Category Archives: health
A Map We Can Never Lose, Or, The Dangerous Times Are The Ones When Everything Seems Fine
Content and language warnings on this one. Sorry, guys.
I’m in a weird place right now.
On one hand, I’m doing better than I have at this time of year in a while.
Fall and winter … okay, and spring … are hard for me. The whole range is loaded with difficult memories, and winter does all kinds of crazy stuff to brain chemistry. Crushing depressions studded with dizzying manias are more or less the norm.
While late summer is potentially the most dangerous season—that period when any Summer Mania shifts into agitated depression—but the winter is full of a trifecta of suck: crappy health, crappy brain chemistry, and really effing bad memories.
This year, I’m having less general trouble with the brain chemistry than usual. I’m not going to say that I’m not depressed; I am probably at least a bit depressed in the neurochemical sense. On the other hand, dancing and cirque-ing and having an actual supportive network of friends in meatspace helps, as does getting the house back in order and baking a bunch of delicious stuff all the time. Seriously, you guys, when something I cook makes D happy, the effect is weirdly magical.
Because of cirque, Winter Ballet Break doesn’t mean an abrupt halt to all the physical activity that helps keep the volume of the peaks and troughs in my brain chemistry a little lower.
I’m putting the rest of this behind a cut, y’all, partly so you have a choice about it, but also partly because it makes me feel less weird about writing about it.
Huzzah
Finally feeling up to Saturday Class, so I figured I’d make it a double. We’re off for the next two weeks (Winter Break, booooooo).
In Advanced Class, barre, adagio, turns, waltz, and terre-a-terre were pretty darned good, petit allegro was acceptable, and grand-ish allegro was a disaster en mènage. I kept alternately effing up tombé-coupé-jeté and leaving out the transitional step that came after. Blargh. Going left, I kept doing my balancé en tournant inside out like a total n00b, which then forced me to do my t-c-j backwards.
At least I haven’t done any backwards turns(1) in a while?
- I have no idea when backwards turns stopped happening, but they did, at least for now.
In Nominally-Beginner-But-Actually-Intermediate Class, everything was good except petit allegro, by which time my legs weighed approximately 1,354 kilograms each. I couldn’t get them to do things quickly. In fact, they were not terribly willing to do things at all.
Nonetheless, the entire day was completely redeemed by the girl who asked me after class, “Are you in the company?” (She was my partner for all all the across-the-floor stuff, and she was also pretty good.)
I refrained, of course, from asking her to marry me on the spot, since I’m already married, etc. But it was a very welcome thing to hear, especially on a day when I’m not feeling at my best.
Speaking of The Company, tonight we get to see BW and TB Nutcrackering. Yaaaaaay!
I’m a little sad that we didn’t we get to see BW as the Cavalier last night (because A) broke and B) so freaking insanely busy), but we still get to see one of his Partnering Masterclass performances.
My introduction to BW, by the way, followed the first performance in which I saw him dance a pas de deux. The very next class, he showed up and, if I remember correctly, installed himself on my barre (we were on portables, 4 or 6 to a barre,because there were like 30 people in class).
I proceeded to quietly have a heart attack throughout class. I am marginally ashamed to admit that I felt felt more or less how a teenaged girl in the 1960s would have felt if John Lennon sat next to her in music class. Only, you know, ballet, so both we were both more or less in our underwear.(2)
- Ballet: because hero worship isn’t awkward enough.
Yeah, I know. #PatheticFanboy
But I kept it all inside, because I’m cool like dat.
B| <— my cool face
Anyway, I need to go takeashowerchangeandbuyflowersforBW, so that’s it for now.
And then, two weeks to clean, finish the book-keeping for the year, and get back in shape (because holy cow, soooooooo out of shape right now).
In Which Your Humble Author Gets Shot In The Butt By His Doctor
…Okay, okay, so technically I got a shot (of steroids) and technically it was in the nebulous region that is not quite butt, not quite hip. (If sideboob is a thing, shouldn’t sidebutt also be a thing? If not, I hereby declare sidebutt to be A Thing.)
And in the interest of full disclosure, the nurse actually stuck me. Apparently she doesn’t jab dancers in the sidebutt very often, as it took her a moment to orient herself in the unique landscape of Square Danseur Hindquarters.
Erm, hooray for ballet muscles?
Once she found the landmark she needed, though, the injection was painless (though slightly sore afterwards, while my body went, “Wait, WTF is this, now? Oh, anti-inflammatories, right, let’s get on distributing that.”).
I am also on an antibiotic again—a different one, this time, to ensure that we don’t just just wind up leaving some doxy-resistant bastidges behind.
The Dx is more or less what I suspected—a relapse of the most recent sinus/ear infection, probably secondary to the viral horror currently laying waste to Louisville (basically, a nasty cold). The corticosteroid is intended to reduce the inflammation in my sinuses enough to get everything to drain this time. Take that, Solenopsia!
The really gross part . . . erm, wait. Grossness warning! Icky stuff ahead, y’allz. Feel free to skip past the next paragraph.
Okay, so the really gross part is is that the conjunctivitis resulted from goop in my maxillary sinus finding the only available way out. THROUGH MY EYE SOCKET(1). Ewww. Squick. On the other hand, it has basically cleared up today, so…
- I tend to sleep in a little ball on my right side, and the right side of my nose and throat were basically swollen shut, hence the right eye)
Anyway, between the steroid, which gets to work fairly fast, and all the other pharmaceuticals I’ve crammed into my bloodstream, I managed to actually get some things done done today.
I also found a 12-hour cough suppressant syrup. It bills itself as orange flavored, but in fact is strongly redolent of mango, with notes of chalk and tangerine and a bouquet suggestive of a fine aluminum foil. It’s surprisingly not that revolting, as such things go, though it certainly wouldn’t be my first choice as a dessert liqueur.
The important thing is that it works, so I should finally be able to get a full night’s sleep, without a 3 or 5 AM dextromethorphan top-up, I hope.
I hate missing BW’s class, but stayed home tonight for my own good. We shall see how Saturday looks, but I’m optimistic. Tomorrow we take Dance Team to the aerials studio for a workshop, which is totally exciting.
And now to bed, because ugh, I’m tired. But OTOH I cooked a lot and washed all the freaking dishes.
Here Is Fine, Redux
I’ve been reflecting a lot on some of the themes from Monday’s post — the need to step back from a dualistic world-view that makes me want to do the adulting equivalent of storming off the playground because the toys I want aren’t there right now, or whatever. I have more thoughts on that, but I’m not feeling very serious today(1)
- Possibly in part because I may finally have reached “laugh so you don’t don’t cry” territory; certainly because this latest fire abt invasion is veering into Theater of the Absurd territory; I feel like a walking, talking … okay, shuffling, croaking Monty Python sketch.
My fire ants are still in residence, but I’m seeing seeing my doctor tomorrow.
I’m really glad that I decided to get off the fence and make an appointment, because over the past couple of days, a detachment of fire ant scouts has established a beachhead in the conjunctiva of my right eye 😐
(Maybe -___o is more appropriate?)
Medically speaking, this isn’t as horrible as it sounds—it’s just run-of-the-mill “pink eye,” which I assume is related to the Invasion of the Fire Ants but might just be a random dose of Immune System Trollery.
In short, it’s itchy and weird-looking, but not dangerous.
The main problem is that “pink eye” in general is often highly contagious, and thus essentially good cause to go about wearing a placard that reads “LEPER UNCLEAN!”(2) and ringing a warning bell.
- Ironically, actual leprosy, properly known as Hansen’s disease, really isn’t very contagious.
In other words, you can’t go anywhere or do anything when you have “pink eye.”
Not that I’m in any shape to go anywhere or do anything in the world (though I finally discovered that I can actually sleep if I take, like, four different decongestants and a cough suppressant before bed, and then keep the cough suppressant handy for the inevitable 4 AM coughing fit, so I’m feeling marginally perkier today).
Anyway, I seem to have wandered (for now!) past the Bitterness and Recriminations phase of being ill and found my way to the Jovial Self-Deprecation phase, so that seems like progress.
Back to the doc tomorrow to (one hopes) roust the dreaded Fire Ants both from my respiratory tract (which they’ve petitioned to rename Solenopsia) and from Fort Pinkeye for good.
Here’s hoping they won’t be back for Round 3,because ballet blogs should be about ballet, not about the only thing that can turn a dancer into a whinging heap of goo.
Until then, I will try to remember the motto of my poor, besieged Inner Buddhist, who is trying very hard not to let the rest of my Inner Populace run away with their whinginess:
Here Is Fine.
Just Monday: A Meditation
I wrote on Friday about gratitude, and also about the company of fire ants living in my throat.
I was in denial. I knew that the fire ants (which had first made themselves known on Tuesday) were probably the opening salvo in the battle with another respiratory infection, but for various reasons, I didn’t want them to be.
I didn’t want to acknowledge the nature of my fire ants because, frankly, it’s frustrating to be sick.
Health-wise, for me, this has been a phenomenally good year. I have gone months at a stretch without getting seriously ill. I have recovered from things more quickly than I expected to. I have actually had a couple minor viral illnesses that didn’t lead to secondary infections.
When I put it like that, though, it feels like a pretty low bar.
I’m a bit of an anomaly — or, rather, I’m something that America’s approach to health, which remains firmly rooted in Puritan ideals, doesn’t know how to place. On paper, when I’m not ill, I seem pretty robust. Tons of exercise, good basic diet, excellent vital stats. Allergies and asthma, of course, but I live in the Ohio River Valley. I have even mostly learned to listen to my body, my wonderful and obedient body that will allow me to push it ludicrously, when it asks me to rest.
According to the American ideal, I should be and stay as healthy as a horse (which, frankly, is an idiom that can’t have been coined by a horse person). But I’m not, and I don’t.
I am still someone whose immune system, for reasons nobody understands, just isn’t that great. I catch things that are, for other people, innocent little colds, and they go rogue. I am terribly prone to secondary infections. I get sicker than other people and I take longer to get well.
It’s worse when I don’t take care of myself or acknowledge the limitations that circumscribe my choices (I can ride my bike hard in cold weather if I’m willing to pay the price in terms of respiratory problems that inevitably lead to infections; I can adopt a schedule that approaches typical American busy-ness if I’m willing to acknowledge that my immune system will respond by going on strike).
But it is what it is even when I’m doing everything I can to take care of myself. This is my reality.
~
This weekend I talked with Denis about some of the ways in which I’ve historically felt conflicted about my body, and how I’m beginning to understand that I need to stop looking at it from a dualistic, one-or-the-other point of view.
Maybe the same can be said for my health.
Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of it as either-or, and start thinking of it as and.
Like, maybe I should take care of myself as best I can, enjoy the periods in which I stay well for an unusually long time, and gracefully accept that I’m still going to be prone to infections that will, from time to time, knock me flat for longer than they should. Maybe I should try to accept that one does not invalidate the other, and to be kinder to myself about all of this.
As a dancer, it’s hard to accept any of these conditions. As a dancer, and as a human being, I find it easy to accept my gifts and hard to accept my handicaps.
One set of conditions propels me forward; another holds me back. I am inclined to forget that this trade-off is universal — everyone’s tally sheet has entries in both columns. Maybe my peers in the studio don’t have immunity challenges that can keep them from dancing for weeks at a time, but they have other struggles. Maybe those struggles don’t affect their lives as dancers, but they hit somewhere.
I feel like there’s a profound lesson in not clinging to phenomena here — both in the sense of not clinging to the phenomena of health or illness and in that of not clinging to the phenomenon of dancerness. I’m not sure how how to put those thoughts into words, though.
~
We live in a culture that treats illness like it treats fatness — which is to say, as a question of moral failure.
People who rarely or never get sick tend to announce that status with a kind of prideful tone that suggests that they are somehow morally superior, even if in the same breath they say, “…and i don’t do any of that health-nut BS,” and scarf down a Whopper and half a bag of Cheetos. People like me, on the other hand, and regarded with a degree of suspicion, even (maybe especially) if our lifestyles should produce unequivocal good health.
When I find myself forced to explain that I get sick easily and that my immune system just kinda doesn’t do its job very well, I almost always receive a bunch of advice about what I “should” be doing to fix it. I get get tired of explaining that I’ve basically tried everything; that, yes, it’s worse when I don’t take care of myself but it’s never going to be normal; and that much of what people suggest is complete crap founded in pseudoscience (I do try to be polite about that).
I get tired of explaining why n=1 makes a great basis for an anecdote but a poor basis for an axiom. I get tired of re-asserting the fact that neither goji berries nor a strict Mediterranean diet will “cure” me.
I get tired of the implicit and usually-unexamined assumption that anyone who isn’t a shining paragon of good health probably just just isn’t trying hard enough, or isn’t trying the right things. Sometimes that may be true, but often it’s not.
My crappy immune system isn’t the result of poor habits or poor morals. It’s the result of poor genes — with the caveat that the same set of genes that saddled me with this burden has also given me the gifts of talent, strength, flexibility, coordination, off-the-chart spatial processing, a powerful musical sense, and the intelligence to use all of those things to make art.
This, by the way, keeps me humble.
I know that my crappy immune system is not a question of effort or a measure of moral turpitude. By that same stick, I can see that the things that make a good dancer are, likewise, random gifts. Morally speaking, they do not make me a better person. In fact, morally speaking, they have sometimes made me a worse person — a less compassionate person; a more self-aggrandizing person. Thank G-d for crappy immune systems and for ballet, both of which are really good at teaching us humility when nothing else will.
I try to make the most I can out of the gifts I’ve been given, but sometimes the things in the “debit” column get in the way. I suspect this is true for most of us.
Most of us are just muddling by ,trying to do the best we can, fairly often saying to ourselves about about many things, “There, but for the grace of G-d, go I…”
On which note, I’ll close, because I’m hoping to go back to sleep for an hour or two.
I’m still working my way through this particular thicket, though. More later, perhaps.
Turkeygeddon
I mean, Turksgiving.
Wait, no. THANKSGIVING. That’s what it’s called!
Public gratitude posts are are a thing.
I don’t normally do them, but I’m (mostly) cool with people who do.
I’m kind of doing one this go-round, in part to take my mind off the fact that my throat has, since Tuesday, developed a wicked itching-burning thing that A) makes me feel like I’ve swallowed a snifter-full of angry fire ants and B) makes me cough, which makes the fire ants even angrier.
I suppose I should begin by being thankful for for the existence of of cough drops, because unprintable words this is driving me crazy.
Nice quiet day at home yesterday. I finally transitioned from Trim Painting hell into Trim Painting Purgatory. I’m grateful for that, because jeez.
Also, I am grateful for ballet, modern, and aerials, which keep me sane (fire ants notwithstanding), grant me membership in a phenomenal community of amazing people, and give me something to do with my creative energies.
I am grateful for my astounding husband, who manages to keep a roof over our heads despite my best efforts to completely drive this little train of ours right off the rails (note to anyone considering marrying an artistic type: we can be very responsible, but some of us are prone to long bouts of throwing ourselves wholesale into our work at all costs, and those of us who who dance can be expensive to feed), and the strange beast that is our family, with its many branches staggering off in different directions.
Also for mixed metaphors, without which it might be much more difficult to describe snifters full of fire ants, the glorious chaos that is family at its finest, or probably anything at all about dance or home maintenance.
Lastly, I am grateful that, at least at the moment, I still have medical coverage, so if these unspeakable, unprintable fire ants don’t GTFO soon, I can go see a doctor about about them.
Oh, yeah — and also for everyone who, for mysterious reasons, reads my blog, and for all the amazing and inspiring bloggers out there.
Break (Almost) Week; Reflections on Renversés and Choreography as a Process
Saturday, I spent four hours teaching, several more hours scraping paint, and two hours composing choreography before we went to a party that was actually very fun. Sunday, after acro and Acro Brunch, I spent an hour running choreography, then another hour teaching, and then untold æons (with, so really an hour and change, maybe two) standing on a ladder and painting the house while my hands froze in a chill wind in spite of my gloves(1).
- Note to self: wear winter cycling gloves next time. They’re wind-resistant.
As such, I opted to stay in this morning, do housework, and take evening class instead) even though I should really get back to doing Modern Mondays).
The piece I was working on Saturday evening and a Sunday is essentially a 5-minute long comedic story ballet set to the 2nd movement (adagio cantabile) of Beethoven’s Pathétique. I programmed in a few renversés, and I realized while I worked the piece that not so long ago I wouldn’t have even thought of them. They just wouldn’t have occurred to me.
BW and JP have really tuned up our renversés this semester, and as such they seem perfectly natural now. I put them in more or less by instinct where the music calls for them and the movement leads to them.
This is, in fact, true of a lot of movements in the classical vocabulary. Many things feel perfectly natural now that wouldn’t have a year ago.
I think I’ve discussed my tendency to get get to the studio and instantly forget every step I’ve ever learned, then devolve upon programming a bunch of piqué turns and ronds-de-jambe (sometimes while thinking, “How do I get to the jumps?! Ack!”). I also used to open every adagio piece with essentially the same sequence of développés and adagio turns that open Simon Crane.
Somewhere along the line, that seems to have changed.
This surprised me. Ballet is funny like that. It creeps up on you, and one day you discover that you are far more fluent in its language than you thought.
As a caveat, I must admit that I don’t know if it works this way for people who are genuinely new to dance. I think it might take a little longer in the situation, possibly. For me, the vocabulary was there but largely dormant; I could picture a dance, but when I tried to essentially run dance.exe to execute the dance, it was as if I couldn’t access the necessary files and code.
Taking class again for the better part of three years has apparently done a great deal of hard disk repair, kicking out the bad sectors and improving the connections between the good ones. The dynamic link libraries are once again accessible; the modules of code that create renversés and cabrioles are no longer in the land of File Not Found (double cabs continue to elude me: goal one for 2017, I guess; double tours are probably goal two).
When I go to create a piece that’s floating around in my head, I rarely lose the piece anymore. The vision and the finished dance usually match pretty well. I still mostly work phrase by phrase — visualizing, iterating, visualizing, iterating, then moving to the next phrase when the current one one seems solid, then eventually stringing them together into parts and finally stringing the parts together into a dance — but that may simply be my work style.
It also really helps to be able to remember the names of things. Makes writing them down much easier. The downside, though, is that I can now stay up till 1:30 AM listening to music and writing out choreography, knowing that in the morning it will still make sense. Or maybe that’s another upside, because it’s not like choreography didn’t keep me awake before. It just rarely turned out to be particularly intelligible in the cold light of day(2).
- Seriously, while working with BB, I have actually said things like: Why did I just write “effacé” there?! Éffacé what?! How? What does that mean? …Did I even mean éffacé? … Wait, I don’t think I meant éffacé.
So I’m pleased to say that this current piece, which I’ll be performing on 9th December if I can convince a couple of people to join me (there’s a second, far less technical dancing part and one brief non-dancing part), is not just a sequence of RDJs and random turns (it has arabesques, penchés, faillis, renversés, double turns, sautés arabesques, tours lent, and some other stuff, not to mention a grand allegro chase scene in the middle). Progress!
In other news, this week will largely be a break week, which means I’ll have time to catch up on household minutiae and start rehearsing “Work Song,” possibly, if everyone is available. After tonight, both dance team and ballet are off until next week. This will be a good week for reconditioning. You guys, I am weak. Between vacation and being sick, I have lost a lot of strength and stamina.
So it’s back to eating for performance (with, of course, occasional digressions into the realm of pure pleasure) and training for … Erm, also for performance.
And housework, because adulting never ends.
Edit: PS – Señor BeastMode would probably like me to remind you that:
Renversé is not a turn.
Because I Am A Garmin Fanboy
When I was racing bikes badly (or at least with immense mediocrity, heh), I relied on a Garmin Edge 500 GPS-tracking device to keep track of speed, time, and so forth while riding and to log my workouts.
These days, I spend most of my time dancing somewhat less badly than I raced bikes, and I don’t ride anywhere near as much. The Edge 500 isn’t equipped for tracking things like dance, aerials, and housework, so while I’ll probably keep the Edge 500, I’ve bought a refurbished first-generation Garmin Vívofit fitness tracker.
I don’t really need it, but I like data, and I’m curious. I wasn’t, however, willing to commit $100+ to a fancy new-model fitness tracker until I’ve tried using one for a while — not least because I’m not great about wearing things on my wrists.
The Vívofit refurb was fairly inexpensive and pairs with my existing ANT heart-rate monitor strap (which is comfy), so I figured I’d start with it and work from there. If I like it a lot and decide I want something a little fancier, I’ll pass this one along to Denis.
Thus far, the only thing the firs-gen Vívofit doesn’t have that I’d like to have is a built-in watch. Oh, so it turns out that the Vívofit does have a watch; it just wasn’t activated until I synced it. Derp. So, now I also have a watch. Yeah, my phone knows what time it is, but sometimes it’s a pain in the neck to dig the phone out of my pocket or whatevs. It turns out that the folks who invented the wrist watch knew what they were about, eh?
It also knows the date, which is nice for those of us (like me) who live in Golden Retriever Time and tend to be a bit vague about dates.
Anyway, thus far, I’m not finding the wristband annoying, which is really kind of the most important thing, since a fitness tracker I won’t wear is worthless. The small one fits fine and doesn’t get in the way when I’m typing.
It’ll be interesting to see what the Vívofit thinks of ballet classes 😛
Moar Whinging, Feel Free to Skip This
I’m really feeling a lot better — which is to say A) better enough that I realize how long I’ve been feeling like crap and, B) better enough to have energy to complain about things.
Before, I was basically feeling too awful and tired to resent feeling awful and tired (besides which, I basically spent the better part of ten days asleep). Now I’m well enough to be past that, but not well enough to be back to normal. So instead I’m feeling cranky and resentful and sorry for myself. Poor me. Le sigh.
I guess that’s progress?
The weirdest complaint is that I’ve apparently forgotten how to eat. This illness just basically killed my appetite, and I kind of don’t think I’ve really been eating enough.
Anyway, today we took our friend KH out for dinner, and I ate half a small Caesar salad and three small seared ahi nigirizushi, and then I was ridiculously and depressingly full.
Mostly it was depressing because the ahi was so good, and I wish I had skipped the salad (which was horrible because it was overdressed, even though this place does a good, legit Caesar … slimy lettuce is just kind of revolting) and just eaten the fish. I couldn’t even bring it home — it would’ve had to sit in the car for a couple of hours, and it isn’t yet cool enough here to pull that off with fish. (I know: First World Problems all the way, quel dommage.)
But it’s also annoying because now I’m eating Graham crackers in bed because I know I’m going to wake up starving at 2 AM but everything else seems nauseatingly oversized. I think I’ve taken in maybe 900 calories today. Bleh.
I hope my stomach will get its stuff together soon so I can go back to eating like I normally do, because this is no way to fuel a dancer.
I don’t have energy enough to complain about real problems right now, at least, so there’s that.
Anyway, I’m done whinging for now. Tomorrow I shall attempt class, so I’m sure I’ll whinge about that, too.
G’night, errbody. Feel free to drop your own ridiculous, frivolous, but still irritating whinges in the comments; I feel like a self-aware Open Whinging thread could be kinda fun, actually. We can collect them into a book later and call it Fine Whines, and we’ll all be famous on the internets and make a million yen (which is only, like, $10,000 dollars, but that’s a start).
Thursday Class: The Accidental Private
One last responsibility before I can throw myself into the Sea of Sleep (which I hope will receive me more readily than it did last night!) — class notes!
It was good good to get back to class tonight; to the thing in my life that’s my Normal.
Also good and terrifying to be not just the Onliest Boy (totes normal) but the Onliest Student (first time ever.
I’ve done a ton of accidental semi-privates with BB, but have literally never, ever taken a private dance class before (oy, vey — here comes the thing in my head that warps lyrics to effect up Tina’s classic). Fortunately, I am apparently all out of panic at this point (had a good bit harrowing therapy session today), and just sort of calmly accepted the fact that it was All Me, All the Time with the dude who is my local Ballet Crush (in the sense that he’s the dancer I want to be when I “grow up”).
Anyway, we put in an hour at barre, some of which was super hard — I finished fondu (which was not terribly hard or long) puffing like a steam train and sweating like a race horse. My body is definitely enforcing its right to use its resources for and. Woooow.Normally, the fondu that BW gave me would have been somewhat challenging; tonight, it was flat out hard. Oh — and the frappé that ended with an 8-count long fondu à la seconde. Eight slow counts long, that is.
Not gonna lie —I was not strong enough tonight to support that without the barre.
BW has a lovely way of shaping things — tonight he said, “You know, your passé is lovely, but I think you could get it even higher and a little more open and it would really show off your turnout.” (Because evidently your humble Danseur Ignoble be turnt.)
I tried it — basically, continuing to fold and lift and rotate the working leg until (avant) the toe rests just above the adductor tubercule or (arriére) just behind the same point, but crossed in a little more —and it worked. I did literally the best-looking passé in the history of my life as a dancer tonight The best part, though, is that this forces my turnouts to remain kicked on and do their freaking job, which makes the passé balance both more stable and less effortful.
Often in long passé balances, I feel like I’m fighting to keep the turnouts of my supporting leg from taking their coffee break. BW’s adjustment solved that problem for me. My supporting leg leg kind leg kind of *has* to stay on the clock at that point, so it does. Go figure.
Anyway, I also identified the source of my ongoing issue with waltz turns — I sometimes fail to execute the initiating movement as a sort of tombé simultaneous with a brush of the opposite foot. Instead, they become separate movements, turning a 3-beat step into a 4-beat step and tangling your feets.
Come to think of it, the fact that we did a center tendu (to work on body facings, my current white whale) that involved a tombé-brush going both forward and backward probably helped. Priming ftw!
Anyway, I managed to make it through to the end of class even though my brain kept failing to retain combinations. Doxycycline tends to make make me foggy, so whilst I’m recovering at a nice clip, my brain is still like, “Wait, whaaaaaa? Howza go again? Izzat a turn or a wut?”
I also learned that double turns with an ear infection are possible but, um, weird. Like, the first revolution and spot feels fine, but in the second one, the inner-ear disruption catches up, and it starts to geek like your small craft has just hit heavy seas.
This is especially true of the combination ends with tombé, pas de bourré to fourth, turn; tombé, pas de bourré to fourth, turn. Oh, and the music had time for quads, at very least, so I was doing slow doubles, which left plenty of time for the invisible ocean to try to capsize me.
…
One more bit of awesome news. Today a very dear person who I love so very much reconnected with me, and that made my heart so very happy. PapaBear, if you’re reading this, you know who you are. I’m so glad glad you’re back in my life. This was just just the right ray of light and hope at just the right time (and helped me be brave enough to talk with my therapist about the very dark and scary stuff that is finally time to start working on).
So thanks to PB and Robert and to the Great I Am for that.
In spite of everything, for me, today has turned out (ha ._.) to be a good day.
danseur ignoble 