Unsolicited Advice

I have been having some unexpected success in getting other people to acknowledge me as a dancer. Inasmuch as the rest of my life is now falling apart, I've started submitting pieces to shows and festivals, because, you know, gotta do something with myself. Submitting to shows is a lot like applying for scholarships or publishing stories in an anthology. If you can find one that's geared to a specific category that you happen to fit in, it narrows the pool of applicants, and gives you a better shot. I submitted an eye-catching open-air number to a festival I knew was looking for street performers, and I put in a number that was all hand-tricks with a hoop for a show that was looking for pieces confined to a small space. There's a holiday show that I know is geared towards large groups of dancers, and I'm already planning for that. I'm particularly eager to submit to a spring show for works by female choreographers. It's run by a woman I work with, and she ha...

One of the more amusing family stories I sometimes tell is about a relative of mine, a few generations back, who moved in with another man after his wife died. Ooh , everybody goes. Salacious family gossip! Except the little town they moved to was actually Lily Dale Assembly , in upstate New York, which so far as I know is still one of the oldest continually running Spiritualist communes in the United States. Harry and Edward moved up there so that Edward, ex-model and former elder in the Presbyterian church, could start on what I think was his third career as a spirit medium. He channeled the spirit of an Edwardian actress named Lillie Langtry, also known as "the Jersey Rose". At this point, the whole 'shacked up with his boyfriend' thing has become the least interesting part of the story, and people begin to look at me funny. My parents fucked things up in many respects, several of them so egregious that I haven't spoken to them in years, but I want to g...

I've made an interesting discovery: The Eccentric is quite possibly the only person I've ever met who understands jealousy even less than I do. The Eccentric is, as implied by his pseudonym, very  eccentric. Mrs. Eccentric has made the occasional crack about him being from the Land of No Boundaries, but that isn't actually true. A lot of them are just in strange places, such that if you try to go casually lean on one expecting to find it in the usual spot you may end up tipping over and falling into a big confusing void. He is aware that he wants weird things out of life, and negotiates for them very directly, probably because he's realized that this is so beyond the norm that nobody is ever going to give him what he wants unless he tells them what it is. The first thing he made clear when we started talking about dance lessons was that he is VERY married, he was NOT looking to step out on his wife, and he did NOT want me to feel like I was being creeped on. I appre...

I finally caved and bought myself a pair of magic earplugs. I murder earbuds. I spent the years 1999-2016 inclusive destroying pair after pair of earbuds by getting the cord wrapped around something, or the bud caught under a heavy thing in the bottom of my bag, and yanking. I'm moderately fussy about earbuds in the same way I'm moderately fussy about shampoo -- which is to say, not very, but I do need something at least one step above cheap. My very favorite ones were Sony MDR-E9s, which were $10 a pair for a good ten years, and were absolutely everywhere until Sony broke my heart by discontinuing them. I ruined about a pair a month, on average. RIP, all my pretty blue earbuds. I graduated to Bluetooth earbuds when I got tired of knocking headphones off my noggin when practicing with my hoops. I tried braiding the wires (and at one point the actual Sansa Clip MP3 player) into my hair, but there's no way to do that and also keep the pads on or the earbuds in while I...

I've been getting some interesting reactions when I tell people I'm still talking to the Eccentric. They range from, "Oh, really?" to "You can still run, you know." Currently leading in popularity, mainly among people who encountered him in the show where we met, is "yipe." I asked around, and there doesn't seem to be any community conflict or feud driving the difference of opinion. When someone is widely considered to be weird, there's usually a reason. It's not always a good reason, but it does exist. I think it is just that he is very much himself, and this is not everybody's cup of tea. The Eccentric is, well, eccentric -- he really only has one setting, which is fairly intense, and has cultivated such colossal bunny ears I'm not sure how he manages to pack them into the car with the rest of his gear. When I first met him, I wondered if his English was kind of wonky, as he still has an accent. Later, I concluded it was pr...

I was having a conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and she asked the question of whether straight people were "allowed" to wear rainbows during Pride Month. I have no idea. I do, but it probably depends on where you are. I'm in Greater Boston, where they swap out four of the five American flags on the façade of the public library for rainbow banners in the month of June, and work in Cambridge, whose mayor, last I checked, was a lesbian. Pride stuff out here is more "warm weather festival" than "angry defiance", because it doesn't need to be. I'm sure there do exist bigots in Boston, but it's considered indescribably rude to voice that. They are under considerable pressure to keep it to themselves, which is really all civilized society asks. The Dancing Queerly month of events that I'm working or otherwise involved in is specifically open to self-identified queer artists and friends , so I can devote the time I might o...

Lost Xyzzy yesterday. It was very quick. He was, so far as I know, asleep until just before lunch, when he started what sounded like a coughing fit. (He'd been having the same allergy issues, and therefore the same steady diet of Benadryl, that I have this season.) I fished him out of his house and went to go sit in the bathroom with a running shower, which helps when they're congested. In reality, he was probably having a seizure. He spent a few minutes jerking and batting at the air with his front paws, and when I was in the middle of emailing the vet for an emergency appointment, he gave out and died in my lap. Almost all of my rats have died in my lap, save the ones I had to take to the MSPCA. Most of the vets will sedate your baby while you hold him, but administer the final injection in the back room once they're out. I've never woken up to a dead rat, because the little plonkers live in my room, and my brain is so tuned to normal rat noises that I wake up and...

I have lately been fielding a lot of comments about my body. I'm used to remarks about my appearance; "you're very pretty" and "you look very nice" are long-running themes in my life. Strangers stop me on the street and get me to take out my earbuds so they can tell me how much they like my hair. All I really ask is that you have enough social acumen to start out with 'nice outfit' instead of 'nice ass'. Some women are bothered by the compliments. I'm not. They are nice things to say and I appreciate that people make the effort to say them, but to be frank, they don't make much of a dent. It's more 'oh, someone is being pleasant,' than, 'oh, someone has passed judgement upon me, and it was favorable'. Enough of the comments are startled and/or worried that I finally coughed up the twelve whole dollars for a scale, just to double check. For everyone's edification, I currently weigh 125 pounds. This is a perf...

Took Plugh in. He quit moving too much on Wednesday and wouldn't really eat anything I didn't feed him on a spoon. He took possession of chocolates if I handed him one -- priorities, man -- but he just sort of held onto them instead of nomming. Plugh was a good rat. He received many pets, and ate many foods. He was also one badass motherfucker. He refused to quit until he literally couldn't walk anymore. Today, like two hours before his appointment, was the first time he let me help him climb something without resentfully shaking me off. His back end had gone cool and his feet weren't listening to him anymore -- something was pressing on his spine, I suspect. He was finally tired of things not working right. Dinner last night was Nutella and ramen. Whatever he'd eat. Today he got strained peas and vanilla Ensure (BREKFISS OF CHAMPEENS) delivered directly to him in his squishy paper-towel-filled hammock along with his morning Tylenol and Benadryl. I tucked his ba...

The single biggest reason I have never gone over to the Mac side is that Apple has a policy of discouraging you, at every possible turn, from noodling around with your devices. It's great for people who just want their doodads to work the way they worked when they left the factory -- and would rather gnaw their own mouse hand off than dig around in the guts to change anything themselves -- but I much prefer to own computers I can get into without three security Torx drivers and a hand grenade. It's mine now, I'll break it if I want to. The IdeaPad has an interesting hardware configuration. It first came out after solid state hard drives were made available to the public, but before the prices had come down to any reasonable level. They shipped from Lenovo with Windows installed on an eensy little 24 GB SSD for booting (just a chip smacked directly on the motherboard, so far as I can tell; Linux views it as /dev/sda1), and a secondary 500 GB platter drive for file storage....

I've spent the past week trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong with the ballroom thing. Ye Ballroom Instructor is busy producing a show and the Eccentric is on vacation, so this has consisted mainly of googling variations of "TF am I missing here?" Whether this is helpful is kind of a crapshoot. Sometimes I just get a page full of eHow articles that all say the same useless thing seventeen slightly different ways. In this case, it kind of was. I've only been to casual events so far, and they attract a mix of the usual people you find in low-impact physical activities -- young people looking for cheap entertainment, middle-aged people trying to get out of the house more, little old ladies coming to socialize with their friends, and the small but annoying contingent who pretend they're trying to pick up a new hobby while actually trying to pick up a date. But if you get into the blogs of serious social dancers, they start talking about something they just ...

I'm setting this to post while I'm at the vet with Grue. I scheduled the appointment a week ago. I seem to have timed it pretty well; he's not been eating anything I haven't been feeding him with an eye dropper or my hands, and as of this morning he's refusing even that. He made a half-hearted attempt to eat some of my seafood salad last night, but today I can't even get him to lick Ensure off my fingers. He's gotten as much Tylenol as he wants. Acetaminophen poisoning takes 2-3 days to kick in, and by that time it won't really be his problem anymore. I hope it helped. Grue was a very good rat. He received many pets, and ate many foods. He even knew his name, and occasionally came out for pets when I said it. He was scared of everything when I brought him home, and he was probably scared of everything until the very last, but somewhere in there he decided it was more important to be brave enough to come out and cuddle. He spent most of his last days ...

I now know two of the dancers in this sequence , not that you can pick either of them out in the background of the potato-quality YouTube video. (You can spot one of them in the B-roll/outtakes if you're quick.) One of them was the choreographer, who happened to be a part of one of the collaborations in the most recent show I've worked. He is a very nice man. He has decided we are going to be friends! I begin to wonder if all of the ballroom dancers are secretly Labrador retrievers. This is becoming something of a pattern. I'm not displeased, just bewildered. I have no idea why people with arts grants and IMDb credits continually talk to me like I'm a part of their community in any but the most hopeful amateur capacity, but they are clearly going to keep doing it. I make it a policy, when I work front of house for performances, to not bother the dancers. Everyone in the performing arts has their own personal rituals to prepare for going out on stage, and it's c...

I am emotionally exhausted. I just lost one rat, and now Plugh -- the lumpy rat -- is starting to behave oddly. He's not gone yet; he did hip check his brother off a box last night for some peanut butter. But he's getting thinner and thinner, and is on his way out. I've asked him to please hold off dying until I have more than forty cents in my bank account. I went into the studio Monday and danced until I hurt myself. Both in the sense that parts of me ache right now, and in the sense that I somehow managed to stab myself on some part of a smoothly-polished hardwood ballet floor, and didn't notice until I'd smeared blood all over my arm. Normally I'm better at pacing than that, but I am too tired to care about pretty much anything less immediate than dying pets right now. I am so ground down that someone handed me an $800 laptop last night, free of charge, and I couldn't even be excited. I don't know that he paid $800 for it, and it would have bee...

The remaining rats are doing better. I'm starting to get 'wher brekfiss' interspersed with 'wher bruvver'. I'm sure they would all love having Flathead back, but if he doesn't arrive fast enough to eat his own breakfast, that is his own problem. Priorities, man. Grue, as predicted, took it especially hard. Grue is the omega rat, to the point where he won't even take food off my fingers. Forks are fine, but if it's on your hand, it's yours. He figures that whoever you are, you probably outrank him, and he shouldn't touch your food unless he wants to get nommed right in the middle of his hard little head. His only ambition in life is to be someone's big dopey BES FREN, and his BES FREN rat is the one who went away and didn't come back. Rats can learn anything you'd expect out of a 1/100 scale Labrador retriever, and I know for a fact that dogs get sad and anxious when their friends go missing, so it's no surprise that Grue sor...

Grue is being kind of worrying. He's making more feep feep noises, and now also propping himself up on things and... hyperventilating? It's the kind of gulping air rats do if they've exhausted themselves running or are having a hard time breathing. I checked his lungs (fun fact: stethoscopes are useless on rats, they're too small and make too many other noises. You just pick them up and hold them to your ear, like a really wiggly seashell) and he's not gurgling like he's congested or wheezing like he's asthmatic. He's just sucking in air like a little bellows. At least when he's awake. And not distracted. He's suspiciously fine when sleeping or nomming. Since he seems physically okay, at least in all the parts I can check without a radiology suite, I sort of wonder if it's anxiety. See, Grue appears to have some sort of panic disorder. I took him specifically because of it. Plugh and Xyzzy are pretty much rats. They ran from me at first, bu...

Flathead deteriorated while I was performing at Arisia. He did survive the weekend, but looked very ill. I felt slightly  less horrible about having to leave him when Grue appointed himself the Designated Cuddling Rat. Whenever Flathead was on my lap, Grue camped out on the cage door, staring at me and emitting little fweee fweee noises. 'wat happen, wher my bruvver, u giev him bak'. I tried in vain to explain to him that, just this once, in this very specific situation, sitting on the other rat's head was the opposite of help. (Normally I would catch the offending rat and give them a moderate smishing, to demonstrate what that feels like, but it wouldn't work on Grue, because smishing is Grue's favorite. He likes being mooshed into the bedding and smashed in various directions. He'll even let me clean out his ears with my big fat clumsy human fingers. If I do it long enough he falls asleep with his face smushed into my palm. So I just kept intercepting his mi...