Warrior Quiz

Sounds like my day job!

My sphere is Knight (Know Loyalty and Respect), and my class is Defender (Peaceful, yet Potent). I am a Retainer. To be a Retainer is to be the ultimate Knight. When the kings of old were threatened, or faced with any obstacle of special note, it was the Retainer they called upon to act in the liege's name. To be an excellent Retainer is to bring great honor to yourself and those you work for, while instilling happiness and security in the people around you. What kind of Warrior are you?

My Sunday

I had a very nice day yesterday after getting the rest of the Brady Bunch to the airport yesterday. I spent the rest of the morning doing LJ and re-reading Beloved Exile, one of my all-time favorite books (Guinevere after the fall of Camelot - sans convent!), then had a pleasant phone conversation with M. Then I called pathdancer, and arranged to visit her and rocket_jockey later in the afternoon.

Off to the mall then for a haircut. I love having long hair, but it had become too long and scraggly. I had at least three inches chopped off, and now it's neat and healthy-looking again. From there, up to Office Max to buy sheet protectors and tabbed dividers so I can better organize my collection of movie still and press photos.

I got to pathdancer's house around 3:15, got the tour of the condo, admired the home improvements they've done, and then she presented me with a lovely white satin fringed scarf to use for bellydancing. We practiced for an hour, and she was a tremendous help! There is nothing like personal attention and instruction to help figure out the nuances of something. I won't go into the details, but by the end of the hour I had a much better grasp of the essentials from the first class. (And it was strenuous enough that my whole body is feeling it this morning!)

Went out to dinner at Azteca with her and rocket_jockey, and I completely went off my diet to have nachos for dinner. Conversation was great - downright fascinating in parts! "Dessert" was a trip next door to Half Price Books, where I picked up a definite book equivalent of dessert: Bond on Set, a behind-the-scenes look at Die Another Day.

I got to bed at my actual bedtime and woke before my alarm this morning. I'm still a bit tired, but Jeannie is still out of town today, so it should be relatively quiet.

Suddenly I have a social life: Bellydance class tonight, gym Tuesday, meeting M at a museum on Wednesday, going to see "King Arthur" with the god-daughter Thursday, gym Friday, game Saturday. Also, the following weekend I have an invitation to go dancing with gothic_coop and his wife on Friday, a henna-and-silk party on Saturday(?), and pathdancer and rocket_jockey have invited me to go to the Ren fair with them on Sunday!

So much for the life of an introverted bookworm! But I'm not feeling boring these days!

Stressful Day

It wasn't a bad day, per se, but it wasn't particularly fun.

On the work side: last Friday I spent hours setting up last-minute travel arrangements for five of our people from Georgia to fly out on Sunday and spend a week in Minneapolis. None of them have personal credit cards that can carry the airline and hotel charges until an expense report can be filed, and none of them have a company purchasing card. So I worked with our internal travel company and arranged to have the tickets billed directly to the company and the hotel to my card. No problem.

Except that this morning I got a call from the hotel saying that my card had been declined. A call to the A/P department didn't help my stress level, because I was told that p-cards are not authorized for travel expenses.

Oh, great. I have five people hundreds of miles from home and no way to pay the hotel.

Fortunately, the woman from A/P didn't waste time chewing me out for being an idiot and not knowing the full policy on the p-card. She figured out how to work a one-time exception authorization and set it up. The hotel gets paid, our people keep a roof over their heads, and I learn a valuable lesson.

Of course, it took several hours to work all of this out, and I remained tense the whole time. I tried to back down from it, using the same technique that's been so helpful in my relationship with Miss Vicki. It was harder in this situation, because I felt responsible to the hotel and to my travelers.

While this was going on, my mother called. I should have known better than to tell her that the Ex, the SO and her grandchild didn't have seats together for the initial leg of the flight on Saturday. I really wasn't worried about it, because it's very rare a flight attendant can't find someone who is willing to trade seats to help a family sit together. But Mom got instantly worried. She was afraid of the Child being traumatized or - knowing her - somehow kidnapped off the plane. Then she asked me what I was doing this week. And I told her: belly dance class tonight ("Belly dance?" she repeated, her voice going tense again), gym on Tuesday, museum with the ex-boyfriend on Wednesday, "King Arthur" with the god-daughter Thursday, the gym on Friday, and game on Saturday.

"So. . ." she said, "you have something three nights a week: this belly dancing class and the gym." And I knew from the tone of her voice, what she had said about the situation with the SO last week, and what she wasn't saying in that moment, that she was upset because I was going out three nights a week instead of being home with my daughter. Which meant that it was the SO instead of me who was going to be doing the mom-job (in her mind). What she said to me was, "I thought we would have you over for dinner one night this week, but evidently you already have a lot going on." There was an atypical edge in her voice, a rebuke -- and my mom is not usually one for guilt trips.

She hung up quickly after that, leaving me with an unpleasant feeling of resentment in my stomach. I am getting strong signals that she doesn't approve of any part of the situation with the Ex's SO, and it's bad enough that I'm not going to be around three evenings a week, but that I'm doing something as scandalous as belly dancing is like salt in a wound for her. Add to that the appearance of an ex-boyfriend. . .

I usually have a great relationship with both of my parents, which makes this even more uncomfortable. If this were par for the course I could just shrug or curse and get on with things. But this is not what either she or I is used to. Unfortunately, our family is not very good at dealing with strong negative feelings with each other. They tend to get buried or come out in a rush of intense hurt. I'm hoping that she'll talk with Dad, and he will be able to help -- but it's entirely possible he'll be matching her mood in this. I honestly don't know.

I suppose I'll have to talk with her about it sometime soon. I want to give her a couple of days to process it before I do, however. Who me? Practice avoidance?

*sigh*

Being a mother is tough enough without having to clash with my own mother about how to do it. She and I are different species, but that hasn't been an issue for a long time. Which makes this even more upsetting to me. I had hoped we were through with certain issues.

Memories of Shimmies Past

In the deep storage under my stairwell. . . every bit as hard to get into as the term "deep storage" implies. . . I have a bin in which I have been storing what I believe are the last surviving vestiges of the costumes raptures_shadow wore when she was dazzling audiences as a belly dancer lo these many years ago.

Now, these are forgiving outfits -- baggy harem pants and elastic-waist skirts, for the most part -- but it was gratifying to find that I could actually wear them and move comfortably in them. They don't look anywhere near as good on me now as they did on her then -- but it was nice to be able to go to class wearing something other than street clothes.

My sister was a marvelous dancer: like flame, with her red hair swirling around her, and the unique light of her spirit radiating out from her eyes and face. There was a joy and a purity of spirit to her dancing that was unlike any of the other women who shared the space with her. She was incredibly sexy but also innocent. Men fell for her by the score. The first time I saw her dance, I was stunned. She had always been beautiful and charismatic, and I had seen her dazzle as an actress, but I had no idea she could move and glow like that.

Mine has always been a different kind of light. It has always felt strange when either of us "crosses over" into what had been the territory of the other, but there's a kind of expansiveness to it. For a very long time we limited ourselves to the boxes other people put on us. We're (mostly) beyond that now. I will never dance like my sister. I can only hope to dance like my own true self -- even if it sometimes feels during class that my true self has two left feet.

I didn't expect this post to go off in this vein. I guess that door under the stairs also leads to an annex in my mind that I hadn't entered in a while.