Who needs updates?

This blog does, that’s who. It occurs to me that since i last “wrote”, I have attended two fairly major swing events, celebrated my birthday, joined a second knitting circle, joined forces with our local swing dance non-profit group, and watched my favorite time of spring arrive and then begin to sneak away into summer.

I wish I knew who I was writing this for. Writing anything without a target audience is a little bit like mindless data entry. You’re not entirely sure who it’s benefiting, why you’re bothering, and whether it’s worth the effort you’re putting into it. Is anyone benefiting from these words? Am I?

Even if no one but me reads this, I need to have some goal in mind when I write - a greater purpose than simply committing words to the screen and sending them forth into the aether. When I first started this iteration of B.A., the goal was to have a place to talk about my knitting, my writing, my reading and my gaming. (Oh, and my dancing. I do that from time to time, don’t I?) I’m still doing all of these things (with the exception of the writing, which is plodding along at the slow rate of a few words a millennium), but I’m not sure who doesn’t already know me cares much about them. For that matter, I’m not sure how many of the people I know care about them.

The eternal struggle: is there really a reason for me to have a blog when everyone and their grandmother has one? Shouldn’t I just call it quits and devote myself to finishing the novels? Am I being a defeatist? Is there any worth to be gleamed from these words? How many rhetorical questions can I ask in this paragraph, anyways?

This is a test. This is only a test.

Here’s a picture of my cat.

And it worked! Sort of. This is why I don’t generally put pictures into my posts; it gets messy! But people like pictures, and I do too. I’ll keep working on this.

In other news, my new dancing shoes came in! I’m looking forward to breaking them in, especially since I don’t have much time if I plan to wear them at the Boston Tea Party in, oh, two weeks…

One of my dance instructors recently said - I believe it was either Devona Cartier or Noëlle Gray - that partner dancing is a conversation between two bodies. I returned last night from a weekend of delightful conversations in southern CT, and all that movement rattled some parts of my brain that have been dormant for a while. Dishes can wait while I run through some of the thoughts I’ve had today.

One thing that struck me after my first workshop weekend is the social strata that exists in the swing community. The dancers at the top separate themselves from the dancers closer to the bottom, and I know that this is a frequent gripe among beginning and intermediate dancers. It is So. Difficult. To break into that crowd at the top. It’s like high school all over again. And it frustrates me. But I also think that much like in high school, a lot of that is an illusion created by awe-based intimidation and the natural tendency of humans to create small social pods out of larger communities. Some people will do whatever it takes to join the “cool” pod. Some people gravitate there naturally. Some people reject the whole game and keep to themselves. It’s unavoidable in any large social group.

I also feel that if the swing super-stars, starlets, and their groupies keep their distance from the rest of us, I can’t completely blame them. It’s normal to want to feel loved, and appreciated, and accepted, and to feel worthy of friendship with celebrities (especially if they’re pleasant celebrities to be friends with). And within the dancing itself, the experience can be the difference between small talk and deep, soul-to-soul sharing. You can have a pleasant chat about the weather, or converse about your deepest secrets and desires; likewise, you can have a simple, uncomplicated dance, or a druggingly rich, detailed, exquisite dance that leaves you barely standing afterwards. When you’ve had a taste of the later, it’s hard to really appreciate the former. I had dances this weekend that left me nearly speechless, and dances that I’ll hardly give another thought to. And often, the nearly-speechless dances come from the really fabulous dancers.

But if we really, as dancers, want to get the most out of our dancing, and give the most from our dancing, then we need to keep this idea of conversation in mind, and realize that even very basic conversations can be intensely fulfilling if we give our all to our own half of the conversation. Sometimes the reward comes not from the complexity of the dance, but from the feeling of camaraderie that is created and shared, and the smile on your partner’s face. For the length of a song, you two are each other’s worlds, and there is a lot that can happen with that intimacy if you are open to it. I notice that even when I’m dancing with less-experienced dancers, the effort I put into my own dancing - when I’m being fully aware and giving my best - doesn’t go unnoticed. It pushes my leader to do the same, to maybe overstep his or her boundaries, to try new things with dancing that s/he may not have been brave enough to do before. My most memorable dances are not necessarily with the best dancers, but the dancers who really gave me the best they had, and did so with joy and love and compassion and a spirit of fun.

In thinking about this weekend, and social hierarchies, I’ve thought a lot about my reasons for dancing, as well. Some people dance to move their bodies to the music, and don’t care much about their technique. For others, technique is everything, to the point where they forget the “social” part of social dancing. Some people dance to be celebrities, and some dance as a social outlet. A friend of mine commented that she didn’t interact well with some of the people in rotation, and she thought it was because they were there for different reasons than she was. I had the same impression with a few of my leads, and there was a certain incompatibility when the difference was too great.

Dancing for me is a pleasant way to learn what my body is capable of, and to keep myself grounded in that body. I tend to live in my mind too much; dancing forces me to live in the material plane and focus on muscle and mass and momentum and flesh and skin and bone and breath and movement. The best dancing would ideally move me out of the realm of thought into the realm of pure sensation and muscle memory and emotion. I dream of climbing to the top, and further, because I want to always be challenged, to push myself, to always be learning and evolving and improving. (This means, of course, that I need to stop being lazy, get off my butt, and actually practice in the off-time between lessons and dances. And work out to build up my strength.)

And I dance for the conversations, the connection between two souls that can be much deeper than speaking just with words can ever be. It’s cheesy, but I like cheese. I like romance and passion, and there is little in the world that is more passionate than dancing. People throughout time have danced in their joy, in their fear, in their sorrow and pain. They have danced for their lovers, and danced to escape the absence of love. Dancing has been used to petition gods, to seduce, and to misdirect attention. And when I dance, I want to remember all these things. Dancing can be an escape, or an affirmation of life and love. I dance to forget my troubles, and to celebrate my victories, and even to practice my flirting and my sex appeal (there is nothing sexier to me than someone who knows all the wonderful ways they can move their body and connect with a follower. It makes one wonder what else they know how to do…)

I could go on, but it’s getting late, and have you actually read this far? You get a gold star. I’m headed to the kitchen to fix some toast and jam for dinner, and then to bed - my body protested being awake in time for work this morning, and I don’t expect tomorrow will be much better. But it’s completely worth it as a price for the fantastic, self-affirming weekend that I had. And that just just a warm-up for the real weekend of dancing, Boston Tea Party at the end of the month. This is the best birthday month ever!

I feel much better today. Not perfect, but better.

I’m looking very much forward to knitting with the girls tonight. My goal is to get the first sleeve and much of the second sleeve finished for this sweater. If I can do that, I might have a finished sweater by the weekend. And that would rock! It would, in fact, be my first finished project since Christmas Day, when I finished my mother’s hat and scarf set. This is starting to really bum me out, but what’s a girl to do when there are so many pretty yarns to play with and so many shiny things to make with them? Last week I made a deal with myself that I would not, under any circumstances, start any new projects until I had finished at least some of my works in progress. So far I’m holding firm, although instead I’ve been getting distracted by Link to the Past and my reading

Speaking of reading, the next few months will be largely dedicated to borrowed books, since I seem to be accumulating quite a collection. I think the number is up to nine, with more possibly on the way. First on the list is Written on the Body. It reminds me of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I lent to a friend last night. It’s pretty, and I’m really enjoying it, but also I really hope that the stupid main characters shape up and get their act together. All this romanticizing of adultery is beginning to destroy what little faith I have left in marriage and love and monogamy. Normally it wouldn’t even be a dream of an issue, but at the moment it’s hitting a few sore nerves.

When I was little, I dreamed of being chased. Sometimes, the assailant was the thumbtacks hanging posters above the head of my bed - they would fly through the air, aiming to stab me, and there was no where I could run that they couldn’t follow. Sometimes the assailant would be an unknown man, and no matter which room I hid in, he would always be a step behind in. I would eventually escape our house and run to the neighbors’ house, but they would either not be home, or be unable to help me, and we would all end up running down the street for… our lives? It was never really clear what danger I was in, but it was clear that I was fighting for my life. The underlying feeling was never one of strength, always hopelessness and despair.

Last night I dreamed that I was running from a man who wanted to forcibly tattoo me with a stapler. But the stapler was broken; not only would he inflict harm on me if he caught me, but he was going to force me to fix the stapler first. I would have to repair the instrument of my own torture. So I ran through the rooms of my parents’ house - in the language of my dreams, the safest place in the world. I hid in the safest place I could think of: locked in the bathroom of my parents’ room. Two locked doors between me and him. But the doors didn’t lock securely, and as I heard him breaking through the first barrier, I had to climb out the second-story  window, and find a way down to safety. But even that wasn’t safe; he was waiting for me there, as well.

That’s about all I remember from the dream, but the feeling of nameless terror and dread stayed with me through the day. That happens to me, sometimes; it’s a feeling that’s hard to describe. When I was in high school, there was an eclipse of the sun. While the eclipse was at its height, there was full daylight, but the quality of that light shifted to something entirely different. That’s what the dread feels like for me, when it happens. A slight, undefinable shift in my perception. It isn’t dread of anything in particular; everything looks exactly the same, and yet completely alien. Everything behaves exactly the same, except with an underlying edge, as if in a nightmare. It’s the difference between a dream of unpleasant events, and a nightmare of the same events. In one, you can watch the story unfold objectively; in the other, the fear takes over completely.

It’s time: I need to move forward with the divorce, and the very thought of it makes me ill. I can barely stand the thought of facing someone who caused me such pain, let alone working with him towards our common goal - a goal I never really wanted in the first place, except out of necessity. Thinking about impossibly high lawyers fees makes me panicked. Looking at the paperwork from the summer, the paperwork I tucked away in a safe place and haven’t looked at much since, brings back all the anxiety and despair and terror that I felt then. It’s as if the feelings wove themselves into the very threads of the paper, and fused themselves in with the text.

It’s unfair that love should end in so much pain, and that anyone should have to face this alone. Of course, my friends and family are all with my in heart and in spirit, but no one can handle the details for me, not unless I pay large(r) amounts of money that I don’t have. They can only offer a shoulder to cry on, or a kind word, or their concern. Not that these things aren’t appreciated, but they can’t erase the pain or the fear, and today my heart felt like it was breaking all over again. All I can do is move forward as well as I know how.

I’m reminded of the stories of people who have performed self-surgery, without anesthesia, in moments of dire need. They have to do it, or they’ll die, right? But that can’t possibly erase the vague hope that somehow, the problem will solve itself, they won’t have to do something so distasteful. I keep hoping that this will just sort itself out, somehow, against all reason. But I know it’s that sort of thinking that got me into this mess in the first place.