Category Archives: balllet
Danseur Ignoble: A Good Bad Day
I’m not sure how else to describe today’s class.
It wasn’t always an awesome class in terms of accuracy (on my part), but the problems I ran into didn’t stem from lack of technique (mostly; for reasons unknown, there was one terrible soutenu moment in our fondu-et-rond-de-jamb combo… o_o) so much as from my brain butting up against increasingly-complex combinations, and there were some really quite nice moments.
Somehow, I left class floating on a cloud of confidence even though I’d completely hosed up the final traveling combination*.
Brienne definitely leveled us up today. We were packed with company dancers and teachers as well we few, we happy few, we band of danseurs et danseuses ignobles. After lulling us into a false sense of security with some nice, gentle pliés, our much-loved task-mistress moved on to a series of increasingly longer and more demanding combinations at the barre. We tried our hardest to execute them, because we all love her and would follow her into battle against the forces of Mordor and all that.
I also once again failed to eat (not on purpose — just poor planning and worse execution), so my brain was decidedly not firing on all 3.5 cylinders.
In case you’re wondering, that did not help me remember the combos.
That said, when I was doing things right today, they were apparently pretty right indeed — I got a, “Good, Asher!” twice; once after responding to a small correction and once straight out of the blue.
Ballet peeps, you already know: there is no accolade in the world better than “Good!” (or its equivalent, “Yes!”) in class.
Even better, I had an awesome conversation with Brienne after class. I laughingly lamented my total failure to get the last combo right, and she said she’s noticed that I’m using my feet against the floor better (thanks in largely to the combinations she and Ms. T have been giving us) and my speed is improving.
Then she said, “You have beautiful feet” and went on to explain that the range of motion in my feet and ankles means it takes me longer to “get there” (that is, to reach full point and extension) than it does for people with less flexible feet, which paradoxically makes quick jumps harder.
On the other hand, apparently it means my feet look great when they finally do “get there,” so I’ll take that. Speed, I can build.
Later, Ms. T. said I had beautiful legs for ballet o.O
This floored me. While my relationship with my legs has improved, I still think of them as disproportionately stocky (that is, disproportionately stocky relative to the rest of my body, which has always bothered me aesthetically). While I now definitely respect their functionality, I’m not really used to thinking of my legs as beautiful (to be fair, Denis also seems to think my legs are pretty fine, so it’s possible that I’m just wildly delusional).
My hypermobile knees are part of that, but at the same time, learning to actually get them straight without locking them has been surprisingly challenging, especially since dancing makes them more, rather than less, hyperextendy.
Sometimes in class I feel like a baby giraffe trying to learn to walk, scissoring around the Sahara, or maybe like a drunken ostrich**. It is nice to know that this is a function of having beautiful legs for ballet. Some problems are good problems to have.
Suddenly, though, I feel like I have a lot to live up to. Beautiful feet and beautiful legs?
So, yeah. It was a good kind of bad day — the kind that you have when you’re working on challenging stuff and your technique is improving; the kind you run into when the dimensions of your comfort zone are starting to expand.
In short, I could live with a lot more good bad days just like this one.
In other news, both of my Capezio Romeos have swallowed their laces (in case you’re wondering, it’s really quite hard to promenade when your shoes are slowly peeling off ._.). So I’m going to have to take some time to fix them. I really should’ve applied something to the knots to make sure they’d stick after I gave the laces a trim.
Um, lesson learned?
So that’s it for now. Robert and I are kicking around the idea of doing a Cooking with ADHD video post in the next few days. I’m also trying to make him take Ms. M’s class on Friday. He’s here ’til Sunday, so he might as well.
I’ll keep you posted 🙂
Danseur Ignoble: It Helps If You Can Breathe
12:15 class today with Ms. T. I haven’t done her class in ages (Claire used to teach the noon class on Saturday), so it was a new experience. I also haven’t done the 12:15 Saturday class in over a month, so that was cool.
While the 12:15 class is billed as a beginner class, like most it gets adjusted based on who shows up; today, we skewed towards the intermediate level, particularly at the barre/
I’d say that our work at center and across the floor was more advanced-beginnery — which is to say that we didn’t do 360-degree promenades in attitude or arabesque, anything with pas de Basque or balanceé as linking steps (you guys, I absolutely and irrationally love pas de Basque; it’s one of those steps that just feels like dancing), or any combinations with different flavors of turns.
Anyway, I forgot to tape my toes and forgot to take my nasal spray. The latter of these was the worse oversight: my nasal spray keeps my whole nosapharynx open, and my allergies are on high alert today, so breathing became a challenge towards the end.
Barre was iffy at first (my plies felt inelastic, and it took me a while to get my head in the game), but the last half of barre was pretty good, and I felt pretty solid at center and going across the floor.
We did some nice adagio at center (with promenades at passé, which are comfortingly easy at this point) and then a really pretty traveling combo in waltz time that went:
Prepare (B+, port des bras);
Tombe
Pas de bourré
Plie fourth;
(Long) Passe balance
Tendu back;
Tombe
Pas de bourré
Plie fourth;
Single (slow) turn en dedans
Tendu back;
Tombe
Pas de bourré
Plie fourth;
Double turn en dedans (or triple if you were that one guy with the awesome turns);
Pivot
Soutenu turn to fifth
Plié;
Chassee to 1st arabesque en releve
Allongé
(Faille implied.) Run away!
I wanted to say that the tempo was fairly moderate, so there was lots of room for expression, but when I tap it out on my mobile metronome it’s about 130 BPM, which is squarely allegro.
Maybe it felt slow and easy because we did a really fast grand allegro combo on Wednesday. I mean, like, we ran it first at a tempo that was also squarely allegro, and then at about twice that speed. Woof.
Anyway, today it felt like we had plenty of time and room going across the floor and weren’t rushing to get from one step to the next.
I was on the rear point of a triangle with its front line made up of two people who were shorter than I am, so I kept having to moderate my travel so as not to gallomph into them or become unsynchronized. That’s a useful exercise, though, as being able to maintain spacing in a squadron of differently-sized dancers is an essential skill.
That said, triangles usually go point-first in ballet, don’t they?
I got through the first set of little jumps before my toe started to feel iffy. I skipped the second set, which made me sad — dangit, I wanted to do entrechats! I also skipped grand allegro today, just in case.
Not being able to breathe very well didn’t help. Everything feels about twice as difficult when your air intake is clogged.
It’s mostly, I think, that when you get even a little winded, it’s hard to get enough air to recover properly.
Instead of getting a little winded, recovering, getting a little winded again, and recovering again (which is a normal pattern during certain parts of class), you get a little winded, get more winded, then get even more winded. By the time you make it to the end of the first set of little jumps, you sound like a freight train and feel like your head and/or heart are going to explode.
That said, it’s not like this is a new thing for me. I have had nasopharyngeal issues as far back as I can remember — I’m just usually better at making sure I’ve dealt with them before class.
So, yeah. Nice reminder today about why I take my nasal spray before class.
I think next week I’ll swing for all three intermediate classes (M,W,F) and the 12:15 class on Saturday, which Brienne is teaching, though I may do evening class on Monday (Brienne is teaching that, too).
Brian is back to teaching the following Monday, which will be awesome. On the 14th, Wednesday AM class will be taught by the instructor who teaches advanced classes, so I’m rather looking forward to that as well.
Anyway, that’s it for today.
Never underestimate the importance of breathing 🙂
Danseur Ignoble: Now That’s Showbiz
Did Brienne’s class today, and I made it All. The. Way. Through!
(Though I skipped a couple of reps of petit allegro.)
She has a really fun CD of class music called “West End to Broadway” (hence, in part, the title of this post), including some nice, slow pieces for torture fondu and barre adagio.
Barre is improving.
If you’re a horse person, you know that thing where if you don’t ride or school your horse for a while, sometimes the horse in question acts a bit silly when you put him back to work? That’s kind of where my body is.
I'm back! Mostly!
It does things I didn’t really ask for, then I correct it, and it’s all, “Oh, you mean those turnout muscles! Okay. No worries!”
However, it’s doing less of that now than it was last week. My successive approximations are closer to the goal state. So, Yay!
Speaking of successive approximations, at center and across the floor, we had nice combos today, and I did the traveling ones, if not worth prefect execution, at least with a lot of elan.
Now, if I could just stop putting in failles where there aren’t any and leaving them out where there are (and adding an extra saute arabesque here or pique turn there)…
But that’s more of my body being a silly horse. At least it’s a silly horse that’s got some style?
Which brings me to the other reason for this title: one of the things my classmates kept mentioning was the struggle to remember the combinations (some of which were fairly complex).
The cool part is that you wouldn’t have known it, for the most part: everyone focused on performing and enjoying themselves, and most of us looked pretty good. (I’ve determined that if you turn the wrong way on the rear point of a triangle, it actually looks pretty cool anyway, so I don’t even worry about that anymore ;)).
I’m back to a point at which I don’t freeze if I blank on the combo halfway through; instead, I improvise. It’s a skill I learned as a musician: nobody knows you screwed up if you don’t let them know.
Of course, in class (okay, and sometimes in big corps numbers), that’s not entirely true, but what you practice in class is ultimately what you will do on stage — and, of course, mistakes do happen during performances, even to professionals. Like we lowly danseurs and danseuses ignobles, they have to learn to make it look good.
And that, too, is showbiz.
(Come to think of it, looking like you meant to do that is an important life skill in general — ask any cat!)
So that’s it for today. The final combination in today’s class went so well (You guys, I threw in a cabriole just for kicks! I’m back!) that I finished up feeling jubilant, ebullient, even bubbly.
Now, home to do computery work.
Danseur Ignoble (Again!): A Teaching Tip I’m Totally Going To Steal
Tonight, I went and rocked out Ballet Essentials (even though The Divine Ms. M playfully scolded me: “What are you doing in this class? You should be in the other class!” I explained I was saving my toe against Wednesday’s Intermediate class).
We had a raft of new dancers and a lovely, simple barre. At center, we worked the basic port-de-bras and positions of the feet, then did chassees (a droit, a gauche, et avant), then did a little combination in two versions: a simple “chassee avant right, chassee avant left” for the really new folks or a swift-traveling polka for those who had been dancing for a while.
You guys, I love polka (if you’re wondering, here’s a basic example: chassee avant right, hop [kind of a saute passe, really], chassee avant left).
Here’s the thing, though, that I’m going to steal: after everyone had traveled across the floor, Ms. M asked even the newest students to try the polka step — and then she said, “Imagine that you’re Clara in the party scene of the Nutcracker — or, for the gentlemen, that you’re Fritz. Get into character!”
At the same time, she demonstrated the characteristic steps for each part.
Suddenly, everyone had permission to play, to perform — and we did.
When you’re teaching adult beginners, especially, there’s a kind of play barrier that you have to knock down. Adults feel as if they must master technique, and they focus on it so hard that they forget to play and have fun and pretend to be Clara or Fritz.
You guys, I have to tell you — everyone in that room looked a hundred times better immediately once they jumped on that bandwagon. Even me.
I got my Fritz on. I thought about the character, about embodying that spirit of Sassy, Irritating Little Brother-ness (because, frankly, that’s a role I know pretty well; I’ve only been working on it all my life) and about how sometimes when you’re a little sibling, you do this thing where you both mock your big sib and show off at the same time. And then I danced that, and it looked cool.
You guys, it was fun, and I think we all enjoyed it.
So I’m going to remember that, and I am going to steal the heck out of it. Talk about “one easy trick!” It’s a nifty workaround to get adults to lighten up and enjoy themselves.
Which, of course, leads to better-looking ballet, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier today.
Danseur Ignoble: Regaining Lightness
I am still ruminating on Saturday’s class, even though I am planning on getting off my butt and going to Monday evening class in a little while.
I mentioned doing flying chassees and sautes at the end of class. What I didn’t mention was the feeling of those chassees and sautes: light, airy, bounding, nimble, mobile. Bouyant. Even when I glanced at myself in the mirror (and in spite of the fact that I was obediently doing them hands-on-hips, since it was Cultural Pass day and we had a bunch of completely new dancers in class and I didn’t want to confuse anyone), they looked fluid and graceful and light.
You know.
Like dancing.
A lot of that came from the moment at which I suddenly realized, “Oh, hey, I can do this again!” I felt free.
I’ve been struggling, lately, with feeling like my dancing is heavy, leaden — like I’m making it happen instead of letting it happen.
On Saturday, I somehow miraculously was able to let those passes across the floor happen, and so they happened beautifully.
So there’s a reminder: you can’t regain lightness by forcing it. You can’t capture lightness by grabbing it with your hands and dragging it down. Instead, you have to let yourself spring into its air.
I once heard someone say that the hardest part of flying is letting go of the ground. I think that’s probably true in ballet: dancing is a limited form of flight, and the hardest part is achieving ballon (okay, and grace, expression, musicality, ligature, and aplomb).
The rest is just technique (Ha! Record this as the day that I used the phrase “just technique,” would you?)
The thing is, without ballon (and all those other, less-effable things), technique itself is inert. We do not pack the house to watch people do dance steps — we pack the house to watch dancers dance.
If someone flubs the technique a little, but carries it off and makes it look good, most of us will never now (the exception, of course, being those of us who know that variation, or that specific dance, by heart).
If someone executes perfect technique but lacks grace, ballon, and expression, watching loses some of its savor.
If you want an exceptional example that’s not ballet-specific, watch the womens’ artistic gymnastics floor exercises from the London Olympics back in 2012. The Americans brought some stellar technique to the floor, but the Russians — whose training places much more emphasis on the importance of dance — looked a thousand times better.
Why? The Americans simply moved from trick to trick; their dance elements looked like afterthoughts. The Russians combined the whole shebang into coherent choreography; their linking movements (for which they receive almost no points) were as important to them as the individual technical fireworks that scored the points.
In short, and in ballet terms, the Russian gymnasts had élan; the Americans didn’t. The Americans had great technique — an American won, because gymnastics is not ballet — but the Russians were simply captivating.
So. Yeah. This actually wasn’t supposed to be a screed about the relative importance of technique and expression, or what have you, but there it is. As someone who enjoys precision, it’s something I need to revisit from time to time.
Precision is important, but it isn’t the soul of ballet.
Homemaking: Kacy Is Your Friend
…And she’s awesome.
Five years ago, author and blogger Kacy Faulconer wrote a great post called “Obvious Tips For Not-Very-Good Homemakers.”
Tonight, I read it … and then its sequel … and then the sequel to its sequel.
The tips themselves are great (if, yes, sometimes pretty obvious: but, honestly, even if they’re things you already know, it’s pretty validating to know you’re not the only adult who occasionally calls upon the power of Pigs in Blankets) in a way that will make perfect sense to anyone who thinks a cookbook called Cooking with ADHD is a good idea — but it’s Kacy’s tone of acceptance and cameraderie that really makes it work.
It’s like a friend or a sister or a cousin saying, “Okay, guys and gals, we’re in this together. We kind of suck at this, but we’re doing it anyway, and it’s okay.”
…And also:
He didn’t become Gandalf the Citrus Moderne Dot, did he?
— Kacy Faulconer
Because, seriously, he didn’t. Because he knew he was going to have to get orc blood off dat shizzle, and you can, as Faulconer points out, bleach white.
My own education as a half-baked homemaker has been very much about giving up on visions of making my own laundry detergent and growing my own vegetables, then embracing my limitations (and strengths) and learning to work with them.
I may not grow my own vegetables, but I turn vegetables that we buy into a mean set of no-sugar-added breakfast muffins every single week, because I not only know how to do that, but like doing it (because I do it well, so it makes me feel good, so I do it more, which makes me even better at it, etc.).
I may not make complex gourmet meals every single day, but just about every evening I do cook a meal that my husband enjoys (fortunately, he is a man of simple tastes, and doesn’t object to a regular rotation of variations on Freezer-Marinated Chicken with occasional forays into Things Made From Ground Beef).
I may use a lot of workarounds, but little by little I’m learning to get stuff done.
That’s the spirit that Faulconer’s blog embraces, and I feel like it’s a spirit whose time has come. So go read her!
Oh, yeah — in other news: did Essentials yesterday morning; was able to crack out the flying chassees and a couple of sautes without my toe falling off or swelling up like a ball of bagel dough. This definitely feels like progress. It also didn’t give me any real trouble today, just the generic “Hey, I’m still healing a little” soreness that has become its temporary new normal (for a while, it was fiercely sore the day after class even if I didn’t do releve work or jumps).
We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
My mood is hanging in there, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Upper Doldrums. It’s not approaching “good” yet, but it’s at least more tolerable. I am more able to ignore Bad Thoughts (admittedly, by playing Bubble Wars or baking, but still…) when they arrive (but they’re still arriving).
The upside of my current mood? Holy cow, I have never been this productive in the kitchen. I mean, I have reached a point in life at which my kitchen is basically under control (I’ve even started weeding out unnecessary kitchen things and relocating or offloading them). I like being there, I like working there, and our dishwasher died, so now I just wash the dishes by hand and everything stays sorted.
The downside?
I don’t know. Is it bad to have 24 carrot-pineapple-coconut-raisin muffins hanging around?
Quickie: Plans
On Wednesday, B. and I were chatting during the quick break between barre about how we’d both lost so much ground to injury this year (she with a stress-fractured foot; I with my calf and then my toe). I was like, “Can you believe we were doing brisees last year?”
Anyway, that’s kind of a theme for me, right now. In some ways — mood-wise, ballet-wise — I’m sitting at the bottom of a long climb back to where I want to be.
Fortunately, as a cyclist, the ability and willingness to climb ridiculous hills was and remains one of my strengths, and I feel like maybe I can translate that over to the rest of my life.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to climb this particular set of hills quickly. Just that I know myself well enough to recognize that I’m probably going to make it (even though I’m in that weird place, right now, where you’re rational enough to know that the voice in your head that constantly yammers on like, “You’ve squandered your potential and will never amount to anything now!” is a crazy voice, but not yet in a place where you can make it STFU).
Anyway. So I’m gaining ground more slowly than I would like, but I’m gaining ground.
I guess I can pop in another bike-racing analogy, here: one time, Timothy and I raced Death March while both of us were recovering from various winter illnesses, including some kind of gut thing that was going around. In short, neither of us had been able to eat like a normal person for several days, and we were what a long-ago Arnold Schwartzenegger might have termed “weak little girly-men,” and we did nothing fast, least of all climbing … but climb we did, and (as evidenced by the fact that I am sitting here in my living room, writing this post), we lived to ride another day (in fact, the next year we came back and roundly spanked half the field, although we were in turn roundly spanked by the other half).
Sometimes it sucked, and sometimes we walked our bikes, but at the end of the day, we kept going and eventually made it back to the ranch without having to ride in the Broom Wagon.
So, anyway. I’m not all there yet, but I’m not ready to wait for the broom wagon, either.
As such, here are some plans for upcoming posts, with no particular timeline in mind (though next week would be nice):
- Two Cooking With ADHD posts:
- What To Do With 10 Pounds of Chicken Leg Quarters (Because They’re On Sale)
- How To Make Bread And
InfluenceImpress People
- One hopes, a string of Ballet Class Notes, as my foot can definitely handle at least 3 classes per week at this point if I don’t jump too much.
- Maybe a post about writing? I am doing that still.
In other news, I am rocking along in Homemaker Mode and actually rather better at it than I used to be.
This is comforting.
Some of it, of course, is the Miracle of Modern Medicine (go, Adderall!), but some of it is simply a function of the fact that, amazingly, I do appear to be able to learn.
I’m hoping my friend Robert (Hi, Robert!) will be able to come visit before we head out to the desert; maybe when he does I’ll ask him to collaborate on a Cooking With ADHD Video Post, since we have two different flavors of ADHD and we might find different things helpful.
Oh, and I just read Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, and I highly recommend it (if Regency-era romping bisexual sword-wieldy people sound like your cup of tea).
That’s it for now.
Maybe if I ever manage to get Cooking with ADHD rolling, I’ll expand it into a guide for the ADDle-pated Homemaker. Goodness knows I could use one!
Danseur Ignoble: Intermediate Again
I returned to intermediate class today. I had my doubts, but it actually went reasonably well.
While I didn’t look stellar at the barre, I did make it through all the combinations (of note, either today’s fondus were less sadistic than usual, or my legs are really fresh, or both). Weight transfers were solid; grand rond de jambes were … Um.
Adagio has been worse, but has also been much better. Across-the-floor, on the other hand, was surprisingly good. I need to tune up my balancé a bit again, but the whole thing hung together and looked rather nice (including a lovely turn from fourth; egads, I have missed turns from fourth).
I did part of the petit adagio, then called it a day. I think that was the right call. We did quite a bit of relevé work at the barre, and my toe was starting to speak up.
In other news, The Momma (Denis’ Mom) is making us costumes for Tutu Tuesday (I am preparing her sainthood paperwork as I write). We took measurements yesterday. I selected the fabrics and colors last weekend. I think they’re going to be pretty cool.
The summer depression continues apace, but I’m managing. I really need to get my butt to class as often as I can between now and when we ship out for Burning Man, and I’m hoping that will help.
Anyway, that’s it for now.
Don’t forget to spot your turns!
Onward and Upward, By Fits, Starts, and Degrees
Sometimes, recovering from a bad episode of this depressive bipolar crap seems a bit like doing the hokey-pokey.
You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, you put your left foot in, and then you go back to bed because frankly you’ve had enough for today and you’d really rather try again tomorrow, thank you very much.
I tend to make optimistic prognostications about my ability in moments that I’m feeling a bit more “up” than I have been (read: moments when I’ve taken my meds and downed something with a bit of caffeine in it, of late).
Later, when things shift back towards really deep end of the spectrum, I tend to sit there kicking myself about making said optimistic prognostications (which I tend to do publicly, because, in short, I never freaking learn, I guess?).
Right now, I’m somewhere between those two states: not at that point where I’m like, “I am going to do All This Stuff soon,” but not at that point where I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a waste of oxygen and I should really stop thinking I’m ever going to do anything.”
Instead, I’m in this spot where I’m able to see that the optimistic part of me that makes bold plans is okay, and the horribly depressed part of me that gets really angry when I fail to complete those plans is also okay, and that can be what they are, and it is, in its own way, okay.
Not always happy, not always fun, not always even remotely anything like pleasant: but valid, allowed. The human experience is rich with contradictions; with complications.
Today I did not even remotely attempt to get out of bed early enough to get to morning class. A part of me is really pissed about that — the same part that’s forever saying things like This is why you never amount to anything; you’re better than that; this is what makes the difference between people who succeed in ballet and people like you.
Another part of me recognizes that you have to work with what you’ve got. What I’ve got right now is hard to work with (though, on the other hand, I’m writing a fair bit, so there’s that).
I did begin my Great Office Rehab Project — or at least some of it (some of it will have to wait ’til I can buy some paint and some fabric). Denis brought in the replacement desk, so I set it up, installed the office air conditioner, and then became insanely, furiously frustrated because there are still Too Many Things In This Room.
The difficulty is that some of the things need to stay, but they need to live in or on other things that aren’t in here yet, and I don’t want to bring those other things in until the things on or in which the first set of things resides are out of the way, but I can’t get them out of the way without bringing in the things to put the things in…
Yeah.
My brain makes everything a thousand times harder than it has to be when I’m depressed (not like ADHD helps any of this, but depression makes it worse; when I’m manic, OTOH, I can organize anything to within an inch of its life, as long as something else doesn’t distr— SQUIRREL!).
So today I went to see my therapist (and rode my bike a lot, because I figured actually getting some exercise would solve one of the problems contributing to the severity of this depression — lack of exercise).
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll bring in the things into which I need to transfer the other things, so the things in which the things now reside can go wherever it is they’re going.
Maybe I won’t.
I’m not making any bold statements right now. We’ll see.
Perhaps that should be my motto for the time being: “We’ll see.”
Ultimately, it’s not like we can ever say for certainty what we’ll be doing at any given moment, anyway. Control is an illusion, and it seems especially illusory when you live with a mental illness that really rather prevents you being able to make long-term forecasts about your emotional weather.
If I have my head together well enough, my foot should hold up to at very least Essentials on Friday. I might give Intermediate class a try.
I do feel like I need to get back on top of ballet. I have missed so much. I don’t suppose I can do anything about that (water under the bridge, etc.), but I can work on putting the pieces in place to prevent it from becoming an established pattern.
Just going to class is one of those pieces — ballet is such an effective preventative and remedy; it seems to take the teeth out of my depressions when I can keep dancing.
This particular depression, though, has been a perfect storm of ballet-interrupting foot injury, stress, hormonal disruptions (blargh), lack of externally-imposed structure in my life, general lack of exercise, and the destabilizing effect of summer itself.
Anyway, that’s it for now.
More soon, maybe?
We’ll see.
Back … ish.
(That wasn’t actually intended to be a play on the title of the TV series Black-ish, though that seems to be a fairly thoughtful sitcom, as sitcoms go, from the tiny bits I’ve seen of it.)
So I’m back on my meds (huzzah!) as of this afternoon and, as such, improving in terms of overall function … which is good, because the drain in our kitchen sink chose tonight to explode, and I would have had a flat-out meltdown about that if it had happened yesterday. Fortunately, I married McGayver, who can fix that kind of thing.
I’m doing the job applications thing and it’s going well — had an interview this morning for a position that sounds like pretty much a lock (unless I’ve been convicted in absentia for some kind of crime I committed in my sleep?), though it turns out there are no seasonal positions open ’til September. I could have started next weekish as a permanent employee, but it wouldn’t be terribly convenient for the company, as I’d have to run off for two solid weeks for Burning Man.
Unless I find something that’s really relevant to my studies and/or sounds really compelling, I’ll probably take that job in the fall. It sounds like a good fit for what I want right now — an active, rather than a sedentary, workplace; decent pay; hours that mesh nicely with ballet. Shouldn’t hurt the fitness bit, either.
I’ll need to finally get an actual driver’s license, since the job in question may potentially involve actually driving, but that’s in the plans anyway.
I’m still working for Denis’ Burning Man project and feeling ever-more-useful in that regard. Tonight I set us up with a G+ page, even though I still feel kind of iffy about social media as a marketing platform. For this project, though, since it’s primarily a do-gooder collectivist kind of gig, I don’t really mind 🙂
On Glassdoor this morning, I spotted a listing for a web developer with some knowledge of WordPress and Drupal, as well as some command of your general web languages (HTML, PHP, CSS). I’m kind of kicking around the idea of applying for that. The upside is that the pay would very likely be pretty nice; the downside, of course, is that most development jobs are desk jobs, and I’m not really super into that whole idea. Been there, done that, decided it wasn’t for me.
Our finances are on the mend. Since it took about two solid years of complete and utter miscommunication to blow them up, it’ll probably take a few months to get them 100% back on track. Until then, we’ll be wearing our dance belts a little tighter* 😉
My toe is healing. I’m still on the fence about Saturday class. Tomorrow’s out; it’s definitely not ready for Intermediate, and Essentials is cancelled tomorrow. I was able to ride the bike a bit today without driving the toe crazy, but I’d rather let it really heal before I try to push it.
I’ve noticed that Fusion Fitness Dance is back on the calendar, so maybe I’ll give that a whirl at some point, too. That depends on the finances, though. If we’re going to be tight enough that I can only do class two or three times per week for the next while, I don’t want to add a non-technique class.
I guess I’m also going to try not to spring back too quickly from this depression. I tend to decide that “feeling somewhat better = feeling 100% better,” then overtax myself and crash even harder. I hope maybe I’ve learned that lesson by now.
I’ve also learned that, while I now know that there is not, in fact, a famous band called Holland Oats, Harlan Oats, or Haulin’ Oats, I still don’t really know from 80s music. Did you know that “Danger Zone” was a Kenny Loggins song? I sure didn’t until just now. Thanks, Amazon Prime Music.
So that’s it for tonight.
Stay out of the Danger Zone.
You know, unless that’s where you want to be, in which case, carry on.
danseur ignoble 