I'm surprised by how much I got done in the past few days. I wrote, practiced, and submitted to my teacher and class meeting chair the outline for my mini voice lesson, which I'll be presenting as the second speech for my college course next Wednesday - it's supposed to be a demonstration speech. I do have to create a document with the visual aids, that is the vocal exercises and song lyrics. I submitted my reading response video and the self evaluation for last week's workshop presentation. Yesterday I rewrote my song “Naive” using western style chord progressions in D minor at a practice session with my friend Tracey. Afterwards we went to a live band karaoke benefit for the Vancouver Tenants' Union. It started late, so after singing “You Oughta Know” Tracey drove me home. 

Over the last three days I filmed seven full-length dance videos for my YouTube channel - unfortunately one of them was struck down right away due to a copyright claim, sigh. But I'm hoping to keep making dance videos for my YouTube channel over the coming weeks. A video that I filmed for an Arabic pop song yesterday has already got 122 views. I was just listening to an old podcast from over two years ago that talked about the many benefits of doing a 30 day/50 day/100 day/365 day creativity challenge - getting better at one's craft, pushing past perfectionism, putting oneself out there, building a community around one's art, creating a body of work. I hope I can keep it up.

I slept a lot after breakfast and then again after lunch. I practiced with Heather Louise's "Basic Dance Warm Up", and Zoe Jakes' "4/4 Shimmy Isolations: Class 4" from the Piece of Cake program on Datura Online. I did 20 minutes of dance improvisation and day 7 from Spirit of Dance's Step of the Day series on Instagram.

I once wanted to learn all the dance styles in the world, from ballet to flamenco to kathak to bellydance. The thing is, there are only a limited number of ways the human body can move. One can try to learn and fuse lots of different dance styles, but there are only a limited number of ways they can be recombined. That's one of the problems with cultural appropriation ideology, people come up with the same ideas independently of one another and so can not be legitimately be accused of plagiarism. For instance, MENATH dance and Polynesian dance share some similarities in movement vocabulary but have developed independently with different histories, cultures, traditions and music.

I was feeling depressed this morning after reading an article in Salon that argued that Ukraine be sacrificed to prevent nuclear holocaust because it's not a real democracy. Thank god Pakistan didn't have nuclear weapons in 1971. I asked Ma if music and dance were haram, and she asked if I was talking like this because I was getting old. She said why send humans into this world with these capabilities, as long as they weren't harming anyone.

I did the fifth day of the Spirit of Dance "Step of the Day" series on Instagram - I'd actually done day 6 yesterday. I did Ashley Lopez's "Built: Torso Strengthening" spotlight from the Piece of Cake program on Datura Online. I felt crap during the middle but good during the beginning and end. I then did 20 minutes of dance improvisation.

After a break, I decided to start doing resistance training again. I did Caroline Girvan's 5 minute warm up and went into her Advent Day 1 Shoulder workout, followed by Colette Todorov's Datura Online video "FCBD Style Class 2: Fast" and 20 minutes of dance improvisation. I chopped onions, garlic, shallots and potatoes for Ma's cooking. I practiced 30 minutes of vocal riyaz (Indian classical music exercises). I sang acapella improv a bunch of political song poems that I'd written a year ago: "Nobody's Pure and It Hurts," "Miss Abarjana", "Stop Lying To Yourself", "Nobody Wins The Olympics Of Pain," "Memoir of A 90s' Girl," "Lost Boys," and "White People." I wrote these songs after watching a bunch of Tori Amos's Dew Drop Inn shows on YouTube and listening to Fiona Apple's album "Fetch The Boltcutters." I would like to record and release these songs along with "Racefail," "May The Bridges I Burn Light The Way," and "It's Time To Kill Off Rock 'N Roll" once I get a handle on my copy of Ableton Live Standard 9. Today I watched a bunch of videos from a Youtube playlist teaching how to use Ableton Live Standard 9. It's 6 hours and 47 minutes long and so far I've watched about 40 minutes. I'm taking a college course on music technology and the instructor said we'd be working on Ableton next week. I played and sang the melody for "Nobody's Pure" on the keyboard.

My earliest memories of identifying as female have to do with beauty. I longed to be a fairy tale princess like Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, and felt that I was ugly because I was dark-skinned. I hated boys because my brother was cold to me and the boys at school teased me. Then I fell in love unrequitedly with a boy who had shown kindness to me at the age of 12, an obsessive crush that lasted until I was 19.

When I first saw the headlines https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/books/brandon-sanderson-kickstarter.html, the first thing I did was to check out Kickstarters in the various categories applicable to me. Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter still appears to be the record-holder for musical projects. Books of poetry don't seem to do very well, but some non-fiction projects have been highly successful.