and that I'm not really sure if I'd have a relationship with my father if not for the divorce. Anyways, regardless of all of that, analogizing from break-ups and other major life upheavals, not ending is without a beginning and these tumultuous events often are what give us the impetus we need to make changes we were too afraid to make when it risked losing the status quo.

It's always interesting to wonder - going over the plethora of people skills - why on earth attorneys should be at the center of these facilitative models. Unquestionably, the training for this approach is available in law school, but it is not the dominant set of skills taught (although arguably, the ability to connect with people will be the ultimate gauge of future success far more than most of the learned skills). I have seen the value of involving attorneys in the mediation process, particularly because knowing the law contributes more than you'd imagine to the holy grain of ADR: the durable agreement. I also think that knowledge of the law is extremely helpful in mediation or collaboration as a resource for objective measurements if parties are stymied, for reality testing (they didn't teach this per se, but essentially did under the name of "client education"). And I suppose, not just knowlege of the law, but that ability to foresee all possible snags and contingencies that might make an otherwise great plan deflate. Still, that we are the ones meant to be managing the process, well ok, if any part of the attorney stereotype resonates it's that attorneys are control freaks and we're more than familiar with process, so maybe it works out pretty well.

Incidentally, the pictures above were taken at the site of the training, Hotel Deca, which is gorgeous and surprisingly located in the middle of the U District.

*** Abrupt Transition Please ***

Between and after training, there were my typical Mr. Wright related sundries with-special-guests... his Dad and Uncle who were up from California on a road trip that surely could qualify as a winner at the next Sundance Film Festival should anyone have thought to record it. Andrew's Dad brought us presents - mine being an extra large shirt that reads "Love an Engineer" (which I do, if we accept that "engineer" is more an internal quality than a piece of paper/job description... or maybe he suspects I'm having an affair with one of Andrew's classmates), and Andrew a large silver thing that looks a bit like a trumpet or a horn of some sort and which we postulate may have been one of those huge airhorns they put on semis.My shirt was extra-large so I could wear it both in my "present condition" and any "future conditions that might result from my relationship with his son" (badabing badaboom, I think even if Mr. Wright didn't hear that one out loud, there was a chilled disturbance in the parents-embarrassing-me force, which cracked me up). But seriously, I love Andrew's dad: he's completely adorable. I want to buy some kind of kettle corn or other family-type-comfort food from him.

Naturally, since Andrew had guests, he had to race for them, so we found a cyclocross race that he would not have ordinarily attended out in Tacoma. Of course that it was in Tacoma would sound like an excellent reason he might not have attended, but actually it's just that it's a different group putting it together and they have lots more stupid rules. And more people as it would turn out. And more people meant more crashes. Some fairly spectacular wipe outs, actually. Glad to say that nobody got too badly injured and the rain maintained a steady low of mist instead of all out spectator-hostillity. Andrew's Dad was tickled pink, his uncle was disappointed there weren't more crashes, and I was just glad that I actually had forethought enough to pack some food this time around. Oh yeah and Andrew thought he could have done better, but I'm mostly just happy he's alive.

I think my favorite moment from the race was a little father-son heartwarming that did not originate in the Wright blood lines. Across the way from Andrew's truck there was a dad with his son. As the cyclo-cross motto "what happens in the parking lot stays in the parking lot" pretty much guarantees that few people have the residual modesty to cover themselves while changing, the father drop kit entirely when getting into his shorts. It's something you just kind of get used to diverting your eyes from when it comes up... and hoping that they are not doing this changing right in front of one of the driver's side mirrors as is sometimes the case (objects in the mirror really are larger than they appear?? I'd hope so!). In this case though, the son was acting as voice of modesty and actively trying to block the public view of his father's derriere. He didn't look ashamed, but fully resolute in his duty to protect his father's dignity. I thought it was cute anyhow. Here's a photo of them both fully dressed.

Speaking of children at 'cross races. This child is insane! He was at the begining of the cat 4 men and stayed there.

not a short adult - that's a kid

Anyways, all was well and I came home to an excitingly hectic week of two trials and another Continuing Legal Education day (retirement assets and family law!). I probably should stop taking these before being admitted to the bar, since I'm wasting all kinds of credits that could be going to the mandatories. But then again, it's a good distraction and just in case I do pass, it might be good if I'm semi-competent going forward. I am after all, a law school graduate and finally have the damned paper to prove it:

That only took uh more months than my math savvy is willing to count

Facebook Detox Status (har har) Report and What I do not Miss at All

2011-10-06T11:54:00.000-07:00

So - the facebook detoxing has not been as complete as I may have liked. After agreeing to cohost a regular milonga and be included as a nominal member of the "faculty" in the loosely formed Tango Popolare (this is mostly my previous teaching partner and his handful of regular lessons and other teaching partners around NW Washington), I offered to maintain a facebook fan page in the hopes of getting the larger Bellingham community more involved:

Yeah, I stole that from here, but it's out user pic because I like it.

Anyways, if you're reading this and on Facebook, please visit and like it. Just for my sake. I won't spam you, I promise. This is a funny request since much of the rest of my post is talking about how awesome *not* being on Facebook is... I'm a complicated woman.

It seems to me that although the community can have redundancies, there are distinct Bellingham barrios developing. Perhaps this is an inevitable and even good thing, but since this leads to scheduling conflicts and many missed connections with my favorite dancers who may have fractionalized slightly differently than other favorite dancers... well for selfish reasons, I'd like to at least encourage *my* favorite dancers to be at events I know I'll be attending because I've agreed to teach/dj/etc. Anyways, this has been a muddied experience to say the least. In hindsight, I probably should have created a "group" which allows you to add anyone without prior notification or consent... annoying when I have been added, but if this doesn't pan out after a month, I may have to switch before giving up altogether.

Creating a page is fairly simple, but getting people to "like" (and thus receive updates in their feed) it has proven to be more trouble than it's likely worth. I seem to recall a time where you would get an "invite" to "like" (er, actually I guess "fan" a page - I assume the same syntax applied) a page that showed up in notifications and was fairly easy to find, identify and act upon. So far, this hasn't really worked out. Although I managed to figure out how to "invite" people to "like" the page, from what I'm told (I feel comfortable asking my boyfriend about things like "did you get that notification" without sounding passive aggressive, so I'm relying entirely on his input here), there are no longer clear identifiable invitations but something kind of weird that doesn't look like anything and is likely to be ignored. The co-teacher, whom I added as an admin on the page, managed to confuse himself into adding about thirty more friends to his personal profile while attempting to invite people to "like" the page. I also attempted to simply post the page from my profile and asked people to "like" it, which inevitably led to more people liking the post where I ask people to "like" the page than actually "liking" the page, despite my added comment that this would not be effective. So... 8 friends and one of the admins doesn't even "like" the page.

Can I just say that by now I miss the days where painfully redundant use of the word "like" was confined to Valley Girl speak and that delightfully dippy intonations accompanying such patter. Give me the days of Clueless over stupid cluttered FB verboddities (yes, as previously established, I can and shall create new words whenever I so choose).

So, like, I'm suppose, like like some like page or something
As if! I like totally don't DO computers except
to coordinate my wardrobe.

But it was an interesting diversion creating the page, and using the service as Tango Popolare is far less cracktastic than using facebook as a personal social networking device. Although occasionally I do actually have to use facebook as myself - and thus get the ordinary slate of invites and notifications - I have introverted out every time I get to the main home page and its relentless tickers, chat boxes, ads and top newses and so on. And once you stop following some of the inane interchanges on there, the urge to stalk does decline substantially. Although I think I am missing out on announcements and funny comments from which I've always derived value, there are many things that I can solidly swear I do not miss:

1. Obsessive Schadenfreudes over sundry stupidities, and morbid fascinations with that love-to-hate urge. I have a few "friends" whose status updates I've watched largely for the opportunity to snicker and tsk in absentee condescension. There's a morbid fascination with some people's trainwrecks of a life and facebook can provide our own personalized Jersey Shore or Starz Magazine. Of particular fascination are the stupid on-again-off-again relationships that were obviously doomed from the begining and bear watching for the inevitable blow ups and subsequent blissful reunions; the insane narcissists who seem unaware of just how conceited and deluded their self-serving posts read and thus make great fodder for reading aloud; the passive-aggressive "you know who you are" types who make equally great fodder and tip one off to all kinds of interesting gossip; the exes for whom I technically bear no ill will (usually even think well enough of to maintain the occasional "how's it going?" contact), and yet get a little surge of fascinated cruelty in following their subsequent romantic endeavors, which I guess is a sort of see it wasn't me, it was YOU! kind of thing.

2. The mindless reload loop. So you're on facebook and *nothing* is happening, but you know if you leave, *something* will happen. So you feel like you have to stay on there, whether you do so actively or just have it up in the background and "occasionally" refresh on the theory that maybe the automatic refresh isn't working as effectively as it should be. And you enter this incredible state of watchfulness as you wait for whatever "something" there may be to happen. Because it's so easy, this leads into rescanning your feed, looking up friends you haven't seen much from in a while (good way to stumble on delightful news like maybe you've been blocked, etc., but usually just kind of a boring confirmation that you haven't heard much because they haven't done much and/or maybe they commented on somebody else's page and it was kind of boring, but hey why didn't they comment on your page??), going back, clicking reload, switching feed options to change the order... and suddenly that sixty minutes of free time you could have spent reading a book, writing an email or taking a walk is gone.

3. The petty jealousies. Ok, in admitting these roil a bit in my head from time to time I am not admitting that I give great heed to them, but there is a little voice in the back of my head who disturbs my inner-elevator music with its spiteful reactions to things that fall into the ignorance is bliss category. For instance, facebook may tell me my bestest friends are going to an event with some acquaintances or see that they've had a long love-fest in comments on their wall with another person... While in ordinary circumstances I understand that friends actually have other friends and are allowed to have other friends, it can a similar sort of thing as recognizing that my significant others will and do find other people attractive and probably have some feelings for others overriden by their better instincts. As neither truths likely impact me from a practical standpoint and do send my mind places I'd rather avoid, I don't need to know about it. Facebook begs to differ.

4. Similar to 3, facebook as a relationship metric. Sometimes - and again we speak of small twinges - there is a little something in seeing the more effusive facebook behavior of another friend's significant other that causes me to pause in considering my own. Or maybe, I start comparing how often and in what way I refer to my significant other to how often and in what way he refers to me. I don't suggest doing this, but I dare you to try not to. Don't get me started on the leery tussle of "relationship status" that occurs at the begining of a relationship.

5. Lest we forget, the birthday pettiness. Why some people post on my wall to wish me happy birthday and others do not is a complete mystery. Some of my very close friends ignore it and some people I've barely seen post extremely detailed and personalized comments on my wall. I generally have appreciated the ritual for reminding me of dormant relationships and how much I appreciate people who aren't as active in my life now, but I also can't avoid at least some calculating about who said what and who did not say anything.

6. Notification addiction. I'm usually an introvert, but I also enjoy affirmation and - as an introvert - I tend to take any sign of rejection including being ignored far more harshly than extroverts. So there is always a hook to posting comments/events/etc. and a deep hope that people will respond and recognize just waiting to be dashed. This feeds desperately into the mindless reload loop. Also, every time somebody comments or likes a post, it makes me feel like I've "accomplished" something, and this feeling can substitute for actual accomplishments. And since this is a tiny bite of a post, it usually is not the same kind of "I made you think or laugh" accomplishment of anything of substance.

7. Oh and the privacy issue. I'm very protective of my time and space. I am - as previously harped upon - an introvert, so having the ability to vanish for a while is a good thing. Sometimes this means that I need a friend to not hear back from me for a brief period of time while I'm mulling on something or otherwise to protect myself and my schedule with a brief wall of vagueness. Not that one can't control for these things, but with passive sharing and a little forgetfulness, frequently friends know what I'm up to when I wish they weren't or that I'm currently on the computer when I'd just as soon they didn't. It goes without saying that I've turned off chat. I can't tell you how much the uninvited conversations stressed me out (introvert with a sense of social obligation to respond to people requesting communication needs mental preparation!)

8. And of course the unfriending issue. I may have mentioned this before, but I feel like in the past, relationships took work to continue as such, or it would simply fade away.. There are friend breakups in the real world, I know, but ordinarily the less cataclysmic end has been that gradual drift. With unfriending, you can stay "friends" far longer than you otherwise would have if it required effort, but ending takes an affirmative act...And since facebook has the mentality of a highschool mean-girl (maybe there is a reason that it's so enamored of the word "like" after all!), you will stumble upon a number of old "friends" whom you have unfriended or who have unfriended you in the "people you may know" area. In fact, it will even suggest your exes, despite knowing that you were in a relationship on facebook and broke up on facebook and maybe said a lot of nasty and indiscreet things that ended you up on lame book together. That just seems cruel.

9. On the flipside, it means hanging onto people longer and this can interfere with letting go. I have a few of what I term "ghost friends" on facebook. These are people whose posts are hidden from my feed and who are blocked in my privacy settings from seeing mine. This arrangement is most common when I'm recovering from a break up as a way of getting the space I need, but allowing a seamless reintegration of the person into my acquaintanceship when sufficient time has passed. I generally think that's pretty ok, since again I tend to like most of my exes and don't mind the semi-annual "how's it goin?" kind of message. That said, I also have had some others in the ghost status largely because the relationship itself remains in limbo. Ordinarily, the fade away process would be sad, but mend over time. This way, occasionally the ghost re-emerges through facebook flubs or just going through the friends list and never has the same resolved feeling that past friends might have or the urgency to take action to end the limbo either way.

10. The political/religious/etc. vitriol. I have friends on both sides of the aisle of many issues who equally bother me by presenting their views in as confrontational and snyde a manner as possible. I don't care what you believe on the issues, but the belief that it is alright to imply in a public forum that any one who disagrees with you is (1) an idiot (2) a jerk (3) doesn't deserve a similar level of reflective respect that invites open conversation really gets under my skin. I try to expose myself to different view points, because I think it's important to be aware of my cognitive biases and try not to let them completely define my actions, but when these beliefs are packaged so aggressively, it is very hard not to fall back into entrenchment and defensiveness even if they were not presented to me directly. This in turn has the opposite effect of what I desire, because it pushes me furhter into my knee-jerk biases and I don't appreciate that. It's worse, if somebody presents an idea I agree with in that manner, because it associates my belief with that level of irrationality and of course shuts down possibility for rational discourse just a little more.

Anyways, that's just an impromptu list. There's probably more.

PNB's All Wheeldon Program

2011-10-02T18:59:00.000-07:00

This was our first ballet of the 2011 season and the first in our brand spankin' new fancy seats - courtesy of a generous graduation gift. I do miss being so close that I can feel splashes of dancer sweat, but being able to see the stage is an additional boon, and what a view!

Christopher Wheeldon has this unparalleled sense of shape. While it blurs the line between dance and acrobatics, his transitions and sense of motion in stillness, both requires a pretty staggering amount of physical control from his dancers and adds a synaesthestic quality to the music - watching the dancers, I really feel that I am hearing the music he has chosen through them. This is often the idea of dancing - the body as an instrument, but I rarely experience it so literally as when watching his work.

from Polyphonia - one of his best known
a set of 10 modern interludes

My favorite of the pieces was After the Rain Pas de Deux, performed to Arvo Part's Spiegel Im Spiegel. The piece is mesmerizing in its stillness and lyrically interpreted by piano and solo violin. The dancers are minimally costumed and seem more bare than nude. Together they intertwine at a physical intersection of poetry and origami. It's strange and inhuman, but beautiful:

Opening the program was a piece inspired by Carousel, the Rogers and Hammerstein musical. Incorporating themes from the musical - which were vaguel y familiar but not well-placed in my consciousness - he uses dancers to become both the carnival bustle and the carousel itself. Two lovers dance between the madness with a brief pas de deux interlude. The costumes were perfectly complementary to the theme - on theme of the carnival festivity in high contrast, but without a distracting deluge of hue.

And as a really perfect end piece - hey too much concentration on a Sunday afternoon is clinically bad for your brain - they showed a backstage-farce of the ballet world that was not without its teeth despite general silliness. More or less it's All About Eve in toeshoes, but with quite a bit more slapstick, including the prima donna leaping headfirst into the "orchestra pit" (the 4th wall opens into one of the wings of the stage) when a male dancer fails to catch her. Of course there's an ingenue and of course by the end the ingenue has risen to the primadonna's spot and contumely only to notice a new shy ingenue sneaking in to practice as she had once done. The farcical elements on ballet productions were entertaining and his work with the tech crew/janitorial staff had a lovely Fred Astaire quality to it. I can only imagine how much fun playing the prima ballerina must have been.

one of many tiffs and tizzies the prima had

I am constantly impressed with how well the PNB selects their programs. It was an exceptionally balanced afternoon of dancing, even if I could always do with cutting down to one intermission.

Wrapped in Emergency Room, but Mostly About Something Else

2011-09-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

So the "lovely" thing about having or having a loved-one having had (I just wanted to show off my mad conjugation-of-the-verb-to-have skillz) any sort of scary-sounding illness such as the BIG C (ok, that sounds more like some kind of Vitamin Water drink with cutesy ad copy and a terrifyingly orange color), is that there's a little tinge of panic about subsequent every day blechs. Not to say every time there're sniffles it's the end of remission or anything like that, but because you just have so much more context for what benign symptoms could be.

And let's not forget the inevitable panic of having to explain to everyone that you may have insisted on taking your mother into the ER with what was probably a stomach bug, but well could have been a bowel obstruction resulting from her prior hysterectomy without every one remember THE BIG C and getting sad-puppy face because they think you're putting on a brave face about the fact that she's seconds away from death's door. Because, honestly, when people believe something about your life en masse, it doesn't take too long for you to wonder if maybe you should be believing this too.

As an illustrative but tangential anecdtoe: when I was a teenager, I was very shy around boys. Actually, I was very shy around every one, but I was - shall we say - uncomfortable with my sexuality insofar as the idea of being grounded in a physical body with concupiscent needs lacking in the light and airy of pure fantasy was kind of disturbing to me and the terror of that link between my physical body's needs and the sheer emotional vulnerability that they clearly could trigger terrified the crap out of me. Add to this the fact that I kind of mediated my fascination with the opposite sex against that terror by forming close "friendships" mostly with men, and the fact that members of my family are gay, and many people did suggest with more or less seriousness that perhaps that discomfort was fidgeting around in the proverbial closet. What's funny is that I started to kind of believe it, even if I had experienced ongoing emotional and physical attachments to boys since I was a child. I really could spend months obsessing about a particular boy and yet feel that this was just my brain's way of compensating for the fact that maybe I didn't want to admit to my underlying sexuality which was weird for two reasons (1) that I might not know to whom I was genuinely attracted and (2) that I might have these underlying prejudices against something I always had thought of as no big deal! It''s amazing how mutable our self-concepts can be and just how threatening a contrary consensus about an aspect of identity can be not for what the perception is but for the dissonance that shows us just how little we do understand ourselves and questions whether self is really a particularly legitimate concept in the first place!

But back to the ER. My mom probably had the flu. She wasn't keeping liquids down, had bad cramps and was getting dehydrated, so after putting on my best Jewish Mother impression, I encouraged her to go in so they could iv fluids and maybe give her better pain meds.The ER is interesting. It's actually really nice and not at all the sort of crazy television model that I might have expected. There were definitely characters - by the television we had a roofer and a Russian. RRRRRR. I'm not sure about the roofer's story exactly, except he hadn't worked in two years and had recently made the change from power bars to candy corn. I tend to like roofers, since two of them bought me my first drink at a bar on the afternoon of my 21st birthday. The Russian - or some form of Slav at any rate... I just liked the alliteration - spent much of his time groaning, but did try to tell me a story "we have in our country" and about a crocoDEEL and a monkey who was I think grating a banana or something and the crocodeel kept asking what he was doing and finally gave him money to find out and then the monkey said something about cleaning off the pit of the banana and the crocodeeel said "stupid monkey" and the monkey flashed the money he'd gotten and smiled. This was related to the news covering the fact that Bank of America is charging for debit card use now, except I think he misunderstood and thought they would only charge him if he didn't use it, becaase he kept muttering 'if I DOOON use my dyebeet card, they weeeel charge me'

The highlight of my ER experience was that they have free books in a pile by the television. I was moderate and only stole two. I love free books, mostly because they encourage me to sample books by obscure authors based on descriptions that would not ordinarily prompt purchase of the book. And occasionally this leads me to discover a new favorite author. This is how I discovered Russel Hoban. The library had a free copy of The Trokeville Way, a children't book that just happened to incorporate Libertango into the puzzle theme of the story about a boy and a painting and... it's kind of complicated but beautifully told, and intrigued me enough to look into his other fiction.

The other highlight was that there was nothing horribly wrong with my mother, they gave her the iv fluids and sent her home. I feel that if nothing else, it was a good practice for having children in the future, since I hear being a parent involves a lot of worrying about loved ones and evening trips to the ER. And hey, it's nice to know that if that happens, there will be free books and stories about crocodeels to greet me.

It's autumn and that means it's almost...

2011-09-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

Ridiculously adorable sea creature season!!! No wait, I mean pumpkin pie season. I am very limited in my pumpkin pie window - October through November, with a possibility of some Christmas related pumpkin pie consumption. I took to making a very simple pumpkin custardy type thing last year and might revert to that once the cans of pumpkin puree come out in full force. Now that I live with a food processor (my roommate has a staggering amount of high quality cook-ware, which is both staggeringly impressive and a little intimidating as I remain the steadfast microwave gourmand), I'm tempted to try a real pumpkin out for my pie making attempts, but the cans are so convenient and I'm terrifically lazy. Oh, also, I always like a little deadly hormone interrupting chemicals in my food and I hear canned food is good for that extra zing!

Anyways, between all the nifty winter squashes (I run to the "local squash" section of my grocery store and feel like a kid in a very odd candy store) and PUMPKIN (which I recognize is a squash, but it's also PUMPKIN!!), I am pretty satisfied with fall so far. Speaking of squash, did you know you can eat the skin of delicata squash? At least I hope so, since I've been doing so regularly. I also have become more comfortable with the idea of microwaving squash, something I used to shun. I find that keeping squash at the office is a little weird, but it's really convenient. If it's small enough, I cut it in half, put it upside down in a bowl with some water, cover with another bowl to make a weird oblong container, put it in the microwave for five minutes, help the seeds fall right out, cut in half and split with my mom. Makes a nice afternoon snack for my tastes.

It is also officially - mostly ... and finally - fall weather. This weekend was a bit on the fence, but we had a few delicious rainstorms and quite the wind tunnel going on yesterday. I ordinarily meet up with some friends to go walking around Padden on Mondays. This week though we opted for our reserved winter activity which involves about as much driving as physical activity (Sudden Valley may be a valley but it's as little less sudden then one might like!), but I never really did it for the work out. But our winter workout activity is the ever awesome Julie and Jaana Core Rhythms, so totally worth it.

In other news, it is almost October. In about two weeks I'm going to my collaborative law training, the third major step towards becoming a collaborative lawyer. The week after that, I hear about the bar finally. I am not nervous yet, but I'm rather seriously dreading that week and all that it means. It's kind of terrifying all around: either I didn't pass and I have to go through bar-exam hell again (which I really could do without), or I did pass and I have to be a lawyer! And having done a lot of shadowing and training this last month, the prospect of that kind of responsibility with the gaping maw of potential life-destroying flubs I can make in my fiduciary capacity... scarier (almost) than another three days of bar hell and the utter exhaustion of telling everyone who's breezily been telling me "oh of course you passed" that I didn't pass.

In other news, after a bit of mulling, I've decided to disengage from facebook. I feel like their model increasingly encourages passive socialization over conscious interaction. As an introvert who can initially come across as standoffish or not as friendly, I do appreciate that social networking has allowed me to show another side of my personality and arrange social activities outside of facebook in a less threatening manner. But increasingly I've felt that it has encouraged a sheer superficiality in what may otherwise have been closer friendships. The ease that keeps me in touch with many people I ordinarily would never hear from is exactly what denigrates the value of the closer friendships. It's easier just to watch and make elevator-appropriate comments than to email and I no longer have penpalships with the five or six people I used to, which is at least partially attributable to this. It's always been strange to me that people who have previously emailed me now choose to use the facebook mail. I also just don't like that the default on facebook is to share everything you do with every one and it takes a conscious act to alter that default.My wall is littered with "stories" about things I've liked, questionnaires I've answered... I frequently go back and delete because I don't need that much story (and by story I mean pure pablum) out there, but it is one extra bother so I often don't. In person, each interaction is conscious, and while that can be intimidating to an introvert, it's also a lot more meaningful.

This - so far - is what I like about google plus - you have to choose consciously which people to share with and what to share... the default is essentially not sharing. It makes the sharing more interesting and more conscious. I love that there is no wall that you can "stalk" for individuals. There's only what they've specifically chosen to share with you. It saves a lot of idle skulking.

I am still not quite ready to delete my profile and cut off access to all that contact information for the 300 odd people I may not keep in active contact with but want to keep tabs on... but, I'm getting closer.

Until then, I have more free time not filled by mindless skulking, so I may need to crack a new book soon!

2011-09-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

Pants... oh pants. This is my multi-annual post about (1) how much I hate pants designers (2) how incomprehensible American sizing schemes have become and (3) how none of my pants fit.(Ok, I have one pair of pants that kind of fit, but for - brace yourself - being drastically too long for me and having insane pockets. Oh and some hugely expensive suit pants that I'm saving until I'm actually a lawyer)

Basically see all previous posts and tada! Nice when you've done enough legwork to fit your life into a see, supra __ at ___ format.

But really, I am having the most difficult time shopping for *anything* these days. I think it's all the weird uncertainty brought on by law school. There are a number of components to that uncertainty. (1) There's the fact that law teaches one to be perpetually non-comittal to a degree beyond even my previous mastery (the word "clearly" is worse than the crudest cuss and all answers are "it depends" with a list of implausible contingencies that erode any potential for a straight answer). (2)There's the financial uncertainty of being a student. (3) And, my personal cross to bear, the utter uncertainty of whether the stress would cause a continuing decline in my measurements or rebound virulently at some point.

But mostly it means that my general incompetency in such retail interactions has turned into a full-on disorder. I occasionally have managed to make it to the store only to shuffle uncomfortably through a few racks of clothes, get cross-eyed and flee the building on some pretense (WAIT ALIENS MIGHT ATTACK! BETTER RUN FOR COVER!!). I don't exactly have money burning through my pockets to buy stuff, mind you, but I do have some really saggy-sorry pockets hanging off of some equally sad pants at this point.

I've made some limited headway with online buying, but only because I have extra "money" ashing up my paypal account from my one attempt at ebay entrepreneurship, and I feel an unplaced sense of urgency to get this out of there somehow so as to completely forget such a transaction ever occurred.After much consternation and clicking, I have managed to buy a sum total of one shirt and some vibram five fingers. This was one of my goals and I'm listing as such just so I can feel accomplished.

On this issue, my goals for the next month or so are as follows:

1. Buy a couple of pairs of pants that don't make me angry to see in the mirror, but which can be worn in a work setting.

2. Buy *something* with a houndstooth print. Houndstooth is my absolute favorite print, but I don't own a stitch of it. This is largely because it is so easy to do houndstooth incorrectly and verge into "painful and scary old lady in the 80's" garb, or go the other route and go fugly fourteen year old frippery" on the other. A smart houndstooth is a major accomplishment, perhaps why I like it so much.

3. Find my tangoleva harem pants! I cannot find them and this would be a major route to my morale, as they are basically the only pair of pants which I love unequivocally and which make dressing for dance events easy and free of the usual sturm und drag.

4. Restock my supply of drapey flowy shirts. I have three and they are hands-down the most flattering look for me. My Dad once told me that he saw me in long flowy clothing, large metal jewelry, and floppy hats. As I was just shy of my teen years, I was insulted to be pegged down into somebody else's version and rebelled by wearing fitted and short everything and delicate jewelry only. Of course, at the time and through my twenties, I was a bit chubby and I think draped wouldn't have been flattering on that, but now that I've blossomed into the tall and bony nearly-thirty-something, I have to admit he was right... about the flowy. The hats... still so totally not me.

5. More short sleeved work shirts. Preferrable this will cross with my other goal of more teals, blues, and greens, which I find increasingly complimentary to my skin tone. I have always preferred a steady diet of blacks (safest color in the world) and reds (power color, duh!), but mostly because it's also hard to find these colors done correctly and in a flattering professional cut.

6. Work shoes! I walk a lot when I'm at work, as well as to and from. With the treadmill desk, I usually walk about 8-12 miles while working alone. So those crampy little pointy witch shoes aren't going to happen. So far, I've been keeping an "office pair" of thoroughly destroyed heels at the office and mostly walking around in my sneakers. Which is all well and good, except my sneakers happen to be a glaring silver and pink and believe it or not, I mostly don't wear a lot of silver and pink work clothes... I might even go so far as to say I don't wear silver or pink work clothes. For your further believing or not believing discretion, I submit that I in fact wear dark blacks, grays, and navys when it comes to work pants and that the combination of conservative dark with FLASHING superhero silver and pink can make the sneaker issue somewhat ill-matched and conspicuously so.And here is where I've made some progress in buying the vibram five fingers. I cannot call them toe-shoes, because to me toe shoes will always mean those pink satin harbingers of ingrown toenails and pooled blood that are also known as point shoes. But naming aside, they do seem like they would be nice and breathable for long walking and that the treadmill has enough give and little enough sharp debris on it that some of my concerns about using them on the streets would be relieved. Also, they sell them in black (I'll have to paint the silver back on!) We'll see what happens when they arrive.

So there you have my goals for the current shopping period. I imagine that few of these will be accomplished in any timely manner, but it's nice to have a place to aim.

What's in a (style) name (other than a lot of baggage and some neat sounding Spanish accents?)

2011-09-22T08:18:00.000-07:00

For the past month, I've been working with an old tango student. I'd say teaching, but I am doing so more or less at floor-space cost. I don't really want to throw my hat back into the teacher ring here, but because much of my dance understanding is intuitive, being forced to break things down into understandable articulations can be of huge advantage to me. It also - as I've mentioned - synchs up a lot with some of the stuff I am working on in my own rhythm dancing. Being able to link my intuitive understandings in tango with the musicality/partnering/technical aspects of competitive dance is actually a means of informing both and helping me to open up my perspective. For me, dance is about expanding your kinetic and spiritual options - the wider your vocabulay, the more subtly you can express and understand the music and one's partners.

This student has a significant chip on his shoulder about milonguero style due to a somewhat militant movement in town to crown milonguero as the only true style of tango! I am only somewhat exaggerating. We have a font of strong opinions about what constitutes right and wrong that comes with a developing community reaching out to the larger Northwest area. For those who don't tango much, a simplified tango-speak divides tango (and of course we mean Argentine, because the other styles are not even approaching the moniker) three dominant "styles" of tango - milonguero, salon, and nuevo. Of course that's a touch illusory a distinction as tango developed in hundreds of barrios all over Bs As and has evolved constantly. Most of us learn a mish-mash of differing "styles" and ideas which equally are evolving over time. But, I am not going to attempt a primer. This is a good read about "milonguero" and style names.

Still, no matter how you label things, there is a certain shudder in the shoulders of a few when their disfavored form of dance is mentioned.I think what my "student" sees in the local milonguero-movement is obstinate resistance: to new ideas, to new moves, to new music. He see grouches with plastered faces of serious and stylized concentration and acres of unwritten rules with no purpose beyond vetting the initiated and ostracizing those who do not take themselves quite so seriously. He also sees the small movements of a crowded floor and imagines that what is not apparent to the eye is not present. In other words - he sees boring and pompous and is not too shy about admitting this.

I haven't really been out dancing enough to agree or deny except to say I am sure this is an exaggeration (we're mostly a fun group here with a decent sense of adventure), but then tango also has always attracted a certain element pedantry and cliquishness that can make this depiction understandable. This seems a shame, since just the word milonguero used to have such saucy and dissolute undertones. These were the same types of guys wearing zoot suits and evolving lindy hop in underground jazz clubs in the US.

And I must say, some of the things that Argentine men senior to my grandparents have done with me on a dance floor with a mischievous grin and utter insouciance - aside from setting my heart surprisingly aflutter - doesn't really lend itself to the austerity of "elegance" and "grace" that some may ascribe to a more sedate style. I am entirely ensconced in ideas of the meditative tango and the "trance," but no form of reverence is entire without a sense of joy and maybe a childlike dose of cheekiness.

After past rants, I've had occasion to lecture him on these philosophies and insist that, no, milonguero was not merely an angry old person dance but often quite satisfying for lack of a more complete description.

Last night - after grilling me for weeks on various nuevo postures and combinations - he expressed interest in finding out what the big deal is. He wanted moves - which is funny since I'm militantly focused on technique and musicality and rarely do much with moves. Not feeling inspired to change my approach just there, I suggested instead of working on "milongeuro" specifically (since lord knows I can't even define the word, despite having taught the "Milonguero Track" at the 8th Style), we worked on microtango (my analogy from micro blues, which is the ultimate dance made of succulently semi-subliminal synchronized twitches).

Instead of thinking about authenticity or conformance to any particular label, we focused on rhythmic subtleties and connection. We did a lot of listening to music - identifying the rhythmic line in the bass. He had been trying to dance to melody and vocal lines, getting lost when they flitted in and out. We experimented with variations, seeing which beats and parts of the beat various instruments were emphasizing and how he may want to play with or against those. Much of the lesson became an olio of check step drills. I have to say can be pretty darned athletic - poor guy was drenched in sweat by the end. It was a great forum to work on some technical fundamentals that have been a little mushy for him, was the first time I felt him really listening to the music and some of the best connection break-thoughs we've had. Kind of fun. So, yeah, I'd totally trademark microtango, except if I learned anything from my tangolates dreams, it's that somebody has already thought of everything under the sun. Oh... yep, Alex Krebs - of course! - has already done workshops in micro-tango movements. So fine. I'm just going to revert back to my old idea of Topless Tango Tuesdays and have done!

Monkeying around with Music Again

2011-09-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

So I want you to squeeze your inner thighs together like you're holding an orange between them and you're trying to make orange juice. If you just focus on your partner's chest and making orange juice, your ochoes are going to feel much smoother... but probably don't focus too much on the orange juice, or it's going to get kind of messy out here.

- One of my more profound moments of teaching this Saturday

As the diabolical facebook event description may have tipped some of you off, I had the honor of dj-ing and cohosting the Tango Experience milonga on Saturday evening.This was my first gig dj-ing in a fairly long time, which I guess I hadn't realized. At least I wasn't aware that I had never used Media Monkey to dj before. I'd previously used iTunes, but broke with it angrily after another ubiquitous update ate up half of my music collection. It is good to be free, let me tell you.

In case anyone is wondering, Media Monkey is pretty decent for djing but it has a default setting that cuts out "pauses and silences." This means that once one song ends, the next immediately begins. Not great for tango and a cause of great frustration for the first part of the evening as I tried desperately to fix it and had all but resigned myself to living at the computer and manually stopping the songs so people could get their dramatic end posing on. Kind of embarrassing, and I wish I'd figured this out sooner, but at least a fair number of people found it entertaining. At least I didn't put on the cross-fade feature, although it was kind of tempting. Luckily, after some phone internet browsing, Andrew figured out how to uncheck the default setting and restore the natural pauses most tracks come with. If anyone is ever planning to dj with Media Monkey, you'll have to ask him how he did it. I imagine that I could figure it out if I had it open.

As always, I managed to change up my theoretical playlist so many times that half of the new music I just HAD to buy for this playlist didn't make it onto the final product. I had two and a half hours to fill, but our class went long (unsurprisingly), so I was forced to make some edits for time's sake. Then somebody requested a Biagi vals set, which required more edits. The typical set structure for a milonga has very specific structural components between tandas (sets of 3-4 songs of a similar sound, orchestra, artist, singer, etc.) of tangos, valses and milongas, so changing one thing usually means changing everything. Sometimes I think it would be much easier to just wing it entirely instead of trying to set up a list in advance, but I get a certain satisfaction about lingering on music as I try to listen through to find the best possible combinations of sets and sounds.

This time around, I played fewer valses and milongas in the first hour and a half, due to the fact that a fair majority of dancers were new and didn't know what valses and milongas were. I also exchanged some of my nuevo sets that would be more challenging to dance to for traditional sets, as again there were more new people and traditionalists than I'd anticipated. This is pretty par for the course, but it does mean I have these beautiful unplayed sets:

Volver - Luis Rizzo

QuintetoAntes del Alba - LRQ

Simple - LRQ

And

El Amanacer - Pablo Aslan

El Flete - Pablo Aslan

La Ultima Cita- Pablo Aslan

And my favorite Esteban Morgado set of milongas got cut as well.

But I did get to include a great set from Medialuna Tango Project:

Una Flor y Dos Corazons

Una Rara Semblanza

Volver a Inicio

And because I couldn't help myself, I included my Xavier Cugat Samba de Cumparsita at the very end. I did include your run of the mill D'Arienzo cumparsita for a "last tango" for all the purists out there, but I'm thrilled to pieces that my tango-crush Jeff and his partner insisted on dancing to the Cugat cumparsita as well.

Anyways. The moral - as always - is that I have way too much music and dj far too infrequently.

Oh and squeezing is good, but peeing on the dancefloor is less good.

Blissed out

2011-09-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Last night, I went to an alternative milonga in what Matt astutely calls Bellingham's Dessert District. The venue was a dessertaurant (I don't know why but these dessert shops always seem like restaurants with multiple courses of dessert, even though one could argue they're closer to cafes - something about the pricing, decor and menus I guess) called Pure Bliss. This is one of those shops that I appreciate in concept, but have no practical use for in actuality. Refined sugar and butter in all their magnificent combinations really don't do much for my mouth (other than a ZAP POW kind of "holy crap that's sweet" moment of culinary panic), and do even less for my stomach. I do drink wine on occasion, but prefer it with something savory instead of additional sugars. And, while I appreciate a good cup of coffee (naturally on tap), Bellingham is awash with adorable little cafes, many of which I've never set foot in and I feel a bit backlogged on those already. For my personal sanguinary tastes, I'd much prefer to go next store to Chocolate Necessities and get the darkest most sullen piece of unadulterated chocolate in a tiny little truffle form and cut out all the froofroo.

While I am really not a dessert person in terms of eating, I admittedly adore the eidos of dessert. And crossing the aesthetic divide from taste to pure visual, I appreciate these puffs and pastries passionately. Particularly the centerpiece and food sculptures that have divorced the correlation between food and eating to a similar extent that Fashion Week may have divorced fashion from wearing clothes. Hence my particular fascination with Top Chef: Just Desserts, etc. To me, the first AND final bite can all be through the eye, thanks much. I found it an astute location for an informal milonga. Most milongas are wise to have sweets and wine, while others make do with coffee. Since a dessert shop has both, it works pretty well. Because Bellingham is anything if not unreliable about crowd size, the smaller floor is hardly an issue and the fact that there is wine and dessert over which to linger while waiting for the three or four leads to make their rounds is not much of an issue. And the decor is admittedly pleasant.Oh, best of all, of course, it's free.

The crowd was largely unfamiliar to me. It seemed like a melange of people who've signed onto this town in the last couple of years, and the WWU crowd. The guy who ran the place is a face I've seen in passing. He learned in Kansas, which gives him kudos in my world. One of my all time favorite festival finds was a Kansas dancer. I didn't get a chance to dance with him, so I can't say much about him specifically, but for now "Kansas" will suffice. Also, he has long hair and keeps it in a ponytail, which I clearly take as a marker of good things for reasons not entirely clear to me. The alternative part of the milonga was largely reflected in the musical choices, as I didn't see a lot of nuevo or any kinds of fusion style on the floor, and my leads were all more prone to salon style.

The music was enjoyable and some of it novel, which I always appreciate considering my leviathon collection. My favorite set of the evening was a fortunate accident in terms of stumbling upon probably my favorite partner of the evening just as it began. The set was I think Yann Tiersen, although I didn't recognize all the pieces, but definitely very simple and haunting solo piano. The partner was a very light lead, and I was initially concerned, since my shoes were extremely slick (virtually new shoes on a concrete floor are like strapping on your own personal ice rink) and he was not exactly burly or towering next to me in my stilletos. But over the course of three songs, we really got a feel for each other and the final dance was just delicious (insert some kind of corny dessert related/bliss whatever joke here - I really wonder if the organizer chose Pure Bliss for its name alone). Did I mention, he also bore a passing resemblance to Daniel Radcliffe and thus I kept trying to call him Daniel (his real name is David) in my head.

At any rate, I didn't stay particularly long, as I have had one of those obscenely candle-at-both-ends kinds of weeks and had spent all of my resolve just talking myself into not turning around and running home as I neared the shop in question.

Sadly, it is only a once a month venue, but it is fun to see how the scene has changed and evolved since I've been gone. I don't necessarily run into the same blissed out opportunities that I have gotten the lucky nights I managed to escape out in Seattle, but there are some pretty shiny little bright spots opening up.

2011-09-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

Well, it's cyclo-cross season once again. This is my third year on the girlfriend-observer circuit, so the rose has begun to drop from the "wow, what the hell are these guys doing hopping off their bikes like that and ooooooh there's a crash" bloom.

I mean, really for all its bells and whistles, it eventually does just become another shorter bike race. Which isn't a condemnation or anything, but certainly leaves it in the mid-range category of "things that appeal to just a different enough audience, that my enjoyment is almost entirely vicarious at this point. But then again, cyclo-cross, being one of the most voguish of all races certainly brings its own Adella-approved appeal. Namely, there are more teams and they care more about their team kits. And I, in turn, do appreciate a nicely designed kit. And so I bring to you from the opener, my quick style review of the 2011 X kits.

Let's call this one a warm-up. The jersey itself is nothing hugely exciting, but I really do enjoy the splash of plaid. Yes, it screams Home Depot to me, but this is really what it was aiming for. And the "I like it dirty" logo is cute. More importantly, it was an excuse for me to take a photo of the houndstooth cycling skirt (these are some weird athletic material formed into skirts for the female cyclists to wear while they're warming up or between races) without looking overtly like i was taking a photo of this lady's butt. That said, note that it is a houndstooth cycling skirt. That right there made me pretty keen on the whole cycling-skirt idea, because I am a houndstooth whore, despite owning none of my own.

Another of the warm-up category. The vintage styling is a head nod to the main sponsor - Fuel Coffee - whose logo looks exactly as it does on the back here. It adheres perfectly to the cafe's aesthetic and I approve of this, while liking the detail work on the back pockets. While not entirely congruent, it's interesting and eye catching. The jersey was easy to spot in a crowd, the font was just satisfying.And I like that "get going" is probably located in the one location that a cyclist might actually accidentally see during a ride.

Ok, this was one of those notables that I'm not entirely sure about. But it unquestionably stood out. The photo is not a great representation, as a lot of the detail work didn't show up. As you can see, it is pink and the team is something like Team Soft Fuzzy Kitten (yes, I'm sure I'll get corrected by Mr. Wright on that one sooner or later). The logo on the back is a fuzzy kitten with two knifes crossing below in a similar manner to the pirate logos. Underneath it says "So Soft." The shorts are indeed pink, but with faint white outlines of these knifes detailed on them. Not necessarily the most elegant of designs, but certainly in keeping with the slightly psychotic whimsy of cyclo-cross. And I appreciate droves of burly sweaty men in pink.

And here, while snapping a photo of kitten kit, I also saw the "traitor" kit. This was the only guy sporting it, but despite the over all simplicity, the cogs - on front and back - caught my eye, the saying was somewhat enigmatic and I just generally liked the lines of the jersey. Especially as matched with the helmet. It was a nice look so I included it in my weird "photos-of-cyclists-from-behind" collection.

Ah, but now we move into my favorite of the day:

Ok, in this one, you can't really see my favorite, but I wanted to show the really cool colors of the one of the right.

Here's another photo in closer detail. You can kind of see my favorite on the left, but definitely from a distance, the one on the right wins on the noticeability in a crowd scale.

And here, is a group clad in my favorite. There's something just satisfying about this combo, which looks both bright and restrained at the same time. I always enjoy when people break up some of the typical expectations of the kit lines and mimic non-spandex fabrics through the print. I like the letter's font. The colors move well and - although probably not the main intent - they're actually fairly flattering on all these ladies.

Oh, also Andrew's mom was visiting. We spent quite a lot of the weekend wandering around out in the sun etc. as a result and there are pictures of that, but they would be out of the theme of this post. And we all know how well I edit myself and maintain relevance... yeah totally. BUT it was her first cyclo cross experience AND she had sent him a special racing Jersey with the Gelfand Partners logo on it, specially designed for him for Christmas. Naturally he took the opportunity to wear it for our commencing race. It looked fairly sporting, I think - although not exactly a team kit just yet:

Yeah, the belt has nothing to do with cycling as much as him just not changing fully into his bib shorts, but I think the lightening bolt crotch wouldn't actually be a horrible idea for a future team kit design... just saying all you designers out there...

Rambling reflections on partnership and musicality

2011-09-06T08:57:00.000-07:00

Working with Nate again has been really interesting. In addition to confronting some old favorite " bad habits" of mine, it's actually managed to universalize my understanding of dance slightly more. Concepts and ideas that have been inherent in my tango instruction and blues/swing dancing are actually the same in my rhythm to an extent further than I knew. Funny to be reintroduced to concepts you thought were second nature in light of a different technique. Last week, we focused on partnering and again I came back to the concepts of elasticity, motion and energy.

Sometimes my understanding on music is challenging to articulate, because it is highly intuitive and followed by theory to bevel the edges of my own understanding of what I want to do when I hear the music. Inevitably everything I describe turns into allegories and metaphors. In this case, I think of the "beat" as a drum that we are hitting with our bodies. The final part of the step being the *hit*. Being on beat in simplest terms means hitting that beat, but the journey to hitting that beat can follow myriad paths.

The "half time" and further fractionalizing of a beat (and one-e-and-a-two-e-and-a... for instance) is a way of understanding that, but for me the simpler idea is that the space between beats can be filled with our movement towards a step in different ways. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but dance abhors motionlessness. Stillness, yes, please, but there is always motion in dance. I remember sitting out on my porch a few days ago looking at the trees and the landscape. Although everything appeared absolutely still, things were always moving and growing. Eventually a flower fell of the tree as a result of forces acting on it likely for days. Just because we do not see the motion, does not mean it is not there. And moreover when we dance and wish to create a sense of stillness, this does not mean killing that natural energy of movement.

Since each step requires a million micro-steps (before you walk, you must shift your upper body forward, bend your knee, build momentum, extend the leg...), the way we divide these micro-steps to fit within the music defines the timbre of the movement. We can stay relatively stationary until just before the beat and then rapidly move to the next beat, where we hold stationary again - this is that sharp staccato motion you might see associated with the older more D'arienzo type milonguero styles. You can move evenly through the beat, which has a more uniform flowing feel. Or you can hesitate for a second, building the energy for the step, accelerate through half of the beat and then deccelerate into the step - this gives a wonderful mix of motion and control, which somebody once described to me as a hydraulic way of dancing.

The stationary hold in any of these styles is actually rife with energy, building more and more spring and compression for the explosive finality and requires a sequence of internal motions to absorb the energy once we land. This is similar to catching a baseball - you don't merely put your hand out and stop the motion of a fastball if you want to catch it; instead you intercept it, move your hand with the momentum of the ball for a brief while as you slow its course and eventually both you and the ball come to a stop. The speed through which you move from one beat to the next is directly proportional to how long the wind up and absorbing take within that motion. The more wind-up, the faster the move and the more absorption will be necessary.

The beating of the rhythm is metaphorical, but it can be mirrored in the body. This is why a perfectly timed boleo has a snap created out of allowing the leg to fly loosely and then rebound as the orientation of body and energy of movement is changed. It's a natural reaction to the creation of an equal and opposite action, but to lead it requires an understanding of the moments surrounding the beat, as most of the action occurs there. As we absorb the energy of one move, we can use that motion to create the compression to spring into the next.

This requires understanding and connection between both lead and follow. The difference between the necessary elasticity in lead-follow and being a "heavy" lead or follow is how we use that tension. The ideal connection is one that gives exactly what it gets. Before I take a movement that the lead gives me, I give a little or a lot (depending on the energy) of contrary motion and this in turn allows for that build and release of momentum that takes me between steps. That means once the step actually begins, all tension is released. A heavy follow merely remains stationary when given energy and puts the idea of "tension" or "compression" entirely into her arms, which results in arm tussles. A follow attempting to be "light" may instead refuse to meet to the energy given her (letting it diffuse through limp arms and an unconnected core), drastically limiting the scope and strength of motion available to both partners.

I think that dancing with the music provides an additional common ground between lead and follow - at least so long as both can hear it. For instance, if a follow does an embellishment and you can feel that she has initiated one, instead of having no idea how long that embellishment might take, you have certain time spans that you can expect to wait - half a beat, a full beat... etc. and this allows a certain shorthand to supplement your natural feel and allow you to enjoy the additional movement while changing your own timing accordingly if it needs accommodation.

As a follow, I try to follow the lead first and foremost, but it becomes particularly disorienting to dance off-beat. It's similar to the kind of clutter that occurs, when a lead has other little tics that may or may not be intended as leads but which conflict with other body language. There's an instinct to move with the music and an instinct to move with the lead, which in the best of all dances is perfectly complimentary. Granted, my interpretation of the music may not be the same as the lead's and there's novelty in that which allows a grand sharing of perceptions through lead and embellishment, just so long as I can actually see that there is a version of the music. Still, one of the most amazed things I can murmur about a lead to evidence my sense of connection is "we hear the same music!"

**********
Update:

This week, it was east coast swing and mambo - talk about playing with the beat. Competitive ECS and social swing are entirely different creatures, it should be said initially. Competitive, for instance, is far more upright and incorporates a lot of latin motion (albeit far looser) from the other rhythm dances. There's a universal sense of momentum and elasticity, but still quite different.

But returning to the concept of music - competitive ECS focuses with a laser pointer on the distinctive musical elements of swing music. Swing is divided into triple-time, but without a step on the 2. The downbeat is emphasized. This gives it that rubato feeling, with the delay in motion on the two and the heavier landing on the three.

Now in theory, we all do that, but in practice, most of the time people swing very evenly, so that their triple-steps are equally divided in time and emphasis. This is perfectly functional, but lacks the styling that really distinguishes swing. There are motions to be done *exactly with* every division of the beat, something that can usually be found in the snare drum or other underlying percussion in a swing song, so you'll know if you match it up or not.

Oh and then mambo. I haven't gone on too much about the agonizing process of listening over and over again to the om-ba-ba-ba-BA-ba of the snare in order to really get the whole "dance on two" aspect of mambo. That was years ago and ingrained enough.

What's super challenging about mambo is that it is FAST. The settling you might have on a non-moving beat in rumba will not be happening, because the contrast between still and moving creates an illusion of quickness that matches the music and sharpens the dance. What's fun, but also terrifying about mambo is that you can choose to emphasize any beat except the one. The *one* is static, but I can emphasize the two (my first step), the four (the last step and return to hold) or the three (the rock step, which to me is the most challenging and interesting to emphasize).

Waiting for Irene

2011-08-28T09:35:00.000-07:00

We are, of course, sitting in the living room with our respective laptops swapping news articles and weather predictions about Ms. Irene the Tropical Storm (nee Hurricane). Twitter, so far, provides the most "intelligent" commentary possible. So far, so good. I'm not one of those apocalypse now sort of people and I'm perfectly happy to have a functional flight remain scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. I've already had to go through the rescheduling rigmarole once for the flight that was leaving tonight/Monday morning early. I'm fairly relieved not to be driving through any flooding in the middle of the night, honestly. So far, the scoop appears to be that we are a half hour to an hour out from actually figuring out what Irene might entail. Most likely it will be some flooding (already halfway there with the random pre-storm downpours), a handful of downed trees, and the inevitable power-flickers that may or may not become outages. Knock on wood, if I make my flight tomorrow, I appear to have been upgraded to first class for the second leg of my flight home. I think this more or less insures something will go awry.

The second half of my trip to Northampton has panned out nicely. The main event of the part has been well documented via social networking, but with a dearth of exposition. This would be Dan and Rin's James Bond Cocktail Party - a superlative idea that appears to be code for "kind of a fancy cocktail version of a tupperwear party." Or at least it could be. The main highlight of this evening - aside from seeing a lot of slackers wedded to second-hand jeans wearing second-hand tuxes and suits instead - was the erudite and enormous liquor library brought by our evening's bartender, Scott.

Scott is a practicing bartender and reputedly one of the best in the area, which I could believe. I actually went through a fancy cocktail phase about four years ago. I had a bit of a soft spot for frequenting Poppe's and Liberty on dates, telling the bartender a random adjective that I was feeling and asking for his/her full creativity. This was a bit like that. Most of the party attendees have settled on either the beer or simple hard liquor approach to drinking when they drink, so it was a particularly zesty innovation to have a bartender let loose in the kitchen/bar area and just start improvising. We had martini glasses filled with just about every kind of drink and while originally they were mixed upon individual order, as the night dragged on, many of the beverages became communal sampling sippers. While I think I may have had the sum of about 1.5 cocktails in the evening, I definitely tasted about twenty different ones to get to that number. Anyways, as party themes go, the "awesome mixed drinks" theme is enough in itself and - as was suggested frequently during the party - it could actually be an excellent side business model for somebody with mad mixology skillz, as Scott also made significant bank in tips.

Of course, it was - as mentioned - a chance to dress up and see others doing so. From my perspective, I can't say this was that novel since I just donned a tango dress and jewelry. And really, I have been to cocktail party fundraisers etc. with my father and others since I was a child, so I think perhaps the idea itself was less novel overall to me, although it was novel to see the novelty experienced by others who never imagined listening to piano type foxtrots and sipping from fancy glasses in suits. And it was fun to see the guys in suits and I, of course, never mind a chance to bling myself out. I did find some pretty awesome nail polish and take some poor self portraits of myself in a bathroom so it was all good.

Additionally, I saw some familiar long-lost faces, mostly men and many from the Olive House era (read nearly ten years ago). It was interesting to see that most of us, despite still holding vestiges of that restless unsettled adolescence that haunted our twenties, have more or less gotten a little closer to becoming adults. Most of the people at the party were coupled (although actually for large portions of the evening, I was the sole female in the group, which it not an unfamiliar place to be at parties like this, so no mind), regularly employed, and not drawn to the idea of recklessly downing the strongest junk in the place, playing loud music and/or vomiting.

I may have inadvertently invited my friend Fidel - he of the two children and honest-days' living - when I mentioned the party in passing conversation. Since he was a coworker with Dan and Seth and knows Rin through another mutual coworker who once was also Rin's coworker at a previous job (it's a small valley after all!), this was not a problem and since we spent most of the evening chatting near the bar, it worked well for me. What with the kids and the job and the visiting family, I was surprised he made it. Unsurprisingly, I think it was probably kind of a relief to have a chance to get out of the house and not be work-dude or daddy, as I suspect that's a large portion of the roles that people play once they have a 1 and 3 year old.

Anyways, as we always seem to, we delved into some very odd conversations about the nature of existence, perception, identity and reality that almost verge of the philosophy 101 milieu of which I'd ordinarily be ashamed, but somehow works in this context. I don't really know what it is that draws this out of me around him, but I suspect it's just the perfect amount of seriousness and unseriousness that allows a comfortable level of sincerity to be honest, but not embarrassed. Or something. Most people make me feel like they either don't want to hear as much as tell, or they want to suck something straight from my inner depths and invade... the rare sort of middle ground apparently brings a broken dam's worth of ideas and reflections.

Amazing how easily almost all of my interactions can pick up where they left off with friends I haven't seen - really seen - in nearly six years; or amazing because this can happen without the need for any interlocutors regressing or losing whomever they've become in the past however many years. blah blah blah time. What am I, Pascal here? This is what happens when you can't leave the house because a window might break maybe if the storm ever actually comes...

The party lasted until about four and a few stayed around until five. Which is amazingly late for me in the context of the last three years, if not the last five or six. But although I was definitely tired (I still don't sleep in very well), no worse for the wear. Nice to know I can still stay up past eleven in the proper context.

At any rate, as we continue with reading twitter and checking the news, the rain has died down. I'm not sure if that qualifies as the proverbial calm before the storm (likely, regardless of the severity or lack thereof from the actual storm). Looking likely that we will lose power soon at any rate. Until then, more obsessive storm tracking!

Northampton!

2011-08-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

My trip to Northampton seems to be shoehorned in between an earthquake and a hurricane, which is only appropriate for the momentousness of my first real trip back to the only other place that I legitimately think of - occasionally - as home. I find it funny that when Dan introduced me, he did so as his "high school friend" or his "friend from Washington." This is probably because in some ways the explanation implies that I have no inherent connection to the location aside from him being there. In some sense, that is true, as he was the agent for my eventual residence here, but many of my connections with the place evolved independently from that point. I suppose perspective is a funny thing: when we were in highschool/Washington, our friendship seemed like an ephemeral one of convenience which gelled into something more lasting during the roommate/coworker phase. To me, he will be "my old roommate" and associated with Noho far more than highschool for these reasons.But yes, nonetheless, I am here.

Thank goodness!When I got my rental car, I cultivated some doubts about getting here. It's an automatic, for which I have no love in general. It is also far smarter than me and much of my trip's beginnings alternated between swerving to find the appropriate toll lane, and attempting to figure out previously simple-seeming tasks such as adjusting mirrors and turning on the windshield wipers. These converged at toll booths where, lacking the instinctual understanding that automatics set in "drive" will do so regardless of whether the gas pedal has been used, I managed to roll slowly through the toll areas while attempting to fish out final quarters. It is a miracle I am alive and have almost figured out the various locking features on my key ring. Only occasionally do I accidentally jam on the break as my left foot blindly gropes for a clutch... still, too much car and too little control for me, I think.

Dan's boyfriend, Rin, is lovely. He's delicately built with a boyish complexion and genial manner. Dan looms over him, due both to his height and the mountain man beard and mien that he has taken to nurturing. In many ways, it may be the most conventional relationship that Dan has ever been in - Rin fits the "feminine" role far more comfortably than any of Dan's girlfriends had, and Dan in turn has embraced the "masculine" with none of the hesitant awkwardness once permeating his interactions. Either way, they seem happy, and Rin makes a mean gingerbread pancake waffle. I rather like him and give any man who can pull off skinny jeans, orange nail polish and pointy cowboy boots.

Although I haven't spent too much time socializing beyond the Dan-Rin circle, I did yesterday manage to visit with the two "romantic" entanglements that I formed in Northampton. I put that in quotes because I'm never quite sure what defines such a term. I have had exceptionally strong feelings of affinity that were far removed from the romantic world, and lustful or egotistical attachments which fall short of the term. Aside from a degree of intensity and high emotions, it actually is hard to qualify what enters that realm and which checks at the door. Honestly, I've had some equally harsh *friend breakups* that were in no way romantic but far more meaningful. So, in sum it's all a squishy gray area, but for the sake of easily categorizing, we will stick with a familiar term and quibble less about precise semantics.

The first was a friend of a friend and a mistaken conflagration of physical connection and generally liking somebody for something more serious. Because I was just pushing 20 (and thus a mellow-dramatic moron as we all are at that age), this small error in judgment was rather cataclysmic and had more than a few uncomfortable consequences for all involved. It commenced slightly before I moved here and had little ripple effects through out my stay, although it evolved into something of an awkward but sincere friendship long before I left. As is true of many of my favorite people, he is just introverted enough that our interactions frequently require a third person to emerge from a sort of pensive silence punctuated by briefs head nods and the occasional outbreak of attempted chatter. Still, perhaps he is merely the kind of the knowing glance or we really do share a similar something when perceiving the mad rush of the world around us that has always made me gravitate towards him as a unified front at larger gatherings - a bit of a calm within a storming world.

The second was an exceptionally close friend, arguably deserving the moniker "work husband" (or so most of our coworkers would have easily agreed); possibly working up to emotional affair as external circumstances paired with a mutual curiosity about the exact contours of a unique but amorphous connection chiseled away at the sustainability of the whole damned thing. No lines were crossed in concrete terms, but certainly it was enough to merit a lengthy separation for the sake of his relationship. I still feel awkward or preemptively apologetic around his wife who has since been nothing if not hospitable. In a reverse situation, I certainly wouldn't be terrifically comfortable with me in any form of the the picture. I suspect she's got enough years in the relationship etc. to feel pretty damned secure, but it would still at least make me uneasy to be reminded of something a bit unpleasant, and so naturally I project and assume and make myself uneasy. It was not without a little strangeness to read to and play with their children last night as they messed about with supper and I'll admit to self-consciously changing into one of my boyfriend's old t-shirts and a bra instead of the beat-the-heat "I taught your boyfriend that thing you like" tank before going over to their house.

At any rate, both are about 5 years my senior who at one point or other worked at that same factory job as me, and it is funny to see how differently their life-paths have diverged. The first has quit his long standing job at Hot Mama's to go into "early retirement" (mostly mucking about off savings, playing multi-player online games, and hosting music and literary events) and the second is the father of two and working his way slowly to his dream of becoming an actuary, one of those grown up professional type jobs that I can't say I could actually define in any manner. And really, they're both where they should be at this point. It works for both of them in different ways - more and less status quo respectively than when we all knew each other, I suppose.

One of the pleasant things about being this age is keeping up with the people who once stirred drama, tears and ecstatic paroxysms at the very thrill and watching these raw emotions mellow and evolve into a deep but muted affinity. I wish I could describe it more accurately, but I suspect we all have ex-loves who have become friends of the sort that are neither particularly close (or at least wisdom teaches us to keep at a slight distance as a matter of cautious reflex), nor ever capable of being particularly distant. Our lives are often in different enough places that I don't know how we have anything to say to each other any more, and yet there's a scintilla of understanding that is shared with very few that makes even an awkward conversation oddly grounding and allows a resumption of dialogues and mannerisms that feel like home without the necessary context of time or common evolution. And it's odd to sanguinely accept that there are some things that do not need to be discussed and "closure" is a protean concept that cannot be forced by full disclosure about things long passed if well remembered (except in blogs, because the B in blog stands for Beating a Dead Horse, of course!!).

I have done a few more things here and there (CONAAAAAAN - not a fine film ultimately), but I suppose I'm mostly entranced by a sense of familiarity blurred by passing time that occurs absent nostalgic or maudlin longing. There's a reaffirming feel about facing only wisps and ghosts of a past without losing the connection to the present.

Waiting for Baz Luhrman's Stirring Porgy + Bess Rock Opera

2011-08-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

Andrew and I went to Porgy and Bess at the Seattle Opera this Sunday.

Although I am years removed from a small African-American community in 1920's Carolina, this opera does somehow hit closer to home from my perspective. Opera is generally dark, dramatic and even seedy, but it usually retains a sort of mythic quality beyond merely the disparate time and locations in which it is set. Opera, more than any genre, is generally intended to be larger than life, making the characters demi-gods with flaws as great as their heroics. What is particularly striking about Porgy and Bess (aside from the musical blending of gospel, jazz and classical music - which swings the gamut of disorienting to inspired) is that the subject matter has a certain modern grit to it that intentionally veers from the mythical veneer of classical opera. The major elements of the story include domestic violence, drug addiction, drug dealing, many undertones of prostitution, racism, poverty, gambling, and destruction wreaked by one big hurricane that can't help now bringing reminiscence of Hurricane Katrina. The music may veer between Puccini and Paganini, but the plot sometimes feels like a lost episode of The Wire. Appropriate for some of the literary styles of the Southern 1920's (P&B is based on a novel from that time and it is typical).

The music, as mentioned, is interesting and my first experience of it looong ago was a rather strong rejection of what I recognized as some of my favorite jazz tunes being ruined by warbles. The music is pure Gershwin. Seconds into the overture, shades of Rhapsody in Blue are overwhelming and his particular elan is never long absent - but blended and woven with a myriad of influences. I think in many ways, what Gershwin did (in his intention to create an American Folk Opera) was to use classical production and scoring concepts to celebrate a spiritual musical tradition unique(ish) to these communities. Spiritual music is born from hardships - being torn from one's native land, thrown into slavery or poverty, living at mere subsistence and losing loved ones constantly. It's the same traditions that brought about blues. What is amazing about spiritual/gospel music to me (and I am no expert on any of this, so don't quote me as such) is the overwhelming element of joy and hope that comes from within this music. Noting can be a more stirring religious testament than that exuberance. Gershwin recognized this and blended these traditions with Jewish melodies (another rich tradition of beautiful music wrought from suffering, alienation and slavery). To this, he added blues, jubilees, and work songs from those communities and finally executed the olio with his jazz training.

This is even interwoven into the plot to some degree.The story is - appropriately - a downer. Hey, it's opera so this is par for the course. Huge swaths of likeable cast members die not through mechanations and plots of any evil villains, but by a force of nature. A baby is orphaned and then abandoned again. The heroine escapes an abusive relationship and tries to get herself off of dope and alcoholism, but succumbs again to both at various times.The hero gets away with murder only because as a crippled beggar, the police never took him seriously and took him in only to harass the weaker members of the community. At the end, the hero realizes that his love has left him once again and sets off to find her in New York, an oddly ambiguous ending, to be sure, but the only appropriate one. It can't end well. We all understand this opera to be just a little too grounded in reality for him to succeed in making it there, finding her, weaning her off her addiction, not getting killed on the way... But by not showing this, the opera ends with a surge of hope and joy that is at great odds with the circumstances of all of the singers. And it's this hope and joy that we see in the music that Gershwin celebrated, now personified.

It's quite a moving moment.

This opera is not close to my favorite; nor is it close to my favorite work of Gershwin's. There is still something a little confusing to my ear about the blending of styles. But it is impressive for the reasons listed above and for the very niche talents and abilities required of the performers. Many, in fact, make a career of Porgy and Bess. Sportin' Life, for instance, who is the dope dealer and who gets one of the best songs of the whole darned opera, is a role that requires a blending of blues, broadway and opera range both vocally and physically. Needless to say, our performers credits were almost exclusively this role. Also needless to say, his costume was pretty - er - sportin'?

Please find me this man's tailor. I think I'm in love.

2011-08-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

Life essentials, continued (see previous post, where I sagaciously cut my tome short):

It is one of my foremost goals to incorporate dance back into my life in at least some manifestation. It fell assuredly by the wayside over the last two years and most precipitously during bar prep. As an attempt to bring some of it back, I went out dancing at the Bellingham Dance Company for the first time ever last weekend. Since it is sort of the Majestic (where I used to dance) reboot, this isn't really a first time thing, but a hugely nostalgic homecoming with many familiar faces. It was pure ecstasy, in part, I admit because of the substantial lapse in time since my last experience in a ballroom. I do, of course, attend the Blue Moon parties more commonly, but I have the very directed goal of seeing Molly and Marcus when I go there and usually bring my partner for the evening without much bothering to mingle - I rather aggressively protect my seat near the front desk while I'm there so that I can spend much of the lesson and dance catching up.

This weekend, I followed up last weekend's dancetravaganza by contracting a flu from one of my nephews and missing out on my Seattle plans. C'est la vie.

Dance hits a quirky intersection of life-arenas for me. On the one hand, it's a discipline/art/sport. To this end, I am beginning lessons with Nate again (to a more limited extent, given my current interest in financial solvency in a year or two from now). This is the side of dance that involves - aside from ten tons of glitter and self-tanner - the hours of solitary practice in front of grimacing reflections and utter fixation on singular and obscure muscle groups the average person may never meet.

My goals in this aspect are initially modest. I can't afford to compete any time soon. I am far enough away from my peak abilities (with which far too many people are familiar) that I would be embarrassed to perform for at least a while without a clustering of lessons that aren't fiscally reasonable at this point. First and foremost, I need to regain the strength in the right muscle groups. I know that I have the muscle memory still there, but not the power to back it up with appropriate precision. I suspect this means lots of drilling of the aforementioned grimacing-reflecting sort. I expect to work through the bronze and silver syllabi while doing this. Once this is more cemented, I would like to return to my perpetual challenge of refining my spontaneous eruptions of musical excitement into a sophistication of my own styling (which has an undeniable elan to it, but as with many raw expressions can be hideously awkward and bizarre from time to time). Don't get me wrong - I always have and always will hate watching myself dance, but the nice thing about dance generally is that I both understand that my view is purely subjective and for the most part I enjoy it so much I don't care a whit that I look like a dog with her head out the window surrounded by flailing jerky arms and legs.

The goal oriented part of dance has always interacted uneasily with the rest of it - which almost thrives on goalessness, carelessness, and pure transcendence of self-awareness. It's an odd marriage and one in which one side constantly threatens the survival of the other.

When I was single, dance provided my source of pure unadulterated intimacy. Not in a strictly concupiscent manner (although surely that was there). I have discussed that pure surge of complete and absolute - albeit temporary - knowledge of another person and the sense of utterly sharing a moment and a music with another... so that. This relies upon the ability to leave self-awareness by the wayside. As soon as you start thinking about your turnout or styling, the connection and melting into another and the music is lost. On the other hand, the greater the technique, the greater the ability to make that connection without your limitations standing in the way. So... a balance.

And of course, it is a social aspect in that dance life = social life. It's a perfectly formed context for an introvert - constant, set roles, one-on-one interactions, and steadily repeatable without the stress of additional planning and scheduling. More than this, of course, is that it brings out a part of me that is wholly me, but entirely different from the serious, intelligent, and taciturn ME that stalks the academic halls, or the soothing and professional ME who listens well and is best described as calming and competent. And well, I kind of enjoy being a temporary extrovert. I don't mind being charming, daffy and charismatic. Nor do I have any problem making grown men blush and grow giddy merely because I have chosen to talk to them. It's oddly entertaining to have developed a blush-worthy reputation based solely on my aura and my uninhibited unabashed belief that what happens on the the dance floor stays on the dance floor. But at the same time, although the thriving and revelling in a certain ME seems to be wrapped up in ego, focus too much on performance goals and competitive aims and the charm fades away into a mere parody of that persona (a mere me-me-me instead of simply a ME). Whoever i am, I will always prefer to simply present myself for others to take or not, and abstain from coercing others to the taking.

And of course there's teaching, which I suppose I did in many ways to cut my losses and increase my dance time. I don't think I have the missionary leanings required for true teaching-commitment. As above, I prefer to be available if approached. While I certainly can sell myself and play politics, it does take a little something out of the experience for me, even if the ultimate experience of watching another come to her own dance-nirvana is as satisfying as achieving my own. That said, if I get back in peak form, I would certainly consider it again for the economic advantages of more-time-less-money, if nothing else. And I do think I had something to offer people.

Anyways, it will be interesting to see how these areas play out and how I will juggle my long distance relationship with the required amount of face time that will keep me involved. Andrew's sport is cycling, something that is both weekend and daytime intensive. Dance of course is weekend, but evening intensive. We're both supportive of each other's interests, but at the same time, if we both simply pursue our goals full throttle, it means that our only time together - the weekends - would be boiled down to a spare hour while he is showering after a ride and I am dressing for a dance. If only there were more daytime practicas and weeknight dances for me or nighttime rides for him, so we could each puruse our individual passions without it being at the cost of potential time together.

Life you say?

2011-08-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

Well I've been a productive little dickens (it was neither the best nor worst of times, but my week has been remade into some terribly pretentious movies featuring an irritating deluge of green, AND a Disney musical based in which I am a cat) in my quest to re-establish some semblance of a normal life. Well, normal is relative. Maybe just *a life* period.

So the general gist and takeaway kind of breaks down into a few areas of what I would consider basic life essentials:

1. Living situation. I am officially moved into my new place. The resident dog is some form of sheparding breed that is terrifically loyal, precocious, and intelligent but pretty distrustful of new faces. Having grown up with a sheltie/collie mix, I'm actually not too phased when Lilly (the resident dog) switches from my bff to flipping out because now that I've picked up a coffee cup I am clearly not the person she saw before and must be there to kill her owner. But, my roomie finds the whole thing upsetting. He ultimately wants to be able to have, say, guests over and so on without a huge drama with the dog, so every time she flips out at me, he gets immensely stressed, which in turn makes me feel guilty because if only I were a better person, the dog would sense my internal good and she wouldn't act in a way that stressed my roommate out. Instead, my flashes of moral ambiguity make her angry and this in turn makes him sad. And I don't want to make him sad as he's a very nice fellow.

But dog-drama aside - and really, I think it will be fine once the moving is over - the place is FANTASTIC. It's an insanely conveniently located and cute old house with lots of little fabulous quirks:

CLICK TO SEE MORE!

So yeah, very thrilled. Even more thrilling is the fact that I am now the proud owner of a genuine tempurpedic bed. Oh yes roil with envy, peons! Of course it will probably seem slightly more luxurious when I have, say, sheets or a comforter or bedding of really any sort. Maybe. I'll take what I can get.

2. Family: My family has been there for me pretty amazingly the last, well, 28.999999 or whatever (I'm bad at math, but I'm a week shy of 29). So it's nice to be able to see them from time to time. It's been really entertaining watching my nephews grow up, since I see them about once every six months. The oldest, Ian, is about 6 now and he's not nearly the deranged psychopath I may have predicted when he was a wee infant. In fact, he's just generally a good kid. Sure, he talks about shooting and exploding and killing a little more than my fairly peace-loving mother (and Ian's BFF on these trips) would prefer, but he has yet to kill any cats that I know of and seems to take his big brother rol very seriously. My second nephew, Braden, is just enterting his terrific twos (I might not have gotten than one right). He is very opinionated on things like who can hold the baby, whether somebody can eat strawberries, etc. but overall he's pretty adorable when he isn't throwing a tantrum. He likes to embody batman, but with spiderman powers. I applaud his versatlity. My youngest nephew is just about a month old and mostly sleeps. Asleep and awake, he pretty much reminds me of a cross between a pig (by ear) and an animatronic muppet (by sight). He still looks a little concerned about this "being alive thing," and maybe wondering if it was really such a great idea here, but I think he'll come around.

I have some relatives past the age of 6, but they are less exciting to watch "grow" per se, having more or less solidified into the people they are going to be. I generally approve. I also saw some of my extended family, which is a rare event. They have also "grown" - or really shrunk just a little. My grandmother just turned 82, so I guess she's entitled, but it is strange seeing the fairly imposing (if always petit) lady from my childhood sink into her own age.

This segues into the fact that we celebrated her 82nd birthday and I saw her not once but twice in the last week, which is honestly twice as often as I'd seen her the previous four years? So, yeah. I'm not exactly Madame Family Values, but I did manage to introduce my boyfriend of over 2 years to the rest of the family, having slowly introduced him to the closer factions. Also, the birthday was held at a place that had kid's menus and crayons. Guess how we spent the entire meal? I'll give you a hint: it was not circulating and making small talk:

Farmer Dan dropped acid

See, it's ok, becuase Ian was doing it too

...And, I've definitely written past even the most diligent reader's attention span, so this shall have to be a to be continued

Coming up... dance/social life, work, and the quest for the crystal skull... Same bat channel same bat place.

Life After Bar

2011-08-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

There is in fact such a life... I think. We'll see. It's been an odd feeling of emptiness and confusion, mixed with a lingering phantom panic/guilt that I am not in fact practicing essays any more. I am going through the stages of bar exam, I think: there's some denial (see above), bargaining ("please, if I failed something, let it be PR!!!"), anger (random flashes of irritability and fatalistic conclusions based on the slightest triggers), depression (or really unprovoked crying jags, at least, for the first few days... they seem to have dwindled now that I've gotten sleep), and acceptance (mixed with an oddly sanguine conviction that I have, in fact failed and that will probably be kind of embarrassing to have to explain to people since I am such an ordinarily clever girl in the top 10% of her fairly prestigious law school and thus will have let my school, my friends, and the WSBA down... and yes, that's what makes the sanguinity so odd).

And yes, if you had a hard time reading through all that last sentence with the weird formatting - you've experienced the joy of being a bar exam grader. Lucky you!! Wait, I forgot the parenthetical numbering. I shall attempt to remedy this defect immediately!

Baby shark gets her wings and flies to the rescue!!

In order to completely divorce my brain from the post-bar-PSTD, I have done quite little. Well this isn't entirely true. I've drooled. I've watched a number of riveting features of Shark Week (see it's SHARKS and I just finishing the bar exam and see, lawyers are sometimes called sharks so it's like totally appropriate). Sharks are cute and some species have 2 penises, which is not what makes them cute just to be clear. I have expanded my dietary range from peanut butter and bread, which is the best travel staples ever. I briefly encountered my sister, brother in law and 3 nephews (yep, there's THREE of them now, although I suspect the new one is actually an animatronic muppet) before they fled to Canada.

Oh and I have looked into finding housing now that I live in Bellingham (sort of, anyways). By "looked into" I mostly mean (1) opening up various search sites and listings (2) panicking (3) screaming "these all look the same!!!" (4) alternating between writing various management companies to schedule meetings and defaulting to my facebook respite. Anyways, just before I had to pull the trigger on actually looking at an apartment, I heard from a friend who may have a room for me in his house. Since he is one of very few people I could ever imagine sharing a living space with (considering our respective levels of neatness, introversion, and general temperaments...), AND it would oddly satisfy my sense of narrative circularity that he is one of my two close friends from my turgid teen years and the other friend was basically my only other non-assigned roommate (way back in the days of Northampton). Anyways, I don't want to talk myself up into too much enthusiasm until we meet up tomorrow to iron out details, but I could dig it. Since I am officially moving my stuff, minus staging related furniture, out of the Seattle place on Thursday... well it would be nice to have the living situation sorted out before my sister and her brood return from their vacation within vacation

I also saw a real live(ish) movie and everything: Friends With Benefits. The undeniable appeal of this movie needs little explanation, but mainly it is that the stars are both gorgeous and incredibly talented comedians, and there is a pretty fantastic supporting cast. The drawbacks of this movie are mostly that it is extremely dated, and I can't help if this movie was meant to be a period piece set in the, say, mid-2000's. Or at least the mix of "ooooh what is this novel thing where friends have sex but don't get into a relationship that the kids are doing these days" (which I'm pretty sure was a well-known and heavily experienced arrangement since before my first stab at college), the basic idea of parodying the rom-com genre while making a rom-com film (kind of been done a lot with possibly more to say), and the "A FLASH MOB, you say? What the dickens is a FLASH MOB?? How delightful!" smacks a bit of Eugene Levy in American Pie, which of course smacked of the dad in Better Off Dead, which of course... yes I know, nothing new under the sun. On the bright side, I like to imagine that having been featured in a romantic comedy such as this, flash mobs have officially been consigned to the history books as that "momentarily charming but increasingly ANNOYING thing that essentially inspired the television show Glee and myriad other evils."

But no, I guess what intrigued me most was that they made a rather pointed homage-parody-rip-off of the famous Harry Met Sally speech, both in their mock rom-com movie and in the inevitable final scene (with a FLASHMOB? What the dickens...). I do think in many ways, this movie strove to be something of an update to Harry Met Sally, but gave up before reaching that level. In the first case, the question was "can men and women be emotionally intimate without it getting complicated?" and in the latter it has the veneer of the complementary "can they be physically intimate..." except actually they were asking "can men and women be both emotionally intimate and physically intimate without... uh" well it does linger on the valid question of what's left to a romantic partnership other than these two intimacies and I credit them for working well with that.

Additionally, the films both revolve around an evolving dialogue between the leads about a romantic movie (Casablanca in the first place, and a fictional rom-com caricature in the second) and around conversations that bubble up only between men and women who are not dating, about their outtakes regarding dating/sex experience (the "I'll have what she's having" deli fake orgasm being the obvious example). I will say that I have heard from my dvd special features that Harry Met Sally actually was never intended to end happily - that it would just be too complicated and they would be forced to part ways after the relationship went to that physical level. And in some sense, you can feel that tension and inherent doubt in the movie.We don't get that from Friends With Benefits, in which it is patently obvious from the first five or so minutes exactly how the entire romance is going to pan out. The writers seem to present the rom-com formula (mockingly at first) and make an outright declaration that it will be followed. Most glaringly being that - unlike the protagonists in HMS - the FWB leads are obviously perfect for each other, and although there's that emotionally unavailable thing... it just doesn't have the same repellent magnetism that really makes you doubt for a minute that they actually are already together in essentially everything but name. So what I'm saying is, I think I enjoyed the movie, but I wish they hadn't evoked HMS, which managed both to define and transcend the rom-com genre and which set the comparison standard rather impossibly high. But of course, as said, there are some pretty dazzling displays of semi-nudity and intermittent flashes of hilarity/profundity, and the actors really are quite good. Also, it was not The Smurfs, which I have been achingly tempted to go view based largely on a mix of masochism and devotion to Tim Gunn who is in a probably painfully featured in a small role.

It has been taken - Post-Bar blathering

2011-07-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

Taking the bar is a lot like flying transatlantic three days in a row. That's the closest analogy that springs to mind. You are tired, passing through multiple security lines (and yes, things have to be in certain sized plastic bags), you have to present your seat ticket and i.d. to get anywhere, you're stuck with very limited carry on, you have earplugs, there are times when you are not allowed to leave your seat or move around the cabin, your biggest concern is your bathroom schedule and you're perpetually dehydrated.Seriously, I feel more jet lagged than anything else.

The additional terror of the exam has nothing to do with the actual questions (ok the looming terror of that question you are totally unprepared for is still there..) Mostly though, it's that it all rides on our computers! I had two close calls where the software didn't load quite right and nearly had to hand write. I was just putting pen to paper when they brought my laptop back in functioning condition (each table has a pink card that you hold up if you have a computer problem and magical computer elves come and fix your problems).

And it's not just whether the computers function during the test. The way the software works is that it locks the answers in a file on our computer. We then must later upload these when we get internet access. Meaning between the bar and the upload... ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN. Especially since we are not allowed to bring our laptop bags in with us. This means that around the testing room there are droves of tired, stressed out, underslept examinees carrying laptops in one hand and coffee in the other - all the while navigating a floor strewn with power cords.It's a melt-down waiting to happen. Glad to say that all files have been uploaded, although there's always that chance one of the files is corrupted somehow... oh the joy of technology!

Anyways, really, sincerely I have no idea *how* it went except I suspect that really isn't an appropriate question. Short of "passing" I never ever ever want to know how I did. There were some fun questions - no kidding, I got a real kick out of a combined sales and secured transactions question for no good reason other than perhaps a full on fit of Stockholm Syndrome. I typed like a dervish and was mildly concerned to find myself finishing re-reading and editing my answers with about twenty minutes to spare on most sessions. But then again, it was nice to have a few moments of silence (they let you leave early unless it's the last ten minutes and then you have to wait a really long time while they pick up test materials, so finishing early is a huge boon). And my seat-mate was a nice guy... good travel companion. Turns out that we were both 2011 UW grads, although he transferred in from California (smart man).

I'm a little flummoxed with life after the bar. It doesn't quite have a tangible meaning yet. I know that there are all kinds of activities I once enjoyed. That I have *friends* and have once been capable of - what's that called - interacting with other human beings?? I'm not entirely sure. I was telling my seatmate that I think that Barbri and other prep courses are really missing out in not offering some kind of post-bar rehabilitation program to get us all back to functioning human beings. In the meanwhile, People's Court seems to be an appropriate transitional aid... or at least it works for the caffeinated brain dead drooling.