ariel? ariel!

another night, another town, another queer party full of the same haircuts. same names. same bad beer in a can. it’s a birthday party  and everyone is summer, dancing, as naked as they dare to be. the moisture in the air is visible and conducting electricity, the kind of electricity that just wants to complete a circuit somewhere. everyone just wants friction. i am a cliche. i am drunk on whiskey and coke and not enough food and too much sweat and not enough water. my electrolytes are turning to alcohol. my heart is beating bourbon.

there is a boy named zach or maybe it’s zak or zac or zayyk or who knows. he has great glasses, of course. who does not have great glasses? everyone is coiffed into whatever passes for perfect. the haircuts are six months behind home. living in new york is a quick way to be jaded about style. those scarves are so last season, they’ve finally made it out to the rest of america. we at home are so over them all. it is easy to judge. new york trains you to feel superior and to find your place in the hierarchy of things. if you make it in new york, you know your place is near the top.

these are true: i will never be man enough. there are so many girls dancing in their summer dresses. man enough means something special, something a little violent. are people there to fuck or are people there to dance? there are weeks and months where i do not want to be a sex object. i like to allow the same rights to other people. there’s a girl i’ve seen around and i need to talk to her, tell her i only stare because she’s so fucking hot. she is not at this party. i let my eyes wander.

i have friends who have figured it out. how to pour a girl’s drink. how to move against a pretty girl in a dress. i am still caught between, still too close to being that pretty girl in a dress, still too far from comfortable in my skin. i am seeing a pretty girl in a dress right now, a girl i am just beginning to like enough to feel nervous about losing. why these things come hand in hand i will never know. and i know that i will lose her, i worry about it. i will not be mean enough, tough enough, man enough. at heart i am not sure i am brutal. i am not sure i need to be. when i feel inadequate, ugly, incomplete about my gender, that is when i envision these other friends coming in. the kind that know how to be charming, how to hold a door, how to stick needles or take power like it’s coming from a fountain. am i afraid of being sadistic or am i just not a sadist? am i afraid of claiming my power or am i just not into holding power like that? all the girls in their summer dresses are grinding their asses against the water air. everyone is sweating. it is not hard to imagine how they would look after sex, mid-fuck, and then it is not hard to imagine how easy it is to be an asshole, and then it is not hard to worry about whether or not pushing against a girl is in fact being an asshole. how can someone wear a dress like that, tight, holding, without wanting to be approached? sweaty faces, damp stringy hair, lips parted, how would they look around your hand? is this how rapists think? that all these pretty summer girls are asking for it?

am i an asshole? i am at this party. i am drinking whiskey and eating an otter pop. what do i have to say anyways? what does any of us have to say? i don’t want to fuck anyone here. i want to watch the girls in their dresses dance. i want to think about what it would be like to go home with someone without the committment of going home with anyone. somewhere along the way my leg hair got long enough that now i am the one who is supposed to start things. what if i am tired? what if that part of me doesn’t work? i have friends who have figured it out. i am still learning the code. i am still flustered too easily. don’t show me your collarbones. don’t show me that soft place under your breasts. don’t show me how your hips fit in my hands. i will lose my breath.

things no one knows about me at this party:
* i am wearing women’s underwear. plain, white, cotton.
* my mother has a cyst in her brain and is home alone while my father takes care of his mother in the middle of the country.
* i have a show, a real show, next week at dixon place, a real stage. i might have a chance to be discovered. i have no idea what the fuck i am doing. i am going to look like an amateur. i am going to fail, fall on my face. i can feel defeat mounting.
* i have no idea what the fuck i’m doing.

more whiskey. more otter pops. another city full of queers. everyone is beautiful when they dance, shirts and suits and ties and dresses, breasts and chests and asses. what would it be like to fuck a boy. what would it be like to pick up a girl. what if tomorrow was the last day i was a queer. what if i gave up, went home, found a nice straight life, wore the twinsets and khakis, knew how to dress for success. i could learn to make roasts. i am dirty from the dye of my ten dollar jeans. whiskey and coke is all over my hands, my shirt, from my leaky mason jar. my hair is limp with sweat. around and around the dance floor goes.

sometimes it’s best to go home alone.

this is the moment where it gets risky. where it gets scary. the moment where i have to breathe hard.

I’ve been going on dates with this girl. We met briefly early last fall, in another city; I thought she was cute at the time. Then she moved here; we made plans that felt like a date. Then more plans, then kissing, then more kissing, then sex, all the time going on dates. Dating. Like you do. Museums, movies, dinners, thrifting, breakfasts. Sweet, and hot, and hot, and sweet.

There is more here than just sex, but what? What do you call that thing? Romance? Sweetness? A particular kind of intimacy? Holding hands, sitting close, eye contact that makes you smile; what are the words for that thing?
This is the moment that scares me. I have a lot of people in my life who have abruptly left; picked up and pulled out. Exes but also friends. This is the moment, the set of moments, the point, where it starts to feel like there is a choice. Open up or close down. Say yes, come in, here is the way — or say no, stay out. Not a question of casual or serious, monogamous or nonmonogamous, but a question of intimate or polite. Of calling just to say hi. Of texting back, reopening conversations, email ratios. It’s a game of don’t be caught wanting, of keep your cards close enough to your chest you can fold if you need to, stand up and leave the table — or, more accurately, keep your cards close enough to your chest that if the other person stands up, game over, they don’t see your hand on the way out the door.

What does this mean in the context of the kind of radical love I believe in so hard? I believe that we all own our own emotions and that it is up to us to decide how we are going to react. I believe that we are all onions, to borrow from wendy-o-matik and 500 other people, and that our first reaction usually points to something deeper. I believe it is up to us to do the work.

But I also don’t know what to do with the fact that I am building for impermanence. There is an assumption in romance that it will end, that the person will leave you (or you will leave them, I suppose, an idea that never really occurs to me), that you will make room in your life and heart for someone and eventually they will no longer want the space. I don’t know how to put that together with this model of radical love I believe in, where you come together with another person not to complete yourself, not to possess them, but because you think they’re great, you like their shoes, you like their brain, you think they’re hot, because you can’t look at them without smiling. I don’t make friendships with the expectation that they will end. Why are these other kinds of relationships any different?

I was riding the Chinatown bus home from Boston this evening and I decided I wanted to say hi to this girl. I sent a text off into space knowing that she was busy all weekend, her mom in town, and that I couldn’t send a text in order to get a response. If she replied, awesome, and if she didn’t reply, that’s fair too.

And she replied, and I am sure the whole Chinatown bus home was lit up by my smile, a smile of feeling attended to and a smile of just being crushed out on someone. This kid is made of sugar and I can’t even talk about her without lighting up just a little.

But then what. My phone died. Now it’s later. Do I kind of want to talk to her? Yes. Do I want to talk to her only if she wants to talk to me? Yes. Otherwise I don’t want to talk to her, I don’t want to be seen wanting, I don’t want to be seen overextended. I don’t want her to assume she has me, I don’t want her to take me for granted, I don’t want her to think I am a sucker for her, I don’t want to be caught admitting I like like her if she doesn’t like like me too.

This is where the onion comes in: this isn’t about her. This isn’t about her at all. This is about me, about a history that has helped me learn to be skittish, about having a hard time untangling the present from the past. But I still feel gross thinking about picking up the phone, about taking that risk, about saying yes, I want to talk to you. It’s been a minute. How’s it going? It feels like it leaves me just too vulnerable.

And radical love, this path I keep choosing, this world I believe in, says that the opposite is true. That only by being vulnerable do we get to real intimacy. That hiding our hearts is fake, is wrong, is chicken or maybe capitalistic or maybe just not the right thing. That there is nothing to be lost by taking a jump and trusting in the long run, that even when we fall it helps us learn.

But oh, try telling that to my bruised up scar tissue heart. Try telling that to my chicken hands, the hands that keep typing a reply text and then hitting discard. Try telling that to my twisted guts who are afraid of what it means that I am looking forward to the next time I see this girl, that that time is a little undefined right now and I am nervous just because there is a part of me that feels, at this moment, unable to believe that there will be a next time no matter how clearly it seems to be true.

I’ve always said that the relationship I want right now is one with a lot of space, one where we can have separate projects, but one where there is never any doubt it is there. I am learning that the problem is that I am a doubter. I have to find ways of reassuring myself that affection does not leave overnight, even when it has left overnight before. I have to find ways of being responsible to my own feelings and needs that don’t assume it is the job of the person I am dating. I feel the zero sum model of love teaches us that people will leave at any time, that love is a fleeting thing, that if there are any doubts that means the situation has no legs. But the doubts are intrinsic to me and my reactions; it’s not about anything more than that. I am the person in charge of reassuring myself.

It feels funny to blog about this thing, this undefined treasure, this candyland set of moments I have been able to share. I feel like it’s cheating a little, like what if she saw, like I do not want to be the person processing things on the internet without processing them in person. I guess this is the downside of blogging with a recognizeable name, of not really caring too much: when you do care, it’s awkward.

I am still learning how to do all this, by which I mean both blogging about my life as it involves other people and involving other people in my life. We have as many ways as rainbows to figure each other out — I believe that — I don’t know where this little adventure I am on will turn, and I accept that as long as I am honest and open it will work out in the end. The hard part is the doing — pushing through the fear of that openness, and that honesty. I cannot protect myself without closing myself off to everything the world has to offer. The answer to fear can’t be running away, no matter how much safer it feels to be sitting on my own in a room that is only my own not touching anything and not valuing anything. There is nothing certain in anything except that change comes and we cannot anticipate it.

We can run from things, or we can embrace them, and we get to choose our path. And little by little, mid-sprint, I am learning to turn around.

I have been writing a lot of drafts lately, and then hitting no. Hitting save, not publish, because I do not know how much I want to talk about other people.

That last post of mine: sometimes, you get what you ask for. I am feeling pretty abundantly lucky right now. Not that my little chicken guts aren’t terrified, just that they are also trying to relax and say yes, yes, yes.

I have a post coming up on Sinclair’s blog in a minute, I think, so I wanted to update and say hello to everyone!

Hello, everyone! I should talk more about fashion here, I guess, but then I am not a “blogger” per se. Especially not with two of my good friends getting married on Saturday, with three huge events behind me, et cetera. Life has been too busy for blogging.

What can I say? Sometimes you generate material; sometimes you digest it.

I have not, historically, thought of myself as the kind of person who has a lot of sex. I have rarely even thought of myself as the kind of person who other people want to have sex with. In my teens it was all about hope and rejection, hope and rejection, or more like hopeless crushes that were hopeless because I was so afraid of rejection. A lot of people I had monster crushes on did not turn out to be very good to my heart in the long run. I can write a history of woe and self-torture but that isn’t really that interesting to me. What is interesting to me, to this post, is that I have a lot of trouble thinking about myself as the kind of person who can go out and get some.

One of my favorite late night things to do is read what I guess I would refer to as communities of sex blogs. Rings like Jefferson and Madeline and Marcus and all of the other people in that circle (a circle I do not even begin to really know the dynamics or dimensions of, honestly); rings like Mistress Matisse and Monk and their cross-references to partners and lovers and play partners et cetera. It is all undeniably hot and yes, it makes me hot, but what I love just as much as the smut is watching the network work. Watching people negotiate with each other and describe the same event from different perspectives and talk about each other and be in a community of people where sex is just one way of saying “I love you” or maybe “I care about you” or even “Hey, you’re really hot and I think it might be fun if.”

That is the community that I have never felt permission to be a part of. In my life right now I am working through a lot of weirdness right now, trying to figure out where I sit, me, on my own and for myself rather than in dialogue with someone else. And this has led me to feel like I should keep my crotch out of the public circuit, that I am kind of a mess right now — but it has also led me to want to challenge myself to fuck honestly, as myself, not trying to play a role. Do what you love and the money will follow. Learn your skin. No faking — no faking arousal, no faking interest, and no saying yes unless you mean it.

This weekend was Purim, a Jewish holiday for which I have been busting my ass for weeks to create a theater moment, a spectacle, a party, everything. It all went on Saturday and it went in the best way; the theater was a success, the party fantastic. It is known for being a drunken holiday (we are commanded on Purim to get so drunk you don’t know the difference between the good guys and the bad guys) and at this party a drunken and sexy holiday. Lots of naked. Lots of kissing on the dance floor, in the stairwell, in spare rooms in the building.

I have a lot of hot friends right now, and a lot of crushes popping up like springtime. I got to spend a little corner of Friday night exchanging kisses with a girl I have a friend crush on — you know, the kind that is oh my god you’re so cool can we please hang out and also make out and maybe could we fuck like bunnies. Saturday night was a blur of heat and crushes: an old friend who I have suddenly started kissing; a newer friend that I have been circling with for some time; an even newer friend, new in town, who makes me want to do absurd things just to see her smile; that girl from Friday night with her curly hair. I ended up in a diner at 230am with this new in town girl, the one with the smile that kills me, eating exhausted french fries until I literally could not complete sentences. We had to strike; she stuck around, helped, waited for me.

I didn’t make a move that night. Maybe I should have. I know a lot of other people would. Part of it was that I am tired, and I had been working hard, and say what you will but my Capricorn ass has a history of turning down sex to get the job done (I will tell you the story sometime, especially now that the show is over and I have ten seconds to think). Part of it is that I just cannot conceive of myself yet as that person, the one who sees a cute girl with the beginnings of a dimple and a lot of smart things to say and gets to take her home. I just figure she’ll laugh, say no thanks, and maybe it will be awkward. She’ll have other suitors and I should back off.

But then I look at these blogs, these human beings, just as flawed as I am, who are going after what they want and getting it. Maybe I am not going to get to have sex, or make out much, with my new friend crush. Maybe this new in town girl* is going to be my friend and not my date. Maybe this old friend of mine and I won’t kiss any more and maybe we will. Maybe the boy — Mr. Circling Around — and I will finally get around to making out like fiends, and go on our great date already. But the revelation, what I feel like is just starting to register, is that I have a say in this. I do not have to wait for them to decide to make a move on me. I can make a move and people can like it, or not like it, but it is not a patently ludicrous thing for me to be doing. Maybe Miss Curly Hair and I can be the kind of pals who do all these things, or maybe not, and maybe that can be true and we can also talk about her regular date and we can be the kind of people who operate in a shared environment of trust and affection. Maybe that is true for all of the above.

I love this process. I love the risk, or at least I love it when I am not panicking about it. I panic sometimes; Mr. Circling Around and I have been in a few situations that I am sure I have run away from because I get intimidated. The air gets very tight and electric and I panic from all the mounting power. But I can do this. It is not absurd. In fact, it is totally natural and awesome and hot and it means that I am probably going to get to have a really amazing springtime. Maybe I can have what I want; I just have to learn to ask for it.

Here is to learning, folks. And here is to sex blogs for showing me one corner of the way — whoever said the internet was only good for porn was right, but I hope they realized just how much good a little porn can do.

* I am beginning to see the appeal of blog nicknames. Oh well. It also feels so absurd. But I guess if I am going to talk about other people publicly**, so be it.

** Also, I realized after a little bit of d-r-a-m-a that this blog might actually get turned up by people who know me in real life. I guess that is how it is; I mean, I called this thing with my first name. Thanks to the Little Mermaid and Ariel Detergent and Sylvia Plath I don’t show up on Google immediately, but it isn’t hard to track down if you know me. I think I am just going to make my peace with that for now, but it means that if I start writing about other people who are connected to me in real life — ie, people who would be identifiable by the people reading this blog who know me — I have to be careful and respect privacy. Anyone have thoughts on this? I guess I should go find a meta-blog and figure out the best practices for this stuff.

So I just wrote a 531 word comment (edited down!) about butch/femme and its limitations on Sinclair’s blog. Clearly, I am having some feelings.

Last weekend I had what I can only term a lot of gender experiences:

• Being asked to be a butch go-go dancer — or peer pressured into it? — only to not, in fact, be invited to be a butch go-go dancer;
• Spending a lot of time at a conference that was run/headed by a lot of High Femmes who seem to date primarily on the masculine spectrum;
• Feeling totally erased by all of this butch butch butch on one side and all this femme femme femme on the other, neither of which resembled me;
• Having so much angst over this that I left a party, only to get mad at myself and go back (”fuck it, if they don’t think I’m hot, it’s their problem, not mine, and I am going to just go be fabulous despite it!”) — and then explain it all to a friend of mine, a high femme bottom friend of mine, who totally did that thing you hear about in books of validation and ego stroking my fragile self that was getting no love from the rest of the world;
• I don’t even remember what else.

I just throw up my hands. I love gender. I love the game, the art, the construction, the way you put together symbols to make a message. And the people I am attracted to have a lot of gender. I think femmes are hot. I think butches are hot. And here I am watching people crow on and on about the butch/femme dynamic and honestly it breaks my heart.

Where does it leave me? I am some weird in the middle. No lover has ever looked at me and said “Ariel, you just have this kind of energy.” I have never gotten that feedback. And I hear again and again about these butches, these femmes, finding each other and seeing each other’s essential soul and having hot sex and complementing each other perfectly and zigging and zagging and yinning and yanging and holding doors and arching eyebrows and all I feel is despair.

I am not either one of those people. I am something else, something parallel maybe, or to one side, at some other stop along the way. It is a sexual economy I want to participate in but I don’t know how much of myself I am willing to sell along the way. I don’t seem to fit in that world — I am not exuding some essential quality of one side or the other that makes me marketable. And so I don’t get to do that.

I am interested in the homosexual and heterosexual as “same” and “different” rather than “gay” and “straight.” There are homosexual queers and heterosexual queers. I think I am  a heterosexual queer — I get off on difference, not similarity — but the differences I get off of are these two that seem to fit so well together. And then there’s me. I can play femme; lord knows I have before. And I think I am learning how to front butch, too; it’s a different skill and I find it scarier, but it is one I am trying for. Learn to embrace that which terrifies us!

But every time I hear people go on and on about their natural gender, their comfortable essential femme self, I get a little sick. Because I do want a lover to put me in a box. I do want someone to look at me and say “Ariel! You fit here!”

Sometimes I wonder about all of this mouthing about how butch/femme is so subversive and whether it is just a front for another kind of gender normativity that at least in my case is not experienced as liberatory at all. I do not want to look at ads on Craigslist or look at people in a bar and think “oh, she’s talking to the femme girls, she wouldn’t want me” or “oh, she’s so high femme, what would I ever do with her, I’m not qualified.” And of course, I know; there’s no way to know for sure until you try. But this is how gender systems and systems of power work — they shut you down and make you feel impossible for not living up to expectations that you didn’t even ask for. Sometimes I wonder, here in this system that is not aping heterosexual norms but is at least in dialogue with them, how much that gender brutality can be avoided. How many people worry about being “not femme enough” or “not butch enough” or “the wrong kind of femme” or all these other things?

I love my ridiculous life but some days I just want to have a straight path to what I am after. I want to not feel impossible. I want to feel like my desires have a place, and a time, and a validity. Maybe this is sour grapes at my own inability to put these things together, but maybe it’s more than that.  I just do not want to feel like I am a fool, a ridiculous fool, because I want to sleep with that person but I wear pants and button-down shirts and ascots. I do not want to feel like a fool because one day I’m in a tie and the next I’m in a pleated skirt. Gender norms are gender norms, and that’s how it is, and maybe I just need to wheel my shopping cart to a different aisle.

But it’s hard to do that without a sense of loss.

my friends, do you know about daft punk?

watch and be thrilled. i find these so satisfying because their aesthetic is so well-defined and the music is the kind of electropunk i love so. just look at the worlds they create! so satisfying!

I overestimated myself.

My own ability to keep my pants and my heart separate. Or to keep my head out of the game. To do something. Anything. I feel like I am exploding, overexploding, overwrought, making bad choices, and driving myself nuts. I haven’t let myself do this in a while and that is how it goes, I guess; I am out of practice. I hate every time I have felt like this, this overextended, this unable to trust it all. I feel unqualified.

I don’t know why the system is so threatened. But I feel it in my guts, threat, danger, a need for resolution, a need for clarity, or at least a need for contact. Too much in my head and not enough in real space, in the real world, in the articulated space. You speak and words become waves that move particles that move particles. Maybe it’s not a butterfly in Osaka that causes hurricanes; maybe it’s the answer to an unvoiced question, the static from a cell phone connection bursting into space and back down again. The beep from a voice mail.

I don’t know what I want. I believe that I do not want definition or some pat answer. I want to know what the framework is. I want to know what galaxy I’m playing in. At least a little. I want to know how — I was going to write how safe this is. But nothing is safe about this. Nothing at all is safe about this. Nothing is ever safe about feelings even if those feelings are whatever these feelings are, or whatever the polar opposite of these feelings are, or any feeling in between.

I am satisfied that I looked up the etymology of “visceral” and they said from the Latin for your bowels, origin ultimately unknown. Who knows where this comes from, this intestine pigshit of emotions going thousands of ways. Who knows how to ride it, the stink, the swell, the bile, all of these uncomfortable things. I do not know who or what I am or who or what I want. I want a phone call. I want a sign. I want to look at these intestines and be able to divine just enough that I can find some peace. I am not good at creating my own peace. I can’t sit still because this comes back to me, too much, too much, bilious and gutwrenching, unable to get rid of the tiny kernel of hope that sits in my gut and irritates me with wonder. What if. What if. What if.

This is not a road I can go on. I cannot be watching my phone for signs of life. My only response is the cold turkey one. Turn off the ringer. Put it away. Hit ignore. Hit pause. Distract and create. I am excited to get in the studio and make things. I am going to make things right now. Make and destroy, make and destroy, gutwrenching and bilious.

There is so much I want to write about and I have been drafting and drafting but I cannot even begin to construct a narrative.

Because I am still sitting on a rooftop, processing under the Brooklyn sky, having one of the most intense conversations in recent history between one kiss at a time. I am still lost in the one moment when I took a risk, pushed the envelope, knelt between her legs, and watched her lose her train of thought entirely.

She lives in Boston, I live here. She is one of my best friends. I don’t understand what happened and I don’t know what will happen.

I did not go home with her that night.

I don’t keep up on comments. I don’t read enough blogs. You all say smart things and I try to remember to put you in my google feed. But even in my google feed I get overwhelmed. My weeks are full and my weekends are fuller. I am online a lot but usually trying to get work done. I am so sorry — I just saw Summer posted a response to some of what I wrote about gender, other folks have written things too, and it is 12:34am (make a wish!) and this is early to bed for me this weekend and tomorrow morning there’s work and it is going to hit me like a ton of lesbian bricks.

I wish my life weren’t like this. I wish tomorrow morning I got to wake up, eat breakfast, stretch and go to the gym, write, work on my clown piece ideas, go to my Purim writing meeting, go to my IJSN study group meeting, and call it a day. Instead I am going to wake up too late, throw whatever clothing I can find onto my body, run to the train, commute with a frown face, be embarassed and continue my 80% late to work trend, do things I don’t really care about all day, run to the gym, run to the writing meeting, run to the study group meeting, and get home about midnight. Then Tuesday, different meetings, same basic agenda. Then Wednesday, then Thursday I am done at 8 (posh!), then Friday, then it is a three day weekend (thank Gd) where I will not catch up on my sleep because even if I am in bed at 4:30 in the morning I am awake alert alive and enthusiastic by 10:30. So I am always tired, I am always buzzing around, I am always too busy, and I never get to concentrate.

I hate it. I want to savor every word you people read and write thoughtful comments back. I want to write more posts, more about New York, about fashion and gender, about sex, about kissing your friends. I want to do more of my other work, more organizing, more artmaking, more going to the gym; I would settle for more sleeping. I hate that so much of my time is dictated by this job I have that I fell into that I feel trapped in but I can’t see my way to what is next. I don’t have the time for any vision quests. I get a ludicrously generous amount of vacation every year and I am still running a deficit right now — taking time off for performing, taking time off to see my family, and taking mental health days or sick days because I just don’t maintain myself and sometimes I crash out even though it’s Tuesday rather than Saturday or Sunday.

They would keep me at my job if I would let them. They like me there. I like the people and sometimes I like the work. Lately I have run out of steam; my energy is better used elsewhere and I resent my job for making me use up my precious few resources on staplers or copy machine training or all of the work I do so that other people can do the work of the organization. I admit that it might be easier if I got to be a little closer to the action at my job; I stay behind the scenes. It is hard for me to be doing this; I want more, more, more. I either want my job to consume me in the happiest way or to stop making so many demands that feel like such poor fits. I feel immature for saying it but it’s true. I want my time to myself. I want to create things when I work that matter. I want to not feel like the weirdo who goes out, who performs, who has to sew her costume on her lunch break.

But what am I going to do with my life? The fact of the matter is that I am going to have to work and  the question of where and how and for whom is starting to press on me. In 8 hours and 13 minutes — or 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, or who knows — I am going to have to sign in for another week doing work that ultimately I just don’t care about and that leaves me exhausted and gasping because I have to fit the rest of my life in between the hours of 5:30 and 12 or 1 or 2.

This never resolves well for me. It hasn’t been resolved since I have lived in New York. When I quit my old job and was temping I was so desperately broke — counting subway rides broke, eating pizza three meals a day broke — but in some ways it felt so free. I do not know if I can deal with another round of that stress kind of broke, barely making rent temping, not paying my bills — this money is comfortable and it’s nice to be able to cover my ass. I am debating trying some new paths and they’re all killing me; I’m scared. I know I am a good administrator, but what else am I good at?

Clearly not commenting on blogs.

it’s a tap dance tour of youtube. Life has been exhausting me and all my writing has gone into self-care and journalling.

But you need to see these. Sound up, caterpillars.

The Nicholas brothers are the most amazing tap dancers that, if you are not a tapper and/or only follow white Hollywood, you may never have heard of. Just watch this. They are such showmen. I am starting with them because I feel like later tappers are more into the “loud and fast” category and I want you to watch them first because this, this, this is how it is supposed to be. They build their act so well and what a final kapow.

It’s Fred and Ginger. I just picked one I love because honestly there are too many to pick. Everybody knows this song — or lots of people do — but the tapping is just amazing, and on skates no less. I can’t say anything new about them because they’re just classic. But you know what, this is what kills me — oh, to be a professional. That was their job, learning to tap on skates and doing it again and again until they got it right. It makes me wish I got to really be a performer all the time and work on it and give myself over to the art. I am really jealous of movie stars who get to, for a role, go learn something new 8 hours a day with their bodies. I love how carefully the glidey skate noise has been preserved.

I love Gene Kelly, but I love Donald O’Connor. I love this number so much. He is such a good technical clown. His hat tricks! His slapstick! Oh Donald O’Connor. Just watch it. It’s amazing.

That’s all for now because it is now ridiculous o’clock in the morning and I have been watching old theater on YouTube for hours. I wish I knew more about the Cotton Club scene and the Nicholas Brothers’ contemporaries, but I don’t; that is the racist system we live in for you. That is definitely a point of more research for me. I also am hoping to see more of Donald O’Connor’s work soon.

What dance kills you? What’s your favorite old movie? Do you know more about black Hollywood? Let me know!