Some Recent Thoughts...

You know, I'm not really upset that I don't post often anymore. It's not that I'm not posting because I don't have things to say or I don't want to be part of this online community I've worked years to cultivate and be a member of. I'm not posting because I'm out doing things. I'm living my life. I'm dancing, or studying, or hanging out with my friends, or at church, or something like that. I'm completely okay with that.

That being said, there have been some incredible things going on in my life recently.

Last weekend, for example, I was in Kansas City to watch my first ever professional ballet (strange, I know). My friend Valerie and I wanted to go ever since we found out about it at the beginning of the year and we discovered we could get student rush tickets for $12 the day of the show, so we drove up together and spent the night with her sister and brother-in-law. The show was fantastic even with my critical eye pouring all over them.

Strangely, my favorite part wasn't even the mainstage production, Carmen, but the shows which were supposed to build up to it. There was one piece, Splendid Isolations III, which was simply breathtaking. I teared up in the middle. It was a ten minute contemporary piece about a man and a woman who were deeply in love but they couldn't seem to reach each other. This distance between them was symbolized in the dance by a parachute-like dress which extended ten feet in either direction. They used the dress in some, well, splendid ways to represent the issue and how the couple was dealing with it and she finally took it off at the end for a gorgeous finalle pas de deux. Amazing. And a great intro into the foyer of professional dance productions for me.

Yesterday in dance class my instructor was trying to explain a concept using analogies from old children's tv shows.
"You guys have to be like Gumby," she said.
"Who's Gumby?" responded the eight tiny dancer girls in the room as I smacked my forehead, confounded.
"Okay, be like Stretch Armstrong. You guys know who that is, right?"
"No." Another forehead smack.
"Alright," she said in a moment of I-swear-I'm-not-this-old frustration. "Who do you guys know from movies or tv shows that is really stretchy?"
"How about Elastagirl from The Incredibles?" tweeted the audience of what I was now seeing as babies.
"Elastagirl it is." One more forehead smack on my part, just because I'm starting to really understand one more part of growing up, and I'm only 21. Yikes. This is only going to get worse, isn't it?

Yesterday I deleted over 300 friends from my Facebook. It was a strange experience. I'm not sure if people who grew up without the internet as part of their upbringing appreciate how central to our identities some of these websites can become. I've had a Facebook page since I was 17. I've had the same email and instant messenger since I was 11. These things grew up with me. I think on some level, they disperse our personal identity to be something online as well as something we carry with us. At the very least, these things are a symbol of our material selves; they're something we understand our material selves and our relations to other material selves through, which has some pretty profound implications.

Anyway, I was going through my list of what was then 894 friends. *Click* Another high school mate is dismissed from being associated with me. *Click* There goes that girl I had a crush on for a few weeks but haven't talked to in two years. *Click, click, click* An old professor, a fellow blogger I never talk to, someone I met at my sister's wedding. It's really strange, but every click is a decision to let go of a part of myself in some way or other. Each person dismissed from the status of Facebook "friend" is something I have to reflect upon and ask myself, "Is this person still representative of myself as I am today?" It was a nice experience ultimately. I do feel lighter now, more clarified, more solidified.

That's really all for now. More later! For now, I have to finish up my fall break, which includes three papers, a test to study for, and two books to finish. Fall break, indeed!