I haven’t danced in more than two weeks and I feel like such a slob. Sure, I’ve stretched and marked a bit in my living room, but it’s been too long since I’ve really beat up a floor. My leg is feeling much better but not perfect, and I’m scared of pushing myself too hard too soon for fear of re-tearing the muscle and really putting myself out of commission. I’ll be back in class this week, but only for an hour instead of my usually three or four. I think it’s best to ease back into things.
In the meantime, I’ve shifted my attention to some of my other hobbies. I had neglected Matt (my guitar) while preparing for the show so I need to catch up. I still haven’t got the solea falsetas down so I’ll continue to work on those, but now Walter is teaching me alegrias. He’s also teaching me to read tablature, which is a challenge in itself. When he was explaining it, it made perfect sense. When I got home and tried it on my own, I just stared at the page and cursed. And while I talked myself through it and figured it out, the process of looking at the tabs, translating it in my head, and making my fingers do what they should is a painfully slow one. “It takes time!” he says. I find this both reassuring and frustrating.
I’m also forcing myself to get back to writing. Well, not forcing myself to write, but forcing myself to make time to write. “But Marissa, you blog every week … is that not writing?” Yes, it is, but it’s more like keeping a very public diary than writing creatively. I’ve had a lot of crazy ideas for some time, but haven’t gotten around to putting them on a page. Time to get back to basics. I’m a writer before anything else. I forgot that for a minute. Here I am spending all this time and energy learning to dance and play guitar, and not putting any time into doing the one thing I already know how to do.
Maybe by getting some of this stuff out of my head and into a notebook I’ll have more brain space for, say, learning tablature. Or maybe not. I’m not going to over think, though; just going to do it. Even if I write just a few words every day … words turn to lines that turn to pages that turn to volumes, right?
Married to the Dance 