I’ve earned my first blood blisters!

(and other happy things)

Last night I went contra dancing for the second time.  Contra dancing is fun because you can get good just by being spun around AND because you end up dancing with everyone. In fact, I only danced once with the boys that I came with. Every single other dance I was claimed immediately by one of the men there. Actually, SP had to reserve me a dance before, and then I had to turn down three men saying “oh, I already have a partner for this dance.” It made me think I was in a Jane Austen novel. Usually at a dance, I get frustrated because there aren’t enough guys. Last night, however, I was frustrated (mildly) that I couldn’t dance more with my boys because I was always taken. It was a singular predicament.

One of the older men said it was a pleasure to watch me dance. That made me smile. A few remarked how this couldn’t be my first time. They didn’t believe it was my second time either until I told them I did ballroom.

I danced barefoot because my shoes restricted the movement a little too much. (“Well, you’re a lively one to dance with.”). After three hours, it felt as though I had taken sand paper to the balls of my feet.

Did that stop me? No. I had a wonderful night with my ballroomies and friends!

Other happy things, you ask?

1. I passed statistics!
2. I am DONE with my semester!
3. My friend Sarah graduates from A&M today!
4. …and last but not least, my friend Alicia IS GETTING MARRIED. 😀

Life is awesome. 

Unexpected Effects of Winter

When I first moved to Ithaca, I understood that winter was going to be an entirely different experience. I realized that I would need to learn different ways of dressing and driving.

Fast forward four months. I have spent nearly everyday in long sleeves, scarves, tights, slacks, boots, and gloves–respecting the visceral need to minimize the amount of exposed skin. In this cold, exposure equals pain.

My body thankfully has begun to adapt to the cold.  Oddly enough, however, my mind is adapting to the idea of my body as merely a collection of clothing.
I have hands and a face, and the rest of my body doesn’t exist.

I had ventured out for so long under all this protection that when I dressed one night for dance practice, something felt really, really wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something about the way I looked made me feel really uncomfortable. After a few minutes of staring at myself in the mirror, it hit me: I could see my neck and (gasp!) my collar bones. I immediately put my turtleneck back on.

Seriously? I can hear certain friends of mine laughing right now. I myself find it incredulous that I would feel immodest showing off my neck. Six months ago in the triple-digit heat of Texas, I felt perfectly covered wearing tank tops and shorts. Now, I shudder at the thought of showing that much skin.

I had a ballroom competition yesterday. I wore my maroon dress that quite obviously shows all of my arms and a good part of my décolleté. I felt extraordinarily self-conscious. And my Latin dress…well, at least I know I still have legs.

Should a sense of modestly depend on where we are? Obviously there are traditional guidelines for how a respectable woman should dress that I’ve tried to follow throughout my life. But beyond that, is modesty also an attitude, a way of carrying myself, a sense of propriety?

Why do I still feel weird about this?

Socially Confused: Where am I?

One of the most interesting aspects of my adjustment to life at Cornell is determining where I fit in socially. As one of only a few graduate students admitted straight from college, I’m about 5 years younger than most of my colleagues. This is wonderful, and I love getting the benefit of their experience. During my “work” week, I interact with them professionally and feel quite grown up.

Then we get to my interactions with the undergraduates. Thanks to ballroom, I am good friends with freshmen and sophomores. While I’m dancing, I feel light-hearted and encouraged, and I remember Lechner and all the fun, awkward, nerdy things that happened in that dorm. Switching back to professionalism, I am now a TA for a group of juniors and seniors. These kids are older than my ballroom friends, but I interact with them as a mentor and not as a friend.

It’s like that experiment when you put one hand it hot water and one hand in cold water and then put them both in a bowl of room temperature water. Even though both hands feel the same water, the water feels boiling hot to the hand that was in cold water and freezing cold to the hand that was in hot water. I’m only one person, but I feel so much older or younger when I’m playing different roles.

If this weekend is any indication, my semester is going to full of social engagements. Homemade pad thai and a live band with my nutrition ladies describes my Friday night. Despite the snow, we made it down to The Haunt, a local music bar. From 7-9, a live band rocked 80’s classics while older couples with a few drinks in their systems rocked the dance floor. We were obviously the young ones in the crowd. The tide shifted almost exactly at 9 as an invasion of skankily dressed college kids flooded the bar. We stared agape at them and at ourselves as the realization hit that we were no longer part of them either.

On Saturday, I went contra dancing with my ballroomies. I had never been contra dancing and had no prior expectation. It was three and a half hours of pure awesomeness. Seriously, it was the funnest thing ever. Here is a video of one of the dances we did. I start out in the bottom right hand corner dancing with the boy in a skirt and pigtails. I’m wearing a dark teal turtleneck and brown pants, and my hair is down. See me? Before each dance, the caller walks us through each movement slowly (so there’s no experience required), and then the band starts up. We have “partners” whom we stay with for the entire dance and “neighbors” that change during the dance. In this way, we interact with multiple people during each dance. Fast forward to 4:19. I am now under the second lampshade structure dancing with Standard Partner. At 5:15, the music takes a tango turn.

During the hours of dancing, I interacted with my undergrad ballroomies, a few grad students, and a bunch of older men. Dancing equalizes, and we were all simply partners despite our differences in age.

In summary, I have undergraduate friends. I have undergraduate students. I have graduate friends and graduate teachers. Where does the intimacy of friendship crash against the boundaries of professionalism? With whom can I appropriately feel “young” and with whom do I have to be “mature”?

I love that I have this quandary. I am blessed with relationships with people of all ages and all levels of professionalism. But where am I, and what are the implications?

On blistered feet

In my posts about dancing, I failed to mention the only downside–my feet were destroyed! I had bought a pair of Standard shoes at DCDI and had been breaking them in for the past two weeks. As additional protection, I taped up my feet just as if I were about to spar. To no avail. After the first round of practice quickstep, the shoes had rubbed off the skin on the back of my heel, and blisters began to form on my toes. I re-bandaged my feet using both band-aids and sports tape. For good measure, I asked for a pair of nylon cutoffs that the shoe vendors offered and wore those, too.

Now my feet are no strangers to pain. Years of sparring and one pilgrimage later, I’d like to say that my feet are pretty tough.

I tried to compare the pain I felt after dancing to the pain after a Tae Kwon Do tournament. During a tournament, the bottoms of my feet would get torn up by the mat, and the tops would get bruised by elbows and hips and knees. Each kick would send shocks of pain through my instep and ankle and sometimes knee. My feet would be red and purple and raw.

Not to mention along the Camino, I pretty much had to perform minor surgery on my blisters every night.

Dancing in standard shoes, however, is like being subjected to a medieval torture device. Think of Esmeralda’s torture in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Ok, maybe I’m being a little dramatic. The adrenaline of competing distracted me from the pain, but between rounds, each step was pure agony. I relished the moment I extracted my swollen feet from those shoes. I haven’t worn them since.

Experiencing that magnitude of foot pain once again made me appreciate of what exactly my body is capable. Look at any athlete’s foot, and you’ll see pain. Look at a ballet dancer’s foot. Same story. Athletic beauty via proper form originates from the feet–the foundation.

“In life as in dance, grace glides on blistered feet.” –Alice Abrams

In any area of life, the proper foundation is just as essential. And it gets just as beat up. My academic foundation trembles under the weight of all the unanswered questions. My emotional foundation is about as solid as storm-weathered ship manned with scurvy-ridden sailors. But this pain and exhaustion prove that I’m doing something right. I’m pushing beyond the boundaries of my own abilities. I’m discovering of what I’m capable and then forging ahead to create both physical and intellectual beauty.

I think I can handle a few blisters on my physical foundation. Little bit of tape, little bit of bandaging, and we’re good to go.

Beauty of chaos

Tonight by tea candlelight, I curled up in my papasan chair with Sync by Steven Strogatz in an attempt to get familiar with chaos theory. Ever since discussing it in my Theories class, I’ve been fascinated by the notion of chaos, so I chose to write my final paper on chaos theory as applied to iron nutrition. This paragraph floored me.

This description, although correct mathematically, does not begin to convey the marvel of synchronized chaos. To appreciate how strange this phenomenon is, picture the variables of a chaotic system as modern dancers. By analogy with the Lorenz equations, their names are x, y and z. Every night they perform onstage, playing off one another, each responding to the slightest cues of the other two. Though their turns and gestures seem choreographed, they are not. On the other hand, they are certainly not improvising, at least not in the usual sense of the word. There’s nothing random in how they dance, no element of chance or whimsy. Given where the others are at any moment, the third reacts according to strict rules. The genius is in the artfulness of the rules themselves. They ensure that the resulting performance is always elegant but never monotonous, with motifs that remind but never repeat. The performance is different from minute to minute (because of aperiodicity) and from night to night (because of the butterfly effect), yet it is always essentially the same, because it always follows the same strange attractor.

Perhaps this is why I wish to be both a scientist and a dancer. Perhaps this is what compelled me to take modern and ballet and social ballroom classes at A&M and now compels me towards competitive ballroom here at Cornell–chaos is my unifying theory.

Ohio adventures

I have now had 19 hours of sleep and a shower.

This weekend, nothing went according to plan, but everything worked out. The team met outside of Helen Newman on Friday to wait for the bus to take us to Ohio. All that morning, I’d been paranoid that my Standard Partner (SP from now on) wouldn’t show up. No reason why; this boy is perfectly responsible. I just was freaking out. I had to stop myself from emailing and texting him asking if he was going to be there. I was so relieved when he showed up.

My Latin partner had notified me two weeks ago that he was unable to go to Ohio due to school work. I wasn’t aware of anyone else who needed a partner, so I planned on going TBA (dancers who need partners put their names and numbers on a sheet at the competition and find each other). While waiting for the bus, I happily discovered that one of the boys on the team did not have a Latin partner either, so we paired up. Yay, I would at least get to dance with someone I knew.

After a hellish (9 hour) bus ride, we arrived at Columbus, Ohio, and checked into the hotel. Even though it was 1am, I agreed to explore the city with two friends, and we set out. We found all the government buildings and explored the river.

The next morning, my TBA partner and I danced Latin. We didn’t make it to the second round for Cha Cha or Jive, but I was ok with this considering that we hadn’t practiced together at all.

After we finished, I wanted to change out of my Latin dress into more comfortable clothes. The hotel was only a block away. I thought I could handle walking one block without anything happening. But no.

Two men cross the street toward me:
“Dang girl you must be cold”
“You a model baby?”
“Damn, you’re a fine one.”

Awwwwwwwwwwwwkward. Why I continue to walk anywhere unescorted is beyond me.

Competing in the Ohio Star Ball granted us admission to watch the professional dancers. This event was so fancy that we had to wear full formal attire just to watch. I wore my “black-maiden-of-death” dress–cape and everything. Our Cornell group sat together in awe of these dancers. We critiqued the costumes and the movements and looked out for collisions. Our Latin coaches, Nikolai and Tatiana, and our Standard coach, Ronen, were both competing.

The most memorable dance was Nikolai and Tatiana’s rumba to Losing My Religion. Even though there were other wonderful couples on the floor, my eyes were glued to them. It was the most beautifully sensual dance I’d ever seen.

SP and I left after about three hours of watching. He was exhausted and needed to sleep. I didn’t think anything of it until the next morning when he texted me telling me that he had gotten food poisoning and had been ill all night. No dancing for him. I was really sad not to be dancing with him. Fortunately for me, another boy on the team (SP2) lost his partner to illness as well. Since we had about 3 hours before our heat, we immediately started to practice.

Now, SP2 is 6’4″. I am 5’4″. It was nearly impossible for me to keep up with him. Even in 2″ heels, I was hopelessly short. We practiced the waltz, the quickstep, and the tango. SP and I had had a better connection for the waltz and the quickstep, but SP2 had a better lead in the tango. (My cortes felt amazing.) I had to learn the subtleties of his lead. Each boy had a slightly different way of leading, and certain signals meant different things. When it was finally time for us to compete, we made it to the Quarter-finals for quickstep. Not bad. 🙂

So even though I didn’t get to dance with either one of my normal partners, my TBA partners and I had lots of fun. It was nice to hang out with the team, too, and just take a break from life in Ithaca. Thanksgiving this weekend, then another competition at Columbia next weekend, then a weekend of studying, and then home! Dance has sure made this semester fly!