29 September 2005: Riding the Blade

 

The monkey rode the blade on an overhead fan
They paint the donkey blue if you pay
I got a telephone call from Istanbul
My baby's coming home today...

- Tom Waits, "Telephone Call from Istanbul"

 

I was awakened this morning by a telephone call from the Director of Undergraduate Studies at California Institute for Integral Studies, who informed me that my letter of acceptance to CIIS' Bachelor of Arts Completion Program was on its way to me, and that my application was one of the best they'd ever seen.

Dragon Lady returns from her vacation tonight.

Congratulations to Beamish on daddyhood! Welcome to the new babycreature - or welcome back, as the case may be. Adorable babycreature photos now available on Beamish's blog, Fervent Ideology, recently added to my ever-growing Tribe page.

That's the Tribe page as in this site's page of links, as opposed to Tribe.net. I mention Tribe.net because I've been more active there than usual recently, mostly on account of Sherpa having joined Tribe.net and started a couple of interesting communities. If you're on Tribe.net and not yet on my Friends list there, look me up under "Nicky Kaa."

Congratulations to Ace for winning “Best Animated Children’s Television Series” at the Ottowa International Animation Festival!

Uh... that means that Ace helped to make the best animated children’s television series, not that he himself is an animated children’s television series. A few of my friends are toons (I’m not prejudiced), but I can assure you that Ace is entirely live-action. He does his own stunts, too.

I officiated at Falling Water’s glorious black belt test this past Sunday. Only the fifth time I’ve given anyone a black belt; my standards are high.

I’ve got multiple homework assignments, a heap of school-related reading, and piles of CIIS financial aid stuff to deal with, so it might be a while before I get another major journal update in after this. By that time, I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about the Clown Lab. Nothing really major to report on that front at the moment, but I can feel big interesting things stirring in the depths like giant Clown Squids; sooner or later they’ll start breaking the surface.

Earlier this month I attended an advance cast-and-crew-only test-screening of The Greater Circulation. (Regular readers may recall my previous announcement that Sherpa had changed the title of The Greater Circulation to Rilke’s Requiem. Well, shortly thereafter, he changed it back. Which I think was a very good choice.) It’s a beautiful film. See it. My own role in it is quite small, but it does capture some glimpses of my use of Autistic movement patterns in the Requiem for a Friend performance piece. The public premiere of The Greater Circulation is scheduled for Thursday, November 10th, 8:00 pm, at 21 Grand in Oakland. Note that 21 Grand is located at 416 25th Street, not at 21 Grand (don’t ask me, I didn’t do it).

Blessings and good things to all of you who are still reading despite the infrequency of my posts this year. In closing, here’s an excerpt from the autobiographical Personal Statement (see my entry of 16 September) that I wrote for my CIIS application:

From my very first aikido class, I knew that I’d stumbled into something that contained so much truth that I was going to be exploring it for the rest of my life. On the aikido mat, everyone was everyone else’s teacher. The instructors facilitated the class and showed us how to do the techniques, but the real learning came from working with one’s fellow students. We didn’t have opponents, we had partners. We were all partners in this astonishing work that we were doing together, this work of transforming conflict into grace. One’s ability to do aikido well depended not so much on one’s ability to imitate the teacher, as on one’s ability to pay complete attention to one’s partners, to stay aware of each person’s unique energy as it changed from moment to moment and to find a way to accept it, to cherish it, and to move in harmony with it. This was my first experience of a collaborative learning environment, and even at that young age I recognized the value of such an approach, recognized that some of the most important lessons a person can learn could never be truly understood through rote memorization, but needed to be absorbed into one’s being through this process of open-hearted, deeply attentive engagement with others.