New Years Resolutions

2007 

LITERAL:

Be conscious of writing, speaking and packing

Money should not get in the way of experiences

Rather than buying a bunch of cheap things you want, save for and make those expensive purchases

MANTRAS:

Retain consciousness of the world around you

Embrace spontaneity with intention; experience life

As it happens inside and outside your control, work with change to make it positive

CHOICES:

The choices you make are defining, but not limiting
Choices are just pockets out of a world where similar things are happening everywhere

Let not assumptions interfere with your outlook

Convention does not have to get in the way of acting, reacting and feeling the way you truly want

2008 

LITERAL:

Give each action the amount of time and resource it deserves

Respect the need for unscheduled time each week; maintain a weekly day off

Allow general interests, personal goals and to-do's to operate with as much importance as work

CHOICES:

The choices you make are defining, not limiting

Choices are just pockets out of a world where similar things are happening everywhere

Resist the temptation to see life in chunks

Everything is a fluid stream of happenings that need not be separated for judged ahead of time

Life as a whole can be informed by art, which in turn becomes a part of your whole life

Let not assumptions interfere with your outlook

Embrace spontaneity with intention

CHANGE:

As it happens in and outside your control, work with change to make it positive

Retain consciousness of the world around you

2009 

LITERAL:

Allow personal interests to operate with as much importance as other commitments

Be willing to dedicate time and resource toward living the way you wish

CHOICES:

The choices you make are not limited, but defining

Choices are just pockets out a world where similar happenings are occurring everywhere

See life as a fluid stream of happenings that may not be judged or separated ahead of time

Life as a whole can be informed by art, which in turn becomes a part of your whole life

Let not assumptions interfere with your outlook

Trust your instincts

Show your gratitude

CHANGE:

Retain consciousness of the world around you

Relationships do not have to be life-long to be life-changing

2010 

CONCRETE

Dedicate time and resource toward living the way you wish

Spend more time actually enjoying your senses

Establish a morning routine

Personal style = doing what feels good

ABSTRACT

Allow personal and professional interests to blossom and inform one another

See life as a fluid stream of happenings that you are both informed by and inform

Trust your instincts

Be actively present in the world around you

Embrace change in yourself and others as simply another way in which the world unfolds

Seek out a sense of groundedness that serves as both a base for adventure and a point of balanced return

Allow space for moment to become what they will, free of limitation

2011 

Strive/ ENJOY/ Reflect

Flexibility/ Planning

Groundedness/ Change

Live the way you desire

2012 

The course of this year saw the repetition of many ideas and words. They seemed to come out into two major categories: Trust in my choices - Stability, Focus, Belief/ Trust in who I am - Value, Fullness, Contentment. Therein...

Trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

2013

Every moment spent not content is a moment wasted, so

seek depth in your passion, practice your ability to be present, and then

. . . 

be content

CONCRETE

Drink more water

Spend time listening to music with care 

Allow side projects and hobbies to be important

ABSTRACT

Pay attention to process

Understand that you are exactly where you are meant to be

Practice you ability to be present

Seek depth in your passion

Things always work out if you let them

Hold yourself to ambitious yet reasonable expectations

Understanding is a constantly shifting creature

Every moment spend not content is a moment wasted - be content

2014

Still working on this . . .:)

Downs and Ups: Half That We Allow Seen

Downs and ups, and a continuous spiral of combinations thereof. It's difficult to predict how they will lay, but they WILL lay.

Today began down. My morning work overwhelmed me, which naturally, I allowed to spiral into a much larger life problem (good job, me). I called my mom, feeling somewhat distraught about my ability to figure out the best balance for my work and my life. The talk definitely leveled my head and cheered me up, but my anxiety felt like what was going to set the tone for the day.

Fortunately, life intervened on my bad attitude in the form of teaching swing dance at a retirement home. It was a fifty minute class this afternoon that I had accepted last minute last week, and had sort of  forgotten about. Turns out it was the thing that kicked my ass back into feeling grateful. I had a truly lovely and inspiring time with fifteen or so residents and 4 care providers that joined me, talking about the history, the feeling, the music and the movement of swing. I was drawn into personalities, stories and energies. I left feeling a refreshed sense of purpose in my ability to see effectiveness in my career. Hell, if I made that much of an impact in just 45 minutes, surely there will be a way for me to strike a work-life balance (after grad school, at least).

Literally right before I walked in to teach the class, I found out that Rhythmically Speaking has received an MRAC Arts Activities Grant of $10,000 for the 2014 show. This very exciting news was easily forgotten during my wonderful experience at the home. It took me about 20 minutes after leaving to remember that I had even received the news!

Back in the down category, I have been feeling somewhat uninspired and incapable of generating great new creative work as of late. As the day came to close, I finished some choreographic work that felt relatively successful, and I decided to reward myself by looking back on some of my recent work about which I felt confident. I also took a first viewing of my duet from this year's Rhythmically Speaking, and I really appreciated what I saw! This viewing practice, in conjunction with my teaching this afternoon, really allowed me to cue in to the good things of recent; choreography I am proud of, being cast on Monday into a piece for Donna Mejia that will travel to American College Dance Festival, procuring AMAZING first and second readers for my MFA project (Donna and Gesel Mason, respectively), the grant . . . I have many things to be grateful for right now, not even including the incredible people who enliven my personal life.

All this said; there is a reason I wrote this into a blog rather than a short brag-post on Facebook; I want to be more careful about how I end up distorting the reality that I present online. A very interesting HuffPost article entitled "Why Gen Y Yuppies Are So Unhappy" has been circulating through my mind for the last several days, due to many things, but one point in specific; us Gen Y'ers tend to distort the reality we present in online social media. Purposeful? Maybe. Unconscious? Maybe. Both? Definitely. I do not write posts for the soul purpose of either making people feel really jealous of me (ie 'YAY! MORE HAPPY NEWS') versus making people feel really sad for me (ie 'BOO. MORE DISAPPOINTING NEWS'), but it feels pretty natural to want to broadcast to the world the highs and the lows of your current life.

Consider you common catch-up conversation. Due to time, we end up offering the recent highs and lows. It's no different on social media. It just doesn't also come with facial expressions and body language, or the more frequent interactions we have with closer friends who get a more accurate sense of what day to day really feels like for you (well, those close friends actually get it on the internet as well). So indeed, it's not much different online; it's just archived and available for constant search.

Back to the point. I have had a shit-ton of awesome things happen to me this week, and somehow, I wanted to tell the people I interact with on the internet about these things. That said, the article referenced about made me decide that maybe this time, I'd put an intermediary step between those announcements and Facebook, just as an experiment in trying to lessen my contribution to this distorted reality.

Friends, if you have gotten all the way to this point in this post; thank you for reading. It's been exciting to share my news and corresponding ideas with you. While I am very interested in limiting my contribution to distorted internet reality, that does not mean I intend to start posting about how many dishes I washed tonight, what I ate for lunch, or what color socks I picked out to wear today. Quite the contrary. I will continue to post about highs and lows. I think I will just begin doing it with a better awareness of its affects, which will likely impact how I deliver such information. Perhaps these happy-braggy posts will show up more here, along with the years of backlog of me trying to sort out my demons as I progress toward a deeper understanding of this life.

###

Oh Beautiful, Water-Logged Boulder

According to relief maps, my roommates and I are situated right in the middle of the higher point of an 'island' of land that is between two major water-ways, Skunk Creek and Boulder Creek. Both are raging like white-water rapids right now! Below I have included some of the images I have come across in my minimal travels from the last few days.

The craziness began on Wednesday night, by which it had been raining for two days already. The CU Campus Alert System must have sent 6 texts/ emails throughout the night, the middle of which informed us that campus would be closed the next day (Thursday). It turns out that campus has remained closed, and will through tomorrow too (Saturday). This has been devastating timing for me, as this week has been my first big hurrah as CU Dance Events Coordinator. I am helping coordinate the week-long residency we have been holding featuring Irish choreographer John Scott and two of his dancers from NYC, and we were to be opening a show featuring a new work by him for the CU dancers, one of his solos, and a duet for his two dancers. But alas; natural disaster. Tonight's opening show is cancelled, tomorrow is too, and Sunday is looking rough. I am SO disappointed. I suppose this has been a good reminder that we humans cannot control everything around us :)

Boulder Creek 9/12/13

Boulder Creek 9/12/13

Video of Boulder Creek 9/12/13

Some sad lookin' equipment 9/12/13

The mass of water gathering at the foot of my bedroom wall :(

Me bein' crazy

The veritable brown-water rapids rushing in a block down from us

The unplugged jam we caught at Blues Greens Blues Bar next to our apt. when the power went out!

Crazy-ass-fools in Scott Carpenter Park, next to Boulder Creek 9/13/13

Boulder Creek in downtown Boulder with ominous clouds whisping the Flatirons 9/13/13

More a dat

More a dat + big-ass downed tree

yep.

Grinding

Bones, coffee, teeth, work ethic, dancing . . .

Perhaps an organ with a little monkey on top?

All of these connotations are currently accurate, and they do tip the scales toward the positive.

Soak

Happiness found me at the Southern during the Rhythmically Speaking 2013 show this weekend. We inspired 400 audience members, 33 performers, 7 choreographers, 4 techs, 5 board members and 1 staff, and I plan to carry the energy generated by the show into my next projects!

Happiness is going to find me again amidst sadness as I leave MN to go back to CO for the start of my second year of grad school, but NOT before I go to the STATE FAIR and the wedding of two of my dear high school friends. I'm going to do everything I can to soak up every moment . . .

Visually Grooved

Wow. I am feeling visually grooved. No doubt about that.

Last nights 'Visual Grooves' event with GST was really awesome. We had been talking about it since November, but really hadn't thought carefully about it until this last month. I sort of felt as though it was going to pull off best if we approached it casually, but since it was a first, a little over-planning wasn't such a bad idea. 

Turns out, as I suspected, that participating dancers were excited simply about the idea of improvising to live music with guaranteed room, and no planning necessary. Most folks didn't even reply to the prompt I had sent about which song to which they'd like to dance. And I kinda liked it.

Improvisation at its heart is casual in nature. The casual, fun, happy-go-lucky atmosphere that we created, cultivated and enjoyed last night was just what I have been dreaming of, and it is my hope that we can continue to make such a thing happen on a more regular basis. As I mentioned to Greg, it seems to me like the perfect kind of event to do quarterly. It'd be awesome to keep it in the same location (at Lee's), but moving venues would not be so bad either. Our audience truly was mostly composed of people who had just walked in off the street to get a drink at Lee's. I'd say maybe a third of the audience was performer friends and family, and the other two thirds were previously described patronage.

That said, they all LOVED it! Other performers (including Scott who I used to work at Muffuletta with) and the bartender all raved about how everyone who just happened to be in the bar at that point get engrossed and really enjoyed themselves. This is just another proof for my idea that people LIKE jazz. They just need to get it in the right setting, in the right way. Jazz can feel stuffy and old, but rockin' it casual with a groove based band and improvising dancers in a classic and beloved bar is the PERFECT way for a lot of people to access jazz. 

I suppose this is among the reasons that it might be awesome to pursue a venue change; we'd get access to a whole new random audience that has not yet seen our tricks, and that would be opened to these possibilities. GST also would not need to work on new tunes. That said, they did eight last night in the first set, and I know they have a lot more up their sleeves, so I suppose we are not yet out of ammo. And, a curious improvising dancer can try her hand at the same tune many times and keep finding new things. In this, staying at Lee's and keeping it consistent could be good, but a venue and audience change could be good too. Either way, in the spirit of keeping it casual!

Planning-musings aside, I left last night having been woken up out of my 'I think I'm tired at 9pm' body and kicked into a celebration of people, sound and movement. I am excited to see where this goes next! Either way, I want it to go, and I want it to go sooner rather than later!

Whelm

"I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?"

What a great movie. Well, bit character from 'Ten Things I Hate About You' whose name I cannot remember; my answer to that question is absolutely. Yes.

It's crunch time for the school year, and it feels both overwhelming and underwhelming. Sometimes I feel like I am never going to get everything done, and other times I feel laid back in a way that I feel like I shouldn't be feeling at this time of the semester. I find myself questioning if it's not enough work. Actually typing that thought out makes me realize how ridiculous it is, and that yes, it is more than enough work. Perhaps I am just feeling as though the work being done isn't always the right kind?

I have been feeling that some of the work we are put to is arbitrary and not very well thought out. That said, I fear that my own students find some of the things I assign arbitrary, when, even if they have not been CAREFULLY thought out, they have been thought out well because I know the items are exercises worth doing. Perhaps that same stream of thought is happening for some of my professors.

I think this again takes me back to the idea of making decisions about what is most important; at the grad level, it feels like it truly IS your prerogative to decide where you will place your energy and thoughtfulness amidst school work and outside work like running a company, submitting to journals and conferences, etc.

Also amid this equation or school work and outside work; personal maintenance and good stuff - relationships,  fun, that whole deal. Yes, that is a part of the equation that we are constantly trying to solve. I am made very curious by people who do not feel that it is worth their time to fumble over and over, trying to solve this equation once and for all. These are the people that either understand that at any time, a new mathematical idea can be found that will crack that delicate balance into a new fumble, or the people that just plain do not overanalyze every part of their lives. I both abhor and envy the folks in that later category.

Another function within this ever unsolvable equation: thinking forward. Yes, good, do it, but not at the expense of enjoying what is happening in the moment. For me right now, that involves trying to absorb and enjoy the end of the semester while not looking TOO much ahead to/ into summer. I know myself well enough to be aware that if I allow that kind of end-gaining, the summer will arrive and disappear while I am anticipating and preparing for fall . . . and the cycle goes on and on.

How do we break this cycle? Personally, I find myself consistently coming back to two ideas;

1) Ask yourself to be in the moment.
2) When you get there, check in; is that thing you love feeling enjoyable? If not, dig down to the reasons why you are doing it in the first place.

When it comes down to it, it's all about being present in the moment, something I know is hard for me and one of the main reasons why I dance. And there it is, the thing. I KNOW this same objective is hard for many other people. And that's the 'reason why I am doing it in the first place.'

Back to square one. Sometimes, arrival at that square is not a setback :)