Green Day!

About a year or so ago my doctor told me to lose 30 lbs. I love the completely unselfconscious way doctors manage to say something that is already perfectly obvious, and then make no effort to actually help.

My first thought was to write some software that would create perfectly balanced lists of foods, with associated quantities, that would meet all my nutritional needs and keep me at a particular caloric intake. The way I envisioned it, I'd have a massive database of available foods, and have the software operate on my favorites. I figured this would allow me to eat the foods I loved, and still get a perfect nutrition.

So I wrote the tool, and it worked just fine. I designed plenty of ingredient lists that provided perfect nutrition for someone of my age, gender, and caloric needs.

There were various problems. For one thing, I hated it. Yes, the food was healthy, but it was sort of depressing to think of maintaining myself on that kind of food forever and ever. It was basically a lifelong commitment, if I wanted to lose the weight and keep it off.

I tried a couple of solutions. One involved an attempt to eliminate eating entirely. I would simply blend the foods into one giant drink, and get it out of the way in 5 minutes. Presto! No more mealtimes to worry about, and my nutritional needs were met better than 99.9998% of the people on the planet.

Yuck!

Eventually that system broke down, and I devised an entirely new approach. Instead of concerning myself with the ideal nutrition, I would try a calorie-counting approach. The only problem with counting calories is that it's not really possible. You just can't make good estimates of how many calories are in a piece of food. If you weigh the ingredients individually, you can do it. But for prepared foods, forget it.

But I got this great idea, that I didn't really need to calculate how many calories I was eating in a given day, if I could instead measure the result of those calories. In other words, if I just weighed myself in the mornings, I could see how the calories from the previous day had effected me.

It wasn't a perfect measurement. There would be more water or less water, stuff in the bowels, and whatnot. But if I didn't worry about the day-to-day accuracy so much, and only thought about the accuracy of the measurement on average, then in fact it was dead on target!

I also realized that this was fine, because it was not the day-to-day accuracy, but only the average accuracy, that really mattered. After all, I didn't care about losing weight on any particular day, I only cared about losing weight over time. If I had a system that averaged out to dead accuracy, that was good enough!

So, this was a much easier proposition. Unlike calories, my weight was easy to calculate, and I already had the device that would do it.

I also got the great idea that the 180 lbs recommended by the doctor was really just a meaningless number. There was no way for me to get there immediately; so it made no sense to try for it. All I really cared about was being on a trajectory of weight-loss; in other words I just wanted to lose some amount - any amount - relative to what I'd weighed in the most recent past.

So I set up a constantly moving target, very close to my actual weight. The target would go down at a rate of speed that was healthy and realistic. I started it off at 1 lb per week.

So my initial target was essentially the same as my actual weight. And every week, my target went down by 1 lb. Meanwhile, every morning I'd weigh myself, and thus indirectly count calories for the previous day.

If my weight was below my target, that meant I was losing weight too rapidly; and therefore I should eat whatever I wanted for that day. Yay! No need for endless willpower!

If, on the other hand, my weight was above my target, that meant I hadn't lost enough weight the previous day, and I needed to engage in diet behavior; which for me meant lots of salads. Vegetables are notoriously low calorie.

The beautiful thing about this diet was that it operated on average. I didn't have to do impossible calculations, and I didn't even need a perfectly accurate scale. If I followed the rules, even inaccurate measurements would average out to more and more accurate results. I loved this aspect because it had the same almost magical properties that I loved so much about calculus, and about those neat scientific experiments I'd done from books when I was a kid.

So, with no thanks to my doctor, over the past year I've managed to lose very nearly the amount he recommended. As of this morning, I'm down to 183.6 lbs, a 28.2 lbs loss.

I also lost the weight very slowly, which is exactly how you're supposed to lose weight. One of the other beautiful ideas about this diet is that you can actually control how much weight you lose over time. I started off at a pound a week; then switched to a pound every 10 days. When I do get down to 180 lbs sometime this February, my plan is to switch to a pound a month. I don't know of any other diet that offers that level of ability to slow down weight loss. The other diets seem to be all about losing dangerous amounts of fat in the least amount of time possible. Bad scene. I don't want to be thin, if that means my organs will all be damaged, and I'll realize no health benefit from the weight loss.

Anyway, so this morning I was not expecting to find myself below my target. I'd had a pretty luxurious lunch with a friend yesterday, including mushroom pasta and crab dumplings, and I'd expected today to be a diet day. But no! I'd lost weight after all, and today is a non-diet day.

Lately I've been feeling more and more as though I don't need to go out and binge on delicious foods on my non-diet days. I think I may be losing my taste for overeating. This morning, for example, when I think about what I want to do with my glorious non-diet day, I find myself considering really very sensible options. I'm not sure if that's a result of habits built up from being on this diet, or not. It does seem to be happening though.

We'll see. Anyway I'm pretty pleased with all this. I love feeling like I've cracked the technology.

Gaston Lagaffe

Spending Summers in France as a kid, I got to know the Gaston Lagaffe comic strips. They've never been translated into English, but it's still possible to follow along by looking at the pictures.

Gaston works in an office as a paper-pusher, but he has absolutely no interest in that. Instead of working, he constantly engages in pet projects that are very creative, but that completely ignore the requirements of his job, or the safety of others (and himself).

I love Gaston! He's so enthusiastic about his projects, and his projects are all fascinating, over-the-top conceptions that violate cultural conformity.

And yet ultimately, he's a Frenchman. Since I was an American kid in France, it was easy for me to spot his French traits. His taste in clothes and food always seemed very French to me. He's not a rebel per se. He's just very enthusiastic about everything.

His lack of concern for safety most often manifests as putting his coworkers in immediate danger, for example, blowing up part of the building. But that aspect of his personality is also fairly directly assessed as stupidity in the strip. In one single-panel story, we see Gaston at the beach, paddling out to sea on a raft. In the foreground, one of his coworkers holds a camera, saying to another coworker, "I told him I wanted a picture of him at the horizon... and he went!"

I have about six books of Gaston, that I bought long ago on one of my visits. There are 19 in all. They can't be found on http://amazon.com, probably because they've never been translated. But they can be found on http://amazon.fr! So I recently found them and ordered the remaining ones. They're €10 each, plus shipping. So it's not exactly cheap. But I got them, and I can't wait to read them!

It's not the first time I've wanted a book that could only be ordered from Europe. When Ann Hutchinson Guest first published her Advanced Labanotation series of books, I had to go to http://amazon.co.uk to get them. I don't know why Amazon would have different items available in different countries. The UK site is especially odd, since there's no language barrier, either in the site itself or in the products they sell. But now that Google Translate will automatically convert any web page to English for me, there's even less of a reason. I just visited http://amazon.cn, with no problem. Chrome detected the language, and converted it to English almost instantaneously. Sadly, the login credentials are not always the same, from site to site. The Chinese site wanted me to set up a whole new account.

Anyway, Gaston Lagaffe is great. It brings back lots of memories from my childhood. I don't recommend spending the money for the books, unless you can read French. But if you come over for a visit, I'd be happy to show off my collection.

Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs's birthday was this past Wednesday. He would've been 72 years old. He hung himself with a belt in 1976. One of my family stories is that my dad tried to talk him out of it.

I listened to his music all the time when I was growing up. I loved his protest songs, they seemed so hard-hitting and pertinent. Songs like "The Ballad Of William Worthy" was one of his story-telling songs, where he just basically took a current news story, and told it like it was. Then, songs like "Here's To The State Of Mississippi", while not about current news stories, were just as hard-hitting and pointed.

But he also wrote songs about other things that moved him. They weren't all fiery, angry protests. When Woody Guthrie died, he wrote "Bound For Glory". And after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote "That Was The President".

He also wrote funny songs, like "Draft Dodger's Rag", "Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends", and "Love Me I'm A Liberal", that were still political, but were more rowdy and something you might sing while holding a beer and dancing on a table.

After his first three albums though, I think it really started to get to him that Bob Dylan was so much more successful, and respected so much more as a poet than he was. But I don't think Phil Ochs really understood what poetry was all about. I think he thought of poetry as something that relied on obscure imagery and indecipherable metaphors.

So, when he started to shift his music to be more along the lines of what he considered poetic, the result seemed to be that his songs stopped making any sense. I still loved listening to them, but I didn't understand a lot of them anymore. Songs like "Crucifixion" were lovely to listen to, but that's all. They didn't speak to me on any other level. Clearly it was a song about Jesus and Christianity. But it seemed to be using too many flowery images, without clarifying what it really meant, and not even making the flowery imagery very beautiful. I much preferred his earlier songs about Christianity, such as "The Ballad Of The Carpenter" or "Canons Of Christianity", which made so much sense to me.

Another later song of his that I didn't really understand was "When In Rome" (and part 2). I could appreciate it on some level, but like "Crucifixion", a lot of the song just passed by me without registering, even after many listenings.

Not all of his songs from that period were inscrutable. I could still relate to plenty of them, and I loved songs like "The Ballad Of Joe Hill", "The War Is Over", and "Jim Dean Of Indiana".

Some of his later songs are very directly depressed and defeated. These also tend to be in line with his earliest work, clear and less flowery. Songs like "Rehearsals For Retirement" are very dark. One of these songs is the final track of his final album, which I'd never heard growing up. But years later, when I finally did hear it, I almost couldn't bear to listen to any more of his music. It was called "No More Songs". It was devastating.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he'd been able to get the right meds for his bipolar disorder, or whatever it was. I imagine him being like Dylan - still around, still making music today. Still relevant. And I imagine him having a lot to say about current events, and things like the Occupy movement. I don't think anyone in our pop-culture today ever made any sense out of the Occupy movement. But I think Phil Ochs would have been able to do it really well. He'd have been right there in Zuccotti Park, making up songs, and telling it like it was, and being a voice for a movement that ultimately never did find its own voice. Or at least, hasn't yet.

Learning To Walk

A lot has changed since my last Labanotation post.

For one thing, I've been focusing on the chapter on directional stepping. My approach is first to cover the direction symbols alone, and how they can be used to express different steps. Then in subsequent chapters, I plan to introduce new symbols that modify the direction symbols, in order to express a greater and greater variety of different steps. Eventually I'd cover the whole topic.

Unfortunately this has turned out to be a controversial decision. Direction symbols alone are able to express just a small handful of basic dance steps; and my tutor, Ilene, is concerned that dancers will be misled into thinking that Labanotation can't express any other types of steps. She insists that the only way to go, is to teach all the ways of notating steps at once.

I understand where she's coming from; but the obvious solution seems to be to just alert the reader to the fact that the direction symbols only explain a few different steps, and that additional steps will be explained in subsequent chapters. I'm not sure what else I'd need to do beyond that, to make sure people didn't get confused.

But she feels it's very important, so we argue about it.

Meanwhile, I've decided to use the Blender open source 3D animation software tool to create diagrams for my whole Labanotation text. The only problem being, Blender is hugely, insanely complicated! So I've essentially spent the past couple of weeks learning how to use Blender to place realistic human characters into still poses and animations.

Just today, I finally started to get something resembling a person taking a single step. This is the culmination of weeks of labor: a 2-second video of someone standing on a bare platform, and taking a single step forward.

What a sense of elation! As I edited the animation over several hours, I felt more and more like I really had a hold on the situation, and was really able to control exactly what this person was doing, to get her to step the way I wanted.

I've tried to learn Blender before; but it's always been so complicated, I just had no idea where to begin, or what to do, or how to approach the topic. But this time around, it's all been so obvious. Of course I would need to read such-and-such a chapter in so-and-so's book. Naturally I would need to do that, because of this-and-that type of problem I confronted, in producing a diagram for my Labanotation text!

Writing a text about Labanotation is really the ideal circumstance in which to learn Blender. Everyone should do it that way. In order to make the diagrams I need for my chapter, I'm constantly running into problems, and having to learn all sorts of Blender material in order to solve them. It's quite an immersion course. Meanwhile, since I'm writing a text about dance, or at least about something else that's about dance, I'm dealing with subtleties of human movement that I wouldn't encounter if I were just trying to make a funny animated movie. All the little details of a given movement suddenly take on an added significance, because they illustrate several paragraphs of text, in which I try to make complex notational ideas clear to a lay reader.

It's so nice also, to be totally captivated by a topic of exploration again. At the beginning of this year, I'd decided to cut out all my pursuits, and leave absolutely nothing between myself and my perceptive senses. I felt that I'd been hiding behind my enthusiasms; and I didn't want to let myself off the hook anymore. So I cut them out. It turned out to be a horrifying exploration of depression and emotional free-fall. But you know what I say - when life hands you depression and emotional free-fall, make lemonade!

Those were rough months. I really felt like I came right up against the bare metal of my existence; or nearer to it than I had in years and years. And when it was over, it took awhile for any topic of study to captivate my attention the way it had before. Of course there was still Labanotation itself; but that was less a labor of love than it was a labor of love/hate. I did it, but it was always just rough and painful, because of the controversies I created among the people I spoke to in the community, and because of my own struggle to understand the material I needed to write about.

But Blender now, has no such ambivalence attached. Not only is it incredibly fun to learn and play with, but it's going to absolutely revolutionize everything I'm doing with Labanotation. Instead of stale line drawings, poorly and laboriously done, I will now be able to illustrate all the diverse Labanotation concepts with highly accurate, rendered 3D images of people in the poses I've arranged, depicting the notation I've diagrammed. Animated videos will accompany textual explanations in ways that no other Labanotation text has ever approached. Readers coming to Labanotation for the first time will discover that the biggest problem they face will be deciding which wonderful creative choreographic idea they want to write down first.

It's quite something. I'm very much enjoying this whole process.

Home Infrastructure

Lena's friend Emily recently decided to try a career in home organization. I think she's considering trying something else now, but she's definitely very very good at home organization. I suspect she'll be good at whatever she tries.

She came over recently to continue working on my apartment. Lately that has meant the she's been going through boxes and boxes of ancient papers, and creating a filing system for me. What a nightmare. But she's just so perky and nonjudgmental about it, that I can just about manage to be in the same room while she's working on it, without panicking the whole time.

I'm not typically a panic-ridden person. But I do have longstanding difficulties cleaning up my living area, that date back to childhood, issues with my mom, and so on. In the past few years, I've been making huge leaps and bounds with keeping the place cleaner, but not to the point where I can maintain my own living space without help.

So, I have a housekeeper named Erin who comes every week; and I hired Emily to help me figure out where everything really belongs. Interestingly enough, I found both Erin and Emily through Lena. Lena seems to be really helpful in lots of ways, now that I think about it. Finding hacker spaces, finding people to help with my home, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

So Emily was here recently, and there are several parts of the apartment that have really needed some attention for a long time. For one thing, my bed is a big oaken thing with drawers on either side, and a long storage space directly under the mattress, accessible from a little door at the foot of the bed. The problem with the long storage space is that anything that goes in there, doesn't have a convenient way to come out again. The stuff at the back, in particular, is really just in there. So I've kept the whole space empty, hollow, and wasted.

Another problem has been the towel rod in the bathroom. The two little metal catches are screwed into the wall just fine; but the actual rod-holders that attach to those catches, and the rods that go between the holders, had long since fallen off and been stowed away behind the toilet. So typically, I'd just drape the towels where I could; or lately they'd just lay on the floor till I needed them again. Yes, it's humiliating. I'm a travesty. Whatever.

The bathroom in general was just not well organized. There wasn't anyplace to put anything, but there were a lot of things that needed places to be. I tend to buy soap and shampoo and toilet paper in bulk; and they'd just sit under the sink, in a pile, gradually spreading out faster than I used them up.

So, this time around, Emily suggested that I commit to solving each of those problems before she returns this Saturday.

And I did! Well, two out of three. And the third is on the way!

First, I made a trip to Home Depot and The Container Store. I took josette with me for moral support and to help carry things. We got the special hex wrench that I needed in order to fasten the towel rack back where it was supposed to be. That's all it would have taken this whole time; but it took till now for me to actually go and buy the tool.

At The Container Store, we also picked up materials to build a shelf on the inside part of the bathroom door. Another brilliant Emily idea (ABEI)! All of a sudden, the room that was too small for shelves of any kind, would now have a nearly full-sized shelf. I got the Elfa system, which is so overpriced that the company executives should really be ashamed of themselves, or at least be punished in some sort of disincentivizing way.

So, the bathroom is now turbo-powered. I installed the shelf, and it's perfect - aside from the space it takes up. And the towel rack now proudly totes two towels, and looks like it's raring for more.

The storage space under the bed is another story, but I think I've got it figured. I'm going to sew a length of rope into a bed sheet, and place the bed sheet beneath any boxes I want to store down there. That way, when I want to get access to the boxes again, I just pull the rope, the bed sheet slides out, and the boxes slide out along with it. When I want to put the boxes away again, I just put a box on the sheet, and push it in, add the next box, push it in, and so on, and they drag the bed sheet with them all the way to the far end.

But I haven't done that yet.

So yeah. Towel rack. Door shelves. Emily. The apartment gradually progresses. Someone recently came over and said, "oooh, I like this place!" Check one item off the list of things I never thought would happen.

Lena's Engagement

Yesterday I had a late dinner with Lena at her apartment. I got some fancy takeout and lugged it uptown, and it turned out to be way too much food. But it was a green day for both of us, which is a whole 'nother blog post unto itself; so lots of excellent food was, almost literally, just what the doctor ordered.

She was also nervous about her impending marriage. What had started out as the very practical idea of marrying one of her lovers for the favorable legal benefits, had turned out to mean much more to her, and also to some members of their respective families and friends. And she had a lot of ambivalence about this, especially since most of the married people she knew had also gotten married for the favorable legal benefits, rather than out of a true desire to spend their lives together. What was all this emotional stuff doing, getting in the way of her participation in a standard, practical element of her immediate culture?

The stress of it was having some commonly recognizable stress-related symptoms, such as not eating enough; another reason to bring her yummy delectables, though I didn't know about the stress until after I'd already brought the food. Happy coincidence.

But it wasn't sad stress - she was stressed by the happiness and excitement of marrying someone she really loved, and how much she was looking forward to it, both for the marriage itself, and the fun adultery play it would allow her to engage in with her other lovers. (All of which would be thoroughly approved of by her husband, but that too is a whole 'nother blog post).

So I got to spend the evening with one of the most happily stressed out people I'd ever encountered. Maybe it was just because I don't spend too much time with engaged people in general; but even among the group of such people I think this must be a particularly special case, since the whole engagement had started out as - at least by intention - a merely ordinary decision based on the merits; and both the happiness and the resulting stress had been just a pleasant (?) surprise.

On a completely different topic, Lena, who is one of the few people I've told about this blog, also told me at one point in the evening that she had considered asking me that day, whether blogging had changed the way I narrate my life to myself; and I joked that if she had asked me, my response would have been, "well, it will now!"

Here's the real answer. Yes it does. And that's why I started writing it. I wanted to write something that would be very personally revealing, about the thoughts and experiences that I find so fascinating in my own life, but that are so difficult to hold onto, as time passes and leaves those moments behind. And what I found is that, while I'm able to do that to some extent, there's also a lot that I'm not able to write about. I don't like saying negative things about people, for example, and so when I have something negative to say about someone, I tend to leave their name out of the post. And I don't feel the same desire to write about negative feelings and experiences, that I do to write about the things I find great and fascinating, or that I'm enthusiastic about. And so when I think back over my recent past, about what to put in each new post, I think about my life in those particular terms; and that tends to color my sense of those events. I see the moments of my life more in terms of how positive and interesting they are, rather than just as a set of particularities that occurred in my life.

Another part of the answer is that blogging has also changed the way I think about all my New York friends. When I was in California, almost every day I had a new experience with someone I rarely got to see, in a situation I rarely got to be in; but in New York, all my experiences tend to be, to some extent, repetitious. This may just be because in New York I have a group of friends that isn't in massive fluctuation, and so I tend to see the same people again and again. Or it may be that I just personally seem to prefer a more repetitious existence. I don't know. It's certainly not a difference between New York and California, except to the extent that I live here and not there. If I lived there, I'd have a different group of friends, but I'd have the same social patterns as I do here. In fact I did live there, and that's exactly what happened. So, writing this blog has made me aware that instead of writing about entirely new experiences each time, these posts may collectively start to reveal more and more about the particular people I know; both about their personalities and their identities. And that's something I hadn't anticipated. So yes, to that extent this too changes the way I narrate my own life to myself, because it's created an informational tension that I feel compelled to consider when composing each post.

Decorations

My friend Naima is full of ideas. A couple days ago she decorated my ceiling. Actually she decorated my ceiling last year; but I left that decoration up all year, and then a couple days ago she augmented it with a new layer.

The original layer was a bunch of red and green shiny Christmas balls. She hung a couple dozen of those on individual strings taped to my ceiling. Lots of climbing and un-climbing of the ladder. She did it because I'd mentioned to her that it was something I'd always wanted.

Actually I hadn't always wanted it. And here's the story about that. Once upon a time, I was not afraid of heights. I used to enjoy leaning over the edges of cliffs, bridges, tall buildings, just to see if I could see straight down to the ground, where the itty bitty people were moving so slowly.

But one day, I went with my dad to visit my grandma in Florida, and he took me parasailing. I forget who advised me on it, but someone told me to tell the parasailing people to let out all the rope, and let me go as high as I could get. So that's what I told the parasailing people, and that's what they did to me.

No one seemed to noticed that I was hanging completely limp in the harness, staring down at pure death from 1200 feet up. I guess the idea of installing an intercom system on those contraptions hadn't occurred to anyone; but I would have liked to have found a button up there on my harness somewhere, that I could push and say, "OK, I've had enough now. I'd like to come back down quickly please."

But no. They left me up there for a good long time. I had plenty of time to think things over. What it would look like from this height, to see someone hit the water after falling from this height. How long the rope was, and how the whole long length of it had to be good and strong, in order to stay attached to both me and the boat at the same time. How small the parasail was, and how it could easily separate from my little harness, and fly off, leaving me to move in a straight line 1200 feet closer to the center of the earth.

After that experience, I developed a whole new set of sensations when looking down from high places. For one thing, I started to feel like I couldn't be sure of my balance, and I might just pitch over the edge of whatever I was looking down from. Even if there was a good solid guard railing, it seemed as though I could definitely just pitch over the edge without realizing it.

I also noticed that it seemed as though my glasses might fall off, because of tilting my head down to look at the ground. It didn't matter that I could violently shake my head without the glasses coming off (I would test this periodically); if I was looking down from a height, I became certain that my glasses would fall off.

These feelings, along with the fear of dying, started to happen at lower and lower altitudes, until even standing on a chair or a stool would do it to me. It was a slow process, but a few years after my parasailing experience, I couldn't tolerate any elevation above the ground at all.

At around that time, my friend July asked me to clean the Christmas balls that hung on individual strings in the hallway of her house. She lived in a San Francisco collective, called The Purple Rose, and there was a hallway right outside the kitchen. The kitchen was used to cook for 15 or 20 people each day, and the grease vapor would billow out the door and along the ceiling, and over time would coat the Christmas ball strings with grease. One of the household chores was to wipe the grease off the strings.

So once when I was visiting, July asked me to do it, and I agreed, in spite of knowing full well that I'd be terrified. I took the ladder, and got started. Now, I could make it up the latter to to the top. I wasn't paralyzed by the fear. I just had all these emotions and sensations whirling through me while I did it. But just going up the ladder wasn't enough to do the job. From the top of the ladder, I could reach maybe a dozen or so Christmas balls, and wipe their strings clean. But there were maybe 100 or more up there. So I had to do it, then climb down the ladder, move the ladder, climb up it again, and clean the next set. I had to do that over and over and over again. Up the ladder... down the ladder... up the ladder... down the ladder.

The thing is, after the first few times up and down the ladder, it did start to get easier. Eventually it was really just normal. I wasn't thrilled about going up and down the ladder, but neither did it cause those whirling sensations to the same degree as it had.

After that, it's not so much that I was cured. But I noticed that the sensation of being afraid of heights just seemed less. I didn't mind as much, looking down from high places. And the fear and whirling sensations continued to diminish over the course of several months, until I wasn't scared of heights at all anymore. And I went back to my old ways of enjoying looking down from bridges and cliffs and buildings, to see the tiny people far below.

I was so grateful to July for asking me to clean those Christmas balls! And I felt like I really understood a lot more about being afraid of heights, and about how to cure such things. The whole experience really enriched me. I thought very affectionately of those Christmas balls hanging in the hallway of the Purple Rose.

So it was years again after that, that I mentioned to Naima my desire to have Christmas balls hanging from my ceiling. I don't think I even told her the significance they had for me. It was just a passing remark I made. I didn't expect her to actually do anything about it.

But Naima is full of ideas. One day a year ago she sequestered me in my bedroom with strict instructions not to come out. I never felt so trapped in a small space in my life. But no, I didn't develop claustrophobia - though that would've been funny. No, I just watched a movie and lounged in bed for awhile, and then she said I could come out again; and lo and behold! My ceiling was covered with Christmas balls hanging down from strings, just like at the Purple Rose!

It was lovely, and meant so much to me, both because of her wonderful expression of friendship, and because of what Christmas balls hanging from the ceiling signified in my life. The struggle, the healing, the learning; not to mention the reminder of my friendship with July, who is someone who also has a lot of ideas.

Then a couple of days ago, Naima came over, dropping little hints, like "where do you keep your ladder?" And "do you have any clear tape? I want to use it later."

Anyone with half a brain would pick up on that kind of hint, I'm sure, especially since she'd done the exact same routine the year before. But not me! I was talking a mile a minute about Labanotation, and paused only long enough to say, "sure, the ladder's in the vestibule. There's tape on the table over there."

Later that day, Slim came over, and Will cooked the four of us some chicken. Naima had also baked us all a cake, so it was party time. Then Naima sacked out in my bed while Slim and Will and I hung out. And after that it was late, so I sacked out in my bed too.

At some point I woke up to the sounds of her leaving. "Wussup?" I grumbled, half-asleep, into my pillow. "Just going to the bathroom," she said.

But she lied! Well, she probably did go to the bathroom, but then she grabbed the ladder, grabbed the tape, grabbed a big bag of silver christmas trees, and paper snowflake cut-outs that she'd made herself, while I had dreams of sugar-plums in the next room.

When I got up in the morning, Naima had sacked out again, this time on the couch; and at first I didn't notice anything. My first half hour of wakefulness usually only distinguishes itself from sleep by the fact that I'm walking around.

But she woke up shortly thereafter and told me to look up; and then I noticed! It was so nice, all over again. The balls and trees and snowflakes were beautiful. It was a lovely present.

Naima always does things like that for her friends, and as far as I know, no one has ever done anything like it for her. I do other cool things for her; but I don't come up with huge surprises like that. I keep telling her there has to be a way to turn that kind of ability into a career of some kind.