No longer a virgin

Sushi virgin, that is. That's right, tonight I had my first ever order of sushi. It was vegetarian and made with nothing I haven't eaten before, but a milestone to document nonetheless. Baby steps.

I also ate the entire meal (including our appetizer of fried tofu) gracefully with chop sticks. For anyone who knows me, that is also a feat worth mentioning.

Oh, and I should include that it was completely delectable.

Beautiful Oddities

Saw this tonight. Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollack Dance Company's OYSTER, a 1999 piece that finally made it to the American Dance Festival. In that link is a little bit about the company, who is from Israel, and a video clip from the piece. Watch it.

I am still grasping for the words to describe this most breath-taking piece. As much as I pride myself in being a writer, I really must steal the words from the description in the link above because it comes the closest to doing it justice:

"... from human marionettes to double-headed men and armless odditities, reality is thrown out the window in this most engaging evening that blurs the lines between ballet, acrobatics, mime, and theater ... it's a fantastical feast."

The piece is based on short story by the always brilliant Tim Burton, which was an automatic turn on for me (Big Fish is one of my favorite movies, and who doesn't love Edward Scissorhands?). The short story, after a bit of internet surfing, I think is "The Meloncholy Death of Oyster Boy" and probably too the other stories that are in the short-story/poem book of the same name.

As soon as the curtain opened, I was transcended into a world much like the one described above--a weird dream of a circus and ballerinas and sights that were fantastical indeed. And honestly, I'm not even sure what happened in between. I had floated above myself and landed in this bright yet gloomy, questionable space where nothing at all was predictable. The music moved from vaudeville-like instrumentals to tracks with vibrant, sometimes even croaky singing in a language I could not identify. The soundtrack went from loose, improvisational-like solos to drum beats like a fist punching into a pillow. The people (or creatures) I saw on stage were characters who I could not tell if they were my friends or my enemies, if they knew I was there or if I was invisible to them.

When it was over, I could not even move. I didn't even notice the curtain was closing until that last sliver of light was about to disappear. The auditorium filled with the sound of applause but I couldn't even get my limbs to move. I could barely find my feet to stand up and give them a standing ovation (though, what I thought they really deserved, was a floating ovation). I found I had transcended into this fantasy-like dream world circus thing, a world full of odd things that were beautiful and beautiful things that were odd.

Odd and beautiful, beautiful and odd. I think I am discovering that things in the world that are both are the best things.

Even now, an hour after this performance, I still feel like I am floating, not landed back in the real world with my feet planted solidly beneath me. My chest has loosened a bit from the tightness that pulled at me as the lights came up, and the vibrations I felt beneath my skin all over have slowed down, back in time with a steady heartbeat.

ADF asks us this season, "What is Dance Theater?" Well, folks, THAT was a great example of what dance theater could be. Not just because Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollack, married partners in crime and the brains behind the company, are one-part theater master (Pollack is a very experienced actor) and one-part big time dancer and choreographer (Pinto danced with Batsheva, a well-known Israeli contemporary dance company, and won a "Bessie" award for her choreography), but that definitely helped. OYSTER, though, says it all.

I can't wait to go to sleep to see what kinds of beautiful and odd things decide to tumble, glide, leap, and fall into my dreams tonight.

Kindness Anon

PostSecret is a website I try to visit often. It's strange, but there really is a great comfort that people find in sharing their own and reading others’ secrets. It’s such an interesting phenomenon. It’s incredible what you’re willing to share and say when you have no idea who you’re talking to. A couple weekends ago, there was a secret posted about committing suicide, and it had such an overwhelming response from readers that someone created aFacebook group telling this anonymous person "please don't jump." the response was overwhelming and amazing--There were over 59,000 members, so large they had to convert it to a different kind of page on Facebook which is at 8,600 members and quickly counting. It also got coverage in on Time Magazine's News Feed in an article entitled, "Can PostSecret and Facebook Save a Life?"

The anonymous kindess that is shown here is so powerful. It's just ... wow. It's like I don't even know how to respond to the secret or to the reaction that followed. Kindness spreads so quickly in the virtual world, and I can't help but wonder where that rapid spreading of kindness is in the real world. Yeah, that's right, the real world, the world that so many of us have forgotten about because we are so distracted by our Facebooks and Twitter and blogs (yep, guilty as charged). And even when we are not on our usernames and tweet names, we are thinking about the next time we are going to be. No more rants about that, it's all been said before but I guess this is just me saying I agree with it all. An age of distraction indeed.

That actually reminds me of a song called "iGeneration" by MC Lars.

Alison, out!

In progress

bear with me as I experiment with new templates and backgrounds! but more entries to come after a week-long hiatus, so stay tuned :)

Deep stuff

First off, I just gotta say that since I've started this blog and done some exploring of the blogging community that's out there, I'm getting addicted really fast. I've already "applied" to join a group called 20something Bloggers which has tons of cool forums and discussions that I'm excited to join. Getting into the prime of my generation, I think. As I've been doing stuff and living and all that, at least twice a day so far has something come up that makes a little "ding" go off in my head and I think to myself, "I should blog about that!" And it's only been six days. This may be an obsession in development. Just a heads up (should that have an apostrophe? Head's up? I never really got that idiom).

I just finished reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I think most people have heard of this book ... I know I heardI the title a bunch of times and though I had heard rave reviews, I had no interest in reading it because, honestly, I had no idea what an alchemist was but with the word "chemist" in in it I was immediately turned off because I was terrible at and absolutely loathed chemistry in high school. Not only was it a first period class and I am NOT a morning person, but I am aboslutely terrible at anything scientific or mathematical (hence why I'm in writing and the arts) and my teacher was crabby and had purple eyebrows tattooed to her face. Seriously. Anyways ...

Just last summer a bunch of friends in my dance program in Italy were reading it and were also raving, so I decided to give it a try. It had nothing to do with chemistry, and I enjoyed it. It's about destiny, desire, courage, love, and spirituality. Considering the deep and broad subjects of the book, it is still simple. It's really a book of philosophy of life snuggled into a story about a boy on a journey. Some of it was a little bit too floofy for me (again, the second time I've used that word this week, not sure if it's real) and as a feminist the extremely traditional perspective of women in the book bothered me, but it does share some very interesting life lessons. There are just a couple quotes I dog-eared that I'd like to share. The book is full of quotes like these that are so deep and general, but what I like about them is that I think everyone can find some sort of relation and comfort in them. If you like those quotes, I recommend the book. It's a short and easy read and provides a lot of insight.

"We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand our life stories and the history of the world are written by the same hand."

(This next one makes more sense in context--the boy and the Englishman are a part of a caravan that is moving through the desert towards Egypt.)

" 'You should pay more attention to the desert,' the boy said to the Englishman, after the camel driver had left. 'We make lots of detours, but we're always heading for the same destination."

"And you ought to read more about the world," answered the Englishman. "Books are like caravans in that respect.' "

"One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving."

Since The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho has become quite popular, so I decided to read another one of his books. I picked up Eleven Minutes at a bookstore in Pisa, but I did not enjoy it as much as I had hoped, but it was certainly an interesting story and had some roots in feminism (don't know if that was intentional by the author or not) and I appreciated that. But he has lots of other ones out and I'm going to give them a whirl.

Adventure rightly considered-- A look back

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered."

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

This is one of my absolutely favorite quotes. There is quite a story behind it, too, which I would like to write down before it completely slips my memory. Things are unfortunately already a little bit foggy, but let's see what I can scrape up.

The date was 05 December 2008 (a year and a half ago? really?). I was 20 years old, studying abroad in Perugia, Italy and had my ticket and plan to travel to Dublin for the long weekend to visit one of my best friends and roommate from the States who was studying there. However, due to confusion, unclarity, and the completely unreliability of Italian train schedules, I was too late getting to the Rome airport to catch my flight.  To blame: the trains in Foligno, a small, barely notable town somewhere between Perugia and Rome that I only knew for its dinky train station. I remember waiting in the thick, plastic, rain-protectant pod on the platform in Foligno, hearing the heavy, cold raindrops hit the tracks, marking each scattered second that the to-blame-train did not ..wait, is that ours? No? ... did not arrive.


Back to Rome.  Missing this flight  was one of the most upsetting things that had ever happened to me. I was panting after a sprint through the terminal in the Leonardo da Vinci Airport of Rome with a 300+ Euro ticket to Dublin, 15 minutes before the flight took off, at the airline desk, and the unsympathetic desk attendants glared at me with annoyance as they told me they could absolutely not let me through.  I sat down against a wall in the middle of the very crowded terminal and cried so, so hard, called my mom, cried more, and tried to figure out what to do from there.  There were no other flights I could even remotely afford that would get me to Dublin. However, I knew my one of my Perugia apartmentmates and friend were heading to Naples/Pompeii for the weekend, which was on my list of places to go. So, I called  and bought a train ticket for Naples. The hurdles kept coming. Upon arriving at Roma Termani (the central Rome train station), there was construction on 2 of the tracks and those tracks were thus out of service. Therefore, a ton of trains were seriously delayed and we (and by we I mean me and the approximately 100 other stranded travelers in the train station) didn't know what platform trains were coming from. So, in a crowd of other frustrated Italians, I stood in the middle of the train station staring at the digital schedule watching the minutes add to our delay for about an hour and a haf. I did finally got on, though, and headed down South to the lovely (sarcasm) city of Napoli.

I don't know how much y'all know about the city of Naples, but it ain't pretty. Though the train station is a relatively safe place, it is not in a nice part of the city at all. Naples is dirty and dangerous for the traveler.  My train arrived in Naples and I had to wait for my friends to meet me there--they were arriving by bus. The original one hour I was supposed to wait for them turned into 4 because of major traffic jams.  In the meantime, I once again found myself alone in a train station. For my safety, I tried my best to make myself look occupied, happy and comfortable, all of which I was not. Thanks to my dark hair, I don't stick out like a sore thumb among Italians. However, I was a sad, frustrated, scared, and lonely American who had nothing to do but wait.  Which I did. I did a lot of wandering and a lot of people watching. I sat in the McDonalds in the station to keep warm, and in my journal made a list of food I wanted to eat when I was back in the US (a chicken caesar salad from Wegmans, burger and fries, cranberry juice, chocolate chip cookies, and Chinese food), and a drawing of how I could rearrange my bedroom back in the states. I do recall now that I was shading in the windows in bedroom blueprint when my friends burst through the door, and I had never been so happy to see them. 


Now around 9pm, the three of us found the Circumsuviana, which is the local train, to our hostel stop at San Agnello. It was raining and we got terribly lost looking for our hostel.  Thankfully, a nice man who passed on his moped turned around to help us and we found our hostel, Hostel Seven. I knew we looked like a reck when we arrived-- tired, hungry, and wet.   The desk worker felt sorry for us and made us gnocchi and served us each a glass of wine in the hostel lobby.  Italian hospitality at its best!

We spent the day at Pompeii, which was mad cool. It had been on my list so I was so glad to get it checked off.  We then went into the adorable city of Sorrento on the water, where they had Christmas lights strung along the streets and giant Christmas trees. We had a great dinner at a restaurant that Rick Steves (always a help) recommended. The two men who owned the restaurant took very good care of us-- I remember our server was a funny Italian man with a prominent lisp and continued to bring us liters of wine, even when we said we were finished.

The next day, the adventure continued. We took the Circumsuviana to head towards our next stop, but we missed our stop and wound up going all the way back to the Naples train station, and we stupidly thought it would be a good idea to take a stroll around Naples. We saw what everyone had always said about Naples--dirty dirty. Rick Steves told us that to assume that any able-bodied person in Naples was a thief, so we decided to head back to the train station, where we then we got completely ripped off on tickets and almost got mugged as we headed back to the tracks. Back onto the train, and found our stop, Castellemare di Stabia. We waited for half an hour outside the station until an energetic, young blonde Italian woman came looking for us, and drove us to the campus for the restoration of Stabia. We got this thanks to the mom of one of the girls I was with--somehow she had an affiliation with this organization that was restoring Stabia, a city similar to Pompeii that got ruined from a volcano eruption around the same time as Pompeii, We had a full, 5-course lunch and a private tour of the campus, and left with hands full of complimentary DVDs and books about Stabia's restoration.

We then took the Circumsuviana train back and forth many, many times and being very confused because it was not going as far as we needed it to (to get to our hostel stop). At some point, we realized something wasn't right, and got off and stood at a random station along the Circumsuviana track just as a crowd of fellow confused travelers started to gather. A few hours of standing and waiting, we learned that a tree had fallen onto the Circumsuviana track further down and they were working on fixing it. We stood standing at that tiny station among many impatient people for many hours. In that time, though, we did meet Martin, an American man in his mid-fifties, I would guess, who was traveling by himself around Italy. He was short, friendly, proudly wore a fanny pack on his waist (it's practical!), and reminded me very much of my father. With a common language and goal in mind, we teamed up with him, and we were soon joined by a newlywed Singaporian couple who were on their honeymoon traveling around Italy. The six of us decided to stick together, especially when we were messily directed to an intersection a few blocks away where we could get a bus to take us to Sorrento.  It was complete madness. At least 100 people rushing across the streets (where drivers do NOT yield to pedestrians, by the way) with all sorts of luggage. All we had were backpacks, but Martin and the Singaporian couple had large bags on wheels. After another hour or so of waiting, some coach buses finally came, and once again the huge crowd of people rushed the buses.  About 30 people, including our group of six, were left behind as the bus was literally as full as it could possibly be. Another public bus finally came, and they were extremely impatient as we loaded our bags on and crowded onto the tiny bus.  I remember sitting on a strange ledge behind the driver that was definitely not a seat. The drive to Sorrento from wherever we were was long and extremely hilly. Hills + speeding bus + no seat + no fresh air + time = extreme nausea. I do, unfortunately, remember that detail way too well. When we finally made it to Sorrento, we are extremely hungry and tired. Martin was staying in Sorrento and told us that his bed and breakfast had an adjacent restaurant, so the six of us went with him to where he was staying.  And where did he take us but the restaurant at which we had eaten the night before! The waiter with the lisp recognized us immediately and gave us a great table and served us a selection of things from the menu to share. Over dinner we found out each other's stories--Martin was recently divorced and always wanted to travel, so he took a few weeks off from his desk job to gallavant around Europe solo.  Italy was the Singaporian couple's middle stop on their European honeymoon. 


These are the best parts about traveling and meeting people.  What an unlikely group we were-- of all ages, ethnicities, and pathways, strangers united by an inconvenience that soon turned into quite an adventure.  Martin paid for our whole dinner which was incredibly sweet, and he helped the Thai couple get a room at the bed and breakfast since their final destination, Positano, was going to have to wait for the next day. Martin then insisted on letting him escort us back to the train where we could get back to our hostel stop. The six of us exchanged information, but we never heard from Martin or the newlywed couple again. I remember I did not have a pen or paper on me so I gave all of them my info and told them to find me on Facebook, but they never did. It's sad that we didn't get to reconnect.  I wonder what they are up to now?

[Some of my photos I pulled up from the weekend. Circumsuviana, Sneaks waiting for train, inside the Circumsuviana, lights of Sorrento, Sorrento and the Mediterranean.]

At some point during the trip, when the six of us were on a train, getting from one end of Sorrento to the other, I remember Martin shared the G.K. Gilbert quote with us as we discussed the inconveniences of the day that had really turned into a fantastic adventure. Not only was the quote so fitting to my entire weekend, but it really shaped how I looked at the rest of my time in Italy, and really anything else I've done. Being in Italy made me a lot more carefree and spontaneous, and reconsidering an inconvenience as an adventure has made being independent and unsure much more exciting. I feel like I can handle anything that comes my way.  I can take the bull by the horns and give pretty much anything a whirl, because if it doesn't work out as it's supposed to at point A, I'll go through ups and downs and twists and turns to a point B. And nowhere does it say that B is not greater than A. Which, conveniently, goes well with the title of my blog. Oh snap.

So Martin, if you're out there, thank you so, so much for giving me a quote to live by.

Life's about film stars and less about mothers

Something I like at the moment: Lily Allen's It's Not Me, It's You. I'm fascinated by her lyrics and am thinking about featuring some of them on this here blog. She's sassy, she's smart, she's sarcastic, she's straight up.

Trying to figure out the lyrics to her song "The Fear". She makes a lot of good points in it, and I like how she admits to not being above it all-- she, like so many of us, have fallen into this trap because that's, as she says, how we're programmed to function. So what is the fear that she is talking about? The fear of being out of the loop? The fear of being forgotten?

The lyrics are as follows, interpret as you may. There are expletives, you have been warned, hope they don't offend.

She sings:

I want to be rich and I want lots of money

I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny

I want loads of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds

I heard people die when they are trying to find them

And I'll take my clothes off and it will be shameless

Cause everyone knows that's how you get famous

I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror

I'm right on track yeah I'm onto a winner

I don't know what's right and what's real anymore

And I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore

When do yout think it will all become clear

Cause I'm being taken over by the fear

Life's about film stars and less about mothers

It's all about fast cars and cussing each other

But it doesn't matter cause I'm packing plastic

And that's what makes my life so fucking fantastic

And I am a weapon of massive consumption

And it's not my fault it's how I'm programmed to function

I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror

I'm on the right track yeah we're onto a winner

Forget about guns and forget ammunition

Cause I'm killing them all on my own little mission

Now I'm not a saint but I'm not a sinner

Now everything's cool as long as I'm getting thinner

I don't know what's right and what's real anymore

And I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore

When do yout think it will all become clear

Cause I'm being taken over by the fear.

On a somewhat unrelated note, what is it about her super cool British accent that makes her so much cooler? Wonder if that helped make her more popular on the US scene? Dunno, but I dig it.

To come, methinks: more fantastico lyrics from smart, awesomely poetic female singers who rock. Ingrid Michaelson, namely, and more Lily Allen fo sho.

Safeplace

(09 March 2010)

I saw geese flying in a crooked V through the sunny, cloud-striped sky this evening. Watching them soar over the Brownstones toward their winter safeplace, I thought how I envied them. Their lives are so simple, so barren, so dependent on so few things.

Many say that we, us humans, are blessed with rationality and a more developed society. I am begging to differ—such rationality and possibilities have lead to corrupted, misguided systems that make us believe that we need material things and bajillions of dollars to be happy and live well. Living simply has become overrated … I am not a fan. As I sit here in front of my very own laptop, wearing my brand new leather boots in my fully furnished apartment at this excellent private, liberal arts university, yes, I realize this is a bit hypocritical. Where to turn for solace in that? Not sure.

I heart music

(28 February 2010)

I had the incredible treat tonight of seeing the Russian National Orchestra play in the chapel at school with special guest pianist the breathtaking Yuja Wang. There’s something really incredible about hearing great music. It makes you escape into a place where you believe everything is possible. Your mind starts swimming with all the good in the world, and all the bad in the world, and that’s when you feel that tightness in your stomach and that stinging behind the eyes that mean tears are a-comin’. There’s a certain resonant chord, or swelling crescendo, or moving melody that for some reason I can’t explain, jump-starts a visceral reaction.

Even if it’s a tune you recognize, something you can reproduce down to the note in your head, the song still has a way of moving you. Even for me, when I found myself distracted during Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff because I KNEW I knew the song, and I have this crazy complex when I have to figure out how I first came to know it. it’s like when I see a movie or am watching a TV show and recognize an actor or actress. I automatically am like “oh, he/she is from ___!” I have a pretty consistent tendency of matching it up quickly and correctly (much to the disappointment of Mel, with whom I often bet on if I’m right or not, and can proudly say that in all the years I’ve only lost twice to her), and sometimes have a hard time getting that original exposure out of my mind. Sometimes, though, it helps enhance my experience. Like tonight, for example, when it finally clicked that the movement was from Center Stage, during Jonathan’s ballet. I could see the fourth positions of the core and the majestic waving of the arms of Eva Rodriguez in my head as I heard the passionate movement being played before me. When it was over, and the applause broke me out of my trance, and I caught my breath, I felt the tiny tears balancing on my lids, though they never dropped over the edge, and my heart beating fairly ferociously (<-oxy moron? But cool alliteration, so it’s staying) and I had to catch my breath.

I had the most fun watching the conductor in the second piece of the three-piece concert as he danced on his podium in a graceful frenzy. It made me giggle a couple times, it was so musical!

Real

Back at the blogging thing. I always seem to begin blogging again when I'm on some sort of adventure. The past two blog fire-ups happened when I was in Europe. This time, the adventure is a little less glamorous, a little more more long term and, I guess a little more real. For real. Now that I'm a real person in the real world with a real apartment in a real city with a real internship paying real rent checks, I hope I can still find sanity and joy in writing about it. My blog has always been as much for me as it is for anyone who reads this (anyone? are you out there?), and that's what it's going to continue to be, hopefully.

The plans for this blog:

a) Freewrite. Not many edits or re-reads. Random chronology, random subjects, random format, random audience, random words.

b) Post photos. Often. Will be used for motivation to keep my camera with me at all times.

c) Updates often.

And FYI, to begin, the title of my blog comes from a song by Ben Folds. A line I've always loved from the song "Fired"-- "She says, 'everywhere I go, damn, there I am!'" It's a good way to think about where you end up and why you're there. I believe that everything happens for a reason so wherever I end up is where I meant to be at that moment. A bit floofy? Whatevs.

I am going to get things going with a couple random entries that I've had saved on my computer for months when I had a moment of inspiration to write but no desire to set up a blog but I wrote them anyway. Some of them are unfinished because I got distracted or lost my moment of eloquence or something. Here goes.