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It’s Taimz for Crazy Taimz
As of today, my schedule officially begins its trek through the land of:
This means rehearsals that end at 10:30 on Monday nights, a whole lotta class(1), extra conditioning for an upcoming audition, Dance Team, preparation for our annual Meeting With The Accountant, and work on the next iteration of the website for D’s business*.
- This is different than a Whole Latte class, in which baristas would presumably learn the art of making ethically-sourced organic coffee drinks, or perhaps simply how to make an entire latte and not just part of one(2).
- If you forget the milk, for example, it’s just coffee!
In the interest of retaining some shred of sanity, I’m keeping Modern Mondays off the calendar until March, at least. My primary studio just added modern on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though, so I’ll be doing at least one of those, depending.
I’m trying to keep Tuesday unscheduled, but since tomorrow is the first class, I’m going to go.
For the time being, on Mondays, it makes more sense to take an evening ballet class instead of a morning modern class. That keeps my mornings free for goofing off on the Innertubes household stuff and groups all the dance things into a nice block from 2:45 — 10:30. (There’s a dinner break in there, don’t worry.)
This is one of the things I’m trying to do differently this year. Instead of saying, “Oh, cool, I only have three things on the schedule for Mondays!”, I’m accounting for things like transit time and the fact that I don’t change gears well, so it’s foolish to assume I’ll get even one task done if I have a couple of hours between engagements.
Thus, while I seem to have once again stacked a lot onto my plate, I’m trying to be sensible about how I approach it.
The thing I’ve learned about pursuing dance seriously is that you’re either up to your eyeballs in alligators—wait, let’s call them crocodiles because it will be funnier later—or you’re on break. The challenge is learning to Arrange Your Crocodiles In A Linear Array. Which is to say:
Get your crocs in a row! (Shamelessly ganked from Chris Booth over at Expatior)
Arranging my waterfauna is really not my forté, but I’m learning. Sort of.
The frenzy of class and rehearsal is worth it to have the chance to make art and do the thing that it feels like I was made to do(3).
- The cat disagrees. He believes I was made to serve as a cat bed and play-bot.
I fully expect to arrive home exhausted at 11 PM tonight. Needless to say, I’m glad Tuesday isn’t Killer Class day.
If it was, I’d make it work. It would be worth it.
Right now I feel weirdly like my dreams are rushing towards me at terminal velocity.
All things considered, that’s a pretty cool feeling.
Though, really—ask me again in March how I feel about my schedule 😉
Here’s a detailed explanation of how my current schedule happened:
Aaaaaaaaaaugh!
So I just submitted my audition registration materials for audition #1 for the 2016 – 2017 season.
Part of me is all like, “Don’t worry, it’s cool; we’ve got this.”
Another part of me is totally like:
Shamelessly stolen from QuickMeme, because that is how the internet rolls.
My goal was to get that stuff sent out before I go to Lexington next week.
I figured that if I didn’t go ahead and make myself do it now, I’d just keep procrastinating and attempting to further perfect my 100-word-or-less dancer biography until my head caught fire.
Sometimes good enough has to be good enough.
Remember this?
Anyway, I shall now spend the next three weeks and change occasionally alternating between having mild heart attacks over the upcoming audition and, like, basically feeling like I WILL OWN THIS THING because that’s what my personality is like when I’m not freaking out. I can rock that whole “wildly overconfident” thing like I was born for it.
Okay, I will also spend at least some time worrying that I’ve somehow screwed up my submission and that the registration forms will come through blank (even though I understand how desperately unlikely that is) and that my resume makes me sound either desperate or like an overweening ass and that my headshot is … I guess, just wrong in one way or another.
As such, I hereby submit the following arguments against my own obsessive anxieties:
- Regarding the forms being blank: “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
- Regarding my resume: the whole point of a resume is to tell people what’s good about you, basically. I’ve been able to do that in this resume without having to use subjective descriptions.
- Regarding my headshot: it’s my head. It’s a shot. So … um … pretty sure it should be okay. It’s not like I sent them someone else’s head, or my butt, or something. (If I was sending an audition picture to my trapeze teacher, though, I would totally send a picture of my butt, because she is all about our butts.)
Ultimately, I realize that I’m only anxious about this because I really, really want to do this — which is, of course, bad Buddhism, but I plan to harness the little bits of Zen practice I’ve kinda-sorta learned how to use to counteract that tendency.
In other news, I will try to get some video shot in the next couple of weeks. A friend of mine (going to nickname her Modern A, I guess?) and I just started work on a random choreography project together, so I got to see some video of myself dancing that we shot last night. My response was:
“Wow, that felt way worse than it looks!” (In fact, I am forced to admit that some of the moments in the videos actually look pretty good.)
We were creating phrases, and I was tired and kind of marked and flailed my way through a couple of quick recordings so I wouldn’t forget mine, and it looked quite a bit better than I expected a bunch of marking and flailing to look.
I figure that if I can feel that okay about my half-baked modern choreography efforts shot late in the evening after a full day of busting butt, I can probably feel okay about actual dancing shot when I’m actually awake 🙂
danseur ignoble 