Discovering New Muscles

Well, the new ballet teacher isn't really a ballet Nazi because he's quite nice and very encouraging, and he kept insisting that we needed to relax because this is supposed to be fun. But I am in terrible pain at the moment. I think every part of my body hurts, down to my little toes and pinkie fingers. After all this dance, I thought I knew every muscle in my body, but I have discovered new ones. And they hurt most of all.

It's not so much that the class was tough (which it was). But he's very precise and focused a lot on technique. We were doing more difficult stuff, but he was making sure we were doing it exactly right, and I think we'd all gotten into some lazy habits or maybe hadn't quite learned it the right way in the first place (in my case). These were tiny adjustments that ended up making a big difference in how things worked, but they meant that slightly different muscles or muscle groups were being used. I was also pretty tense because it was a new teacher and I was by far the oldest student and the least experienced one and I am something of a perfectionist. That's probably why my shoulders and back are sore.

My normal teacher mostly tells us what to do with our feet and legs with some suggestions about arms, and then we can do what works for us. This guy was telling us exactly what to do, right down to head and hands, which meant retaining and processing a lot more information. I will probably be a far better dancer by the end of the summer, but for today, I'm barely mobile.

But that's okay because this is going to be a writing marathon day. I'm so very close to the end of the book, moving into what should be the Big, Climactic Scene of the whole story. Unfortunately, the end of the book fell into a busy week when I can't just shut out the world and finish. Today I have nothing going on (so I hope to make progress), but tomorrow evening I'm going out with a group of women from church to see Mamma Mia, then there's a concert I want to go to Friday night, followed by the weekly explosions at the lake, and then my friends are planning a big movie day on Saturday. Depending on book progress and whether I'm socialed out by that point, I may or may not make it to the Saturday event.

I'm already getting the other "near the end of the book" symptoms, like suddenly wanting to Clean and Organize All the Things! And wanting to make plans for other stuff. Strangely, another book hasn't yet popped into my head, demanding to be written. That may mean it's a good time to take a little time off and clear my head (and clean my house) before jumping back into a new project. This week, I should pass the number of hours I spent writing all last year, so I'm doing pretty well, but that also explains why I'm a little tired.

I mean, other than dancing tired this morning. There was one funny thing from class: I was having trouble with a step because it's essentially a waltz-like step, but I'm so used to ballroom dancing the waltz that it's hard for me to do it forward (since the woman dances backward most of the time in a ballroom). When I said that, the teacher got me in a dance hold and we waltzed around the classroom. I still had trouble with the step, but a waltz was fun.