Won Word Wednesday

What is 'Won' Word?

Today's Won Word:

grateful :)

Comment below if you're joining!

Steal This Meme

I haven't forgotten about my Dancer Series! But it's my last day of vacation, so in the meantime...

This seems to be the most popularly lifted meme these days. I got it entrecard surfing to Angelika.

The full version has about 5,438 questions so I've trimmed it to the first 15. Now you can know ever more about me me me! (H thinks I'm selfish anyway, so why not?)


How many people live in your house? 2

Do you like your siblings? My cute brothers are actually Selena's siblings so I adore them!

What color are your nails? nail-colored

What’s your favorite place on earth? Where I am right this second on the Sky Deck of L.S.'s building overlooking the Hudson River in southern Manhattan

or Bora Bora

Ever punch someone in the face? No...not square in...

Did you have a dream last night? Vividly as usual

Where is your top from? Hollister, of course

Are you mad at someone? sigh. Surprisingly no, but I may just be tired

Where’s your best friend? I think she's at work, in the kitchen of the fancy French place

Last place you bought something from? I have to check Geezeo for this one...wow that was anticlimactic: a one-way Adult ticket on the New Jersey Transit from NY Penn Station

Last person you were in a car with? my dad when he drove me to the train station to go back to NY yesterday

What bank do you use? This meme was clearly started by identity thefters

Do you like being in photos?


















Who’s your last missed call from? H

Ever broken something at someone else’s house? Luckily, no. Although I've been the victim of unfortunate toilet malfunctions - not caused by me

The Best Thing About America

My boyfriend doesn't know it but there's something I really like about him:

He loves America.

It makes sense for him. He doesn't take for granted things like high living standards and potable water.

I, on the other hand, am a recovering cynic raised on the East Coast and schooled at a university where it was popular to call yourself an expat and run away to The Continent during intersession. (Or Reykjavik, if Europe was too far.)

I am your typical New Yorker who harbors a distaste for the flyover states and calls any city smaller than Hong Kong a "country town". And of course, I don't need to go into what growing up with a Chinese face in white America will do to a girl's feelings about her so-called "home".

But tonight as I was compulsively blog surfing I stumbled upon Wife2jason's blog post that reminded me of the one thing that makes me, at last, find the one good about being an American:

Sesame Street.

I am unadulteratedly proud to be from the country that raises its children with this:

Of course, I'm a pre-Elmo generation - why does he get to meet all the celebrities?

Okay one more moment - I died when this Backstreet Boy patted Elmo on the back, who promptly turned and said, "Oh, hi Kevin."

Headache Spree

I have had a headache for 2 days now. I hate when that happens. I've been getting these 2-day headaches on and off since I started my twenties and I have no idea if they're all related to the same issue or not.

Sometimes it's hypoglycemia, sometimes it's eye strain from my incorrect glasses prescription combined with obsessive blog reading, sometimes it's stress or sleeping too late.

This one started Thursday late afternoon from sitting on the Sky Deck of the apartment I'm borrowing from the inimitable L.S. (more on this Week As a Rich Bitch later). It was windier and cooler than I had dressed for and after reading in a funny neck bent position on a deck chair getting chilled and growing hungry I had a headache.

It went away briefly during the Jivamukti yoga class I tried with a friend and came back sharply afterwards. It abated during the pescatarian dinner and returned on the subway ride back downtown.

On and off it went as I came to visit my aunts and cousins in Jersey and today I woke up with my period (which, by the way, behaved this month as I told it not to arrive while I was sleeping in other peoples' beds). My period is always a headache bonanza full of trembling hands and cramps as my uterus attempts to dig its way out of my body with dull spoons.

I may not make the hotel lobby birthday party (these things are for real?!) of some fashionista friend of a friend tonight in midtown, but we'll see. This diva usually rouses herself for a chance to wear her new Betsey Johnson, birthday gift from H.

Off to lay down on the IKEA couch and languish like a pallid Victorian.

Part 1: How I Became a Dancer

This series details my journey into a late career-stage professional dancer. For any dancer who thinks they're too old to go pro - read on!

There is a reason why So You Think You Can Dance is so important to me:

It led me to become a professional dancer.

Kind of a Big Deal

As some of you know, in my past life I was a working actor, playwright and yes, I was the first I-Pod model ever.

Seeing my silhouette on billboards and in store windows across the nation got my rocks off just fine and having my commercial pop up in the middle of Friends or Everwood (yes I watched that show, what?) was always a TiVo moment. (The TiVo bought with money from the same commercial.)

But there was one dream I had yet to fulfill. To be Christina Aguilera's back-up dancer. (I think that was actually my goal.)

When I first got to Hollywood, I threw myself into this dream, taking ballet and hip-hop and yoga and trying out this new fitness craze called pilates. And then I got injured.

It was over.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the world of professional dance knows that if you want to start dancing after the age of 18, it better be on a pole because your shot at ABT is gone.

This was now a dream of the pipe. (Oh my gawd, I just realized what pipedream means! I always pictured a skateboard park. You know, it must be hard to skate up and down those pipes...Shut up. You know I have a parsing issue.)

Anyway, the dream was over.

Then SYTYCD happened.

Not MTV's The Grind

During the best year of my life, FOX debuted a little reality show they called So You Think You Can Dance.

For the first time in my life, I saw all the dances I grew up learning and the many more I never got a chance to. I saw a Paso Doble for the first time, danced by a real live Russian ballroom dancer. I finally recognized the genius that is Wade Robson, who at that time was little more than a bleach-haired white kid from Orange County who purportedly danced like a black guy. I cried after almost every piece, in awe that this kind of dance was finally on network TV.

And something in me stirred.

I wanted to dance again. Bad.

Getting the Call

I went to the gym regularly. When I first moved back to NY, I had consulted with a trainer who knew injuries to rehab my bursitis (as well as a car accident injury I had further accumulated since Hollywood.) I did these exercises and in less than a year I was stronger than I had ever been.

And in that summer I got the call.

My agency phoned me with an audition for an untitled film directed by Julie Taymor (Frida, the Lion King on Broadway) featuring songs by the Beatles sung by other people.

For a dancing role.

"But these are professional dancers!" I said.

"You're a professional dancer," her associate replied.

After two sets of three-hour auditions and an amazing phone call later, I was indeed, a professional dancer.

That movie, as you may have guessed, turned out to be Across the Universe.

Part 2: I Danced With Desmond Richardson

Relationships Are Hard: What To Do About It

Relationships are the hardest thing in the world.

While I am given to hyperbole for literary effect, in this case that universalism arguably holds true.

Organic chemistry is hard. Still there are scientific principles to guide you and molecular equations that balance out.

Selling stocks short is hard. Way too much luck is involved and in the long run, that dart-throwing monkey doesn't beat the S&P 500 after all. (Wait a minute, is 'dart-throwing monkey' a euphemism for options traders...?)

But relationships? It is a mix of luck, guiding principles that don't always work and are rarely followed and most significantly - people.

People means emotions, which follow a psychological stimulus-response pattern. Even when we are enlightened enough (all 52 Faces readers and me, of course) to be aware of the particular brand of neuroses that plague us, about 80% of the time we can't do scheiBe about it.

We continue to react to something our significant other says, hell, to every little thing they say. We continue to play out unfinished childhood business with them, replicating every little childhood wound to such an exacting degree I sometimes wonder if I'm stuck in the Twilight Zone and somehow dating a lethal combination of my father and mother in one slow-moving body.

After all the self-help, therapy, coaching, re-parenting, and Artist's Dates ad nauseum we are left with little more than a stack of books on co-dependency and a 128-pack of crayons for a life vision we meant to draw. And our relationship frustrations are still there.

What the hell are we supposed to do about that?

The Answer: Let It Go

Okay, to address the Inner Gremlin - yes, letting go is hard. You'd rather take Orgo instead.

I know, dude, believe me I know. I hate letting go. When I was young I was proud of the motto, "Maybe forgive - never forget." And since I'm still young, I guess I still abide by that. :D

I gave a card to my best friend some years ago that read:

Some women have terrible memory - they remember everything.

That, to my lifelong pain, is my affliction. I remember every little thing you ever said to me that hurt me and unfortunately, due to my extraordinarily quick synaptic connections and an archival-quality brain, these quotes can be retrieved quicker than you can say Dewey Decimal.

This burdensome "talent" of mine exponentially multiplies my pain when past transgressions are repeated over and over and over until I finally realize, then teeth-grittingly accept, that these lovely little grievances are not isolated incidents but, in fact, are actual personality characteristics of my oh so beloved! Possibly permanent personality characteristics.

The fury and hellfire that rains down after this realization will not be mentioned here in order to keep this blog at a family rating of, oh, NC-17 maybe.

My Oh So Beloved Does This...

Let it out You all find certain things that your dearly beloved does absolutely, horrifyingly IRRITATING.

(Seriously. Let it out. I need to know I'm not alone!)

But what can we do about it? Keep getting agitated? I tried that - it only causes more stress.

So let it go.

How to Let Go

First of all, if I had the surefire trick to letting go each time, maybe I would be Tina Su and simultaneously discover the ultimate SEO secret to getting a bajillion readers as well. But I am S of 52 Faces and here's my take on it:

Do whatever you have to do.

Distracting yourself works well. Playing music, getting my body moving has always helped me.

I usually turn on So You Think You Can Dance but since this season has ended I have lost a valuable anger management tool.

Use denial if you have to, or discover the joy of forgetting, just do whatever it is you need in order to let it go.

That's short-term. Apparently, if you meditate regularly you will be able to float in a perpetual cloud of farty vegan bliss, able to detach at will.

For the rest of us mortals with our feet in the mud, just do what you can. I believe practice makes perfect. Just as the heartbreaking habit of taking things personally and ego-attachment were taught to us by our horrible parents, so we can learn to unroll our fingers from their claw-shapes and stop holding on to that thing our significant other said the other day.

Now I am going to go to sleep thinking about the delish dinner I will have tomorrow with my youngest "brother".

Saturn Returning, The Best Birthday Gift Ever

Something amazing has happened.

An unprecedented amount of people have written me to say Happy Birthday.

It is not the number that makes this amazing (although I am so touched by it), but who wrote me and the quality of these emails.

People whose birthdays are burned in my mind (June 10) but I thought had forgotten mine - remembered.

Old friends wrote hefty gifts of an email packed full of honesty and intimacy. They wrote of struggles in the past year whose wisdom I gained but I'm sure still give them grief.

I don't know if it is Saturn returning for everyone (we are all in the twilight of our twenties when that planet of commitment and maturity makes its round back to where it was when we were born) and my friends new and old are realizing what is important, what is truly important in life.

Whatever the reason, these messages, straight from the Divine, make me feel blessed and loved. In clarifying my values and goals with the 31 Days plan, I recently put into writing, action and the Universe something that has always been important to me: to be someone who is surrounded by friends. To be the kind of person who would be surrounded by friends.

And what good friends.

I realize now that I am memorable. That I am loved. That I am prosperous and I am okay.

The best birthday gift ever is seeing that I have at last become the person I always wanted to be.

Happy Birthday To Me!

I am officially in my late 20's!

The pains, the paunch, yes, it is over the hill.

Postings will be sporadic this week as I have AT LAST returned to my native NY to celebrate.

YAY!

Overheard: Too High Brow For NPR

H: Baby, you really need to write for This American Life.

Me: What if they think I'm not high-brow enough.

H: High-brow?! Why are they high-brow?

Me: It's NPR! It's public radio!
H: Honey! Is public welfare high-brow?

Later...

Me: Man, they're gonna come to my website and say, "This is terrible! All she writes about is Joshua Allen!"

H: What do you think they talk about all the time.

Me: They talk about reality TV?! Hm, maybe I'm too high-brow for them.

America Got It Right: Joshua Allen Can Dance!

Psst! Looking for the Best of Season 4?

3.5 musical bars

= The duration of my scream when Joshua Allen was crowned America's favorite dancer last night on So You Think You Can Dance.

(See number 5 on my Best of Season 4 list.)

Okay, I admit it. I have a crush on Joshua Allen.

It's been developing for the last few weeks now, as he grew increasingly "maa-cho" (as Nigel says), causing me to think that, despite his slightly effeminate accent, he isn't gay after all. (A girl can dream.)

Or maybe it was this moment:



If that doesn't make you need to change your underwear then you probably don't have eyes. In which case, I highly suggest you find someone immediately who can describe to you in florid language how Joshua Allen's bull chest looks bare and the set of his jaw as he flings Katee around like a cape and...


Sorry I had to go change my underwear.

No Really, He Can Dance

Sexiness aside (aren't you glad he got his braces off last week?), Joshua Allen really is the ultimate American Dream manifest.

He comes from a poor background, exchanging chores for dance lessons at the local studio when he was a child. He began the season self-effacing and soft-spoken but soon stepped into his role as hottest dancer I dream about touching strong male lead who, a week before that pase doble, ran his hand over his clothed chest and said, "Wait 'til you see the rest of it" - and then turned charmingly embarrassed into Cat Deeley's shoulder.

He took on every style they threw him and he, along with runner-up Twitch, were the only two men strong enough to dead-lift their partners above their heads for brilliant spins in their respective ballroom numbers.

He and his family deserve the money, the recognition and the role in the upcoming Step Up 3D (Yes, I know. Shut up, you wish you were in it).

And I would let him drag me across the ground any day.

Best of So You Think You Can Dance

Psst! Looking for my post of Joshua Allen?

So You Think You Can Dance Finale Wrap-up:
13 Best Things About Season 4

1. Katee and Joshua premiering Bollywood on the SYTYCD stage!


2. Mark Kanemura (and my favorite) doing Bleeding Love:


3. Mark Kanemura's Bohemian Rhapsody solo:


4. Will and Jessica's Garden of Eden contemporary:


5. Discovering Joshua Allen.

6. Nigel saying "America got it right. You two deserve to be here," about Will not being in the finale. It's true. Will Wingfield will go far show or no show. But Josh and Twitch embody the American dream of the common man (untrained dancer) making it.

7. Katee and Joshua's Wade Robson lyrical:



8. Katee and Joshua's Hip-Hop to No Air

9. Joshua and Twitch's Trepak:

10. Katee and Joshua's first contemporary by Mia Michaels

11. Gev's Top 14 solo

12. Mark Kanemura's face

And Finally...

13. Rayven at 28 years old inspiring this aging dancer to get back into the game

Viva La Rezo!...or You Want to Resin Chinatown?

An old classmate from Harvard sent me an email that started with:

If you have a minute, could you please sign AAFE's online petition to support an independent rezoning analysis of Chinatown?

And I was like, What the hell is ‘Rezuhning? Is that a way of applying a safer asbestos? Like a resin? It must be some labor union jargon I don't know. "Viva La Rezo!"

So I clicked on the petition and after reading the word about 10 more times finally parsed it correctly.

If anyone cares, sign the petition about the re-ZONING of Chinatown, NYC. Yes. Re-Zoning.

(I have to go alert my friend to the use of dashes now.)

Full email about the rezuhning below.

Hey All,

If you have a minute, could you please sign AAFE's online petition to support an independent rezoning analysis of Chinatown? Our position is that in order to best protect the affordable housing, economic, and historical character unique to Chinatown, it should deserve its own rezoning by the City to prevent rampant luxury development. We differ from certain fringe groups that have disrupted any public meeting exploring the rezoning, and we propose an open and safe, consensus building process rather than one that is focused on mudslinging.

The online petition is at http://www.aafe.org/pgs/aafe_position.html - please support us, thanks!

U.S. Army Does It Again

I was totally traumatized reading this first thing in my inbox. Please sign the petition. Just click and sign.

U.S. Army Private LaVena Lynn Johnson, RIP

by Elizabeth Higgs at LewRockwell, 8/4/08:

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, Private LaVena Lynn Johnson killed herself on July 19, 2005, eight days before her twentieth birthday. Exactly how did she end her life? She punched herself in the face hard enough to blacken her eyes, break her nose, and knock her front teeth loose. She douched with an acid solution after mutilating her genital area. She poured a combustible liquid on herself and set it afire. She then shot herself in the head. Despite this massive self-inflicted trauma, she somehow managed to drag her then fully clothed body into the tent of a KBR contractor, leaving a trail of blood along the way and set the tent ablaze in a failed attempt to cover up her crimes against herself.

If this story sounds plausible to you, you may have missed your calling as an officer in the U.S. Army, because Army officers, speaking with a straight face, would have you believe that such a thing is not only possible, but actually happened.

In reality, LaVena Johnson was raped, beaten, and murdered by someone on a military base in Balad, Iraq, and the Army doesn't want you to know about it. Army officers most especially didn't want her parents to know about it, so they concocted the suicide story, informing them that their daughter had shot herself in the head in her barracks.

Read the rest of the article.

A Lion and a Ferret. Why?

Inspired by a posted link on facebook of Christian the Lion, I started surfing lion-related videos (shut up) and came upon this:



WTF?! My brain doesn't know which question to ask first. Maybe this one is most urgent...

There is a TV in there. It seems to be a living room.

Why is there a ferret and A LION in the living room?

I'm a Kick Ass Blogger

My first award! Mammadawg thinks I'm a Kick Ass Blogger, so there. Thank you MD!

The rules:

"Do you know any bloggers that kick ass?

Maybe they've got incredible, original content. Or they're overflowing with creativity. Is it someone that helps you become a better blogger? Or a bloggy friend you know you can count on? Or maybe it's someone who simply inspires you to be a better person... or someone else who sends you to the floor, laughing your ass off.

Whatever the reason may be, I'm sure you know at least a couple of bloggers that kick ass. Well... why not tell 'em so?

LOVE ON 'EM

• Choose 5 bloggers that you feel are "Kick Ass Bloggers"
• Let 'em know in your post or via email, twitter or blog comments that they've received an award
• Share the love and link back to both the person who awarded you and back to www.mammadawg.com
• Hop on back to the Kick Ass Blogger Club HQ to sign Mr. Linky then pass it on!"

I nominate:

• Cereal Dieter
• It's a Mad Madge World
• Ramblings of a Red-Headed Step-child
• Follow That Dog (and her multiple blog starts, all hilariously titled)
• OMFG - San Francisco (hopefully this will get him to start posting more salacious tales of a young gay man again)

Share the love!