All She Wants to Do is Dance

Another Friday - and not a moment too soon! It's been another exhausting week of "being a good Toby," as Bill would say. Shame on my parents for imbuing me with such a good work ethic. Shame on me for being such an overachiever. Ah well, it makes the fun that much more fun.

We're in a new month too. Happy February! Time is flying by, as promised. I've completed the entire month of January as a vegetarian. I've been craving meat here and there lately, but I get by. I try to throw some spinach into every other meal to keep from getting anemic - a propensity of mine anyway. When I was a child, my brother Tom used to dance around me, doing Indian war cries and calling me Chief Paleface. ("Mommm! He's teasing me again!!!")

Liberation! My oddball roommate is moving out today. Thank all the gods. I served him with an eviction notice the other day for lack of payment. He's going quietly and without incident. Actually his sister stepped forward to make restitution, so I'll have some spare change too. I was really quite touched by my conversation with her. She thanked me for putting up with him (clearly he has some psychological developmental issues - I've told people he's 40 going on 12, and that's not a stretch at all). I found her willingness to help her brother out of a mess very heartwarming. Family... they'll drive us nuts, break our hearts, but they're always there, huh? Robert Frost said it best in The Death of the Hired Man:

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
they have to take you in."

Still, I'm looking forward to having my place to myself - to dancing in the living room (oh yes, I do!); to playing the piano at odd hours when I can't sleep and nothing else will sooth my restless spirit; to cranking the tunes and hearing the stereo no matter which room I'm in; to only having to clean up my mess in the kitchen; to solitude and autonomy. I'm just not good at sharing my space with someone for long - even if I care about them, even if I love them. It's not really that I'm such a loner, although I excel with nothing but my own company. It's that I dislike having to be considerate, considerate though I am. Hey, I'm nothing if not a conundrum of a gypsy girl.

Beyond all that, I'm thrilled to have a clean studio to dive into this weekend. It makes it so much easier to create, plus, I tend to get a little depressed if my stuff is in absolute chaos. I'm no neat freak (as if!), but I do enjoy a modicum of organization. I found an old wooden sign that John routed out years and years ago. It reads: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. It's now hanging on my studio door. It makes me smile whenever I walk by.

I leave you with one of my favorite Deadwood quotes (damn their sorry eyes for canceling the series!): "Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to."

So, in the words of David Bowie, "Let's dance."