Happy Lunar New Year!

It's Year of the Rat!

To all you rats out there: Good luck. You will need it. I guarantee that 2020 will be hard on you, if you're a rat. I'm guessing 2020 will be hard on all of us.

Hi! I'm back. Haven't been writing for a few years, as Event Updates became unnecessary. There's live feed now, we can watch events as they're happening. No need for old-school written updates.

But I do enjoy writing, so I've wondered what I might write about. The weather? That's a good old standby.

How's your weather been lately? We live outside of Washington DC and here people are showing up at the grocery store looking confused because it's January, and yesterday it snowed, so they're buying snow shovels and driveway salt ... but two days before it was in the low 80s, people were out in t-shirts and shorts. Very strange. It's not climate change, though, of course not. Everybody knows climate change is a hoax.

Last January it was colder in Minnesota than in the North Pole.  And hotter in Australia than ever before in all recorded history.

Now Australia is on fire.  And in DC, January has been so hot we've had the AC on.

But today it's bitter cold here. It’s windy, and everything is flying and banging and rattling, lashing at your cheeks, your eyes watering, your nose drips, and you're clammy and hot and cold all at once; you want to run and yell at the charcoal streaks in the sky, and kick at the pewter glare in the puddles. The air feels electric, unstable, disorienting. It feels like something's coming.

It feels like I don't have anything of substance to say, though my mind is racing with internal chatter.  Big things, like Are We Doomed, and small things, like coronaviruses and global pandemics.

My mind is dancing but the rest of me is not dancing and is instead at home, avoiding the coronavirus, perched on the edge of the couch, watching the impeachment hearings while folding laundry (but not in my underwear, like Stormy Daniels, who’s turning out to be pretty cool. A 2020 Mae West.)

Everything I think about seems like a potential grenade. I tiptoe through the most casual conversations at Wegmans, for fear any wrong word might cause a civil war in the produce aisle, which will be live streamed on Facebook and receive 27 million views before I can get through check-out.

Civility is all the rage these days.  "We need more civility." It's all you hear. Everyone agrees that everyone else is awful. Meanwhile, we in the dance community are above all this. We're very civil. We never exclude, ignore, or disrespect anyone. Especially shy, unattractive, overweight, scrawny, minority, poorly dressed, older, socially awkward, uncoordinated, unpopular, or beginner dancers.

Civility is an old fashioned word. The whole concept seems old-fashioned, like handwriting. They use to teach us handwriting in school. It was fun. "Cursive" or "script" (bet our grandchildren have never heard of those words) was like doodling but with rules. There was a weird vibe to handwriting lessons, it felt like there was something unsaid, something more to it, a morality maybe, something we kids weren't supposed to hear about.

We used to learn a lot of weird things in school. Like, "Chin up!" "Good posture!" "Look people straight in the eye!" Also, don't interrupt, be a good conversationalist, mind your manners, show respect, be polite, don't point, wash your hands, dress respectfully, don't brag, enunciate, offer your seat, hold the door, don't raise your voice, tell the truth, please and thank you. These things were actually taught in school. My parents, who were leftist intellectuals, didn't approve of any of it.

But schools don't teach handwriting anymore. Children have far too much to worry about now: active-shooters, predatory priests, peanut allergies, fentanyl, Facebook bullying...

But back to Australia. Three quarters of a billion animals have been burned to death in wildfires there. Just thought I’d mention that, as we welcome in this new Year of the Rat.

I feel cynical. That's not good, no one needs more of that.

Maybe I should try writing fiction instead of essays. Fiction, especially the most wildly implausible kind, seems to be very popular these last four years.