• On Life and Love

    Feeling way behind

    I came down with a cold two weeks ago, and the next thing I know, I’ve missed three of my own deadlines for posting stories, haven’t danced in two Mondays, and haven’t done a lick of the design work for the non-profit I’m trying to work with. In good news, I can sleep soundly through the night again without choking on my own phlegm. It’s times like these that remind me not to try to “catch up”, but just to keep moving. It’s not like I fell off a bandwagon; I can’t make up for two weeks of missed productivity. That said, there will be a story this Saturday. It…

  • On Life and Love

    Dancing: exactly what I wanted

    Second week of belly dance and hip-hop classes: fucking amazing. We had a sub for the belly dancing class: instead of Nayna, it was her assistant, and she worked us pretty hard. We got through what felt like a big chunk of routine, learning 4 or 5 new moves and getting better at some of the early ones. The class was just as fun as last week, but felt a lot more productive. I’m going to be sore tomorrow from the rolls and agitators. Now, the hip-hop class… I dedicated a lot of words to it last week, when I wasn’t sure if I was gonna like it, blah, blah.…

  • On Life and Love

    Um… jazz hands?

    I stepped out of my shell a bit tonight and went to two dance classes: belly dancing and hip-hop. Belly dancing was a hoot — the instructor was hilarious and everyone was there for a good time. I was, of course, absolutely awful at it, but I got the gist of it pretty quickly and I’ll do a lot better next week. Hip-hop, on the other hand… Whoo. I went in knowing it wasn’t going to be club dancing, and that’s what I wanted: a “real” dance class. Unfortunately, there were a few things that complicated my ability to judge whether I want to take the class: Biggest of all:…

  • On Life and Love

    Is Soulja Boy Ze Frank inspired?

    I think it’s pretty obvious that Soulja Boy is a child of the internet. He has music videos of people watching his videos on youtube and all that. Jay Smooth did a video a while back about Soulja Boy stealing some song. I can’t embed it, but watch from 0:30 to about 0:40 of this. Then watch the Ze Frank dancing here (especially “Strutting It” and “Stop it Silly”) and here and tell me there’s not a marked resemblance. I knew there was something familiar about SB’s dancing the first time I saw that mess. At the time, though, I was watching my high school students do the dances, and…