Going up, Coming down: Manhattan Museum Experiences

I began this entry standing in line at the Natural History Museum and thought it would be appropriate to share some thoughts about the museums I've seen here. I am continuing it now, sitting in the hall of primates, because it's a...errr...compound fiasco...of a design and there are WAY too many children here (don't get me wrong...I love kids. But it's summer. I don't wanna see those little snot-nosed faces for another month).

So anyways. I say it's a...Charlie Foxtrot...because it's a totally confusing design. Museums shouldn't have dead-ends. As helpful as museum maps are, I much prefer to be able to wander my way through. That doesn't work here. I actually had to download an app for my iPod so I could find my way. And I'm kinda over it. The Museum of Sex, on the other hand, was a different experience: you go up. You come down. (I wonder if that's a metaphor for something...)

I didn't realize there WAS a museum of sex here til I started looking at my Manhattan pop-up map (another coincidence?). When I found it, I knew I had to come. After all, I visited the Musee d'Erotisme in Paris - it would be interesting to compare the French with the Americans. For a subject that you'd think would have a limited number of ways to approach it, the two were surprisingly different. MOSex seemed to focus on sex in the media (porn, mainstream, and even in the comics) and had an exhibit on animals and the variety of behaviors that we think of as abnormalities that occus quite naturally in the animal kingdom.

For example, the fact that dolphins will, uhm, make use of each other's blowholes - the ones on top of their heads - or the first recorded instance of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks, which won the discoverer an Ig Nobel Prize (if you want to read the story, try here.) It even talked about elephants, although the ones pictured were in the Natural History Museum). The Musee d'Erotisme, on the other hand, was much more multicultural, much more artistically focused, and far less graphic. Those romantic Frenchies.

However, as you may know if you know me at all, the best museums, in my humble opinion, are art museums. I made it to two this trip: the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thursday morning I decided to hit the MOMA, since Babysis went while I was stuck in DC (another story - I'll cover it later...maybe), and went via Central Park and Tiffany's. Well, Central Park and Tiffany's aren't really between Times Square, where I was staying with Babysis, and the MOMA, but they were the way I was walking. The problem? It was really hot. In fact, it was

THIS HOT. That's a Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture, in case you were wondering, but it is a very good demonstration of how hot it was in New York.

All jokes, aside, the MOMA is a great museum, as is the Met, where I was happy to introduce Babysis to a number of beautiful Louis Comfort Tiffany pieces, including some jewelry she'd never seen before. And as for me, well, I'd seen it before, but a night at the art museum is never complete without naked men......

And we have....FUSION!

I'm an idiot. Photos would be a great thing for this post. Actually, I've decided photos would be a great thing for every post, and my failure to remember my camera is probably a very big reason I haven't done more with this in a while. Oh well. Life goes on.

So I've been back in Iowa for two weeks now. It is not the best place for me. I tend to sit around too much and eat poorly when I'm here. But you can't choose where you come from, so here I am...for another three days. I don't even want to think about what the last two weeks have done to my body; I will just have to fix it when I get back to Shanghai. In the meantime, I have been shopping til I drop, and visiting with family. Mom, Dad, and I took a roadtrip in which we cut across the great state of Missouri, seeing my grandma and her hubby, hit the family farm and spent some time with my great uncle, dropped in on my cousins and their anklebiters, and along the way witnessed the tornadic destruction in Joplin and the flooding along the Missouri (wow, Mother Nature. Suitably impressed. Now back off and send the rain down south where it's needed). I'm trying to finish up a few things here; I had taken my computer into a repair shop, only to be told, 8 days later, that it was probably the motherboard (apparently it was so screwed they couldn't actually get the diagnostics to finish running, so that was their best guess). I was planning to either buy or borrow Socrates' baby laptop, but no sooner had I emailed to ask him about it than my parents offered to combine my upcoming birthday present with Christmas (since I'm not planning on coming home this year) and get me a new one. So this post is coming to you from my brand new Toshiba laptop, which is not bogged down with a bunch of other crap that my family downloaded before I took it over. IT IS ALL MINE...and it's red. I've named it the Junior Tamale (my old Dodge Neon was the Hot Tamale - it was the first thing that came to mind).

Anyways, I'm boring myself with the recap, which means I'm probably boring all five of my readers, so I'll just cut to the chase, the reason for writing...my trip to RAINBOW ARTISTIC GLASS (http://rainbowartisticglass.com/rainbow/index.htm) with Babysis. She is a groupon junkie, and this was one of them. For a pretty reasonable price, they supplied us each with some inspiration, a little instruction, a base square of glass, and different glass bits to use to decorate it. When they are fired, the glass will get hot enough to fuse together. Babysis decided to make a bunny piece. I thought briefly about doing a dragon (it would have looked really cool if I'd used the glass pebbles to make his scales), but in the end decided I needed a bigger piece of glass and curved "stringers": thin pieces of glass which make great outlines. Unfortunately there isn't such a thing, or they didn't have them - whatever the case was, I decided (after a brief stab of guilt as I thought my mom might like me to make something for her) that I would make a phoenix instead. So that's what I did. I made the thing almost entirely out of fine frit in red, orange, yellow, and black (in that order). I did add a bit of a border at the bottom, and a few yellow dots for accents at the top.

Like I said, I forgot to bring my camera, but Babysis sent me this photo of our finished work, since I wasn't there when they were finished. I was really pleased with how they looked when we left, and can't wait to see them after they've been fired. If you have the chance to try this art, I highly recommend it - it's pretty easy and a lot of fun.

Korean Belly Dance Comes of Age...

So, eight hours ago saw me prying myself off of Belynda and convincing myself that I HAD to go back to Shanghai. I went back to Korea for her world belly dance day event, RAK 2011...in this instance, RAK stands for Raising Awareness in Korea, and NOT Ras Al Khaimah (just in case you were confused). See, World Belly Dance day is meant to be a charitable event, and this year and last Belynda donated the money to organizations that benefit women in Korea (for more info, check out her website).


Anywho. The opportunity to attend a dance event in the most wonderful of all cities was not to be missed (plus I needed some art supplies that I haven't been able to find in Shanghai), AND she even let me dance in her student show...win, win, win, wins all around! My performance went all right (with the exception of the bit at the end where I'm supposed to scoop down and pick up my veil...I slipped on my pants, oops), and I suppose the rest of my show was okay, but I didn't get to watch it. I can tell you that Koreans are STILL nuts enough to dress their little girls up in full makeup (complete with fake eyelashes) and padded bedlahs to dance - and from what little I saw between the curtains of the 10-year old soloist who performed before me, she was pretty good, but...well, let's just say that there's no WAY I'd let my ECA baby bellies dress up like that.
I got to watch the professional show, though, and I found some things very interesting.
Koreans have figured out that there are more than two styles. When I left Korea, it seemed like most of the dancers were doing cabaret or what might best be described as "sexy-dance fusion." This is not to dis the Korean dance community; it was highly entertaining, and I really don't care what style you're dancing, as long as you're dancing. But on the other hand, I was pleased to see a healthy mix of raqs assaya, tribal fusion, and even some khaleegi influence thrown in for good measure.


Costumes! Used to be that everyone wore bedlah or lycra cossies (or an assortment of other weird things). I'm happy to report that we've branched out. We've still got the sparklies, never fear, but now they come with shrugs, belly covers, and pants. Belynda tells me that this is, at least in part, due to the rise of South American belly dance. Whatever the reason for the additional modesty, I appreciated it...one of my fellow sisters-in-Zion may have expressed some doubts about the propriety of belly dance as an ECA at school, as her daughter - who wanted to join - wanted to know if it would be modest.


Never fear, though...it ain't all class. We had this lovely number, which I like to call "Xena the S&M princess" (yes, apparently it is a Suhaila Salimpour design - she's very famous, if you didn't know - but that didn't stop us from wondering whether or not you went commando with a cossie like that or whether the lovely Suhaila had thoughtfully built some panties into her creation).
This one treated the audience to a performance of raqs beaver before the strap started to come off the bra 2/3 of the way through.


Finally - be still, my beating heart - there were Korean girls dancing that didn't look like chopsticks! Good on them! I need to see something like that when I've been REPEATEDLY told by Asian kids this semester (and one fellow Mormon whitey who shall remained unnamed, the little turd) that I am fat.

Hiatus

I know, I know - I've been gone. I know I always say this, whether or not it's true, but I've been busy. No, really, I have. No sooner had Socrates left than I set off on an adventure in illustrating with my good buddy, Ger. Ger was also interested in starting a writing club, and since I've been trying to find the discipline to get my own children's book written and illustrated (not necessarily in that order), so on alternating weeks I'm either having a brainstorming "coffee" on Pluto, or meeting with the writers. I want to keep pretty tight-lipped about my own book, but Ger's got a website if you want to read the story we've been working on - it's Plip and the Purple Princess, which you can find here: http://www.ebookswithger.com

This has been really challenging for me. My drawings have a definite style to them, and I wouldn't describe it as "sci-fi picture book," but that's exactly what I'm doing. Plip is a little Plutonian boy who dreams of having ten arms with ten fingers on each and very long ears like his Grandpa Zoop. Yep. Ten arms. Ten fingers. How do you even illustrate such a thing? Well, something like this:

I stole from Hindu sculpture in order to manage this one. Shiva's only got four arms, but I knew other deities had more, and Kali, as it turns out, has ten. She was the inspiration for the arms.

I couldn't for the life of me think of anywhere I'd seen anyone or anything with ten fingers on one hand, but I laid my two hands on top of each other, and came up with this. I was pretty pleased with it - if we're so advanced (as opposed to animals) because we have a thumb on each hand, how much more advanced would a species with TWO thumbs be???

This is a scene I drew of Plip leaving for his first day of school. On Pluto, you have to learn to count BEFORE you have fingers, so Plip only has one finger on each hand. If Plip can learn to count to ten, he'll have ten fingers on each hand... The educational bits about counting and colors will make some nice graphic layouts, I think, and the colors should be out of this world (pun totally intended there, people).

I'm also trying to get back to the belly. I've been taking lessons almost since I got into Shanghai, but I haven't been an especially diligent student. Sometimes I think this is because there's not a whole lot of review from one lesson to the next, but I know (duh duh duh-duh duh) it's my own damn fault. I need to practice on my own to make progress, and I'm not doing it. I still love the dance as much as ever, but life gets busy and I'm a lot fatter than I was in my "glory days," which might explain why I still haven't bought a mirror to practice in front of. What I lack in quality I'm trying to make up for with quantity - my gym offers a class on Tuesday night, and I'm very likely going to start taking classes across the street, as I've discovered the yoga studio there offers them, and after a tip from the Evil One I've downloaded Kim Pechet's "Shimmy" workout show, which makes a nice (if cheesy) way to start the day...

...but really? What I really need is to perform. I'm doing this in May - I'm going to Azhaar's World Belly Dance Day extravaganza, and she's invited me to dance in her show - but although there are lots and lots of dancers here, I have yet to hear of any haflas or shows, nevermind be given a chance to perform. I have dreams of setting up a group like Azhaar's MECDACK, but I'm not the organizer she is, and I don't have a faithful sidekick like Kim to help me BECOME one, so right now it's just in the research stage. Someday, though...

A-boom, boom, boom, BOOM!

And...it begins again.

So last night was New Year's Eve here in China, the one that really counts - Lunar New Year, or Chinese New Year to most of the world, even though, in fact, it is celebrated at about this time all over Asia and is known by a different name in pretty much each country (for instance, Seol-Nal in Korea, or Osho-gatsu in Japan). People have been intermittently shooting off fireworks essentially since I got here, but the frequency with which your ears are assaulted by their reports has steadily increased over the last few weeks to a fever pitch last night.

Damn, I feel sorry for kids who only get to blow things up once a year.

Being an open-minded sort of person, I decided I would join in the fun - I bought a pack of sparklers and the smallest amount of firecrackers I could (1000) at the stand I came across on Tuesday afternoon. There was one on my street corner, but I passed it by, and never came back to it. Oops. I burned all the sparklers standing on my balcony around 9 last night then went down to set off my 1000 firecrackers in the parking lot...see, I'm catsitting, and I didn't think Puddin would have been too happy with me if I set 1000 firecrackers off on the balcony. I figured it would take a while for them all to go off, and I didn't want her having a heart attack or, worse, diarrhea from the scare, but as it turns out, a thousand firecrackers only FEELS like it should take a long time exploding. In actual fact, that 4-foot string of firecrackers which feels like Rambo ought to be feeding it into his machine gun, when lit, is over in about 30 seconds. Not even a minute. Who knew?


I felt like I'd done my part to ring in the year of the rabbit. I got settled into my apartment and started watching Glee again, but just past 11 it became impossible to continue - there were just too many flashes of light distracting me. I went to my room and tried to read, but this was even more distracting, because I could see them out my window, in the distance. As midnight approached, it became RIDICULOUS how many bursts of light there were going off, some of them directly outside my window. Frickin cool is all I can say. Sometimes I'm thankful for China's lack of public safety laws.

Well, after opening the window long enough to realize how much sound two panes of glass actually DOES kill, get high on the smell of gunpowder, and get these pictures, I managed to fall asleep. I woke randomly four hours later to bug Socrates on Skype, and it was eerily quiet...for about five minutes, and then I heard the reassuring sound, in the distance, of small explosives going off. Yes, even at 4:30 in the morning, somebody in Shanghai was still lighting fireworks. Naively, I thought that perhaps it was going to quiet down after last night, while hoping otherwise, but no - it's 8:30 at night and already the artillery brigade is going. Most excellent! From the window last night I could see the parking lots accumulating a covering of shredded red paper, and although the groundskeepers of our complex had cleaned pretty much all of it up by this morning, it looked something like this:

It's a good thing the Chinese parents don't have the same kind of work ethic mine did growing up, because those kids would have been out there trying to clean up the mess all day.

Cycling Shanghai

Due to a lack of funding*, I am spending my first vacation in a VERY long time in my own apartment. This is fine. I have lots of things I need to do. Hell, I joined the gym for this specific reason. Of course, the gym won't reopen for another day or two, due to the holidays, and I can't find the motivation to work on things like my illustrations or unit planners, so instead I've been reading Sharon Shinn's Twelve Houses series and watching Glee, and once a day going out for a bike ride. Shanghai is a little bit soulless - what can you expect from a city built on the opium trade? But it does have its moments. These are a few of the ones I've found while I've been tearing up the streets on my bike the last few days...


The thing I've really loved about biking all over the city is the fact that you get a much wider-angle view of it. Riding the subway you see nothing. Riding in a taxi everything goes by much quicker. But down on the ground, pedaling, you see everything as it goes by. You realize how huge and high those elevated roads are. I still haven't begun to feel for Shanghai what I felt in Seoul, but on the other hand, I never could have cycled across Seoul. Hell, don't know if I even WOULD have. It's a much bigger city and with Namsan being smack dab in the middle it's harder to navigate, and much less bicycle friendly. Some people thought I was crazy for getting a bike here, but I stand by my assertion that it's a pretty great place to ride.


Just when I thought I had left the last year of my life behind, I pedal down Yishan Lu, cross under the middle ring road, and get smacked in the face with THIS. RAK Ceramics was the parent company of RAKESS, and thus the sponsor of my UAE visa. It brought chills to see it again...and not the nice kind.


So, today I finally got to visit Jing'An Temple. The smell of incense wafting out the gate literally stopped me in my tracks. I can't really explain why, but I love Buddhist temples. There's the smell of the incense, and the architecture, and that feeling of being somewhere so completely foreign. I find them incredibly peaceful. And Jing'An is a pretty good one.


And finally...red underpants, hanging out to dry over the sidewalk. Found this little gem in the French Concession. But there is a reason WHY there are so many pairs of red underwear - apparently wearing red knickers is some kind of good luck at Chinese new year. APPARENTLY they have the power to scare tigers and an evil monster called Nian Shou. I say, any excuse for red underwear is a good excuse.


*if anyone out there wants to donate to the "Send Mutrux to yet another fabulous destination you're too lame to visit" fund, email me and I'll send you my paypal info :-D

Coups, and Hips, and Healing Facts

The problem with having a really lovely, warm apartment is the fact that it's hard to find the motivation to go anywhere else, knowing it's going to be colder there than at home. I haven't been to the gym since last Friday. So far I have not made the membership worth my money. Oh well, I've got 50 more weeks to do that.

One of my thoughts from the gym last week focused on what might have been if I hadn't come to China. If it hadn't been for Socrates, I wouldn't have applied to my school. Well, now he is gone - really gone - and I've been in a funk, and I ask myself whether it wouldn't have been easier if I'd only had to live through his leaving once. And I thought of the fact that if I'd stayed at RAKESS, I would have ended with two years under my belt, and right now would have been looking for jobs in Lima, where Evil will be moving this year. But then I realized that if I'd stayed in the UAE, I probably would have found myself working as a classroom teacher, or an ESL teacher, when the Trunchbull cut RAKESS' art program. Seeing as my current school was more interested in using me as a kindergarten teacher than an art teacher as it was, I think another year outside the art room might have ruined my career prospects. Thus, as hard as the last month has been, I've come to the conclusion that I'm ahead of the game.

Speaking of ESL, I managed my own personal coup at school this week. For the last semester I've been carrying the heaviest class load of any teacher there, and two hours of it have been ESL. This has not sat particularly well with me, and I've tried to make strategic battles against the situation, but a true opportunity to amend the situation didn't come until Wednesday. After our student-led conference day, I was pulled into a meeting with three of our powers that be, and had it explained to me that there was a problem with my schedule. The Chinese teacher who has been taking one of the grades for art was needed to teach more Chinese, due to an influx of second semester students. Their solution was to split his grade and give me two of the classes, give him my fourth graders, and thus fix the problem. They still wanted to keep me in ESL because the kindergarten classes were filling up and they were going to need the help. But there were some other issues brought up by this, and far be it from me not to press them to my advantage. Namely:
1. I knew at least one fourth grade parent was going to have a problem with Dingleberry taking those classes.
2. I didn't particularly want to have to plan units/lessons that he was going to have to teach, because he doesn't actually KNOW how to teach.
3. I was adamant that if I was continuing the ESL, that it would be in-class support only, that it was not fair to me or the kids to make me sacrifice art prep so that I could do a pull-out ESL class, which would take much more time.
Then as we were discussing this, I pointed out the fact that, at the beginning of the year, PE, Music, and myself were all told we would have to teach some ESL, but only I had been made to do so. PYP said, "Oh, I think PE is free during first period...I wonder how full his schedule is..." I had to work hard not to grin, as I knew for a FACT that PE was only teaching 12 hours, and he was about to get busted!

So that took care of my ESL problem. I suggested that if my kindergarteners only had one art class a week, that I would then be able to take ALL of the classes in ALL year groups. This would make one of the kindergarten teachers pretty happy, and create a solution to Dingleberry's obstinance regarding criticism of his art teaching methods. PYP did a little schedule juggling, and yours truly is now teaching each class in every grade once a week. This means a little more planning for me, but on the whole, I'm pretty pleased with myself.

I haven't been very good about my resolution to not eat out this week, either. I had good intentions when I cooked my sweet and sour chicken on Tuesday night, but the following two nights I had dinner dates with a couple of friends. One was a girl Azhaar introduced me to on facebook, who had taken belly dance lessons with her in Seoul. We agreed to meet at the stop where our subway lines meet, which just so happens to be Xujiahui, a pretty major shopping and eating area, and the place of December's MARVELOUS (that's only half sarcastic) staff dinner. So I looked up the Xinjiang restaurant in Lonely Planet, figuring a fellow belly dancer would enjoy the food and the dancing both, and she did...but it didn't actually turn out to be the same restaurant (I think the other place was actually better food, and the dancers did a few more diverse styles, but this place didn't cart the lamb around with its head still attached going, "Baaaa!") She and I were - enthusiastic - audience members, to say the least, a fact which the uyghur staff found pretty amusing. As if being tall and redheaded didn't make me enough of a target. So during the third or fourth song I found myself being led up on stage by the male dancer, and being a bit of an exhibitionist, I found the experience of having a little dance off with a good-looking Chinese Muslim delightful. And the new friend turned out to be pretty cool, too.

Lastly...it has been hard letting Socrates go, but I'm getting better at it. Sunday I spent a while comparing our friendship to my heyday with my Dark Lord and Master, and I realized that - for a number of reasons - this was a piece of cake compared to boarding that final plane out of Korea. I also found myself thinking of his assertion before he left that I would be fine without him. That's something I realized when I was back in Korea, before he'd even lost his job with Soul Sucking International School. What I finally figured out this week was almost poetic:
No matter how much I want him, I don't need him.
No matter how much he needs me, he doesn't want me.
I think that makes me pretty lucky. And if that thought fails to cheer me up, Bohemian Rhapsody sung with vigor during a school sponsored karaoke night ALWAYS does the trick.