"You make my dopamine levels go all silly."

"I'm not telling you it's going to be easy,
I'm telling you it's going to be worth it."


- Anonymous

I wanna feel natural and safe in a volatile place

"I wanna fit in to the perfect space,
feel natural and safe in a volatile place.
And I wanna grow old without the pain,
give my body back to the earth and not complain.
Will you understand when I am too old of a man?
And will you forget when we have paid our debt
who did we borrow from? Who did we borrow from?


Okay part two, now clear the house.
The party's over, take the shouting and the people, 
get out!
I have some business and a promise that I have to hold to.
I do not care what you assume or what the people told you!


Will you understand, when I am too old of a man?
Will you forget, when we have paid our debts,
who did we borrow from? Who did we borrow from?


I wanna have pride like my mother has.
And not like the kind in the Bible that turns you bad.
And I wanna have friends that I can trust.
That love me for the man I've become not the man that I was."

Divine inspiration

"A good piece of art should inspire you to do it yourself."

- Stan Ridgeway

That's one of the things I love about good art....the feeling I get when I see something so amazing, so well done, so inspired, that I get this undeniable urge to attempt to create something even a fraction as good.  And it can come from unexpected sources...sometimes it's a song on the radio, sometimes it's watching a dance piece, sometimes it's a musician's live performance, sometimes it's an article in a magazine or a story in a book, sometimes it's a TV episode or a movie....but tonight it was church.  

I had the slightly unusual experience of having the majority of my technical dance training done through my church.  So the idea of associating creativity and inspiration and art with God was something that I simply took for granted.  (I'm not going to get into the whole thing about the difference between being a Christian artist, and being an artist who also happens to be a Christian...that's a whole other point and a whole other can of worms)  My point is that it's been a very, very long time (as in I don't actually remember the last time) since that feeling of inspiration and the drive to create that I get from good art, came from anything specifically related to anything spiritual.  But tonight during the worship after the message, I got completely lost in just hanging out with God.  And then at some point I got this antsy, almost hyper urge to create.....anything.  I wanted to dance, and draw, and write, and....I don't know, sculpt (though I've never sculpted in my life).  I even for a brief moment considered driving 40 minutes to the studio to go dance.  

I don't want to loose that feeling.  That creative drive, the ants-in-my-pants urge to make something amazing is what I need to motivate me.  I keep getting caught up in the logistics of trying to start a company.  I keep thinking, I need to lay out my 5 year plan and 10 year plan and look for sponsors and recruit dancers and get rehearsal space and and and....I mean, I do need to do all those things, but if I loose inspiration then there's no point to any of the logistics.

The dictionary definition of the the word "inspire" is:
to fill with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence; to produce or arouse; to fill or affect with a specified feeling; to influence or impel; to communicate or suggest by a divine or supernatural influence; to prompt or instigate; to give rise to, bring about, cause; to infuse or to breath life into.

For some reason I don't really feel as anxious about all the details as sometimes I think I should.  Maybe some part of me is more mature and trusting than I think....but I kind of feel like if I will be faithful to stay inspired, and continue to trust the place I'm in and the provision that has already happened, then the rest of everything will come.  And obviously I don't mean I think I should just spend all my time dancing around my apartment and sponsors will magically find me to give me money or anything like that...but I so have a tendency to get lost in the planning and the details, that what I need to do is remember and trust that what I'm called here to do is so bigger than me.  

Soooooo I think what I'm gonna do now is put on some good music, find my sketchbook, maybe make some hot chocolate, and create something.

Dancing about architecture

* Scroll down and click the play button before reading on *

I love it when something has the ability to stop me dead in my tracks...for just a moment, the rest of the world stops and all the clutter in my head quiets and I am overtaken.  It's an incredible feeling.  And one that I haven't had in a while.

A line from one of my all-time favorite movies (Playing By Heart in case you're curious) is "You can't talk about music.  Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."  Keeping that in mind, I'm going to give it a shot anyway....

Earlier I was in the car on my way home, listening to a playlist comprised of "I And Love And You" by the Avett Brothers, the self-title album by Mt. Desolation, and "In Rainbows" by Radiohead (these 3 albums work together surprisingly well...I just put it on shuffle and it's magic).  I had just pulled into my driveway and was distractedly gathering my things before turning the car off, when Thom Yorke's voice hit this one note and I froze.  My breath caught and I was completely transfixed.  I sat motionless as the note soared into vibrato before trailing off...then the drums came back in, along with my breathing, as my eyes filled with tears.  These are the moments that I live for.  These are the moments that I am just arrogant enough to hope to create for others.  This is why I believe in art....really good art....that can inspire and change people's lives....even if it's just for the length of one note.



* the moment I was referring to happens at 2:59 in case you're wondering *

It's not the chase that I love, it's me following you.

Marking the territory of this newly impassioned soul

(totally never thought this song would work acoustic or as a solo - it's just so massive when it's done with everyone - but I have to say, Marcus rocked this to a whole new level.  I will never doubt him again)

Love and Monsters

"You know, when you're a kid, they tell you it's all grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that's it.  
Ah, but the truth is, the world's so much stranger than that.
It's so much darker, so much madder.............
and so. much. better."

- Doctor Who, S02E11 "Love and Monsters"

You desired my attention but denied my affection....

This I Believe....

(stolen from Neil Gaiman...I'm telling you, I might be obsessed)


"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.


I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marily Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed.  Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice one that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.


I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass.  I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.


I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative.  I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.


I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.


I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one armed Siberian shaman.


I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars.  I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.


I believe in a personal God who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do.  I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive.  I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.


I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly.  I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.


I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.  I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.


I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."


- Neil Gaiman, from "American Gods"

The wisdom of Neil Gaiman

I've never read any of his books (not yet anyway, though there's a large number of them on my list), but he is the author of my current favorite quote (in fact favorite enough that it's been a fleeting thought to make it a next tattoo)....
"Sometimes you wake up.  Sometimes the fall kills you.  And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."

Just out of curiosity, I did a google search for "Neil Gaiman quotes"....and hit the jackpot.  So, so, so many lovely, lovely words, strung together in such funny, touching, beautiful, profound ways.  His books just jumped to the top of my To Read list.

In no certain order, here are some of my favorites.....

"Have you ever been in love?  Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable.  It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.  You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. they didn't ask for it.  They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.  Love takes hostages.  It gets inside you.  It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart.  It hurts.  Not just in the imagination.  Not just in the mind.  It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.  I hate love."
(from "The Kindly Ones")

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school.  They don't teach you how to love somebody.  They don't teach you how to be famous.  they don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor.  They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer.  They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind.  They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying.  They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
(from "The Kindly Ones")

"He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once."
(from "Neverwhere")

"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away.  The bad things are still out there.  The nightmares still walking.  When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better.  'It's all right' we whisper, 'I'm here, I love you.' and we lie: 'I'll never leave you.'  For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."
(from "Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days")

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."
(from "Good Omens")

"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dream, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks.  Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas - abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken - and what could be more frail than that?  But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."
(from "Fragile Things")

AND

"I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time."

Words vol. 1

I've been realizing lately how much words mean to me.  A few years ago my best friend described me as an "external processor".  And it was like a light bulb went off.  My whole life the only way for me to make a decision or work out a problem was to talk it out.  Sometimes even talking to the wall will do, but somehow getting it all out of my head and into the air is the only way for me to work.  When I was younger and working on some of my first freelance choreography gigs, I used to make my sister stay up (sometimes very late into the night) with me so I could talk through my ideas and show them to her as I went.  

But sometimes when I'm really emotional I have a hard time organizing my thoughts into words....actually, that's not entirely the case...it's more that I have a hard time getting them into any sort of coherent stream.  I end up reverting simply to individual words (i.e. Pain. Love. Anger. Frustration. Manipulation. Communication. Why?)  Either that or I use poem or music lyrics.  You know they say the way to know if you're in love is if all the love songs suddenly make sense...or if you're going through a breakup suddenly all the breakup songs were written about you.  Well for me it seems as though the music that I am drawn to in general can usually be turned to in various times of emotion (whether it be happy, sad, lonely, excited, etc) and used to speak for me.  If I look back throughout my years of blogging, it is evident how much this is the case.  The times that I was feeling the most are usually full of posts containing only strings of individual words or copy/pasted song lyrics.
I am most definitely my parents child....I have the overly-emotional side from my mom, and the overly-practical/logical one from my dad.  I think that even in the times I'm at my most melodramatic, my brain knows I'm not being completely rational or in control and so, when writing at those times, instead of putting exactly what I'm feeling into my own words (and possibly regretting them later when I'm a bit more objective), I instead turn to these safer, more vague ways of expression....individual words that could be interpreted various ways, or songs & poems that are someone else's.

It's also occurring to me at the very moment, that I really should write more often because it can sometimes serve as another form of external processing for my brain.  (in fact, that statement is the proof of itself)

I have other thoughts on my love affair with words....more later....

All exits look the same

I heard what you said.

"I heard what you said. 
I’m not the silly romantic you think. 
I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. 
I don’t want gemstones or gold. 
I have those things already. 
I want…a steady hand. 
A kind soul. 
I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. 
I want to love, and be loved." 


- Shane Abé

A fail to kiss is a fail to cope

Ok so not only is this video completely and incredibly awesome, the song is about the best thing I've found to describe what I've been feeling as of late....