Dance school is a beautiful, beautiful place. We sweat together for endless hours everyday. Our gathering is a daily homage to the temple of the body, its potentials, its mysteries. We endure the same hardships, see one another develop, falter, fail, and succeed. We are all working towards the same end, that of expanding, extending, specifying, and living with movements in order to build a body of knowledge that will one day make us virtuosic dancers in our own rights. It's consuming, good hard work. It feels wholesome. Coming home exhausted, bone-tired; returning the next day to subject the body and mind to the same rigors and keeping careful track of how we change: the length of our hamstrings, the angle of our point, the extent of the spiral in our spines. How quickly we learn new choreography, how we deconstruct our physical habits, our awareness of other bodies in space. I am hungry every day for more. Writing it down like this, it is all I can do to restrain myself from getting up to continue working on my spot and turning pirouettes.
Being a student, in my case specifically of dance, feeds the soul. It can not, however, satiate time's appetite for the contents of my bank account. I do everything within my power to minimalize, to consume and live amongst only the things I need, and I do an admirable job of it at that. I like living this way, I want to understand everything in my surroundings and its role. But it always ends up coming down to the same conflict. Stone broke. It's my bear to wrestle, and I just don't know where to get a foothold. I've done such a good job in placing myself in a position where I'm surrounded with people, things, and activities that I love, but when it comes to actually making a living I'm always backing off, hedging, refusing to engage and suffering for it. I can't help but think back to that oft-encountered character of literature, the bachelor who almost inadvertently creates esteem and mystique by going into the world and Making his Fortune. I certainly think I'm worth speculating about, as the cast does of these mysterious moneyed men of novelry. Just missing the dollops of cash that let the world know. And god fucking dammit, sometimes it's all I can think about.
I really need to go to sleep now, but I'm sure I'll end up talking more about the green later. At least until I have more than $1000 in my bank account.
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