Tuesday Night Chatter vanished, and I realized on Wednesday which by then is far too late. This post has now been open for about an hour, while I stare at it and wonder how to begin. This is a familiar refrain to you now, I'm sure, Gillian struggling with language, trying to take a thousand small infinities and fit them into a few pixels of text on an LSD screen.
Let me start here: my attention the past two days (and before, I guess) has been entirely occupied by two things --- the public performance for my students, and finding a new apartment.
For the former, I finally sat down with them -- most of them -- and managed to hash out more or less what I'm expecting from them and what they want to do and when they can rehearse. That in itself was somewhat of a nightmare, as I returned home that evening with 14 excel spreadsheets with Xs all over them and needed to smash them all together into a comprehensive rehearsal schedule that would 1) work for all of them, and 2) not require me to quit my day job and just rehearse with them all the time.
There are still three of them that have not yet told me how many dancers and which dancers they want to work with, making it utterly impossible for me to schedule anything, plus another one who was not at the meeting and apparently wants to join.
Half of them were a half hour late, which does not bode well for my attempt to drill professionalism in them, but I guess it means there is room to grow. I had a translator and did not tell them I don't plan on using one for the project, but they'll figure that out pretty darn quick. It was mostly just an exercise in watching the X's cover up the pages and watching them bicker about who was going to dance in who's piece and when that might happen.
Well, hey, all projects start in chaos, right? As a measure of how much I've been thinking/worrying about it, I spent the entire night last night having anxiety dreams about it, of them not taking the rehearsals seriously and playing cards or generally goofing off, while I try in vain to get them to work on their pieces. Unlikely -- very -- to actually happen, but still vexing.
Thankfully I had google calendar on my side. My computer looked like this:
Success. I did have to go out and have a drink after that though...I really do hate scheduling. I long for the days when I have dancers who are just in my company and will be readily available...
As far as finding an apartment, that's been a bit of an adventure. I was trying to rent a room somewhere but with no real leads, someone contacted me to ask if I wanted to go in to find a 2bed together. We picked up a third person -- as 3 is cheaper than 2 -- and quickly found a great place, in a good location, but then the third person inexplicably bailed at the last second. Apparently it was too far to walk and she was afraid to bike. Good luck spending 5 months here...!!!
The search for a third person has commenced and seems to be going smoothly. The good part of all of that was practicing my Khmer with the very friendly agent, who eventually did figure out that I wasn't going to go for his advances, but either way he was sweet. My Khmer is bad but for the amount of time I've been learning, I think it's pretty good.
In either case, I should be moving in about a week -- and will reduce my expenses by half. Score.
Until next time...
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