Ten. YOU – Five.

Oh how long has it been since you wrote a post? Oh but shouldn’t you wait and write a positive post? I mean really, does the internet really need another Delta airlines horror story? The facebook posts were melodrama enough, dear.

Oh, true friendship is three days of cleaning out an empty cat litter bucket of your vomit? Save it. Really, we don’t need to hear that. (I love you guys!)

So what have I been thinking? Probably that some adventures can be summarized or skipped over, and just left at that. That and my immune system hates me. Or maybe I’ve not been nice enough to it.

It’s Valentine’s Day. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m wallowing about ambiguous situations with the opposite gender. Actually – I’m most disturbed that this year, I’m not getting up on stage and yelling at a crowd of strangers about my genitalia. And while I’m blushing typing that this year, in the previous two years I proudly marched up in front of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Thailand to a packed house and proceeded to give voice to how ridiculous tampons are (which is ironic, in itself). This year – I have backed down from even helping run an art table at a combination dance marathon/monologue event representing the same women’s causes. Sure, I can blame my food poisoning and my throbbing back pain and I really do feel like utter crap. But I think that’s a further indication of being off course not just from eating the street food (It was chicken soup! There were more than 20 people eating there. Hrmph.) It’s an indication that I’m not really headed on a path I identify with lately. And that is the upsetting thing.

And frankly, that’s a disconnect I’ve been loathe to give voice to, because in the space of the disconnect, I’ve let plenty of other voices that do not resonate with me get under my skin. Worse still, plenty that do resonate have gotten under my skin too. I’ve balked because I haven’t had the next thing ready to go in verbal combat. And holding up the armor, and my focus away from my physical self, has taken a toll.

I’m not peeling back my façade, but I’m going to admit that my battle has been a lot more uphill lately. And I’ve considered a lot of things for the coming year that were not on the table even two months ago. But I’m going to nurture those ideas the same way I now need to focus on my physical body.

You might be wondering about the title. I tried a yoga class this week. Twice, actually. And as I joined the class, the teacher was well aware of my physical state. As he directed the class to do ten repetitions of something, he looked me in the eye several times and declared, “YOU, five.” I am not strong enough to do ten right now. So I will do five.

Behind the Scenes

Sometimes, when we have the least to say, we have the most going on behind the scenes. Writer's block. What to say.

I successfully organized tie-dyed t-shirts with more than 100 teenagers recently; language barrier and Imperial/Metric conversions (and straight up guesses for complete lack of measuring instructions in either) and all. And in so doing fostered the confidence to do it again in the future. I pushed it knowing how much I wanted that confidence boost.

I have experienced a fairly high volume of mental shift - and generally a daily reordering of priorities; be they mundane daily tasks, or the grander, longer term plan lately. It doesn't always seem like it, but I feel I've slowly opened the flood gates for a whole series of new ideas that even six months ago did not even seem like remote possibilities. I'm still assessing the stream of them.

I'm 7 months in to a project that I feel to be of very high importance. Some other things have fallen off along the way, some new stumbling blocks have arisen, but we try to climb the sand dune again any way. And I've got more momentum this time. Despite a righteous wipeout in mid-October, still going.

I will not run even a 3K again before 2013 as my foot heals. My photography is still backlogged. My taxation frustration is not going anywhere. New big ideas are just fermenting, and I am impatient for them to mature. In many things, it appears back to the drawing board. But my drawing board, while I feel it's filled with childish imaginings and farfetched hodgepodge, has expanded. And much like my life drawing class* - maybe you have to find a bigger canvas before you start to figure out how best to fill it. Perhaps wiping things off and widening the corridors is exactly what we need first.

Notes: *My life drawing instructor suggested working on a larger paper, and my work really bloomed from that point of the semester onwards, working in the larger format.