I love the chance to write you... I think I actually had a visitor or two to this page, but so far no one but the robots have dug into this site like I would have had I found it. There seem to be a perplexing few who check the main page on occasion, but nothing else. I'm not quite into implementing changes yet. I'm still learning what I can do.
I would feel more secure if I had a good backup system in place, as well as if I physically separated my three computers... I will work on the backup system first, then the second. I was planning to use one of the free storage spaces on the net to save my backups on... maybe if I just found a pay one that would be a better option (free ones make you fill out questionnaires and such, and are hard to use from the command line). We'll see. Not much terribly priceless on this machine yet.
I will get to experience, but some more on the technical aspect of this first. I'm not super-happy about Zope, because it is somewhat slow, and to make a site with Zope nicely usable, I'll have to use one of my overclocked to 550 Celerons with 128 MB RAM. But that is what I got them for (this web project). And I haven't been using them much at all since the old P133 has been so handy (and runs so quietly). I'll probably stick the one I choose to be the server off in another room somewhere-- aside from diversifying physically (speaking of that, you might find http://www.venona.com/rdl/ interesting), I won't have to listen to it.
I'm thinking of moving in April. I think by that time I'll have another raise, and be able to afford reasonably $600/month rent, even while still working half-time!--and I will still qualify as fairly underpaid for what I'm doing if I'm still working at the same place. The old woman I rent from now gets a bit grumpy sometimes, and when that occurs, is unnecessarily/overly nit-picky about how I do things involving entering the house and using household appliances, plumbing fixtures, and so on. Also April is when my 1 year DSL contract will be up, and more importantly perhaps it will be easier/less of a waiting game to get DSL in the likely event the place I would move to would not have it yet. But there is a lot nice about how I live now. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Now: Last weekend, and perhaps the one before, especially, were quite miserable for some reason. Partly was dealing with the rain, and different sorts and levels of feelings of humiliation/ being an outsider perhaps. But at those times I don't feel like dwelling on such feelings, so would be unlikely to be caught here writing about them.
This is about sharing my successes, and hypotheses for improvement and continued successful performance, so when I'm not doing well, I really feel I have little to say.
But I do develop hypotheses: in that case one of them was: stop/reduce evening dance classes-- try to be at home by the latest at 7:00 p.m. so I can get my fill of computer time without having to stay up terribly late, and not be able to get up early. Also swim for an hour every morning, even if late. I can do this! On days when I don't have a class at 1 p.m, at any rate. I was working 10-2++ many of the days last week--because even though I did not go to many evening dance classes (none in fact), there was a lot I wanted to do/learn on the computer.
Unfortunately many of the good dance classes are in the evenings. And spending so much time with computers I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to move when time came for class again.
Subjects for site topic areas: Eating; bodies, movement, physical awareness of self.
We'll see what I work out this coming week.
Damian Conway is a guy I read about on Slashdot.org who many people are raising money for to pay him to work on Perl (an open-source programming language) for one year. In an interview he was asked what he might do if he had many billions of $. One he mentioned was finding the most creative people in the world and just paying them to be them.
What would I do if someone paid me to be me?? On my poor days, my efforts are just to stay sane/content, which in fact can be a nice break from wondering what to do with one's self when everything seems nice, but when one still has no passion. Earlier I found I really needed at least four hours of paid work/weekday to stay content. Now though, with dance, I may have an alternative to part-time work for its sanity-preserving benefits. And with my interest in working on this web site, I may have discovered a beginning of a bit of passion.
It can be tough to stay motivated to work on something like this, when no-one is really out there cheering for this sort of thing (I think there may be but we haven't found each other yet), and when I don't balance solitary computer time with some amount of people time/ physical movement time.
It also takes an extraodinary amount of time to make visible and felt progress on this project at this early stage. There is a lot to learn. But I look forward to having a site in place I would be happy to advertise to groups of people I find who might contain individuals interested in this sort of thing.
One nice development this week, or last week was finding http://artofliving.com. It was on a bumpersticker on a car I saw. The site uses words to describe an orientation toward life/experience that are similar to words/metaphors I have thought of when considering my desired approach to experience. I do not agree with or like a lot on the site, however. In a roundabout way I ended up writing Frankie Lee (the site/group founder) to discuss possible reasons for my feelings about her approach and site.
It was sort of strange thing to be doing as I wrote a whole lot of stuff one would not expect from a stranger, but on the whole it got me excited to work on this site--it helped me remember that there are people out there who might be likely to value the sort of site I have in mind. I also came away with a generally positive impression of Frankie Lee-- not everyone would react in such a reasonable/positive way to the critiques I gave, while also making me feel like she actually read what I wrote (take this journal for an example).
Now I'm getting a bit closer to what inspired me to write this evening. First, though, I have thought of another fun thing to do with other people (i.e. still with a strong preference that the people be women I think are nice). There's an old roller-skating rink I pass by when returning from ballet class in the weekends. I don't really notice it during the day, but at night there are people going there, and it has an old broken neon light sign that still has a few letters lit. I went to some birthday parties there when I was a kid. I think that would be a fun place to go on a date. I really have to rack my brains for date-like things I think would be fun. Then I began to wonder who I might ask to do something like that with. Actually one of my ballet instructors came to mind, not as someone I would want to 'date' but as someone who would be fun to go to the roller-rink with. A more likely scenario might be that I ask people from that class if they'd like to go. I'm not really sure how it would work-- I don't think she would get the idea that I'd want to date her per se, Hmm. I guess we'll see if I do anything with this. I bet I could do it-- as a lark, "Hey, would you like to go roller-skating at Del Monte roller-rink some time?" and see what she says. I suppose I could explain 'Of all the people I know, I think you'd be the most fun to do something like that with.' But that's probably not necessary. She does seem to be the person most into the kind of experiences I appreciate, but she's definitely 30 something (I don't think I mind that but it adds to the difference between us and the strangeness of the idea of us spending time together), and has kids, and gets a punitive tone in class sometimes that isn't helpful or necessary to my mind. Oh what fun to think things like this. Mostly because when I do get thoughts like this I know I will do something about them, but there's still that feeling of 'will I really??' And 'what will happen?' And I suppose some sort of social embarassment fear? I don't know what that part is. I suppose more realistically I should fret about all the non-rollerskating parts of such an experience, or like how do you treat/interact with her when you are skating around, and how do you say goodbye, especially if you have a lot of fun? (and there's the risk that you don't, or that emotional turmoil is the overall result...)
I would like to go swimming in the waves sometime, but that's not something I would do by myself--and she does that with her kids. It does seem possible that we could be friends, and other folks could get used to that if we did. Fascinating... The only annoying thing about daydreams like this is that they're often _so_ far off from what does actually happen, that is, if anything happens at all. Some time ago, 2 years or so, I resolved not to spend much time daydreaming, but to act more. Some planning and forethought can help.
Ahh- I've thought of something else. She is perhaps a bit too powerful of a woman to be interested in me. People are interested in people who are similar to themselves in many respects, and in many ways I may be her junior (perhaps subordinate may fit better)- I guess particularly with respect to being established as a stable person (a person who knows who s/he is), and also with respect to being recognized for her positive contributions to peoples' lives. I may offer her someone to learn from regarding thoughts and approaches to life and experience, but we are in such different situations, I'm not sure my thinking would be relevant, nor am I stably content/loving life enough to be super-confident in my ability to teach yet. That is why I like my idea for this site- I can work on my concerns, others can work on theirs, and I do think we can learn from and enjoy others' learning, though we may be most interested in the efforts of those in similar life stages/situations. Also, she seems to find some value in a punitive/angry expression- something I rarely do, and this definitely adds to a perception of difference in force or power- emotional force?
That brought on a lot of analysis. I just thought of the idea of Frank Q. in the roller-rink :))) He's an enthusiastic and somewhat crazy Afro-Latin-Carribean dance instructor/dancer/choreographer/psychic. Hmm. At UW (Univ. of Washington) they had free roller-skating in one of the IMA (intra-mural-activity ctr.) gyms on Friday evenings, and there were one or two regulars there who were really good dancers.
I could pretend it was like a birthday party and invite a lot of dancer people. That could be a lot of fun. Maybe! Of course I do value the person-to-person interaction that may be less likely to occur in a group event like that. But I do think it could be cool to have a birthday party of sorts there. I wonder if they have roller-dancing classes there? That would be quite something. I will have to check it out. Sort of mezmerizing to roll smoothly in a circle, in curves.
Anyways, the thing that got me interested in writing was a bit of partnering (i.e. me attempting to dance with Elle [not a real name]) in rehersal today. Part of the time we were asked to simply work together and practice any sort of turns we could think of-actually we were supposed to choreograph a little routine, though I didn't catch that at first. I consider myself a pretty creative person, but this was not terribly easy for me.
It was nice to work with her. I still draw a mental blank when trying to think of a good dance to do with someone else-- really bizarre. I suppose a good part of this is because it's not a swing dance class, and we're just not used to doing things crazy and close in ballet, while those are exactly the things I might think would be fun to do with a woman at least. And if it were a guy?? Such a barrier against doing anything interesting. Contact improvization work is needed? If I had more familiarity with her perhaps I could do better, but really a whole change of environment could be needed. Wierd. Also the clothes we're wearing aren't consistent with the couple dancing I think of as fun. You don't see swing or salsa dancers wearing tights very often. It would take familiarity and playing with eachother- contact improv / modern dance- like. Maybe I'll get the chance to try this again.
I don't think I need to mention the role of sexual attraction/ sexual/ sensuous beauty / physicality in the aesthetics of dancing, but I'm not sure either how to deal with it here (partnering) or what its effect on my behavior is with respect to partnering. The comparison between guy and girl partners can be helpful. How to do it well in a fun and beautiful/ inspiring way? It might help if I could have this discussion with Elle. I'm too tired now to think much more about this.