How do you deal with being one-sided?

I’ve always been ambidextrous. I write, brush my teeth, and use a fork with my left. I play racquet sports, knit, and use chopsticks with my right (so I can write and eat with chopsticks but not with a fork!). I can do everything on this list with my other hand, and there are a lot of things I don’t have any hand preference for whatsoever, though the more complicated the action, the more I develop a preference based on sheer repetition.

I’m asking this question because I’m in the process of trying to be more casual about dance training because I realize that I really can’t do dance three hours a day while working on a novel and writing a dissertation. So I decided to take up ping pong (ok, table tennis), which seems to suit me in that I can play it whenever and I haven’t been doing it since I was a kid and I’m too old so there’s no career pressure involved.

So I play ping pong maybe an hour or two three days a week. But the next day, I feel this weird soreness on the right side of my body that I find completely bizarre. I mean, is that just something everyone who plays a one-handed sport gets used to? At least with tennis, I used a two-handed backhand so I didn’t feel so lopsided. I’m finding it rather alarming and maybe I’m just looking for reassurance that it gets better, or tips about how to maybe even things out. I’ve already moved my mouse to my left side and am making sure to do most of my carrying with my left hand. Help!

Writing and the Body

Lately, I’ve found myself writing a lot more, mainly because I’m working on both fiction and academic projects, which means that I often spend entire days typring in front of my computer, only pausing to take short breaks to eat and maybe take a walk. It’s during days like these that the necessity of cooking actually becomes a treat, since it involves the physical acts of shopping for and preparing food.

However, this also means that I’ve been dancing less than I used to. For the past few years, I’ve been taking class five or six days a week, most of the time two or even three classes, but lately I’ve only been training every other day. My body will probably eventually adjust, but right now it feels strange, and it makes me wonder whether my writerly ambitions are getting in the way of me leading the healthiest life I could.

Any thoughts or tips on how you balance your physical and mental activities?

The Academic Arcade

A number of discussions have caused me to ponder why I choose to be a comparative literature grad student. One was with a junior here at Cornell who is contemplating grad school, but has reservations about how the field is mired in privilege, doesn’t serve people directly, and still operates from a largely Western perspective. I definitely empathize with her reservations, but also find myself asking which fields in the United States are not like this, in the sense that we confer benefits to those whose forms of intelligence we value, and that such intelligence tends to be acquired unequally based on social factors. Occasionally, people like us come from disadvantaged backgrounds and end up occupying these positions. It’s a really tricky path because it’s hard not to feel commodified because of one’s background, but it’s also a position that’s most suited for questioning and commenting on the particular assumptions of a field. Comparative literature in my experience has been extremely open to such questioning.

I’m also somewhat wary of arguments about “direct” service, as someone whose parents work in direct service fields (my mom as a nutritionist at a prison and my dad until recently as a social worker). They’ve raised me with the sense that my first priority is to do something that makes me happy, because it doesn’t serve other people for me to do things that make me unhappy. I’m certainly less wary about what they do than those in other professions who claim to improve quality of life while expending enormous resources, or ending up making products that promote inequality because only the rich can access them.

Literary study is a relatively low-resource field. Its benefits are debatable but it doesn’t have a lot of potential to be destructive. And most of all, it’s fun. I know that fun as a category that should arouse suspicion, but I still think it has a lot of merit as a basis for doing things, even if we consistently have to question why things are fun, so that we don’t end up being blind to the problems caused by activities we like.

Efforts and Encounters

After giving two different papers in two different conferences the past two weekends (lots of two’s here), there’s definitely something comforting about writing something that isn’t for anything “official.” I want to be better about documenting my activities, but I’m so busy that it’s somehow becoming quite difficult for me to perform the simple action of using my digital camera, because I don’t look forward to having to upload the pictures onto my computer later. And in this image-driven culture of ours, there’s definitely something about the unadorned word that strikes even me–a huge lover of words–as austere.

Last weekend’s conference at Cornell, which I helped organize and did a fair amount of design work for, reminded me how fun it is to just have a bunch of people in a room together talking about a bunch of different things, and how one can make so many unlikely connections just by being around interesting people. It’s a tendency of mine to cycle through periods of sociability and lonerism, and the conference definitely made me feel inclined to be more social.

A lot of what I talked about had to do with incorporating physicality in a realm that has such an emphasis on the textual, given that it was a comparative literature conference. I used a physical model to describe some of my theoretical ideas, asserted that the location of the critic is vital to the actual criticism, designed programs that emphasized tactility, etc. This was easier to do in a physical conference. I’m now going to turning my ideas into an academic paper, which introduces an even more complicated set of challenges.

Saved by Time

I was on my way to dance class yesterday morning and Igor, my partner, decided to walk with me part of the way. When it came time for us to part, he gave me a lingering kiss that lasted a few seconds, before sending me on my way. I walked across the street and as I was about to reach the sidewalk, a large mass of ice and snow fell from a building ledge about six stories up, and landed with a cracking sound on the ground.

“It’s a good thing no one got hit,” I heard someone say.

I would have been, had Igor not kissed me. Or if I hadn’t lingered to put on my shoes, or if I had walked just a tiny bit faster. But why is it that the first reason is the one I prefer?

Hectic and Rescue

It’s been a fairly hectic few weeks since the start of classes and being back in school, which is strange because I don’t have any courses this semester and am preparing for my comprehensive exams. I’ve decided to use the time tracking tool Rescuetime to keep track of my productivity. Some friends have pointed out that using this tool is somewhat against my ethos of doing what I like and not worrying about it.

There is a certain sense in which Rescuetime turns time into a valuable commodity, parceling it out into little pieces. But there’s also a sense in which it allows me to be more able to do the things I want to do. Ultimately, I would prefer to read a book most of the time than watching TV or playing on the Internet, and Rescuetime puts this reminder in my head about that every time I go on Facebook or Twitter.

Thankfully, I’m crocheting hyperbolic models for a conference talk at NYU in March (more details later), so it’s actually productive for me to watch movies on the Internet, at least for now.

Breathing

I woke up today at 5:30 a.m., my usual waking time, for the first time in a while. I’ve been on winter break and it was the first one in a little while where I traveled a lot (Hawaii mainly, then San Francisco). I’ve always been ambivalent about the benefits of travel compared to the comforts of staying home, the perspective you gain from being in other places and the insight you have by being around environments that are familiar to you.

In my head I somehow associate these feelings with two authors, Jane Austen and James Conrad. Austen I’ve long enjoyed, even if her world is so circumscribed not only in terms of location but of class. But there’s something about the movements a social world completely unknown to me when I first read her that I found so much fun to read.

I didn’t really get to love Conrad until I read Almayer’s Folly in Hawaii. Maybe it was partly that I was reading about a world of travel as I was traveling, but it is also maybe an identification with the Southeast Asian world he evokes (having grown up in the Philippines), compared to the Africa with Heart of Darkness that I appreciated in the way so many literature students are taught to, but have never really loved. So why do I enjoy the foreign world of Austen and the familiar world of Conrad? I guess I’m not really sure, though I suppose I do tend to gravitate towards novels with strong female characters, and Heart of Darkness doesn’t have that.

If it takes travel to appreciate Conrad, then I suppose it’s definitely worthwhile. And I was in Hawaii so I suppose I don’t have anything to complain about.

Handed Identity

I’ve always considered myself left-handed because I write with my left hand but lately I’m becoming more used to the reality that I am in fact substantially ambidextrous since I also perform a lot of tasks with my right hand, i.e. catching, chopsticks, sewing, etc. Though interestingly enough, I both prefer to balance and kick with my right foot. Preferring a different hand and foot is what scientists call cross-laterality.

Speaking of, do you know that there’s an entire journal dedicated to body and mind asymmetry? It’s called Laterality and it seems pretty awesome. It has article titles like “Hand preference for sending phone text messages” and “Lateralisation in trunk movements of captive Asian elephants.” So many fun abstracts to read!

Dance! Teaching! Happiness!

These are some of the students from my Dance As Writing class performing some choreography we worked on for an informal showing. Feldenkrais people may notice the application of such concepts as opening and closing and distributing weight through the whole self to hip hop choreography. I’m so proud of them and how relaxed they all are, especially since some of them haven’t had a lot of performing experience. We were working with mostly modern dance concepts in the class, but decided to apply them to an urban dance form since it’s the kind of movement my students are most familiar with. The result is a hip hop / Merce Cunningham / Trisha Brown-type mashup.

Knitting a Baby Dress and Other Philosophies

I took a rather hasty webcam image of my latest knitting project, a baby dress courtesy of Blue Sky Alpaca, using an alpaca/silk blend. It’s a Christmas gift for a friend’s baby.

I love the sense of contemplation that comes with knitting, the way that I’m able to put together ideas and memories in that state.  There’s something about using my sense of touch for extended periods of time that connects me to the world in a unique way. This reminds me of the Confucius proverb: “What I hear I forget, What I see I remember, What I touch I understand.”

I used to do my own designs, but these days I just follow patterns from other people. I hope to be able to design again. It’s like the difference between choreographing and dancing. For me, executing either a dance movement or a knitted pattern always gives me the desire to figure out how it works, and come up with my own designs and variations. Unfortunately, I’m supposed to be studying for a comprehensive exam so designing is probably going to have to wait a little while.

Information on the pattern for this dress can be found at the Blue Sky Alpaca web site. More pictures of this dress can be found on my Flickr page.