Category Archives: life
Giant Ballet Part-ay!
I skipped class tonight to go on a date with my husband. This involved a whole lot of mental wrangling, which mostly revolved around the fact that I’m forever kvetching at him about how This Afternoon Will Never Happen Again But The Dishes (or Billing, or Whatever) Will Still Be There When We Get Back, So Let’s Go For This Walk Now.
This evening, we had a one-time chance to go see a friend from church speak about her amazing bike adventure, so I sucked it up and went. It was fun and illuminating. The best lesson percolated in my mind this way: When you’re reading, the adventure doesn’t really happen with things are going exactly how Bilbo or Frodo or Harry (and/or Hermione and/or Ron, etc.) want(s) them to go. The adventure happens when things are off the rails and the unexpected rolls in. The adventure happens when our intrepid heroes encounter giant spiders or Dark Lords or, you know, flat tires. Or just hours and hours of rain and hills.
So, anyway. Pretty cool stuff!
Tomorrow night, Louisville Ballet is throwing a party at ReSurfaced, which is an interesting little outdoor happening space that has materialized in downtown Loutown. We are going, which I am using to assuage the part of my mind that is totally having Wednesday Class Withdrawals right now.
I have no idea if anyone I know from class is going, but darnit, we’re going. Or, at least, I am. I hope Denis is, because I frankly have no idea what to do at a party by myself, even if it’s a ballet-related party. At least, I have no idea what to do until the dancing starts. Then I can hold my own until someone shuts the music down.
I’ll be doing Friday class again, and probably just Essentials on Saturday because it’s Opera day, so the noon class will be too tight a fit, and I’m not ballsy enough to brave Advanced class yet. I don’t think they’d kick me out or anything; I’m pretty sure that if you’re a game Intermediate student and you know how to play along without holding the class back, they’ll let you jump in.
I have discovered that, where ballet is concerned, “Game” is my middle name. I will try anything once, and then again, and then an infinite number of times until I finally get it right, or at least sufficiently un-wrong to cease being a living embarrassment to the art form (at which point I will keep going until I do get it right. Even if I do keep forgetting what comes between the last saute arabesque and the brisée — assuming I heard that part right*.
So that’s it for tonight. I’m off to bed. Much homework to do tomorrow, plus conditioning workout, plus party taimz.
Notes
*I spent about an hour on Monday night lying in bed trying to figure out if I’d heard the first part of the combo right — like, was it sauté arabesque or piqué arabesque? I missed the visual. I did sauté the whole time and nobody complained, and since I went (as always) in the first group, I figure someone might have said something if I was totally freaking wrong.
Errbody Wearin’ Tights
Last semester, I was frequently the only person on campus in tights.
Being as I leave the house at 8 in the morning on a bike and proceed to run around on the bike all day and then head to ballet class, it just makes sense to live my life in tights (jogging tights, usually; capri-length if it’s hot out).
This semester, tights have asploded all over campus. As far as I know, I’m still the only dude in tights (because not everyone can be as cool as Robin Hook, ‘k?), but there are all kinds of girls wearing tights — and I really do mean all kinds. All shapes, sizes, and colors. And I think that’s pretty awesome.
I would like to think that this means that Health At Every Size is starting to make a really visible impact. Hard to say. But, anyway, lots of people are wearing tights, and it’s not just the skinny little societally-approved-image people. And everyone looks pretty great in them.
Personally, I prefer “workout clothes” to regular clothes — as I’ve often said, it’s like you get to wear your pajamas all day! — so I’m down with this.
So that’s it for now. More later.
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Radio Silence!
…But don’t worry, I should be back in action soon.
Class on Monday was nice (we just did Essentials, because OMG homework). Other than that, I’ve been plowing through a huge, huge pile of schoolwork since last Wednesday.
It so happened that a couple of math homework assignments, an upcoming math exam (with attendant exam prep assignments) , and the due date for a major phase of my Senior Seminar project all coincided — and also that the Senior Sem project part took much longer than I expected (I made a huge survey, guys!). I have been very, very busy.
My brain is cooked and I’m sleep-deprived, so I’m taking the evening off tonight. In fact, I’m not even planning on riding my bike home: I’m going to roll home on the bus, then maybe take a walk.
I plan to hit up Friday’s 10 AM class. That’s a straight-up intermediate class (instead of combined Beginner&Intermediate, like Monday’s class), so that might be interesting. If nothing else, I can keep my fellow students amused.
For what it’s worth, while there was a straight-up blizzard of math assignments, I should note that I’m really enjoying my precalc class. In particular, I like my instructor, who has a great sense of humor and high expectations. I knew I would like her when, on the first day, she said, “…And it can be hard to do the password retrieval thing for MyMathLab, so seriously — just write it down. Nobody is going to break into MyMathLab and do your math homework.”
I think I did reasonably well on my exam. Most of it seemed pretty straightforward. I’ve found that I like working difference quotient problems, and part of me will be rather sad to see them go (though they’ll return for the final exam, I’m sure).
Meanwhile, the giant ball o’ Senior Sem stuff is done for now. Survey is made, Institutional Review Board forms are prepared, and all that jazz. I even managed to finish an article notes assignment that I’d overlooked completely.
So that’s it. Might be quiet here for a few more days, though I hope to regale you with exciting tales of my foray into the rarified realms of Weekday Morning Ballet on Friday.
So, there you have it. Be well, and keep the bottom side down 🙂
Vitamin P
Most of the time, I eat pretty well.
Then, every once in a while, for no apparent reason, I eat all the rest of the pretzels because I am yearning for chocolate cake and pretzels are as close as it gets in our house right now.
Not gonna bust out the judgment on myself or anything. Just kind of wondering … does this randomly happen to other people?
And why don’t I just go get a slice of chocolate cake somewhere?
Moving Forward Using All My Breath…
Okay, so I said radio silence through Saturday was probable, but I’m up and running earlier than is usual for a Thursday, so I have time for a quick entry.
Every now and then, I reach a turning point in my life. I think we all do — the proverbial fork in the road.
In truth, I think we usually reach them months, sometimes even years, before we acknowledge them.
I’m not sure when exactly I reached mine, but at some point I did. At some point, a while ago, I chose a path.
I wrote once about my decision not to branch off my ballet-related ramblings into a separate blog. I still have no intention of doing that. What I do intend to do is re-structure this blog.
When I started out here, I was a first-year psychology student, fresh back in school, and still working at a job I hated (actually, this blog goes back to before I even returned to school, but that’s another story). My primary obsession, at the time, was cycling. My primary goal in life was to be a homemaker. I didn’t really have any central focus, though I thought I did. Ballet was a blip on the radar — something I missed fiercely every time I watched anyone dance, but similarly something I guess I could only imagine doing in a far-away Somedayland beyond the margins of imagining.
Obviously, a lot has changed.
First off, while taking care of my home and husband remains an important priority (the cat won’t feed himself — oh, wait, yes he will, if I leave the Food Closet open…), “homemaker” is no longer my primary career goal. Early in our relationship, Denis predicted that this day would come. Because I am stubborn and kind of an ass like that, his prediction made it much harder for me to admit it.
Yet here we are: I no longer think of myself as someone whose primary career goal is “homemaker,” although I still think that’s an important job. It just so happens that I’m not very good at it, in part because I am constantly doing other things that have coalesced into an entirely different, nascent career path.
Four years ago, I thought of myself as a kind of apprentice homemaker. Now I think of myself as a dance/movement therapist in the making, a hopeful choreographer, a researcher, and perhaps someday a neuroscientist.
Four years ago, I was also in denial about my bipolar disorder. Obviously, that’s changed (and it’s changed in part because dancing has made it feel survivable).
Even one year ago, I had bike-racing goals. They were nebulous, but they existed. I don’t anymore. Bike racing and ballet are, to an extent, mutually exclusive. They are antagonistic activities. Training to race tightens all the muscles that ballet needs loosened; ballet, meanwhile — well, ballet might build a better randonneur, actually, but racing demands a high degree of specialization. So I don’t plan to race for the time being. Maybe someday; maybe not.
One can choose either to be a bike racer who dances in a casual, recreational kind of way, or a dancer who rides in a casual, recreational/transportational kind of way. While not that long ago I wouldn’t have been willing to admit it, I have, in fact, made a choice, and the choice I’ve made is to be a dancer.
I’ll undoubtedly still knock out occasional centuries though, and I’d still like to roll a 200k, just to know that I can. But my life with the bike will no longer be about being stronger, faster, harder.
Cycling for transport remains a major component in my life. I don’t see that changing. Likewise, I expect to continue to care about and advocate for forms of transport beyond the private motor vehicle.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve decided to restructure this blog — in effect, to start over fresh, redesign my system of categories (which is, right now, so complicated it isn’t even funny), and let it reflect the direction my life is taking now.
I’m also going to shelve the vast majority of my older posts. Not that I think history is unimportant (that’s why I don’t plan to delete them); it’s just going to take me a dog’s age if I try to go back and re-organize everything. I feel like I’m at a point in my life at which I want to wipe the board clean so I can start working the next problem.
So there you have it. I’ll be tinkering with things for the next couple of days, and I hope that I won’t break anything too badly. This feels like a cleanup project of such epic proportions that, admittedly, a part of me wants to say, “Screw it,” burn my digital house down, and just start over. I’m choosing (with great effort :P) not to do that, but I can’t promise I won’t completely hose things up by mistake and have to start over anyway.
Regardless, going forward, I’m going to let this blog take the direction it’s been taking anyway. I guess it will mostly be about ballet. There will also be bits of research, occasional reviews and travel-related entries, some stuff about cycling, excursions into the realms of bipolar disorder and ADHD, and possibly some other ramblings. I shall re-structure my categories accordingly. Oh, and as always, there will be recipes. I’ll resurrect the old ones as I have time.
In the end, this blog reflects my own journey — the process of becoming myself. I suppose its history is as complicated as that process is. I hope you will forgive me my grand and sweeping changes.
So that’s it. To borrow the words of the great Sam Cooke, “It’s been a long time comin’, but I know a change gonna come.”
Ballet Squid Chronicles: For the Coming Year
…By which I mean the coming academic year, of course.
The other night I had a chat with Denis about my plans for the upcoming year.
Since I won’t be doing the honors program, I mentioned that graduating in December is an option again. He pointed out that if I graduate in December, I should be able to find a part-time job that will let me save up for corrective surgery for my gynecomastia.
Coincidentally, this will also let me add MOAR BALLET! to the schedule, which will allow me to be better prepared when I apply to grad school. Perhaps four to five classes per week will help me tame my tentacles*?
As such, I’m seriously considering it. I feel like I keep making these declarations — “I’m going to do this!” — and then changing my mind … but maybe that’s normal?
Anyway, I feel a tad nervous about wading back into the world of work. I don’t want a 9-to-5-behind-the-desk kind of job, which leaves me really a bit uncertain about what I might do. I’d ideally like to find something that’s somehow related to my future career path (something somehow connected to dance, or to psychology, or even perhaps to fitness), but I don’t really know what’s out there for which I’m qualified**.
I wouldn’t have any objection to a stocking or warehouse job for the time being. Likewise, a part-time office job would probably be fine.
For what it’s worth, I also have the option of not working. Denis isn’t forcing me to find a job. It’s just that we’ll be able to fund the surgery*** and things like ballet camp (I totally want to do Sun King next year) more quickly and easily if I do work.
Plus, I don’t entirely feel like it’s fair to ask Denis to pay for all of my ballet training, even though a portion of it can be written off as an educational expense. He’s happy to fund my passions, but right now, we’re working on Paying All the Debt! so we can work our way towards a less encumbered way of living. I’d like to help with that process instead of doing everything in my power to make it take longer 😉
Likewise, while Denis has repeatedly offered to pay for my gynecomastia surgery, he is deeply uncomfortable both with the notion of me going under the knife and with the statement it makes — that we live in a world wherein our notions about gender and bodies are so deeply entrenched that people who don’t fit, in one way or another, feel like they have to risk their lives in order to live their lives.
I am kind of with him on that, but I also know that it’s holding me back in a way that, say, being bald isn’t holding him back. He never chooses not to do something because he’s bald: I often choose not to do things (like swimming, no matter how much I love it, or auditioning for plays) because of my gynecomastia.
For all that, I might discover that I like the “office/warehouse worker by afternoon, dancer by morning and night” lifestyle. Who knows? I feel like it’s really hard right now to say where my particular journey is taking me.
All I know is that I want bikes and ballet to be there; to be part of the journey.
And Denis.
And, you know, maybe the stationary trapeze.
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| My butt looks huge in this picture. |
One last bit.
In the interest of improving my dancing, I’ve realized I probably need to add at least some small measure of regular strength training (especially core work), daily stretching, and some focused work on static balance to my daily routine (Ha! Daily routine! Now that’s comedy!)
I suppose I should probably come up with some concrete plan for this. As such, once I do, I’ll post the plan in question.
Notes
*The arms are getting better, I swear, but consistency really helps.
**Our ballet school was recently hiring a front-desk person, which would’ve been a good fit, but the schedule would have been impossible for me until I graduate, so I didn’t apply.
***Last I checked, most insurance companies still consider gynecomastia correction “cosmetic,” rather than “reconstructive.” I’m not sure I disagree.
I look at it this way: surgery with general anaesthetic carries some serious risks (including death); living with gynecomastia for the rest of my life isn’t likely to cause me physical harm, and thus far is not directly responsible for any of my moments of suicidal thinking.
As a dancer, though, it does interfere with my confidence considerably. Likewise, it makes me super-shy about things like swimming. Also, dancing in a gynecomastia vest kind of sucks, but being the boy in class with sizable moobs sucks even more — so, yeah, there you have it.
Monday Non-Ballet Brain Dump
We’re going to Chicago this week for the long-time-coming finally-legal wedding of a couple of our dearest friends.
As such, I’m in Trying To Finish All The Things Before We Go mode, which is totally something I’ve caught from Denis*.
So today I have:
- done yet more laundry,
- completed the drawing part of a painting I need to finish before we depart (it’s a watercolor, so it’s entirely possible that I will be able to finish it),
- initiated the packing-for-the-trip process (which I never, ever do this far in advance),
- topped off the Tricross’ tires,
- ridden the Tricross to the grocery store,
- slayed the grocery run for the next three days (along with some extra food because I couldn’t pass up a really good bargain that I can freeze),
- ridden the tricross home,
- put away the groceries,
- and started dinner prep.
I also had a complex internal conversation with myself about why we still use gender-specific insults even though this is the 21st century and the perceived gender of an individual has no bearing either on that individual’s ability to be a total jerk or the qualities of that individual’s jerkitude**.
Later I will finish making tacos and maybe begin trying to figure out how to set up a rooting dish for my pineapple.
I don’t know why I’m so into growing this pineapple all of a sudden. Denis suggested it when I told him I brought home a pineapple, and it just seemed like a really awesome thing to do. Meanwhile, a friend of mine on G+ has decided to attempt to grow an avocado from an avocado pit, and suggested that perhaps her avocado and my pineapple could be pen-pals.
I think that idea is so ridiculously fun that I’m just going to have to give it a whirl. First, though, I will have to think about what a pineapple would even write to an avocado***.
I am writing this brain dump thing because I find that doing this helps me feel like I’ve actually done something on a given day, which makes it easier to see that my mood disorder has not, in fact, totally torpedoed my life. Sometimes that’s hard to see.
I get that, like schizophrenia (to which it is genetically linked), bipolar disorder involves cognitive deficits.
This means sometimes my brain works better than other times. Right now, it’s not at its best (though I did, for once, remember to buy cookies for Denis). I think this is why sometimes it’s hard for me to imagine what I’ve done all day, which can feel … I dunno. Weird. And less than great.
So I’m doing this thing to keep a handle on my brain. So far, it does seem to be working.
That’s it for now.
More to come some time soon from Pineapple Paradise.
Notes
*Did you know that traveling like a grown-up is, um, transmitted by AHEM close physical contact? Well, now you do. #TheMoreYouKnow
**That said, I have noticed that the use of historically gender-specific insults is at least somewhat more flexible than it used to be, so … um … I guess that’s maybe one small victory in the fight against sexism, if not in the fight against everyone being jerks to each-other in other ways?
***Here’s a possiblity:
“Dear Avocado,
I am finding life in a dish with some pebbles and water reasonably acceptable, though far less fun than life in the tropics might be.
How is life in the dirt?
I am really bored so if you have any suggestions of video clips that might be relevant to my interests, please send them my way. Thanks!
Your friend, Pineapple”
More Small Victories (Now with More Pineapple Picture!)
Today, I butchered a pineapple. I ate some of it (it was absolutely delicious; the best pineapple I’ve had in years, in fact) and chopped the rest up into little chunks. The chunks went into a freezer bag; the freezer bag (perhaps unsurprisingly) went into the freezer. Soon, we will have delicious frozen pineapple drinks.
While I was butchering the poor, innocent fruit, I saved the top of it so I can try to grow a new pineapple.
Apparently, growing a pineapple takes a couple of years: but I can be patient, and it sounds like fun to try. Fun, at least, for me — the last time someone presented us with the gift of a plant (an aloe that continues to limp along next to my sink), I immediately asked, “What has it done to deserve this?”
Except for a brief stint successfully training bonsai trees from seedlings in high school, I have generally been horrible about keeping plants alive. So it’s possible that I’m violating some UN accord by trying to raise a pineapple at all. My theory is that the bonsais did well because they lived outside, beyond the radius of my plant-killing aura, but I have also failed at growing garden plants, so who knows?
Anyway, attempting to grow a pineapple is kind of like saying “I will still be alive in two or three years to see if fruit happens,” so there’s that.
I also did a couple of iterations of laundry and continued updating the books.
Oh, and I made lunch, thereby using up a bag of Lipton noodly stuff that’s been hanging around uneaten in our food cabinet forever.
A little at a time, I move forward.
If I was in a better place, I guess all of this would probably seem pretty minor. Like, “Big deal, you washed your hair.” (Technically, that was last night.)
But I am where I am right now, so all of these feels like it matters.
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| It’s my pineapple and I’ll grow if I … you’re right, that doesn’t even make sense. Sorry. |
Tomorrow I'll add a picture of my pineapple-to-be. Right now, though, I'm going to bed.
Progress?
My husband has been obsessing about creating, for us, a giant Postmodern Hippie Bus. The idea is that we’ll live in it and roam around the country (or, at any rate, to roam sometimes — perhaps more to be able to roam).
I think it would be great if we could even roam beyond the country — roam to Canada, roam to Mexico. I guess we’d have to park it to roam to another continent, but there’s a contingency for that sort of thing in the works as well.
I call it a Postmodern Hippie Bus because the vision is a little more IKEA catalog than Mother Earth News. We are only quasi-hippies, but there’s room in the universe of traveling people for all kinds.
Anyway, up until now, the Postmodern Hippie Bus has been entirely theoretical — diagrams, research, lots of scoping out YouTube videos about tiny homes and living in buses.
But today, we bought the kitchen sink!
At least I assume it’s the kitchen sink. Maybe it’s the bathroom sink? I don’t know. I didn’t ask.
But it was at the Habitat Restore, and Denis had seen it before, and he said, “Oh, my bus sink is still here,” and I said, “You’re going to buy it, right?” and he said, “Oh — well, I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”
I figured, it’s a nice sink, it’s a good price, and we’re definitely doing the bus thing at some point — so buying it makes sense.
So we bought the sink.
Somehow, that makes the Bus seem like something that really is actually going to happen someday, maybe sooner than I was thinking.
And that seems pretty cool.
The other cool thing is the process of designing the interior living — of really thinking about how we live, how we use space, what we want in our space, and so forth.
This is something I’m kind of doing in my own life right now.
Living with bipolar disorder — finally being willing to look it in the eye and call it by its name and accept it for what it is — has forced me to sit down and really think about my plans, goals, and dreams, and what is and isn’t possible for me.
I has forced me to think about how I want to arrange the furniture of my own being; if you will.
For a long time, I felt like saying, “I am not able to do this thing or that thing” was like quitting, or admitting defeat, or whatever. I think I saw it — for myself, but not for anyone else — as a sign of weakness.
I’m starting to see that it takes a lot of strength to accept your own limitations, and that transcending them doesn’t always mean living as if they don’t exist (though sometimes it can).
Rather, it’s like working with (for example), watercolors. There are things you can do with watercolors and things you can’t — in other words, there are limitations inherent in the medium.
If you want to paint beautifully with watercolors, you learn to accept the limitations of the medium — which are, in fact, at least partly responsible for its beauty — and you work within those limits. Maybe (as, for example, Andrew Wyeth did) you push those limits as far as you can. Maybe you don’t.
But there’s no point in pretending the limitations of the medium don’t exist. Instead, you use them to shape your paintings; within their constraints, you create beauty.
So I am not going to medical school and I don’t think we’re going to raise kids — at least not from the tadpole phase, and definitely not for a while. Maybe not at all.
I am, at this juncture, okay with both of those things, though it was tough getting there — especially med school. That took a lot of internal struggle.
The funny thing is that it’s getting easier. I didn’t expect it to, somehow, but I guess letting go, accepting limitations, and redefining abilities is a skill like any other. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
Anyway, it’s late, and I should try to get to bed. So that’s it for now. We did class today, and it was lovely, but I’ll cover it later.
Keep the sunny side up.
“Productivity” is Relative
One time I saw a sketch from some old comedy show about a dating service called “Lowered Expectations*.” I’m guessing you can kind of get the gist of it from the name of the service.
To an extent, that’s kind of how I’m feeling about living with bipolar disorder right now. The secret to success at the moment (as opposed to overall, long-term success) is to lower my expectations a bit and celebrate small victories.
Really, really small victories.
So, basically, I am like, “Heck yeah! I put laundry in the washing machine!” or, “Right on! I managed to put the receipts in order by date! Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
Now, admittedly, between bipolar and ADHD, putting the receipts in order by date is kind of a huge thing for me. It also makes me feeling like I’m a step closer to disentangling the horrible Gordian knot I’ve made out of the bookkeeping (the finances, meanwhile, seem to be going along without crashing, mostly because we’ve grown rather paranoid about large purchases since the books are a huge mess right now).
I actually think this might be a good strategy. Yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous, but you know how it is. If “ridiculous” gets you from point A to point B when nothing else will, then you might as well embrace it, right?
This is particularly important because, frankly, doing stuff is hard right now, guys.
Like, I had no intention of writing this post. I paused in my laundry process, sat down on the sofa, and cracked open my lappy for some darned reason. Problem is I haven’t the faintest clue what that reason was — and, in fact, hadn’t the faintest idea by the time I was done logging in.
This happens to me a lot right now.
My mind is feeling clearer right now than it has in a while. I wish I could really explain this — mania kind of gives me mental tunnel vision (though often it feels deceptively like laser focus, which it isn’t); depression makes me feel like I’m walking around with a 2-meter thick wad of cotton wool wrapped around my brain.
That said, it’s still hard for me to maintain attention. I mean, harder than normal. Task-switching is particularly hard; I forget which task I’m switching to before I get through the switch (task-switching is never easy for me, for what it’s worth — like everything else, it’s just harder than usual right now).
Anyway, I’ve done some looking into things and discovered that, unfortunately, my schedule isn’t going to play nicely with the Honors program curriculum, so it looks like that’s out — but I probably will stay until May for reasons I might discuss later. I’ve added an intro-level exercise science class to my schedule because A) it looks interesting, B) it might actually prove useful to my future plans, and C)it’s an online class, so why not? It doesn’t add commute time or classroom time.
I also bought a plain black V-neck t-shirt for ballet class. Up until now I’ve been dancing in my bike race t-shirts, because my gynecomastia makes me shy about wearing plain t-shirts in general. I bought a green version of this t-shirt to go with another outfit and discovered that the fit works well, so I decided to try a black one. The black shirt looks pretty sharp on me. Looking forward to seeing how it performs in class — the fit is a bit more athletic than the average t-shirt I’d wear (go figure). An athletic fit is good because it gives your teacher a better sense of how you’re using your body.
Okay, gonna close here. Obviously I’m still a bit on the uptick. I’ll be going to see my psychiatrist on the 24th, so I’m hoping to maybe work out some kind of medication plan that works. I’m not sure how this is going to work, since Lithium and Risperdal are right fracking out (I was on both in high school, with disastrous results, including the gynecomastia that continues to be a big problem for me).
Keep the upside up!
Notes
*Googled it. Turns out it was on MadTV.
danseur ignoble 