Being a Dancer is Hazardous

Being a dancer is hazardous. You have to be all anorexic and do seventy hours of exercise on two meals of frozen grapes and loo paper (you’ve got to get your roughage from somewhere). You have to do very scary things on a daily basis, like throwing yourself high into the arms of a man who may or may not be inebriated (I used to have a dance partner who was rather fond of ethanol) or indeed, a man who is more interested in the hot guy that just walked in than making sure that you do not die as a result of flinging yourself head first into the ground (yes Sean I’m talking to you!). You always have bleeding toes and purple knees and feet that look like they have dipped in acid and then battered around by footballers.

But for me, the most hazardous thing about being a dancer is that there is a 90% chance that at some point you will develop a weak bladder and wet yourself and thereby alienate yourself from society and live in shame as a recluse for the rest of your days and never experience love or laughter or booty calls at three in the morning or corndogs and best friends and life in general.

I suppose I should elaborate.

You see, us dancers have a very special way of dressing. It is called layering. Dancers will do this both in summer and winter (although in winter it can reach ridiculous proportions). We do this mainly to be cool (not cool as in temperature but cool as in ‘awesome’) and ‘dancery’. Dancing is an extremely competitive profession and so this translates to being competitive about the number of layers of clothing you can stuff onto your body. It can get nasty and has been known to lead to overheating, dehydration and even death!

“Ooh look at me I’m a dancer, I’ve got on seven layers of clothing!”

“Well I’m a better dancer than you because I have on eleven layers! In fact, that makes me a better human being than you!”

This is all good and well but when it comes to going to the bathroom it can get seriously tricky. I have been dancing since the age of four and to this very day I experience what I like to call the “Dreaded Downward Pee Spiral”.

You wake up in the morning and you go to the loo. It is simple and uncomplicated and you barely think about it. You start to get ready for class. Here you are faced with one of two options;

#1 You can get dressed in normal clothes and take your dance clothes with you, thereby precipitating a need to take with you approximately seven bulging sports bags.

#2 You can wear dance clothes underneath your normal clothes which makes you look approximately 5 kilos heavier than you actually are (which is really damaging when you’re trying to promote your image as an anorexic).

So you get to the studio and you start class. After a few minutes you start the de-layering process but if you are awesome you will still be rocking at least five layers of clothing.

By the end of class you will be wearing only a few layers of clothing. The more layers you shed during class the more awesome you are.

During class you drink lots of water. You sit and stretch and you have some more water. You might have some fruit juice with a muffin. At this point you are blissfully unaware of the painful chain of events you have started. It is like the butterfly effect…but way worse. Chaos theory on crack.

At some point you vaguely register the fact that you need to pee. You are not desperate however, and the thought of struggling through all 57 layers of clothing to complete this simple task hardly seems worth it. You blithely carry on with your day; disaster is on the horizon but you cannot see it.

You will be sitting eating a yoghurt or you may be checking your email at the library. One second you are just a normal girl being anorexic and wearing 78 layers of clothing and the next something just snaps! It’s like someone grabs your urethra and is like “OMG what does this do?” and you feel like you are for sure going to have spontaneous bladder explosion. To alleviate the now colossal pressure on your urethra you wiggle around and change positions and zip your pelvic floor or whatever the hell it is they tell us to do in Pilates and pray to the gods of ammonia that you can make it to a bathroom in time.

So you start running and trying to remove articles of clothing as you go. If you were a normal civilian person this task would be simple but as a dancer it is like trying to solve a rubix cube…with a grenade in your bladder! It’s like and episode of 24! Racing against the clock and playing Russian poo-lette!

So you get to the bathroom but then you have to grapple with the door! The bathrooms were obviously built for willowy anorexic types so it’s quite hard for a normal-sized person to actually get into the cubicle. You open the door and you manage to get one leg in but you can’t get the rest of your body in without closing the door so if someone were to walk in they would find a near-hysterical person jammed into a door and gasping with exertion like a fat dude on a treadmill.

You eventually manage to batter your way into the cubicle and escape with most of your skin (although the door certainly claimed some skin off your left arm and a bit of your face) and a minimum of bruises. But the battle has only just begun. You now look in despair on the layers of clothing that lie between yourself and bladderly freedom. Unfortunately this requires logical thinking; something which is in short supply with me in the most mundane of situations (which means that basically I’m fucked). So the first thing you do is take off your coat. You then grapple with a tight jumper which will reveal a long sleeved vest. Once the vest is off you can begin to tackle your onesie (this is an incredible invention which although fantastic for dancing in, is detrimental to peeing…it is basically an adult-sized romper). So you start to pull down your onesie but something impedes your progress. By this time you are nearly crying from frustration and exhaustion. You realise that you are still wearing a waist elastic so you pull up your onesie again to grapple with the tight elastic but your bulimic arms hardly have any fight left in them and it takes a further two minutes to get the damn elastic off your body. You are now free to rip off your onesie…or so you think. Just as you get to your calves you realise that you are still wearing leg warmers which have been wrapped around the legs of your onesie. In a urine induced rage you rip the legwarmers and onesie of in one fell swoop.

You look down at yourself in desperation. Your bladder feels like someone is playing in it with a supersoaker and a paintball gun and you can practically feel it expanding into your uterus…that can’t be healthy. You prepare for your second assault; all that remains between your bum and the toilet seat is shorts, a leotard and stockings. The shorts are easy enough and they are flung into a corner of the loo on which there is invariably water on the floor. You then contemplate your stockings…they can only be removed once your leotard is down. You start taking off your leotard (which, for those of you who are not savvy with the lingo, is basically a swimming suit) and are on the verge of wetting yourself but the leotard will get tangled in your haste and there will be an epic five round fight: dancer versus lycra. If you are lucky you will win this fight and once your leotard is off you can rip down your stockings and PEE!!!

It is the best feeling in the world. You sigh the sigh of a wholly satisfied person. You have no troubles in the world, you don’t even care that you are completely bum naked in a public building. You can breathe again, the pain in your bladder subsides and you feel like you can take on the world.

But then you look around you and take in the carnage that your epic battle has wrought. It will take you a good ten minutes to sort out the snarled tangle that your clothing has become. You realise that half the items are now also damp with toilet-floor water and that you will have to put everything back on again. It is an exhausting and depressing thought.

You have been gone for a good half-hour and people are starting to wonder where you are. You walk into rehearsal.

“You’re late.”

“Well fuck you!!!”

Tonsil Wars

I’m sick. I hate being sick. The problem is that every time I have gotten sick since the age of zero it has been tonsillitis. I know the symptoms well.

1. At first I am blissfully unaware of what is about to happen to me.

2. Then my throat starts to feel a little scratchy. This phase is laced with denial about my imminent illness.

3. My skin starts to hurt and I become a little irritable. I am still, however, in denial.

4. I start to run a fever and get the shakes. My denial starts to weaken.

5. My throat starts to hurt in earnest and I can only croak out a few syllables very now and again. I now have to face the awful and irrefutable fact that I am sick. It is at approximately this point that I curl into a ball and hug my knees.

6. I start to get a bit delirious and feel very very sorry for myself.

7. I start to question why something this awful is happening to me!

This last phase of illness, coupled with my delirium leads to many strange discussions with myself. I start to wonder what I ever did to my tonsils to deserve this cruel and unusual punishment. Could it be that I insulted a tonsil in my past life?? Or maybe I abandoned a tonsil in a time of need! Possibly a business deal between myself and a tonsil went sour?! But STILL! This is ridiculous!

My tonsils mock me from inside my throat. ‘Hahahaha we are going to hurt you for no conceivable reason other than our morbid will to bring pain and suffering upon you!’ And then they decide to hold the Tonsil World Kick-boxing Championship inside my throat and beat the crap out of each other. But then it turns into WWE and Stone Cold Steve Tonsil runs down the ramp and jumps into the ring and hits one of my tonsils over the head with a chair.

Soon Hitler and Mussolini are involved and it’s a full-on free-for-all! My tonsils are double-teaming Hitler but then Mussolini tags in and beats the crap out of one of my tonsils while Stone Cold just flails around hitting everything in sight with a ladder! And then fuckin’ Mike Tyson joins in with his deceptively squeaky voice and one of my tonsils makes the mistake of laughing at him and so Mike Tyson goes apeshit and bites my tonsil’s ear off! The tonsil loses it and starts running around like a headless chicken trailing blood and chaos in its wake. In the process it manages to run headlong into one my glands.

‘Aha!’ he thinks, ‘A weapon!’ and then he rips out my glad and turns to face the melee, wielding it like some sort of swollen, bloodied club! Everyone else (especially Hitler) thinks it’s a fucking great idea to fight fire with fire and so everyone rips out a gland and a fierce fight ensues in which all of my glands are completely obliterated.

Stone Cold inevitably wins the fight with the Dictator Tag-Team of Hitler and Mussolini coming a close second. Tyson is out but he has a tonsil ear to nibble on so he’ll be ok. My tonsils have inevitably come off worst. They lie festering in a swollen, aching heap, unmoving and thoroughly obliterated.

Damn you tonsils. Damn you right to hell.

How to convince my cousin I shouldn't be replaced by an amoeba

So I’m self-employed. I suppose it’s a fancy way of saying that I’m sort-of unemployed. Thing is, as a dancer, I move from gig to gig planning as I go, it’s not a normal nine to five. I do lots of work but, unlike other people, I still have time for other things…like swimming and falling in love, eating crisps while reading a book and sitting on my ass doing fuck-all for hours at a time. I also obviously have time to sit for several hours a week writing utter nonsense and churning out rabid illustrations on MS paint and then claiming that it’s a ‘blog’. Thing is, most of my work happens in the evening, so my days seem to be these halcyon times of bliss and leisure that stretch into eternity (even though they so do not!).

So my parents decide that although my ironing and dishwasher-emptying skills have improved, they are still not good enough (granted, taking 3 days to iron a shirt may be construed by some as ‘too long’ but I’m getting better! Ok but now I have to admit that this was a blatant exaggeration on my part…it only took two days) and that we need some help. Cue the entrance of my cousin, who is older than me and possibly has a child. Cue also, the most awkward situation ever.

It’s kind of like being under house arrest…but worse. On the first day she arrived I’d had an extremely busy weekend, the company had had three gigs and we'd been shooting an advert (which Flavian and I choreographed) until midnight the previous evening so I slept late. Boy was that a mistake. I stumbled into the TV room half dressed with my hair all stuck up on one side of my head and make-up smeared across half my face. She didn’t even recognise me and my rasped ‘g’morning’ went unanswered…it was probably because she was too busy looking at me like this:

So then I try to sit in front of the telly to watch something while I continue to slowly wake up from my zombified state. But then I feel this burning in the back of my head. I was so sure that she was judging me like a judgy McJudgster! I could feel her judgement creep across the floor, up the couch and then settle over my head like some hideous judgemental hat-monster. She was ironing and I was just sitting like a lump watching the telly! Oh the shame!

Ok…I think to myself…I need to get out of this hideous situation, so I decide to go and do some work on the computer. I get up and shuffle over to the office giving her an apologetic smile as I pass. I sit down and open my emails, then I check my Facebook. Our office is open plan so I manage to convince myself that she is staring at the computer screen judging me for being on Facebook while she has to do the ironing. Can I get no peace! So I bang out a couple of invoices and some minutes from a meeting to lead her into thinking that I was doing something useful. Ha ha! I laugh to myself in triumph, now I can go on Facebook without feelings of debilitating guilt! But alas my plan was always doomed to fail…I still felt completely rabid with uncomfortable…um…ness.. I went to empty the dishwasher and then I slunk back to my room like the useless lump I am. ‘I’ve worked really hard this weekend and I work lots in the evenings’ I felt like saying to her, but then she would’ve given me this look again:

...and I just couldn’t handle it.

So now I have embarked on a sort of guerilla warfare where I use subterfuge and diversionary tactics to try and convince my cousin that I have a purpose in life and that I should not be replaced by an amoeba.

1. Every morning I set my alarm for a semi-decent hour (like 9) I wake up, walk around a bit, say good morning to everyone and then go back to bed. With this tactic I may lead her into thinking that I’m doing big important things in my room.

2. When I finally get out of bed properly I walk around the house on my cellphone trying to sound busy and important. This tactic worked great until the phone rang during a fake conversation. (Ok, that last part was a total lie, but wouldn’t it be funny if that did happen??)

W When I do leave the house I shout very loudly to my dad that I’m going to a meeting and does he want me to buy him some newspapers on my way home. I say this even when I’m leaving to have a drink with a friend…or to buy bread.

At the end of the day I could easily have chosen to do what some people perceive as a ‘real’ job, like being an accountant or a human resources manager but do you know what; I get to live my dream every single day and dance. How many people get to do that? If only she could see what I do every day (especially when she’s not there). If she really knew why I do what I do and why I love it so much…I think she’d be ok about keeping me and not replacing me with an amoeba. But until that day guerilla warfare and subterfuge are my only weapons against judgement. The war continues…

Rapey Corners

Everyone has encountered at least on Rapey Corner in their lives. It is that dark, creepy looking corner or alley where you’re like ‘If I go down there, I will get raped. In the bum.’ UNAM has lots of Rapey Corners, I don’t know how anyone manages to keep their virginity over there…oh wait they don’t! Everywhere you look in UNAM there is a Rapey Corner yawning out of an abyss of other Rapey Corners and you’re so damn scared of the Rapey Corners that you start running down the middle of the creepy empty streets flailing your arms and thrashing your head from side to side so that you don’t miss any rapists creeping up on you. And then you’ll probably run into some poor student and you’ll be all like ‘The Rapists!!!’ and you’ll grab him by the front of his shirt and give him a little shake and then he’ll start to wonder what kind of drugs you’re on and where he can get some and he opens his mouth to ask but by that time you’re off again, running like an anorexic from carbs.

Suddenly a strange thing happens…it’s kind of like Rapey Corner vertigo and you abruptly feel the need to go and minutely investigate one of these chasms of doom. It’s like those dreams where you are being pulled forward and your legs aren’t working and in front of you is a machete wielding saber-toothed panda and you know it has rabies but there’s nothing you can do and you keep moving forward. It’s like being sucked into a vertiginous vortex!

The Rapey Corners call out to you; you’re so close you can almost see the rapists! Their arms stretch out to pull you into the Rapey Corner where you will meet definite anal trauma but then suddenly, out of the haze of blatant stupidity that has clouded your brain, you hear a familiar voice and it is like a light through the fog of utter idiocy:

‘Yo Tuls, where the fuck you going? We’ve got rehearsal.’

And suddenly it’s all over. The pudding custard legs release me and my fuzzy brain clears and I can see that all the rapists are seriously annoyed (‘we were so close!’) and so I walk to a safe distance and perform a victory jig and blow raspberries in the direction of the Rapey Corner. ‘Ha ha not this time rapists!’ I cry with glee whilst dancing my victorious jig. But then they burst my bubble;

‘ Hold on a minute, is you a woman?’ (For some reason they have British accents)

‘No…I’m a petrified mongoose…of course I’m a woman!’ Those rapists are so rude! }:O

I hear them having a little whispered conference. ‘All right then love, off you go then, we thought you was a penguin!’

A fucking penguin? ‘What?!’

‘We thought you was a penguin love, we’re all penguin rapists, not interested in humans…sorry.’

Well how very dare they! Aren’t I good enough??

…wait a minute, what did I just say?

UPDATE: The moral of the story is that actually you don’t need to be afeered of the Rapey Corners at UNAM because they are populated only by penguin rapists. If you are human you should be ok.

‘Cept on Wenesdays love!’

Oi shut it you rapey creep! …but yeah…except on Wednesdays.

‘And on Tuesday mornings we molest fruit.’

Oh for fuck’s sake…

How being in love turns your brain to candy floss and has the potential to end all human life on earth

I once fell in love with another artichoke. You know the saying ‘fools in love’? Well being enamoured with someone turns me into a drooling half-wit. It’s attractive I can tell you. In fact, my brain morphs with startling immediacy from a fully functioning, highly developed landmark of human evolution to a substance more akin to spun sugar, namely candy floss. Pink candy floss. I float around the house in a sucrose-saturated daze thinking only of the object of my affections. I smile secretly to myself and do stupid things like stroke table tops as I pass them. I sing love songs quietly to myself and remain blithely impervious to the rest of the world, wrapped as I am in my sugary cocoon of love and happiness and rainbows.

It’s enough to make anyone eat their own face off and then drown themselves in carrot juice.

Do you know why being in love sucks so much? You can’t get anything done. My dance company had three gigs during my week of love and my empty candy floss brain was simply not co-operating.

“Ok, for real this time I’m going to go and sit at the computer and email that invoice” I says to myself.

Five minutes later I find myself trying to eat an unpeeled orange with an idiotic grin on my face and a wistful, far-away look in my eye.

(click to enlarge)

Then I try and snap myself out of it and my head voices start arguing;

Head voice no.1: “We have work to do, wake the fuck up!”

Head voice no.2: “Silencio you love-hating slave driver! We are busy thinking about our man!”

Head voice no.1: “We have deadlines and rehearsals and costumes to think about-”

Head voice no.2: “And his body…we definitely have to think about his body.”

Head voice no.3: “Ooh yes, and his general all-around yummyness!”

Head voice no.4: “Frankly I’m inclined to agree with voice number one.”

Head voice no.2: “Oooh get you! Well you would wouldn’t you, you emotionally stunted goat carcass.”

Head voice no.4: “Oh no you didn’t! What did you just say to me?? Hold my weave number one I’m about to get gangster on number two’s ass!”

Before long the argument of the head voices has escalated into fully blown war and my brain cells give up on trying to live in a war-torn environment and endeavor to vacate my head. Unfortunately they seek refuge in my eyeballs and my eyes simply don’t have the natural resources at hand to be able to deal with that large an influx of asylum seekers. So then I end up lying on the floor whimpering in a love crazed stupor and since my brain has imploded and formed a black hole in the cavity of my skull the head voices are finally silenced. On the downside my face is then sucked into the black hole and then the rest of me follows until there is actually nothing left of me at all except for a weird crumpled outline where I had previously been employed in the activity of lying in a heap and twitching. Of course then the black hole just increases in size as it consumes more matter and soon the whole world will have been sucked into oblivion but suddenly alien invaders will appear and they will all be like:

“Meep meep we shall save the highest forms of life on this planet and then regenerate a clone planet blorg shmeep.”

But they’ll get really confused about what the highest forms of life are on earth because humans are all really useless (I mean seriously, we laugh at monkeys who throw their shit round their cage and ruin their own living space but that’s basically what we’ve done) and so the aliens will choose goldfish instead and then in about 56 years and 7 days there will be a clone planet that is exactly like earth except that it is entirely populated by little orange fish with a three-minute memory span.

An Aristocratic Goldfish

I sort of forget what I was talking about at the beginning of this post… reads back to find out… ok got it! Basically, the moral of the story is, don’t fall in love, otherwise we will all end up dead and goldfish will rule a clone-earth for the next six millennia. Yeah…I think that was it.

The Artichoke has spoken.

Plums Are Nice

Ahhh...the pressure of the first post. The intimidating carte blanche. What shall I begin with? Shall this opening statement dictate forever the path that my inner ramblings shall take?

Well not really to be honest. I'm a changeable artichoke. One day I'm a philosopher the next I'm a butterfly. Where am I? In a bush, in a lane, in a salad bowl? No, I am inside yourself.

The artichoke panders to no man-made rules...I speak my own mind and some days I might only want to say:

"THE BANANAS ARE COMING!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!"

And the next I may tell you what I think about Harry Potter (The books are great but Potter is a pansy just in case you were wondering). Tomorrow I might want to discuss the theoretical principles of Descartes or Paulo Freire or maybe I will feel like chatting to you about oranges (yuck!) or Taylor Lautner (yum!).

In other words; I want you to expect nothing and yet everything from the words that I so gleefully lay down. If you come here with a pre-concieved notion I'll eat it like it was covered in chocolate and pink sprinkles. Arrive with an open mind and revel in the unimportant mumblings and rumblings of my errant mind.

The Artichoke has spoken.