lilmissnever

Oh, my few remaining readers, remember those halcyon days when I returned from the Dominican Republic feeling stronger, smarter, and more flexible, capable of achieving all things in relation to the aerial circus arts? That was nice, wasn't it? I'd grown comfortable with the idea that, while I will never be as good as my teachers, who can and do devote themselves full-time to training, that I was not too shabby for a girl with a day job. It was this spike of overweening optimism that caused me to sign up for a five-week rope "master class" taught by a visiting aerialist from Australia.

When I came to warm up and I didn't recognize any of the people in the master class, that should have been a warning. When I noticed that all of the other people in the master class were men, that should have been a warning too. Look upon those biceps, ye mighty, and despair. When the instructor, a cheerful blond Australian Ken doll, started us a twisty variation on toe climb that required either much greater toe strength or a far better one-arm hang than I currently posses, I should have prepared myself for a five-week lesson in humility. When women showed up to class and they were teenage former national gymnasts and supernaturally flexible yoga instructors, I probably should have stayed home. Working out with professional aerialists and teenagers that are mostly made of cartilage makes me feel like a clumsy visitor from the Land of the Troll People. I would not subject my fragile self-esteem to this kind of abuse if only is wasn't so effective.

I never did make much progress with the twisty variation on the toe climb, but my regular toe climb is much improved. I now have the callous between my toes that allows me to climb the rope without needing to haul myself up with both hands. I can hipkey climb to the top of the rope--the secret is to start in meathook. I have improved my beats, which has enabled me to do a lot more of the dynamic, swinging rope tricks that have always impressed me, but have never really been my style. I can do a couple of the more spectacular open drops out of back balance, even if I prefer to do them when I'm not too high up in the air because I'm still a little skittish about the possibility of missing the rope. I have landed (deliberately) flat on my back on the crash mat so many times that my neck is sore.

I am humbled by how much more there is to learn, but I am pleased to have made some progress.

I never wrote about my vacation because I returned from vacation and was immediately promoted at the Mysterious Workplace. The more I write at work, the less I write here. I only have so much writing in me, and right now it's all going to Skype security problems, Syrian malware, and Pakistan blocking Twitter. I will skip the traditional recitation of the things I have not written about. We will proceed directly to the tropical island.

I have never been to a tropical island, not even on family vacations to Hawaii. I'm not the kind of person who spends their precious PTO sprawled on a beach. I have nothing in particular against the sun or warm weather or clear blue oceans, but when I need to decide how I'm going to spend free days, days when I do not check my email or write blog posts about international freedom of expression, I visit cities. I do not pack a bikini and fly to the Dominican Republic to train aerial circus arts in a little tourist town by the beach for ten days.

All of the cliches about tropical islands are true of the little corner of Hispanola near Puerto Plata that I've seen--impossibly blue skies, lukewarm ocean water, miles of white beaches, the kind of lush vegetation that peels paint, the jungle that strives to reclaim everything. For the first few days it rains. For the first few days, we are eaten alive by mosquitoes. I wake up impossibly early in the morning and train harder than I ever have in my life. At 8:15, there is an exercise class on the beach. Then I try to get something to eat. Then my morning aerials class. Then lunch. Then my afternoon aerials class. Then an hour of stretching. Then a couple of hours of lying in the sun or passed out on my bed until dinner. It hurts to walk because my hamstrings are so sore. I roll my calves around on a tennis ball. I go running on the beach. I go hiking in the jungle, where I cannot look up because it has just rained and I am going to slip on roots and rocks. I see an enormous millipede.

What does the jungle look like? Mud. Rocks. Goat shit. Rocks at the bottom of the river am I wading across. Our guide asks if I'm a dancer. I tell him we're all dancers, but we dance several feet up in the air. On the ground, we're useless. I swim under waterfalls and cut my hands on rocks. Rocks are sharp.

What's the special? my classmate asks the waiter--20 years old, blond, permanently stoned. There are two photos of him surfing an enormous wave on the wall behind the bar.

"It is warm," he says. "The sun is shining. Everything is special."

Our instructors are carved out of marble. They run down the beach in the morning. They do handstands in the afternoon. In between classes, they touch their toes to their heads and do oversplits. After five or six hours of training every day, even they start to ache. I feel a little better, knowing that they're human. My classmates are people whose bodies are their livelihoods--Crossfit trainers and yoga instructors. My classmates are lawyers and architects, engineers and journalists who train until they're exhausted because it's the only time they stop thinking about work. I examine my body for exciting new bruises and strange abrasions. I take a dozen ibuprofen every day. I walk around in a bikini because I am never more than a block away from the beach. By the end of the week, my metabolism is spinning so fast that a shot of rum gets me drunk.

I try to imagine a world in which I am not Carmen San Diego, a world in which it is my job to train full-time. I try to imagine being the kind of person who can only eat very small meals and wakes up very early in the morning to go running. I pretend I could be a person who does not drink and goes to bed early. For a couple of days, when the worst of the pain has subsided, I enjoy the illusion I could do this indefinitely.

And isn't that what a vacation is supposed to do? Isn't it pretty to think so?

Alternative title: When I Said I'd Given Up On Writing About SXSW, I Was Obviously Kidding Myself.

For a variety of reasons, I spent more time on my own this year at SXSW than I have in the past. I did a lot of work, then I'd sneak off to Austin's only aerial gym for a rehearsal, or sit by the hotel pool. Being conspicuously alone during an enormous music festival, with my funny hair and cartoonishly large sunglasses, a lot of conversations would begin with so, what band are you in?

Longtime readers of this space will know that I am not in a band. I have never been in a band, not even in high school. More importantly, if the bands I see at SXSW are any indication, the cranky goth girl with a headfull of black dreadlocks is not in the band. The girl with limp brown hair, awkward posture, and a closet full of third-hand cardigans? She's in the band. Extra points if she is wearing a pair of large plastic eyeglasses and Keds. And if the girl is young enough not to recall a time when these clothes were not ironic? Band. In fact, she plays keyboards. She might even play keyboards held up with a neck strap. Just wait until she discovers the keytar.

Since it was obvious to me that I am not in a band, I continuously passed up this golden opportunity to lie to strangers. I did not tell anyone I am a musician. I did not tell them I play the sitar, or the balalaika, or the accordion. I did not tell them my band is headlining the Latvian showcase, which is being hosted by the Quebecois showcase, but has been totally packed all week because the Baltic scene is really taking off right now. I did not claim to be the second drummer for White Savior Industrial Complex (it is a true fact that bands with two drummers are twice as good as bands with only one drummer). I did not describe my sound as ambientcore, hard folk, or anything ending in "step." Not once did I tell some inquisitive stranger that I was a singer/songwriter/cellist.

Oh no, my eye-rolling readers. I did none of these things because I foolishly believed that telling people what I do for a living might not result in a 20-minute discussion about SOPA. Next time, I swear I'm in a band.

The trouble with writing for a living is that I rarely have the time to write for fun. For the past month, my life has gone sadly undocumented, and as the number of things I have not written about (SXSW, the Stormkern show, the Hubba Hubba Revue's Goth show, last week's aerial act, protecting activists from pro-Syrian-government malware) piles up, I feel as if I've fallen hopelessly behind. How can I possibly write about what's happening now when I haven't written about Baratunde Thurston's How to be Black, or Rebecca MacKinnon's The Consent of the Networked or those endless George R. R. Martin novels?

I suspect that the only way to start writing again is to wipe the slate clean. I must accept that I will probably never write that perfect clever thing about the Hellraiser burlesque act, or the bands I saw in Austin, or injuring my shoulder and having to re-choreograph my entire tissu routine at the last minute. I will not finish my fiction for Write Club, or write cute little essays for other people's websites. I have spent my month writing blog posts for the Mysterious Workplace and reading papers with titles like "Problems
 with 
Extending
 EINSTEIN
 3
 to
 Critical
 Infrastructure." I regret it a little, but I cannot fix it.

As Carmen San Diego, I don’t do television. I am a funny-looking creature with odd mannerisms and a fanciful dress sense. I have had to turn down television appearances because I was wearing a dress with a pattern that would moiré and I didn’t have time to go home and change. I spend a lot of time talking to print journalists, which I enjoy except for that one time that a magazine misquoted me and it looked like I was praising Facebook’s transparency policies. I am always happy to do radio—especially NPR. Appearing on public radio makes me feel competent and professional. Television does not.

In the interest of doing things that are hard (see also: learning Chinese, aerial circus arts), I take the occasional talking head request on news shows that I hope no one is watching. I have reached a certain level of comfort with Skyping into interviews. Having immediate visual feedback is very helpful in finding a camera angle that doesn’t cause my chin to completely disappear and stopping myself if I start to make a stupid face. I make a lot of stupid faces.

Television is outside of my comfort zone.

Last week, my adventures outside of my comfort zone put me on a red eye to Washington DC, so that I could co-host a half-hour news show about Chinese Internet censorship. Chinese Internet censorship is my comfort zone. It was the subject of my undergraduate thesis. This almost makes up for the pants.

Longtime readers of this space are well aware of my lifelong opposition to pants, succinctly described in this Euler diagram. There has never been any overlap between the times when I am truly happy and the times when I am wearing pants. Nonetheless, days before my television appearance I received a helpful primer from the show’s producer—here are your flight and accommodation details, here are some links to some of the things that we will be talking about, and by the way, wear pants. I can only imagine the unfortunate incident that led the producers to discover that the combination of the height of their couch and the angle of their cameras resulted in upskirt shots of their female guests. I scrapped my plan to wear a navy blue shirtwaist and brought out my pinstriped grey pants suit—the closest thing I have to corporate drag.

Washington DC is not a real place. It’s an airport and a shuttle between terminals and a professional chauffeur in a suit holding a sign with my name on it. Washington DC is a car with bottled water and a copy of The Washington Post. It’s a bright morning, driving past rows of bare trees. It’s a posh hotel with freshly-baked croissants and “Oh, I’m just here for the day to do a tv show.” It’s a hotel room with a view of the Washington Monument. Did you know that the saddest words in the English language are “empty hotel room?” This is a fact.

I spend the morning in my empty hotel room. I take a shower in a marble-tiled bathroom that is larger than the apartment I lived in in 1999. I use all of the fluffy towels. I pay for wifi so I can answer email and study up on Chinese Internet censorship. I try to sleep, because I did not sleep on the red eye. I get up and iron my jacket and pants.
The front desk calls me to tell me that my driver has arrived. I could not tell you where the studio is located, only that I seem to have driven past every big white monument in Washington DC. I track our progress by watching the little blue arrow move across the map on my phone, but this city is meaningless to me. There are joggers on the street and tourists with cameras. There are so many people in business suits and overcoats. I feel like the weirdest person for miles around. One of the producers escorts me upstairs. We talk about Burning Man and flamethrowers and quadcopters. He leaves me with a cup of coffee and the makeup artist, who complains that everyone from LA wants their makeup laid on with a trowel. He magically makes me look well-rested, for which I am profoundly grateful.

Live television is easier than I thought it would be. The studio is unusually cold. The producers and cameramen have piled on their coats and gloves and hats with flaps over the ears. We talk about travel. We speak in ridiculous Russian accents while we wait for filming to start. The hosts pace and throw balls and do yoga in an effort to keep warm. Newseum tourists stop to gape in the windows and see News Being Made. I sit up very straight and try to keep track of the cameras so I can catch myself if I start to make a stupid face. My hosts ask smart questions. The other guest, whose work I have been following for years, makes salient points. Once I relax a bit, I mostly do not make a fool of myself, though I think I may have fumbled a point about Facebook’s real name policies.

When it’s over, I’m relieved. I live up to the stereotype of Girl from San Francisco by constantly checking my phone, which provides me with a steady stream of messages from people who have seen the show. No one calls me an idiot. My work here is done.

I'm not going to talk about my act because I don't have one. That's the problem. In March, I am performing at the Hubba Hubba Revue's goth-themed Deathguild anniversary show and I have nothing: no music, no costume, no choreography, no concept. To make matters worse, March is a scheduling nightmare for gym time. My East Bay gym has just sent out a notice that they will not be having any open gym on the weekends in the month of March and all of their open gyms time during the week are scheduled in the middle of the day, when I am at work. I suspect I will have to pay for a month of open gym at the Very Serious Circus School and sacrifice my precious weekend mornings to the ravenous aerial gods. I may even go so far as to take the advanced aerial conditioning class with the Terrible Russian Woman, since I've been suffering from dangerously a high self-esteem/maximum number of pull-ups ratio.

I have seven weeks until my next act and I have nothing. Nothing. I was handed this gig because the promoter thought I'd be inspired and I don't even have the kernel of an idea. Normally I start with a piece of music that I wouldn't mind hearing a thousand times, or a character I want to play, or a story I want to tell, but all I can think to do for the goth show is to put on a black leotard, pick out one of the Deathguild standards, and slink around on the tissu for four minutes. This is not the kind of act I like to watch and it's not the kind of act I like to perform.

These are dark days. If I do an act to Dead Stars, I may actually die of shame.

There are those to point out that the Edwardian Ball is neither particularly Edwardian, nor a ball. These are usually people whose primary interest is in period recreations of clothing, ideally worn while performing period dances. They are displeased by steampunks and circus and clowns, mechanical curiosities, and bicycle-powered carousels putting a damper on their recreationist vibe. I am not a recreationist. My interests run towards Edward Gorey, not Edward VII.

Even so, I have discovered my limits. I cannot do more than three nights in a row of Edwardian Ball festivities. I cannot drink any more absinthe. I cannot dance on any more boxes. It may be several weeks before I can bring myself to wear a bustle or a tiny hat. I must declare a moratorium on cage crinolines. I am a Top Hat and Cravat-Free Zone until at least February.

I wore clothes! Such wonderful clothes! I led Tugboat the Buffello around on a leash while wearing my gold-spangled circus outfit for the Thursday night Edwardian Ball edition of the Hubba Hubba Revue. I wore my Edwardian bathing costume to the Edwardian World's Fair on Friday. And Saturday I wore my "Extensive Commentary on Victorian Orientalism" costume, to great acclaim.

I saw acts! Such wonderful acts! Molotov did his knife-throwing act at Hubba and Jill Tracy played at the ball. I saw one of my instructors do her aerial act and some girl I did not immediately recognize do an excellent corde lisse act. Suzanne's paintings were all over the walls and Monique's Cindarella taxidermy display got its own little vitrine. I wandered through the Red Room and briefly regretted that J and I did not get married in front of the set of Faust, which is all about the importance of contract law.

I saw objects! Such wonderful objects! The most dangerous part of the Edwardian Ball is the bit where I become tipsy and wander downstairs where vendors are plying their wares. There were far fewer bustles than in previous years (perhaps the bustle market is saturated), but I saw some beautiful sculpted leather masks which I will be sure to purchase if I should ever take up a life of crimefighting, and an astonishing hand made gown whose "as quoted" price was (unfortunately) $1800. I am not yet so wealthy that I can drop purchase-a-laptop money on a dress. Digital civil liberties is not where the money is--take note.

I ended the weekend happy and tired and a little bit dizzy. My house looks as if a showgirl exploded in it. I have engaged in a half-hearted attempt to start choreographing my next aerial routine. My feet hurt. It's raining. And I have to write about the largely inadequate state of pseudonym support on social networks. I find this to be an acceptable state of affairs.

Berlin, we need to talk about your smoking problem. I want to love you, Berlin. You're pretty and hip and you stay up all night. I can always get a beer, which is preferable to paying ruinous prices for a bottle of still water. Your trains run at all hours. Your Thai and Vietnamese food is surprisingly delicious. I am charmed by your Christmas markets and glühwein. Your hacker spaces are like that club in that movie that one time. But you're suffocating me, Berlin. I can't breathe. I come back to my hotel and my clothes smell like cigarette smoke. My headsquid smells like cigarette smoke. Cigarette smoke permeates my skin and all night (okay, all of the daytime because I keep going to bed at dawn) I cough and cough. I am generally a hardy creature, but I have delicate lungmeats, Berlin. Have pity on me!

Fortunately, Berlin also has a Liquidrom, where exhausted, bone-chilled Berliners can soak in a salt-water pool in a dimly-lit room while ambient techno is piped in through underwater speakers. The saunas and salt scrubs and pools of varying temperatures have a restorative effect on my ravaged lungs. I drink cocktails and fall asleep in a lounge chair. My glamorous, globe-trotting software developer can't bring herself to wake me up because she swears I have dozed off with a smile on my face.

The Chaos Computer Congress, which is the reason I have come to Berlin in the middle of Winter, does an admirable job of meeting my expectations. I see several excellent talks (Morozov on surveillance, decrypting Skype communications, the "war on general computing" talk that I think Cory Doctorow wrote while sitting behind me at the SCADA hacking talk) and miss an even larger number of talks that I'm certain would have been good if only I hadn't been sleeping, or nursing a hangover, or eating dinner with a dozen other people who were speaking at Congress. The gender balance is approximately the same as DEFCON (80/20), but the women of CCC were frequently there on their own, while the women of DEFCON are usually there because they're some hacker's girlfriend. I meet a physicist that looks like Zoe Deschanel and a Canadian network engineer and many computer science professors. I meet an embarrassing number of fascinating people who turn out to be from San Francisco. I suspect that they are not spending their evenings at goth clubs.

I come home with a cold, a long list of projects to which I have foolishly promised my time and attention, and a profound sense of disappointment in ess eff nightlife. I come home to a place where I cannot stay out all night dancing, but at least I can breathe.

Remember last year, when I put on pretty clothes and read poetry at Neil Gaiman's bachelor party? Neil wrote a poem about it afterwards. Here is Jason Webley, telling the story of Neil Gaiman's bachelor party, and Neil himself reading the poem.

Just remember, if anyone asks you to be part of a poetry brothel, say yes.

I'm going to say something about 2011 that I don't think I have said about any other year for as long as I have looked back on my year and written down my thoughts: 2011, I love you so much I could kiss you with tongue. I will not pretend that there were moments that I did not enjoy, but 2011 was a year of International Mystery, from reading poetry at the Famous Author's bachelor party to drinking glühwein while watching fireworks explode over the Brandenburg Gate. I have traveled to more countries, met more remarkable people, and achieved more milestones than I have in other, lesser years. I made countless appearances on radio and television. I gave talks that I was proud of. I had an op-ed with a news organization that I respect. I did ten pull-ups in a row. I performed a good aerial act. In 2011 I had adventures. Indeed, think I could reasonably be described as an "adventuress."

I've always wanted to be an adventuress.

I never did keep my one small resolution for 2011. By summer, I had mostly forgotten to eat breakfast. I cannot even pretend that it was really about remembering to eat often enough that I would not get dizzy with hunger, having just returned from Berlin, where I would frequently forget to eat more than once in a 24 hour period. Is it still breakfast if it's your only meal of the day?

So I failed. But then I won. 2011 was unreasonably good to me. I don't think that I was especially virtuous or disciplined or hard-working this year. I probably did not deserve the 2011 that I got, but I'm still hoping it will continue into 2012.