The Day I Hit A Wall

You know sometimes you reach a point where things maybe have been stressful for a while, you've been working too hard, you get caught up in all the business of life, and it slowly takes a toll on you until one day you just stop? Your brain shuts down, maybe you get emotionally drained, you just can't deal anymore. And they call that "hitting a wall."

Yeah, but I hit a wall.

No, I literally hit a wall.

No, I mean, I literally ran my body into a brick wall.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we? So, if you read yesterday's blog, you know today was going to be epic. It didn't disappoint. Well, turns out today was also accident day for Jo. I got to class with Susan, very excited to work with her. She asked me to lead warmups, knowing my background training in movement that I got in undergrad from Leslie Felbain (as the two of them are close friends, not to mention the reason I heard about this program). So I'm leading these warmups, we do our stretching, I can't get anyone to make any kind of vocal noise but whatever. Susan asks me to get everyone moving around the space, so I'm having us walk around, now walk faster, now walk faster, now jog, now---OUCH! Somehow I manage to step on a piece of glass and get it caught in my foot. So, the energy of the warmups is broken and I'm bleeding. Great. Now I look really competent.

Fast forward. The day has been fun, we did our birthday stuff, I've gotten a baidaid, we're all happy. Lectures go well and all, and we get to the workshop part of our day. We begin an activity in which we all stand in one corner of the room. In the diagonally opposite corner stands the workshop leader. The directions: Close your eyes. Run at the opposite corner as fast as you can. This leader will tell you when to stop. The idea is that people will start out running fast, but will get scared and will slow down and stop themselves before they get anywhere near the corner. So, the first people take their trip across, and they don't disappoint. Getting worried that they have been running too long they pull themselves up short before they are anywhere near the corner, usually accompanied by flailing arms, whiny noises, laughter, and small screams of fear.

Now here is an interesting observation. Maybe it is from my cultural upbringing as an American, or perhaps my experience of having to do so many seemingly weird or scary things in acting classes, perhaps my Napoleon complex. But apparently I am fearless. So, eyes close, I start to run, I listen for the leader to say stop...

Now my kneecap has a kneecap. I think they call these hematomas. Fortunately at the time I had my sweatpants rolled up so they were thickest around the knee, acting almost like kneepads, so maybe I got off lucky. Well, lucky is that I hit the brick wall knee first, and not face first, because otherwise we'd currently be checking out how well Britain's universal healthcare deals with broken noses. Or facial reconstruction.

After class we head off to the pub. There we get into an interesting conversation about love, marriage, babies, not unsimilar to an ongoing conversation I've been having with one of my best girlfriends. So, I pose a question. Is it truly possible for two people to be in a lifelong monogamous relationship and be totally faithful and happy? Now, I have a lot of feelings about this, and I have heard a lot of opinions, and I'd love to hear more. I'm truly curious as to peoples' answers.

So, with my head reeling and my heart feeling all twisted up and funny from this talk, I walk to ballroom. Hooray ballroom, the cure for-- as soon as I got into the room I shoebrushed (ballroom dancers use little brushes made of metal barbs to scrape the suede on the bottoms of their shoes when they get dirty and matted down) my hand and now have 5 slices on my left index finger. Are you kidding me.

Well, the injuries of the day were countered by two cool bits. The first one, I have a dance partner for one of the competitions this semester! An adorable friend of mine from the team has a new partner, but she can't make one of the comps, so he and I are going to dance! Now, I have none of my makeup or hair stuff, my costumes, or my competition shoes (or any Standard shoes for that matter) in this country, we've never practiced together, and we're not even the same level, but I don't care, I'm so excited! The countdown to November 8th begins!

My second bit of cool news:
www.danceumbrella.co.uk/festival%2009/BodiesPhotoComp09.htm


Shout out to the amazing hot bath I am about to go take while I try to stop the amazing amount of pain I am in!




But what I'm still confused about is why the leader never told me to stop running...