Hello!

Kwathela ndje Kalugna kandje! (Help me my God!)
This is the first sentence I am writing in Oshiwambo – the language of my father – on this blog. And yet, it is just a dialect of Oshiwambo, since Oshiwambo does not exist a single language, unless you consider the mixture and misuse of dialects together as a language.

I need to learn more of it. I believe I will dedicate myself to learning more of it, but then I am also learning Spanish. There is indeed a tension between more of this or that, hay una tensión entre más de este o ese.

That is it for today. Going to bed.
As opposed to a week update, sorry. I prefer to wake up early and do yoga, when I can mediate on the Lord and perhaps on my new dance. It is about me being a fifty something year old lady whose image probably derives from Patracia Hoffbauer, the choreographer and performer of Yvonne Rainers pieces, who teaches at Princeton University. I never took the dance criticism class in my senior year that she taught and yet my dance I am doing here started of as an exercise of physical, performance, criticism.

There is a ballet book called “Princess Ballet Tina” in which Burmese dance is described as unique and beautiful. It is a dance tradition that is relatively unknown to the West, but which is centuries old, just like the ballet. In so far as the dancing is described, emphasis is placed on how it relates the life of the “old imperial court” , the “life of the villages” and “classical Buddhist tales”. The implication is that Burmese dancing is an exotic, eastern, form of ballet, where folk tales are preserved through movement. This assumption is rooted in the narrow minded, occidental view of Burmese dance, one that overlooks the significance, the sacred aspect of this dance for its people. The dance describing the life of the Buddha can only be justly compared to the Bible in the West, rather than to fairy tales told in Ballets. Hence, I was thoroughly incensed by this superficial perspective of Burmese dance.

The dance was analogy a caricature of both ballet and Burmese dance. Having little knowledge of ballet and a stereotypical view of Burmese dance – influence by the popular media – I sought to emphasize how this book caricatured Burmese dance. However, now I have personalized the piece. It is about me, that middle aged lady, fighting back, kicking, pushing, repelling, deflecting all the Christina hegemony. Now I am tapping into movement of disgust – on my face – and in my limbs. Then I am tapping into the feeling of being a locust, one that moves its limbs away quickly when touched in a sign of discomfort, but then stretches them out again. Like when you prick your foot, that type of feeling. I am still working on it.

So I went quite a while here.
That was Thursday
Friday I applied for a job as a lab assistant. Do I really need it? If I were desperate, I would be living of writing, like my father did when he was a student in Bulgaria. He told me so as he paged through my article in the “The Flamingo” magazine, the one he said was good when he first read my first draft. It is published, I was paid about $160 for it and they editor said I could write more – even about health champions – the people the WHO is looking for in 1000 cities around the world (1000 LIVES, 1000 CITIES)
I am going to sleep. I would tell you about how I sent in my application and found out today that the person on other end of hr@polytechnic.edu is on leave. I question whether what the lady told me on the phone in pleasant tones on Friday “yes , if you emailed it to us, it is ok” is actually true. I will check again on Monday.
Why I am applying? Health insurance. What’s the point in writing about health when you have no health insurance?