I'm on a date with a girl who's hard to describe--one minute dumpy and dumb, the next beautiful and intelligent. I don't get it. But in both of her phases, we communicate badly--smart or not, pretty or not, she misunderstands me and I'm awkward with her. She seems bored with me a lot, and not in cycles. But I'm not sure; she makes no effort to cut the date short. Maybe I'm misinterpreting her expression as boredom, or maybe she thinks looking bored is cool,or maybe she LIKES being bored...

Dinner in a fancy restaurant--where I'm allergic to most of the entrees. Oh, well, dating's not about food, is it. I have to lean across the table to talk to her--the table they gave us is so damn wide it's like a sea. Hello? Hello? Eventually, without even noticing, I creep up onto the table, lie on my belly, spanning its width with my body, only my toes on my chair... What am I, the entree?

Sink back into awkward silence.

Finally the maitre d' suggests we move to a smaller table. We agree, relieved. I pick up crayons--some are mine, too: the erasable ones. I must pick them out. I do...

Yes, this table's better. I can hear her now. She says "I'm European. I EXPECT American men to be weird and awkward, so I'm not upset that you are."

Run into a couple of Euro friends of hers. She talks to them vigorously--with the same langorous expression I took for boredom! So it wasn't me at all--her look is meant to be bohemian, glamorous... Weltschmaltz or Zeitscheiss or something.

She says she hasn't touched me much "because it's so terribly hot"--though it doesn't seem hot to me. She has a bit of a headache from the terrible heat. I look at her head from a healer's point of view, not an anxious dating-novice's, and suddenly I'm massaging her head. She seems very sexy now, and I feel a rush of excitement...

We walk along touching and talking more freely and comfortably, though I still slip back into "She's bored, she doesn't like me..." Ho hum!

We come to an institute she knows. I peer into the central quad. A swimming pool! There's a high-dive board, though I can only see its shadow from here. A sexy shadow... a sharp silhouette of a girl climbing up and leaping off in an Olympic-class multiple flip, an aerial ballet... Sexy, riveting--and a little scary. I look furtively, scared my date'll be mad I'm looking at another woman's shadow. But she's Euro, not American, not puritan. Expects me to look, and admire. She is, herself.

She leads me in.

This school teaches a variant of Gurdjieff's simple philosophy: "WAKE UP!" Exercises to make you alert. In fact it's a gym for alertness, for the mind and senses not muscles. All around, people in leotards sweating--but not from lifting weights. Sweat of concentration--and fear! They must act, sing, dance, flirt, socialize, dissent, lecture, climb, balance... whatever tasks are hardest for them. They stay alert, focused, calm--or fall!

They have a motto: "Remember the motto!" Wait a minute. When I wake, I can't recall, and when I ask my brain, this is what popped up as a placeholder. Damn. Not alert enough...

A teacher, a tall thin man she knows, comes out and shows us a trick: he tosses coins, like a penny-tossing game, but he lobs them in 5-meter arcs and hits every target within a centimeter. Incredible accuracy. I pick up some of the coins--and find they're not pennies but quarters.

A wino in the corner is trying to learn penny tossing--starting with small change, eh?--hunched in an alcoholic haze, pitching them a foot or two and losing them... But he's pushing his personal limits, and that's what matters.

Another teacher, a barefoot woman in gauze robes like Isadora Duncan, comes out and shows us a vivid relevée pose. I try it but start telling myself it's too hard. Well, it IS hard--but I'm talking myself out of getting it. She shows me again...

Walk on with my date. We're touching more. I pet her, enjoying it. "What do you want to do now?" she says. "Kiss you, then..." I blush. I'm too shy to say more.

"We could go to my house..." she says, still with her cool bored expression. I realize sex for her is just fun--no big deal. Never been scary as it is for me.

That makes us unequal--I feel vulnerable, I get involved, I fall in love. She could hurt me easily, since it means much more to me.

But it's good too, she calms me, gives a cooler view.

The next alertness-gym exercise for me! Though I wonder what her next is...

Dropping her cool?

MORNING NOTES

• Thin teacher = me! I'm tall, thin, and quite coordinated when I stay calm.
• He's generous, thinks big, sees quarter as small change; I feel poor and stingy, see a quarter as big money, wouldn't give one to a beggar today out of fear that I couldn't AFFORD it! Time to think bigger and stop sweating over small changes.
• Dancer = Isadora Duncan! A classic, pivotal figure in modern dance... but I just read an article on how they saw her THEN. A slut! Duncan had lovers and wouldn't marry--and worse, she danced with NAKED FEET! Obscene, you see.
• That pose up on toes (relevée) was from "How to Draw Fashion," a book my friend Zooop lent me. The pose felt physically bold, spiritually open, and unapologetically sexy. Relevee usually does to me, whether I'm seeing it... or in it.

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