Unsolicited Advice

I've ruined the soles of my feet. My legs are stiff. I kind of don't care. I was in a dance studio this afternoon, doing salchows in both directions. It was not exactly mindless; there was a lot of looking at my feet, and the lines in the tongue-and-groove flooring, but not much at the mirror, and less at the clock. The motion is less a jump than a very fancy traveling step. You only need to be in the air so you can spin without having to force the blade around on the ice. You simply swing your free foot out in front of you and put it down again in the most roundabout possible fashion. This is quite bizarre for me. Repetition is the boring part. Doing it without a specific goal in mind is Sysiphean boulder-rolling for my brain. I've done dance and theatrical rehearsals; they're fun as events, because I get to see all the friends that are also in the show, and they're necessary work, but I do them in anticipation of the end goal: Performance. Merely learning chor...

I don't speak Russian. I actually mean that this time. Aside from "yes," "no," "please," and "thank you", I know maybe half a dozen words, all of them food. I have some minimal knowledge of how the grammar works, and a decent enough idea about the names to twitch when TV gets it wrong. I do know the Cyrillic alphabet well enough to read things aloud. Russian spelling is roughly phonetic, although not quite one-to-one; if you see it in print, you can take a pretty good stab at the pronunciation, but there are sometimes ambiguities in how you can spell something you've only heard. It doesn't help that Russia traditionally celebrates bloody regime changes by fucking with the orthography . Despite this, I'm persistently mistaken for a russophone. When it happened in Arizona, I just chalked it up to general ignorance, but then I moved to Boston and got the same thing from several native speakers of Russian. Inquiries get the answer t...

...so it turns out that axels are like the last jump you're supposed to learn on skates. Whoops. Chalk this up as another thing I've taught myself  mainly because I'm too stupid to know I can't really do that. Apparently you start with less ambitious things like waltz jumps and salchows. All righty then. A waltz jump is essentially a flying jump  starting and ending in opposing  arabesques . It's been a while since I tried hopping around with my foot way the hell up there, but it's doable. Easier clockwise, but entirely possible in both directions. All four directions, if you count variations in what way your skating foot is going. A salchow  is a toe-assisted jump that takes off straight out of a 3-turn -- skating forward along the wall on your inside foot, you turn towards the center of the rink, and then put your other foot (previously the wall foot) down going backwards instead, and curve back out along the wall. This generally preserves your momentum wh...

Apparently the universe really really wants me to learn figure skating. One of my friends on Facebook was complaining that she was bored senseless by her workout, so those of us who were awake at 2am were suggesting things that were less stupefying. I told her the last time I ran out of things to do, I started trying to figure out how to do axels on the floor. One of her friends asked if I was a figure skater, and about four exchanges later she was going SKATING IS THE BEST THING LET ME TEACH YOU IT! She used to skate competitively as a tween, but had to stop before she destroyed her knees and ankles. I want to see if it's really as much fun as it looks. She gets to be a coach, which is the traditional thing you do when you've had to retire from competition, and I get a few experimental lessons. I'm not going to let her do it for free forever -- maybe for cheap, but not for free -- but at least I can find out if I'm a wild hazard on the ice before committing. I did ...

I'm paying for all my studio fuckery on Monday. My launch leg is fine, probably because the jump mainly uses the same muscles as walking, and God knows I do enough of that. My landing foot is also fine -- see previous comment about walking, and note also that almost all of my good walking-around shoes have 1"-2" heels on them. My landing leg is sore in bits that Google informs me are the gluteus minimus and one of the adductor muscles. I would guess the former is from the half-circle rotation just before takeoff, and the latter from stopping the rotation and not falling flat on my face after touchdown. You apparently also use the adductors in your thigh when going up and down stairs. I got frequent reminders of this. Boston is made of stairs, especially if you ride around on the T. Central Square is very slippery right now. The skies opened up and dumped snow on us the other night, and though it hasn't been above freezing since then, there's a lot of foot tra...

Studio time this afternoon. You all get to hear more about figure skating because as it turns out my imagination was perfectly right about what all goes into an axel, albeit I am not particularly good at the motions. Yet. Explanations are not helpful because an axel does not actually launch off the lead toe. The right one, in my case. The power comes in way before that, and while it's probably possible to do one with a standing start if you've had a decade of experience, or are part tree frog, it's not especially easy. The weight shift is all weird. I know this because I tried from a standing start at first. The position a skater is in immediately before the jump is essentially a staggered plié , which I gather figure skaters call a 'check position' . I can jump one-footed from there, but it's ugly and I don't get far enough off the ground to swap feet. This baffled me; I've been doing changements for decades now, and I can flip feet perfectly godda...

Still sliding around in socks. Not a large place, my apartment, but all the floors are wood. I'm beginning to realize how irritating friction can be. Dancing is fun, but often I feel as if I weigh too much -- not that I'm too bulky for my frame, just that one of the more annoying properties of matter is that it has mass, upon which gravity can act. There are a surprising number of dance moves that involve making like your feet don't stick to the floor, which of course they do. That's the whole point of thick, ridged skin on your soles. It's grippy, like the stuff on your hands. It's... obstructive. I booked more studio time this week. I've done it before, but normally I just sort of go in there and stretch a lot and noodle around for a while, and when I leave I feel like I've accomplished a lot of nothing. I don't have any particular plan, and trying to choreograph something without a specific goal is a lot like those godawful assignments you get i...