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I am so not looking forward to karshilama class tonight.  I worked on 9/8s for a while yesterday, zills and all, and I just do not feel them.  I'm just not a happy bouncy swishy hoppy dancer.  Saidi hopping is different, that's got swing and earthy joy and you bounce to accentuate your connection to the ground, not to skip around above it.  Sigh.  I think this is about the first time in dance where I've felt obligated to learn something that I don't have much interest in/aptitude for, just to be a well-rounded dancer who will not freak out if the live band suddenly hands her a karsh. 

After working on karsh, I cleansed my dance palate with a nifty sharqi piece that I'd been wanting to dance to for a while, but it has these flamenco-ish sections that left me at a loss, as I do not know any flamenco.  But then randomly this weekend I saw a video on YouTube of Dina dancing to the same piece of music, and what she did during those sections was all raqs sharqi movement, not very flamenco at all in technique, and it worked fine.  If it's good enough for Dina, it's more than certainly good enough for me.  It will be a fun piece of music to perform.

Had a lovely birthday dinner at my parents' house for my brother last night.  The best line of the night came from M, who declared "I can rock like a penguin!"  If you grew up in New England, you will know exactly the sing-songy voice to use when uttering that phrase.  I want to have that put on a t-shirt, in silver glitter letters.

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Dior's fall collection is just amazing:

It’s a parade of medieval warrior-women in gilded chain mail, copper verdigris gowns, and glass diadems, each equipped with an armored sleeve. It’s a bizarre troupe of goth-punks in outsize black-and-red folded 3-D shapes fashioned from trash-bag plastic. It’s a mincing line of forties ladies in pea-green and magenta doublet-jacketed crepe suits sporting lobster parts for hats. And then it’s a perambulating collection of Tuscan topiary, with pennants and trumpets poking out atop.

All this—and, be assured, there was more—played out against the backdrop of a Renaissance garden underneath a sky that alternated between blood-red storm clouds and a spinning astrological wheel taken from an illuminated manuscript.

(well, the pea-green things are rather silly, but I love the beginning and end of the collection.  A couple of times the slideshow window came up blank for me, but if you click where the next button ought to be, you can continue on)