Life of a Dancing Engineer

All in all, my current schedule accounts for about 22 hours per week of dance, with about 2 hours of that spent warming-up, 2.25 hours spent in 3 private lessons, 3 hours spent in 4 group classes, 2.5 hours spent in am-am practice, 7.5 hours spent social dancing, and the remainder, about 5.25 hours spent practicing.

I have scheduled two days off from dance each week (though I sometimes do dance on Thursdays), leaving (transportation time slots not included) about 13 hours of time per week completely open and unplanned for (time to spend relaxing, thinking, shopping, cleaning, with friends, or doing *whatever I feel like*).

I have scheduled 40 hours per week in the office.

I have scheduled 64 hours of sleep per week, plus 2 hours of nap per week, totaling about 66 hours per week. In practice, I am almost never able to achieve this (to get to bed on time, or to sleep through the whole night). I’m very sleep sensitive, so if I got any less sleep than I do, I’d end up walking around like a total zombie.

I have scheduled 6 hours per week of wake-up/shower time. I’m slow to get ready in the morning. I even get 45 minutes for breakfast on Saturday! It would be nice to have this every day (I should find a way). That’s about 7 hours per week.

I have scheduled about 5 hours of set dinner time per week, and 4 hours of play time at home (hamsters, reading, hulu, facebook, phone, etc.).

22 + 13 + 40 + 66 + 7 + 5 + 4 = 157

That’s about 157 hours of time that is scheduled (even if it is scheduled as free time). That leaves about 11 hours of time that is unscheduled, but also can’t practically be used for much besides transportation between all the different places I spend most of my time (Home, Work, SuperShag, MIT, Ryles, and Burlington), overtime at work (ugh), snacking before dance, and maybe running the occasional errand.

All in all, dance gets a minority of my time each week. Sleep and work get the vast majority. But, dance is still #3 on the list, and of course, I can skip out on dance time if I’m ever not feeling it (though in practice, I crave more time on the dance floor, not less!).

Two days before the SuperShag invitational, I had a coaching session with Pat Traymore. In retrospect, I feel like I was more nervous dancing in front of Pat during our coaching session than I had been the first time she judged my dancing (and the first time I ever competed — about 2 months earlier), in San Diego. I was nervous because I knew I had improved immensely since she had first seen me, and because I knew she had traveled a long way to come coach and judge at our studio… I really didn’t want to let her down, I wanted to be my best in front of her. I think the only way to let her down would have been to not try, but I felt, going into it, that I needed to perform.

The lesson was wonderful! She is an amazing coach. And despite my being human and making mistakes, I learned no less than 10 fundamental things from her, which have all really impacted my dancing in the weeks since our session. I feel like I’ve made a night and day transformation just since then! Even just two days later at the invitational, my dancing was already much improved.

Given how amazing her technical coaching ability was, I was thinking of elaborating on some of the technical feedback she gave me for this post. I could easily make a whole post out of the ways she suggested I should squeeze my thighs together during rock steps and turns (and a myriad of other positions!) in the latin dances, or on her advice on maintaining forward posture for better connection in latin dances, on compressing my hips in East Coast Swing, on not being afraid of my height during underarm turns, on her suggestions on improving my posture in Tango (e.g. sliding into the corte without losing my height), and on using my long legs to my advantage in all the smooth dances (especially by taking longer, more sweeping side steps in Waltz), or on her arm styling techniques… and gosh, the list continues on!

However! In the end, I feel that one of the most important things she taught/reminded me, and one of the best and easiest things to share, was that “mistakes are to be cherished not avoided, because we can’t learn without mistakes.” – This is so true, I believe it, and often profess it to others in other aspects of life, but it seems I can never be reminded of it (or remind myself of it) often enough!

I have noticed the trend that as I start to excel at something, I seem to go through phases where I know where I am and what I’m capable of at that point. When I reach such a place, I find that it often irks me to fall back below that level. But of course, as Erik always points out, falling down is natural. Nobody ever just goes up and up and up without any dips. We real humans go up, and down, and the overall trend over time is up, but we always fluctuate up and down, day to day; we have good days and better days and bad days and worse days!

Being extremely self-critical, I usually fall on one of two polar ends of the spectrum with things…

…Either I admit to having no skill in something, and then for that activity, my expectations of myself are almost unreasonably low, because (I suppose) I can blame it on complete lack of experience.

…Or, on the other side of things, I know I’ve gotten somewhere with something, and I expect no less of myself than what I’ve achieved up to that point.

Somehow this hasn’t really prevented me from excelling at a few different hobbies in my life upto this point; but, I recognize that it is turning into a really counterproductive pattern in my dancing.

I think that it is great that I am very self-aware and can often know exactly what I’m doing wrong (out of the things I have learned so far) at any given moment… but sometimes, I need to be able to ignore that sense, and just practice one thing, without worring about all the other things that are falling apart as I focus on that one attribute of my technique. The mistakes are inevitable, so I believe (and Pat and Erik wholeheartedly agree) that if I can ignore all but one at a time, and focus on fixing just one at a time, I will likely be even happier with my dancing and my progress in the long run.

The combination of technique, encouragement, and truth that Pat imparted during our session was pretty much priceless. It far surpassed my expectations, and I couldn’t help but give her an extra-deep, heartfelt embrace as we were saying good bye.

I look forward to our next session (whenever that will be), with great excitement!

Don’t forget to cherish your mistakes, for they are the bread crumbs to greatness. <3

A couple of weeks ago, I had a big scare one night after dance practice. I was sitting in the changing room, winding down and taking my shoes off, and as I removed my right shoe, it quickly became apparent that during practice, my big toe on my right foot had gone completely numb. And despite massage, stretch, etc., it remained that way for a couple of days! The doctor did some x-rays, and confirmed nothing major was wrong (I didn’t feel any pain, so I didn’t expect a break), and agreed with my assumption that it was due to the circulation from that part of the foot being cut off on a regular basis while dancing in my new competition shoes for extended periods of time (my old competition shoes recently broke during a practice session, and Brian at Take the Lead DanceWear helped me, with no questions asked, into a higher quality pair for only the price difference between them; he even took 20% off the new pair, as that was the sale he was running at the time!). So over the course of a few hours of practice each night, the lack of blood flow would lead to swelling, which then eventually, after doing this every night for a couple of weeks, led to the nerve going numb under the pressure.

As a result of that scare, I’ve been looking around for a pair of ballroom/latin practice shoes. I’ve tried on six pair so far, and none of them have fit quite right. The whole reason I’m searching for practice shoes in the first place is to have a comfortable shoe with a perfect fit, which I can wear for extended periods of time, day in and day out, without slowly causing injury to my feet (as dancing 20+hrs per week in competition shoes has been doing), so I’m just not able to settle for something that doesn’t fit right.

Brian has been a huge help in the process of searching for the right shoe; he even paid out of his own pocket to have one company priority mail a couple of pairs of a type he doesn’t normally stock for me to try on. Unfortunately, despite Brian’s best efforts, the perfect practice shoe has so far proved entirely elusive to my oddly shaped feet. I have a long foot (Size: 10US, 40EU), a wide ball, a tall arch and a high in-step, and with all of that, a relatively narrow heel… I have also recently developed fairly… formative… ankles (with all the new muscles sprouting up in that area!), which can make wearing anything with a low volume ankle fit or strap difficult (though this part really only applies to competition shoes, not practice shoes).

Brian has suggested that I visit his competition to see if they have anything that will work for me… failing that, we might just have to get really creative! He has a few ideas; but secretly, I am really hoping that the practice shoe fairy comes to the rescue, leaving something perfect under my pillow tonight! 🙂

I’ve been doing some online window shopping recently… welll… more like planning… because I’d like to pick up at least a few of these things in the near future! 😉

I intend to go to my friend Brian’s dancewear shop (Take the Lead DanceWear) tonight to try on a few of the following things:

DanceWear Page 1 – Curved Seam Skirt, Practice Skirt, Red Long Latin Skirt, Red Short Latin Skirt, Red Top, RP 1 Ladies Dance Pants

DanceWear Page 2 – Tunic Top /w Sleeves, Stephanie Black Ruffle Skirt, Stephanie Ruffle Top

And maybe next weekend I’d like to stop at bebe to try on these dresses:

Romantic Whisper Dress and Strapless Sequin Train Dress

I also need to ask them to replace this (Bohemian Cargo Strapless Maxi Dress) dress I just bought, which has a defective button 🙁

Last night, I attended this event at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, as a volunteer for Project Smile, not to be confused, as I confused it, with Operation Smile.

The event was really nice, I was surprised to find that Yelp organizes real life events, and it was also interesting to watch the Yelpers become real life friends. I was also impressed by a lot of the fashion, considering that this was a meetup of a bunch of people who primarilly know each other through a website. I think it was the first time I’ve been at an event with such a plethora of beautiful dresses, shoes, handbags, etc., since coming back from Shanghai. At one point I even commented that “It is a really good thing that I can’t just buy those shoes by pointing my cell phone at them yet! My bank account would be empty by the time I got home!”. The photographer quickly replied “don’t even talk to me about emptying bank accounts!”

The actual exhibits were all on the 3rd floor, while we were setup at the door on the first floor, and then again with a photobooth and a table on the 2nd floor (which the photographer commented was great, because it really slowed traffic down, making it a lot easier to lure people into having their picture taken, without forming too much of a crowd ^^;).

All in all, I saw lots of funny pictures taken, took a handfull of really cute and funny ones myself (covering for the photographer while she was away), feel like I helped a worthy cause, met some really nice people, became more than a little intoxicated from consuming more than my thimbleful limit of alcohol, ate lots of yummmmy food, saw a bunch of cool exhibits (including the glass flowers exhibit), had a really fun walk and conversation with a new friend afterwards, and gave my body a probably much needed rest from dance (though I’ll never admit it! ~_^)!

Before the gala, the dancer inside me was crying out not to skip dance (which became even more difficult when my friend called asking me to convince her to get off the couch and go to the very dance class I was missing!); but in retrospect, I am glad that I decided to skip dance and go. I dance an average of 6 days per week, and it felt a little bit healthy (though the dancer still doesn’t really agree) to go out and socialize with people outside my tiny little dancing bubble! 🙂 And, more importantly, to do something for other people, not just the selfish dancer inside.

Ahh! A blog! 🙂 And my first post in it! Alas, after hours of messing with the new hosting site, I don’t have time to even note a fraction of the myriad of ideas I wish I could write about at this very moment! *sigh* But I made it this far! xD Next time, I’ll write more. For this time, I’ll leave it at: Hello, World! My name is Layla, and I <3 Dance~

晚安，皆さん！ 😉

P.S.: I really <3 this Rumba: Slavik Kryklyvyy & Karina Smirnoff – Rumba (2004)