balance

I am sort of pissed off, stressed out, and worried.

But I will figure it out.

Tomorrow is a new day. I know I've been a fucking bum and shouldn't complain, but god damn I needed this break. Applying to real jobs, still working a couple measly ones, and living off my art. At least we're not eating ramen. PRAISE BABY JESUS, we shall eat no ramen in this house! Just wish money wasn't always on the back of my mind. Work, be miserable, have money to buy things to make you less miserable. Work less, be happier, create beautiful things, stress about not having money to just live. I know there is a balance somewhere. I believe in balance - there is always a gray area, a middle ground, moderation, and so on. When your balance of whatever gets out of wack you're in trouble - maintaining that delicate medium, that is an art.

Goodnight, whoever you are, reading this.

Ride, ride like the wind, to be free again

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations." - Anais Nin

Your name is (whaaaaaat?)

In a community where half the people I know consistently go by their "Playa name" or performer name and/or it is totally acceptable to call them, think of them, and have that name BE them just as much as their birth name of John, Joe or Mary. Although I have been going by "Xtina" since just about freshman year of high school, I have had the freaking hardest time trying to come up with a burlesque stage name and have it 1) not sound stupid, 2) be unique, and 3) have some relevance to me, my life, my self, my characters, and who I actually am. Xtina can't be my burlesque name, it's my everything else name. It's just me. So I'm testing out Coco XO - my official "porn star" name (meaning, the formula - first pet as your first name and street you grew up on as your surname) is what inspired it, which is pretty good but I am hesitant to use a formula name - is Coco Obispo, which I've been proud of since I realized it was actually kind of sexy. I like Coco - the two C's are reminiscent of my initials, which partially inspired by moon tattoos on my upper back - and it just also happens to be the name of my first pet, a little white parakeet named Coco that was the first pet that was actually mine. And then the cat (who was not mine) ate him/her. Poor thing.

I know some people have been trying to think of their stage/playa name for years without any success. Can you imagine? No one can even come up with one for you in all this time, you have to make it up. And this, ladies and gentlemen, makes me shake my head and laugh. It's kinda sad. You can't just make up your own nickname. Right?

I guess it doesn't matter. If you introduce yourself as that to anyone else besides a hipster/burner/open minded individual, they're going to look at you like you have three heads regardless.

Look at these wacko motherfuckers. Just kidding, neither of them

go by bizarre names, just look like they should.

Fucking Awesome Raw Kale Salad recipe

Kaley kale kale. I love kale.

This is a recipe I adapted from one I found online. It is my JAM. Some things I do not have exact measurements for, because I usually wing it based on the amount of kale I have left versus the other veggies I add to the salad. Besides what I mentioned, pretty much anything you'd normally put in a salad - tomatoes, celery, red bell pepper, walnuts or pumpkin seeds, whatever - would be good as well.

Fucking Awesome Raw Kale Salad

Ingredients:
Salad:
Several big bunches fresh Kale (any variety)
1 tangerine or orange, peeled, de-seeded and chopped
red onion (adjustable based on your kale/veggie ratio)
red cabbage (sliced thin and chopped)
1 carrot (peel the outer layer and discard, then peel strips for salad using a vegetable peeler or other device)

*Dressing:
1 TBS olive oil
1 TBS balsamic vinegar (use less if making a smaller salad)
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
black pepper (preferably fresh ground) to taste
juice from 1/2 lemon or lime


Slice kale into thin ribbons and put in a bowl big enough to get both hands in. Add olive oil and sea salt, and massage into kale pieces. (No need to be gentle, this is a wilted salad.) Let sit 10-15 minutes.

Chop up remaining veggies. Add to kale after at least 10 minutes, along with remaining dressing items. Mix well and let sit another 10-15 minutes (can cover and put in the fridge if it will be longer.)

CONSUME and ENJOY. (You may feel like a million bucks afterward!)

*You can feel free to adjust the dressing ingredients as you please. The first time I didn't measure my oil and salt and put wayyy too much of both, which I regretted heavily. If you're making a smaller salad, feel free to start with less than the recommended measurements and add more. If you don't have balsamic vinegar, you can use apple cider or rice wine vinegar. And you can adjust the veggies to suit your favorites or however you adjust the dressing.

This salad is the shit. It gets even better the next day, and it's retardedly good for you. You can always add nuts (walnuts or pumpkin seeds) and dried fruit, or even some crumbled goat cheese for more protein/tastyness. If you're not eating kale in your diet (you are doing something wrong, so) try a raw salad on for size. Thanks to the "massaging" with sea salt, the vinegar and the citric acid from the fruit and lemon or lime juice, it starts to break down the cellulose in the kale, taking away the bitterness. Same concept as ceviche.

A whooooole bunch of my friends are on this diet - Tim Ferriss's The Four Hour Body, same guy who wrote The Four Hour Work Week, (the latter which is sitting at this moment on my living room coffee table. Haven't read it yet.) Some of the book, I hear, is kind of out there - cold showers and icepacks and whatnot - but the basic jist is a very basically nutritious diet 6 days out of the week with one cheat day - and no dairy, carbs, and I think fruit during those 6 days... among other things. Annoyingly strict, but yes. Otherwise perhaps the miracle doesn't work. I understand if you really want to shed some pounds - some people do need someone else to tell them what is okay to eat and what isn't. It's a treacherous world out there - fast food drive thrus on every corner and junk food at every checkout. Sometimes it seems to me, more often than not, that those folks who try and "limit" their diet, due to taste or preference or whatever - "I don't like tomatoes" or "I don't eat seafood/red meat/animals" - seem to have either digestive problems or issues with gaining wait easily. It's incredibly easy, if you buy food out at all, to accidentally ingest hundreds of calories you didn't expect to, along with extra fat, sugar, and god knows what else.

It's like I said in my initial nutrition post- and I love that I can use this blog for talking about that - eating a healthy diet is incredibly simple and easy. You just have to simplify it - buy whole foods, fruits and veggies, whole grains, make things from scratch, cut down on the salt, dairy, fat... And that doesn't mean you can't have a cookie every once in awhile. The point of The Four Hour Body book is that you do get a "cheat" day, where you can eat whatever you want. Anything. (My friends literally almost make themselves sick.) And you actually "shock" your body on this day, and it hyper-over-processes itself to get rid of these very literal "poisons." It's a wack concept but it seems to be working. (Good luck with that. )

Gift horses

Photo of me by Sarah Gzesh

My organizational systems are many many lists, and many many piles. Sub folders within folders within folders. That doesn't mean it's not usually just chaos, but I get a kick out of cleaning and organizing every once in awhile (otherwise I feel like a mess) and it's springtime so... yea. Piles and folders and sub-piles and boxes and bins and ...

there are still giant piles of crap, everywhere.

I have a room that we affectionately have named, "The Room of Shit." It's a small, one window room off of our giant bedroom. And it is full of shit. We have no closets in our apartment (we have one actually, one was built since moving in) so it's somewhat justified. You have to store your crap somewhere... and if that somewhere happens to be a completely disregarded side room that everyone keeps telling you should either be your studio or a walk in closet... (you try getting your husband to challenge that chaotic catastrophe and then let's talk,)... well, it'll happen someday. One big giant pile going on one ever-growing list.

***

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Right? I thought of this several times today as the complaints rolled in from theater subscribers (meaning, those who purchase season tickets) for this plays "Free Lunch" day. How can you possibly justify complaining about something given to you? It's not entitled to you, it's a perk, a generous offer. You don't have to participate and you sure as hell don't have to like it. No cookies? Aw, I feel so bad for you! Really I do.

***

Also, it's frustrating as hell not being able to make my website absolutely exactly how I want it and have everyone and their mom tell me what they don't like about it. Do you realize I have no choice? Dad, do you realize I do not know how to program a custom website? Sure, I can throw together some graphics, but the internet has progressed so fucking far from when I was learning html and Dreamweaver - Flash even - that the technological world has passed me by. Luckily my father-in-law has been gracious enough to help me out, though I barely understand and comprehend the parameters which within I need to design or think about layout. Archaic, and maybe not the best way, but I'll take what I can get. Someday I'll be able to pay someone or trade someone for the necessary skills to have a kick-ass custom website displaying my work and life in the most perfect, appealing way - but for now I literally have what I have and that's going to have to be okay. (Dad.) I'm lucky I have one at all. I'm lucky I have help. Don't look a gift horse... right?

Sigh. All I want to do is paint. And put on crazy spectacles of awesomeness - the kind that happen on stage, not on your face.

Drowning...

As I sit here I am trying to isolate and flex my stomach muscles. Yes. I actually practice far less for every dance thing I am involved with than I should - however lately I have been really trying to be good. Be good with work, be good with art, waste less time, practice more, devote more time and effort to things I enjoy and want to excel at, want to improve at, need to work at, desire to get better at. It's sort of working.





I just had a moment, working on my story and listening to an old mix, and posted this video on facebook. So I'll share it with whoever is stumbling upon this and let you know - please realize this was a deep seeded, intense favorite song of mine for quite awhile. I have many, of course, but this one hit the cord for some terribly long, terribly intense part of my life so far. And I bet you probably think it sucks, or it's nothing special. It's not really, just a song, just a song that was there, that meant something, that someone put together once and some guy played out and some other guy recorded it and then it ended up in my music library and then I played it obsessively...

The weirdest thing is that even with drum n bass, once my most favorite electronic genre (and probably still) - I can appreciate everything about that track, including the diva-blues-ey vocals, which in house music sometimes are too much and turn me off. Beautiful voices are always good. Specific genre beautiful voices are only good when they're really good - and this one is really good? I don't even make sense to myself, don't worry. The point is, it's an important track to my "Life Soundtrack." Everyone has to have a "Life Soundtrack." Don't you? If you don't, try thinking about it once in awhile - what songs would be playing at certain points in your day, your life in general. If someone was making a movie of my life, and I got to pick the music.... (carry on.)

As someone who spent a great deal of time, at least in college, making films and videos, this is something that you start thinking about. Once you have to bring that dimension to life, you either need to create a physical, real world soundtrack - recorded sounds, footsteps, cars going by, voices in the foreground or background, phones ringing - whatever is there, should be there, would be there if you want your viewer to be there - you have to create this, you have to make it believable. It's half your "movie", and it's just important as your images. (While plenty may agree, this is also just my opinion. As usual.)

****

And you know what else? With the exception of my bellydance ladies, all of those people who are *suddenly* picking up fire fans and wielding them around like they know what they are doing after 2 weeks - excuse me, can go fuck themselves. Like any other tool they take time and practice. Please don't disregard the rest of us and our hard work by making it seem insignificant. Thank you.

Free Will

My horoscope for this week from Free Will Astrology. (This is the only one I read. Sometimes, of course, it seems totally off - but more often than not it is something I at least recognize as eerily relevant to my life. You should have seen the ones around the time I met my husband. It was ridiculously on and in retrospect, kind of creepy.)

"In the absence of clearly-defined goals," said Cancerian writer Robert Heinlein, "we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it." If this description is even a partial match for the life you're living, now is an excellent time to address the problem. You have far more power than usual to identify and define worthy goals -- both the short-term and long-term variety. If you take advantage of this opportunity, you will find a better use for the energy that's currently locked up in your enslavement to daily trivia.

At this point in my life, (and this has never ever been the case before) I find myself less of a slave to time. ( "Don't be a slave to time...man..." - I'll give you a dollar if you know what movie that's from. It's one of my favorites. ) My jobs hold different weekly hours, for small or different amounts of time. I'm not in school, so I don't have to show up at a certain class at the same obnoxious hour every week. I have some routines, but I'm still struggling to hold true to the ones involving work, even if it's art. I should, I think, be sitting down and scheduling art work time like it's the real job I want it to be. I mean, yea - sometimes I'm just not feeling it, but more often I just waste time ON THE INTERNET or doing whatever else where I could probably be more personally productive. Since I'm here doing housework (laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning) sometimes takes a priority to more fun stuff since I feel obligated to take care of it, being here all the time as I am. (That would be guilt coming through. Sigh. Yes.) So maybe that shit is my "daily trivia" and I need to put my energy when I'm not at real work to better use.

So, don't be a slave to time. Man. That's today's lesson.