Category Archives: adulting
Summer Is Coming
I am, astoundingly, almost at the end of my first year as a company apprentice.
OMG HOW IS IT 26 MARCH ALREADY?!!!
OMG, you guys. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN.
Our season officially ends the day after Beatrix Potter closes—which is to say, the 14th of April.
This, of course, means that it’s time to firm up the Summer Plans.
At the moment, two events are on the books: PlayThink on 12-16 June and Burning Man at the end of August.
At PlayThink I’ll be teaching a workshop (same basic format as last year’s) and performing. I plan to rope my poor long-suffering husband into my performance piece, because I’m just thoughtful like that ^-^ (Don’t worry, he’ll will have lots of props to play with, so he’ll be fine.)
PlayThink is in a new location this year, which is cool because we’ll have new playspaces to explore and stuff, though also a little bittersweet, as things are. I have grown to love HomeGrown Hideaways, and especially Nathan and Jessa, who own and run HGH, and it’ll be both exciting and weird to be PlayThinking in a different place.
It wouldn’t be the same without him. I mean, like, literally. Without him, I’d just be lying on the ground.
This Saturday, the 30th, I’m auditioning for a July gig that should be pretty cool if I make the cut.
Beyond that, I need to figure out how to spend my summer making money, so I can cover my expenses for next year.
Ferrying myself back and forth to Lexington has been, shall we say, not inexpensive, so if I’m going to continue next year I need to figure out how to both bank some cash this summer and keep a steady income stream throughout the season to offset the cost of either commuting or renting a room in town.
Most of us have secondary jobs, but my commute has made it difficult to do more than the occasional brief contract gig this year. When I ride-share with D, I lose a whopping 6 hours per day after accounting for warm-up time, 2 hours’ commute each way, and the inevitable 30 – 60 minutes wait time between when I reach Bardstown and when D gets done at work. When I drive by myself, I’m still losing 3ish hours that I could spend making a little cash on the side.
I’m not complaining, of course: the opportunity to dance full-time has been a g-dsend, and I’m immensely grateful. I just could’ve, like, planned a little better. So I’m trying to be more proactive this time and, like, plan. And we all know how good I am at planning -.-‘
Actual Footage of Me, Planning
Assuming that Circumstances Don’t Intervene, it will probably make more sense for me to rent a room in town and take a secondary job to cover my expenses. I’ve said that before, but haven’t given myself enough time to make it happen (you guys, that’s a lot of squirrels to juggle), so I’m trying to get well ahead of the curve this time.
However, there is at least some chance that Circumstances Will Intervene, in the form of Other Life Events that might throw a spanner in the works.
I’m not quite ready to write about the Other Life Events yet. It’s not that they’re bad (don’t worry, D and I are fine, and nobody’s dying), it’s just that everything in that specific part of the Life Events Department is so vague right now that I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Like, in short, it relates to us potentially moving within the next couple of years, and I’m simultaneously excited about that and Very Not Thrilled at the idea of leaving behind the community of dance and circus friends and colleagues who have helped me kind of, like, find my way and finally start trying to grow up and stuff, and it’s a lot to think about and work on and involves Level 80 Adulting things like getting the house in shape and selling it and stuff.
Honestly, though, that’s more like Fall/Winter/Next Couple Of Years Plans, so it also kind of falls beyond the purview of this, my Tentative Summer Plans post.
So, to bring this back around to the point, I’m not currently planning on traveling for summer intensives this year—though, who knows, that could all change depending on how flexible the Making Money bit is and how well it goes. *shrug*
No matter what happens, I will definitely be dancing this summer, and in particular I’ll be focusing on making my turns really hecking solid and reliable, not leaning back all the danged time, and (ideally) improving my ballet partnering skills.
It’s a Petit right in my Allegro, you guys.
Oh, and Petit Allegro, because everybody knows how much Petit Allegro loves me and how much I love it back >.<
But, like, that’s basically the same thing as just saying, “And I will work on sucking less at ballet,” because I suspect that I will spend the rest of my natural life doing battle with Petit Allegro, and it will probably still win. Petit Allegro is a worthy adversary, and all that. TBH, thus far, it has outlived every dancer who has ever lived, come to think of it, so my chances of defeating it are slim to none, eh?
Anyway. In summerary, here’s my plans for this summer thus far:
- PlayThink
- July Thing Maybe?
- Make Dat Money
- Burning Man
- Suck Less At Ballet
Further details to follow, of course, because besides “Dance Every Day” my other motto is apparently “Too Many Words.”
A Lesson Distilled From Illness
I have been wrestling a sinus infection, one of those opportunistic tagalongs that grabs hold on the wake of a brief-but-fierce virus. Thus far I’ve been trying to wait it out: but while the initial fever has abated, the lingering congestion, drainage, pharyngitis, and fatigue have pretty much convinced me that resistance is futile and a trip to the Immediate Care place is probably in order.
Throughout all of this, I’ve been prying myself out of bed to get to class and rehearsal. It’s just what you do. If I was still running a fever, I’d stay home to avoid infecting the rest of the company: in a company this small, two or three dancers out sick is practically a massacre.
I’m not feverish, though, so I gather my gumption and go.
It occurred to me this morning (a blessed reprieve, since the company isn’t called until 2 PM) that I wouldn’t do this for a desk job.
In fact, I couldn’t. Being still and concentrating is an enormous challenge when I’m at my best. Right now, it’s impossible.
At the ballet, I can mostly keep my head together when I’m moving, and when I’m not needed it doesn’t matter as much if my brain clicks itself off for a while. I can be a zombie on the sidelines, passively absorbing as much as I’m able to, until I’m needed on the floor again.
I don’t think I would’ve figured this out if I were working a desk job. I’d just have known that other people work through non-contagious illnesses that turn me into a zombie. I couldn’t have figured it out, because I wouldn’t have had the necessary data.
Think of me as a kind if intellectual shark: if my thought process is to live, I have to keep moving. At the best of times, micro-movements and occasional breaks to get up and walk around can do it. If I’m sick or sleep deprived, though, I have to really move to pass enough water over my metaphorical gills.
Driving is the most stressful part of my day right now: too much bodily stillness as the body and its protective shell—a missile that weighs a literal ton—hurtle down the road at around seventy miles per hour. Keeping my brain out of screen-saver mode is far harder than usual even with Adderall.
But I’m getting through it. After the intense mental burden of the drive, I manage all right at the ballet.I
And this is new information, and valuable: it’s not that I’m somehow weaker than my fellow desk-jockeys were when I worked at a desk. It’s that I need different inputs.
So that’s that. And now I need to go gird my loins and enter the fray. The dance, after all, isn’t going to rehearse itself.
Danseur Immobile
First, a billion apologies. I set up a schedule and responded to it exactly how I typically respond to anything that’s more than I can handle: I missed a post, then balked at making the next one because I figured it would have to be really good, then just kept balking because I didn’t want to get myself back into something that was obviously kind of beyond me right now.
So, yeah.
There you go.
I write best when I can be alone, and right now I have almost no alone time and I seem to spend 100% of the alone time I have doing laundry and dishes and otherwise trying to catch up on housework, which directly conflicts with writing since it involves using my hands. I’m not someone who can dictate into a voice recorder: my brain doesn’t work like that. If it did, I would probably be much better at actually talking to people, but maybe not as good at writing, so who knows.
Part of what makes it so difficult to write with other people around is that they don’t seem to understand that writing for me, requires a kind of uninterrupted focus that is literally impossible when someone[1] insists on asking questions like, “What are you working on?”
Even if I don’t answer (which would be rude and would only invite even more questions), it takes my brain a long time[2] to merge back into the stream. Likewise, the knowledge that I’m almost certain to be interrupted in this way makes it hard to establish concentration in the first place.
Today, we got out of rehearsal early, which is great for writing purposes. I also don’t have a rehearsal for The Other Thing I’m Doing (LBS’ Spring Collection), so I might even get some extra alone time tonight while D is at Trapeze and Acro (despite my fondness for combining them, these are two separate classes ^-^) … though I might go with him and do Acro instead. We’ll see.
Anyway. Add to the list of things I’ve leaned about myself this year: I might never feel 100% certain of myself during the rehearsal process, but once the curtain goes up it’s like I don’t know what uncertain means (except for the bit where I’m always vaguely paranoid that I’ll space out and miss my entrance).
Add also: I can enjoy the heck out of being a performer in an interactive game … but I’ll need a solid three days to recover afterwards. I could get through a multi-day run of that kind of thing, I’m sure, but the longer the run, the longer the break I’d need at the end. This past weekend was exactly that: Friday night, my Cirque company played the international spy collective in a spy game. Saturday, Sunday, and (to a lesser extent) Monday, I played, “Maybe if I squeeze my eyes shut hard enough the rest of humanity will disappear.”
I had a sore throat and a vicious headache on Saturday, so I used that as an excuse to spend most of the day in bed, aided and abetted by the fact that Actual Ballet Company wasn’t called for rehearsal and that I’d been exposed to Strep. Honestly, sometimes it feels amazing to do nothing for an entire day.
I came into this week feeling brighter and better rested than I have since … I’m really not sure when. My body hasn’t been running at 100% (as reflected in my worse-than-usual Petit Allegro), so I think I’m probably fighting off a cold or something, but dancing has felt pretty good. Except for Petit Allegro, and my inexplicable inability to do a balloté during a combination when it was just fine a moment before.
Or … well, not entirely inexplicable. I suspect that the balloté failure happened because we were running into it, and I have literally never done balloté from a run before in my life.
To make balloté work, you have to really brush the leading leg out as if you were going to do grand jeté, then snap it in through passé so it meets up with the back leg just as the back leg is at maximum height.
I kept running myself over, much as I used to do when running into Bournonville jetés. The result was more of a mutant pas de chat than a balloté, which was doubly annoying because balloté is a jump that I can usually do quite well.
Anyway, a mutant pas de chat is what happens when you try to balloté without brushing the leading leg straight out and jumping before you snap it back in. Or maybe more like a pas de araigneé morte[3].
There was also something that was supposed to be assemblé en tournant but became some kind of rotating pas de chat[4], so maybe I was just having a Pas De Chats Only kind of day. Except my actual petit allegro pas de chats were … erm. Not Good.
So that’s ballet for you. You never stop making mistakes, you just make fancier mistakes. You never stop having bad days, so you have to remind yourself that the bad day you’re having today would’ve been a fantastic day two or three years ago and a decent day last year.
- Like my lovely husband … to whom, it occurs to me now, I should explain all this, since he has this weird (but kinda sweet) policy of mostly not reading my blog because he wants it to be my thing.
- I can’t actually be more specific than that. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes; sometimes it’s hours. It Just Depends.
- Step of the dead spider. You’re welcome.
- I understand what happened there, at any rate. My thinking brain got ahead of my body, and I was thinking about the plié that was supposed to land the darned thing, and apparently attempted to plié in mid-air … because THAT makes sense! ^-^’
Ballet Lessons: On Being A Shy Dancer
But first: housekeeping! By which I mean, apologies for totally failing to post anything on Saturday. We had an unexpected visit from my MIL, AKA Momma Fluffy, who is awesome, and who I haven’t seen in quite a while, and as a result I totally blanked on it. I’ll try to get it out ASAP to keep the series going.
Tomorrow, we begin the second half of my first season with ActualBalletCompany.
During the first half of the season, I learned a great deal both about being part of a ballet company and about myself … and one of the things I learned is that I’m still horribly, horribly shy and socially-awkward.
Apparently, over the past few years–years in which I’ve settled comfortably into a dance- and circus-based social scene here in Louisville–I slowly forgot how terribly, terribly hard it is for me to connect with people I don’t know, especially when they already know each-other. (Admittedly, my summer intensive experiences should’ve reminded me of this, but since they resolved successfully, they didn’t.)
I also forgot, apparently, how my particular flavor of social awkwardness can make me seem like a bona-fide idiot.
When I’m nervous, my working memory, like, stops working. And when I’m around a bunch of strangers whose opinions of me matter immensely to the shape of the next year or so of my life, I get nervous. Like, really, really nervous.
I should note my nervousness isn’t a question of fearfully wondering, “What will they think of me?”
It’s more a question of experience. I’m really, really bad at the initial stages of getting to know people. When there are other people in the room who find my flavor of social awkwardness charming, that isn’t a big deal … but that’s a fairly rare circumstance, in my experience.
And dance is one of those contexts in which being a cohesive part of the group is immensely, immensely important.
When you dance, the greatest resource available to you is your fellow dancers.
Ironically, the working-memory failures that come with a bad case of nerves make it even more important.
When you dance, the greatest resource available to you isn’t the music, or the big fat book of ballet technique, or even YouTube.
The greatest resource available to you, right then and there, is your fellow dancers.
Why?
Because when you’re learning a dance, you’re going to miss something.
This isn’t because you’re stupid, or careless, or distracted (though, yeah, sometimes you’re probably going to be distracted, especially if you’re me). It’s because choreography comes at you hella fast, and you have to, like, blink sometimes.
To complicate things, you also can’t really see yourself in the way that other people can see you. So you might be absolutely sure that you Know The Steps, and you still might be wrong.
When you’re unsure, or better yet, you know you don’t know a step or a phrase, the single best thing you can do is ask another dancer.
If you’re shy, the thing you’re least likely to do is … you guessed it! Ask another dancer.
Obviously, this is a problem.
It’s an even bigger problem when your AD or your choreographer says, “Hey, you! You don’t know this part!” and it’s a part you’re dead certain that you know (because it’s, like, saute-balance-saute-balance-pique turn-pique turn-chaine-chaine-chaine-run away … why, yes, this is an example from my actual life, what makes you ask?).
Because that means that you’ve missed something without realizing that you’ve missed something, and now you have to figure out exactly what that is.
In my parenthetical example above, what I was missing was the arms. It wasn’t that I was doing something inherently wrong with my arms: my port de bras was one of the eleventy-million acceptable versions for the combination of steps in question.
But it was wrong anyway, because it wasn’t the one our AD wanted.
The problem is, he didn’t say, “You’re doing the arms wrong,” he just said, “You don’t know this step.” Which, to be honest, is valid: in the context of this dance, I didn’t know the step.
You guys: THE ARMS ARE PART OF THE STEP.
At this particular moment in the dance, I couldn’t see what anyone else was doing with their arms, so I didn’t realize that I was doing something different. Mr D called me out on it a few times in a row, but it didn’t occur to me to ask the girl standing next to me (who is actually one of the nicest, sweetest, and funniest people in the world, but because I was in Super Shy Boy! mode, I didn’t know that yet) what I was doing wrong.
It wasn’t until I videoed the piece and sat down to watch it that I figured it out … and because I couldn’t quite tell from my tiny phone screen what I was supposed to do, I finally, like, asked someone.
And it took almost no time to fix once I did, except for the fact that I’d done it wrong so many times that it’s burned into my brain the wrong way, and I still have to double-check it before we perform that particular piece now.
If I’d just asked earlier on (“Hey, BossMan says I’m wrong, here, but I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong … any thoughts?”) I could’ve saved myself that struggle.
When you’re shy, it can be extra hard to feel okay asking people questions that expose your weaknesses.
In a dance context, however, everyone’s performance depends on everyone else’s … so it’s deeply unlikely that someone’s going to say, “OMG, if you’re so dumb you can’t figure that out, I’m not gonna tell you.” (If someone does, you might be dancing in a group that’s toxic enough that you should think about finding somewhere else to dance.) Usually, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s this,” and demonstrate, and then you can go, “Okay, so like this?” and if you’re right, they’ll say, “Yup, that’s it!” and if not, they’ll adjust you accordingly, and you’ll all go on with your lives and learning the rest of the dance.
What it took me for-freaking-ever to realize is that one of the reasons I sometimes struggle to learn new choreography is that I am extraordinarily shy about asking when I don’t feel like I’ve got it.
Then, knowing that I’m very much a kinaesthetic (that is, physical) learner, I don’t walk through the choreography and nail it down, because I’m afraid I’ll learn it wrong and then have to un-learn and re-learn it.
Both of these things put me behind the curve. First, by failing to ask, I don’t patch the holes in my knowledge base. Second, by failing to loosely work through the choreography on my own I greatly lengthen the process of learning it.
In turn, both of these realities make me nervous (when you have to have the piece down and you know you’re not getting it as fast as everyone else, nervousness is pretty much the guaranteed outcome), which makes my working memory stop working, which makes learning anything next to impossible.
Which makes me look like a complete idiot (because in those moments I am one, albeit temporarily). Which makes people think I’m a complete idiot. Which makes them not want to work with me. Which is glaringly obvious even to someone like me who is not very good at reading social cues. Which makes me nervous.
Repeat ad nauseam.
The solution, of course, is obvious.
In this case, there’s only one way forward, and that’s just to bite the bullet and talk to the least-scary-looking person in the room.
Occasionally, you’ll get lucky and discover that she also isn’t sure about the step in question, and then together you’ll go and prevail upon her friend or friends until one of two things happens: you might find someone who’s dead certain that they know it, or you might discover that nobody’s really entirely sure and thus you might work something out by consensus.
And then, the next time you run it, either your AD will go, “Oh, hey, that looks better,” or s/he’ll say, “No! You’re all wrong.” (S/he might also add, “Oh my G-d, how many times do we have to go over this?!” but try not to take it personally: even the sweetest ADs get nervous, too.)
More likely, the person in question will say something like, “No big deal, it’s this,” and will show you (or tell you) what’s supposed to happen.
The thing I have noticed is that other people do this way more proactively than I do. They don’t waste a lot of time trying to muddle through and figure it out by trying to dance and watch at the same time (by which I don’t mean the usual kind of “watching” that you do to make sure your spacing is okay and that you’re in sync with the people in your group: I mean the high-cognitive load kind of watching that you do when you’re trying to learn brand new choreography).
Most people, if they’re really unclear on something, just ask someone.
So I guess one of my goals for the next half of the season is to stop being afraid to ask people when I’m unclear, even if I feel like I should have learned the choreography in question five months ago.
This won’t fix the thing that makes me amazingly adept at saying the wrong thing at the worst possible moment, or the fact that my sense of humor is (to say the least) odd and that people who don’t know me very, very well often don’t seem to understand that I’m joking[1].
But it will help me learn dances faster, and that’ll be a big step in the right direction.
With, I hope, the correct port de bras.
Notes
- You guys, for future reference: if you’re talking to me in person and what I’m saying sounds completely ludicrous, assume I’m joking. Likewise, I’ll continue to work on my delivery, in hope of someday being able to use irony, sarcasm, and guerilla-theatre-of-the-absurd without convincing everyone around me that I am, in fact, actually stupid.
When You Get There, Part 2
But first, Hi! And I survived Nutcracker, and it was great, and Happy New Year, and Jeez. Now, on to the next thing.
We all focus a lot on where we’re trying to go, and that’s a good thing. It’s good to allow for the possibility–even the probability–that you might wind up somewhere else entirely, but it’s pretty helpful to have a destination in mind when you set out. Also, like, a basic plan; a loose map that allows for the likelihood of dragons, uncontacted peoples, and so forth. Even if your plan is to explore uncharted waters, after all, you still have to get there somehow.
So that’s an important thing, and a good thing, and helpful up to a point. Specifically, the point at which you reach your destination, and need to move on to Phase 2 of whatever the Grand Plan is … and, curiously, there are precious few resources that explore what happens after you forge a path through whatever obstacles to reach The Far Shore.
And that, I think, represents an enormous growth area for idiots like me who write blogs about setting completely ridiculous goals and pursuing them.
As such, I present the first of my observations: when you get there, you will still be you.
If you’re socially awkward, you will still be socially awkward. If you’re shy and bad at integrating into established social groups, you’ll still be shy and bad at integrating into established social groups. If you’re a slow learner, you’ll still be a slow learner. If you’re prone to bouts of depression … well, you see where I’m going with this.
When you get there, you will still be you.
In other words, your weaknesses, your struggles, and your blind spots disembark with you on that Far Shore.
So, of course, do your strengths, your victories, and your stunning insights–but I think we all assume that anyway. Besides, our strengths are less likely to create problems for us once we Get There. We tend to visualize success, and it’s a good strategy. But, just as the classic fairy-tale ending, “…And they lived happily ever after” omits the likelihood that Cinderella, though kind and brave and all that, has no idea how to comport herself at court, visualizing the success of reaching a certain end-point (say, working for a ballet company) omits the reality of living with ourselves once we’re there.
I’ve been quiet for the past several weeks because I’ve been trying to figure how to square this circle. I remain a sensitive, shy, touchy introvert with enormous, gaping holes in his training. I still have difficulty processing spoken language. I am physically flexible, but mentally not-so-flexible. I am good at adapting to physical challenges on the fly, but not great at coming up with workarounds for more abstract problems because, ultimately, I’m not really good at thinking*.
*Boy, is that a topic for another post.
So I guess that’s my introduction to Danseur Ignoble, Phase 2: going forward, I’ll continue to explore the process of learning to be a dancer, but I’ll also examine my weaknesses as they intersect with my life as a ballet dancer. I hope that in the process, I’ll be able to reflect on my challenges and possibly brainstorm some strategies for coping with them.
As such, here’s the plan–the tentative plan, because hey, this is me we’re talking about–going forward:
On Mondays, I’ll post about a challenge I’m facing in my work that stems from my own personality: how it impacts my work, both for the worse and for the better, and how I’m dealing with it. From time to time, I’ll also check in with other dancers and creative people about similar challenges they’ve faced in their own careers (Are you reading this? Would you like to be one of my interviewees? Let me know in the comments!).
On Saturdays, unless we have a show, I’ll write about technique. If we have a show, who knows? I’ll try to make it on Sunday, but I’m more likely to sit around letting my brain leak out my ears.
The Monday posts will probably be grouped under the Ballet Lessons heading; the Saturday posts will be grouped under Technical Notes.
I will, of course, totally fail at this from time to time, but I figure having some kind of goal is better than having no kind of goal.
I’m not at all certain that any of this will help me address my challenges in helpful ways, but I figure it probably can’t hurt. And, of course, the insight that I’m still me, and that my major life challenges won’t magically evaporate just because I have somehow fumbled my way into a ballet company.
Still, reflecting does usually help, and writing helps me reflect. So here we go: off onto a new adventure. Ish.
Reflections On The First Week
I took my first company class on Tuesday and dove into my first ballet company rehearsal on Wednesday. Our AD (who I quite like) has been putting me to work learning basically everything and dancing in two of the pieces for our season-opener.
Our company now comprises four boys and more than four girls … I keep meaning to count them but I keep forgetting ^-^’ All of them have more experience than I do, but that’s okay. I’m working my booty off catching up, and the challenge is good for me.
Surprisingly, I find it comfortable to be the least experienced dancer in this context. I’m used to being at the top of the class and having to set an example. It’s nice to be able to relax, acknowledge my weaknesses, and just learn like crazy. I don’t have to try to be the best dancer in the room: I already know I’m not the best dancer in the room. I just have to try everything and work like crazy. Those are things I know how to do.
The “trying everything” bit has led to some surprises. I have done at least one double tour on purpose this week. I realized part of my problem is that I wasn’t really snapping my legs in tiiiiiiight. I think I wrote about this once before: to make a double tour work, you really have to turn yourself into a pencil, and do it FAST.
There have, of course, been plenty of non-surprises. When I get tired, I still get swaybacked, and I still let my ribs splay. I’m working on it. When I don’t get in my own way, I’ve got a lot of jump. I have nice feet. I have a habit of throwing my head back in my turns. When I’m unsure, I pull back into myself; I can get very internal. Sometimes I run myself over in grand allegro.
Basically me coming in too hot in the grand allegro. (Photo by tyrese myrie on Pexels.com)
The cool part is that I feel like I now have the opportunity to work on all of those things. I’ve had great classes for the past few years, don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t be doing this right now if I hadn’t. What I haven’t had is class at this level every single day, five days a week, or the opportunity to take what I’ve been working on in class and immediately apply it in rehearsal.
Unsurprisingly, I like the work. Although I don’t really know anyone very well yet, there’s a kind of peace in being a dancer among dancers. We’re all movers, artists, and obsessed people with intense work ethics. If it’s close to lunch and the AD says, “Let’s run it again!” you might hear a little grumbling, but then everyone runs the piece like it’s the first thing we’ve done today.
I like the structure. I like knowing that I fit somewhere in the company. I don’t in the least mind that, for the moment, my particular spot is “The New Boy.” Being the New Boy means I can only get better (or fail to make an effort and bomb completely, but that’s not my style).
It means the world to me that our AD has taken me on as kind of a protegé. I am grateful for the body that I have, which is well-made for ballet, and especially for my feet, which are apparently all that and a bag of chips (they’re the thing that basically every ballet teacher I’ve ever had has mentioned most specifically). At this point it’s up to me to make the most of what I’ve been given, and to live up to the faith Mr. D has placed in me.
And to learn the slave variation from Le Corsaire and nail down an overhead press lift o.O’
Stuck(ish)
You know that thing where you’re facing what’s probably going to be a pretty big change in your routines and you know you should probably get a bunch of stuff done before said Pretty Big Change hits but you keep looking at all the things that need to be done and going ACK NO HOW?
That’s where I am right now, even though I know that I know better.
…By which I mean, the whole Do Two Things thing would really help right now, but it seems like I keep Doing the same Two Things (cooking, dishes) over and over again and not really being up for much more (possibly because things have been stressful and I’m not sleeping well).
To clarify: the Pretty Big Change should be a good thing. I don’t want to talk about it much because I don’t want to tempt fate (and also because I don’t want to have to be like, “Yeah, you know the Big Thing I announced? Well, um, that fell through.”).
lt will also hurl a wrecking ball through the comfortable schedule that has slowly evolved over the past few years and force me to try to be a little better at adulting (or possibly just accept a lower standard, ugh).
So I’m feeling a little up-in-the-air; a little stressed out; a little stuck.
None of which prevents me from being sort of electrically alive with hope that the Big New Thing will actually come to pass; that it won’t turn out that I show up on Day One and get sent home immediately.
Of course, I am terrified of hope, and being electrically alive with anything feels a lot like anxiety, so … yeah.
If the Big New Thing works out, it will be like when you’re playing a puzzle game and you’ve had this one row jamming up the works and you finally get the piece that lets you clear it and then you can put everything else in place. (Edit: I mean in terms of being able to plan. Right now, I feel like I can’t schedule ANYTHING, which is wrecking my head a little now that it’s within my Golden Retriever Time Zone of two weeks.)
If it doesn’t, I suppose I’ll be a little bit devastated, but the worst thing that will come out of it is more time to work on Antiphon projects and the assurance that I’ll be able to continue with what I’m doing now, including the lovely classses with L’Ancien that now take place twice each week, for the foreseeable future.
Historically, the week before any major change is always kind of a giant kettle of stress, and I know that about myself: I dislike imminent changes; I’d rather just get things over with. So I’m trying also to give myself a little bit of grace and not be such a jerk to myself right now. But, of course, being stressed out makes both those goals a little harder to achieve, so … yeah.
Just breathe; just be here now. I’ll be better once I’m in class tonight and the only thing I can think about is dancing (especially since it’s Musical Theater tonight and that requires ALL OF MY MENTAL RESOURCES, you guys).
Gay Marriage Was Never Just About Tax Breaks
Recently, my favorite podcast touched on the topic of the debate within the LGBTQI* community about the prioritization of same-sex marriage (as opposed to trans rights, equal access to housing, etc). Both the host and the guest mentioned only the question of tax breaks as a motivator, with the context suggesting that tax breaks shouldn’t take precedent over issues of survival, like fair access to housing and employment.
I don’t disagree with that premise in the least: frankly, I could care less about tax breaks (and being married doesn’t automatically save you money on your taxes anyway). We definitely need to be more in-tune to issues like the dangers faced by trans people, and especially trans women of color, who are assaulted and murdered at staggeringly high rates just for trying to be themselves. As a community, those of us out here in Rainbowland definitely need to center the issues of those among us who are most vulnerable.
I’m sure that this was an unscripted oversight, and if the topic at hand had been “Let’s Talk About Same-Sex Marriage,” the million and fifteen much-more-important rights afforded by marriage would probably have come to light sooner or later.
But the fact that both the host’s and the guest’s first instinct was to frame the question of gay marriage as one of mere access to tax breaks reflects its own kind of privilege: one that has a lot to do with the one of the Great Divides in queer history, and a lot to do with being relatively young and healthy.
Because, for gay men and women of my husband’s generation, gay marriage has a lot more to do with death than it does with taxes.
Let me back up a little.
D and I are members of two distinct generations.
He was born in a Cold War world, at the peak of the space race, and grew up in the world of arcades, local media, snail mail, and telephone calls. I was born at the very tail end of the Cold War, when we’d already decided to kiss and make up and were basically just sorting out how to do it, and grew up in the world of in-home video game systems, global media, email, and increasingly-rapid telecommunication. In high school, he had the library and his local friends. I had the entire internet and more or less the entire world to chat with.
As D was coming of age, sex was a terrifying game of Russian Roulette: he remembers the time before we knew how HIV was transmitted. He was a young adult at the peak of the AIDS crisis.
As for me … although its confusing specter haunted my childhood and probably made me far more paranoid about sex than was entirely necessary, by the time I first heard about AIDS (from an NPR radio segment in my Dad’s car), we already knew how to prevent transmission and were starting to see effective treatments. As a young adult, I already lived in a world where AIDS was a fact of life—in essence, a particularly obnoxious lifelong chronic illness that could be managed with medication. Like, herpes on steroids, or something.
D is part of the generation that experienced the staggering pain of devoted couples being separated by hospital policies that allowed only legal family members visitation rights.
He is part of the generation that saw bereaved spouses ousted from their homes when the deceased’s family decided to seize the property of the deceased.
He is part of the generation for whom access to life-saving treatment that would’ve been covered by one partner’s benefits might not be covered by the other partner’s—a roadblock invisible to legally-married heterosexual couples. He is a part of a generation in which people literally died because they lacked the protections of legal marriage.
To gay men of his generation and the gay women who carried so very, very much of the burden with them in those dark days, tax breaks are the last and the least concern. I would say “icing on the cake,” but cake isn’t sustenance.
Knowing that your mate won’t be driven from the home you’ve built together after your death? That’s sustenance. Knowing that you can’t be cut off from death benefits simply because you’re gay? That’s sustenance. Knowing that you have legal protection that allows you to see your beloved in the hospital; to advocate for them; to make medical decisions on their behalf when they are incapacitated? That’s sustenance.
Coincidentally, it’s also access to safe housing. It’s also access to healthcare—on the private market, D and I bear less of a financial burden for one decent plan than for two poor plans. We have access to such a plan because we’re legally married. If it weren’t for that, we’d be scraping by with two separate iterations of the kind of health plan that only covers you in catastrophes.
Never mind certain other critical protections: spouses cannot be forced to testify against one-another, for example … unless they’re not legally married, in which case anything goes. Legal marriage can prevent one’s life-partner from being deported.
I’m not saying that any of this makes the other work that we’re doing as a community any less critical. But to frame same-sex marriage as a matter of a tax break is short-sighted. I hope nobody actually believes that was the prime mover, here.
For what it’s worth, legal marriage also serves the vulnerable.
It affords a path to safety for immigrants who arrive here on journeys of love, or who arrive here on other journeys and fall in love anyway.
It affords protection against post-mortem dead-naming by hostile families of deceased transfolk.
It prevents children of same-sex parents from being torn from their homes if one parent dies and homophobic family members (or legal systems) intervene.
It protects the devoted spouses of military members who are severely injured or killed in service.
My generation isn’t old enough for death to have touched many of us in the ways it touched D’s generation when they were our age, or younger than we are now. We mostly haven’t dealt much with death: most of us still have both our parents (and probably a step-parent or two as well) and will for many years. Many of us still have all our grandparents. Few of us have lost our spouses.
We might have been alive during the most harrowing days of the AIDS crisis, but if we were, we were children. We didn’t personally lose friends in staggering numbers or watch our friends suffer the agony of being barred from hospital visits. I have, in my lifetime, lost one friend to AIDS—a lovely guy a few years older than I am who committed suicide because he had contracted a strain of HIV that wasn’t responding to antiretroviral treatments and so forth. He chose to end his life before the complications of HIV could end it for him.
People Denis’ age lost dozens, sometimes hundreds, of friends, in a ground swell of bereavement complicated by discrimination against which no grounds for legal protection existed.
Death, for my generation, isn’t the visible specter that it has been for so very long, from such an early age, for the gay men and women of D’s generation. For them, it has been very real from the beginning of their adult lives, as have the potential repercussions associated with the lack of the legal protections afforded by marriage (and which efforts to secure by other means have not reliably secured).
I’m not saying that focusing on gay marriage, to the exclusion of other issues, was by any means the right path. I do think that, in many ways, it was low-hanging fruit: in an age when the US is far less uncomfortable with queer people in general, but fraught with racial tension and wildly unsure about transfolk, it was relatable. Marriage, as it were, will play in Peoria.
One thing it was not, though, not ever, was simply a tax break.
Either way, at this point, it’s a fait accompli, more or less. It could be undone, but it would be easier not to undo it. People who don’t believe in gay marriage can go on not getting gay-married all they like. They don’t even have to come to our weddings (amazingly, Rainbow Goons won’t show up at your door if you choose not to attend your lesbian cousin’s lesbian wedding, and in fact you’re not even legally obligated to feel guilty about it).
And now that we’re over that hurdle, maybe we can all agree to focus our efforts on the most vulnerable among us, and on making the queer world one that hears their voices, that sees and embraces them. And maybe we can also work on making the queer world one in which no one feels like an alien and a stranger.
Adulting with ADHD: Pillowcases
I keep promising to add photos to my Like Skillz posts, but then forgetting, so I’m going to try to stop making that promise. Maybe I’ll come back and add photos here, maybe I won’t.
Anyway.
This might be something you’re already doing. I might be the last person alive who hadn’t thought of this.
BUT!
If you’re still wrestling with pillows every time you change your sheets, here’s something that might help.
When you fold your pillowcases, fold them inside-out.
(Since they’re likely to wind up inside-out when you yank them off your pillows in the first place, this can save a step in the washing/folding process, too!)
Then, when it’s time to put them onto your pillows, reach into an inside-out pillowcase and use the corners like hand-puppet mouths. (This isn’t as kinky as it sounds … but if you want to make it kinky, you do you, Boo!)
Bite down on the corners of your pillow. The pillowcase will probably bunch up on your arms: that’s fine; it actually makes the rest of the job easier.
Next, keep a firm grip on one corner while you use your other hand to start pulling the pillowcase up by its open edge, turning it right side-out as you go.
I make no promises that you’ll turn your bedroom into a boutique hotel room, but at least you can cover those naked pillows, STAT! (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com)
This is especially useful when you’re wrestling a really fat pillow or a floppy down or feather pillow. It’s also the easiest way to get duvet covers onto duvets, which is where I picked up the idea (which in turn transferred from putting on compression stockings).
Like I said, you’ve probably already figured this out. But if you haven’t, I hope it makes making your bed easier.
And if you’re in a place right now where making the bed and/or folding pillowcases isn’t really on the radar, that’s okay, too. There are way more important things in the world.
Cooking with ADHD: Chia Pudding
It’s been about a thousand years since I posted a recipe, but this one’s worth knowing about if you like tapioca. If you don’t like tapioca, on the other hand, you might hate this stuff.
The TL;DR
Prep Time: ~5 minutes
Cook* Time: 1 – 8 hours
Who’ll Like It: Tapioca fans ❤
Who’ll Hate It: Tapioca haters XP
Best Uses: Dessert, Breakfast
Hardest Part: Remembering to buy the d**n Chia Seeds
Pairs Well With: Disorganized mornings; late-night cravings
*And by “cook,” I mean “stick it in the fridge and mostly ignore it”
The Actual Recipe
I’ve adapted this from a variety of similar recipes with similar goals. One of the best things about it is that it’s adaptable. Lactose intolerant? Use almond milk. Allergic to almonds? Try coconut milk. Hate coconut? Use rice milk. Don’t like artificial sweeteners? No worries; you can use sugar or agave or honey or maple syrup or…
Here’s What You’ll Need (for each serving)
- 1.5 tablespoons of chia seed (I’m using black chia seed because that’s what I’ve got, but white is fine, too)
- .5 tablespoon unsweetened coconut shreds (or powder)
- .5 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk
- 1-2 tsp sucralose
- ~.25 tsp coconut extract
- ~.25 tsp vanilla extract
Here’s What You Do
- Put everything except the chia into a small container with a lid (I’ve repurposed a glass jar that came with shredded cheese in it)
- Stir briefly
- Add the chia
- Whisk all the things briefly with a small whisk (a fork will work fine, too)
- Stick the lid on and stick that bad boy (or girl, or gender-nonbinary personage) in the fridge
- Chill for a minimum of 1 hour, but preferably more like overnight, then come back, stir, and stuff it into your maw
For even distribution of the chia seeds, I’ve been coming back 30 minutes into the chill time to re-whisk everything, but that step is optional.
Most of the recipes I’ve found for this use 1 cup of whatever milk-like product and 3 or 4 tablespoons of chia seeds, but when I made my first batch, I found that makes rather an enormous portion. I halved all the volumes to arrive at what seems, for me, like a more reasonable end product.
That said, you can definitely shove an entire 1-cup-of-milk portion of this into your face if you try hard enough.
Notes
- I’ve read that highly acidic ingredients can prevent the chia seeds from “gelling” adequately, so if you’re going to toss in orange juice, lemon curd, etc, you might want to do it right before you serve this up.
- If you eat this stuff after one hour, chances are good that it’ll still be a little loosey-goosey and a little crunchy. Don’t worry, though, you won’t die. Or, at any rate, I didn’t.
I entered the ingredients above into LoseIt’s recipe calculator, and here’s what it threw back:
The (V) is for “vegan,” since I also made a dairy-based version and entered that one into the calculator.
I suspect that this would be really, really good with lemon curd … which, of course, I don’t happen to have on hand. Even better with berries (which I do have) and lemon curd.
As always, I’ll try to get some pix up here soon.
‘Til then, please enjoy this picture of me looking disconcertingly like a young George “Dubya” Bush on the trapeze:
I misunderestimated how aggressively this trapeze would attempt to remove my clothes.
And also this one of “splits down,” just because:
Danseur Booty: 1 / Tights-Removing Trapeze: 0
danseur ignoble 