smiling over my shoulder

i went to a chiropractor today. dr. troy chamberlin. it was my first visit as part of my new determination to FIX MY BODY so that i can start working out again as well as dance with more freedom. (someone flipped me into a backbend while i was dancing in ny and i had to go find ice and lie down during a party. sucksass. no more.) dr. troy was nice. a little over-eager cheerleader-ish, but then i expected that.

so i'm sure it's human nature that every injured person wants to think that their health problems are special and waaaay more interesting and intriguing and baffling than anyone else's. can we agree on this? right. so i have that inclination, cuz i'm human. well all my self-importance was validated and i was left with a sense of smug satisfaction when, halfway through the session, after a few not-so-successful attempts to adust my upper back, the doctor said, 'i will see and adjust 50 people before lunch today. you will be the only one who i can't adjust.' HA! i'm SOOOO cool.

note: apparently one is not supposed to wait six months between the point at which one receives an injury and the point at which one goes to see a physician to discuss and remedy the symptoms of the injury.

so the long and short of it is that i have three (#$%&!!!) chiro appointments next week. by the third one he thinks he'll be able to slightly adjust my back. is it all a ploy to extract cash from an unwitting innocent? perhaps. but at this point i'm willing to put my cynicism aside and be completely gullible for at least...let's say...three weeks.

one good sign: he *did* manage to adjust my neck and jaw, and those feel great.

(p.s. thank's to amy's friend kate for the recommendation! so far, so good...)

i have to be at my new job in 50 minutes. BIG sigh... work... ugh and yuck.

oh, and btw, i'm terribly terribly nervous. wish me luck.

so fyi and i'll stop posting for the evening:

the whole earth festival (wef), held on the uc davis campus in good ol' davis, california, is taking place on may 6, 7, and 8 this year. that's friday, saturday, and sunday of mother's day weekend.

i've been on wef staff since i was 19 years old. it was the focus of my life during my seven years in davis. i'm still helping out, and am trying to manifest a toyspace at this year's festival. i'd love it if you all wanted to come visit.

ok, so wef is a three-day free festival. it is managed and put together by a small staff of volunteers and semi-payed amateurs who strive to abide by the principles of sustainability, non-violence, and community as they plan. check out the website: wef.ucdavis.edu. the festival is all vegetarian, mostly organic, mostly vegan, has 95% waste diversion... all crafts are hand-made by the people who sell them; there are *lots* of education booths, workshops, and speakers; there is lots of local music and dance (two main music stages, one dj stage, one dance stage)... it's similar to oregon country faire in some ways, but on a smaller scale. 20-30,000 attendees each year over the three days.

the festival hours...
friday noon-10pm
saturday 9am-10pm
sunday 9am-5pm

i'm hoping i can be there friday, but might only make it on saturday and sunday. interested in coming? need a place to crash? let me know and we'll logisticate. looking forward to seeing you there!!

(note: i know this is all ridiculously outdated. but this is my journal, and i'm updating it. apologies!)

a few months ago, my friend sara told me that i had to mark the calendar for a party she was going to throw for her birthday in early march. she had enlisted the services of two of our favorite djs and was going to throw a super-cool house party with ooah and dorfex bos headlining. a couple months later, i found myself working excitedly to prepare my new house for the aforementioned festivities.

my housemates and i threw a breaks party, and it rockedass. besides ooah and dorfex, sara also got smoove and donna matrix to spinnnn their vinyl. the whole experience made me even more excited to have moved. i mean hulLO, a bunch of my favorite djs playing records directly outside the door to my room?!? pinch me.

despite fierce competition from some uk breaks artists playing elsewhere for the first half of the night, we had a few hundred awesome lovelies chillin at all times throughout the evening, from round about 11pm til we pulled sound in the breaks room at 6am. friend kelly (dj omni) brought us a system and made things sound good downstairs. we also had a bunch of downtempo djs keeping the upstairs space comfy cozy yum.

i know this this after-the-fact, but let this serve as a huge thank you thank you thank you to everyone who came by. i had a great time (or so i'm told ;) and it was really special to see so many of my community blissing out in my new home.

(housemates sara and dan are breakzheadz, but housemate whit is a psy-trancer. whit and i talked the day after the party about our relative experiences with the crowd we'd had the night before. he said that he'd been a bit nervous since he hardly knew anyone, and told me about how he was used to the parties at our house being full of psy-trance kids who he knew he could count on if anything got out of hand. i was proud to be able to tell him that the night before i had felt that same thing--i knew that i was safe and in a good space full of people i trusted and who would help me out if the party went in a weird direction. purrrs and hugs and such, kittens. you're lovely.)

i moved. to san francisco. and i love it.

seth and i found out about 2 weeks before our trip that we were going to have to move out of our apartment by march 2nd. ikes and yikes and yipes, no? seriously. so we had to both find places to live before we left. and then we were scheduled to get back into the u.s. on february 26th, a saturday, leaving us not-a-lot-of-weekend-time with which to relocate our possessions. despite the massive lifespan-decreasing amounts of stress that this caused, everything ended up working out. half an hour after posting on tribe, i received a message from a friend, letting me know that there was a spot opening in her household. the place was amazing, the room available was huge, and the people seemed good.

so i moved to a wonderful warehouse space in the mission. the people ARE good--i love my living situation.

i live with three housemates--sara, dan, and whit. we get along well and have fun together. it feels great to have roommates i have life in common with. at first i was worried that i'd have too much in common with sara. she and i met at a hoop day and then at a breaks party, and i was nervous that our lives might overlap too much. but nope! i actually would love to have *more* social time with her! and each time i get to play with any of my housemates at a party i get ridiculously excited--they're all fanTAStic.

my room is huge. and guess what? one of the previous inhabitants decided that the ceiling of the room would be best decorated by draping long *orange* tapestries to cover the rafters and piping. uh-huh. the majority of the ceiling is orange. and i had NOthing to do with it :)

and mmmm....living in a neighborhood again...with actual stores and restaurants... oh oh oh! and i'm living *so close* to so many of my friends!!! i can have dinner with people now, and run by to borrow clothes, and have people *over*!! and i'm within walking distance of cellspace and mighty and amnesia...and cabbing distance from 1015 and half a dozen other party spaces... and then of course i already told you about the food coop a few blocks away...

I LOVE MY NEW HOME!!!

so i went to belize. and then i came back. and it was fun :)

anyone even know anything about belize? cuz i didn't. i assumed it was all latin-influenced and typical central american stereotyped and such. yeah, no. it's crazy carribbean flava.

i went with my then-housemate seth and his girlfriend agnes. the motivation for the trip was my need to visit my friend nikki, who has been down there for the last year and a half with the peace corps.

we took off thursday, february 17th (my birthday, wOOt!), taking a red-eye down to belize city. having had virtually no sleep the night before (thanks to good dancing and a yummy birthday present from friend ian), the fact that i then proceeded to get another 0 hours of sleep on the plane meant that my first day in-country consisted primarily of naptime. but what i saw of belize city was pretty cool. it's the biggest city in the country, but that's not saying much. it reminded me of a town on barbados or similar. full on rasta-stylee, with jamaican accents flying around in the air. all the signs in english. u.s. dollars accepted everywhere (literally). SUPER-friendly. no catcalling. no weird looks. just nice folks.

the next day seth and agnes headed off for a few days in guatemala, and i started my trek down to nikki's village. belize city is in the northern half of the country, and i was heading to the far southern tip of belize. took a bit of time, yes. after a loooong bus ride i arrived in the town of punta gorda and found a hostel. i found a restaurant that nikki had recommended because the proprietess was a friend of hers. the woman's name was marian, and she took very good care of me. sunday morning was spent lazing and wandering around waiting for a ride down to nikki's house in the village of blue creek. finally got down there and found nikki 'round mid-afternoon. she lives in a small house (with running water and electricity, thankyouyes) with another woman. both of them teach at an alternative high school for mayan kids. the house is located on the schoolgrounds near other teachers' homes and also near the kids' dorms, so it was a fun social place to spend a few days. the kids were great--a lot of fun and super-friendly. i spent my time lying around reading (this was definitely a VACATION, remember!!), wandering around the village and town with nikki, and occasionally helping her do something productive. we spent one day erranding in punta gorda, and i really enjoyed getting to see how life went in a small town. punta gorda is small and sleepy, with a very different feel from belize city. still friendly, but with a lot more spanish spoken, and a lot more latin influence. another afternoon we went to the blue creek cave. i guess i've never really been to a cave with a river running through it--i was in awe of the feature and also a bit spooked. nikki suggested we swim all the way in and check out deeper parts of the cave, but i verrry quickly nixed that idea, being totally content to stay in the pool at the mouth. beautiful though, that's for sure...

i left nikki's early wednesday morning and got on another series of buses. crazy surreal weirdness, that country-- imagine sitting on an old yellow u.s. school bus, modified a bit to encompass allll the rasta colors in the side designs...next to you is a teenage girl, black with carribbean-accented english and fully done up in u.s. hip hop fashion...across the aisle is a menonite couple speaking german to each other and generally acting very stiff and strange...in front of you is a mayan family in traditional dress, speaking ketchi...behind you are a couple of latino men speaking rapid spanish but just smiling shyly if you ask a question...over the bus's sound system you're getting a mix of early 90's u.s. soft rock (complete with mariah carey, george michael, and berlin), dancehall, reggae, mariachi, and latin pop...

got up to belize city and took a boat taxi over to the cayes, the main tourist attraction in the country, where i rejoined seth and agnes for the second half of the trip. the cayes consist of a couple of islands that have lots of hotels and restaurants and diving outfits. lodging is cheap, food is waaay over-priced and not very belize-ish, and the people are slightly less friendly than on the mainland. (though really, if i had to deal with that many stupid americans on a daily basis, i'd be slightly less friendly too.)

the culture shock of quick transition from pc-worldly-cultural-experience-backpacker to drunk-idle-i'm-going-to-lie-on-the-beach-and-wait-for-you-to-entertain-me-tourist was a bit much, and it took me a while to stop being grumpy about how nasty patronizing the island tourism culture is. but eventually i remembered that i was on a tropical island with nothing to do but lie around and be lazy, and i decided to stop feeling guilty and have a totally wonderful time.

we were staying on caye caulker, which is the less ritzy of the two main cayes. we had a nice room in a hostel with a cozy front porch, out of the main rush of things. one morning we did a snorkling trip that stopped at three interesting locations--two reef areas and one shark/ray petting area. the snorkling was wonderful fun. i hadn't been in years, and enjoyed it more than i remembered. i think it helped that there were only five of us on the boat besides the guide, and also that the other four folks weren't enthusiastic swimmers--the guide spent a lot of time showing me cool stuff while we waited for the others to catch up. another day we went to ambergris caye, which includes the town of san pedro. way more expensive than caye caulker, and less interesting, but please note that the madonna song 'la isla bonita' was written about ambergris caye and san pedro, so the novelty of that compensated for the island's shortcomings :)

i'm generally very bad at meeting people while travelling. i'm not sure why. well, actually i know why--it's cuz i don't talk to people--but i mean i'm not sure why i don't talk to people. i think it must be related to my nervousness about accidentally befriending someone who can't tell when it's time to let me get back to my book...you know? (i could digress here to a story about having to spend a 10 hour train ride dealing with an over-friendly man in the seat next to me as i tried very hard to nurse a shitty hangover, but i'll spare you.) but i managed to make a few new friends on caye caulker. the most interesting was a boy who works at one of the shops. he saw me walking away from a book exchange and wanted to know what i had gotten. it happened to be 'the screwtape letters' by c.s. lewis. aaaand SO, i ended up in a two-hour conversation about religion and spirituality with an 18-year-old baptist kid. ?!? his shop was right near our hotel, so i saw and talked to him a few times a day after that first conversation. our snorkling guide was another new friend, and since his business was also near our hotel i got to have the lovely experience of having people call hullos to me every time i left to walk around. yum :)

the other new friends were travellers. i saw a boy wearing a shirt that said 'pink mammoth', so of course i inquired as to whether he was associated with the sf party group of the same name. indeed he was (and is). his name is vincenzo (and he is RAD because he tried to hook me up with a gig go-go dancing on a bus, which didn't work out but was totally cool to just *think* about. thanks, yo!). and then on our last evening as we were watching a specTACular sunset, seth, who is horrifyingly friendly, started talking to a group of kids from canada. i eventually overcame my silly aloof i-don't-talk-to-people-while-i'm-travelling thing... (ok, so i managed to overcome the barrier primarily because one of these kids was a super super cute boy with an accent. but whatever.) ...and ended up making plans to go out with them later. so my last night was phenomenally fun, with a huge crew of us hitting first a weird swiss-family-robinson-treehouse-style reggae bar and then a silly-fun hip hop club that was having a birthday party for 'the hottest male stripper in belize'. and the cute canadian boy continued to be very cute and adorable, a moderately good dancer as well as a moderately good kisser ;)

if you're still reading, i'm impressed. i can't stand reading people's travel accounts. if you're a REAL glutton for punishment, check back later to see if i can manage to past in a link to the trip pictures. (there are only about 24 of them, but they aren't that exciting.)

the end :)

just got back from a bm fundraiser for dustfish at nimby. (YUMmmmmmy venue, as always!) i know this is banal for all y'all, but i had a glorious moment, round about 2am, of feeling grateful and lovely and luscious and special, so here's a recap, just for appreciation's sake.

got over to oakland by 11pm or so. got up on my stilts as soon as i could, joining atom, mt, anna, and lee (and later cj and tika. moments of silence here for nick da creature and his silly broken wrist... ok, done.). the stilting crew was in fantastic form. we had this crazy art car to play on--multiple stories with lots of good poles and bars--a veritable jungle gym for us tall folks. i made a new hoop today specifically for use with my stilts--it's HUGE and very orange sparkly. i had great fun utilizing it.

highlight of the night was while i was up on top of the art car. smoove had been spinning for a while, and his set was purrrrrrfectly energized. i was dancing with mt and atom, watching folks like jesse and scott throw fire, watching chelsea and jason and other folks dance as the dancefloor expanded and took over, watching ian throw his hands around with that smug-proud dj look as the crowd lapped up his bass n beats, watching cicely and diego and other friends who'd just gotten there wander through the scene taking things in with shining eyes... lucky lucky lucky fucking lucky bitchezzz are we. who else gets this luv, this vibrant crazy energy? we are fortunate and blessed...

smiles and glitter, yo.

was ready to stop being high when i saw ooah get started. got down and got buuuuussssy on the dancefloor. spent some good dancetime with CICELY, DIEGO, CHELSEA, XOCHI, LARS, ORION, DESIREE, LIZA, RENE, FRANKIE, JESSE, and many many others. hooped much with the likes of jesse, frankie, joohlz, seth, aimee, and jason. got to watch jesse and seth do their firehooping thang, which was amazing (as expected). seth, fyi--your firehooping blows me away and away and away again.

ooah's set rocked asssss...but then you knew that. kirk's set too--YUM and yay. lux (yayayayayay for lux) had a great run of beats, with massive amounts of buzz and praise. and ian, as aforementioned, did a kickass job as always always always. the sky began to glow in the color of cornflower--that weird waxy blue from crayola--towards the end of lux's set, and as kirk took over again. i held out for longer than i should have, which was wonderful. cut out round about 6am. kirk was on the decks, and the crowd was still going strong. as we walked out seth and i followed our noses to a booth with bacon sizzling on frying pans. i must state for the record that i am now OFFICIALLY a baco-vegetarian. ooooooooooh my god and it is a lovely place to be. i highly recommend it. it had been *so* long... so many months and months without letting that amazing substance dissolve on my tongue...

drove by gingerbread, saw a couple of my girls on their way to their vehicles; all was done so i came home.

again, i want to remind us all how goddamn lucky we are to be here and now. the things we are privvy to make my heart race and dance.

love and hugs and glitter and such...