A Spork in the Road

Free passes to yoga classes for cancer survivors. Oh yeah.

YogaBear.org

A poem beloved of my Mom’s side of the family, who all have a playful relationship with language:

Habits of the Hippopotamus
by Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943)

The hippopotamus is strong
And huge of head and broad of bustle;
The limbs on which he rolls along
Are big with hippopotomuscle.

He does not greatly care for sweets
Like ice cream, apple pie, or custard,
But takes to flavor what he eats
A little hippopotomustard.

The hippopotamus is true
To his principles, and just;
He always tries his best to do
The things one hippopotomust.

He never rides in trucks or trams,
In taxicabs or omnibuses,
And so keeps out of traffic jams
And other hippopotomusses.

…was how I felt all week. The initial rush of being done with chemo has worn off, and I’ve still got all sorts of weird stuff flushing out of my body. I was irrationally angry all week: irritable, easily provoked. Not fun to be around.

Then this morning I woke up and felt fine again.

So weird.

You have to get your hands dirty. Yes – risk being bad, not just to free yourself, but as a way of hearing the human truth of a moment and the flesh and blood intention behind it….

I think that most actors agree that spontaneity, freshness, the illusion that everything is being said and done for the first time keeps a performance alive. This can only happen if there’s a strong alertness that, at any moment, the performance could change – something could be radically different. It doesn’t mean it will be radically different. But if I allow myself to listen, let myself (not make myself) listen, if I am alert to what is being said, how the current, the energy of a scene is going in that moment – then there will be changes of pace, inflection, vocal colour. The direction of a speech, or its quality, may alter considerably on a particular night just because a singularly acute state of awareness has allowed the speech to be discovered and spoken as if for the first time.

from Ralph Fiennes’ “Acting Shakespeare” in Arete Magazine

As I’ve been catching up on work, I’ve had more than one day in the past month when I’ve said, “Let’s open up a hot dog stand on the beach.”

Some days it seems like a much better idea.

Anyway, you can see why I got suspicious about Google’s information-gathering methods when this appeared in my Gmail ad bar: