How to be a dancer

Written on February 13th 2024

If you could be a process which one would you be?

I remember feeling so lucky.

I stayed in bed all day today, leaving only to take the bus to get four bags of Trader Joe’s takis. I’m curious about what rest becomes on days like these and how skipping things makes me feel. I didn’t go to Pageant yoga. My mom called me about going to India and China after we go on a family trip to Korea in May. She sounded so angry at me. 

I think I’m in love with someone. I’m enamored with cooking and kitchen culture. There's something so dazzling about making beauty and doing it fast. Barely having enough time. Time brimming at its edges, pouring out of its center, my hands moving faster than my synapses to catch the overflow. I think this is why I Iike the busy days more. They’re hard but I prefer it to the lazy ones. I think that if given the choice I will always choose comfort over discomfort. 

I feel that I’ve been making a series of social blunders whenever I’m around people lately. Chidi and I have been doing this thing on public transportation where we both wear our own respective headphones and show each other what song to play next, making sure to hit play at the exact same time on the exact same song so that we’re inhabiting the exact same subjectivity. When it comes to something as imprecise and arbitrary as metropolitan life, the closest-you-can-get becomes the absolute. I love being friends this way: being at the same time. I value this. I am trying to be the kind of friend to others that I want for myself.

I’m giving a mini dharma talk to a group in my meditation teacher training. My partner is a 53-year-old Taiwanese American woman named Bonnie. I feel young around her. She takes her time and can’t be messed with. She breathes loudly in her headphones as if to take up space. I want to be her mother. 

Everything just continues all the time. I love my gymnastics job. I come up with lessons on the train in the Notes app and then write them on the white board in the gymnasium. After lunch all of the kids' farts smell the same. Institutional flatulence. I love them. I’m working on the progress reports. I want to make them brave. I want to teach them that they have bodies. I want them to love me. I want them to see their bodies in space. To feel their flying bodies suspended by time and in various standing, sitting, rolling, turning, balancing, springing positions. I want them to be well, like I always say. 

I’ve been living for Trisha Brown class. Shelly Senter teaches us Alexander technique. I learned that our legs are in front of our torsos. Our heads end at the soft palate in the back of our throat, where our neck and spine begin. Habit and culture bring our torsos forward, making us forget our legs are in front of our torsos. We form kinesthetic pathways through habitual synaptic connections made in relation to the sound and sensations of the words "head" and "neck." We slouch and fall in one direction. We forget that everything is always and. Never that. It’s paradox. Alexander technique and Trisha Brown’s mentality is I think a practice of non-doing. Of emptying the center. Of release through structure. Of progressively distal causes and effects, constantly transposing and disappearing. Language is involved. I love the class and the movement so much. 

I love being a dancer even when I skip yoga to lay in bed and watch videos of people making beautiful things on Youtube. This is part of being a dancer. This dancer. I forgive myself because my dance training has taught me how.