Wednesday, June 24, 2015

The worst blogger in the world...

Once upon a time I was good at blogging semi regularly. These days not so much. Blame it on the crazy schedule as a freelance artist, the changing seasons, the fact that for once I am intact and in great physically functioning state... whatever! 

Today is Luminarium's fifth birthday and I'm so proud of what Merli and I have done in the past few years- artistically, sustainably, there is an every day need  to keep forging ahead with momentum and vigor in this profession, so every now and then I can clear my head of the daily work and realize what we have actually accomplished. Here's to many more multiples of five years!

The biggest news besides Luminarium turning five today is that very soon I'm breaking ground on my Masters of Fine Arts degree (focusing on Interdisciplinary Arts) at Goddard College. I've wanted an MFA for a long time, not so much for status and letters but for the chance to submerse myself back in process and identity and how who I am is reflected in the art I make. It's been so easy to dismiss going back to school for the sake of time, money, schedule, but the low-residency format of this program allows me to maintain my life as a professional artist at home while also allowing myself to get back in the pool of learning. I'm so looking forward to continued learning, self improvement and an additional new community to join. It's easy to forget that everyone always has more to learn and the ability to grow. 

In choreography land there's lots happening: I showed a snippet of brand new rough work at the Luminarium Gala on Sunday (nerve-wracking but ultimately great), but that deserves its own post. 

Below is a mysterious sneak peek at a second new work I'm starting tonight. (Yes, I managed that tiny amount of sewing all by myself - I'm very handy in every other medium, just lousy with thread!)



Monday, February 16, 2015

Write it down, move forward!

Note:  Apparently since my blog template is so old, I can't use a jump break to shorten this novel.  Since it's mostly for my own brain and the sake of recording various life experiences I apologize for the millions of words.

I disappeared from blog-land from most of 2014 as much of the year was fairly traumatic.

Just over one year ago I decided to finally get to the bottom of some excruciating hip pain.  I can deal with a great amount of discomfort and pain as someone in the dance industry, but it had gone too far even for my pain tolerance.  The first ortho doctor I went to was puzzled. Yes, I'd had snapping hip syndrome and osteoarthritis in said hip for years since a college-era injury, no it wasn't the same pain.  Doc #1 was seriously resistant to declare it anything but a strained hip flexor.  Maybe it was because I walked in with my own theories, but he didn't want to do x-rays or other testing and recommended chiropractic and PT (I added in acupuncture, just for the sake of the experiment). All of the above, many more appointments, thousands of dollars and two cortisone shots later, guess what... no improvement!

Around that point in time I started feeling legitimately crazy, and not ridiculous normal creative/ADHD/zany Kim crazy.  Every time I got into my car and turned the volume up on NPR there seemed to be the same feature on chronic pain for this whole entire week in March. How could something unreal make me writhe in pain (yes, turns out that expression's real) on the couch for 20 minutes until a dose of the nearest pain killer kicked in? I vividly remember Russell staring at me in concern as I left him at the cash register, literally crawling out of a Home Depot into our car because I misjudged the window of time I was covered with medicine. It was bad! Too many times I found myself biting my lip and deep breathing through a rehearsal for one of the musicals I was working on because my medicine time-window was up and I felt far too unprofessional to excuse myself from a rehearsal.. this usually ended in holding a straight face until I shut my car door, and crying and yelling until I could get home and medicated.

After some research and with some additional urging from family and a couple close friends I swapped over the Sports Medicine Department at Children's Hospital.  Finally someone prescribed me a better anti-inflammatory painkiller and ordered an MRI!  Doctor #2 was so wonderful and called me at home with the results once he got to examine them.  The initial diagnosis was that I had a pre-fracture in the neck of my femur and had signs of a labral tear. Gross. After running for several months on Boston streets I wasn't surprised.  The initial goal was to clear it up by no activity, rough, but doable.

Five weeks later, no improvement, it was time for a followup MRI - otherwise known as the entire day I spent bouncing about Longwood scared out of my mind!  After getting into scrubs and trying to keep my toes pointed inwards in the MRI tube for far too long, I expected checking out and hitting Starbucks before my followup to discuss results with Doctor #2.  Instead I got a concerned looking technician asking me to wait in the waiting room, not answering any of my questions but taking the initiative to reschedule my followup appointment until later that afternoon.  I was instructed to pick up a mystery phone with no buttons, where Doctor #2 (from his office across the street) told me they had spotted a mysterious lesion hiding on the underside of my femur neck and could I please come back in two hours to be squeezed in for CT scans? Sure... what else was I going to say?

Around that time I was both trying to distract myself by using every single app I ever downloaded on my iPhone, stupid or not, and frantically texting a handful of people to share my internal freak out.  I killed my fully charged phone battery by 1pm, spent far too much money on a charger at CVS, scowled at a burrito, got two iced coffees (only one caffeinated) and awkwardly cried by myself in my car.  The last of that list is atypical for me, but realize by that point I thought I had some crazy bone tumor that was going to just devour my body whole.

Good news, bad news.  Post CT scans I ran across the street to visit Doctor #2 who was running over 2 hours late only to discover that yes, I had a tumor in the neck of my femur, but also it was completely benign.  Meet the osteoid osteoma... a tricky little bastard that lurks in the long bones, vertebrae and jaw bones of teens and young adults with the sole purpose of causing pain.  Boom.  In the late summer I went to Doctor #3 for a consult for surgery to remove it, and a short time after that I showed up at Beth Israel Deaconess, took off all my jewelry, got hooked up with some crazy drugs, hit the anesthesia, and woke up minus my tiny bony tumor friend, after it had been burned out of my femur bone.  I spent two days confined to oxycodone and the couch, where Russell brought me anything I needed, Merli came over with an activity bag full of presents to open on the hour to cure boredom, and Jenn & Christos showed up for some evening entertainment.  I'm hugely spoiled and lucky to have a great group of people in my life! Fast forward two days, and my mom came to take me out for the day.... and I realized while walking about I was both medicine and PAIN FREE! A couple of weeks later my mom and I were walking the entirety of Manhattan.  I will never forget that feeling of freedom.

Through the rest of 2014 Doctor #2 determined I still had the labral tear in my hip cartilage, but with a lot of attention spent on my muscle imbalances and a few appointments with the WIZARD known as Barry Meklir (Muscular Solutions in Coolidge Coorner - just go!), I was able to cancel the serious surgery planned with Doctor #4. Hard work!

I'll cut short the rest of the saga.  It's February 16, I feel GREAT and I never thought I would get here.  I'm working every single day to strengthen, stretch, workout hard and get everything under control after a year or more of inactivity.  It was a scary, sad and sometimes hopeless year (though marked with many great accomplishments and happenings in the world outside the hip), but it's over and I'm in control!

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

a poem from the bathtub

Weightless nothing,

but structure.
What
infinitely tiny colony built these rigid chambers,

left these crispy solid wisps
that
bob and wave, but don’t.

Exoskeleton of a creature that never existed.

The moment washed away as my soggy leg circles the drain.

Scowling at a misplaced nail file,
as it lazily drifts around the whirlpool; realizing it
is
actually
a small sliver of soap.






 **Disclaimer: I am not a poet, but I like to steep in long baths that morph me (even more so) into an idealist that writes poem-reflections. The self-imposed consequence of the risk I took of dropping my iPhone into the bubble-ridden bath water was that I posted this poem, which might possibly suck upon later examination.  Enjoy?**

Monday, January 19, 2015

8 months later...

I knew I hadn't blogged in forever, but I was hugely surprised to see that it's been nearly 8 months. A great many things have gone down in 8 months, and perhaps I'll gloss upon them to the sake of keeping records, but the sole point of this blog entry is to serve as a gateway blog post. 

Here's to establishing consistency...

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Laying on top of my bed frantically scribbling the ideas that are pouring out of my brain, and unsure whether that's due to the cloudy cold dreary weather, or because I've been thinking heavily about the brilliant poet lost today. 

Saturday, May 10, 2014

A recommendation

Staying up too late because:

1- BBC's Sherlock is the most genius thing ever 

and

2- The episodes all seem to be 1.5 hrs long (which I appreciate but dont help the case of bed time).

Monday, May 5, 2014

Clean slate excitement

Coming to you live from my brand-newly renovated bedroom (still in process, actually as I need to paint all the doors)!

I'm savoring a tingly moment laying in bed on freshly washed sheets within freshly painted and constructed walls. Space! It's everywhere! 

For anyone stumbling across this post who doesn't regularly indulge my griping on the woes and glory of diy construction, the abstract is three and a half years ago we bought a house under foreclosure in a boston neighborhood that needed a complete overhaul. The most recent project is making a beautiful feel-good bedroom with a usable closet that had a chance of housing my unnecessarily large amount of things to wear. The preexisting bedroom was tiny, perhaps 8'x15', and had a laughably small space to hang clothes (I refuse to call it a closet). Luckily there was a strange L-shaped room next door, and the shared wall wasn't load-bearing.  In January we moved our queen-sized bed into my 10'x12' home office (!! I won't mention what became of my productivity in these last few months), and broke out the sledgehammers and contractor trash bags.

Fast-forward through weekends full of demo and hauling Sheetrock, joint compound and the Sisyphus-reminiscent task of eradicating the constant snowfall of dust from the entire house, and the whole month of February where Russell was away on a business trip and I kept trying to get rid of the dust (nemesis!).  Flash back to me in my clean-sheeted bed facing a brand new direction (bed/chair/desk alignment in any given room is a huge deal to my brain), with super saturated cool-Brown walls and gleaming shiny white trim and reconstructed radiators (I'm a painting boss, no modesty). Awesome new bronze light fixtures hang overhead, but most importantly in my direct line of sight are four doors blocking the way to a spacious new closet! 

This is certainly the best moment of home ownership. Even though it's seriously rough gutting every room in the house, getting to live this feeling upon completion of each room in the house provides complete validation.

Now, how to decorate...