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parasitegirlAnd so ends a three day weekend. I've spent much of the weekend dodging a
head cold. I still sniffle but I seem to be past the point of escalation and
on to recovery. Staying at Wataguy's on Friday and Saturday has helped,
because his heat is always pumped up and he has those heated floors that my
ice digits long for.
Heated floors remind me of my childhood. A friend of my father's, (a bass
player for the bluegrass band, or maybe a fiddle player, I forget) had a
Frank Lloyd Wright house that he'd fixed up. Frankie-boy loved heating his
floors. The same heating elements were firmly in place at the Frank Lloyd
Wright Unitarian Universalist church in Madison where I was in the youth
group.
It has also been a weekend of stretching and pulling to the point of
exhaustion
I'm still going to an acupuncturist. My ankle seems to be healing. It is
quicker to recover from exercises and rarely throbs unprovoked. I am back
to two hot yoga sessions a week, but not the full three I was at, and I am
still taking it easy with dance. My wrist has some leftover nerve issues, I
can't rest my weight on it or push with it.
I tend to lump acupuncture day in with dance lesson day to save myself an
extra trip into Tokyo, but this isn't the best strategy. I find the
treatment to be relaxing and fall deep asleep within minutes of the needles,
but afterwards I am spent. I really shouldn't even be trying to go to dance
lessons afterwards, but my schedule usually means that I have 1-1 1/2 hours
between the two. This weekend I walked to lessons (from Shibuya to Gaienmai)
, alerted Mishaal that I would be in the back room while she taught basics,
and proceeded to fall asleep on the cold basement floor of the changing
room.
I'm not sure how I got through class, but knew that I could be half there
because Mishaal was focused on the students who weren't understanding the
9/8 we'd be using for our end of the year show. Mishaal knows what's going
on and she's just happy to have me there in some form, so many students are
skipping classes right before the end of the year show it's a bit insane. I
schlepped back to Omotesando to pick up some L.Rose items we'd ordered at
Mishaal's apartment, and then caught a train down to NIshi-oi to Wataguy's.
Wataguy had given me plenty of warning that I would be subjected to an
Arsenal game on Saturday night, I in turn told him that I would be
zombie-like. I got there, tried on my new jazz-pants and sprawled out on the
couch in a state near drooling as he ate a large bowl of rice and meat. We
watched The Departure before he realized that the game would be on at 12,
not 11pm, and I wasn't going to make it.
I told him that the sounds of the game in the next room weren't going to
keep me up, that he should enjoy his game, and I crawled into bed still
wearing my jazz pants and my twist top.
Intimacy brings with it intimate noises, private sounds that average
acquaintances are spared due to social norm. With Wataguy the intimate
noises include his soccer mode.
The first few screams of "Auuuuuuuuughhhhh gaaaaaaah" (crash) "aaaaaaaaugh!"
woke me. I sat bolt upright, thinking the apartment was under attack, before
my brain prossesed these noises as soccer related.
"aaaaaaaaugh" (thunk) "Fuck!"
Eventually I learned to tune these out.
We were both pretty knackered the next morning as we sat and mumbled through
our coffee and figured our schedule for the day. He would work and then miss
out on a family meal of shabu-shabu (with meat his father won in a golf
tournament) to come home and I would run errands and go to a workshop before
returning.
But things were not to be. On Sunday Wataguy's grandfather lost
consciousness and later passed away. It was not an unexpected death, he was
in his 90's and the family had been gathering around him more frequently in
expectation of his death, but it was a death none the less. It was time for
Wataguy to be with family.
In case the cut tag didn't work, parents and relatives please stop here and
allow me my privacy.
I wouldn't have been much good to him after the workshop anyway, it was a
relief to return to my own apartment.
The workshop I'd signed up for was "Moving beyond expectations into
limitless flexibility" and the description was thus:
"In this workshop, you will receive information that is rarely taught
because of it's intensity ,efficacy, and potential danger. You will learn
Chinese acrobatic contortion stretching techniques combined with practical
mysticism to realize your stretching potential. This workshop focuses on
BACK BENDS and ALIGNMENT for extreme flexibility with proper use of muscles
to avoid injury. Dancers can use these techniques to increase their over all
flexibility.
You will also learn what else it takes for transformation, that will enable
you to work effortlessly for boundless realization and remembrance of your
desires through love, service, surrender, joy, and deep listening to your
soul and divine self.
NADA
- A well known artist from the San Francisco underground, this
multi-talented performer, has trained with Master of Chinese Acrobats, Mr Lu
Yi of Bejing, specializing in hand balancing, and contortion. She has
performed internationaly with several circuses, and was hired by the Cirque
Du Soliel. She has performed in collaboration with Alex Gray and Kenji
Willams, and can be seen in the`World Spirit`dvd. She also performed for The
Greatful Dead, to highlight just a few of her many interesting projects. She
is also a Chi Nei Tsang, taoist belly massage, practitioner. Nada, a world
traveler, and dedicated student and practitioner of many forms of mysticism,
and shamanism, invites you to her ecstatic garden of awe, so that we may all
remember our authentic divinity and love within. Right here, right now."
I'd seen Nada perform a combination of dance and contortion at the Sharron
Kiharra show, she was pretty amazing. And I can't really resist classes that
involve stretching and seeing how far you can bend and pull your body.
There was a spiritual aspect to the class, but it seemed genuine and not
overly "wooo wooo" so it didn't rankle me. I understand that stretching your
muscles and body beyond where you imagine it can go involves being able to
understand why your mind is constricting your muscles at certain points.
Beyond that, Nada just seems like one of those rare souls who really has
chosen a spiritual path (including traveling through the Amazon with a
french shaman) after years of fighting it because it is what she's best at.
She got into contortion at the age of 23 in an attempt to deal with her
scoliosis, so she's not someone who has done this since childhood or who was
"naturally" flexible. She's also got some fascinating stories involving
living illegally in America, being narced out to the FBI by a famous Bay
Area dancer who was also illegal, being accused of being a terrorist who ran
a forged document ring...and more...which then took her to the Amazon and
later to Japan and Mishaal.
But back to the body:
She teaches that to do a back bend without hurting your back involves first
opening up your hips and pelvis, that with a constricted hips and pelvis the
bend has nowhere to go but your lower and upper back, and that's where you
end up crunching things. The idea is to bring the stretch through the hips
and up the body. We're to think of it as a full-front stretch, not a back
bend.
Opening the pelvis, front, arms and shoulder involved many stretches,
including splits (forward and back and side-to-side). We also worked on
hand-stands and arching from the floor. Unfortunately my wrist simply
couldn't do any of that without the sharp pinching pain that signals NO and
I eventually fessed up.
The pelvic stretches were intense. I am out of practice in doing splits but
I can still drop down into the one leg in front one in back variety. It
impresses my students to no end. However, I have never had the range of
flexibility to do splits out to the side. I have a hard time getting my legs
wide. It has never made sense and I've always simply though "well, I guess
my body just doesn't do that."
Now, I've been aware of this for some time but last night something clicked.
There really isn't any physical reason for me not to be able to do this. I
can do the splits, drop my head to my knees when I bend forward, and am
generally very flexible...the only thing left to admit is that this
tightness, which manifests itself physically, is mental in nature.
This made sense to me. It should make sense to you.
If we check out the statistics for young women and pelvises we have to
realize that there is an alarmingly high number of us have suffered physical
sexual trauma. I hope you're not in those numbers, but I am. My past
includes an unreported date rape my freshman year of art school, the details
of which I would rather not go into now, I have written and drawn about them
elsewhere. This isn't about that night, it is about now. That's also why I
have this behind a parental honor cut. I'd rather not put them through the
pain of knowing my past pain, but yet I'm ok with sharing this with the
general public. Much of the impact of that night has been grappled with and
written and thought on over the last 13 years and it doesn't seem fair that
I should find any of it in my muscles nowadays.
I had to ease out of some of the stretches because I was near tears.
I want to regain my pelvic flexibility. This tightness might not be due to
rape, but something tells me that this is the physical evidence of a crime.
It doesn't matter if it is past trauma or if that's just a convenient
explanation for what I cannot explain. I want that flexibility and am set on
being aware of where I think my limitations are and trying to get past them.
After that it was all I could to do send Wataguy some messages and get on
the train home. At points on the train I felt like crying, but those moments
were replaced with intense exhaustion.
I fell asleep around 9:30, missing his call to me.
Now my crotch feel like some sort of improvised explosive device has gone
off. It doesn't hurt, but all my muscles feel open, loose, and somewhat
ignorant of any commands from brain central. If I don't go to Wataguy's
tonight I'll be at hot yoga, pushing, stretching.
Wish me luck.
head cold. I still sniffle but I seem to be past the point of escalation and
on to recovery. Staying at Wataguy's on Friday and Saturday has helped,
because his heat is always pumped up and he has those heated floors that my
ice digits long for.
Heated floors remind me of my childhood. A friend of my father's, (a bass
player for the bluegrass band, or maybe a fiddle player, I forget) had a
Frank Lloyd Wright house that he'd fixed up. Frankie-boy loved heating his
floors. The same heating elements were firmly in place at the Frank Lloyd
Wright Unitarian Universalist church in Madison where I was in the youth
group.
It has also been a weekend of stretching and pulling to the point of
exhaustion
I'm still going to an acupuncturist. My ankle seems to be healing. It is
quicker to recover from exercises and rarely throbs unprovoked. I am back
to two hot yoga sessions a week, but not the full three I was at, and I am
still taking it easy with dance. My wrist has some leftover nerve issues, I
can't rest my weight on it or push with it.
I tend to lump acupuncture day in with dance lesson day to save myself an
extra trip into Tokyo, but this isn't the best strategy. I find the
treatment to be relaxing and fall deep asleep within minutes of the needles,
but afterwards I am spent. I really shouldn't even be trying to go to dance
lessons afterwards, but my schedule usually means that I have 1-1 1/2 hours
between the two. This weekend I walked to lessons (from Shibuya to Gaienmai)
, alerted Mishaal that I would be in the back room while she taught basics,
and proceeded to fall asleep on the cold basement floor of the changing
room.
I'm not sure how I got through class, but knew that I could be half there
because Mishaal was focused on the students who weren't understanding the
9/8 we'd be using for our end of the year show. Mishaal knows what's going
on and she's just happy to have me there in some form, so many students are
skipping classes right before the end of the year show it's a bit insane. I
schlepped back to Omotesando to pick up some L.Rose items we'd ordered at
Mishaal's apartment, and then caught a train down to NIshi-oi to Wataguy's.
Wataguy had given me plenty of warning that I would be subjected to an
Arsenal game on Saturday night, I in turn told him that I would be
zombie-like. I got there, tried on my new jazz-pants and sprawled out on the
couch in a state near drooling as he ate a large bowl of rice and meat. We
watched The Departure before he realized that the game would be on at 12,
not 11pm, and I wasn't going to make it.
I told him that the sounds of the game in the next room weren't going to
keep me up, that he should enjoy his game, and I crawled into bed still
wearing my jazz pants and my twist top.
Intimacy brings with it intimate noises, private sounds that average
acquaintances are spared due to social norm. With Wataguy the intimate
noises include his soccer mode.
The first few screams of "Auuuuuuuuughhhhh gaaaaaaah" (crash) "aaaaaaaaugh!"
woke me. I sat bolt upright, thinking the apartment was under attack, before
my brain prossesed these noises as soccer related.
"aaaaaaaaugh" (thunk) "Fuck!"
Eventually I learned to tune these out.
We were both pretty knackered the next morning as we sat and mumbled through
our coffee and figured our schedule for the day. He would work and then miss
out on a family meal of shabu-shabu (with meat his father won in a golf
tournament) to come home and I would run errands and go to a workshop before
returning.
But things were not to be. On Sunday Wataguy's grandfather lost
consciousness and later passed away. It was not an unexpected death, he was
in his 90's and the family had been gathering around him more frequently in
expectation of his death, but it was a death none the less. It was time for
Wataguy to be with family.
In case the cut tag didn't work, parents and relatives please stop here and
allow me my privacy.
I wouldn't have been much good to him after the workshop anyway, it was a
relief to return to my own apartment.
The workshop I'd signed up for was "Moving beyond expectations into
limitless flexibility" and the description was thus:
"In this workshop, you will receive information that is rarely taught
because of it's intensity ,efficacy, and potential danger. You will learn
Chinese acrobatic contortion stretching techniques combined with practical
mysticism to realize your stretching potential. This workshop focuses on
BACK BENDS and ALIGNMENT for extreme flexibility with proper use of muscles
to avoid injury. Dancers can use these techniques to increase their over all
flexibility.
You will also learn what else it takes for transformation, that will enable
you to work effortlessly for boundless realization and remembrance of your
desires through love, service, surrender, joy, and deep listening to your
soul and divine self.
NADA
- A well known artist from the San Francisco underground, this
multi-talented performer, has trained with Master of Chinese Acrobats, Mr Lu
Yi of Bejing, specializing in hand balancing, and contortion. She has
performed internationaly with several circuses, and was hired by the Cirque
Du Soliel. She has performed in collaboration with Alex Gray and Kenji
Willams, and can be seen in the`World Spirit`dvd. She also performed for The
Greatful Dead, to highlight just a few of her many interesting projects. She
is also a Chi Nei Tsang, taoist belly massage, practitioner. Nada, a world
traveler, and dedicated student and practitioner of many forms of mysticism,
and shamanism, invites you to her ecstatic garden of awe, so that we may all
remember our authentic divinity and love within. Right here, right now."
I'd seen Nada perform a combination of dance and contortion at the Sharron
Kiharra show, she was pretty amazing. And I can't really resist classes that
involve stretching and seeing how far you can bend and pull your body.
There was a spiritual aspect to the class, but it seemed genuine and not
overly "wooo wooo" so it didn't rankle me. I understand that stretching your
muscles and body beyond where you imagine it can go involves being able to
understand why your mind is constricting your muscles at certain points.
Beyond that, Nada just seems like one of those rare souls who really has
chosen a spiritual path (including traveling through the Amazon with a
french shaman) after years of fighting it because it is what she's best at.
She got into contortion at the age of 23 in an attempt to deal with her
scoliosis, so she's not someone who has done this since childhood or who was
"naturally" flexible. She's also got some fascinating stories involving
living illegally in America, being narced out to the FBI by a famous Bay
Area dancer who was also illegal, being accused of being a terrorist who ran
a forged document ring...and more...which then took her to the Amazon and
later to Japan and Mishaal.
But back to the body:
She teaches that to do a back bend without hurting your back involves first
opening up your hips and pelvis, that with a constricted hips and pelvis the
bend has nowhere to go but your lower and upper back, and that's where you
end up crunching things. The idea is to bring the stretch through the hips
and up the body. We're to think of it as a full-front stretch, not a back
bend.
Opening the pelvis, front, arms and shoulder involved many stretches,
including splits (forward and back and side-to-side). We also worked on
hand-stands and arching from the floor. Unfortunately my wrist simply
couldn't do any of that without the sharp pinching pain that signals NO and
I eventually fessed up.
The pelvic stretches were intense. I am out of practice in doing splits but
I can still drop down into the one leg in front one in back variety. It
impresses my students to no end. However, I have never had the range of
flexibility to do splits out to the side. I have a hard time getting my legs
wide. It has never made sense and I've always simply though "well, I guess
my body just doesn't do that."
Now, I've been aware of this for some time but last night something clicked.
There really isn't any physical reason for me not to be able to do this. I
can do the splits, drop my head to my knees when I bend forward, and am
generally very flexible...the only thing left to admit is that this
tightness, which manifests itself physically, is mental in nature.
This made sense to me. It should make sense to you.
If we check out the statistics for young women and pelvises we have to
realize that there is an alarmingly high number of us have suffered physical
sexual trauma. I hope you're not in those numbers, but I am. My past
includes an unreported date rape my freshman year of art school, the details
of which I would rather not go into now, I have written and drawn about them
elsewhere. This isn't about that night, it is about now. That's also why I
have this behind a parental honor cut. I'd rather not put them through the
pain of knowing my past pain, but yet I'm ok with sharing this with the
general public. Much of the impact of that night has been grappled with and
written and thought on over the last 13 years and it doesn't seem fair that
I should find any of it in my muscles nowadays.
I had to ease out of some of the stretches because I was near tears.
I want to regain my pelvic flexibility. This tightness might not be due to
rape, but something tells me that this is the physical evidence of a crime.
It doesn't matter if it is past trauma or if that's just a convenient
explanation for what I cannot explain. I want that flexibility and am set on
being aware of where I think my limitations are and trying to get past them.
After that it was all I could to do send Wataguy some messages and get on
the train home. At points on the train I felt like crying, but those moments
were replaced with intense exhaustion.
I fell asleep around 9:30, missing his call to me.
Now my crotch feel like some sort of improvised explosive device has gone
off. It doesn't hurt, but all my muscles feel open, loose, and somewhat
ignorant of any commands from brain central. If I don't go to Wataguy's
tonight I'll be at hot yoga, pushing, stretching.
Wish me luck.
