Volunteering Abroad

Lacey and I have been doing some research recently on volunteer travel opportunities. We're thinking of planning a trip for March, though we haven't yet decided where, or even specifically what sorts of projects (e.g. environmental conservation, building homes, working with kids in orphanages, etc.). Here are some of the organizations we've been looking at so far, though:

• Globe Aware - Looks good, but they pretty much only do 1-week trips. (I'd rather go for 2 or 3.) Also says that even the airfare is tax deductible. I don't know how standard that is, but it's cool.
• i-to-i - Some interesting touring/volunteering combinations, though I'd probably go for something more work-oriented with maybe just free time to run around on weekends.
• United Planet - I'm particularly interested in the Turkey trip.
• Volunteer Visions - Some really good prices, e.g. for India.

Has anybody had any experience with any of these? Good? Bad? Any other organizations to recommend, or other advice to share? Let me know!

Zappy Zappy

Various factors in my life have recently converged to get a certain something off my "someday" list: LASIK. Yesterday I went to the highly recommended Dr. Scott Hyver for a consultation, and next Friday I will be going under the laser and then throwing away my glasses. So I have a week to get over as much of the lingering squeamishness as possible. That part's going pretty well so far, though.

In terms of motivation for this, I've never had much of an opinion on glasses aesthetically one way or the other (so I've stuck with them over contacts just because it seems easier). For me, it's all about independence. With either glasses or contacts, I'm completely reliant on external, breakable, losable objects for one of the most vital means of relating the world. If my glasses were to break, I'd have trouble just getting myself home safely, much less doing anything else. That would be a pain three miles from here at work, or much worse traveling somewhere on the other side of the world. Freedom from that worry and dependency is the gift I'm giving myself here. I expect real peripheral vision will be pretty cool too, especially for dancing.

So... if for any reason you liked seeing me in glasses, get your looks in this next week while you still can. Maybe I should shave my head out of season, too, just to really confuse people. :-)

Back to Blues

I've been vaguely wanting to get into blues dancing again since Herräng this summer. Recently I've been reminded of it by random other slow dances, like the gorgeous last waltz I had with Jessica when she was up visiting a few weeks ago. (Michael's Mazurka, by Childsplay. Never thought I'd be able to say I'd danced blues to a mazurka, but we did. Luckily, it's not actually too mazurky.) And then last week's Faster Polka had a couple waltzes that were too slow even for cross-step, so there blues-ifying it just made more sense.

Anyway, R.A. Blues is right here in downtown Mountain View, and I'd never been (at least not since last year or so, when it was down in Campbell). This week they had a live band (The Insomniacs, from Portland) so I decided to finally get myself out there. And it was awesome.

I went for Mihai's lesson before the dance, and it was a good one. We did a lot of exercises on listening to your partner's dancing, which I think was probably the best single thing that could have happened for my blues dancing at this point. The point was to get things from being nearly 100% leader-driven to more like a "conversation" between leader and follower. Not necessarily all the way to 50/50 perhaps, but much more balanced. The beauty of this is not only in how it makes for a much nicer dance on both sides, but also in how leaders can actually learn from followers. I think one of the most difficult things about being a beginning lead in most ballroom dances is that if you only know three moves, that's all you get to do. Whereas the follows can dance with experienced leaders and get led through all sorts of new stuff and learn much faster. This approach to blues evens that playing field a great deal. The way the exercises worked, it also really reinforced the concept of not having "moves" but just moving, and it helped me be a lot more comfortable with that.

As for the dancing itself, it was exactly what I'd been wanting recently. One of the things I love most about dancing is being a musician with it, and good blues dancing feeds that incredibly well. The music becomes like a third partner in the dance, being channeled through the two human beings, and all three elements are drawn closer together by the intensity and focus of it all. This can happen sometimes in other dances, like a waltz, but it's harder when you're doing something with a fixed "basic" step, because it's so easy to relax and put things on autopilot for portions of the dance. With blues, on the other hand, you have be be there and in the flow of it at every moment. (I have another post to write about Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, but for now suffice to say that an activity that forces you into it is inherently enjoyable.)

I'm going back next week. Come join me!

Hallowe'en Music

At the library last week I picked up some CDs by a Finnish group called Värttinä. For a random library find, I was extremely pleased, and I definitely recommend the group. But a song called "Äijö" on their Ilmatar album really just seems like something to sing at midnight on Hallowe'en under a full moon. I only know 3 or 4 words of Finnish but this thing was completely creeping me out the first time I heard it. Awesome. I've been listening to it all day. :-)

Another musician I've recently discovered is Screamin' Jay Hawkins. He sounds somewhat more insane than scary sometimes, but he's got some cool stuff. Richard even played some at Friday Night Waltz (at my suggestion): "Little Demon" (swing) and "Voodoo" (one-step/polka, sped up slightly). "Alligator Wine" and "I Put a Spell on You" are good, too.

Oh, and I just realized: we got all the way through a Hallowe'en FNW without a single rendition of "The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati." Impressive.

So now I'm thinking about what else I have that's Hallowe'eny. Rockapella's "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch," certainly, for all that it's a Christmas song. Definitely a few things by Tom Waits. Anybody have anything else to suggest?

The Ecotopian Perspective

At the Green Festival last year I picked up a 30th anniversary edition copy of Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach. It imagines an alternative future (looking forwards from the 1970's) in which Washington, Oregon, and Northern California have seceded from the United States to form a new country called Ecotopia. After decades of little to no communication between the two countries, a US reporter travels to Ecotopia, and this book is made up of his journal entries alternated with the articles he sends back for his newspaper to publish. The country has completely remade its society and technology into a new, ecologically sound, stable-state system (hence the name).

I won't go into the details, since if all that sounds interesting, you should just read it for yourself. But here's why I particularly appreciate it. Whether you agree with all the ideas or not (and yeah, it's a mixed bag) it's the perspective that's important. It steps away from the question "how can we fix or adjust what we have to make it better?" to "what would an ideal system actually look like?" If you ever get bogged down looking at the trees in the first question, use this book to get yourself thinking at the forest level.

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This post is part of Blog Action Day. One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.