Portland's tango scene kicked up a notch with the tango nights at the North Star, but this weekend just beat all other tango events I've ever attended. Saltwater Tango was fabulous. I can't even explain how fabulous, but I got to play the violin every morning while looking out over the bay, got to rock the house with the band on Saturday night, got to dance up a storm, and got to spend an hour and a half helping a bunch of musicians sound like tango musicians...and then segue into a superfun rendition of "Sweet Child of Mine", played by 2 violins, bass, clarinet, guitar, and 2 accordions. Wicked good. The location was gorgeous, and the people? As A. remarked, where else can you get muddy playing stupid beach games, jam with other musicians, eat an amazing dinner, and then dance all night...all with the same people? And Sunday night's White Party, complete with black lights, glow-stick jewelry, and fabulous music confirmed that PortTango dancers totally know how to party. At one point I thought, suddenly I feel like I'm at the Hollywood version of a middle school dance, only everybody actually knows how to dance and we're all nice to each other and we're all dancing in close embrace and there are no chaperones! Yessah.

Home now, looking forward to washing off several days of sand, salt, sweat, and sunblock (30 people tenting and 1 shower...) but totally happy. School tomorrow.

I can accept criticism now. All it took was a visit to the best acupuncturist I've been to yet, unfortunately in Sacramento. More reason to visit S.! As if I needed another reason...so now I have some herbs and am adjusting my diet to one that's really similar to the one I was doing in the early days of MS. I opened up Pitchforth's Healing with Whole Foods to review the section on liver wind and liver stagnancy.

I do feel great eating that way, but the trick is keeping everything in balance. It's easy to follow Potatoes Not Prozac and use protein to regulate my blood sugar, but it can also make me feel sluggish. An anti-liver-stagnancy diet leaves me on the thin side (though nothing like I was when my brain was healing, thank god), and that's generally good for MS folks. It makes me feel energetic, but I don't want to be running on adrenaline, nor do I want to starve my brain of serotonin. Right now it's experimentation and adjustment time. I can fit into all of my clothes again, have a good amount of energy, and can feel my muscles. I've missed that. Tomorrow school begins again, and then dietary requirements will change overnight as I'm required to be "on stage" every day. One step at a time.

When I started teaching 3 years ago, I was assigned a mentor. She helped me navigate the annoying craziness of trying to get certified, but I didn't ever really talk to her about problems with teaching. I just handled whatever came up, and generally the kids and I got along and got stuff done and by the end of each year I was very tired. As are all of the teachers every year.

This year I said to her, "I don't know, I think I might have to retire after this year." She said she had been afraid that might happen, and gave me a talk about "remember they're only high school kids" and maybe I needed to adjust my expectations (I know I'm always a perfectionist, argh), and gave me an assignment: this year my goal should be to change whatever I need to change to make teaching a good fit for me. She's right, we're lucky that at PATHS we have incredible freedom regarding what we teach and how we teach it. So that's my assignment. Making teaching work for me.

I started off by challenging the Video Tech teacher and his class to a competition to see who can come up with the most ridiculous athletic activity involving classroom curriculum. (I decided that it would be fun to end the year with all of the computer geeks kicking butt in something athletic--yeehaw! Just remembering college days when the CS Department floor hockey team totally housed the lacrosse frat. Yessah).

This was the first full week of school and the first week back to teaching violin, and on Monday and Tuesday I was totally fried. Somehow I forgot what that was like. Now I'm back to the grind, except I am noticing one thing: good group of PATHS students this year. My students are getting better. Lots of them are dealing with tough personal issues, but as a group they have a good attitude and are working. I have a ton of things to grade this week. This is good. And exhausting.

Hmmmm. Schoolteaching. Pros and cons. Happy. Tired. Argh.

How could guys fail the deer in the headlights test? I never understood this as I bumbled along through my life. Then sometime in August I was thinking, "geez, every time I go over to [person in location] I feel like I've completely lost my mind." Oh no. I realized I was a deer in the headlights.

At first I was mortified, which of course made the whole thing worse. And then I got a hold of myself and made myself cut it out and now I can actually carry on a conversation there again. Whew. Close call. The next time a perfectly nice somebody stares at me in petrified, silent shock, whoever it is, I promise that I will try to help him out of it gently.

One evening L said, girls overanalyze why guys do what they do. For example: "we had a wonderful dinner together and were having a great time, and then suddenly he said, 'this has been great, but I have to go. The Patriots game is on in 10 minutes.' Was I too pushy? Does he like me or not? What does it mean?' Well actually, it's much simpler than that: he had a great time, and he had to go because the Patriots game was on in 10 minutes.

Oh, but I overanalyze much more than that. Recently I've been stewing over various things, which is pretty amazing considering that school is in session and you'd think my brain would be all taken up with thinking up ridiculous computer-related athletic activities and creativity exercises and the band and violin students and tango teaching and so forth. But somehow I've been stewing. Current topic: the Tumbleweed. Yes, it seemed like a good idea to start getting rid of most of my furniture and design a tiny 8'x15' house and do heavy dejunking so that I can downsize my life next summer, but is it really the right thing? What does it mean when all of the relationship books say to make space for someone in your house so that it will attract the man of your dreams (yikes! what a thought...) and instead I'm planning to live in a house where elbow room is so limited that I'm afraid my cat won't even like it? Does it mean that I'm trying to escape my life? Escape relationships? Accept a future for myself that doesn't include a partner?

Actually, no. It means I've wanted to build a house for a while, and this seems like a manageable size, and it's just so fabulous. Ayuh. And that is all.

Whew. Back on track.

Last night I went up to Bates with a bunch of PortTango friends to see Avantango perform, and this morning TML was lucky enough to have a lesson with Pablo Aslan. He's a fabulous musician, of course, and has that intense love of tango that I'm always searching for and so inspired by. I'm still thinking of what a good match he was for us personality-wise, too. It was a very illuminating 2 hours. It makes me want to audition for Escuela de Tango, something that crosses my mind every so often. Then I remind myself that there are other ways of becoming a better tango violinist than moving to Buenos Aires for 2 years.

He gave me some advice today about keeping arrangements clean and understanding the roles of different players, and that will really help me as I continue to write arrangements for us. The best thing he did for me, though, was to listen intently. It made me focus and take my own playing to a higher level. And when he picked up Liz's bass to demonstrate something by playing with us, WOW. It was so inspiring to play with him. Such focus and intensity.

I'm doing a bad job of explaining why today's lesson was so good for us, and that's good, I think. The explanation will come through our music and our improvements during practice time instead. Yes.

I have not lost my mind. I am not stewing over a guy who would rather go watch the Pats. That was L's generic example. But maybe I should? My dad recently said, "why can't you date somebody normal?" Um...thought that was obvious. Wacky repels normal. It's some rule of physics.