There’s a new cat in town, a huge black creature with white paws and insanely fluffy fur. I have decided to call him “Loofah.”

Loofah is a bit of a voyeur. Regardless of what room I’m in, if I look out the window I’m sure to see him, sitting very still, peering back at me through the glass. He has a few favorite spots: the porch railing if I’m in the kitchen, where he sits to watch me wash dishes or cook dinner; the driveway if we’re in the rec room, huddled under the car and waiting for us to part the curtains. But his very favorite spot to sit is in the garden just outside my living room window, where he has a clear view of my cats losing their mind every time they catch sight of him.

It wasn’t bad at first, because he wasn’t around all that much. Olive and Lola would be inside, doing their best to hold the living room chairs down, and he’d appear out of nowhere, peeking his hilariously fluffy face through the window. My cats would suddenly become electrified, jumping straight into the air with fur standing on end, and yowling in that terrible way cats do. Lola would retreat to a hidden place, but Olive would race to the window, in full kitty fury, and launch herself against the glass. She’d start with a giant whack, presumably to catch Loofah off guard, and proceed to abuse him with repeated slaps against the window. Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat, I would hear. Pat-pat-pat-pat-patty-pat. She’d keep going, crouched on her hind legs with her paws slapping at the glass until she was completely exhausted and would slink away to my bedroom. Loofah would just watch her, impressively unperturbed, his nose inches from the window.When she left he would turn his silent gaze on me- watching, yawning occasionally- until I left the room.

This was happening about once a day, this indoor cat explosion, but lately Loofah seems to have taken up permanent residence in my yard, which has seriously pissed off my cats. He’s here all the time now, day and night, peering calmly through the windows and every once in awhile putting his paws up against the glass, a gesture which sends my cats racing for cover. Olive and Lola are stressed out and jumpy; there has been no kitty snuggling the past few days. They are at war with this outdoor beast, always on alert and ready to fight. I pitied them initially until I remembered that everyone likes a little drama now and then. Their serene existence has been disrupted, but at least they have something interesting to talk about now.

I’m concerned that Loofah thinks he owns us. We’re his own personal goldfish, swimming back and forth in our glass bowl for his amusement. I worry what will happen when he realizes that we leave the bowl, sometimes for hours. His military stoicism makes me think it wouldn’t take much for this little sergeant to try to enforce a curfew- or worse, an internment. I can imagine him guarding the front door, standing at drowsy attention until the door opens and he flies at us, all teeth and claws, forcing a retreat. Has anyone ever been held hostage by a cat? They can be such little assholes that I think it’s entirely possible. All I’m saying is that if you don’t hear from us for a few days, it might be worthwhile to drive by. If you see a fuzzy black-and-white soldier pacing the grounds, a rolled cigarette clenched in his teeth and a rifle slung over one shoulder, send reinforcements.

I have forgiven the tango.

It was up in the air for awhile, there. I wasn’t sure, after that terrible, tearful night at the tango club, whether my brain could handle learning something new. I am drowning in the information from school, so many tests still left before I am finished, and I was struggling with remembering the steps during my tango lessons. I wondered if I had made a mistake taking on such a huge endeavor, because it felt like one more thing I sucked at and knew so little about and needed to pay attention to. But I am so glad I stuck with it, because I have fallen in love with this dance.

The class I am in now is called tango turns, and it builds on all of the basic steps we learned in the beginning session. Everyone has improved, and there is so much less stumbling and shuffling. We’re dancing now, moving with, if not grace, at least some fluidity and cohesion. We still crash into each other and step on everyone’s toes, but we know how to move through that now, how to find our place in the music and keep on dancing. And even though I love the movements, feeling my body create visual music, it’s the people that truly make this a beautiful thing. See, we’re really not very good. We’re terrible, all of us. We look like a group of lumbering rhinos with our heavy feet and stiff, inelegant shoulders. But there is something so hopeful about our determination and perseverance. We’ve all stuck with it these many weeks, not because we’re any good, but because we enjoy it. We want to be there, we want to learn, and this is such a rare and precious thing in a world of have-to’s and musts, obligations that we begrudgingly fill.

One thing that frustrates me about this world is this need people feel to create some sort of puffed-up version of themselves to present to others. It’s like we pad the air around us with false confidence and pretend strength, because to show any sign of weakness would mean certain disaster. You must show people that you know who you are and what you’re doing at all times, because if you don’t the other birds will sense your vulnerability and peck you to pieces. And I think this is one of the greatest fallacies: the idea that strength equals success. It may be true that the stronger you seem to other people, the less they mess with you, but that sounds lonely to me. I kind of like to get messed with once in a while. It seems to me that the more I pretend to know, the less open I am to actually learning something. Think about the body language we use when we say the words “I don’t know.” We shrug our shoulders, and hold our arms out in front of us with palms facing up. Waiting for something new to be placed in our hands.

Tango requires this openness. You invite someone into your personal space, you press your body against theirs and clasp hands. You move together and follow each other, and the dance becomes your conversation. Watching all of us in class tonight trying to learn this new language was an unbelievably moving experience. The eagerness and willingness that these people have to let go of their comfortable boundaries and step into something entirely new is astounding. It makes me believe in so many things. If these people that I go to class with- the man with one arm, the giant Italian who wears suspenders printed with music notes, the meek little Chinese man who barely speaks any English- if they can learn to dance, then maybe there’s hope for this broken, mixed-up planet after all. I have seen it with my own eyes: grown-up people throwing caution to the wind, letting someone into their arms, and learning to move with the music.

Great things are possible, if only we rhinos can shrug our shoulders once in awhile, hold out our hands, and wait patiently for the answer to come.

The tension is running high in beauty school.

Tomorrow we have an enormous test. ENORMOUS. We will be performing back to back exams from 7:30 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, and I am expecting to collapse into a gelatinous, comatose lump at about 3:01. We’ve been preparing all week, practicing each portion until our fingers cramp and our eyes lose focus. I have also had an unusual amount of clients, which has severely limited my practice time and I am not feeling as ready as I had hoped. Add to this stress the frequent interactions with instructors who never agree on anything and an extremely high consumption of Thai food, and you have a group of very anxious, very gassy women. I’m really not sure if we’re all going to make it out alive.

I think it may be time to reconsider my career choice.

I wonder if Krispy Kreme is hiring.

I had a disastrous night at the tango club last Saturday. I could tell it was going to be bad when I walked in the door and realized I had completely forgotten everything I had learned in eight weeks of lessons. Every dance was worse than the one before; I tripped, stumbled, cursed, and silently screamed my way across the floor, and by the time the evening was over it took every ounce of self-control I had not to cry in the car on the way home.

One of my instructors at cosmetology school also happens to be a salsa teacher, and I was talking to her about how hard Saturday night was for me. I told her that I was concentrating so hard on the steps and my posture and trying to keep up with my partner that I ended up completely confused and tangled up.

“Listen baby girl,” she told me. “Dancing is a lot like life. If you look down to see what your feet are doing, you’ll end up crashing into someone else. You need to listen to the music. Close your eyes, forget about your feet, and listen to the music, listen to the music, listen to the music.”

I spoke with my mother on the phone today, which is really never a good idea, and she told me something so hurtful, so awful, that I’ve found myself tossed completely overboard. The ship is long gone, and I am stranded and flailing in the dark water. This is not new. I should start calling this place the Ocean of Mom, considering the number of times an interaction with her has left me drowning. There are so many things I don’t understand, and she is one of them. I don’t understand how I could have fought so hard every day for so long to become a somewhat healthy human, and still find myself so gutted by this.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I never do. Someone once said, “Take the action, and the insight will follow.” I do this every moment of every day, and my god what a huge statement of faith that is. I must have faith, that must be what this is, because what kind of person walks blindly through their life unless they somehow believe that God will clear the path in front of them?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find being a person extremely difficult. It would be so much easier to be a robot, say, or a sea urchin. Something with a nice, hard exoskeleton and no emotional attachments. It’s hard to feel things all the time, to choose growth and wellness and change, and that’s why I used to drink all the time. I would take a look at all that human, feel-y stuff people were doing and I would say, Oh hell no. Unfortunately that choice hurt more than it helped, so I’ve been trying to do it the other way for a while now. It’s hard, but I do it. And every day I trip, stumble, curse, and silently scream my way across the floor. I spend too much time looking at my feet, trying to anticipate the next step. And I frequently royally fuck things up. But I keep trying. And I keep reminding myself to close my eyes and listen to the music, listen to the music, listen to the music.

I’ve put up a bunch of posts that I wrote on my MySpace blog over the last few months. You’ll have to click through to see them, sorry. I seem to have forgotten how to code and now I don’t remember how to get more than one post to show up on the front page. Enjoy!