Slow days no more.

This is a completely personal post. I warned you.

So, I haven't been blogging much this week. The truth is that I have been in a bit of a crap mood. There are various reasons for this, and I really have no excuse to be in a bad mood because I had two marvelous ladies cook dinner for me this week, neither of whom would even let me do the dishes.* Yet, if I had any question left about whether or not the belly dancing has been very, very good for my mental stability, it was answered this week when my teacher went on vacation.** I am still doing yoga and I have had a few very good classes but, in general, the yoga classes at the gym I have been going to aren't very serious and they don't leave me with that feeling of being so into what you are doing that it is utterly impossible to think about whatever you would normally be thinking about. Meditation is much easier for me when it is coupled with complete physical immersion/exhaustion and that is what I found so addictive about the power yoga. It is also why I have always loved dance and pretty roundly hated dance classes, especially the aerobic dance that is sold to you at most gyms.

However, the belly dancing, and I am well aware that this is partly due to the method of my teacher (which amounts to: throw everyone in the deep end and make sure they keep dancing, no matter what), has been becoming that sort of almost meditative exercise for me recently and I needed it desperately. Most of you know that the last year or two has been pretty difficult for me and the emotional stress I had been under meant that any spiritual center I had was not being well-tended, but this New Year's I (and several friends) swore that this was the year of change. Though it has been happening more slowly than I like, things have been changing and I am not ignorant of the fact that poetry and belly dancing (and my mother, who made me join her gym when she saw they had begun offering it and only occasionally yells at me for being a slob) have been part of the reason.




*I am a person full of contradictions; I am a complete slob, especially if I am in a place where I don't get visitors much, but I am also known for going over to people's houses and doing their dishes. When I was actually living in my very own college town this impulse, and the squalor some particular persons lived in, occasionally resulted in me feeling the need to clean bathrooms. I'll tell you, there are few things that make people think you are a kook like disappearing from a party for half an hour only to inform them that their bathroom is now acceptable. In my defense, I only ever did this when I knew the people very well; I wasn't the bathroom-cleaning bandit of Clemson University; and I never actually used the word acceptable. I used to bake cakes when the party was at my own house.

** I also owe a large thank you to several people who listened to me rant and rave last week about the idea of manufactured sexuality brought on by substitute dance teacher trying to sell "sexy" hip-hop as a replacement for belly dancing: "NO, I will not touch my body and make googly eyes at the mirror while wagging no with my finger!" and Vanessa Williams should not be airbrushed to within an inch of her life to appear on the cover of a magazine.