Capoeira Angola Quintal

Thank you to the CAQ school for letting me into their world!

Results below…

For anyone who’s not familiar with capoeira, I highly recommend watching a few videos on YouTube to get an idea of what it sounds like.

Capoeira Angola Quintal students, stretching

Capoeira student Meredith Ahlberg

Capoeira moves: Habo Dji Ahaya

The people that you meet

Just a few photos from last Sunday. Each the result of a chance meeting a with cool person on the street.

Washington Square Park, NY

Piggy, help me pay for tuition!

Except for the one involving a piggy bank and my dear friend Mariana: A cool person, but a planned meeting, in attempt to illustrate student frustration over tuition hikes.

And in attempt to play with a piggy bank.

Get me a Yoplait, stat. I have something we should talk about.

Jezebel often clues me in to good things. Such as:

Sarah Haskins

On my continuing preoccupation with people-besides-me-who-realize-that-there-is-something-horribly-wrong-with-how-the-media-portrays-women, I have been given a new mark for my arrows of approval. (They’re like Cupid’s arrows, but without the prestige and nasty unwilled side effects.) It comes in the form of certain series of videos, available on current.com, entitled “Target Women.”

The star is a woman named Sarah Haskins, who, by all appearances — despite the fact that her only “appearances” to me have been made via computer screen — is a real woman. And by “real,” I mean unafraid to admit a profound enjoyment of the occasional burrito. (Er, I think she did that, but I can’t find which video it was in right now. Maybe I just imagined that. She does say she likes take-out pad thai…)

There are a lot of things for which we, as women, are supposed to blindly develop a fondness. And, I mean, sometimes we do. (Flowers? Okay. Bronzing products? Er…) Sarah Haskins admits that she gets sucked into romantic comedies with the rest of us, even while realizing that it’s sort of, basically, really, a load of tripe. With these running commentaries, she singles out some trends in TV marketing, and asks why, why, we could ever fall for such blatantly ethereal falsehoods.

As she puts it, dryly (and slowly), ”I am just a lady! With a simple lady mind.”

Incidentally, my best friend and I have been wondering what’s up with all these women sitting around on our TV screens and eating yogurt in groups while talking candidly about their periods for years now. I have to say it. Sarah, you can join our yogurt circles any day.

Then we’ll chuck it and order a round of pad thai from the place that thinks my name is Daila. (Seriously, why is that? At this point, it’s all I can do to help the delivery service understand that, yes, I am calling from the same cell phone number, but no, I’m in a different building than I used to be, and if you could please deliver to that one instead…)