sundries

[rm]

I think I finally understand what Kat and Kali have always meant abut the fairytale of their NYC childhoods now. I'm almost never on the UWS except to eat at Cafe con Leche, but I've had cause to wander the area pretty extensively in teh last couple of weeks. Today, I discovered Pomander Walk. There's a lot of weird stuff on the UWS.

I just said to Alison in email: "Fencing is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is ridiculous. Only I could wind up with a pursuit so ridiculous that acting is my respectable profession." That said, I'm irritated with myself, because I feel like a slacker. I hear some of you laughing. Stop. No, really. When I danced really seriously, it was always murder for me to drag my ass out of bed and get to class. Of course, dance was often a pursuit that started in the mronings (no friend to me). Anyway, I loved dancing, but the work of it -- oh I was dreadful about it, and I'm still ashamed of that. Anyway, I rarely have this feeling with fencing, and I've never yet skipped a class even when it has cropped up. Here's the thing -- this is not enough. Especially over the long Wednesday to Monday break. I have to be working on this at home. I have to, or else the entire tone with which I come to this thing is merely wanky bullshit. Also, knowing that there's a possibility I'll be out of class for a week and a half at the end of this month because of some film work and because of Phoenix Rising in May, I really have to establish a routine to maintain muscle memory and strength and so forth, because I have paid massively for the New Year's gap. I know, I sound like a lunatic. But really, I've got to find some personal structure here.

I would like to start menstruating now, please. The nasty emotional PMS has largely passed, but oi.

I really want to get back to riding, and wonder if I'll be a less timid rider now just because I'm stronger from the fencing and more fearless in general. I know that you just have to show horses charisma in ways nt that disimilar to how you show it to people, but I never got the hang of that and then I went to Australia and didn't continue the struggle when I got back.

I should be able to get my tattoo in February.

I received a lovely compliment today. I was told that I was or looked, I can't remember because this is all about the adjective - wait for it -- dashing. It's so nice when small ambitions are satisfied.

On the bus home tonight, some dude was using that annoying walkie talkie feature -- TO HAVE PHONE SEX. "Are you my dirty little slut? a filthy little girl like you wanting to get fucked by a forty-year-old man?" Did I need another reason to hate the modern era? Did you?

Open call tomorrow I should go to, but blech.

I am toying, with some dismay, with reqacquiring my French. I don't think I'd even put this on my plate until the second half of this year, but it really wouldn't be such a huge effort since it's all buried in my head somewhere.

Comments

[alabastard.livejournal.com]

Dashing, appropriate word, I think.


I'd love to ride in Central Park the next time I visit NYC. I used to do it on the occasion.

Your fencing might have instilled the edge you would need with the horses. I feel now about my riding the way you desribe your fencing classes ... it just pulls me in. I wish I lived near a fencing school like yours, here the main school is just awful, I had to leave class, as all anyone wanted to do was spar, there was no technique or ritual, which I crave.

I would have been yelling YES!!!!

[haya.livejournal.com]

right there on the bus, just to see if it would embarrass him.

UWS means Upper West Side. I had to look. I am in DC, so we don't have one.

Never underestimate the ability to find a ridiculous pursuit. It's a blessing of humanity.

I want a horsey too. And a new icon.
(((HUGS)))

[mizg.livejournal.com]

#1 I spent about 5 years of my youth living on the upper west side, up near Columbia. It has its bad points, but really? Much of it is lovely.

#2 I am getting so into the dancing that I have become a member. Those who have known me for a long time will tell you that my continued interest in an organized form of DANCING is hysterically funny, for, though I love to dance, I never even remotely stick with it. Ever.

#3 Open call for what? I'm so jealous of you. The longer I read your journal and talk to other actors who have been increasingly entering my life, the more I miss it. I've GOT to start doing community theatre or something or I may burst.

#4 I used to be really good at French and it got all screwed up. I sometimes consider spending some time in France to reacquaint myself with it (Quebec would be more feasible, but Québécoise is different) but I don't know.

#5 I've often contemplated a tattoo, despite the "OMG bad Jew" thing. I have considered a Tree of Life most recently (I used to just want a chai but I think a Tree of Life would be a cooler way of doing that) because I always wanted a JEWISH tattoo. I've often also considered a Jane Austen tattoo (the portrait that I have on my necklace), but I realize that'd be a little much.

#6 Phone sex in public = super super super creepy

#7 Did you do riding in your youth? How did you learn it? Like, did you live near a riding school or a farm or what?

[rm.livejournal.com]

#3: Some movie or other. Background crap. I should go, but ugh.

#5: I know a lot of Jews, even practicing ones with tattoos, their theory being as long as it's not for non-appropriate (idolatry) religious purposes or something that could be construed as such their fine.

#7: Oh not at all. My brief experiences on horses as a child were traumatic, and in one case, quite bloody. I took riding lessons for about a year in 2004. Actually, believe it or not, after seing that awful King Arthur movie and deciding I should learn to ride. (That was when this sword business first started pricking at my brain too). It made me really nervous, consistently, but I had the knack for it if I would just let myself. Also, NYC has tons of places one can learn to ride, mostly accessible by subway.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Man, that's cool. I would live on Pomander Walk. If I was, you know, fabulously wealthy. Have you seen all the bronze statues in St John's gardens? They're very pretty. Also, apparently there either used to be or sometimes are peacocks there, but they weren't around when I went to look.

What do you want a tattoo of?

[rm.livejournal.com]

http://pics.livejournal.com/rm/pic/000bkhe4 is the tattoo. Palm-sized though (I had wanted it this size on my forearm, but it won't work with teh detail, and I've gotten over that, so it's going on my back, on my right side, probably between spine and shoulderblade.

If you mean t. John the Divine, I have, embarassingly, never been there.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, lovely! Why a compass rose, if you don't mind me asking?

Yeah, that's the one. I'd never been before either, so after my friend and I had sufficiently scoured the gardens to realize we weren't going to find the peacocks, we went inside, since I'd never seen it. And right as we were walking around, a choir started practicing latin carols. It was awesome.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The compass rose sums up a lot of my obsessions. This from a coment last I was asked about it:

- Regency/Age of Sail stuff
- the fact that I tend to go on weird pilgrimages -- I get ideas in my head, places I must see, things I must honor that usually seem crappy and pop culture to othe people, but invariably wind up changing my life (i.e., my whole australia thing)
- the idea of a compass itself also has a lot of relevance to this Anubis archetype business that crashed into my world via fandom and made me grok stuff about myself I knew but didn't have a package for, per se.
- the green is for my Slytherin crap. The gold, of course for north being whatever we quest for -- the purple in the center of that is a sort of there's blood/life/cost in everything both for good and bad. The blue just looks right -- and it's a mariner's compass for heavens sake.
- the scrollwork doesn't mean anything, it's more just about my aesthetic, and the sourcing of it is personally amusing to me (but would take a really long time to explain and isn't terribly deep).

I would also say additionally, that there's a certain inspiration in the poetry of Lucie Brock-Broido in it. Her The Master Letters are my favorite poems of all time, and many of them are, as influenced by the master leters of Emily Dickinson addressed to figures unclear: "My master", "my tinsmith", "my lord of filaments" things like that. It is in a way an acknowledgement both of what it is in my nature to seek and what it is not in my nature to accept. It may be weird to get a tattoo for the point of saying "I am not just a map," but it's a true thing. Not any longer anyway.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Very nice, thank you. I can see why all that would be important enough to want a tattoo for it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I have three others, but they are small and this will be the largest and the first color piece.

Here, have a Brock-Broido poem, because I don't know if you know her work, and I'm sorta an obsessive evangelist of her stuff:

Gamine

Heart, be clean. Fists, be open, numb.
Most lovely

Lovely, let me be wrong in almost every
Thing. That the page is waste, all that rag

Content. That even despairing relentlessly cannot

Spare you what you fear the most.
Gamine, you are growing

Old now; it’s your time. If you wait here
For the noises of this night,

They will sound out as the rustling of autumn,
Spiky, dried of unctuous

Airs, blazing like a chestnut horse on fire in
The padlocked barn;
It is time it will be time.

[rm.livejournal.com]

ah, that kills some of her formatting. Here it's right:

http://bostonreview.net/BR29.1/brockbroidogam.html

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's absolutely lovely. And yeah, I hadn't heard of her before, so thank you very much.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Dashing, yes that's definitely about right for someone who is well on their way to becoming an accomplished fencer and is soon to be back to working on riding. You have the dancing down, now if you get some practice with black powder pistols, you'll be all set for a career as a swashbuckling highwayman, which is a noble ambition indeed. In any case, I am most impressed.

I should be able to get my tattoo in February.

Of what?

[rm.livejournal.com]

The compass rose thing I posted ages ago.

[shayguevara.livejournal.com]

so glad to hear that things are WELL with you.

Pomander Walk is so beautiful...one of the great things about my "walk every street under 125th (before attempting above that)" is finding spots like this. I came upon it last December during the transit strike.

you are SO not a slacker...you are passionate about many things and a great explorer!

i f'ing hate cell phones and walkie talkie functions and generally being exposed to way too much of peoples' personal lives/conversations in public.

glad to know that acting gigs are coming your way. I totally blew an industrial audition yesterday, but hey - it was my first one and now I know what I did wrong. Keep trucking.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It is good you have auditions in January. It is so slow now. So are you back or are you heading back to DC again?