Category Archives: life
Quickie: A Hundred Pounds of Rocks in the Tour (Not So Literally); Ballet Dreams (Literally)
I’m taking a more conservative approach than I have in the past to managing my bipolar disorder.
This means that I haven’t returned to a three-classes-per-week schedule yet, or even a two-classes-per-week schedule. I wanted to go to class last night and did not feel ready, end of story. I need to learn to listen to that voice or reason, even though sometimes it feels like it’s standing between me and my dreams and goals.
I try to tell myself, instead, that it’s like not pushing yourself too hard on the bike when you’re recovering from a serious physical illness (like the last time I had pneumonia, or the time I broke my leg). You have to build back into it with a modicum of caution. Sometimes that means it takes longer to reach your goals than you had hoped.
Dottie (my therapist) and I talked about a similar thing yesterday. I found myself telling her about how frustrating and sometimes disheartening it is when this whole bipolar thing throws me off the rails, and how I sometimes really resent my difficulties instead of really appreciating what I can do; what I am doing. We also talked about how I tend to forget that I am living with a serious mental illness; one that can be really debilitating.
We wound up with this crazy Tour de France analogy: living with this is like riding the Tour de France with a hundred pounds of rocks in your chamois. The Tour isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s really freaking hard when you’re carrying a hundred pounds of rocks (or maybe when you’re the domestique and you have to carry … all … the water bottles?!)…
Here is a high-quality graphical rendering, replete with cheering fan, to help you visualize this concept. (An oldie, but a goodie! You might remember this from last TourMonth July, in fact.)
Riding the Tour with a hundred pounds of rocks doesn’t mean you don’t get there. It does mean maybe you don’t ride all of every stage, or maybe sometimes you don’t ride a given stage at all. It certainly means that you’re probably going to finish each stage long after the crowds have gone home.
It means that, if you’re smart, you might be willing to accept some help — maybe a motor to get you up Mount Ventoux, maybe a partner to carry some of your rocks when you’re really struggling. Maybe an extra book of matches or two.
Maybe, sometimes, you even stop halfway through a stage and climb into the team car.
Maybe you try medication. That’s why they make medication.
In short, carrying a hundred pounds of rocks on the Tour takes a hard job and makes it harder. It makes you reassess your goals. When you’re carrying that load, there’s no way on Earth you’re going to win — not even if you ride the best eBike in the world and hop yourself up on so much EPO and caffeine that your veins stick out like the Alps on a topographical map. Instead, making it to the finish becomes a goal worth achieving — in fact, sometimes, just making it to the end of the day is a victory.
Anyway. I didn’t mean to wax on about that for quite so long. I meant to write about literal ballet dreams.
Lately I dream about ballet all the time — that is, about dancing. Literally, it’s like I’m practicing in my dreams on the days I don’t do class (and, in fact, these dreams often take place on the nights following would-be class days; I should say will-be class days, because I will work back into it). Last night I had a long, long dream entirely devoted to perfecting the very simple combination (demi-petite allegro? ;)) from Margie’s class on Saturday — tombé – pas de bourrée – glissade – assemblé.
It was kind of a dream about mastery, I guess, and about confidence. And also about the fact that my arms are a heck of a lot less awkward than they used to be.
It was, in fact, a pretty cool dream. I love dancing, and my dreams are extremely vivid, so it was like having the opportunity to dance for a long, long time on a day that I didn’t get to dance in my waking life.
It will be interesting to see if the dream in question has, in fact, acted as practice. There’s good evidence supporting the hypothesis that athletes (including, presumably, dancers) are not just exercising their egos (a nebulous concept at best) when they use concentrated visualization, but actually firing the neural circuits they would fire when performing the athletic task in question*.
Anyway, today I’m feeling fairly okay, I think. The challenge is not to tip myself back over into mania. People who do not suffer from bipolar disorder often imagine mania to be a pleasant state, and it can be — but for me, mania is often “black,” characterized by immense irritability, agitation, expolosive rage, near-psychotic paranoia (though I suppose I don’t really talk about this: because it’s only near-psychotic, I know it’s irrational, so I simply try not to give in to it), and a restlessness that prevents the completion of even the simplest tasks.
I know I’m not “better” yet, not quite back on an even keel, because I’m not feeling much need to sleep and I keep forgetting to eat (among other things). But I’m at least close enough to earth orbit to be getting stuff done, and the agitation and anger have passed for the moment. I’m into the kind of hypomania that can be very pleasant (Lots of energy! Reasonably positive mood! The ability to talk about things! Fast but not totally out-of-control streams of thought! Accomplishing lots of tasks! Wild productivity! Not so much total inability to feel the presence of G-d!) as long as I don’t let it get out of hand.
Okay, well. This is now much, much longer than I intended for it to be — but I guess it’s illustrative, nonetheless.
So far, I’m feeling kind of okay about being more open in this blog. Recently I had a long and awesome conversation with another person with bipolar disorder who seems to experience her disorder in much the same ways that I experience mine, and that was very heartening in a totally unexpected kind of way.
If even one other reader stumbles across my ramblings and goes, “Hey, this sounds really familiar. Maybe it’s not just me,” and it helps … well, that would be really awesome, and make it all very worthwhile.
Notes
*Non-athletes do this as well, as far as I know. I believe there have been some studies of this process in musicians. I’ll have to see if I can dig them up.
Tear the Whole F**king Thing Down
Recently, my friend Robert asked me what I wanted for a username on his Mumble server. I told him, “Mystif,” because that’s a concept that holds a great deal of meaning for me, where I am right now (yeah, I know, I totally sound like a woo-woo hippie, here).
He, being my oldest and bestest friend, gave me some crap about never sticking to one thing and mentioned he’d basically had the same internet identity since forever (which, btw, is and isn’t true — like me, he’s got at least one internet identity that goes back a decade, maybe more, but has also had a bunch of ephemeral ones that served some or another purpose at some or another time.
I should issue a caveat: when I say “internet identity,” I don’t mean “a totally fake persona.” I just mean a different username, handle, whatever you want to call it. Mine always point back to me. I’m pretty transparent about the really relevant facts of my identity. In short, I’m not trying to hide anything or be someone else.
To belabor an analogy, the armature is always the same; it’s just that sometimes the artist hangs different things on the sculpture that highlight different aspects in its nature. And, of course, the artist in question is probably not me, but G-d, and I just change the title of the sculpture accordingly, or whatever.
Robert, of course, was just messing with me about my internet chameleon status. I know that now, and I knew that then, though at the time it actually kind of ticked me off (and I told him as much, and also that I knew being ticked off about it was totally irrational). What I didn’t understand was why it ticked me off; what nerve it struck that garnered that juvenile, “Heeeeeey, stop picking on meeeeee!” response.
Having had some time to reflect, I realize that some of it is that I’m uncomfortable with my own sort of ephemeral nature.
Like most people, at my core, I am basically one thing — an evolving, elaborating thing, but one thing. On the outside, I would hazard that I probably seem very different to different people; so much so that if two people who know me in two different areas of my life described me to one-another, they might come to the conclusion that they knew two different guys with the same name or that I am a giant fake.
I think the former of these conclusions would be closer to the truth. I have lived a very compartmentalized life (I think I’ve written a bit about this, here). I’m not sure how to stop doing that. It’s a coping mechanism that mostly works most of the time.
It doesn’t help that I regularly pass through what I think of as “iconoclastic phases” — periods in which I want to destroy not the cherished icons of the world around me, but my own cherished icons. Phases in which I want to sweep all of the detritus from the table and start over new. Some of them are sane — they represent, I think, the desire of a creative personality for a fresh canvas. Some of them are not sane — they represent the struggles of a brain, mind, and soul with the intricate pulsings of an illness that sometimes makes bad ideas seem like good ones.
Basically, what I mean is that sometimes the phoenix does need to burn in order to be reborn, and sometimes it doesn’t. Right now, the phoenix doesn’t need to burn.
I’m in the midst of one of those phases now. This one is not a sane iconoclastic phase, so I’m trying not to give in to it. A part of me, for reasons I don’t really entirely understand, wants to basically burn my entire internet presence to the ground. Right now, my established history here, in email, and on G+ seems like a sea anchor; like an albatross around my neck.
Part of the problem is that compartmentalization thing. My history here is mostly one of writing about happy bike stuff; happy ballet stuff, with intermittent episodes of writing about religion, about mental illness, about the difficult things in my past, about my struggles with life.
I think maybe writing about that harder stuff is important, and yet part of me feels as if to do so muddies the waters. It’s such a weird way to feel. Then, part of me also feels exposed when I try to do this — the part of me which learned at a very young age that if your vulnerabilities can be detected, they will be exploited in order to cause you harm. That part of me refuses to listen to reason: to understand that things are different now, and that while that’s still a possibility, I am much better at protecting myself than I once was, and that the vast majority of people don’t operate that way*.
So, yeah. I have built this whole thing; this internet presence, I guess. And sometimes, like right now, I want to burn the whole thing down, raze it to a clean slate, start over.
I think instead I’m going to just try to let my history stand, but also let myself write about everything. Particularly, perhaps, about how hard it is sometimes to live inside a brain that insists that you act “normal” and do “normal” things and maintain a “normal” image when you’re dancing on the brink of madness. Which is, by the way, totally me right now.
At the end of the day, perhaps it will help if I remind myself that the difference between kitsch and art is often unflinching honesty — not, as some with imagine, an unrelenting focus on whatever is socially inappropriate, dark, or unpleasant, but rather the willingness and ability to present the whole picture, even when sometimes it’s really hard to say what exactly the whole picture is (hello, Mona Lisa).
I don’t know if I’m supposed to be an artist or whatever. I kind of feel like that’s a word other people use to describe you; “Oh, he does this work, he’s an artist.” Here, I am just a dude writing about ballet and bikes and sometimes about being wacko (and using funny words to deflect the weight and perhaps the vulnerability and pain of saying “mentally ill,” or whatever). I am just doing the work. Later on, people can decide about its value. It just is what it is to me.
I’m not promising a regular series about this, though perhaps I should; perhaps it would be therapeutic, or something, to force myself to write about all this crap, unflinchingly, on a regular basis. The thing is, I am not doing so well with consistency just yet. I’m still working on forcing myself not to live as if I’m under seige, withdrawn in my fortress and depleting my stores, even though there are no enemies at the gate; no invaders waiting to storm across my drawbridge.
Maybe eventually I’ll get there. That’s the best I can do right now in terms of making positive statements about the future. I realize I’m supposed to have faith and so forth, and when I stop to think about it, I do — I just can’t see the path G-d has laid before me right now, so it’s hard for me to say anything with certainty. I’m stumbling around in the dark, and I don’t always remember to reach up and hold my Father’s hand.
I guess that’s it for this post. This is hard, and I’m tired. This is much harder than riding a bike up a big hill or hanging by my hipbones from a trapeze or doing a million fondues in Brienne’s class (which is, come to think of it, probably why I do those things: in my life, those and loving Denis are the easy things).
I’ll try to write more soon, though making that statement kind of fills me with dread, since it’s like making a promise I may or may not be equipped to keep.
Meanwhile, keep the rubber side down, your waterfowls in a linear array, and your eyes on the bacon donuts.
Notes
*To this day, it weirds me out that film and TV writers imagine that screaming in response to a perceived threat is a normal behavior. Is it? Because that sure as heck seems maladaptive to me. If you scream, you reveal your location to the source of the threat. I have never been a screamer. My native response to perceived danger is silence.
In Which I Am Remiss
I got my timelines confused last week, and didn’t get my Ballet Lessons post written up before we left. I had also completely forgotten that the site where we’d be spending Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday lies in the Land Beyond the Signal, which is awesome except when you realize that you’ve failed to post something you meant to post.
Thus, my apologies. I’m never great at planning ahead, and sometimes I’m really bad at it.
The PlayThink festival itself was a mixed bag of awful and awesome (words that, taken at the most technical level, are basically synonyms, but that’s not how I’m using them here).
The awful part stemmed entirely from the spectacular failure of our pop-up camper to live up to its primary, indeed its titular claim — that is, its failure to pop up, replete with the snapping of not one, but three aircraft-grade steel cables. This, after it sat happily in our driveway in popped-up mode for three weeks while we lovingly cleaned and prepared it!
The late-night hotel-finding excursion on Thursday night and the lack of privacy for basically the rest of the weekend were also pretty un-great (though our friends Kelly and Tessa were gracious enough to put us up on Saturday night, which largely made up for it, because we all got to sit around ’til the small hours giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls). The worst part was missing most of the classes we really wanted to do while my husband stubbornly wrestled with the camper.
The rest of the festival, however, was completely awesome. Highlights, for me, included a stationary static trapeze class and a belly-dancing class. We also made some really amazing new friends, enjoyed oceans of playtime with the six-and-under contingent (Indy is six, so we had all kinds of awesome, shareable toys along), and got to hang out with my friends Robert, Tessa, and Kelly. That last bit was really, really seriously great, since I consider myself lucky if I get to see them once or twice in a year.
That said, for me, the coolest moment transpired when I was hanging upside-down from the trapeze in an inverted straddle. The teacher mentioned that I was really graceful and asked, “Are you a dancer?”
It was kind of cool to be able to say, “Actually, yes.”
Where the trapeze is concerned, I learned that I’m graceful but weak; specifically, that my upper body is weak. No surprise there. We also learned that Louisville is home to a place where you can learn to do all those awesome aerial circus arts, and we are definitely planning on pursuing that line of inquiry. Our teacher from PlayThink is one of the teachers from Louisville Turners, and I really enjoyed working with her.
I would really like to further explore the possibilities of aerial apparatus, especially since the techniques one uses on stationary trapeze harmonize well with ballet technique. Some of the elements even share the same names — an arabesque, for example, is an arabesque, though it seems that what is attitude in ballet is … um … a king scorpion (I think?) on the trapeze.
Where belly dancing is concerned, I learned that belly dancing is a blast, and that belly dancing classes seem to be populated with strong, smart, vivacious women, along with a few gay dudes — in this case, one guy I didn’t know, Denis (briefly; he then ran off to get his face painted), and me. I don’t think I’m going to try to cram an ongoing relationship with belly dancing into my schedule right now, but it’s definitely something I plan to try again at future festivals and so forth.
Nick snapped a bunch of pictures of Denis, Tessa, and me on the trapeze, so I’ll try to re-post some of those, but it may take a while, because they’ll have to make it from Nick’s facebook to Denis’ hot little hands to my cloudspace and then here. Denis and I were also photographed a bazillion times in our winged costumes (he paired his wings with sparkly, spangled tights and a hot pink t-shirt; I paired mine with my leopard outfit, which came together rather brilliantly).
Incidentally, the wings — assembled with loving care by sister-in-law Alice and Mom-in-law Phyllis for Nick, Indy, Denis, and me — worked beautifully. I continue to be impressed by the creative abilities of the family I’ve married into.
That’s it for now. Get out there and enjoy the world!
Toast, Eggs, Milk, and Juice
By the way guys, sorry about the double post this morning!
Does that sound like a pretty complete breakfast to you?
It does to me (though I’d rather see “fruit” in place of “juice”) – and here’s the funny thing. It seemed that way to me as a kid, too.
I remember seeing breakfast cereal commercials when I was six years old or so that trumpeted about how some or another sugary cereal was “part of this complete breakfast with toast, eggs, juice, and milk” and thinking, “Toast, eggs, milk, and juice? That sounds pretty complete by itself. What’s the cereal for?”
This wasn’t because I was some kind of super – genius (though I’ll halt take that accolade if it’s on offer! :D). It was because my parents had taken time to instill a healthy skepticism about commercial advertisements (and nobody does skepticism like six-year-olds, who are just discovering that how things are and how things seem can be very different). It was because we talked about nutrition at home, in school, and even at church.
Perhaps most importantly, though, it was because I had recently eaten a breakfast of toast, milk, eggs, and juice, and by the end of it, I was stuffed. Where, I reasoned with the irrefutable logic of the very young, was the cereal supposed to fit – literally?
So, in short, I discovered a valuable piece of insight mostly because I loved poached eggs on toast and someone (either Mom or Grammy) made them for me as a treat that morning. I realized that in the “part of this complete breakfast” equation, the cereal was basically extra. The breakfast was fine without it.
I’m not sure, dear reader, what I hope you’ll take away from this post (which is neither about bicycles nor about ballet, though it is about food, which quite literally fuels both of those passions). I don’t mean it as a criticism of individual choices. I suspect you’re probably already the kind of person who makes that kind of connection.
If anything, I see it as the opposite of that – I happened to be privy at a useful moment to a bunch of information that led me to a sort of breakfast – related epiphany: that cereal was the dessert part of a complete breakfast. I was able to apply this idea because my family ate desert maybe once a week or so, not with every meal. I had a context that allowed me to just the information at hand in my own best interests.
It sort of worries me that, as a country, we largely seem to lack that skill (critical reasoning deficits are disturbingly common at school, too – and I’m a university student). It seems a little baffling.
I don’t have any prescriptive advice, here, or anything. I’m sort of just thinking out loud. I’m also wondering how we reached this pass (and I find it interesting that people in the political arena seem to reflexively blame the folks on whichever side of the aisle is opposite their own). Like, I don’t think we’d have stuck around this long as a nation if we weren’t, in years past, pretty good at critical thinking about practical matters (and creative thinking).
I will resume my normal bikes-and-ballet related blathering shortly. For now, this is what’s on my mind, via some experiences I’ll discuss at a later date.
Til then, keep the bottom side down 🙂
Really Brief Notes and Only Partially About Ballet!
First, I did Margie’s Essentials class this morning, which was cool because we had a new girl and Margie asked me to take point on the barre so she’d have someone to follow. Then I got confused when we were doing an attitute-and-arabesque thing (I was all, “Arabesque all the way!” instead of “Just with the legs!”, so maybe I wasn’t such a great leader after all. But it was nice 😀
Second, I didn’t do the class after Essentials (which I think is officially Beginner/Intermediate ballet?) because we had Epic Shopping to do for the upcoming festival. OMG, you guys, like six hours of shopping with my Bro-In-Law, Nick! It was stellar. We are prepping for a cool festival which I’ll post about when I’m not about to jet off to bed.
Third, plans were made to storm The Hike, Bike, ‘n’ Paddle Skedaddle on Tandems! We will be riding with Dave and Diane and maybe another tandemaniac couple we know. So, yeahhhhh! Tandemonium on Monday! WOOOOOOOO!
Of course we are going to wear our ridiculously adorable matchy-matchy Kokopelli kit, and I will try to get pictures. I’m seriously hoping that we can get all three tandem teams into at least one picture.
Today in class I thought I looked very lean and dancer-y, which was a huge improvement over Wednesday, on which day I was retaining like three pounds of water for some reason and looked like a post-binge drinking dancer, complete with lingering coordination issues during parts of the adagio (but only parts). However, for some reason, I was only marginally able to balance in passé, so it wasn’t all, “O Look How Awesome I Am, With My Dancery-Looking Tights And Legs And All That.”
Ballet Lessons
Lesson One: Everyone Starts At The Beginning
There’s a famous saying in cycling circles attributed to Greg Lemond: “It never gets easier, you just go faster.”
It reminds me of something my ballet teachers say: “In ballet, you keep doing the same basic things. You just get better at them.”
Many adult beginners (and probably some child beginners) walk into the studio carrying a load of worry about being beginners. Adult re-beginners often walk into the studio carrying a load of worry about how much they’ve lost in the year or ten years or more that have elapsed since last they slipped on their slippers and danced ballet.
Yet, just as basic elements of cycling remain the same no matter how long you ride — you turn the cranks and balance; that’s basically it — the basic elements of ballet never change. Like cycling technique, ballet technique elaborates upon itself.
The five basic positions (of which you will mostly never use one — the third — unless you can’t get into fifth for some reason) never change.
Everything begins and ends with turnout and plié.
Tendu leads to dégagé. Dégagé leads to grand battement. Grand battement leads to jeté. Jeté leads to tour jeté. Tour jeté, for what it’s worth, looks really impressive.
You learn tombé and fondu at the barre; later they become connecting steps that you will use all day, every day, at center and eventually on the stage.
And still everything will begin and end with turnout and plié.
When we first began class, Denis worried about how polished many of our classmates seemed. Now, he is beginning to show a little polish of his own. He began at the beginning — all the way at the beginning, having never set foot in a ballet studio before.
Last Saturday, at the Joffrey, the population of our class ranged from newbies even less polished than Denis to one guy who danced with a degree of refinement that suggested he was at very least an advanced student who was either filling in a class due to a scheduling issue or possibly working back from an injury.
We all did the same things. Nobody judged anyone else.
We were all true beginners once. Every principal dancer commanding the stage; every top racer commanding the mountain — they, too, were beginners once. They, too, start every single day — every class, every workout — with the same basic things we do. They have simply been doing them longer.
So beginning is important — and not just important. It’s good. If no one was ever a beginner, we would not have the David Hallbergs and Jens Voigts of the world; the Natalia Osipovas and Marianne Voses of the world.
I’m not going to say we shouldn’t worry about being beginners. To worry is human. What we shouldn’t do is let that worry stop us from beginning.
Everyone starts at the beginning … and once we start, we often learn that the little elemental skills we learn at first lie at the heart of something beautiful; that the beginning is, in fact, the most important part.
Various Thoughts About Chicago, and a little On Ballet!
I am fond of Louisville. There’s a fair bit to like about it, excepting its landlocked location in this oft-sweltering cauldron of concentrated air quality problems known as the Ohio Valley. It’s too far from the ocean, but it’s got friendly people and great cycling and a nice ballet company with a good school and some of the most beautiful domestic architecture around. Where parks are concerned, it has few, if any, rivals in the United States.
Seriously. Name another US city this size with nineteen graceful parks bearing the unmistakable stamp of Frederick Law Olmstead’s trail-blazing vision; with this much space set aside to be green and a little wild sometimes and beautiful so the people who live here can get away from the bustle of urban life for a bit any time they so please. I have lived in quiet rural and suburban places and in busy urban places and I have concluded that it’s best to be able to experience both; one makes you appreciate the other more. Here, you can do that without leaving town.
I say this because I don’t want you to think I’m dissing the city where I live. There’s a lot to like, even love, about Louisville.
The thing is, I think I like Chicago even more.
I suppose Chicago has some unfair advantages.
First, Chicago has trains. I love trains. I love trains for themselves, for the feeling of riding them, and for what they mean. In Louisville, people like me, who don’t drive, can escape from the city by riding bicycles or getting on the bus and then riding bicycles or walking. In Chicago, it is possible to get on a train and go. It’s easier. You can take your not-so-athletic friends along. You can even get a ticket on the South Shore Line and ride all the way to Michigan (the first time I visited Chicago, it was by South Shore Line from Michigan City, Indiana, which is practically in Michigan).
Moreover, the trains form the core of a transit system that moves a lot of people. Here, people still mostly seem to regard public transit as a stopgap measure for people who can’t afford to drive — which is, quite frankly, a pretty backwards way of looking at things (this isn’t to say that it’s not getting better, but that’s still the prevailing sentiment). Chicagoans drive more than New Yorkers, but don’t seem to regard public transit as an embarrassment. They cram onto the trains and busses in their legions and go to work, to concerts, to clubs, to the ballet, to restaurants. Many of them don’t drive a whole lot or at all, and because of this Chicago is full of vibrant, walkable neighborhoods where there are people out getting dinner, retrieving groceries, going to bookstores, whatever. The trains, in their way, have helped keep the city operating on a human scale.
I grew up in a small town, but it was (and still is) a small town where you could walk to dinner, to the grocery store, to a good ice-cream place, and so forth. I loved that and had no idea how precious it was.
The thing I dislike about my current neighborhood is that it’s the kind of place the vast majority of people would consider unwalkable. Places you might want to go are a mile away or more. Sidewalks, where they’ve been included, are inadequate. There’s a big, beautiful park practically in my backyard — literally about a block over — but the neighborhood (built long after the park) is designed in such a way that you either have to travel two miles to get there or trespass on private property. Nobody thought to include, for example, a path. If you do choose to get to the park by cutting through people’s yards, you then have to either climb over or tunnel under a big fence, which is (of course) meant to prevent people from cutting through private yards going to and from the park.
It is this way because my current neighborhood was designed for people who drive cars, by people who regarded diving as the wave of the future; as a new convenience that would save us all so much time. They meant well, but these are the people you can thank the next time you’re sitting in a traffic jam, because these are the people who designed so much of America as we know it today. These were not, for the most part, the people who planned and designed the neighborhoods in Chicago.
Second, Chicago is several times the size of Louisville. A few years ago, even a year ago, I wouldn’t have identified that as an advantage. It’s still not something I would automatically point out as an advantage. Like, I enjoy New York and Washington, D.C., immensely, but I wouldn’t describe their sheer size as an advantage, necessarily. In Chicago, though, the scale of the city lets it breathe in a way which neither NY or DC can do, being situated where they are. Yes, downtown Chicago is dominated by giant buildings — but they stand far apart, across broad streets, and you don’t feel like you’re in a cramped, narrow canyon.
Chicago can do this because it’s in the big, flat heart of the Midwest on the shore of a lake so huge that people who know things about bodies of water classify it and its sisters as a series of freshwater inland seas. Perhaps because of the trains, though, Chicago doesn’t seem like a collection of unrelated cities jammed together. Different neighborhoods feel distinctly different, but they’re all connected by the same circulatory system; they’re all part of the same organism.
Third — well, did I mention the lake?
The city of Chicago is sliced up by rivers and canals flowing up towards the lake. Maybe that should be Lake, with a capital “L.”
I’m an ocean junkie. I grew up on the Sound and the Cape and the Atlantic. The first time I felt the thrill of real, mortal fear, it was in the waves of the Atlantic on the windward shore of Block Island. The first time I felt the unspeakable power of the numinous, it was watching the moon rise over the ocean from the peak of Mount Desert Island. My people have never lived far from the ocean. I joke that you’ll find members of my family everywhere, but in truth I don’t think very many of us can be found very far from the coast, or not for long. I miss the ocean keenly and powerfully, and that particular flavor of homesickness never seems to fade.
So the lake isn’t an ocean. But it’s still pretty good. It’s a proper inland sea — it’s Big Water. It has moods and waves and a bit of the terrifying power that makes the ocean so compelling. It has sandy beaches and a far, blank horizon. I can look at that horizon and feel something of the same thrill that I feel when I gaze out over the Atlantic.
So it seems inevitable that I, who so love trains and variety and, above all, Big Water, should like Chicago an awful lot. Don’t think I’m some kind of rosy-glassed pushover about it — I know it has its own problems; its own quirks I would probably come to resent if I lived there, the same way I resent the highways here that cut entire swathes of the city off from each-other and disrupt the flow of what could be a pretty cool urban lifescape, so to speak. Nonetheless, I really like Chicago. I think I could be really happy there.
Now for the ballet part. On Saturday, we got up and ate breakfast and made our way up to the Joffrey Tower for class. The Joffrey’s adult open division Ballet Basics class is 1.5 hours long. I wasn’t 100% sure Denis would make it all the way through. I didn’t know what to expect (one never knows what to expect when one starts a new class, though).
What we got as an awesome and really pretty enormous class. I think there were about sixteen of us; about half of us were men (our teacher, Lynne, exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, there are never this many men! We’re doing pas de deux today! …Just kidding.”). The barre work was athletic and demanding (for what it’s worth, I don’t think I’ve ever done attitude en cloche at the barre before), which I definitely appreciated.
I found that after exercising my brain trying to memorize long combinations at the barre, it was surprisingly easy to memorize the combinations when we worked in the center … though also surprisingly easy to get mesmerized while doing changements and forget to move on to the next sequence. This, however, is not a problem that is specific to ballet. When counting repetitions, I tend to forget to stop. The effect wears off once I know the pattern and stop counting (in this case, on the first repeat, when we reversed the direction of the combination).
Lynne did a brilliant job explaining how to stop your circular port de bras from looking like some kind of fit or an attempt to deflect a missile (though she didn’t put it quite that way). She also sorted our promenades, which I deeply appreciated, as I think promenades look a wee bit silly to begin with much of the time, and look even sillier when I’m sort of f(l)ailing my way through them. By which I mean that she sorted my promenade. Everyone else’s looked pretty okay. I feel like mine is uniformly terrible, though once in a while on Saturday I caught sight of myself in the mirror and realized I looked better than I expected to look.
We did a nice reverence, though I tangled my legs a couple of times.
So that was class at the Joffrey. It was excellent. I would say “Excellent, as expected,” but I didn’t know what to expect.
I’ve found that what people say is true: it’s good to take classes from different teachers, as long as they’re good teachers, because every teacher explains things a little differently, focuses on different refinements, and so forth. Just as Claire’s correction for my back has really helped me get my turns and stuff sorted, Lynne’s explanation of circular port de bras and a number of other things clarified stuff I’ve probably been doing wrong for a while now, if not since, like, first grade.
It’s weird how you can take this long, long journey of digression in your life, go wandering about in the wilderness, and then find your way back to the track you started out on, and realize it was the right one in the first place. I sort of stumbled out of ballet class in middle school — not because I didn’t love ballet, but because my life was pretty crushingly depressing and I stopped doing almost everything. In high school I did modern dance for a couple of years (as a non-major) at an arts magnet, and I loved it, but I lost the thread again after I graduated. Then for a few years I entered a kind of wilderness in my own life. I don’t quite understand why it took me so long to find this shimmering thread again.
I guess clarity just comes when it’s ready to come. We don’t have the privilege of divine insight, so we make mistakes and discard things we should keep and sometimes don’t get back to where we should be for a long, long time.
I feel like I’m finally returning to the self I was intended from the beginning to be: ballet, in a sense, is an expression of that. I suppose I had to learn how to identify and to be that self. I am sure there are still plenty of things I’m missing.
It is very much like re-learning ballet. You attempt some bit of technique you once had down cold years ago and it doesn’t come, and doesn’t come, though you can sort of see it, if you will, “as through a glass, darkly.”
Then, as if from nowhere, you hit it, and it’s like the fire of memory enlivens every nerve.
P.S. If you happen to be in Chicago and you’ve always wanted to dance, give the Joffrey’s adult open division a try. You won’t regret it.
P.P.S. Denis survived and then went on to also survive a walk and a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago and another walk (to the bus). He is coming to class this evening, the first time he has done a Saturday and a Monday class in the same week.
Read-A-Thon Prep!
I’ve been gathering books (with some help from my school’s book sale, where I’ve found some good titles at $0.50/each) for Dewey’s Read-A-Thon.
The plan is to start with these:
An old friend (I’m re-reading -A Separate Peace-) and some new friends waiting for tomorrow.
(A Separate Peace by John Knowles; The Dancer’s Way by Linda H. Hamilton, PhD. and New York City Ballet; and Eminent Dogs and Dangerous Men by Donald McCaig.)
…And this:
La Belle et La Bete: “Beauty and the Beast” en francais.
I also have a DI Marjory Fleming mystery on tap on the Kindle. Since I have class in the morning, I plan to read that on the bus. I really enjoy Aline Templeton’s books; she writes well, but they’re still very relaxing reads.
I have no idea how much of this snowbank-o-books I’ll make it through, but the idea is to enjoy it rather than to kill myself (kind of like the bike ride I took this evening!).
In other news, general updates:
Monday’s ballet class was a mixed bag — my core was more together, my turns were in some cases pretty good — but my head wasn’t entirely in the game the whole way. I think it was a function of not having slept well at all for a few nights in a row, so I’m hoping to be much better after a good, solid rest tonight. I got “Use your technique; don’t lose your technique,” a couple of times on Monday; while that implies that maybe there’s some technique in here somewhere after all (ha!), I’m hoping I’ll hear a bit less of that. I do get overenthusiastic in the turns, though, sometimes.
I wore my stripey shirt on Monday. Addendum: I should have captioned this, “Use your technique; don’t abuse your technique.”
Today was the Student Conference (undergraduate edition), and I think it went quite well. Bringing my poster to school (and back) was interesting, as we didn’t have a sufficiently-sized poster tube and I didn’t have time to get one.
I am super, super tired at this point, so I’ll probably turn in pretty soon so I can get a good night’s rest in before class tomorrow.
On Ballet (sort of)! – The Importance of Counting
All jokes about dancers not being able to count higher than eight aside, there are some very good reasons to count things.
Like, for example, alcoholic beverages.
Historically, I have been one of those people who have a couple of drinks perhaps six times a year (mostly on trips to visit family and friends, who — I am convinced — enjoy plying our naive systems with alcohol and watching us get tipsy). Various influences (read: somehow, we have suddenly developed a non-bike related, non-ballet related Social Life o.O) have conspired to knock out three of those drinking occasions in the past three weekends.
Friday night we went out for dinner with Kelly. It was the best kind of dinner: grazing at table for something like three hours without overeating, then enjoying coffee and affogati by a really cool fire pit.
Not content to stop there, we dropped in on ironically-named Bardstown Road hot spot “Big Bar,” which is really a lovely little venue, after which we went dancing at NoWhere, another Bardstown Road venue with lasers, DJs, and enough room on their dance floor for me to actually dance! …Which is to say that I danced for like 2.5 hours while Kelly and Denis intermittently danced and chatted. We packed it back home at 12:30 and were in bed by roughly 1 AM.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. However, I made a serious mistake: I completely failed to count how many alcoholic beverages I had enjoyed. I’m still not really sure. That’s not a good thing. If you can’t account for all of it, you have definitely had way too much.
Needless to say, I remain quite a lightweight. I don’t think I went Full FratBoy on this excursion, but I do know I more than found my limit. I wasn’t exactly incoherent, but I was hammered and I knew it.
I wasn’t “drinking to get drunk,” either — just kept trying different things because they tasted good, and quickly lost track of how many good-tasting things I’d tried. So, evidently, it is quite easy to vastly overdo it without trying. It was very much like the, “Petit fours? Don’t mind if I do!” sort of thing that can happen at catered events where endless plates of new and different little hors d’ouevres and desserts circulate.
The end result was a jammed left knee, one heck of an abdominal workout (derived from about two hours of early-morning hurling), a wickedly sore throat that persists to some extent today (cinnamon infused whiskey is lovely going down and hellish coming back up), and no ballet class on Saturday. I think I probably would’ve forced myself to get up and go if it weren’t for the knee thing, but the knee was definitely a problem. I am guessing I jammed it on the dance floor and failed utterly to notice until I woke up at 5 AM.
So, in all, a distinctly self-punishing experience … and I think maybe I’ve reached a point in my life at which I’m smart enough to learn from my mistakes. At least, this mistake.
The lesson? I can handle two to three drinks in the course of a night out, depending on how long the night out in question is. That’s all. No more. More than that, and I begin making poor decisions, like, “Sure, coffee with creme de cacao sounds delicious!” and “I can have one more shot of that cinnamon stuff, that was delicious!”
In case you’re wondering, “delicious” is not a good reason to miss ballet class.
Ballet class is more important than Trying All The Drinks, even if they’re tasty. Also, it’s hard to enjoy dancing at a club* as much as I normally do when you’re as hammered as I was on Friday ._.
Also, there was some of this.
It is nice having a kind of straight razor in your life that helps you make decisions.
“Will this interfere with the ballet? Yes? Then I’m not doing it. End of sentence.”
Denis kept telling me this would happen: “Some day you’ll find that one thing that you feel passionate enough about to put everything else down.” I don’t think I quite believed him, but ballet is the only thing that has ever made me willing to change the way I ride my bike and, yes, even give up Strava (at least for now, until I learn how to ride in a way that doesn’t directly conflict with my ballet goals). I am an Endomondo boy for the foreseeable future.
Easter seems as good a day as any for clarity of thought, revelations, and renewals — so I will consider this a lesson and a renewal. The occasional night of wild culinary excess is no big deal because I am skilled in the art of enjoying small portions and tend not to overeat to the point of imminent explosion, but there will be no further nights of wild alcoholic excess. Two or three drinks is my maximum, end of sentence … and I probably ought to stay away from the ones that combine alcohol and coffee, because alcohol + caffeine = 32 flavors of Asher Being Stupid.
So that’s it. Class notes will resume on Monday.
Notes
*I realize this is the opposite of how many people feel. For me, alcohol-induced clumsiness interferes with freedom of movement, and the high you get from dancing itself is much better without alcohol.
Thursday Nerding Quickie
Denis just texted an offer to come pick me up at school — either half an hour from now or four hours from now.
What did I say?
Basically, “Sweet! I’ll hang around here until 7 PM and cruise for data.”
And I did, in fact, use the phrase “cruise for data.”
Here’s the thing: I am Doing Science (kind of) and it’s exciting (very)! My sample is pathetically small, and yet I am seeing interesting trends — trends that are related to the predictions I made, but perhaps a wee bit more complicated. I want MOAR DATA so I can get a better sense of whether these trends might actually be real or whether my study is suffering from that bane of all researchers, Sampling Error.
Moar Daytah Cat was shamelessly stolen from the Innertubes, unlike my data set, which was shamelessly schmoozed from IUS peeps.
I will admit that data gathering has been hard, y’all. I mean, not the process itself: it is really easy to set up a few hoops and make people jump through them (well, not literally hoops, but you take my point). The hard part has been buttonholing random people and convincing them that they really do want to participate, For Science!
It would probably help if I wore normal nerdy clothes or something instead of showing up in bike kit. I think there might be something about a dude in skintight lycra with a stack of papers and some hand-eye coordination tasks that sort of intimidates people.
And then there is the part where I am fantastic at standing up in front of a huge group of perfect strangers and doing anything, but ask me to talk to an individual person and I come all undone and forget how to function. I have begun to suspect that this is a function of being a control freak. It’s easy to control the direction of the conversation when you’re the only one talking, or when you have a badge that says, “Ohai! I r en ottority figure.”
Respect mah ottoritah.
Individual humans in undefined contexts, on the other hand, are slippery (see what I did there? Okay, so it’s a slow puns day here at the central office.). And I think I make them even more nervous than they make me. So basically finding participants to fill out the staff/faculty side of the sample is a huge pain in the neck (students were easy; you can bag whole groups of students by asking their professors if you can drop in on intro classes; it’s like parametrically measuring fish in a barrel). So maybe I will really actually cruise for more data and maybe I will just hunker in my bunker and analyze the data I’ve got.
So, yeah. This is all really the long way ’round to say, “Life has reminded me once again that I am a nerd, and I’m okay with that.”
And now?
Off to (maybe) cruise for data.
Keep the bottom side down, whichever side it is.
danseur ignoble 