barn dance

Through some not inconsiderable rearranging of my schedule, I am in fact going to the barn dance tongiht/tomorrow (depending on how you calculate that -- i.e., by date or by when you've slept).

Please come to dance geekery with me! I will maybe even wear my cute skirt with the bustle.

http://www.nycbarndance.com/

sundries

Today's bento:
Bottom layer: hummus and carrots
top layer: lemon wafers and gingerbread cookies

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I have become obsessed with Jose Gonzalez thanks to wordsofastory. It's the sort of guitar work that reminds me of the classical guitar work I did in college, before the infamous Guitar Craft tangent (that adventure still stuns me, early and often). It has a cadence of dialogue and playfulness (that is, yes, evoactive of fencing) and moodiness that's all very interesting. It's the type of music that makes one long for gentleness from the most unlikely of places.

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I am thinking of joining that Novel in 90 thing, knowthing that I can't write to structure in that time, but knowing I can do the word count, and if I could just generate that much amaterial in that time I would at least have everything I need to work on and solve the damn thing. My latest feeling is that the solution to it is the way I like to move forward and backwards in time in my short pieces, and a focus on a secondary character as the way in. But I can keep having these thoughts all day long, it's still not solving the damn thing.

Triplette -arrrrgh!@#@#@!

Okay. The fencing jacket saga continues. I am beyond frustrated.

Let's recap:

Jacket arrives and arms are 4 inches too short.
I send jacket back for an exchange. After speaking to them on the phone they assure me that the new pattern for the size 34 will accomodate my arm length.
They doublecharge my credit card.
I call them, get the second charge taken off.
New jacket arrives, it fits perfectly, BUT it's the stretch jacket -- I ordered the cotton duck!!#!#@#.

So now I have to send it back, AGAIN, because it doesn't offer as much protection as the jacket I should have received. And this means I still can't fence properly next week.

I think I'm going to cry.

(no subject)

Having decided that plastic bags aren't just bad for the environment and taking over my house, but intensely aesthetically displeasing, I bought a deep purple bag that folds up really tiny and attaches to my keychain for using at the grocery store and suchlike. It's probably perverse how pleasing this is to me.

Now, quick food and off to the barn dance. I'm too tired, really, but dancing is good and it's Irish fiddle music tonight and that's just one of those things that fits into my world so sweetly. Also, it will take my mind off the fencing jacket nightmare.

In other news, the awful neighbors with the awful chihuahuas have a new acquisition -- a large plaster fish. I first saw it out by the trash at our building and thought "now there's a weird object." They apparently rescued it from the trash and either thinking it was not all they hoped it would be or that it was a perfect "welcome to our chihuahua-infested home" signpost have left it outside their door -- for weeks. Today someone has perched an empty coffee cup in its mouth. I wish I had a camera, it's large and cartoonish and not painted, just this white creepy fish with a broken fin Aie.

barn dance!

One of my earliest memories and, in fact, my first memory of magic, of serendipity, of doing my will in the world is from when I was five, and my mother and I went with my father on a business trip to Chicago. It was the summer, and a terrible one at that -- 105 every day we were there, so that my mother and I sat in the hotel room while my father was at work because it was too hot to go out.

But on one of the nights, they took me to a bar to hear Irish music. It's an odd thing, considering that most of he oddities of my childhood were entirely different from this sort of thing, that my parents were always taking me to bars and casinos and whatever inappropriate for a child places you could possibly think of if there was some sort of cool music to hear.

I insisted in dressing up in this fancy, gauzy skirt and top my aunt had bought me, and when we got there and I heard the music, I got up to dance in that way children unselfconsciously do. A fellow got up, handsome as hell, black hair, thin and grinning and with not a shred of condescension for me, and bowed to me and started doing a jig, slow at first so I could imitiate it and then faster and faster, and then people were clapping in time with the music and had formed a small circle around us and when he bent down and grabbed my hands to swing me around, I saw the that circle had doubled in size behind us and everyone else was now joining the dance. After, he bowed to me, all solemn, and told me I was a faerie princess, not in the way you tell girls who want to be pretty, but in the way you tell girls who are quite serious and undeniably strange. It is my perhaps silly and vain belief that other people who were there that night still tell this story too.

Tonight, when I arrived at the Barn Dance a dance was just starting up and I ran out to join but had no partner. The caller hollered for me to come up to the top of the set and he'd dance with me. And so I did, dived right in with a live Irish band and footwork that just makes itself up and my perfect little swinging skirt and my hillarious boots and no damn clue what I was doing and rocked it, and while the whole night was fun, that first dance was oh so much just like when I was five.

The band, back there in 1978 in Chicago, btw, was The Chieftains.

Meanwhile, all of you are on notice that you're coming to the next Barn Dance. I don't care if you don't dance. It's so charming and fun and exciting and magical and any of you who write anything not set in this where/when will be assailed by plot bunnies due to this sort of thing. I swear to you.

Also it was delightful to move my muscles in an agressively casual but structured way. It felt of a theme with fencing, but also a necessary antidote. I suppose maybe I can do frivolous too, as long as it's with intensity.