Trust

Hype, the dance company I'm in, is learning this dance that's been around for a couple of years now called Thank You. A duet, it's one of the most choreographically interesting pieces we have in our repetoir, with a lot of weight sharing and interesting shapes. For a long time now, there have only been three of us who knew the dance at all, and each of us knows only one of the two parts, so we finally got around to teaching the rest of the company the piece. Those of us who knew the dance were dispersed throughout the masses, working with different partners. Kyla and I have been dancing this piece together for a couple of years now, but I found myself working with Lindsey, an extraordinarily shy girl, though she's getting better about it now, and I was amazed by the difference it made. I felt her introversion in a very physical way when I found myself not holding any of her weight. She didn't want to trust me. Maybe she did mentally, but her movement gave her away. I will be the first to admit that trusting another human being with your weight can be difficult at first. There is always the fear that somehow you will slip out of their control and land on the floor. The hard thing is that that fear and the reservations that come with it make it more difficult and therefore more dangerous. As the 'base' which others have to learn to trust, we have to make ourselves trustworthy to them. If something does go wrong and start to slip, our duty is to break their fall any way we can, usually by maneuvering ourselves between them and the floor. We are responsable for their well-being. My problem is that, having been a base for so long, I expect too much of others on the rare occasion that I am lifted or supported by others. I am ready to try new, bold, death-defying feats, but we both usually end up on the floor sporting fresh bruises and sometimes full-blown wounds.

You guessed it; it's "unveil the analogy" time again! Just as we have to learn to trust each other physically in dance, so also in life we must learn to trust one another emotionally. Otherwise you will land on your flat rump and won't be able to sit down for a week. This applies to every kind of interaction, be it friend to friend, parent to child, sister to sister, lover to lover, or God to man. Each of these has different rules as to who bears most of the weight.

All the world's a stage

Nothing is what it seems when you're on stage. From the audience, it might look like you're sitting in a house, or a resteraunt, or a park somewhere, but it's just wood scraps and paint. The audience knows that, but thanks to suspension of disbelief, they don't care and accept anything presented at face value. You can be anything or anyone, regardless of who or what you really are. In some cases, the role you play influences your behavior in real life- like when I had to play Peter in Narnia last year. Towards the end of the process, I started craving video games and wanting to blow things up. It was a little creepy. When it was over, I had to be thinking all the time, "Oh, wait. I can stand like a girl now." Then I'd shift my weight onto one leg and tilt my head slightly to the side. When sitting, I had to remind myself to keep my knees together. I made myself wear makeup. I let myself sing an octave up in church again. It's amazing how differently guys and girls behave, and nobody even notices, but they do notice when people step outside what's expected of their gender. Anyway, it's really strange to have an actual boy as Peter this year. I find myself giving him tips- David, if you just kept your shoulders down and back more, you'd look a lot more like the future High King of Narnia.- and then feeling like I should hit myself over the head with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. He obviously is more qualified for the role than I was. I don't know. It's just weird.

Ponder this. The girls who are the strongest, the most aggressive, and in short the least 'girly' are generally those who don't have the willowy, stick thin body they need to make it as a dancer. Generally, they're more 'well endowed' than most, real bottom of the pyramid types. Since nobody wants to hold them up, they get stronger holding everyone else, metaphorically speaking. The willowy types know they're willowy and act like it. Super girly. They actually fit in a tutu, so they get cast to wear them. Therefore, we will never have a flat-chested girl cast as a boy in Narnia. It's as paradoxical as it is problematic. Just a thought I've been thinking for a while.

Apparantly, Homecoming is tomorrow, which explains why everyone's been dressing up weirdly all week. (I swear, if I ever see another boy in a grass skirt and coconuts, some heads are going to roll.) Today seems to have been something like North Spirit day. If they had called it "Pretend you like North day", maybe I would have given it a second thought. Or even a first thought. Everyone else is going to a lame-o assembly where they'll probably have some stupid relay race and probably pour gravy on people (They did that once). I'm skipping it to do my math homework. I haven't actually started yet. The librarian let me stay in the library, which they don't usually do, probably because it looks like I'm studying furiously, staring at the screen and typing a good 100 wpms. I wonder how fast I actually type. I'll have to pull out ol' type to learn and find out. I should start actually being productive now.

Update: It turns out that this particular assembly did not involve gravy in any way, but did feature milkshakes and a bunch of girls who didn't know how to walk in heels on the Homecoming Court. If you didn't know that walking in heels is a totally separate skill from walking like a human being, you have obviously never tried it, which hopefully includes any and all of my male readers.

Halloween

It's 10:04 on Thursday night, and I'm about halfway done with my AP US History homework. (Aside: It took me about two weeks to figure out that APUSH was an acronym for that. Sad, but, you know, it looks like A PUSH. Total gibberish. End Aside.) I'm behind in every part of my life at the moment, so I need some distraction, so I'm going to ramble.
Halloween is next Tuesday, so why is it that I'm already seeing Christmas turn up everywhere? It's ridiculous that we spend two months advertising for one day. It's not even about anything anymore.
Halloween is a bizarre holiday. It's sole purpose is to glorify everything that oughtn't be glorified. I do use it as an excuse to wear something that I always wanted to wear to school to school. This year, I'm planning to wear my kimono I got in Japan in 5th grade. Maybe I'll wear Tanner's yukata instead- same look, less fragile. Less... silk. Anyway, usually I just wear some old ballet costume. My best one yet was last year, when I made a tutu out of old newspapers. Too bad it melted in the rain. And that I couldn't sit down. And that I crinkled when I walked. But it looked awesome. (Word of advise: don't ever wear old pointe shoes all day. You will regret it for months.) It seems that I'm feeling parenthetical today. Ok, back on subject. Even though I dress up, I don't think that Halloween should be as big a holiday as it is. We dress kids up as personifications of evil and send them out to demand 'treats', threatening to 'trick' them unless they are placated with solidified sugar that rots their teeth out of their head. It's like roasting marshmallows. We give kids pointy sticks, put highly flamible objects on the end and tell them to stick them in an open fire. Why don't we just give them knives and guns to play with? It'd be more efficient. On what level is Halloween at all edifying to anyone? There's enough violence, hatred, anarchy, and literal glorification of evil in my school already. I know that the capital-C Church officially disapproves of Halloween, replacing it with thousands of "Harvest Festivals". What the carp does that have to do with anything we ought to be supporting as earthly ambasadors of an eternal savior? It's just a euphemism, another version of the same thing, except for ghosts and witches the decorations are pumpkins (uncarved), squash, and various autumnal fauna. It doesn't accomplish anything but cloistering mini-church goers into thinking that everything not put on by their youth group is the devil. When they grow up a little and start seeing things not church- sponsored or even approved that are way cooler, more meritous, and more interesting than the auditorium/sanctuary with orange construction-paper leaves taped to the wall and a potluck set up on folding tables, they will start to question everything about not only the church, but what it taught them too.

Weekend

I'm back from the longest break in the history of this blog. What a crazy weekend it was! Friday- rehearsals for Hype and then Narnia, as per usual. Saturday- left for Portland around 3, lazed around the house until then, then went to my first school dance with my cousin, which is just sad on so many levels. I had an awesome time, but I kind of feel like my dance quota for the rest of school is full. It was kind of funny that so many of Spencer's friends knew of me from this blog. It was really fun, but strange, to never have met these people before, but have a reputation among them already. Anyway, then I spent the night at the cousin's house and got up at five to go to the airport. A couple of hours later, I was chillin' on an airplane. Everyone complains about flying, but I really like it. I never check bags, since I've heard too many stories of people who spent weeks without clean underpants because their luggage got sent to Bora Bora while they were in Chicago. But I digress, which I do a lot. When I arrived in Spokane, I met up with yet another set of cousins- the Goins kids. We hung out for a couple of hours, during which I introduced them to Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, an excellent adventure game c. 1989. Then they dropped me off at Whitworth College, which I fell in love with almost instantly. The only thing about it that is slightly less than ideal is the lack of a strong dance department. I could still minor in it, though, and nothing says that all my dance training has to take place on campus, either. We toured the campus and were lectured on how great the school is, then that night, in the dorms, I played soccer foursquare (no hands!) and twister with some guys, and then talked to this really cool guy, Sam for like three hours. He will probably read this, so I won't embarrass him by telling all y'alls how awesome he is. Besides, everyone I tell is like, "Oh my gosh! Aubrianne's finally got a boyfriend!" which isn't even true and makes me blush and get all flustered, so I won't go into that.
The next day, I went and visited some classes. The intermediate Japanese class was way too easy, but I had a lot of fun anyways. After lunch, I got on a shuttle to the airplane, then on an airplane with a couple of girls I met, then off the airplane just in time to be picked up by my cousin Cameron, who took me back to their house, where I hung out with Spencer and his friend Michelle, who I met at the dance. Then I went home and wrote an English paper that was due in school the next day. When it came time to turn it in, I found that instead of 300 words, the limit was 500 words. Now I have to put back in all the stuff I cut out. Arrgh. Apparently, Monday, there was a lockdown for a couple of hours because some kid brought a gun to school. Glad I missed that. I hate my school.
So this post was probably the least abstract and philosophical yet. And extremely long. I'll write more tomorrow, probably.