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!

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?

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.

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.

“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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.