The Stars Aren't Blind

Those who have Scorpio as their star sign are born when the sun was in Scoprio, and therefre, it is also-- more correctly-- called the sun sign. The sun in Scoprio is their natural selves: what they are when they are relax, when other planets in their horoscope are not active. It is their basic drive, a character they have as an ingredient-- more or less evident in all they do and all they are.

Scorpio is the most misunderstood of all astrology signs. They are all about intensity and contradictions. They like to be aware of a situation and always know what's going on, figuring this out with their probing mind on the other hand, they become interested in conspiracy theories and mysteries. They are capable of hiding their true feelings and motivations, they often have a hidden agenda.

They are a secretive bunch, who enjoy strong emotions lived out through others, but they themselves are quite restrained. A key word for Scorpio is passion, but it must be understood that passion is so strong a feeling that it can hardly be expressed. It is suppressed. Under the surface and deep inside, that's where their passion roams. Still, this is what makes them trigger others to live it out. Scorpios are constantly trying to understand their emotions through finding a deeper purpose in life.

They enjoy the mysterious and the incomprehensible, and they crave to make their wishes come true, no matter how unlikely it is. They also have a taste for the bizarre. If the sun is in the beginning of Scorpio, they tend to be very good at having people live out their feelings, and it pleases them tremendously. They are mysterious, and derive enjoyment from making others confused by it.

Scorpios are fiercely independent. They are able to accomplish anything they put their mind to and they won't give up. They are perfectly suited to being on their own. They like to be in control. To be out of control is very threatening, even dangerous to the Scorpio's psyche: when they control, they feel safe.

Relationships with a Scorpio are always complicated, just like the person-- their relationships are a series of extremes, they can even be downright moody for apparent reason. Scorpios are known for their possessiveness and jealousy, but on the other hand, they are extremely loyal.

Scorpios have an excellent memory and combined with the inability to let things go, they can hold grudge against someone who did them harm forever, in fact a Scorpio rarely, if never, forgives and forgets. On the other hand, they will always remember a kind gesture forever and repay it. Their truthful and shocking, if different, sense of humour make Scorpios an amazing powerful interesting friend that can be trusted.

Scorpios are suitable to any form of business that makes a difference in the world, greatly impacts people and society, and most importantly, they have to be in a power position. They are extremely ambitious, persistent and determined which is shown through a power hungry, controlling attitude-- not in a stubborn sense though, since a Scorpio will work for what they want, and therefore such trait tend to be reasonably justified.

Scorpios have a fear of failure which they keep hidden extremely well. Scorpio are very weary about trusting anyone, a person needs to gain their trust and this gets built up over time, and once all the 'trust tests' have been passes, Scorpios love deeply and intensely.

Latent Appetite

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us-- don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

- I'm nobody! Who are you?, Emily Dickinson

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I do my thing

and you do your thing.

I am not in this world

to live up to your expectations.

And you are not in this world

to live up to mine.

You are you

and I am I.

And if by any chance

we find each other,

it's beautiful.

If not,

it can't be helped.

- Gestalt Prayer, Fritz Perls

Frosted By Fear

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

- The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

It Speaks Of My Most Authentic Self

Tonight I was privileged enough— thanks to my idle self— to chance upon this video by Sir Ken Robinson.

I gotta say that I was slightly irked when I saw his name for the first time because he's got the title 'Sir' right in front of his name. Oh great, another snotty Brit telling us what's wrong with the world, I thought to myself.

Dang. I was so wrong. This 'Sir' is probably one of the wisest, most charismatic, most eloquent, most humorous geniuses whom I have ever spent 20 minutes on my entire life. He does say a couple of very smart and profound things that really hit home with me. True, the video posted above is more about the theme on revolutionising education, an issue now so cliched that we don't even yawn at it anymore. But if one listens to him intently, and takes certain things he says and views them in isolation, one will realise that there are a lot of pearls of wisdom leaping from his stiff upper-lip.

Of course, when I talk about things that hit home with me, I talk about the two things that are central to my existence at the moment: law school and dance— though the latter seems to weigh down on me more than the former does, which actually should not be the case, but this is another issue worthy of an entire post by itself. Now, I want to comment about what he says about passion, or at least what I think passion is:

"I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it... They endure it, rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do... If you said to them Don't do this anymore. They'd wonder What the hell are you talking about? Because it's not what they do, it's who they are. They'd say But this is me. It would be foolish of me to abandon this, because it speaks of my most authentic self."

Extraordinary statement. There was a time in my life that I felt that I was one of these passion-laden people, and I'm talking about dance here. I felt that dance was me, it was something that defined me as person, that it was who I am, and that it would be ludicrous for me to abandon it because I felt most true to my self when I'm dancing.

Dang. I was wrong.

I did not have dance as an identity. I was not born with it. I had not acquired or deserved it. Just because I spent hours and hours doing it, talking about it, spending time with the people whom I shared it with, all these did not turn it into an identity of me. The more accurate way to describe my circumstance was that it was something that I aspired to become.

I read a blog weeks ago of someone who has plunged herself into the world of dance way deeper than I have: she takes it as a semi-profession, and she claims it as one of the few aspects that describe and fulfill her and her life. She wrote on the blog that learning how to dance is much like learning a new language. When you learn a piece of choreography from someone else, you are basically learning a message as how it is conveyed by that person. When you're not used to speaking the language or the vocabulary, you stammer and you stutter, and all these translate into your lack of execution of the steps, or your forgetting the steps, or whatever screw-ups you do.

Some people are born dancers, I believe, the way some people are born English. You are English either because your parents are English, or you are born in England, or both. Likewise, some people are born dancers because either they are brought up by parents who are dancers, who teach them about and how to dance, or they are born and brought into this world of dance without even them having realised that the 3 year-old girl in pink leotard and the 4 year-old boy in shiny tap shoes staring blankly back at them in the mirror are actually themselves.

Sadly, I was no English. I wasn't born a dancer. For me, I need to work my ass off to attain some level of fluency that I have at the moment. I did not have the privileges that others might have had at the early stage in their lives. So, dance was— is— not something that was— is— me. No, it is something that I am still trying to be.

In the beginning of Step Up 3, there were all these clips about what dance means to all these great dancers, and there and then I thought that I might be able to used the things they say as inspirations, you know, something that I could tweet about or something. Then, it dawned on me. Seriously, Calvin, what does dance mean to you? Stripped off of other people's perspectives, what does dance actually mean to me? I thought for a while. I guess, I found the answer in the first answer to that question which I told my dance friend years ago when she asked me about it. I said:

Well, I just want to reach a point where I could say to others I dance. And I want it that when I said this, they wouldn't go What a poser. OMG, so poser. No, I want them to react in all sincerity Well, of course. How else would you call what you do? That's you.

Yea, that's what dance means to me: an identity that I will forever strive to attain. I don't know whether there is and should be an end to this pursuit. The same said blogger piquantly wrote once that the answer to the question Am I there yet? is— should be(?)— always No.

Another point I want to make here is that, as pointed out by Sir Ken Robinson, you should not abandon your pursuit so long as it remains a true manifestation of your authentic self. "Authentic self", huh? *Chuckles!* To be brutally honest, I have been ashamed of my authentic self for quite a while, because evidently my authentic self is rather peculiar, unusual, quaint, different. As a result, my sociologically-conditioned consciousness consciously suppressed this authentic self— deep down under. Why? Because it's safer to be one with the herd, to fit into the mold that is expected of you.

This, unfortunately, demarcates the territory of the things that I should do, and excludes part of that which I could do. Just because I could do it, it doesn't mean I should do it; but more importantly, those things I should do, I must could do it. Whether I wanted to do these things or not became irrelevant, or perhaps more accurately, I consequently made it irrelevant. I could then only look at others in envy, watching them doing the things they should, could and wanted to do.

I realise now though, that if I lose my authentic self, I should abandon my pursuit to have what I want to have altogether. It is simply not worth it. Sir Ken Robinson here reminded me that human flourishing is an organic process— personalised, customised, not industrialised. He warned:

"We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energy as much as fast food is depleting our physical body."

This is the reason why I reached a point where I hated dancing, and to be right on the money, my dancing. I could not accept my interpretations, my movements because others— and I— imposed on me the "singular conception of ability", or in my case the singular conception of what a person in my shoes should do. Really, fear blocked my vision: the fear that bred another fear of others blossoming while I wilt and wither. I have forgotten something that is so simple and so fundamental: the attitude I need to have toward this it that I so much treasure.

"It's about passion. Often people are good at things they don't really care for. It's about passion: what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes an entire course entirely."

I remember looking at the clock during the past weeks' rehearsals and classes once every two minutes, hoping that the minute hand would tick faster. I remember being told months ago that I came to life when I danced my choreography, that my body came to life.

From now own, I'm going to be me. I will try my best to do things I do, not because I should do them, but because I want to do them. What will come of this I do not know, but as what Natasha Bedingfield says in "Shoot For The Stars":

/I rather jump and fall/ than never jump at all/

Sir Ken Robinson's words still haunt me.

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

- Cloths of Heaven, William Butler Yeats

Cambiare

"All change is not growth; all movement is not forward."

- Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

A Life of Fatigue

You know you have not had a good night sleep when you wake up first thing in the morning, only to curse at the fact that you are so freaking tired still, even after having slept for supposedly-healthy 8 hours. Well, I know why that is, I don't stop thinking even when I sleep. If there is anything that I learn from Inception, it is that the mind doesn't stop working even when we are asleep, and that it works extra hard when we dream. Guess what, I dream every single night, not in the Romanticist sense, like literally. Before I fall to sleep, there's always something, some thought, that I latch onto to keep myself company in the quietude of the night, something to keep me entertained as all my senses shut down. Slowly, this thought, or I guess it's more proper to call it, the incepted thought, develops into an entire world, an entire experience of a dream. I don't necessarily remember what I dream about, but I always know have I dreamt of something the night before.

Unfortunately, most of the stuff that keep hanging over my head are things related to dance, something which I have been trying to stay away from, even though it seems like I've been trying in vain. I have no idea why now I'm shying away from dance, something that I once loved so much. I mean, someone told me that I portrayed myself as someone who put dance over everything else in life. It's a proposition that I'm not entirely mad about, but somehow things don't seem to pan out in my favour these past few weeks, no, months. I just feel encumbered, long gone are the days where I can just dance with ease. I would like to think that this is a way of my body telling me that I should have a break, that I have had too much of a good thing and now I'm simply burnt out. To be honest, I'm not even sure whether I hit the nail in the head on this point because well, I really really don't know, and I don't know how I can know. This is one plausible option, a plausible answer to my problem, but I don't know whether it is the right one. Perhaps it's the worry about living up to expectations, those of others and of myself.

I think the most annoying or exasperating aspect of it all is that I know I can do it, that I'm well-equipped with whatever is necessary to be the person who I want to be and the person who I should be. Don't get me wrong, I still need to learn a heck lot of things. My point is that there's no question, and I can say this with confidence, that I can do it. Nevertheless, I can't seem to focus, or to calm the nerves down, or to just hit that potential that I know I have. I don't know whether the problem lies underneath it all, that it's a problem with my psyche, something which I can't exactly put into words. Sometimes I just wished I could cry, let loose, and go crazy-- have a real cathartic experience. But I can't, and I don't know how to fix this. It's like my body has erased from its system every single venting-out mechanism. So I've this bottled-up and unresolved issues in my mind, and they're gnawing at me from the inside. I wished I could just hurt myself so badly, so harshly that I could knock that stopper off and let the tide out. But I can't.

I also am not sure whether my problem lies in the fatigue that has been accumulating since ages ago, that the body has used its mechanism to tell me that I should take a break. I need to know whether even when the aching is gone and the tiredness is gone, your body can still be not ready for another go. I need to know the signals, the signs because nowadays it feels like I do not have ownership over my own body. During rehearsals or classes, a part of me would tell me 'Come on, Calvin, just half a hour more!', but there's another voice playing that says 'This is such a drain!', and my body just cannot-- or doesn't-- want to listen to the former. It's so frustrating. It just shuts down, and it all goes down the drain. I know my body has not been feeling well these past few weeks, but I don't know whether it falls ill because it wants me to stop, or because my mind is telling my body to shut down, or simply because I just caught a bug somewhere somehow.

I think, in all earnestness, the main reason why my body doesn't listen to the trying-to-persist-through-the-storm voice is because deep down, I don't want to try to persist through the storm. Deep down, I don't want to dance. To be honest, I don't really want to go for rehearsals or classes at times. I could hear me cursing and complaining in my head when I had to wait for the bus, when I stood on the MRT, when I peeled myself off my bed to get ready and put on my dance attire.

But, isn't so sad? Dance was once something that I "put over everything else in life", but now has turned into something that I honestly do not want to do. I don't know whether I should even quit. I mean look at it this way: I grumbled to myself when I peeled myself off my bed, when I waited for the bus, when I stood on the MRT. By the time I reached the studio or the whatever dance venue there was, I was already not in the mood. Then I psyched myself to get excited over the rehearsal or class, that it would be fun, that it would ok, that it would be over in one, two, or three hours. Halfway through my mind shut down, my body followed. I didn't do well for the rehearsal or class, disappointed myself, and felt like shit over it. The cycle repeated itself for the next rehearsal or class.

Why would I want to do that to myself? Because I love dance so much.

Perhaps, I should love me more.

I don't even know how to reconcile these feelings. Worse still, I don't know how to fix the problem. I do not know what is the root of it all. It comes to a point where I hate the way I dance. People said before that I had some talent, that it would be a waste should I quit. They too said before that I should do whatever I want, do whatever makes me happy, conform to nothing, eff everything else. Everything else shouldn't matter.

Sometimes I wonder why does it have to be so hard? Why am I feeling it way to much? This is not just about me feeling it. This is also about me thinking about it. All the time I think about it, but I can't seem to find the answer. It's the last thing that lingers on my mind before I doze off at night, and it's the first thing that comes to mind when I wake up in the morning. Even in the in-between, I can't stop this incepted thought from flourishing into an entire reality in my head. Ok, I don't always dream about dance, but my point is that my mind doesn't stop thinking, and I do not know how to go about it. Most of my friends are in dance. When I talk to them, think with them, or think about them, it inevitably turns into something dance-related. By right, I should be having a break now, but physically and I guess, cerebrally, I have failed.

I want help. I can't make this stop.

J'aime Écouter de la Musique

This awesomeness belongs to Mike Tompkins, if not to those who have acquired the copyrights from him. I do not own it. I am merely "passing it on". Enjoy!