Attack of distractions – letting go of my psych doc – what Floridians think of as “cold” – dance: shifting weight and balance.
Adventures du jour!
I am struggling to concentrate on writing fiction today:
All the yoga.
All the difficult books.
Worked on secret project for an hour.
Wrote for two hours on a friend thing.
Went to a cemetery to walk and take photos, then posted same.
Went nuts on Midjourney prompts.
Answered emails.
Danced around madly (this usually helps but not today).
My psych doc chose to do one more unprofessional thing, so I decided to cut ties with her. And now I’m out of meds and trying to decide whether or how badly I need them. Really, I should just go to a regular doc and get everything checked out, but Imma wait until after January, when the plan gets renewed and I have less to worry about things being suddenly disrupted.
I’m disappointed about my psych doctor. I truly feel like she helped me while she was working with me. She could be frustrating at times, but essentially every time I talked to her, I made a big step forward.
But I can’t run her business for her. I don’t want to work with her as a businessperson, and that makes me think I shouldn’t work with her as a therapist, either. She didn’t take the time to ensure that her problems (getting insurance to go through on her end) were not my problems in the first place, to find out why her problems were crossing over into my problems and stopping that, or even to acknowledge that her problems were spilling over and becoming my problems.
Ironically, she’s the one who was on my butt to make sure that I didn’t let my sympathies overtake my good boundaries.
Anyway: bleah.
Today’s just going to have to be today. Everything feels twitchy and jagged. I’m moving too fast, yet time keeps getting away from me. I blink and it’s gone.
Yesterday: the big thing was finishing the difficult chapter I was on, on the big WIP. An important character has just been killed off and the bad guys just got stupider, more vulnerable, and more dangerous. The Goob is up next, but he keeps telling me that it’s not his scene but Mr. Assassin’s. But what’s he supposed to be doing?
The Goob just keep holding his hands out and shaking his head. *You figure it out.*
Great, thanks.
Yesterday on the walk, a guy who works at the next apartment complex over stopped his golf cart to stare at me and finally said, “Aren’t you *cold*?!?” I was wearing my normal outfit with capris and a cotton shirt over a tee shirt. It was sixty-five degrees. He was wearing a puffer jacket and looked genuinely cold, the zipper zipped up all the way to his chin.
I said, “I’m from up north.”
Off he went, shaking his head.
I am sore all over from the stuff I added to yoga in the mornings. But getting up, putting on music, dancing a song or two helps. I’ve pretty much just added “try dancing” to my list of things to do when my “human-being.exe” program isn’t working.
Drink water?
Have you slept?
How about something to eat and a shower?
Dance yet?
And so on.
I also picked up another technique from a dance video, about passing weight/balance from foot to foot.
If you stand on one foot, then your weight is over that foot, and you are balancing on that leg. If you stand on your other foot, you have moved your weight/balance to the other side.
So what I picked up on, as I tried to follow along with this guy’s feet (as much as I could), was that I wasn’t moving my weight or shifting my balance as much as I thought I was.
I was twiddling around with my feet, my steps. Ratta tatta squish squish. But my weight and balance were pretty much just staying put. Which is okay, but not the only option.
So I started moving my weight and balance around more. I’ve been working on balance a lot lately, so I can.–This is probably part of the reason I was stupid sore all over this morning.
Brief discursion, what I know about dance:
(Actual dancers know loads more than this! But are also usually pretty bad at explaining it with words instead of movement! So I’m giving it a go! Because I are good at words!)
Underneath a lot of different types of dance is the idea of moving “energy” around or holding it in place. If you hold your two hands in front of you and imagine a ball of “energy” between them (as in tai chi), then shift that ball of “energy” around in time to music while recording it, then you will look like you’re dancing. Perhaps awkwardly, but dancing.
Each type of dance has its own types of “energy” movement. The Charleston squishes bugs, darling! Ballet floats off the ground and moves like air: graceful puffs of air move the arms around or spins dancers around like whirlwinds. Pop and lock movements recreate the stiff, jerky, angular movements of a robot. Tap dancing scrapes and kicks icky things off the bottom of their shoes while laughing: “Take that, filth!” (Sweet Charity’s The Aloof is probably Posturing Bird With Long Neck energy.) Street dance is a mix of styles, popularized by the public rather than dictated by schools of dance; freestyle is shifting through styles fluidly, one second using ballet techniques (for example) and the next using pop and lock.
This idea of “energy” is essentially just a metaphor, a way of simplifying what you’re doing using a higher-level organizing concept so you can make choices quickly.
The exact metaphor varies. “Is this a legitimate pop and lock movement?” “Does it recreate a stiff, jerky, angular movement a robot might use?” “Yes!” “Then whether or not anyone else has ever used that movement before, it is legitimate.”–You have to make this kind of choice in a split second, because if you’re dancing you’re in the middle of falling (or otherwise shifting your balance) and you have to catch yourself in time for the next beat.
Anyway…
The thing I started doing was treating my feet as though they weren’t just pillars for me to stand on (bent or straight or one legged or hopping or whatever), but similar to my hands, able to pass “energy” back and forth in order to affect weight and balance. Which means a lot more lunges, spins, balance poses, etc.
And *lot* more core work.
Ow.
But suddenly it became easier to follow what dancers are doing in videos. When they try to explain things, I still just want to slap them. But I can now watch and at least kind of follow along.
Bonus, it also became weirdly easy to identify which music videos are meant to be danced along to. I’d already been grasping which songs are meant to be sung along to rather than listened to, but now I can “read” the movements, too.–This shift in weight is what makes the Daniel Craig vodka ad so elegant and playful (and tricky). Same with the “Weapon of Choice” video with Christopher Walken. “All the Single Ladies” keeps Beyonce’s shifts in balance and weight to a minimum (deliberately, I’ve heard) to make it more danceable. (Watch the side dancers for the “advanced” version.) Beyonce is a pretty good dancer, so she sells it with style. “Bad Romance” is also very simple, if offbeat.
My favorite is Pink’s “Try,” which is just magnificent, an aggressive pas de deux that recreates a vicious argument by a couple. I was watching the American Music Awards show live at the time for some reason, and saw and heard the song performed for the first time that way.
No cuts in the filming to hide stunt doubles or weak skills, no mercy in catching good angles. And barefoot, which now makes me look at their feet and go, “Did they…chalk their feet?” I hope they did. I still have a blister hole in the bottom of one foot from deciding I didn’t really need socks like two weeks ago.
I wish I still had my hobbit feet from growing up on a farm.
Someday.
A cemetery that felt full of love, that had me teared up all day.
