Sorting out the curly q's and a weekend off

The reasons behind this post are entirely selfish. Being unable to sort out the curling mass of thoughts, I thought maybe if I pull them out and lay them flat they'll make more sense, that if I can see them in language I'll know what I want to keep and what I want to toss, or maybe just simply they'll be here and not there and unclutter the premises. 

People keep asking if I'm doing okay. I guess I have the glazed look, the kind of "lights-on-but-nobody-home". It crept up on me -- I knew I needed more of a vacation than the four days over Christmas (which could be years ago now) but for three weeks I was possessed with energy and drive. 

There was the showcase, which has only been mentioned here in passing and probably deserves more of a look than it's getting, but all you need to know for the moment is that it happened and the fact that it happened took a lot out of me. But it's really all about CTN, and me, the young white female in the midst of a very Cambodian company and paddling like mad just to stay afloat. 

"Soft launch" or not, I knew the expectations would be high (or low, as it turned out) and the need to make a good first impression to a bunch of very skeptical concert coordinators was very great. If we didn't do well, I'd lost whatever trust or promise I may have come with. And by launching into the midst of this already skeptical situation, I then was lacking some very basic things in order to make things look good. 

Getting those things, like costumes, decent rehearsal space, music files a couple days in advance, and food and water for the dancers, cost me at least ten dollars in phone credit (usually good for a month or two), dozens of hours (I don't think I'm exaggerating) and god-knows-how-much sheer willpower and energy. I did get these things, everything clicking into place this past weekend, and the subsequent crash has been -- 

Well, to be honest, kind of dramatic. My energy has been all over the place, up and down and around. I have moments of being really happy and mischeivous, and moments of being really down and upset. I'm alternately starving all the time or not really hungry at all. 

I'm okay, yes. The truth is, I'm exhausted, but I suspect it all to just be the aftermath of a serious emotional rollarcoaster that lasted almost three weeks or longer. There are a couple of various personal things that have added to everything as well. 

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. This weekend, due to the cremation ceremony of the late King-Father, the whole city is essentially shutting down for four days and the entire country is descending on Phnom Penh. Road blockages have already begun in preparation for the procession tomorrow and I can only imagine what Monday during the cremation itself is going to be like. 

Although it is a historic occasion and it's kind of cool that it's happening while I'm here, my general aversion to large crowds (that could stampede at any moment) and terrible traffic, as well as a serious need to chill, has fueled my decision to stock up on food (ie junk food) and not leave the apartment for four days. I guess I think that maybe if there's only one place to throw energy, eventually it will bounce itself out and stop doing so in my head. 

I'll watch the procession and the ceremony on TV, accept house calls if they happen, and generally take four days to hermit. To watch all of the possible futures currently rattling around my head, speculations on potential situations based on presumed readings of various happenings and generally having nothing to do with the here and now, watch them all and then lay them to rest. Tell them, "I see you. I know where you come from," and then let them go, to be or not to, depending on which cosmic Hamlet wins the argument. 

And hopefully, when I come back to the surface on Tuesday morning, I'll be at peace, rested, and prepared to go forward without trying to think my way into it. 

Don't look at me

I don't want to give the full update. Maybe you know, maybe you don't. I started a new job and got a bit more than I bargained for, and have spent the last couple weeks fighting tooth and nail for the things I need to do my job properly. I have begged, discussed, texted/called myself out of credit, gotten the upper management involved, and now, everything I was on about, I got.

Let's take a moment to acknowledge that's great, but today is not about triumph. In fact -- well, it's complicated.

Being sick (and coined) again has not helped my case. Today, simply put, I was constantly frustrated. I can take it with a grain of salt because I know why it's happening, but from the ridiculous detour through the middle of nowhere (though it might have been because the roads are closing for the late King-Father's funeral next weekend) my ride decide to take this morning and making me almost fifteen minutes late, to the young guys making fun of the dancers and movement during our usual rehearsals in the bathroom, I've been wanting to fight the entire world.

Sometimes I feel accepted and welcome, and sometimes I feel like the very out-of-place Barang who really maybe should just go home. And sometimes I understand that I only feel that way to myself, and then sometimes I want to scream, "STOP STARING AT ME, I'M JUST A BLOODY HUMAN BEING LIKE YOU."

That's what you get for living and working in an alien culture, and don't get me wrong, I don't think I'd change it. I know this post is taking on a rant feel, and that's okay -- you never get much updates, but right now you are riding with me through a very real moment of sheer frustration that is part and parcel of what I'm doing.

I'm learning a lot (oh lord am I learning a lot). As I told one of my dancers today, everything is different here. He suggested culture, I said that too but it's everything, everything is different and sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't.

The thing about all of this, all of the fighting I did, I can't say "I'm so tired of it," because I'd do it all over again and I know I'll have to to do what I want in life, and again and again. But I am. And naturally if you asked, so why not just go back to the expat  bubble where it's safer, I wouldn't.

I don't think this post makes much sense, and I'm debating on whether or not to post it (though since you are reading it, clearly I did.) It's the product of a very long Saturday where I was not at my best and at the end of a very long week that saw a lot of diplomacy and the end of a lot of outstanding struggles, when I'm a little too tired and my thoughts are not my friends.

I've decided to wait a couple days until I decide if I believe what I think. We can talk then.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and avoid the bad neighborhoods in my mind.

ADDENDUM: 
Although my instinct was to go out and escape from my head, I thankfully decided against it, took a hot shower, and went to bed.

Unsurprisingly, life looks different after sleeping for 12 hours.

Hi hey hello, yes, yes I'm here

Dear Reader:

I have not forgotten about you.

I have just been really really busy, and some really important things have happened, like the first two weekends at CTN (and all of the grand messes that came with) and the showcase with my students at Cambodian Living Arts, which I've only been working towards for my entire stay here.

Those things have happened and happened in spite of a lot of things, and inside them every second was full and filled and I could have written about it, but didn't dare get language involved in the very delicate matter of walking creations from my head to reality.

Writing would have also required thinking, and thinking about something besides what was in front of my eyes and pasted on the inside of my eyelids.

I'm  not sure if I'll be able to go back and write about it. I'm currently in the middle of a 4-concert, 15-song weekend that is being compounded by the GM watching and serious music issues, and my ability to think about anything besides putting something halfway decent onstage (which was a bit touchy today, and my biggest priority for Wednesday's rehearsal is getting the dancers to dance like human beings and not robots) is quite limited.

In any case. I've decided that instead of spamming the heck out of everyone on Facebook with my misadventures at CTN, I'm moving all of that to Twitter, where I can invent hashtags and whine all I like, and will fit in just fine. My handle is @pixiedustdance. I'll attempt to keep the tweets up, live-tweet a concert or two, and generally report on all the various madness I can possibly spot (I don't have to work too hard currently...).

And whenever I come out of haze of obsession and focus that is keeping me going right now, we'll talk.

Hercules and the impossible tasks

...like finding the audio files for a bunch of songs for which you have the name and artist written in a language and an alphabet you neither read nor write.

The script stared back at me. Two documents, filled with it, both of them my ticket to having something prepared for the first concert at CTN this weekend. It's being called a "soft launch", but let's be honest with each other here: the GM will be watching and if it's a disaster, shit's gonna hit the fan.

It's not going to be a disaster, mostly because I refuse to let it be. I'm young and inexperienced, sure, and I am totally out of my league here, working in a foreign company, language, and medium (TV), but I am very good at what I do, and part of that is understanding what I need to make it happen.

It involves, by the way, a lot of texting and calling and following  up and bothering people and starting conversations with, "I don't know if you are the right person to help me, but-", and persistance.

Like the seven hours I spent on Wednesday wrestling with those documents, covered in script.

Clearly, I decided, I need to learn to read Khmer. I learned the alphabet at some point but never memorized it, and reading is different from recognizing symbols. But for the moment, I thought, I'll just copy and paste this into youtube and see what happens.

This is what happened:

´ecHemIlEfnagehIy

Un-copy-paste-able. Right, so before I learn to read, I'm going to need to learn to type, that doesn't require understanding. Off I went to activate the Khmer keyboard function, check out online keyboards, install software, whatever else I thought I might need. The keyboard function and a picture of the Windows 7 Khmer keyboard layout proved to be the most useful, though I was never quite sure why the "AltGr + shift" command never worked (there are so many Khmer characters that each key gets three or four). 

Then it was the laborious part of going back and forth from the picture to the document, trying to recreate the symbols in the proper order with the proper vowels on the proper consonants, and then pasting THAT into youtube. 

Youtube proved totally unhelpful, but I did find a couple of the songs elsewhere, and was incredibly proud of myself when that happened. The thing is about youtube, is that the khmer songs have been transliterated to the latin alphabet, so in place of ´ecHemIlEfnagehIy you get something like "knhom jes merl ther neang hery," and the only way I'd know that is if I could read the title and could somehow guess how you put in latin letters (I can read it now, by the way, I had my teacher help me). 

The title, by the way, means "I know how to look after her," which I find utterly ridiculous, but what hey, it's not my job to be snarky about the song titles. 

After all was said and done and my dancers couldn't find the songs I was missing either, I contacted the person at CTN and said something like, I can't prepare the dancers without the songs, so HELP. And he did. I got the full files just like that. 

Let's just not talk about the other document, for which I was somehow supposed to figure out which songs we were to prepare and discovered that it wasn't for traditional dance at all (as expected and anticipated by the presence of a Cambodian dance expert in rehearsal) but Khmer twist and cha cha cha. The dancers figured something out, thankfully, as I was caught utterly on the hop, and besides, I just learned Khmer cha cha cha. 

Every day an adventure....

Coined: Khmer Remedies

I slept badly last night.

I couldn't get to sleep, first of all, however tired, my mind was racing (as it does annoyingly often). When I finally went to sleep, my dreams were restless, disturbed, and disturbing. When my alarm went off at 7am, my entire body was protesting mightily, and I sort of stumbled my way into the day.

When I arrived at rehearsal at 8am, things hadn't really improved, and I was sort of there in a haze, until my student suggested I be "coined."

I had seen it before -- neat rows of red, irritated skin from neck to back, over shoulders and along the collarbone. It is a Khmer tradition for those who are sick. They believe it helps them get better, I'm not quite sure how exactly but I think it has something to do with releasing the bad energy. Headaches, dizziness, fever, insomnia, exhaustion, all can be helped with the coining. I can't remember exactly what it's called in Khmer.

It literally is coining -- generally, the edge of a coin is rubbed along the skin until it turns bright red, not quite enough to bleed. I was somewhat dubious as I thought it would hurt, but at last agreed to let him do it. Anything, I thought, would be better than passing the day as a zombie.

Without a coin available, we used the top of my tiger balm pot. He put the tiger balm on first and then rubbed it in with the edge of the lid, neat rows from neck, down the spine, horizontally to the bottom of the shoulder blades, around the shoulder and down the collarbone, and three long lines mid-way down my upper arm.

It didn't hurt that badly, really, if at all, and everything was left tingling. At the start the skin turned red very easily, but by the time he reached my left arm, it was hardly reddening at all, which he told me meant I was getting better.

He also said the color had returned to my cheeks, which had apparently been quite pale when I arrived. He said that at the start I seemed to have no soul behind my eyes.

I'm still quite exhausted and have a bit of a headache, but I do think it helped.

Here is the result (you'll notice he spared the butterfly...):

2012 Year in Review

The sheer amount of life that occurred in 2012 astounds me. It’s impossible for me to believe that everything happened that did, and yet it did. Somehow.

The list is endless, the highlights are: 

• I fundraised, choreographed and rechoreographed, workshopped and coached, and then shepparded and took care of three dancers to perform in a festival in Paris, a stressful, frustrating, and magical time that took me back to my beloved city and back among my friends, and left me with something to be really proud of. 
• I graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University. 
• I co-produced a showcase, fought and coached dancers much more experienced than me in two pieces, and somehow got it onstage in Manhattan. 
• After a semester of planning, applying for a grant and not getting it, communication, I bought a one-way ticket to the other side of the world and left Manhattan in the middle of the night like a refugee, flying 16 hours in the company of the Indonesian navy.

And then there was Cambodia.

And I don’t know what to say about that, except that it was nothing like what I expected and now I’m having trouble remembering what it was I was expecting. I have no ability to intellectualize the country. I wasn’t lost, or changed, or fundamentally altered as in Paris, at least, not to my knowledge, but I must be because this place which was so strange is not so much anymore.

In six months, I found four jobs, two apartments, several friends, got to a very basic level in the language, organized a showcase, danced in a performance, gave four workshops to over forty students, got addicted to rice and learned how to deal with fish heads, got in one bike crash, one moto accident and several more near misses, got sick a couple times, spent two weeks in Siem Reap and saw the temples, learned and taught Thriller, met some amazing artists, and rethought my entire life plan at least twice.

The highlights are:

•  The first time my kids invited me to eat with them after the workshop performance.
• Meeting Linda, who I’m still looking for,
• Dancing in a real performance again, and
• All the many times I looked around and realized I was the only Barang, and yet being totally accepted by the surrounding crowd.

The greatest gift I received this year was a realization sometime in September that had been germinating for quite some time, since I met the Beyond in Paris. I had been obsessing over the latest One That Got Away, and the Ones Who Got Away before that, and feeling down about learning that I was making half as much money as I thought I was.

Resistance is the struggle between what is and what you think should be. Let go of what should be, embrace what is, and create from there.

I found a way to live out the axiom that things are the way they are and that’s that. I don’t believe there is any other or higher meaning than that. It’s just the way it is and everything is always perfect, even if it was different. Every possible reality is as perfect as this one is. 

And the resistance went away. I enter the next year much more peaceful, and much more zen. I know what I have, what I don’t, and that’s where I begin.

In the next year, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of this crazy adventure called Cambodia. I’m looking forward to:

• Taking some time to rest and relax and process, having not done so in a year,
• My trip home and to Paris in March and April to reset and touch base with the places and people I love the most,
• Setting a show of my own in motion here and moving towards my dreams,
• Improving my Khmer and deepening my understanding of Khmer culture and life,
• Being open to the richness and vibrancy of the arts and of life here with all of its caveats,
• Keeping in close contact with the people I love the most and hopefully seeing some for visits here, and
• Traveling around the region, saving a little money, and getting some things on my wishlist.

The past two years I've ended these year in reviews with little sayings, goals I guess, what I want people to say about me, but this year I have nothing, in line with my realization. What is, is, what I am, I am, where I am, I am. Sometime along the way, that became enough.

Merry Christmas from the Pixie Dust Chronicle!

I'm a day late, I know. Although I did have my computer with me the past four days spent in Kampot in a beautiful guesthouse right on the river, I used it to skype my family and check Facebook. I quite ambitiously brought a book, my notebook and journal, and some markers with me, thinking reflection would come in the form of words, but as it turns out there was no reflection and more of just staring at the world going by.

I'll publish a 2012 year in review in a bit here, but I will say that it has been one year of complete insanity, and I haven't stopped moving since Christmas last year. This vacation -- somewhat ill-timed as there still remains a shit ton to do and projects in full swing and projects just getting started -- was so, so necessary. I needed the four days of not thinking, which was startlingly successful consider my usual issues with remaining thought-free.

It was a great vacation. We rented motos and puttered into town about once a day, exploring the villages and the salt flats in the area or just poking about Kampot, which is a very sleepy, small town, where the most activity happens on the trampolines randomly set up in the middle of town and everything is 'close to the durian," a large and random sculpture of a durian in the middle of a roundabout.

The rest of the time was spent at the hotel, eating or sitting by the pool, or talking, or swimming in the river. We swam across the river one day, which was lovely. And eating. There was Christmas to be had, and a huge barbecue that included an entire pig, a tree to be trimmed, Christmas cookies being baked by a couple other guests (who were actually some friends of mine -- small world here!!), skype calls to make, greetings to be had.

The motos, by the way, were fully automatic, which means you sort of perch on top of them. Both hands have brakes and the right hand has the accelerator, which I found confusing. They are also much heavier than you think, and especially compared to a bike they are much less agile, however much they look like toys in the hands of the teenage drivers. Figuring out the balance was a challenge, especially on the very bumpy dirt roads from town to the hotel.

So naturally I had to bail a couple times as I was learning how the thing worked, one time when I was trying to turn for the first time (oops), once when I was trying to pass a bike on the tiny backroads in the little surrounding villages and discovered I was heading directly for a very unflexible looking piece of palm tree, and stopped too quickly, and once when I apparently revved at precisely the wrong moment on a piece of mud and dropped the moto on my foot -- and sliced it open from sole to heel on the inside of my ankle.

So there was a trip to the hospital in there and a lot of blood, but six stitches and some bandages later I was patched up nicely and busy thinking how I might get in the pool while leaving one foot out of the water. It is still quite sore and quite annoying, and I still get the willies looking at it (fortunately I don't have to, it's covered most of the time). I suppose I could take it as a sign to never get on a moto again, but I don't think I will. I've never done it before, I don't know how to deal with mud and dirt, and I'll probably learn.

Also, better to get the crashes out of the way first, right?

Foot cut open or not, it was a lovely, lovely Christmas and vacation. Kampot is much, much windier than Phnom Penh and therefore much cooler (I wished I had brought a cover up for the evenings!). Amazing how different weather can be just a two hour drive away. There were even hills there, adding some texture to the incredibly flat landscape around here. The dirt was this lovely burnt orange, there was real grass and actual birds, and getting back into Phnom Penh today was a shock of people and traffic.

The only thing wrong was not having my family around and I missed them terribly, especially with my sister having some serious health issues and the family kind of tense, worried, and waiting. Still, through the miracle of skype we were able to spend my Christmas morning and their Christmas eve together. It wasn't perfect, but it was still beautiful.

It was my first Christmas in the blazing sunshine, certainly.

I've sent most of my Christmas greetings already from email and Facebook, but just wanted to post it here. Here I am, in Cambodia, celebrating Christmas in 90 degree weather.

Craziness.