I am the cockroach of ballet students, etc.

A thought that ran through my head yesterday. Like a species that won't take a hint, crawling back above ground after nuclear apocalypse, eventually I always find myself back in a dance studio.

(I'm not doing this right now, but the impulse has been occurring to me.)

Lately I find myself wanting to email my favorite ballet teacher from my teenage years, who also shepherded my mid-twenties comeback: Guess what, I'm obsessed with circus classes these days! I ponder whether I would send him a short video or not - a little brassy for my taste but could be a good idea so he knows what the f*ck, specifically, I am talking about. I imagine saying, And guess what, ballet helps with that too! - even from underneath the years that bury it - even if not one smidge with the upper body strength - my feet chronically if imperfectly pointy, my eye sensitive to line, my preferences leaning towards the shapes that most closely echo an arabesque.

Let me get down to it: I think I am also the cockroach of bloggers. I've been using this very account, off and on, for nearly as long as I've been in and out of ballet classes. The impulse comes and goes but is hard to eradicate. Eventually, always, I find myself online again typing to friends and strangers. Here I am again, hello. I've missed you all.

Thank goodness, it's finally over

November is by far the busiest month of the year in my industry (because of the dread Thanksgiving). Thank goodness, thank goodness that's over and I can look forward to some time to breathe now. 

To get through the final push of this week, I decompressed with an old favorite book, one that I haven't reread in years and years - Enna Burning, by Shannon Hale. 

In a roundabout way, she is the author who got me blogging. I was part of her ferociously active little fan forum, Little Red Reading Hood (est. 2006), and a number of the girls and young women there had blogs as well whose comment sections became another way of hanging out and chatting.

What about you - do you remember who or what (if applicable) got you started blogging?

Something's changed about this blog

Gradually. I don't know quite what, but it's not a place that has been feeling like home for the words and photos of my days, these days.

I'm going to experiment a little to see what needs to change. Perhaps a fresh template, a a fresh name, perhaps a fresh blog without these archives. Perhaps it's blogging itself that doesn't feel right anymore, or perhaps it's just that I'm making myself take it too seriously.

For now I am going to turn off comments and see how that goes, because the idea felt good when it occurred to me.

You are always welcome, of course, to contact me via any of the channels listed here.

Radio silence

It's been hard to write recently. Anything, anywhere. I have plenty to say, but I don't know who to say it to, so I don't know how to say it, how to begin. (Should it be a letter? If so, to whom? Shall I carve it down into a series of 140-character musings? Do I need to journal it out, do I wish to save it to tell to my love, could I write a blog post?)

I owe words. Letters especially are overdue. I hope my dear correspondents who are reading this will forgive me. Words written or typed sustain (and are the historical foundation of) so many of my relationships, I feel like I'm failing everyone a little bit lately with this silence, including myself.

Perhaps I just need to be less black and white, and instead begin somewhere (anywhere, anything). Perhaps I need also to pare down my commitments with regard to communication.

I'm still taking pictures. I'm behind on posting my 365, but not on taking the photos. You'll see them.

I'm still here, anyway.

On blogging / Against compartmentalization

I wonder sometimes what this site is. It's not my journal, but it's not unlike a journal. I would never want to say that it's about me, so I resist calling it a personal blog.

But it is all personal. My intellectual pursuits, my artistic pursuits, they are no less personal than my emotional life or my relationships with family and friends. These things are not even distinct from each other. What I do and what I think and what I make, who and what I love, where I go, what I see, what I believe...it's a big wild soul-party of connection and mutual influence and engagement. It's kinda dialectical. Grounded theory.

I proceed from myself and my life. Always. Who doesn't? What other starting point is there?

It might be tidier, to my mind, if I could compartmentalize in my blogging life. Here's where I talk about my daily life, here's where I get to be a feminist, here's where I talk about embodiment and eating and mental health things... 

But it's impossible. Any divisions I made would be false and unsatisfying. So I'm not drawing any lines — except for the one between what I can write publicly about without facing significant, negative, not-worth-it consequences for my offline life, and what I can't.

Because as my "About" page used to say, this space is not only "about" the unity of experience, emotion, intellect, and creativity that I find in my days, it's also one of my tools for clarifying that unity. Which is to say, precisely as I need and like it.

What I need: [SAVE THE FOTOS Campaign]

Help paying for a renewal on my flickr pro account, which is about to expire.

It's $24.95, and it is the one unavoidable expense of blogging for me. Custom domain? Nice, but not necessary. Film and developing? Well, I can abstain from shooting film when funds get really low. (Or groceries. One of those.) But continued hosting for 1500+ fotos on this blog? Necessary. Definitely necessary.

So if you can spare a few dollars towards that, I would be so very grateful. It's not exactly up there with impoverished children, but it'll allow me to keep sharing photos with you AND buying groceries in the coming year. Woohoo!


[moolah button]

peace,
Holly

UPDATE: The photos have been saved! Thank you, Erin, Poppy, and Martin. Words cannot express my relief and appreciation.

Attribution or bust

One of my biggest peeves in the entire world: when bloggers accompany their posts with images and do not credit the photographer or artist.

If you find a picture you like but you can't find the photographer's name, don't repost it.

If you find a picture you like and you do know who took it, and it's not licensed under Creative Commons, ask their permission before you repost it. Then include the photographer's name and a link to their page, or credit them in another way if they prefer.

I once read a blog post in which the blogger expressed her frustration that her posts were being spread around Tumblr in their entirety. She wrote, "It's one thing to make tiny source links for photos that accompany a piece, but entire articles is something different."

That sentence stuck in my brain and itched for quite a while. I don't see how there is a difference.

To the photographer who took that photo, it may well be the equivalent of your "entire article". They put some combination of their thought, creativity, unique perspective, and skill into producing it. And I doubt they took it thinking, "I hope some stranger picks this up and presses it into service as an illustration on their blog without asking me!"

So I went back into the archives of my blog and took out images that I used without proper attribution. These days when I use photos other than my own, it's from a flickr user whom I've messaged for permission.

Just because you run across a pretty picture, doesn't mean that it's yours to use as you please.

Just because it's incredibly easy to share images on the internet, doesn't mean non-attribution is okay.

Be courteous. Choose to use images whose source you know (and I mean the creator, not a weheartit page); then, unless the image is licensed under Creative Commons, go to the tiny bit of extra trouble to get the artist's or photographer's blessing, and credit them when you do repost it.

And if you use Tumblr or similar, I think it would be great if you decided not to reblog uncredited images. If you just favorite, then at least you won't be responsible for it spreading further without attribution.

Survey

I have made a survey for YOU about the content here on Eating a Tangerine. Please click on over; it'll take less than a minute and your responses will be really helpful for me.

Takk takk.

Peace, Beaver

Sometimes it's not possible to know exactly what a person means without knowing where they're coming from and who they're addressing. A reminder for me to give the benefit of the doubt, which I did not do in the case of [recent blogger drama].

For those still interested in the content of the argument, I explained to Kristy Eléna that I interpreted the section of her post I quoted as saying that women have body image issues because they have not been strong enough. Kristy clarified her intent in writing that section:

"my excerpt was not meant to be a blame or to ignore the historical factors that have brought us to this point. that paragraph is meant for a very specific type of woman - one who unfortunately exists in abundance and whom i've had the bad fortune of running into far too often. the woman whose first reaction is to say something horrible and demeaning about another woman for her weight/looks but then turn around and play the 'men make women feel bad' card and 'why aren't we equal yet' and 'why am i not being respected by men.' the woman who is constantly saying 'i'm fat' but not because she actually IS struggling with a weight issue, but because she wants to put down her heavier friends. and though deep down she knows that's a really f-cked up mentality, she keeps doing it because it makes her feel better about herself, and she relies on that instead of actually looking inside and fixing whatever problem is causing it. she blames the models she sees in magazines for her problems when in reality it's HER. it's a 'tough love' paragraph for sure, but i've run out of ways to try and reason with people like that. maybe tough love is the only thing that's left."

You won't catch me writing like that, but I am writing to different people than Kristy Eléna is. Perhaps it's a needed message for some of her audience. I can't say.

I suspect we still disagree in some places, but no more ugly fighting. Yay clarity, yay agenda-free communication.

If the drama made you uneasy, my apologies, friend! It kind of made me yikes too and it's not exactly something I want to cultivate more of. Though you are quite welcome to disagree with me or one another in the comments.

I like you for bearing with me as I get wiser.

as ever,
Holly.

Newsy news

Jenica asked in a comment whether I have a Formspring.

Nope. However, I made an anonymous form submission page of my own last night. Here.

Put whatever you like in it. Like throwing coins in a fountain? I think what I'll do is this: if there's no question mark, I am just listening. To the ones that have question marks, I will respond in a post, probably periodically to several at once.

As per always, you can also just email me (wie.ein.lied at gmail dot com). I like emailing very much.

Cheers.

Etsy [listen up, you]

Why hello!

Do you know what New Year's resolution I have recently crossed off my list?

[Do tell, which one?]

The one about opening an Etsy shop, of course, hence post title. Yay!

What that means at present is that you can now buy prints of some of my favorite Diana pictures, like the ones below.

My storefront is here.

If you're interested in buying a print but would rather mail me a check or something else, let me know. I'm flexible.

Same goes for if you want a print that I haven't listed. Basically anything I've blogged or put on my flickr I'd be happy to list; just ask.

If you would like to make a small Christmas present to me...

edit:

Thank you to gracious Perthite Vagrant Imp/@Vagrant for the account upgrade. It means so much to me that I'm not the only one who cares about what I do. I shan't forget it.


Hey readers,

I've become increasingly frustrated with the free image-hosting options available to me for blogging. Flickr is the best I've found so far, in terms of convenience and retention of image quality, and has the added bonus of being a great tool to connect with other photographers and bloggers. The only issue I have with flickr is the 200-image limit on free accounts.

I've been fine with periodically deleting old pictures from my photostream, but now that I'm using flickr to host the photos that I blog, that's an issue: I don't want my posts here to go image-dead after a few weeks in the archives.

In order to keep my older photos from being deleted to make space for new ones (and thereby also deleted from any blog posts they appeared in), I need to upgrade to a pro account...which costs $24.95.

If you enjoy my photos and this blog, I invite you to make a donation towards my flickr account upgrade.

[for those of you in a reader, there is a "donate" button right there ^]

Because I would like to keep blogging sustainable for me, and I also like to ask for what I need.

pro acount or not, I remain,
yours,

cuileann

Two articles of business

1. You can see some of the professional photographer's pictures from the wedding HERE.

2. Remember this? I kept forgetting to tell you, but I made a machine pick a number for me, and it picked five, which means Madison, who is one of my oldest blogging friends and also awesome and wicked smart. Madison, I owe you a bloggy-love package.

The art of eating a tangerine

Thich Nhat Hanh illustrated mindful living by describing the act of eating a tangerine. You eat it one section at a time. If you can't first eat just the piece of the tangerine that is in your mouth, you won't be able to eat the whole tangerine. In the same way, he wrote:

"If you cannot find joy in peace in these very moments of sitting...you will be incapable of living the future when it has become the present. Joy and peace are the joy and peace present in this very hour of sitting. If you cannot find it here, you won't find it anywhere. Don't chase after your thoughts as a shadow runs after its object....Find joy and peace in this very moment."

That is the real art to living that I want to know, being able to take whatever you are given and recognize it as beautiful. Not because it's whatever you perceive it to be, but as a realization that there is sufficient goodness in what you have and are right now, in the present moment and in what you can make happen in it. I want to carry that ability with me.

So I have to remind myself, If you can't find beauty on this street where you are walking right now, if you can't find fulfillment in washing the dishes, if you can't find calm in this traffic jam, then you won't be able to find these things anywhere else in any meaningful way. So find it. It's there; there is something and it's enough.

And why do I rename this blog in honor of that way of thinking? Because a lot of what I write now comes from the process of learning how to think and live that way, present and receptive to the moment. You can imagine me typing with fingers that are maybe still a little sticky with tangerine juice.

Yay change

I came up with the current name for this blog back in 2007 without much thought, and I've been wanting to change it for quite a while now.

I finally came up with something that I'm wholly happy with. :)

And I decided to register my own domain at the same time. My new address is http://www.tangerine-eater.com

I would be much obliged if you would update your links. So obliged, in fact, that you should tell me if you do so, and leave me a comment with the address of the page where I can find this updated link. Because I might decide to do a drawing and randomly choose one or more of these saintly link-updaters and give them presents. You never know.

^ That paragraph was important. Stop skimming, skimmers.

To my special fellow RSS rats: HERE [http://feeds.feedburner.com/eatingatangerine] is the new feed.

Explanation of the new title to follow soon.

You are cordially invited...

Faith, Erin, and I will be broadcasting live from my webcam to the internet tomorrow (June 4th for you USians) at 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time.

Possibilities for our agenda include: a sock puppet adaptation of The Goose Girl, cartwheeling, and Erin's Samara/Sadako impression. [She won't admit that she has one, but I saw her do it yesterday.]

You will find our stream here.

The difference between this and a live vlog is that there is a chatbox on the same page, so you can talk to us [command us to dance, request stories, etc.] and each other while it's going on.

Lots of fun. You should come.

Thoughts?

I've made some layout changes once again, though I've been working off the same theme. Much as I liked the look of a single-column blog, I missed some of the more functional sidebar widgets.

It could probably use a little more work, so let me know if anything about it looks off to you.

Pointless post

I keep wanting to post, but I don't know what to say, or how to say what I want to say. Which is not to say that I have anything momentous to say.

And I need to get through the Poetry Friday links. Argh!

That's all.

Some Monday afternoon linkage

Almost all of you who took my survey (which is still open!) said that you'd like to see a feature like this, so I'm giving it a try. Some favorite stuff picked up from th'internets over the last week:

- This Icelandic photographer's latest pictures remind me of what Duong Thu Huong called "the hallucinatory whiteness" of snow in Russia. More at his flick photostream.

- Colleen at Chasing Ray: "On happy lives". Rather thought-provoking.

- The Pursuit of Harypness is a fairly new blog to me. I don't agree with its writers on all the feminist issues they cover, but where I do, it is tremendously gratifying to me to read what they have to say, because they are so fierce and articulate. "What You've Got in that Bag" is one such post.

- Heather on the Sublime. I like this post because "sublime" is something that I am familiar with feeling, but have never heard explained or even clearly defined before.

- Maureen Johnson is one of the funniest people on my RSS reader, and her Badger Diaries (click for parts one, two, three, four, and five) are hilarious even by her blog's standards.

- Lovely small stone.

- "Homeless Shelter Glossary, Volume 1". The blogger, Tim, oversees a homeless shelter and writes most insightfully about faith and social justice in practice.

- This flickr pool is so great. Even though it fills me with camera envy.

- Very interesting discussion at Anilee's blog on the plausibility of Ally Carter's protagonists knowing fourteen different languages, and a tangent into the issues of what makes something canon and telling versus showing.

Early Christmas present for you Blogger users

Let it snow! :)