Category: on my mind

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Some stuff will happen next week; some stuff happened last week

It’s going to absolute madness next week with a heavy post-holiday workload and all these rehearsals and then performances. Hopefully I can maintain some modicum of a sleep schedule.

A recap of the Thanksgiving weekend:

  • It’s always nice to see family over the break. But I always feel sad afterwards, and it has nothing to do with departing from them…
  • Full Black Friday purchases: 20 AA batteries and 20 AAA batteries from Amazon.
  • Also a digital camera for my mom.
  • Stanford WVB somehow captured a share of the Pac 10 title when Cal lost another game. Stanford has a 1 seed, and the 3rd seed overall. Pretty exciting stuff. Unfortunately, a certain holiday dance routine excludes my ability to attend the first playoff rounds.
  • Stanford football ended up with a school-best 11-1 record. Simply amazing. And the BCS computers love us, ranking us 4th compared to the voters who have us at 5th. It’ll be nice to have a guaranteed bowl spot, because us fans are lazy as hell and don’t travel. Just one more week. Rooting for Oregon to win their last game, since there’s no way to make the championship game now. It sucks that the Rose Bowl isn’t really possible. That would have been fun.
  • Bought these two violin songbooks from Amazon. They’re probably going to be terrible, but maybe they’ll be incredible. Pop music on the violin should be amusing, at least.
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Turnout? More like burnout.

Sometimes I wonder why I keep doing this, and this time I’m not talking about continuing to live this horrid life. My ankles and knees feel like they’re chewed up. And something deep in my left hip hurts; it feels pretty sore. I try to figure out a movement that will make it pop like a knuckle, but I just can’t do it. Hopefully it’s not anything serious.

My old orchestra conductor had this theory which I believe is true and applies to the learning of any skill. That it sounds somewhat Kuhnian probably adds to its compellingness. It says that progress comes in steps, with plateaus in between. The point being that there will be long stretches of time when little or no progress is seen, but you just have to push through because eventually you’ll reach that next jump and everything will seem awesome for a short while again, until you get stuck at the next plateau; but at least you’ll be higher at that point, and somehow that signifies that you’ve accomplished something in life.

Okay, so I realize that in an adult class, you’ll have dancers of varying skills; sometimes, professionals also attend the open classes, and, while it’s fun to watch them, it’s also sometimes soulcrushingly disheartening. However, I feel like there is something to be done about the state of ballet pedagogy: no matter how many times you don’t teach me how to do a brise, I won’t be able to learn it. It also irks me that we only spend 2 minutes on each combination. I understand that the ballet vocabulary is large, but I can’t help wondering if it would be easier to learn things if we concentrated on one or two steps a class for 15 minutes. But really, what the hell do I know about such things? Maybe I’m just being impatient.

Work has also picked up a little, which may also be a contributing factor to the general increase in the level of my tiredness. And since it (viz., my tiredness) already started out at such vaunted levels, one cannot but think that that also contributes to a decided lack of vim in the later hours of the day.

Also, I’m beginning to get a little scared that I’ll fuck something up for my Clara and ruin a girl’s dream, etc. Even the gods don’t know how I’ll survive doing an acting role, or how I ended up in one…

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Things on my mind

  • I haven’t been able to write anything recently. I don’t know why. My brain’s typically a mess, but I feel more addled than usual. And also more tired. Why am I so tired?
  • Learned a new word at work today: elide. Don’t know who the smartass was that decided to sneak that one in some documentation, but it’s a nice word. It seems strange to think how few words we consciously know we’re learning at this age. Coincidentally, coworkers and I were talking about how many words a typical person knows, and it’s supposed to be somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000. Which means at some point in our lives, we were learning like 5 new words a day on average. Maybe we just don’t realize it anymore, but it seems like the only time I’ve consciously picked up words in the last few years is studying vocabulary for the GRE. And even then, a couple new words a day was a chore.
  • KOIT is already starting with the Christmas music. I don’t understand why holiday music can’t wait until after Thanksgiving.