The title always comes last

In response to surprising complaint about the lack of information being disseminated about my life to demanding friends and family (I thank you: I feel loved), and in the more critical effort to systematize my meandering thought processes and occasional profundities, and after the elaborate penning of a two-thousand-word email to someone I only just met but really wanted to tell stories to (in response to which he replied, "Wow -- have you ever thought of writing a blog?"), HERE I AM. It is January 2nd, 2005 (yes, I did type "4" first) in New York City, where I have sat on Anna Uma Morgan's bed figuring out this blog stuff since the mischievious winter sun struck me awake at a cruel 8:30am. I have been staying here courtesy of Anna's two week holiday at home in Orange County, CA, investigating the dance scene and the im/probability of my moving up from Philadelphia.

It has been a rewarding week.

In every dance class, I translate the teacher's advice and admonitions on alignment, placing, or any other physical technicality into what I have learned from Jacek and Ania in Poland, and this is a comforting 'gathering together' of segmented periods of my life. This is perhaps why the only place I can understand my holistic self, where I feel whole and genuine, the only place I consider "home," is the dance studio. My compulsion to continue dancing over and above any other vocational choice is indeed that: compulsive, maybe obsessive, maybe a disorder? For this, I criticize myself, finding some poetic way of describing my travels as an "adrenalin addiction" rather than 'fess up that dancing is maybe a labor of vanity.

Tell me, what in the arts of self-expression is not the labor of vanity? As choreographer Tere O'Connor -- with whom I will take class next week because of this statement -- notes in an interview in December's Dance Europe, "Just going 177% into your personal voice is something that rocks people. No one has to do that in their life."

I want to rock people!