Challenge Accepted

If nothing else the adult ballet blogging community keeps me motivated (this blog included). I am wretched at self-discipline. I basically have none. I have to trick myself in to keeping up with classes twice a week by paying in advance when I am not thinking about it. Oops! Nope! I already paid! I have to go! So, keeping up with doing pilates once a week and convincing myself to get down on the floor and stretch once a day has been ... well. I won't say it's been a challenge, because that would imply that I've been winning or overcoming or something. Honestly I've been pretty dreadful about it all.
One of the blogs I keep up with is written by an adult dancer who keeps making me feel awfully lazy about not getting my self-improvement on. I'm feeling terribly inspired by her 30 day challenges to herself and so I think I will steal the concept for the next month and attempt to work seriously and with focus on the little and annoying things I really need to improve. Balances and building up strength in my core/ab muscles, feet, and legs. I have been working on it here and there, but I forget about it more often than not. Perhaps having a goal and deadline in sight will encourage me to actually get on with it. There is nothing harder for me than trying to self-motivate for an inarticulate and foggy future purpose.

In ballet class news: we started doing cabrioles. Which is the name of a small model car from the 80s or something, isn't it? My spell checker informs me that, no, it was cabriolet. Well, fine then. Never mind. Cabrioles, on the other hand, are not anything like as easy as you would think. Also: stupidly painful with shin splints! There are days when I just can't figure out why I took up ballet. There is so much jumping! I should have taken a country line dancing class or something...

OKAY YOU KNOW WHAT? NEVER MIND. BALLET IS BEAUTIFUL.

Sigh...

One Of Those Days

So last night was one of those nights. You know the ones, where nothing works properly. And we got stuck with this fairly straight forward combination of glissades and assemblés (and if it includes the word "assemblé" then it can pretty much kiss my booty-bum in the first place. Every single movement made me hurt like it was going out of style), but then we switched to doing everything in reverse which screwed me up and I failed to complete a single one successfully even though she made us do them in sets of four THREE TIMES. BAH. Also, it didn't help that I got sandwiched against the wall standing uncomfortably close (like, not enough room for all of us to stand with our arms in second) to the two new girls in class, who honestly have no freakin' right to be in beginning ballet. If you have been taking class four days a week for 10 years then take your triple pirouettes and get outta my line of sight, bitches.
I mean "bitches" in the nicest possible way, of course.*
C'est la vie. As they say.
On a different note, I finally learned which "school" or "method" of ballet we are learning at my studio: Cecchetti. Not wildly unexpected, it's probably the most popular style in the US. I only found out when our teacher told us that Cecchetti looks for turned-out palms rather than the prettier (in my opinion) turned-down palms of Vaganova. Honestly, though, for adults I don't think it matters all that much. I still don't know what technique the first studio I went to teaches. They had a sort of strange third arm position.

* if you happen to be one of the new girls, don't take offense. Colorful metaphors in the name of artistic expression and all that. As I often say: if you've got it flaunt it. But, please... spare a moment to think about those of us with little to no natural coordination.

I gots the crazy moves

So I may or may not have recently been sort of grumping about how I am stuck in level 2 ballet class until the end of Summer, when I can move up without a conflicting work schedule. But then tonight the substitute teacher was all "okay! Now we are going to do pirouettes!" and I was like "WHAT?" and then EVERYONE ELSE IN CLASS totally pulled off a gorgeous pirouette. Out of thin air. I had just about gotten the preparation part down. Tendu to second! Tendu to fourth! I can do this! Pow! Passé, baby! And then I was supposed to ... what? To actually manage to spin around? Like... all the way around? WHAT?
And then maybe I almost fell over. Twice. The teacher said "were you trying to do a double, there?" and I sort of cringed and said "no" and then she said "oh, there is kind of a dip in the floor, there, maybe! You just got caught in the dip!"
I sure didn't see any dip. Dress it up however you want, the fact is that I just screwed it up.
It was pretty lame.