Is That What It Is?

Artemis is the Greek goddess of hunting, wild animals, virginity and the moon, twin sister of Apollo. This guy asked for my phone number over the weekend and it made me think of this story (and wonder why it's been 2.5 years since the last time that happened, what is it about me? I've been told I'm intimidating, being a referee of men's rugby (and women's), tall and not ugly and all). Anyway this is the story:

Artemis was once bathing in a vale on Mount Cithaeron, when the Theban hunter Actaeon stumbled across her. Enraged, Artemis turned him into a stag and, not knowing their own owner, Actaeon's own dogs killed him.

I mean she was pissed he saw her naked. She couldn't have him going around saying, "Yo I saw that virgin goddess Artemis naked!" BUT, I think it's significant that she turned him into a stag (deer), allowing him to live in the form of an animal she held sacred. Hmmmm. Then again she probably knew his dogs would attack him if he were a deer.

Infinite Jest, an amazing book I just read and highly recommend, had a character named Joelle/Madame Psychosis who was beautiful (the former love of her life, Orin would continue to refer to her as the "P.G.O.A.T.", as in Prettiest Girl Of All Time). Her father warned her about men who were only attracted to her looks, ("The sweetest syrup attracts the nastiest flies.") so she was paranoid about that. But the author called it "Actaeon Complex", ("deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty"), which is what men get around women who are so intimidatingly beautiful they're actually repelled by them and can't bring themselves to even talk to her. I can't say this is my problem (I'm actually quite awkward and get this same Actaeon Complex around good-looking dudes as I go around looking like an unmade bed) but it makes me feel better to blame it on this. Maybe I should be asking "What's wrong with this kid who wants my phone number!?!?" (just teasing - I know that a girl's phone number is like a trophy for a guy)

*(Ultimately, at Thanksgiving dinner at Joelle's parents' house (with Orin at the table) her father revealed some gross crap about him being in love with her so the mother freaked out and went down to the basement where the father had his lab (he was a low pH chemist) and threw a beaker of acid at the father, who ducked, so it ended up breaking on Joelle's face, which made her deformed and un-look-at-able, so she joined the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed and took an oath to always wear a veil to cover her face. And obviously Orin dumped her soon thereafter. At least she didn't have to worry if men were just interested in her physical appearance anymore.)

From wikipedia, other reasons I identify with Artemis' story:
The childhood of Artemis is not fully related in any surviving myth. The Iliad reduced the figure of the dread goddess to that of a girl, who, having been thrashed by Hera, climbs weeping into the lap of Zeus.[17] A poem of Callimachus to the goddess "who amuses herself on mountains with archery" imagines some charming vignettes: according to Callimachus, at three years old, Artemis, while sitting on the knee of her father, Zeus, asked him to grant her six wishes: to remain always a virgin; to have many names to set her apart from her brother Apollo; to be the Phaesporia or Light Bringer; to have a bow and arrow and a knee-length tunic so that she could hunt; to have sixty "daughters of Okeanos", all nine years of age, to be her choir; and for twenty Amnisides Nymphs as handmaidens to watch her dogs and bow while she rested. She wished for no city dedicated to her, but to rule the mountains, and for the ability to help women in the pains of childbirth.[18]
Artemis believed that she had been chosen by the Fates to be a midwife, particularly since she had assisted her mother in the delivery of her twin brother, Apollo.[19] All of her companions remained virgins and Artemis guarded her own chastity closely. Her symbols included the golden bow and arrow, the hunting dog, the stag, and the moon.

"She wished for no city dedicated to her..."
"...Guarded her own chastity closely."

And she killed Adonis, the guy everyone thought was so hot. (Also from wikipedia):
In some versions of the story of Adonis, who was a late addition to Greek mythology during the Hellenistic period, Artemis sent a wild boar to kill Adonis as punishment for his hubristic boast that he was a better hunter than she.

So, Artemis is one of my favorite mythological figures. There was a point but I forgot it.

You Know Who You Are

Thank you for bein a friend

Travel down the road and back again

Your heart is true

You're a pal and a confidant

And if you threw a party

Invited everyone you knew

You would see

The biggest gift would be from me

And the card attached would say

Thank you for bein a friend.

I Want To Be Weird Again

"What kind of music do you play?" Uh, Haylee Slaughter Music. I don't know. Some of it can be pegged into a genre but some of it cannot. Since I've been recording an album in a real studio with a very talented producer, I've taken into consideration mass appeal to a certain extent and attempted to meet the listener halfway. There are songs I've deemed too personal that have been left off the final track list. The tendency to hold back and water it down now is stronger that I started refereeing seriously, for fear that rugby people will hear a song or read this blog and think "Ummm, yeah, what an unstable emotive weirdo." Referees are definitely not supposed to be unstable, emotive weirdoes.

You know who my song-writing hero is? Daniel Johnston, an unstable, emotive weirdo. So RAW, so REAL. Much of his early stuff was recorded on toy organs or badly-tuned guitars onto a cassette. Check him out, : http://www.hihowareyou.com. I want to make music just as weird. Some instrumental, all experimental, brutally honest lyrically, all music that exposes my heart and soul in a way that makes other people uncomfortable.

In the first two years of my refereeing career, I thought I had to fit a mold, not stick out too much more than I already do as a female. Be humble, not join in conversations, always get to meetings on time with my clothes ironed and my shirt tucked in. In other words, Play the Game. It's not quite me but I think that in a way these expectations have helped me grow up a little. In other ways, I've have to suppress who I really am for fear of weirding people out. I'm much more morbid than I allow myself to let on, and I've learned which anecdotes I need not share. Maybe these are good things. It is unrealistic to expect everyone to understand where I'm coming from, and it's really quite a hassle to try to change this on a day-to-day basis.

I've got high hopes for this record I'm working on right now; Internet radio play and shopping it for song placements on TV, movies, commercials or with major recording artists. I may do a CD launch party and actually perform for the first time in months. Who knows? But when it's done, I want to let myself be weird again. Really weird. Daniel Johnston weird.

Some Things I Learned This Weekend

1. I need to learn how to get in touch with my feelings.

2. I have to stop spitting.

3. Being teased by both my mom and my coach together is disturbing.

4. Many things are not within the scope of my control, but many things in fact are.

Quote of the Day

"You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking. You enter a trance. You feel the seams and edges of everything."

....TALENT IS ITS OWN EXPECTATION.


-from the book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's so weird and I can't put it down.

Routines

I was going to say something nice about routines giving me confidence. It just occurred to me what was missing from my athletic development: I'm not superstitious enough. Rafael Nadal, a great tennis champion, was so reliant upon his routines that he declined an invitation to meet the Queen of England at Wimbledon, saying, "It was disappointing for me but the Wimbledon club knows I have my routines before the match." Most of the routines I do have now are about food (e.g. packing the cooler with pre, during, post match snacks, then enough calories for the ride home), but I could get weirder about my watches or the way I tie my bootlaces. Hmmmm...

Traditions

It's not just the name of a local shop that sells ceramic knick-knacks to old ladies who have nothing better to do than shop for ceramic knick-knacks.

Townes Van Zandt

A girl at church (Laura) was the first person to mention him to me after she'd been to one of my shows, asked me had I heard of him. Then, at a record store downtown the guy in the store pointed out a TVZ vinyl double album (Live at the Old Quarter) and spoke of it with such reverence I regretted giving my turntable to my dad. The latest sign was Brother Rufus (my harmonica player!) loaning me an issue of American Songwriter that featured Townes Van Zandt, and the article quoted several musicians. These resonated with me:

Guy Clark:

"And that poetic nature that's so richly inside Townes' work is like standing in front of a Van Gogh or a Renoir. You want to be able to access that part of any artist or writer or poet... They show you what a true artist is capable of doing."

14-year-old Elijah Berlow (Proctor School, NH)"

"He's such a poet, a really, really sad depressed poet. I tell my friends: 'Listen to the words...,' because at first, you know, they don't; they're about the sounds. But you put on 'Flyin' Shoes' and they don't have a chance. I tell 'em, 'Keep listening! Over and over 'til you get it' and they always come back blown away. My friends are inspired. They wanna write songs, but then they realize this is way hard."

Grace Potter:

"...you hear a song like "Waiting Around To Die" and there's such enormous despair, you're consumed by it. Taken whole from a very few, very pure lines... and as a writer, who doesn't want to do that? The way he does it so completely? Wow.

"And it sets a standard. Even his voice is poetry: The beauty is in the broken places! He always chose the perfect place, the perfect word to break... and he never overdid it. As a singer, that's part of it, too: He knew his voice inside out, how to deliver his lines so he could deliver that pain and never let the emotion take over, but be so real because it's true when he wrote it; you know that, but it doesn't make it true every time you sing it. That's the deeper poetry."

Good things come in threes, so I'm sure supposed to get into him now. The good Lord thinks I'm ready to learn from his songs.

And this is just brilliant:

Legs to walk and thoughts to fly

Eyes to laugh and lips to cry

A restless tongue to classify

All born to grown and all grown to die.

From "Rex's Blues" by TVZ