Enter the Confessional #3: But I've got a really good personality!

Wow. So I'm doing really well with that 'keeping to a weekly schedule' thing, huh?

It would be easy to blame my extended fail on a long list of recent events, so that's exactly what I'm going to do. Some of them are easy to discuss in a public forum: Thanksgiving, moving house, busy time at work, lead-up to Christmas, etc. etc. etc. Others are more complicated and more personal, and have involved an intense mix of joy and pain (and sunshine and rain, sing it all god's children...) and fear and triggering and triggering and triggering. I'm dating a couple of girls, one of whom is awesome and good to me, and the other of whom I actually like - and you all know me well enough to know what that means. I'm settling into a life here that after only a handful of months is already uncomfortably rife with overlaps and I'm making decisions that aren't always good. I'm broke, of course. And I'm going to rot my teeth out with candy canes if I don't slow my roll.

Returning to the topic of moving, it's been... hard. The physical move itself wasn't too bad, but this was the first time in many years that I've packed up my room in my parents' house and not been taking it all to Sydney. I've been dreaming of home a lot lately and I know it's just my brain trying to sort through things and move on, but it's exhausting and it's starting to wear me down. I never thought I'd be living in an apartment in Boston. It's a great apartment, and I have a great new flattie named Karen, and it's in an area that I don't know so it feels new. All good. But I can't help but think back to this time last year, when my life finally felt like it was coming together again after far too long - job I liked, house I liked, friends I loved, new prospects on the horizon - and then how quickly it all got pulled out from under me, and how much I lost in the process. And that's happened too many times in the last few years, that thing of going, '...finally.' right before having my whole life go tits-up, for me to be able to even begin to believe that good things may be on the horizon. Which is all apart from the fact that I still struggle to see Boston itself as a good thing. It was the right thing, I know that, but it doesn't feel like a good thing. So there's that to contend with.

On a less fraught note, my bed is cursed. I'm not sure what the hell is behind this, but it's one damn thing after another: first, the queen-size mattress and boxspring arrived as scheduled, but the boxspring didn't fit up the stairs. They took it back and advised me to order a split queen, which I did... but no one told me I had to order two of them, because for some reason they sell the halves individually at Sears (Flattie Karen said she was going to go by there and ask for one leg of pants), and none of the three people I discussed my order with saw fit to clarify it with me. And so a week later - this past Saturday - the delivery men arrived with one half of a boxspring. And when I called Sears to give them a piece of my mind, they put me on hold for 20 minutes and then asked me to call back later because their systems were down. No, really.

At this point I decided to just get a cheaper set from the furniture place downstairs, and that arrived yesterday without incident. And having the boxspring meant that the bed was high enough off the ground for me to put my brand-new, custom-designed, hand-painted doona cover on without it dangling onto the floor. So I did, only to discover that the lovely cherry-blossom detail that was meant to have bright red flowers instead had anaemic red-pink ones, which is... not what I wanted. And kind of icky. And has prompted Flattie Karen to start calling me 'Salmon'. So now I'm trying to organize a return on a custom item, which is always a joy. I also still have a stray half-boxspring lying around my room because I'm trying to arrange the return of that to Sears, but they seem unwilling to get in touch with me about it. Oh, and my actual bed frame, which I thought was being delivered at the end of this week, won't be here until sometime next week, or possibly after due to the holidays.

[Sigh.]

I mean, all I can do at this point is laugh, but it's beyond ridiculous. The rest of the move has gone pretty smoothly, and I do have furniture (and credit card debt) thanks to the proud Scandinavian meatball merchants at Ikea, but the fact that the main feature of my room is unlikely to be sorted within the first month of my living here is starting to bug me. I will say that the mattress is amazingly comfortable, though, so I'm lucky there. And half expecting it to spontaneously combust in the night, or possibly be harboring Julian Assange without my knowledge.

In better news, the dancing's going well. It's been a busy few weeks, but now I've got two shows down and only one more to go - but the remaining one is the biggest and scariest one. I'm doing a fusion number with a dagger; it's to a song called 'Dr Sin' by Chasing Shadows (highly recommended), and my character is an assassin. It's a bit martial-artsy and a bit tribal and entirely fueled by my latent rage issues, but it seems to be going over pretty well so far, apart from how I almost took out an audience member a couple of weeks ago when my dagger slipped from my hand and went shooting out into the audience. First time I've ever dropped it, let alone flung it, and of course it happened at a show. Luckily no one was hurt, but the event has already passed into legend and my teacher is never ever going to let me live it down, not that I can blame her for that.

So that's me. For now. I won't do anything so stupid as to promise another post between now and February, but I'll see what I can do.

XOXO

File under 'things that shouldn't be this complicated but have decided to be anyway'

I've finally broken down and signed up to a two-year mobile contract. I had been on a pre-paid thing with Virgin, who are very much a third-party carrier here (Caitlin: 'Ohhh, you're the one.'), but the phone was dodgy as fuck and the service was spotty, so when I learned that my work has a deal with Verizon, a major carrier, that meant that I could get a two-year contract and a great phone for only $15 more a month than what I'd been paying with Virgin AND keep my phone number, I was in.

Oh, silly girl. As if it could be that easy.

Something's gone wrong somewhere along the way that means that my new phone is screening my texts and phone calls without my consent. Not consistently, mind: I'll get one text from someone and then not hear from them again for 24 hours, in which time I have of course decided that I have mortally offended them and they now hate me, but I don't want to get in touch because I don't want to be pushy. And then my brain goes in circles for the next several hours until it explodes into a million fleshy pieces and I'm weeping into a bag of Nutter Butters. (Bad enough when it's real people; you should see what happens when Wil Anderson's Twitter feed mysteriously disappears.)

Why yes, I *am* looking for a therapist! Funny you should ask.

[sigh] Yes, I really am. Things have been increasingly rough the last few weeks. I think what's happened is that now that I don't have the worry of job-searching, everything else has come banging to the front of my head. And not to sound self-pitying, but there's a fair bit of everything else to process. I'd suspected that I was dealing a bit too well with the move, and that there might be a crash coming eventually; the small mercy here is that the crash waited until my health insurance kicked in and I could afford to see someone. So now I'm in the process of trying to find that someone, which is a bit tricky because the only recommendations I've been able to get so far have been for people who don't accept my health insurance. But I found a few on my own who look promising, so cross fingers one of them will work out.

In other news, I have just re-read all of Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree series (collections of his book reviews for The Believer, McSweeney Press' monthly magazine), which has inspired me to start doing my own monthly book reviews. I like his format, wherein he lists the books he's bought and the books he's read in that month, so I'm stealing that. Unlike him, however, I am not restrained by The Believer's policy of not permitting negative criticism, so if I read something I don't like, I will absolutely tell you about it. I expect to have the first of these up by the end of the month.

Finally, a last note on my mobile: My old Virgin phone wasn't great with international texts because my receipt (or not) of them would depend on how much random cash was floating around in my account. I've learned that some people did text me and I never got them; if at some point you did text me and didn't hear back, that's what happened. This should be different now because those texts will be added to my bill rather than debited from my account, but given the way my first three days with my new phone have gone I'm not overly confident. So I guess what I'm saying is that e-mails are still and always the best way to reach me, and also there's a bunch of you I haven't heard from in ages and I miss terribly, so if you're feeling so inclined please drop me a line, or even just a comment. I don't care if it's the most boring stuff about your day, I just like to know you're out there. xoxo

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

You guys.

For the last two days I've been having run-ins with the American taxation and health care systems. They are... like, I don't even have the words. I don't know how to say all the things that are wrong or how astoundingly wrong those things are. I don't know how it is that either of these systems could be so completely broken and yet still be the civic equivalent of required reading.

I am not stupid. I am not lazy. I am not trying to do anything illegal, immoral, or even remotely out-of-the-ordinary. And yet I have, on three separate occasions over the last 24 hours, been reduced to tears by the incomprehensible garbage that governs my ability to comply with (not break, not stretch, not find-a-loophole-out-of, but comply with) federal and state law, and to access and pay for (not abuse, not cheat, not rort, but access and pay for) basic health care when I need it. And along the way I have talked to people who are kind but lack the knowledge or ability to help me; or who are unkind and uncooperative and lack the desire to help me; or who just plain need a punch in the mouth and make me want to move to Abu Dhabi tomorrow rather than deal with their bullshit one fucking second more; who are all employed to (at least in theory) help me and millions of other people do exactly what I am trying to do. None of this, none of the system that has grown up to support hundreds of millions of people, makes any fucking sense.

In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams wrote an awesome bit about how hard it was for him to discuss two obnoxious German students he had met in Africa because everything about them was such a stereotype. Writers, he said, should be in the business of destroying stereotypes, not enforcing them. He eventually decides to deal with the problem by making them Latvians instead, which made all of their annoying qualities interesting instead of cliched, and also allowed him to use the line, 'a smile played across his thin Latvian lips' - an excellent result all around. Unfortunately, I do not have that luxury. My recent experiences are so horribly, stereotypically, fundamentally American that to assign them to any other country would rob them of their power (and be unnecessarily cruel to whatever nation I'd picked on). But the flip side of this is that because everyone already knows that our health care system sucks ass and our tax codes were written by day patients, I cannot communicate how truly heinous it is to have to deal with these things in real life: if I rant about it, I sound whingy; if I joke about it, I sound like a hack (amirite, ladies?); and if I try to give you the information straight, I still sound like I'm exaggerating because unless you've been through it personally you would not believe that it could be this fucking ridiculous. So this is where I'll end. I'll shake it off and get on with my day, because that's all I can do, because somehow I've ended up back in a country where these systems are the systems.

Some shimmies are bigger than others.

So I had my second belly dancing class this week. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant… except for how I was having a particularly clumsy day, so I could do pretty much nothing right. Until, that is, the end of class, when we did the usual shimmy circle. Every teacher I’ve ever had has done a variant on this, and it’s always my favourite part of class: throw on whatever song (usually a drum solo) and shimmy. Nothing else. Just shimmy.

Shimmying is exactly like what it sounds like, but it’s not done at all like how you think. Here’s what you do: stand up (go on, no one’s watching!), bend and straighten one knee, then bend and straighten the other. Did you notice how your hips dropped and raised as you did that? [sigh] No, I didn’t think so. Okay, try it again, but this time pay attention. I’m not doing this for my health.

Got it? Good. Now keep doing it, and congratulations: you’re shimmying!

Shimmying is very important to most belly dancing styles, and it’s just the most fun. (It’s also a great way to keep warm at bus stops, if you don’t mind the odd stare.) But like most things worth doing, it’s much harder than it seems at first. My particular weakness is slipping from a standard shimmy into a full-body shimmy when I speed up. I can’t really explain that without going into detail that would be boring and mostly useless without illustrations, but suffice it to say that it is, like almost everything in my life, a control issue. Except that this week, for some reason, I got it exactly right and entirely without trying. I can’t imagine why, especially as I’d been so useless at everything else (don’t even say the words ‘chest circle’ to me), but it felt SO. GOOD. There’s something about the rhythm of a good shimmy that feels like nothing else, and the best ones clear my head in way that few things do. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be doing this again.

This week I also had my first Zumba class. I switched into this when my intermediate belly dancing class got canceled; I figured it would at least keep me moving, and if I hated it, well, I’d only have to do it for six weeks.

I didn’t hate it; I didn’t love it; I was just terribly amused by it. Forget alcohol: Zumba is the great equalizer. Just ask the basketball butches - definitely a subspecies, easily recognized by their two-tone, mulletted plumage and wife-beaters - who were mamboing around with the rest of us: you can’t make Zumba cool, you can’t make Zumba tough. You can’t be too cool for school when you’re doing the Macarena (and no, I’m not making that up).

In other dancetastic news, I will be spending my weekend here. My belly dancing teacher is teaching a couple of classes, and I've wanted to check out burlesque for ages, so while many of my farthest-and-dearest are camping and fishing and otherwise being tormented by the 'Great' Outdoors (yeah, I have my sources!), I will be sauntering around in fishnets and heels. So... pretty much business as usual, there. I promise a full report after!

XOXO

Link du jour: This is what I want played every time I enter a room.

Confidential to the Ginja Ninja: Be careful at work, the temptation may overwhelm you. :)