All Strrrletched Out

I am dead as a doornail. In my ballet class tonight, there was a new guy--an older, returning dancer like me--even a little older than me, who hadn't danced for about 15 years. At the end of bar when our teacher Emira said, in her beautiful Yugoslavian accent, "Okay, strrrletch," he fell on the floor in a heap. I guess you had to be there, but I thought it was hilarious. I had so much empathy for the guy. I wanted to get right down on the floor with him, curl up in an exhausted spoon position and call it ballet... or yoga.

My sweet love LR is going to get me a Debbie's chopped salad at Factor's. Thank god. Thank god for sweet loves.

Just Wonderful

Pointless?

There's the idea that writing breeds writing. Writing poetry certainly breeds writing poetry, but blogging doesn't necessarily breed writing poetry (at least, not for me). My poetry blog Alunir was great for a little while, but then I became paranoid about publishing poems (even though they weren't finished poems) in that medium and how it would affect submissions to print journals. So I stopped posting poetry.

Without a raison d'etre, I've been feeling lately that this blog is pointless. There, I've said it. But isn't that the definition of blog? Pointless. I started this blog on a whim. I'm not ambitious enough to try to turn it into a "magazine" about contemporary poetics or literary fiction. So if I don't post for a while, it's not because I don't have anything to say or I don't care, but because I'm thinking. Thinking, reading, living and writing poetry that I can't post here. Plus, Facebook and wedding planning are now taking up all my free time.

Shake, rattle & wed

Imagine having these in your wedding photo album.

Beginning Again

I went to the Marat Daukayev School of Ballet and took a beginning adult ballet class with a gorgeous Yugoslavian teacher named Emira. It really was like starting all over again, except instead of a six-year-old body, I have a 35-year-old body. My calf cramped while trying to balance in attitude, the muscle above my hip seized up while flinging my leg to the side, and my hip flexors really started to hurt while doing fast degages to the side, but overall it wasn't that bad. The saddest thing of all was not being able to lift my leg to 90 degrees in adagio due to what I term "bricks in the hips."

Considering my age handicap (plus eight years or so of doing almost nothing), I didn't do as badly as I thought I would.

Time may have chipped away at the cartilage around my hip joints, but it hasn't stripped me of my love of ballet. My focus as a senior-citizen dancer will be to dance with as much love as Suzanne Farrell (pictured here with George Balanchine) sans the young body, to try not to injure myself and to not give up again.

I want to be one of those older ladies with colored hair, who quietly come to class every week, take their place at the bar, and despite not being able to lift their legs very high, still manage to have beautiful arms and to dance with the kind of reverence that comes only with age.

Natto Natto Mon

Here's a video I shot and Lee-Roy edited of our friend Abo trying natto, a Japanese delicacy, for the first time. Natto is fermented soy beans and is the definition of an acquired taste. Many people say it smells like stinky feet. I like to describe it as tasting the way a dumpster full of rotting garbage smells. It is also incredibly viscous; to get to the bean, you have make it through the slime. Our natto was served to us at We Be Sushi in San Francisco. I recommend the restaurant, but maybe not the natto (although I think everyone should try it at least once... it builds character). The guy walking out of the kitchen near the end of the video was our waiter Simon, who likes to eat natto for breakfast.

AboNatto from Lee-Roy Lahey on Vimeo.

Landscape

I like to think the landscape of my soul (if such a thing exists) would look like nature--a forest, some vision of the Northwest in rain surrounded by lakes and sea, mountains and trees--an evergreen soul. Either that or Hawaii where I grew up, the ocean rising and receding, wet dunes out to the shallows, then the reef. I've disdained the idea that it could resemble anything like Los Angeles, held together by the silvery black tar used to seal fissures in the streets, a strip mall on every corner selling surprising things like art and culture (amazing what treasure and good times you can find in a strip mall), the sewage sea that is, nevertheless, the sea. Yet I have to begin to admit these things are part of me, part of the air I breathe, from the Venice beach cruisers to the Lincoln-Navigator ladies talking on their cell-phones to me in my white Toyota Camry. Perhaps I'm becoming this way or perhaps it's always been in me, along with all the other things, and perhaps finding myself in this state is not as terrible as I thought it would be. Perhaps it's even kind of soothing.

Poem Play

Sea Forest

Let's set booby traps in the sea,
wade through redwoods and tramp on ripples.

Listen to the roaring of the woods,
the crashing of the trees.

Can you hear the rustle of waves?

Me, As a Cartoon

If you haven't already noticed my new profile image, yes, it's me as a cartoon! My "crazy, crazy talented" (as a friend puts it) fiance created this. I love it. My fantasy is to star in a Miyazaki feature, as a cartoon of course, someone like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. And, folks, if you haven't already seen My Neighbor Totoro, it's the most delightful cartoon feature ever!