Recently I began to incorporate 5-10 min. of practice on various dance things in my day. Ideally, I’d give myself an hour but well, time is a precious commodity. I figure the short practice can easily turn into a long practice and if it doesn’t, I don’t feel discouraged. So yesterday was veil, today is sagat and zills.

Sagat are different from zills. My now tired hands can tell you that. I learned zills, which are generally two-slotted and made in a very different process than sagat. They’re one-slotted and have round elastic vs. the flat elastic. They’re much heavier than my zills and require a different technique to play. It is almost like starting over with finger cymbals.

So why am I interested in them? They can produce a wide-range of sounds that zill cannot.  Even though most Arabic style dancers do not perform while playing sagat, they’re part of the the history and do bring something extra to the performance. My particular interest is to better my understanding of the music and they’re fun to play.

The only place I know of that you can buy sagat is through Yasmin of the Washington, DC area. She and Artemis Mourat produced two CDs, one on zills and one on sagat. Great resources for those working on these skills. I wish they would release a DVD on playing both but particularly sagat. I suspect finding someone to teach sagat is much more difficult than someone who can teach zills. A DVD cannot replace a teacher but would be quite useful.

I hope over the summer to become more competent with playing sagat or at least not have such tired hands!

As I close out the semester and start to focus even more so on research, I’ve been focusing on preparing for working at home. It is a kind of fun project. I’m not much of a decorator so it is challenging on that end but I’ve been taking the time to organize my desk and figure out what, if anything I may need. The first step has been to determine what I have and what I need, as I do not want to waste money or purchase things that I simply do not need.

So far, I’ve purchased a fireproof, waterproof lock box (something I should’ve owned for personal reasons) to store my data; the box is quite nice but difficult to open unless you put A LOT (I sit on it) of pressure on the top. Because my desk (Ikea) is badly worn and my foray into wallpapering it has been a failure, I went back to the cloth I had over it. However, the cloth isn’t conducive to using a mouse so I need a mousepad.

I’m hoping the extra effort to make my workspace nice will help keep me productive this summer through my dissertation completion. When I’m finished really cleaning up the space, I’ll post photos

I’ve been trying to provide support to a friend who is trying to complete her master’s thesis. While from my own experience, I have a lot of thoughts and advice but today I was thinking I am only one person. Granted, I did a lot of reading and researching to learn how to handle issues but this is still through my own filter as I have not read such advice in 2 years.

So I decided to see if any of the readers of this blog have any advice on working with a difficult advisor and how to manage through completion. What worked for you? What do you wish you would’ve done differently?

Not the best photo but there she is. A fine tuxedo with white toes.

She’s lived with us since Easter but I haven’t had a chance to properly introduce her. Asha, from the MSPCA, 11 years young and a holy terror to my male cats.

No one can replace my deceased cat, but I like the 3 cat dynamic and I know the shelters are about to fill. Unfortunately, people don’t always spay/neuter their cats and living in a highly collegiate area less than a month before graduations and other moving seasons, cats often get dropped off at the shelter or even worse, get abandoned on the street. To end my PSA, please neuter/spay your pets and please try to accommodate them in your lives. They are dependent upon you and the reality is the shelter, even the no-kill shelters or the beautiful shelters, are no place for pets to remain.

This past week I have been working on a WordPress website for my TAing job; to facilitate applications for the undergraduate TAs, we decided we should have a website. I ended up working with it, because I was the only person who had the experience with WordPress, thanks to this blog.

My university’s GUI for WordPress is slightly different from this one (features disabled or set up differently), but it is still WordPress.  It’s always surprising to see how skills one acquires through hobbies or non-job activities can come into play. I’m excited to help ease the process and provide some good PR for the program as well as work on developing a website.

This is my last semester of classes, and right now, I’m a little amazed how tired I am.  There have been a slew of personal issues and schoolwork has been quite a lot. Not to mention research commitments and commitments I volunteer for.

I’m glad I take time out for dance. It is good stress relief.

Although I don’t enjoy these moments of high stress and being overworked, it does really make me feel committed to my work in some odd way. I am tired, I am stressed, but I don’t feel resentful about my work. I do look forward to being finished with this semester, though.

Najmat and Hanan, both of Boston, are bringing Yasmina Ramzy of Toronto to Boston on Sunday May 20th from 11 AM to 4 PM. If you are not familiar with Yasmina, she is a beautiful dancer and has done many, many incredible things in the Middle Eastern dance community, including the International Belly Dance Conference of Canada and the Arabesque Academy of Middle Eastern dance and music (they have an orchestra!)

To register, click here. I already did . Fun fact: the workshop is the day after my birthday.

After an application fell through, due to not having a cosigner and not being able to get one, I’ve made the decision I’m not moving.

I can’t find a landlord willing to take me on as a tenant because I’m a grad student and am tired of searching for something that may not exist. It is makes little sense to me. I can produce paperwork regarding my income, which is more than adequate. I’ve rented 6 years, no problems, no late rent, no wrecked apartments. I have no debt, began establishing credit almost 9 years ago (opened a small credit card at 18 to do so), and I checked my credit score. No blights, everything in good standing.

In a city like Boston, where college students must make up half the population, one would think the landlords would have an easier way to handle this. In Chicago, there weren’t these issues and I assume Chicago landlords deal with far less students. Although I suppose at my age, parentless people are a rarity, I doubt it is that uncommon or that students may not have someone who is able to cosign for other reasons.

The good news is I save myself a lot of time. Packing, unpacking, finding a subletter, organizing a move, and so on are time-consuming. I also save myself money, because I don’t need to pay for a mover. I enjoy the section of Boston I live in, and as someone who has moved around a lot, there is something nice about staying put. I’m working on resolving what made me want to move and hopefully, I can make things a bit better.

Searching for an apartment in Boston is never easy. We have high rents and it is dominated by real estate agents. In places like Chicago, the way you find an apartment is much more causal: you walk around a neighborhood you like, looking for a “Apartment for Rent” sign about a month or so before you want to move in.

Here, September 1st apartments are already on Craig’s List, the best place to locate an apartment typically. For misc. reasons, I think I need to move apartments and at all costs, am trying to avoid Sept. 1st, as it looks like everyone is fleeing the city. You can’t go anywhere unless it is by foot and typically, there are accidents.

This apartment hunt has been ghastly-er this year. I won’t lie; I never had any fun apartment hunting in Boston. I was very lucky to find the current apartment I’m and an apartment I lived in about 6 years ago in Brookline. I really love the area I live in, but I’m essentially priced out of it at this point unless I stay in my current apartment.

So what has made this year’s search worse than normal? All of the following:

• The economy. It appears that it is not a renter’s market but a landlord’s. This year, there are few no-fee apartments, which means you typically pay one month’s worth of rent to the real estate agent.
• Rents are high. Again, being a landlord’s market, they’ve raised the rent considerably. It is outrageous, considering quality very often does not factor in. That means a small place that is barely holding up is priced the same as a huge apartment in better condition.
• The amount of money due up front is also high. Many places require first month’s rent, last month’s rent, a security deposit equal to a month’s rent, and a realtor fee equal to a month’s rent. Supposing you land an apartment that is $1,000, you must pay $4000 upfront.
• Searching as a student. In Chicago, I never had issues finding an apartment being a student. Here, I’ve never looked for an apartment as a student. One of issues I’ve been encountering is even as a grad student, with a good income, I have had issues finding a realtor/landlord who doesn’t want a cosigner upfront. A cosigner is someone who basically guarantees your rent, should you flake out. The problem for me is that there is no consideration that I make money and there is an assumption built in that one has parents; both my parents are deceased. It’s such an obnoxious assumption; even if one has two living parents, that doesn’t mean they are on good footing.

Needless to say, I’ll be glad when this ordeal is over. There are other aspects to apartment searching here that are obnoxious as well (when real estate agents don’t realize your maximum rent is firm or don’t listen to your requirements), but these are new ones for me. It is quite frustrating, time consuming, etc.

Yesterday, Kay Hardy Campbell taught a Khaleegi workshop here in the Boston-area. She is yet another person I consider to be a hidden jewel in our area. Kay works with the Arab Dance Seminar, which ran by Karim Nagi. I have heard warm things about her Khaleegi teaching but hadn’t experienced it.

I wrote on Facebook that her workshop was excellent and one of the best I’ve attended, and it’s quite true. I enjoy Khaleegi but Kay’s teaching and organization is phenomenal and comprehensive in a way I hadn’t seen before.

When we got there, Kay greeted all of us and handed packets of info out. I haven’t fully looked through mine, but a quick perusal indicates they are well-designed and chock full of valuable information. On the technique side of things, we learned a choreography that was beautiful. Khaleegi as a performance piece to watch can be challenging, because it is simple and can honestly be boring to watch. Kay’s choreography was dynamic and fun to both dance and watch. We worked together both as a group and sometimes worked with partners, because that’s how women dance khaleegi at parties.

With her assistant, Lisa Esperson, we learned some basic frame drumming and played rhythms that are present in khaleegi; Lisa was also quite good on teaching the drumming. We sang the song with Kay on oud. It was easier to connect to the music with all the extra work with the music as music (and it was fun).

Additionally, Kay explained a lot of cultural info and also brought some of clothes from the Saudi region she owned; they were gorgeous and so different to see.

This format was excellent, because I feel like I gained so much out of it. In the Middle Eastern dance community, quite a few people talk about connecting to the music and cultural. The structure of this workshop accomplished this goal while keep things fun and moving.

Besides the format, Kay (and Lisa) is warm, encouraging, patient, and fun. She is a phenomenally good teacher. I thoroughly, thoroughly recommend studying from her if you get a chance. If you get a chance to host her or take this workshop in this kind of format, I would have no hesitation in recommending it.