Seven Is The Perfect Number

I got tagged by the lovely Amber of danceprimer.com!

Here are the rules:
1 – Link to the blog who tagged you (above)
2 – Post the rules on your blog
3 – Share seven random and/or weird things about yourself.
4 – Tag seven people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5 – Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Seven Random Things About Me:

1. I actually like getting tagged in memes like this. I enjoy the challenge to my creativity. Plus, it shows me that other people are reading what I write and actually want to hear more! That’s exciting.

2. I love roses. There’s something about them, with their many soft petals gracefully unfolding around the secret, fragrant heart. I love every color of rose, but I particularly love the soft, pastel roses brushed with many colors all at once. They enchant me. I also love climbing roses. I have a theory that any outdoor structure could be aesthetically improved by the addition of a climbing rose. I once amused myself on a long car trip by imagining how you could grow climbing roses up over the St. Louis Arch. This included a scheme of hanging platforms for them to could grow on and an irrigation system. It was pretty sweet. I’ve always said that if I ever get married, my husband will be a lucky man. If he does something stupid, all he has to do is bring me home roses and all will be well. Of course, that depends on exactly how stupid he’s been.

3. I’m becoming a bit addicted to sugar-free drink mix powders. I used to scorn them as the quintessence of over-commercialized, over-packaged, artificial suburban lifestyles. An unnecessary product with absolutely no nutritional value, packaged in single serving portions, designed to be added to another unnecessary product (bottled water – when the stuff that comes out of the tap is perfectly good). I didn’t go so far as avert my eyes when I passed them in the supermarket aisle, but it was close. Then my boss bought a box and didn’t care for the flavor. So she passed them on to me, and, well, I couldn’t let them go to waste, could I? (God forbid I should actually throw something out!) And… they tasted good. And I started drinking more water. And they had Vitamin C in them. Now the box is almost completely used up and I’m contemplating actually (eek!) spending my own money to buy another box. Sigh.

4. Lately I’ve also been getting a little addicted to the Pieces of Flair application on facebook. I resisted it as long as I could. I always looked down on applications like this as faddish clutter – annoying and teeny-bopper-ish. Then my friends started using it, first Sue, then Lori, then Stella. They kept sending me stuff, and talking about what they’d sent. Finally I couldn’t hold out any longer, and with true convert-fervor started flair-ing all over the place. Maybe there’s a 12-step program I can join…

5. There’s a chance I might get to go to Australia for World Youth Day this summer. It seems that there is a certain organization sending a delegation which has acquired a sponsor eager to pay all expenses for young adults who otherwise could not dream of going. As far as I can tell they’ll pay for everything, and in exchange you help work their booth promoting vocations. As soon as I heard of it I sent back an e-mail saying essentially, “Oh, me! Pick me! Pick me!” They say they want to meet with me, and then… we’ll see what happens. Here’s the funny thing – the acronym for the organization I’d be going with is SPORCH. Which, if you squint at it a little, is like SPORK. Which is a lot like The Tick’s battle cry of, “SPOON!” I find this endlessly amusing. Liv says that we should pass out metal sporks engraved with vocations information, and then people would remember us. I pointed out that all of the meals provided to us at World Youth Day will come with their own sporks as it is, so perhaps extra ones won’t be so memorable. And then, it seems that, since this is an organization promoting religious vocations, most of the other young adults on the trip will be guys discerning vocations to the priesthood. Considering my strict (sortof) no-dating-wannabe-priests policy (and what does it say about my life that I have to have such a policy?), this is more proof that God has a seriously twisted sense of humor. Fortunately, so do I.

6. I am currently watching the season one DVDs of Heroes. Justin found out that I like the show, but hadn’t watched the first season (besides the two episodes that were still upon the NBC website), so he lent them to me. So far I’m almost more a fan of Sylar than any of the other characters. There’s something about a really good villain. They appeal to the same part of me that likes guys who ride motorcycles and have five o’clock shadow. Maybe this is also why I like Dexter so much… Although Mark challenged me the other week on how I, the Theology Major, could justify watching a show celebrating a serial killer. He’s got a point.

7. I am the third daughter of my mother, who is also named Bernadette, and who is also the third daughter in her family. If I ever have kids, I’ll have to have three daughters so I can name the third one Bernadette.

And that’s what I have for you today! And I hereby tag… Mames (again), Polly (also again), Stuart, Kjirstin, Allison, Kenzie, and Zaph (turnabout is fair play!).

 

Hints & Promises

Today I saw a drowned worm on the sidewalk, the first of the year.  I think that might be an even more powerful harbinger of spring than the warm weather we had for a few days, or the tiny green leafbuds on the tree outside my bedroom window, or even the small, red growths on the rose bush that signify leaves and blooms in the future.  I think this is my favorite time of year, even if the contrary weather is currently making things bleak and gray.  Hints and promises are all over the place, like the small green spikes of flowering bulbs, and the beginnings of new growth on my thyme plants.

Also, all the yarn scraps left over from the pom-poms on Liv’s Hat of Awesomeness (more about that later) which I scattered on my windowsill yesterday have disappeared.  I hope that the birds have taken them for nesting material, not that they’ve simply blown away.  Our backyard is very bird-heavy these days.  It’s been fun identifying them.  We have a nesting pair of cardinals – the lady is so funny looking in her deep red brown feathers with that bright orange beak.  There are also finches, both plain and rosy, (I’m kind of excited about them, because I read that they’re one of the few birds aggressive enough to chase off the ever-present sparrows) and chickadees.  The chickadees were the most difficult to identify.  It took me a while to get a good look at them.  For a while I had convinced myself that the black and white bird that kept showing up on the suet feeder was a kind of woodpecker.  Then I saw a picture of chickadees in the bird feeder catalog and immediately recognized the birds in my backyard.  Now every time I hear them sing it makes me smile.

Something else that makes me smile is my Swing Club kids.  They’ve started coming out to more of the local swing events, which has been delightful.  There’s a lot of them, so I’ve been borrowing my parents’ van to chauffeur them around.  On Saturday I took them out to the monthly dance.  They were a huge hit with the regular swing people.  They’re so young and excited and, well, innocent.  (Mark: “They’re like swing dancers before Original Sin.”)  I enjoy watching them.  They’re not the best dancers by a long shot – there are almost universal frame problems, footwork issues, etc. – but they’re learning and growing at such a pace!  Plus, they’re just so cute!  They’re very sick of that adjective, and I don’t blame them, but it fits so exactly there’s simply no other word to use.  Several of them will be taking the Balboa workshop this month, more than will fit in my car, so I’m borrowing the van every Wednesday to take them.  I can’t wait!

 

Seasonal Disorientation

The other night I was talking with Jenn, who launched into her list of Christmas cookies. There’s the standard cutouts, and chocolate pretzels, and Russian tea balls, (which gets amended to Russian tea cakes with a look at Mark, her husband, who just can’t resist going there with his dirty mind), and Lord knows what else. She has peanut butter dough and gingerbread dough and sugar cookie dough, and then there’s the plans for when she’ll get each kind made, and how she’ll arrange the platters and who she’ll give them to. Her associates at work each get one, and then there’s family, and… yeah, like that.

I remember when that was me. I would be reading the food and housekeeping magazines, with their feature stories on cookies and families who make lots and lots of cookies in a heartwarming and family spirited sort of way. There are gorgeous pictures of these cookies, arranged tastefully and appetizingly in ways that just scream, “Omigosh, the person who made these is amazing!” (No, really! They do!) I would clip recipes and make shopping lists for ingredients and garnishes. I planned out days and baked accordingly. There were some memorable cookies in those years. I particularly remember the chocolate sandwich cookies with Bailey’s Irish Cream flavored filling. And then there was the year of the gingerbread people. I baked bazillions of them, icing them to resemble various members of the family, and hung them up as an edible part of the Christmas decorations. Of course, it was one of those unpredictable southern Ohio Christmases. Somehow we got a spell of humidity, which softened the gingerbread, making them slowly start to fall off their hangers. This meant we had to eat them quick before they fell. I still have the recipe somewhere, along with the one for little gingerbread mice with black licorice tails (too insanely cute) that I just never got around to making.

Then I went back to school, and the first weeks of December became irretrievably associated with exams instead of Christmas preparation. I’m all good with the holiday fun up through Thanksgiving, and then life becomes a blur of final projects, final papers, and tests on books that, oh yeah, I might want to actually read. The holiday hype buildup becomes reduced to vaguely noticing the Christmas songs playing at the grocery store as I’m blearily stocking up on necessities before another all night study session. In my world, school is all there is. People keep inviting me to Christmas parties (I have four this weekend alone), and I think to myself, don’t you people realize it’s exam week? I become very grateful for the liturgical season of Advent, which gives me a good reason not to be thinking about this stuff right now. I’ll do that later. When exams are over, and it’s actually Christmas.

 

When Worlds Collide

My social life tends to be a little schizophrenic.  There’s the swing dancing part, and the Catholic young adult part.  Historically, the Catholic young adult part was the biggest and the deepest, where my good friends were, where I drew my emotional support, the people that I hung out with on the weekends, the people I took care of.  Swing dancing was that odd thing I went off on my own to do.  I wasn’t very close to the other swing dancers, and I was happy with that.  There were already too many people who felt they had a right to my time and attention.  Swing dancing was the place I could go and just be, the place where I could be selfish.  All I wanted was to dance, and so I did.

Then I started getting closer to people at swing.  First Mark and Jenn, then Chiara, then Trey and Anna and others.  I started dancing a lot more, and spending most of my free time (and a lot of time that wasn’t really free) dancing.  Little by little I began to pull away from the Catholic part of my life.  Being Catholic is still one of the foundational facts of my existence and my friendships with my Catholic friends go way deeper, but my social life is now focused on swing.

Last weekend I had a party.  I called it Big Party @ Bernadette’s, and I invited my whole life.  I told everyone that this September marks my 2nd year of swing dancing, plus I’d moved into a new house that I wanted to show off, and I wanted to see all of them.  And they came.  I had maybe 60 or 70 people there, although they came and went, so I think the most we had at one time was maybe 50.  We had beer, and chicken on the grill, and a dance floor in the basement that everyone was having too much fun to use.  It was a great party.  People are still telling me what an awesome time they had.  It was a huge success.

Except my worlds didn’t mix.  My Catholic friends and my swing friends pretty much stayed in their own groups, warily acknowledging each other’s existence at a distance.  I think each group intimidated the other, but for different reasons.  And while my Catholic friends are well aware that my life has a cast of thousands, I think my swing friends didn’t really realize what a large circle of acquaintance I have.  I can’t make people talk to each other, but I guess I’d hoped that there might be a little cross-over.  And… no.  I’m still stuck in the middle.

 

WWBGD: What Would Betty Grable Dance?

I’ve been getting very discouraged about my dancing the last couple of months. While intellectually I know that I’ve improved enormously (I dip now. My Charleston, both solo and partner, looks infinitely better. My Lindy basic is lighter and more controlled than ever before. I’m having dances I could only have dreamed of six months ago.), emotionally all I know is how far I still fall short of where I want to be.

Part of the problem is that as I’ve gotten better, and especially as I’ve begun being groomed to become an instructor for the local scene, I’ve accumulated perhaps too many people who want to help me improve even more. So I have Jack telling me that I’m still anticipating a little on the one and going off the slot, Anna wanting me to correct my knees and make my spins intentional, Mark saying that my hand connection needs work, and Trey telling me that the way I keep my frame is all wrong (it should be more with the muscles in my back and less with my biceps). And then there’s my perennial problems with balance and keeping my feet underneath me. It’s a lot. In the end I feel like everything is wrong, trying to fix it all at once, and feeling like a failure when I don’t see immediate improvement.

This has been heightened by the teacher training process. Chiara had been teaching Swing I for a long time, so when she moved to Indianapolis, everyone was curious who would take her place. It had to be either myself or Alice. I’m a better teacher and I’ve objectively fulfilled more of the requirements, but Alice is a better dancer. It was taking Anna forever to make the announcement, and meanwhile I was continually conscious of having my dancing evaluated and falling short. Even when it was announced that Alice would teach in September and I would teach in October my feelings of failure and discouragement didn’t go away.

The thing that finally really helped was having a heart to heart about my dancing with Anna on Sunday. We agreed that I have too many chefs in my kitchen right now, and it’s spoiling the dish. So I’m telling all my instructors to back off for a little while and let me just dance. I also asked Anna what she sees when she watches me dance. One of the big things that’s holding me back is my lack of confidence, which really comes through in my dancing. Technically I’m pretty good. All the things I’m trying to work on are really little, tweaky things. However, my lack of confidence makes my dancing rather hesitant, which comes through as oddly delicate. It just doesn’t look right on a girl my size. Anna said that something that helped her have confidence when she started dancing was pretending to be someone else while she was on the dance floor. She loved Cyd Charisse, and would try to be her while she danced. She encouraged me to find someone I liked, maybe one of the great ladies from the old movies I love, and be them while I danced.

I went home and thought about this. If I could dance like anyone from the old movies, who would I dance like? Myrna Loy is awesome, but I’ve never thought of her as a dancer. Katherine Hepburn would be much too stiff. Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe are too vulnerable, too much at the mercy of their own beauty. Bette Davis is pretty formidable, but again, I don’t know that she’s much of a dancer. Then I hit on it – Betty Grable, the girl with the Million Dollar Legs, the pin-up darling of WWII, cute and fun and not someone to be messed with. So now the question is: What Would Betty Grable Dance?