So I was just thinking, I should save writing about the banalities for Tuesday Night Chatter, but then I realized several things. (All at the same time, so naturally I will have forgotten most by the time I write this.) The first was that, I will never remember everything I'm thinking of now on Tuesday, and TNC is mostly just for stream-of-consciousness anyway, a kind of snapshot of a moment. And besides, currently, the little observations, little ideas, short stories and small pictures, are what is making up my life these days.
I have some posts in the works with a bit more point, mostly about the workshops that I've grossly neglected to mention for several weeks. But in the meantime, I want to tell you about the small things.
Like how I got stuck biking in a real monsoon the other day, the several minutes of madness (only this time it lasted about an hour), and it was only the bright pink, flimsy poncho that one of my students gave me out of the goodness of his heart that saved me. Mostly, I just couldn't see, blinking madly as the raindrops assaulted my eyes and hunching my shoulders; not because they were getting wet, but because I guess I thought I could use them to shield my eyes.
The six week slump, I think I addressed somewhat last TNC, fueled by a lack of power and internet, the onset of a nasty head cold, and various other factors, has been rearing its ugly head this past week. I've been referring to it, but I don't think I've articulated its main source in clear terms on this blog yet, though I have to my family. The fact of the matter is this: I came to Cambodia with some fuss and fanfare, with a grand vision - subconscious or otherwise - to modernize and develop the dance form and be some kind of hero, or heroic presence. I didn't think of it in such terms, but I did.
I found out pretty quickly that that was not in fact what I wanted to be doing, that it was the most grossly western and arrogant thing I could do. Therefore, it left me scrambling a bit, and dealing with a very simple fact: I don't know why I'm here.
I don't mean this in a bad way. I don't even think it's a bad thing, and I don't think it's permanent. I don't particularly wish to be elsewhere, and don't regret having come here. But the fact remains. I came here because someone asked me to, and now I have to create what it means.
I'm sure that the previous times that I went to live in a new place -- Asheville, New York, Paris -- I went through this stage too, this maddening stage where you are where you are and glad to be there, but trying to adjust as quickly as you can and understanding that you can't hurry it along, but live it through. It's encouraging that I don't remember those times, because that means they were unimportant in the long run, and the breakthrough more than paid the hours spent running at the wall.
(You know, even when I want to not have a point I somehow ended up creating one. In blog posts as well as life, apparently.)
Anyway, it's also not like I'm not busy. There is a lot going on, and yet somehow I find that when you ask me what I've been doing I have no idea what to say, such that, like now, when I sit down to write blog posts I stare at the screen blankly, wracking my brains for something to write about.
I dropped the teaching job with the trust that I would be able to live without it, and that if it wasn't the right fit there was no point in doing it, and since then I picked up an odd job teaching an NGO the Thriller dance (despite not really knowing it myself) a couple hours a week and was contacted about another dance teaching thing. I modeled for an art gallery's weekly 'Drink & Draw' and picked up five bucks. Somehow, things are fitting together in ways that I couldn't have possibly expected, but that are only possible because I trusted enough to say no to something I couldn't fully commit to.
Besides getting caught in the rain -- and it has been VERY rainy recently, precisely after I said something about it not raining much -- the main adventures of the past week have been mostly in guessing how long until the power comes back, finding ways to keep cool and cheap cafés to go to, and obsessively reading the Fountainhead, which I finished on Wednesday (and loved).
Also, I apologize if I repeat myself. It's a bad habit, but when you can't remember what you've been doing without serious mental strain and just go for the main themes, you often mutter the same themes over and over again...
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