Events Planning

Twice a year, in my job, I am responsible for putting together a meeting for a group of creative and humble people that receive money or have received money to do interesting and important things. I'm lucky to have responsibility and trust and somewhat free reign in how these meetings happen. I have a relatively generous budget to do this and a staff person devoted to helping me make everything happen the way we would like it to. I like these people and enjoy seeing them and derive a great deal of gratification from producing an event that is helpful and interesting. It's the best possible circumstance under which to have such a role.

These meetings, however, make me a tad bit insane. I am somewhat of a mess the day before and the day after. I obsess about the finer details of the conversation, the catering, the quality of the moderator, you name it. After all is said and done, I often find myself in the most inconvenient places in a puddle of my own tears. I once broke down in the middle of a party, in fact it was a salsa/tango themed holiday event at the United Nations . My boyfriend at the time whisked me out there and onto a bus heading towards home and very helpfully pointed out that it could be worse. I could work at the sporting goods store that we were driving past.

That is all to say that this is one of those weeks where I have this particular meeting that is crazy making. And I am starting to feel the crunch.

Pasos

After my little victory on Sunday at the dance studio, I suffered a smack-down. Last night, I was back at the Salsa Workout Class at the Y, where we did some samba. Usually half way through the class we all go to the side of the classroom and dance forward across the floor, in some combination. I hate this part, because its harder to follow the teacher and it's too easy to bump into someone. It is visually arresting to see ourselves in the mirror when we all get it sort of right, this crowd of students dancing behind our teacher a la Fame. The smack-down came when had to do this particular samba step that was totally complicated. I couldn't do it, I couldn't even pretend to do it. I could sort of struggle through some of the other parts with some flailing arm motions that approximated what my teacher was doing, but this one step I just gave up on. The, later in the class when we went back to salsa, there was another little step that involved a hip roll, which also seems to be beyond me. I hate how ill-coordinated my body it. I just hate it. Also, I got a haircut which I'm not too fond of. It's that kind of week.

Another Sunday night at home

Today I went to church, which was good. It's hard to say that without kind of wincing, because I feel like it communicates this whole set of messages about the way I might think and what my priorities might be that are just incorrect. Saying, "today I went to church" rings of mom, dad, and the kids dressed in Sunday best shaking the pastors hand, singing hymns, reading the Bible and generally thinking about being the upstanding members of the community. And that's not what I'm about at all. But I won't belabor this point any longer. I did go to church. I had a hangover and I slipped out early to get to my salsa class, but I went, and I felt better for it.

What was really cool about today was the salsa class. Because nobody showed up. It was just me and the teacher, so I got to practice dancing with a partner for a full forty minutes. I made lots of mistakes and I have to give him credit for being tirelessly patient. I would get something right, and then get it wrong again a moment later, but I did get some things right, some of the time. And it was fun. It was really really fun, dancing around the studio.

Enemy of the People

Here is yet another sign of the new United States version of fascism on the rise. There is a legislator in Texas who wants to name a stretch of interstate for country music legend Willie Nelson. Says the AP article...

"But two Republican senators, Steve Odgen of Bryan and Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio, said they didn't want Nelson's name on the road that crosses their districts, citing the musician's fondness for drinking and smoking, and active campaigning for Democratic candidates."

It's that last little bit that gets me. They kind of betray themselves, though with the smoking and drinking part too. I mean, how many country music legends don't have songs that glorify drinking and smoking?

People doing impressive work in exciting places

Newyorquina salutes my colleague and pal, M. who is starting a public health fellowship in Kigali, Rwanda. M. is documenting her experiences in a blog of her own that is thoughtful and entertaining.

Mashie

Dear God, what torture and angst I have been spouting. Let's talk about music.

Today I am listening Los Angeles's Indie 103.1, which is about the best radio station in existance, I'd guess. They just played the mash-up of the day, which was a combination of Mirror in the Bathroom by English Beat and Riding on the Metro by Berlin. Call me old fashioned, I'd just as soon hear both songs one after another.

Difficulty

Rereading that last post I sound awfully discontented, so I think I should add a word or so more to this. I'm not at all unhappy in my life or really dissatisfied with the things I have been able to do in my education, spare time, and professional life. Moving to New York, grad school, the job I have been in for several years, losing 30 lbs and keeping it off, learning another language, teaching English are all activities that do in fact have loads of meaning for me and I don't underestimate the importance of them. So it's not that I have really been blocked or had difficulty finding meaningful things to do and I don't take the capacity to do any of this for granted. I think what is bothering me, and has been bothering me since the election is a larger question about how to organize my life. There are all sorts of universal difficulties, sometimes caused by nature and chance, but more often caused by human error, greed, indifference, and apathy. We all are guilty of various incarnations of this from time to time, although some obviously more than others. We all learn our roles, our place, and our way of fitting in and making it in this world. Those lessons teach us ways of shielding ourselves from all the potential ill that could come to pass (financial ruin, loneliness, illness, being the victim of a crime.) We develop ways of being to protect ourselves, but those habits insulate us from strangers and from the unknown. These habits are ground into us from the day we are first spoken to (along the lines of don't talk to that strange man, don't go to those parts of town.) Changing the way we interact with one another ranges from challenging to impossible. From the little bit I know about her life, Marla Ruzicka was so clearly an example of someone who was able to transcend some of these day to day rules and regulations that we all live by to a certain extent.

Last fall, my friend who teaches seventh grade knew I wanted to do some volunteer work in the neighborhood, so he set me up with one of his students, a teenage girl whose had loads of trouble with her family and with schoolwork. She didn't do work in school, was stubborn and intransigent with teachers and with her foster mom, but when we got settled in at my apartment, she would try any excercise I asked her to. At the beginning, it was super-awkward, and often making conversation with her was next to impossible. I was conscious of the fact that didn't know much about what the kids are listening to and on the walk to my apartment I sometimes gave up on thinking of things to talk to her about. The first few times I was supposed to pick her up I desperately wished I has dinner plans with friends or could go home and watch TV, but it did get more comfortable over time. She was probably about three years behind in her reading level, so reading books was a little torturous, but we were plugging away, and I kind of got into finding little excercises that might be good for her. In the end though after a few months, she quit showing up for tutoring, and after she stood me up a couple times, I told her mom to please call me in the future, but for now it didn't seem to be working out. I took from all this 1) that it is that it's hard to get yourself out of your comfort zone, to do something different with someone who isn't necessarily going to be comfortable around you, 2) perhaps I'm not necessarily well-equipped to help someone with a different life history and experience, 3) even though I probably live an eighth of a mile from this child, in a certain sense we don't share a community or neighborhood, we function in entirely separate worlds, and finally 4) poverty and abuse and crappy schools make it hard for kids to learn and shut people off to new experiences.

And then I read about someone like Marla Ruzicka and I feel a little helpless, I guess.

Cog

I have been thinking more about Marla Ruzicka and about what I said about "feeling insignificant in my less than robust life" a day or so ago. Yesterday, I was in therapy trying to explain my thinking about her to my shrink, because one of the points that he makes all the time is how I need to focus on living, dealing with daily stresses, doing work on my house, saving vs spending, balancing rest with play as unremarkable, as normal occurences and dynamics to be managed with a minimum of anxiety or self-judgement. (I don't have an anxiety disorder or anything, but perhaps I am a wee bit prone to obsession.) I was saying that focusing on this as a goal in therapy is, in some respects, self-indulgent. To worry about living well and buying things for your home and organizing your life so you derive gratification from it seems to be such a capitulation. We are all such little cogs in the system that constantly puts up barriers to doing meaningful or valuable things, barriers to doing things that have real significance or meaning for people around us. And here is this woman that was concerned about the war in Afghanistan who just bought a plane ticket and set herself up as her own human rights advocacy outfit, started an NGO, got funding and, in some cases through the sheer force of her personality, made a measurable impact on the biggest crisis of the time. Yesterday, I actually found a conservative blogger, who I won't dignify with a link, that dismissed Marla Ruzicka as "a contributor to the World Socialist Web Site and an admirer of Fidel Castro." The very act of trying to do something to counterbalance the bloodiness of the Iraq war is called into question.

Now on paper, I realize this sounds like your classic leftie hand-wringing (apologies to Allison Bechdel) and perhaps I shouldn't be working myself into a state over some silly bloggers. I've allied myself with the tortured classically-white liberal guilt informed community organizing at various points in the past. At other times, felt really frustrated by them. So, perhaps I am engaging in pointless navel gazing, but I feel like I'm reflecting on something that a lot of people feel, which is that we are relatively powerless to change the course of things in this country right now and that organizing your life to make any sort of meaningful contribution against the less admirable dynamics of human behavior is tough.