Bust Out

Disclaimer: I found this photo on the internet. What follows is a creative interpretation and in no way reflects the actual person.


Bust Out
She stomped across the asphalt and ignored the sun burns rising from the tar. Drips of sweat soked her bra and slipped down the soft underside of her arms. Her make up was melting.
'God Fuckem." Three blocks of shadowless alley in broad day light in the middle of the summer, all for a silly disposable camera photoshoot.

Her bra was riding low, drawing a perfect bulls eye for curious eyes.
The times she usually wore this getup were Dusks and a Kort of Vodkuh saturated her throat and pallette. She required a certain amount of liquid courgae stupid to go out in public at night dressed in highlighter yellow tutus and stockings. Once saturated she'd feel the stir in her shins and the hum behind her ears, and she'd melt into the body knotted dance floor.

However, this was an alleyway dissecting five lanes of traffic, not a throbbing rave. Ahead, she saw Dawn waiting, shifting from hip to hip and wiping the sweat form her mustache and frown lines. Passing through the honka nd horn traffic, she stole the water bottle from Dawns purse and growled "We gone, or what?"

"Calm it, right? Just a few pics is all. Jeezus loves you, girl."

"I fuckin left Damo upstairs with the dog and sure as fuck ain't gonna get him food and shit."

"whatever, just pose and go home."

The quick snap of the crap camera did littleto distract 'Manda from 'HAAAAAAY GIIIRRRRLLL' whizzing past in the traffic. Dawn whinnied for 'Manda to move over, relax, act natural and for fucks sake stop frowning. Gawd, you're such a tight ass 'Manda.

"Hurry up." She muttered. There were a few people in the park, one woman was close by dressed in beige slacks walking her lovely Foofoo, or Fluffy, or Precious. Them DNA Bundles rich people like to call dogs. Fuzzy Rats, mom calls them. She looked like Mom, though. Well, MomPreDivorce.

Still, 'Manda muffled her FuckShitPiss tongue as the woman swept by.

"Just pose."

Fed up, She rocked onto her tippy toes and put on her best shit eating grin to please the camera.

"You better not facebook that. For reals."

Dawn merely smirked.

SwimTypes - Instructor

There is a family of three girls that come to the pool for private lessons. I teach the two older girls, while another instructor teaches the youngest.
Now this instructor is fairly new at the teaching biz, so she has yet to refine a certain quality necessary for teaching.
It has been three weeks and she has done very little to further this little girls understanding of how to float.
It is a simple manipulation of wording that is the reason for her failure.
She says "Do you want to do a float with me?"
Perfectly fine phrase. However what she should be saying is "we're going to do some floats."
I discovered while swimming past her lesson last week that she spent an entire half an hour asking this little girl for permission.
An eighteen year old asking a five year old for permission. There's something very wrong with that image.
So I offered to take her for ten minutes at the end of the class to see if I could get something out of this girl who had taken to saying "NO NO AND DOUBLE NO" to everything the other instructor asked of her.
I pick the girl up and take her out into the middle of the shallow end. Immediately the little girl starts barking out orders. I look her dead in the eye and say "I am the boss. Do a float or we're not playing a game."
And whaddaya know? The girl can float.

It's a common error in a new instructor to ask for permission. We believe that because we are responsible for some one's child for half an hour that we have to treat them like a guest.
So we paddle around in the shallow end cooing in sickly sweet voices to these children, bowing our heads apologetically when the child cries.
Children cry. Children laugh. Children scream. And yet we cower.

So here is this new instructor battling with herself on how to deal with this child. When she touches her the girl screams, which automatically means that she has hurt her, not that the child is screaming as a way to get her to back off.

But we can't give kids the right to control their environments and set their own boundaries. They're fucking five years old. How can they possibly know what is safe and unsafe for themselves? We are the bosses of them, we've been around longer, we know that the edge of the tot dock is inches from their bouncing feet. We know that water in the lungs is a bad thing. We know how to hold our breaths, we know how to float. We know that we have to teach them.
So why are the kids in control?

I'm not saying punch a baby out when they scream. I'm saying be firm.

The Instructor came up to me after the class and said "I'm not going to tell her I'm the Boss. I'm not going to tell her she has to do a float or we can't play a game. That's mean."
It may appear mean, but I did not yell at her, or call her names. I said plainly in my regular voice, I am the Boss. Because I am. And now she knows, and now she'll behave.
Besides it's much worse to skate through eight weeks of lessons and have nothing to account for than giving a firm statement and then getting results.

I used to pull that at camp all the time. It's a time waster. You stand around with the kid and say 'what do you want to do?' and Little Johnny does nothing, because he don't know what there is to do in the water. So when the parent takes Little Johnny away they seem puzzled. They know they've been played but they don't know how, because Johnny did dick all, and there was a clear 'attempt' from the instructor to do something.
So tricky.

However, after a few months of teaching everyday, I started to gain confidence in my ability to know and to teach, so I started calling the shots. Immediately the success rate of my classes increased.

Here are some things I've noticed...

- Skilled Instructors rarely bob their heads like pigeons when they talk to parents. The bob is like a minion bowing to their trigger happy king who enjoys a game of Johnny Whoops with his guillotine. An Insecure Instructor will smile meekly and bob their head ever so slightly. Sorry sorry sorry, I'm teaching your kid, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, please like me so that you don't complain to my boss.
- Skilled Instructors speak with their regular voice. They crouch down to the childs eye level, not bend down. And they speak to the child in simplified but not dumbed down language. Insecure Instructors say something like "Okay Jane? Wanna just go sit over there? And maybe we'll play a game?"
- Skilled Instructors know how to build trust with the child. They don't sabotage their own class by letting a child go mid-float before they're ready. Kids remember that shit.
- The ability to talk to paranoid parents is an art. One I have not refined.
- Insecure Instructors are just that. Insecure. We have the knowledge in our brains, we're aware of the methods of how to convey it, but fuck, what if I'm wrong? What if the parent was an old instructor? What if the kid doesn't get it?

And the Parents. There's a dissection better saved for another time. Probably needs a few entries to go over the entire world of parents who believe in their core that little Jimmy is Gifted.

Now, the instructor I mentioned at the beginning isn't nearly as neurotic. She's just new at this and hasn't been allowed the time to hone her skills. She'll soon grow confidence and Oh The Places She'll Go.

In the meantime, I hope she learns the art of staying afloat.

Blink

Just now I was eating a half assed warm tuna melt in Just Us and I looked down at the pickle on my plate.
What if I had never seen a pickle before? I would think that they were an animal.
Green, clammy, bumpy and soft on the inside.
Slug genocide by the hand of slobbering snuffling humans.
It secretes liquid when scared, and smells acrid as a defense mechanism.
On land it is immobile, however once in mud it propels itself via air propulsion located in small gastric sacks located in the dark green bumps on its body.These are two petrified Pickles with their feelers still attached.

The Pickle's natural predators are worms (who needle through the crunchy exterior to slurp in the jelly innards) and moles who rely on the intestines of the Pickle to insulate their nests.
It finds nourishment in the garbage juice that seeps from garbage cans. Hot days are the best, as the garbage becomes saturated with bacteria and noxious liquids feeding the Pickles for days.
On garbage days, Pickles venture to the graveyard where the bone marrow and hair from corpses provide an alternative to the preferred waste juices.
Pickles are harvested using a small vacuum that glugs the Pickles up from the ground.
Washed in dish soap and clipped of their feelers, the Pickles are left to wallow in their own secretions in a cold space until they are devoured by pig faced monsters. The squelching sound they make when consumed is the quiet screaming of pain as they die without sedative.



Pickles are now an endangered species and need your help to keep them alive. Their infants are harvested and impaled on stakes served at social gatherings of the Pig Faced Monsters. The Elders are cubed and gnashed together as a spread for meats.
Pickles are a docile species and their culture and way of life are at risk of being ruined forever. With the Pig Faced Monsters separating the garbage into sections, the juices Pickles feed on are less potent leaving some colonies dying of starvation and malnourishment.

Please donate to the World Wildlife Fund and save the Pickles from extinction.

Old World Clutter

My entire existence is of two minds. Every teacher, every instructor, friend, professor, everyone at some point or other has commented in some fashion to my 'neither here nor there' tendencies.
My acting professor this term wanted to ring my neck because I was never in my body.
I am a 'hit or miss' actress.
which is fine, seeing as how I'm not going to be an actress professionally any time soon.
I don't know whether my flighty essence is a bad thing or a good thing.

One particular aspect of My Flighty Attitude is...interesting.My binge and purge room.
I tend to hoard knick knacks. candy wrappers, ticket stubs, photo booth pictures, term papers,receipts. I hoard everything.
I carry my life around me in a little dumpy halo of five second memories contained in small tidbits of my life.
In order for me to be comfortable in my space I have to be surrounded by bits of my past life. To 'ground me.'
I carry two notebooks with me where ever I go and I doubt I'll ever throw them out. They're a type of security blanket. If I'm ever stuck waiting for some one (which is a devastatingly frequent occurrence within my theatre company) I can doodle and people watch and write.

However, once every five or six months I start to become claustrophobic. This dumpy halo is heavy around me and I don't have the wing span I used to have. So what do I do? purge the halo of a couple of pounds until its just a mist around me.
I'm feeling the niggling in my stomach for the need to wash away my clutter.
I have moved into my new room, and looking at the shelves upon shelves of crap, I realize that while I needed that crap to ground me in my old room, it won't work in this one. This room has a different frequency to it and therefore needs a new halo.
Before I actually unpack all my things I'm stuck in a limbo of deciding whether I'm ready to rid myself of my security blanket.

I'm like a jelly fish. Jellyfish move in expansions and contractions. Their skirts open wide and then squeeze together propelling them forward in a heartbeat pulse. My skirt expands with all my junk and insecurities and then I squeeze them all away allowing me to propel myself forward for a few months, or a year.

Occasionally I'll come across a little galaxy in my halo of an entire life that I no longer live. I must be ruthless, so I hold a little funeral for the photos, notes and ticket stubs and then throw them away. The feeling of loss is only temporary, and I'll feel lighter in a week or so. Other times I find things that I simply cannot throw away, like my notebooks. They're just too close to rip apart.

Sometimes I purge people. (a common thing to do on facebook, apparently) Every so often there will be this 300lb presence of a person and the only way for me to survive this crushing weight is to purge.

At the end of it, I feel lighter, happier and mobile. I can go anywhere without worrying about leaving something behind.
Perhaps that's the reason why I'm like this. Too much weight and you're grounded forever in the same place. If you're lighter, you can fly farther. (hence the term, flighty?) Explore people, books, scents, noses, mud, breathe... without worrying about leaving a trail.

Wish me luck on my quest to clean the clutter.

Swim Types

Oh water, how I love thee.
I've spent a large amount of time submerged in chlorine, lake water, bath water, sea water...
Working as a lifeguard and an instructor gives me the perfect combination of my two favourite things: water and people watching.

I find humans combined with any element is far more entertaining to watch than humans interacting with each other. There's bound to be disaster.

Take for example the jock who believes that because he can whip down the field in less than three seconds, he can swim a mile.
Heavy, thick set, bulging muscles and hair on his entire body. Arms rotated forward in a bull dog walk and his traps are on some serious 'roids. Wearing billabong swim trunks that are more suited for surf boards, volley ball with your bromance buddies and tanning oil.
Walks in slightly disoriented, and chooses the first lane he sees. Hops in.
He's thinkin 'alright, I got this. In the water, step one complete.'
takes a furtive look around, no one cares to look at him except the guards, but he daren't look at us because that's just scary.
Takes a few strokes, head up. Alright, not so bad. I got this.
Keeps going. Now he's getting confident. A sudden surge of testosterone and BAM off like a shot to the other end. and SWOOSH back to our side.
Cock of the Walk, completed 50m all on his own.
But then he notices this pressure on his chest. Has the water always felt so heavy? And every single one of his muscles is alive and saying 'now now Junior. Think this through.'
Doesn't listen. Tries to keep up the same speed. Stops halfway through the length. Doggie paddles to the other side. The muscles are now screaming 'BITCH. WATCHOO THINKING?!'
Decides, well 50m is pretty far, I'll just breast stroke to the other side and take a break.
and his lungs are saying 'If you ever make me do that again I will kill you.'
He gets to the other side. Hangs off the diving block. Stretches traps. Smirks at other people taking rests in neighbouring lanes. Bounces up and down. Hangs off the diving block. Smirks. Bounces again. ahhh, should be going soon hmmm? OOp, forgot to stretch the other side. Should just do that. Alright, when the little hand gets to the thirty, or no...the 50, then I'll go.
He sees his friend in the other lane. Actually not a friend at all, just some one he sees in Soc class, but he'd rather talk to anyone than brave the water.
'aw man, I could go so fast right now but my lungs man. I think I'm sick. Figure I'll just take it easy tonight come back tomorrow."
Gets out. Doesn't come back.

You'd think I'm being judgmental. But I've been watching you people for over two years.
I've seen every type of jock hop in the water like its nothing and then leave fifteen minutes later with their tail between their legs.
I don't know what it is about swimming, but people figure that because they took lessons when they were but wee ones, that they can just jump in one day and swim thirty lengths.
Now, it is totally possible to swim thirty lengths if you're a sort-of swimmer or a piddle-paddle swimmer. or even a I-swam-once-and-nearly-drowned swimmer. Anyone can swim.
It'll take you up to three months of swimming regularly to get anywhere good.
But you aint no Michael Phelps. 'Specially you jocks out there. Your muscles have formed to sweep you across fields and take pain like a champ. Not slice through water.

But, like Ratatouille (the movie) and its conceit: anyone can cook. even a rat.
Anyone can swim. Even a jock.

The process of swimming just provides endless entertainment for us guards who are getting paid to save your life the day your heavy muscles sink you to the bottom of the pool.

Four AM, Cirque on the Mind

I found the most beautiful thing. http://www.bu.edu/today/node/7818

It'd be even greater if Hagrid didn't show up in the last fifteen seconds and ruin it all.

I'm an insomniac. Perhaps that word is a little extreme. There's too much expectation behind it.
I'm a jiggery sleeper. I don't sleep much. My 4 am is your 12 am.
Lately I've tried watching movies I've seen over and over to lull me to sleep.

Last nights attempt was Quidam.

Supersex androgynous spandex
hanging from hoops and red silk curtains
swinging around to formulaic music
we end on jazz hands

Cirque loves the over abundance of roles onstage. Quidam for example:

Little girl and parents. - The main watcher of the performance or the central focus the performance is geared to in the show, is a child figure. Perhaps to reintroduce us to the innocence of childhood, or to give us permission to view the performance like children; with a naked eye. Permission to believe what we're seeing and be dazzled.

Quidam - omnious figure that jump starts the entire illusion. In Alegria, it is the Ring Leader, Saltimbanco its the fat stomached pajama man.

Zombie parents - showing the departure from our world into the illusion

Little girl ushers (three people that guide her through the show as companions)

Comic relief clown and croonies

and the part that I find most interesting: two or three characters that sit on stage as audience. So we the audience watch an audience watching a little girl watching a performance.
metametatheatrical?
Cirque loves plugging in audience characters. Also found in Alegria and Saltimbanco.

Another recurring role is the singer who acts as a deux ex machina esque character who sits on high in the background melting one act into another. When I saw Quidam as a wee one, she was a white princess character (oddly not present in the video version...) in Alegria, its two women, Saltimbanco, is one woman in a siick coat-cape.

Also, the role of the band is not just an auditory aid. Even they are outfitted in elaborate costumes and makeup, sometimes trotting across the stage with drums and other hand held instruments. Nothing is allowed to stay in the background permanently. Everyone must be present.

Quidam is darker themed than Alegria. Perhaps mature would be a better description.
You have the girl draped in red curtains knotted and bound, the chorus of women with nooses and blue gauze bags on their heads and the orgy like white people making human sculptures.
The closing song does say 'quidam le soiree l'amour.' It's necessary to show all shades of l'amour.
The lighting is grey and blue washes with hits of colour, whereas Alegira and Saltimbanco are more saturated.

The sad thing about Cirque which is also a great thing, is that it has become world renowned. I would love to time travel back when I was born and see Cirque in its infancy. Now that they have millions of dollars, they can do whatever they want in terms of lighting, special effects and daring new acts. I think it could draw away from the performance itself.
This is something that was discussed in one of my theatre classes. Sure we see amazing things, but wouldn't it be greater to see what they could make of nothing?
That's the sort of spectacle that I love. While Quidam and the sheer beauty of its performance will always have a place in my heart, I will always be drawn to those who make something from nothing.

The Greatest Worst Movie

Being an art student, I get to benefit from practical examinations while the rest of you textbook slaves needle away memorizing useful things like... I don't know, whatever it is you boring people study.
I'm kidding.

Anyways, I was left exam-less and what better way to spend a day than to frolic in the concrete wasteland of New Minas and watch a movie.

I went with my friend Tom, which means that already we were headed for trouble simply because when Tom and I hang out we are a rampaging couple of assholes. Funny assholes. But assholes nonetheless. So here we were standing in front of the theatah and our options are dismal. So, why bore ourselves with a mediocre movie when we could see DRAGON BALL EVOLUTION?

Never mind going to see a movie worth the eight dollars, lets nuke our brains with the biggest crap movie of life. The empty theatre should have been clue enough that this movie was going to take a steaming dump on our faces. It was awesome.

First of all, the acting: Now maybe this is because I'm a theatre major which automatically makes me a pretentious douche, but I swear to God there wasn't a moment where I wasn't cringing. Emmy Rossum is in the movie. Fucking Phantom of the Opera is in DRAGONBALL. Girl sang with Pavarotti and she's running around a green screen 'tracking energies'?
Here is a sample of the ace acting:
'Are you the one who stole my orb?'
'no, are you the one that killed my grandfather?'
'no, give me your orb'
'no, I promised on the death of my grandfather that I would not give away my orb'
'well, mine was stolen. Can I buy yours?'
'no.'
'I could have killed you.'

This conversation could be funny, if they didn't say it in complete earnest.

On top of the effects whose sole focus was on slow motion water droplets and colourful mist, the writing which was full of the typical 'i won't lose you' lines, and lots of yummy plot holes...one of our ex-profs showed up.
And he wasn't there to make fun of it.

So yes, Dragonball Evolution is an awful movie. There wasn't one single thing in that movie that saved it. But its so awful, it's amazing.

I'd download it. You should too.