Tagged with a MEME

I've been tagged by Stilaholic Nartian Knits and since it's not really knitting it gets to be on this blog:
Four Jobs I've Had:
Dancer
Pastry Chef
Follow-Spot Opperator
Carrot Juice Squeezer
(I would add the current job: Nut Jockey, But I fear people just wouldn't understand.)
Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over:
Casablanca
Detroit Rock City
The English Patient (Although this takes some time)
Harry Potter (any of them)
Four Places I Have Lived:
Paris France (briefly. Still counts?)
Santa Cruz California
Cairo Egypt
Durham North Carolina
Four Television Shows I Love to Watch:
Project Runway
Alias (No more!)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (what?)
Firefly (on DVD only now)
Four Places I Have Been on Vacation:
Morrocco
Palau
Cozumel
Sinai
Four of My Favorite Dishes:
Seared Ahi or Ahi Shashimi
Pasta (Amatriciana, Carbonara, Mom's Spaghetti, Kraft Mac&Cheese...)
Ice Cream (pretty much all of it)
Huge Caesar salads
Four Websites I Visit (Almost) Daily:
New York Times
Yarn Harlot
Online Sudoku
Blogger, of course
Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now:
Under the Sea
In a cafe in Paris, preferably knitting
Almost anywhere but here at Work
In the arms of my BF
Four Bloggers I am Tagging:
Adrastas
John
Gee...I don't know!

Earthquake!!!!

Hawai'i earthquake, right near where I live. 6.7! And plenty of aftershocks! This is what my house looks like after the Earthquake that hit today (okay, we stacked those 3 boxes on the right while searching for the cat). Shelves empty, all glass broken, drawers open, pictures off the wall, cracks in the plaster, door doesn't shut right, and cat headin' for the hills! No electricity, gas shut off, no water...no cable TV but since my television did a faceplant onto my wood floor, it's not like I can notice. Outside it is even stranger: Several cracks across roads and bridges, huge landslides and boulders in the roads, broken water mains flooding the streets. All the streetlights are out (Drive with Aloha people! And an out streetlight means a four-way stop!) but since there are only 3 streetlights in town, we are doing okay.
My mother and I went through the 1989 earthquake in Northern California, so we are jaded Californians about it. When the shaking started, we knew instantly what it was, and for the first few seconds it is a bit of a fun ride. Then the knowledge kicks in, and in our heads we go through the following thought process: "Earthquake! This is fun!...Wait, this is strong! Wait, this is going on too long! Okay, fine, I'll get up and head away from the windows...Hmmm...About a 6, maybe 7..." Funny how I didn't notice things falling. I moved away from the walls and windows, and I watched the walls shake. I guess the structure was more of a worry than the falling items. Immediately afterwards, I went outside, of course. Checked on the neighbors, all whom were looking for pets. The first aftershock came while I was outside, the ground surging in P-waves, like dirt surfing, under my feet.
Ironically, my big strong father is taking it the worst. He was away during the 89 earthquake, and maintains this was the worst earthquake he has felt in his life: Stronger than any in California or Japan. My mother and I set to work cleaning up the glass, but since we have moved alot, been through earthquakes, and, well, we are both pretty clumsy, we had experience in briefly mourning and throwing out the broken shards of favorite things. These items are just possesions. They are with you for awhile and then they break and you move onwards.
What is more important is the blessing of everyone's safety, and family and friends are fine. Utilities are back on, our service-people in safety and utilities sprang to work, and I hear we are under a state of emergency. The beauty of it is how everyone pulls together, sits outside, waves at cars, calls all their friends to make sure everyone is okay. Thank you to everyone who called, emailed, texted, and checked or commented on this site! What aloha!

The Esquire

My friend says goodbye to a beloved watering hole here. Beautiful post. Please check it out.

Happy Anniversary: Kama'aina

It is my 4th Anniversary of living in Hawaii. I have been thinking alot about what that means, and thankful for all I have here. As someone who lived many places, I never had a "hometown", and I adopted Hawaii as home because it always existed in my parents heads as "home" and I saw how happy they were on the occasions we were here visiting relatives.
I have a friend here who says that whatever you ask of the island, she will provide. Not in terms of plenty, but in terms of need. Something about paring down that need appeals to me: It's like traveling, where you limit yourself to the contents of your bag, and you are freed in that sparsity. When I moved here, I asked for a clear head, peace, a path, and some diving. The island has provided most of that.
I don't think I can stay here. I don't think I can afford to live here very long: There is not much economic future, and I will never be able to afford a house. And dearest BF, who hates it here, has his sights on a colder, rainier isle that pulls at his heart like home. And that is one thing we can't ask this beautiful, fiery isle to do: We can't ask her to be anything but herself.

Nobel-Winning Author Naguib Mahfouz Dies at 94

I love Naguib Mahfouz's work, and mourn his passing. I have felt those moments of his writing, the quiet dusk Cairene moments when the lights begin to glow from behind your neighbor's turned wood screens, when children playing in the street drift home, and the sounds of life float like the warm desert wind up to your balcony... I raise my glass of sweet mint tea to this man. I send my prayers for him up with the breath of exhaled Sheesha. He loved Egypt and he will be mourned by his beloved nation, and the World.

Limitless Human Potential?

Check out this interesting article in the Sunday Los Angeles Times by Lewis Segal. It's title is Five things I hate about ballet.
A snippet:

Ballet has given us visions of limitless human potential and a sense of grace as profound as anything we have ever thought, felt or believed. But all too often, it now commandeers a disproportionate amount of money and attention in the dance world and returns only an increasingly self-satisfied triviality.

Thinking of dancers as beautiful children might seem harmless enough, but in ballet it's part of a system that denies young people any real choices in their lives. The best foreign training processes and company structures develop distinctive artists through career-long mentoring relationships. Ours, however, too often turn out obedient classical athletes by imposing rules about where to be, what to do, how much to eat, whom to believe in and when self-esteem is deserved or not. It's even worse for the ballet women who starve themselves to match a skeletal ideal and then stop menstruating for the length of their careers. Talk about arrested development.

For the audience, this system produces something well worth hating: dancers forever young (because there's always someone new to replace them when they age) who don't really know themselves but have learned how to move skillfully and energetically while thinking critically about how they're doing — not what. It may be a minority opinion, but a life lived by someone else's counts is the ultimate unexamined existence, and it gives an audience nothing when set to music.

Although I agree that sometimes ballet is guilty of all the things he hates, I also feel like through it's discipline and training, I have felt the most alive. There is nothing like that instant when your warm and trained body does something amazing and surprising. It is like that moment at the top of a leap when you hang in the air for a split second that feels eternal. Or that feeling that every cell is breathing, moving, and alive.
I don't know how to reconcile all that yet.

Refuge

The ancient Hawaiians had too many possibilities to make mistakes. A very complex systems of Kapu (Taboos) ensured they were constantly offending, making atonement, or suffering the punishments, including death! When one had broken such a serious Kapu, there was only one thing to do: Run. Run as fast as one could to a Place of Refuge, where, once safe inside its walls, one could make atonement and be forgiven.
The Place of Refuge on this island, Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, is a thatched temple surrounded by an almost insurmountable wall, at the bottom of a cliff, bordered on most sides by pounding surf. As with most Hawaiian Heiau (temples) it exists on one of the most beautiful pieces of Real Estate on the coast. However, it seems like quite a journey to get there, especially while running for your life from angry warriors.
These days Kapu are long gone, yet we still often need refuge, rest, and forgiveness. Saturday I went diving at Honaunau Bay, the protected bay adjacent to the temple. The bay is designated as a marine sanctuary, and is teeming with diverse life, including many snorkelers and quite a few divers. The topography varies from deep sandy bottom, to a steep sloping coral wall to about 70 feet, up to a vibrant coral garden around 30 feet, then shallower, sunnier corals full of snorkelers and kicked up sand at about 10 feet. It makes a spectacular shore dive due to the varied topography, the diverse life, and the ease of entry and nearby parking. In fact, I mapped this site for my Divemaster certification.
Saturday I took my brother, visiting from the mainland, and we met a friend of mine there for our second dive. We shared two hour-long dives filled with fish, protected turtles, beautiful corals, and even a large snoozing white tipped reef shark! In between dives we shared a walk in the park, pineapples, bagels, and croissants, and a bit of a sunburn. (Wetsuit sunburn: Top is burned and legs are white. Comes from folding down only the top of the suit!)
These days diving feels like my refuge. For that one hour I am floating only in the moment, free of worries, appreciating the world around me. My existence is whittled down to only my breath and my body's placement, and the beauty before me. Through monitoring my breathing, I can extend this moment for about an hour. And then the weightiness of the land crushes down upon me again.

Choreography is Intellectual Property...

But who owns it?
This battle is being played out by Pilobolus, as the New York Times reports here. A Snip:

Ms. Chase said that she was cast out by a new, corporate-minded executive director and board after three decades of service, and was denied ownership of the dances she created. “It was artistic differences and sort of a mean-spirited power grab by the board,” Ms. Chase added.

The companyÂ’s management sees it differently. The executive director, Itamar Kubovy, said Ms. Chase was demanding to do larger-scale works that the company could not afford. She was offered access to her dances and a contract to stay on but declined, he said, and she was voted off the board after she suggested that she wanted to start a potentially rival company. (Ms. Chase denies wanting to start a new company.)

In this example,collaborativeive choreographer admits that she gave her dances to the company, but seemingly only while she was a member in good standing. Should she have asserted rights overcollaborativeive company formed in an artistically collective environment? Who owns the intellectual property undercollaborationion? The article gives two examples of power-house choreographers: Martha Graham left all her dances to the Martha Graham company, and George Balanchine left all his dances to the Balanchine trust. But what kind of intellectual property rights exist for small choreographers? In a business where dancers and choreographers are happy enough to get a little cash for their work, how are we protecting this ephemeral artform?

Lynx

On Saturday I was invited by wonderfully generous friends to accompany them on an afternoon sail of the Privateer Lynx, an 1812 era reproduction of a sailing privateer used for historical education.
I helped raise the sails and coil lines. I loved the experience, and would love to take longer voyages with them the next time they are in Hawai'i. They do longer, inter-island sails (the Kawaihae to Lahaina sail is sold out), and you can even go with them back to the mainland West Coast.
Although I enjoy the maritime history of the 16th and 17th centuries more: Spice Islands! Venice! Evil Portuguese raiders! British East India Company! Curry! This privateer and her crew may just pull me into War-Of-1812 era history. We also couldn't resist talking like pirates a bit. Gar!
I love being offshore on a boat. The land is hazy and colorful in the distance, and I try to recognize the once-familiar landscape from the flip-side. We could tell the hotels and the stretch of beaches, but we are used to standing on the shore and looking out. The world flips on a boat, and you stand in the ocean and look at where you have been, knowing that it all looks strange and wrong and tiny. Looking the other way is blue: Blue below, blue above, blue as far as the horizon... My mother said that people in Hawaii are of two kinds: The kind that feels confined by the ocean (they get rock-fever and need to leave) and those that are freed by it. I love the ocean, the possibility of it all. I know that, far from the blue desert that some see, the water is teeming with life, is, in fact, the reason we are able to survive clinging to our little continental rocks. I would love to spend time on a sailing vessel like the Lynx, far from the sight of land, with nothing but ocean and sky, and the small, efficient provisions of a tidy boat. Sometimes we need such drastic changes of perspectives to remind us of our lonliness and peril, to make us thankful for the embrace of land, family, and the familiar.

Maybe its the Road Rage Talking...

I was behind this car on the commute to work this morning. Sure, it is expensive ($440k?) and fast (205mph?) but only one thought went through my head:
"Why in the World would you have this car in Hawai'i?"
Con#1) The roads are crap. Literally sometimes: My town is a cow rancher town, and the island has a large amount of gravel, dirt, and lava roads, along with roads into steep valleys. Most people have 4-wheel drives. There is a ton of traffic and the large construction trucks cause damage on the paved roads, which leads me to:
Con#2) The crap roads are under construction. I appreciate the use of my tax dollars, and the fine labor of our State contractors. But there is construction all the time. This means that one is sitting in one's stopped overheating car, awaiting the other lane. Recently I have been sitting still for around 45 minutes. For me this means knitting in place. For the Porsche owner, it means he is nowhere near his possible 205 mph, which brings me to:
Con#3) Nowhere on the island can you go faster than 55mph, with most roads being 35mph or slower. This is true legally (I should know, I have two speeding tickets to prove it!) and literally: Due to the above reasons, plus traffic, you just really can't go fast!
Con#4) No one but tourists drive convertibles. It just rains too suddenly and furiously to bother with a lid. I get giggles driving out of the rain, and seeing happy sunburnt tourists in their Mustang convertibles about to drive into a huge rainstorm...Blissfully unaware. And yes, I know they have fast lid devices and such. Still a pain in the ass! And these people have heard of skin cancer, right?
Con#5) All the above mentioned, under-construction, slow, congested paved roads are only one or two lanes. Passing is possible in designated areas, where a fast sportscar would still be within the flow of traffic attempting to pass a huge truck full of lava rock or papayas or macnuts or...Whatever.
Final Con) Even if you had an open, empty, paved, fast, unrainy, unpatrolled stretch of open road...Where are you gonna go? We are on an island!

I must conclude that the owner wanted to show off his possibilities: He spent $440K to drive 35 mph on crappy roads, in order to show the rest of us that if conditions were right, he has enough money to buy a machine that could possibly go 205 mph and leave us in the copious dust.