Jan. 13th, 2008
First story.
When I was 21-or-22, my boyfriend-at-the-time, his wife, her boyfriend, and I went to a concert in the woods – World Concert, or something like that. It had all manner of flavours of bands – Irish folk music, bluegrass, something with African drums, something with almost more instruments than band members, and so forth. (I can't recall them all. Though I can recall that it was in/near a forest, as I got splinters in my feet.)
One band was the Nigerian Brothers, and they did amazing things with drums and vocals. I was there in a black top and some blue wrap as a skirt-like thing. I wanted to dance, but I saw people towards the front of the crowd doing Real Dance Maneuvers, and I wasn't that good, so I didn't. But then I noticed that a lot of people were just doing the two-step dance – not really a dance, more like "I'm moving back and forth, hurrah".
I want to note that I don't mock them for this. Hell, I was doing that. But I thought, "I'm not as good as the group up front, but I can maybe move better than these folk around me." So, I closed my eyes and stomped along. It was fantastic. Later, I got a couple of people asking me where I learned to dance like that, in admiring tones. "From the people at the front."
Second story.
I was at this club in Boston, years ago. It's located on Lansdowne street, and it has a downstairs that's open and an upstairs that's more like a bar with a dance space, and that's all I remember about it. The downstairs was playing house music, and the upstairs was playing rock music, mostly from the 80s. I was, as you can imagine, upstairs. And no one was dancing. No one.
Then, the DJ played "Dancing With Myself" by Billy Idol. "Well there's nothing to lose / And there's nothing to prove / I'll be dancing with myself"
So, I went up on the dance floor, by myself, and I danced. By myself. Oh man. By the end of the song, a couple of other people had come up to dance – I assume they were emboldened by my willingness to, you know, dance with myself.
And now, the point.
I keep saying I want to write more here, but I keep not doing it. Instead, I fill this blog with links to other people's words. And part of it is because these words and links are amazing, but part of that is anxiety – what if I write something that annoys someone? What if I write something and I'm wrong, or I get something wrong? Aiee!
Well, if I annoy someone, then they have every opportunity to not read what I write. And if I'm wrong about something, or if I'm ignorant about something, then that's an opportunity to learn. It's possible that I will anger someone that I respect, but all I can do is be willing to learn if I'm wrong or ignorant, and be determined to be myself, whoever that is, regardless.
So.
Hello, world.
Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts. Comment here or there.
And now, irony.
Jan. 13th, 2008 02:41 amKate Harding writes on the fantasy of being thin. It is amazing. Truly amazing. Go you read it.
Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts. Comment here or there.
Miscellany.
Jan. 13th, 2008 05:47 pm- I plan to use 'Unfiled' for things where I don't know what the tag should be. I also plan to test the 'search blog' function; if it works well enough, maybe I won't have to worry so much about tagging everything Just Rightly.
- If you go to blogs that have Haloscan comments, where the comments still open as JS pop-ups, try installing this Haloscan comments rewriter. For mine, I just change the setting so that comments open as a window, not as a pop-up, so hooray.
- My new CSS project of the day is finding the equivalent of making a table that has cells for the rounded parts of an image. See also the title-image of this blog. I want this thing wider, which means doing away with static background images and their widths.
- Shapely Prose is seriously my newest blog crush. Yes, the entire blog.
- It occurs to me that I should perhaps be eating something at all today. Hm.
Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts. Comment here or there.