I've decided to track the total number days I get in a good practice. I saw that after 21 days of practicing the riq a few minutes a day, I was able to do a decent job of playing the maqsoum rhythm. I've been practicing bellydance, voice, and piano for far longer than that. Now, I won't be practicing 365 days in a row - I intend to take off at least one day, and mostly two days a week. So here goes.

I begin my practice with four physio exercises - side leg raises, clamshells, glute bridges, and figure four stretches. I did the kathak warmup consisting of the namaskar, tatkar footwork, mobilizers, and stretches. I intend to work on just this the rest of this week, and add on more material gradually.

I finally completed the last 36 minutes of “Datura Style Fundamentals”. The Cherry Moon combination is a genuinely advanced movement which made me understand why the Datura Style Focus program was recommended for intermediate to advanced dancers. After lunch I did a cardio bellydance class by Kamrah from YouTube.

I watched several videos from the Versatile Musician to give myself material to practice on the piano this week. I watched Lesson 3: The Blues from the Piano Improvisation course. I reviewed the Tonic Triad lesson from the solfege course. I watched the lesson on minor 7th b5 chords from Piano Skills For Singers Level 2. And I watched the Week 3 lessons from Piano Technique and Ear Training exercises.

For the first time in a while I practiced harmonica for five minutes, working on the C major scale. I think I'm getting better at playing the B before high C.

 I practiced maqsoum rhythm with fills for 10 minutes on riq. Tomorrow I might start working again on the malfuf rhythm.

I practiced the gallop - LRL - on the zils for five minutes. I'm thinking that tomorrow I might start practicing the 3-1-3-1-3 pattern, because I've learned that before.

I studied the body percussion tutorial from Salvo Russo, and finally figured out what I needed to do in the third exercise.

And I remembered to practice the flower mudra -  I was in the bathtub at the time, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

Tonight I had the first class of the online song poetry course, Every Day Is A Love Song. Anjalica Solomon was kind enough to gift me a scholarship. I did some free writing for five minutes on a prompt she gave from a lovely pop song.

I thought doing Ashley Lopez's “Low Back Love” from Month 2, Week 1 of Datura Style Focus after all this would be too much for me, but it was actually highly restorative.

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.