SYTYCD: My guilty pleasure revealed
I finally got around to watching the finale of "So You Think You Can Dance" tonight, and came to several conclusions. First, I need to re-enroll in dance lessons of some kind. I did ballet as a kid (badly) then moved on to cheerleading (train wreck) and finally tried out for the dance team in high school. I made it on what my coach described as "enough enthusiasm in your face to make up for the mistakes you made with your feet." A couple of friends and I formed what we called "the back row crew," so called because we were both tall enough to enable us to stand in back and clumsy enough to necessitate it. Despite my slight lack of rhythm, I did okay on the dance team. I'm very flexible and have inhumanly long legs; an excellent combination for dancing. I discovered Broadway and ballroom styles around the same time, and these I can do with some finesse. In Italy, I took jazz dance lessons, which both allowed me to eat obscene amounts of carbs and not gain weight, but helped me realize I was neither a natural-born dancer (like several of my sickeningly talented classmates) or a total dolt (like several of my entertaining ones). This summer, I took my students salsa dancing, and we had a blast. Especially when one of my students and I tore up the dance floor once I discovered he was both strong enough and coordinated enough to do lifts and side swings with me. Moral of the story: my gym has free classes (well, included with membership) in bellydancing (which I've taken before, and love), salsa, and jazz/hip-hop fusion. Methinks I'll try out a few and see what happens.
The second realization was somewhat more sobering.
One of the judges' favorite dances was one about addiction. The dance was beautiful, the music touching, the costumes stunning, but the combined effect of all three created a stunning package. I watched, breathless, as my mom sat beside me and went, "I don't get it. I don't think that looks like addiction at all." No, mom. You wouldn't. But that dance looked exactly like addiction to me. The female dancer, the addicted, was pushed, pulled, thrown, vaulted, grabbed, restrained, fought and fraught with the man acting as her addiction. The powerlessness of the female grabbed me. Her frustrated, fruitless fight had me nodding in understanding. Because that's what a great dance sequence should make you do: feel and understand and want more when it ends.
I'm the first to admit I have an incredibly addictive personality. I can become addicted to food, people, experiences, feelings even. If something or someone makes me feel a way I like (or not feel a way I don't), I'll seek more of it. I think, to some extent, that's the natural human condition. But I find myself obsessing, conniving, finding ways to get more, to have more. IT, whatever IT is at the moment, takes over, and it becomes an obsession. My freshman year in college, IT was my carpet. I had a new carpet, and it pleased me, the way it was so fresh and clean and smooth. I would spend hours (literally, over 2 hours) vaccuuming and brushing it down with duct tape to remove every teensy speck of dirt or hair or dust and if someone walked on it, I flipped. I literally kicked people out of my room for walking on my carpet. I was addicted. Obsessed. If I find an author I like, I have to read every single thing he or she has ever written. It may take me a year or more, but I'll get through his or her repertoire, and feel personally offended if there's something he or she wrote that I don't like. You name it, I can find a way to obsess over it: hair color, purses, shoes, jackets, a certain type of food, drink, place, person (especially people), even habits and tendencies.
I never just like or enjoy anything. I go big, or go home. I go until it consumes me, until I hate that which I previously loved. I'm a person of extremes; I've said that here before. And maybe that's why the addiction dance resonated so strongly with me. It was extreme. It went all the way in and then threw itself back out again. I'm like that, too. I never half-ass anything. It's all the way or not at all. And I'm fully aware of the dangers of that tendency. Is it safer to drink one glass of wine than the whole bottle? Of course it is, but that half a bottle or little bit in the bottom looks, no, feels incomplete. It feels wrong, unfinished. I can't put a book down in the middle. I can't take one drag. I can't "just try it." And by the same token, I can't ease myself out of things either. Cold turkey, or I don't stop.
Take working out for example. I had to stop (for medical reasons), and it killed me on several different levels. I felt physically disgusting, and emotionally distraught. I was a wreck. Cranky, irritable, easily annoyed, easily startled. Like my drug had been taken away, because in a way, it had. And when I was cleared to go back again, I was told to ease back in. So I did. I tried. But within weeks, I was right back again, full force. Counting and tallying and bargaining with myself again. I run until I throw up sometimes, I lift until my muscles are screaming and sweat is running into my eyes. If my heart doesn't batter its way out of my chest, I don't feel like I've done enough. If I haven't exceeded my personal threshold, I can't stop. Something in me won't let it go, and I'll beat myself up until I can rectify it. Obsessed. Addicted.
It's a vicious cycle, one I wish I could stop sometimes, but I can't. It's not in my nature. All or nothing. God help me, I'm an addictive sort of girl. So I could feel what that dance was saying. The pain of losing control over something you had originally taken on as a pleasure, recreation. That moment when you realize the substance you used as your release won't release you from its vicelike clutches.
I don't know where I'm going with this. Or if I'm going anywhere at all. I meant to get into the incredibly disturbing dream I had last night, but never really got around to it. Maybe later. As it is, it's bedtime. Until later, my friends. Be well.
The second realization was somewhat more sobering.
One of the judges' favorite dances was one about addiction. The dance was beautiful, the music touching, the costumes stunning, but the combined effect of all three created a stunning package. I watched, breathless, as my mom sat beside me and went, "I don't get it. I don't think that looks like addiction at all." No, mom. You wouldn't. But that dance looked exactly like addiction to me. The female dancer, the addicted, was pushed, pulled, thrown, vaulted, grabbed, restrained, fought and fraught with the man acting as her addiction. The powerlessness of the female grabbed me. Her frustrated, fruitless fight had me nodding in understanding. Because that's what a great dance sequence should make you do: feel and understand and want more when it ends.
I'm the first to admit I have an incredibly addictive personality. I can become addicted to food, people, experiences, feelings even. If something or someone makes me feel a way I like (or not feel a way I don't), I'll seek more of it. I think, to some extent, that's the natural human condition. But I find myself obsessing, conniving, finding ways to get more, to have more. IT, whatever IT is at the moment, takes over, and it becomes an obsession. My freshman year in college, IT was my carpet. I had a new carpet, and it pleased me, the way it was so fresh and clean and smooth. I would spend hours (literally, over 2 hours) vaccuuming and brushing it down with duct tape to remove every teensy speck of dirt or hair or dust and if someone walked on it, I flipped. I literally kicked people out of my room for walking on my carpet. I was addicted. Obsessed. If I find an author I like, I have to read every single thing he or she has ever written. It may take me a year or more, but I'll get through his or her repertoire, and feel personally offended if there's something he or she wrote that I don't like. You name it, I can find a way to obsess over it: hair color, purses, shoes, jackets, a certain type of food, drink, place, person (especially people), even habits and tendencies.
I never just like or enjoy anything. I go big, or go home. I go until it consumes me, until I hate that which I previously loved. I'm a person of extremes; I've said that here before. And maybe that's why the addiction dance resonated so strongly with me. It was extreme. It went all the way in and then threw itself back out again. I'm like that, too. I never half-ass anything. It's all the way or not at all. And I'm fully aware of the dangers of that tendency. Is it safer to drink one glass of wine than the whole bottle? Of course it is, but that half a bottle or little bit in the bottom looks, no, feels incomplete. It feels wrong, unfinished. I can't put a book down in the middle. I can't take one drag. I can't "just try it." And by the same token, I can't ease myself out of things either. Cold turkey, or I don't stop.
Take working out for example. I had to stop (for medical reasons), and it killed me on several different levels. I felt physically disgusting, and emotionally distraught. I was a wreck. Cranky, irritable, easily annoyed, easily startled. Like my drug had been taken away, because in a way, it had. And when I was cleared to go back again, I was told to ease back in. So I did. I tried. But within weeks, I was right back again, full force. Counting and tallying and bargaining with myself again. I run until I throw up sometimes, I lift until my muscles are screaming and sweat is running into my eyes. If my heart doesn't batter its way out of my chest, I don't feel like I've done enough. If I haven't exceeded my personal threshold, I can't stop. Something in me won't let it go, and I'll beat myself up until I can rectify it. Obsessed. Addicted.
It's a vicious cycle, one I wish I could stop sometimes, but I can't. It's not in my nature. All or nothing. God help me, I'm an addictive sort of girl. So I could feel what that dance was saying. The pain of losing control over something you had originally taken on as a pleasure, recreation. That moment when you realize the substance you used as your release won't release you from its vicelike clutches.
I don't know where I'm going with this. Or if I'm going anywhere at all. I meant to get into the incredibly disturbing dream I had last night, but never really got around to it. Maybe later. As it is, it's bedtime. Until later, my friends. Be well.