I recently took the time to clean up my room and display some documents from my latest performance "A 12-Hour Fieldwork Study, Intervaled." It was pretty great to take the time to go through these artifacts only a month old. The performance was in a durational performance festival in Boston through the performance group Mobius. The show lasted from noon on September 16 through 6pm on September 17. Performances ranged from 4-24 hours in length, and we all dealt with the issue of time (as it was both required and unavoidable). I went on from noon until midnight on September 16, documenting the events of the day at intervals between 3 and 12 minutes. The documents express how silly my entire performance was. It is nice to have them up and around. It is impossible to document any given moment, but I try anyways.

Things are better. My muscular pathways have cleared and my mind has followed. As my friend Erin likes to describe it, "Mom, I'm a VEGETARIAN and I'm NOT an academic!" not that those two pieces of information go together, I think she just likes to string together a couple of my life defining moments. It's pretty funny.
This all translates to my newest realization, I am NOT an academic, nor do I want to be. I do not want to write a Thesis this year, nor anytime in my life (at least not in the next 7 or so years). I want to make art and tell stories. And that is what I am going to do. Now that I got that figured out, this will be a much happier year.

This is an exciting moment in life. Right? Maybe. I am not sure if I am convinced. It is hard. Last year I had a completely new experience which opened me up to new passions. And so now that I am back, I am reintroducing myself to my past passions. Are they still my passions? If so, am I willing to dedicate extended time, effort, and energy to them? There are some big questions that have been plaguing my tear ducks.

I think I feel this stress because it is the first time in a while I have felt opposition of any kind. I am constantly working against the grain, but usually most people still cheer me on. Since returning I have had to fight more than ever to achieve the things I thought were going to be easy. I didn't think the struggle would begin so soon. But here I am.

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In other news, I worked with my dancers on Monday and I am pleasantly surprised with the dance that is being created. It is based off of chance and their internal relations. I gave each dancer a set of tasks, only sometimes giving them directions beyond the action of the task. For instance, if I wrote "walk," sometimes I wrote "walk 68%" or "walk towards Lily" or "walk 7 steps" or sometimes just "walk." I gave each dancer 12-14 tasks and about 28mins to figure out what the tasks mean to them. Then we put it all in the same space and played XTC's "I'd Like That" on top. I think the result is very nice and silly.
We will see what the critics think tonight...

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Fear not, Monday I began the "I am bored, let me look to see if anyone has updated"-search, and sure enough, my bro updated (about an hour after I last posted). And sure enough, I skipped over the sports and scanned over the music and, in turn, I read very little of the post.

My bro blogs all the time (2-3 times per week) but last week he began a new job and probably hasn't yet hooked his home up to the world wide web, so he hasn't updated for a week.... and I am going through serious withdrawal. It is funny because I don't think I have ever read a post word for word, or at least I always scan past the all the sports and most of music related crap, and only sometimes completely read selected stories. But, I checked his blog at least once a day every day this week, only to be disappointed by the lack of new writing.

I guess this tells me that I should either spend less time searching my favorite websites when I should really be working on homework, or that I should find some more regularly updated blogs to browse (at least until my bro adjusts to the new lifestyle).

Yesterday I had a conversation with my friend Lemons about my current work-in-progress. During the explanation of my intention for this piece, I told her that I am interested in creating an "extended moment." I want to create an experience for the audience and that experience is about one particular moment in time which might take many minutes and hours to recreate.

This seems to be a theme in my life right now. I am interested in these times that seem everlasting only because the sensory experience is so rich. These moments are usually created spontaneously and naturally. So how can I go about choreographing them? I don't know. How can one recreate the feeling of experiencing nature?

If I figure out how to do it on the stage or in a gallery for an audience, will I be able to do it in my daily life? I hope so. Or maybe I will just figure out how to engage my senses more fully. That is my true challenge, the challenge to feel more all the time and to live in awareness.

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Speaking of senses, my improvisation teacher recently told me that proprioception has been considered the "6th sense" since the 19th Century. Proprioception is the sense of internal motion. It is the thing we feel when our organs are acting up or when our blood is pumping. Why didn't I know this before? I feel it every moment of everyday...