http://lion-tamer-zoe.xanga.com/audio/d8e3b1725280/

It's now been over two months since I graduated from college and entered what they called the "real world."  I've learned a lot so far and I imagine will continue to learn as I go.  Here are some things I've learned about teaching.

• Everything you read in text books is only half-true.
• You can follow the Vaganova methodology, but when you're teaching kids who can already do fouettés and switch leaps, it's okay to give them a grand allegro or a pirouette once in a while too.
• With little kids, a mixture of "make this part up yourself" and "do exactly these steps" is optimum.
• The curriculum for seven- and eight-year-olds is not very different from the curriculum for four- to six-year-olds.
• The average American child's attention span is about the length of the average television commercial.
• Kids appreciate a smile and humor more than you know.
• Kids appreciate dancing to fun music more than a smile and humor.
• You have to say "no" to most requests.
  
• In addition to this, I'm getting better at winging it, altering or making up combinations on the spot, slowing things down, finding different music, and um, operating the CD player.  I'm also getting really good at running across the room.

I don't know how much actual learning is going on in my studio.  I'm trying to progress logically in my lesson plans, give the students enough repetition to become good at the combinations, and give them as many individual and group corrections as I can.  But whenever I run into a parent of one of my students, they tell me that their daughter is really enjoying my classes, and that's encouraging.  What's even more encouraging are the hugs that my little girls give me at the end of class.  ^_^

I don't know how to start this . . . I've been at a loss for words for the last two or three hours.

Today Justin, my knight in rusty armor, asked me to marry him. Through tears and gasps and laughter I somehow managed to say yes.

I don't think I've ever felt this happy, except for once or twice in my teen years when I encountered the presence of God. This is like that . . . it's like heaven came down and surrounded Justin and me.

Almost two years ago, I saw my brother marry the love of his life, and this song played as they were dancing under the Christmas lights that surrounded the dance floor. I'll never forget that moment . . . it was such a happy moment, and yet it was sad for me too because it made me yearn for the day when those words could be mine. Today is that day.

Here is the song. You can listen to it on Youtube or something. The remix version is really happy - I mean really, really happy. You'll get a pretty good idea of how I'm feeling if you listen to it. Here are the words.

"Heaven"
DJ Sammy

Oh, thinking about all our younger years
There was only you and me
We were young and wild and free
Now nothing can take you away from me
We've been down that road before
But that's over now
You keep me coming back for more

Baby, you're all that I want
When you're lying here in my arms,
I'm finding it hard to believe
We're in heaven
And love is all that I need,
And I found it there in your heart
It isn't too hard to see
We're in heaven

Oh, once in your life you find someone
Who will turn your world around
Pick you up when your feeling down
Now nothing could change what you mean to me
There's a lot that I could say
But just hold me now
Cause our love will light the way

Baby you're all that I want
When you're lying here in my arms,
I'm finding it hard to believe
We're in heaven
And love is all that I need,
And I found it there in your heart
It isn't too hard to see
We're in heaven

I've been waiting for so long
For something to arrive
For love to come along
Now our dreams are coming true
Through the good times and the bad
I'll be standing there by you

Baby you're all that I want
When you're lying here in my arms
Im finding it hard to believe
We're in heaven
And love is all that I need,
And I found it there in your heart
It isn't too hard to see
We're in heaven
Oh, Oh
Oh, Oh
We're in heaven

*~*~*~*

Thank you Jesus for bringing Justin into my life. Thank You for his love and faithfulness and the promise of a new life. Thank you for the peace that passes all understanding.

Happy Easter, everybody.

Yesterday was the end of a very long process for me, the process of choreography.  Choreography - or at least, the method of choreography we study at college - is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.  I would love to say that I overcame the challenge and presented a kick-awesome piece.  I would love to say that because the concept of my piece was so personal to me, I was inspired to create amazing movement.  Heck, I would love to say that I finished the piece prior to the last rehearsal and had time to clean it.  None of those things would be true.

One of my roommates said it was a really, really long time before she could look at her choreography piece objectively, so I'm sure it will be many months for me as well.  But already, now that it's over, I feel a lot better.

I may not have overcome the challenge of choreographing, but I did face the challenge.  I didn't try to elect out of the class like I thought about doing.  I prepared for it way in advance and tackled the class head-on.  So maybe I did bounce off a wall and fall flat on my back.  At least I can say I went for it, right?

My choreography was not kick-awesome, and I'm not sure at this point that I can even call it creative, but I think it was an improvement from my last attempt, way back in Comp 2 my sophomore year.  I mean, I had two characters whose base designs were symmetric successional -- that is really hard, and there were about 3 minutes were it was mainly just the two of them moving.  I did it though, whether it was good or not.

As far as inspiration, I think I started losing that after the first class.  We had to abstract our concepts to such a degree that mine really lost any resemblance to my original idea.  I guess to present my idea in the way I wanted to do it, I would have had to use a different choreographic method.  So there were times -- a lot of times -- when I was really, really unmotivated.  In fact, pretty much the whole semester, thinking about choreography tied my stomach in knots and made me want to crawl into a hole and pretend the class didn't exist.  That's why I stopped writing, you know -- I lost my inspiration, ran out of ideas, couldn't figure out what came next, so I stopped.  But with this, even though I was unmotivated, stuck, brain dead, and all that, I made myself finish.

As far as finishing and cleaning the piece . . . I finished choreographing a week ago Saturday, taught the remaining 45 seconds of choreography to my cast on Monday, and tried to run it on Tuesday.  It was a disaster.  The piece needed so much more work - not through any fault of my cast, but because they hadn't had the chance to rehearse it enough.  But it was Thanksgiving break (I literally went straight from rehearsal to putting my bags in the car and leaving town).  There was no more time.  For a few minutes I was really, really frustrated and depressed and worried.  Then I realized that there was absolutely nothing I could do about my piece anymore, so worrying about it wouldn't make things any different.  I left it in God's hands until I came back for the showing, and guess what?  I was really pleased with the final product.  No, it wasn't perfect, but it was good, much better than I expected and even better than I could have hoped.  To my cast, thank you.

One thing I've found to be pretty constant in life is that things turn out different from what you expect.  That was certainly true of this process for me.  The result was not as awesome as my highest hopes imagined, nor was it as awful as my lowest doubts predicted.  It was somewhere in between, but more on the positive side I think.  And I think I'm happy in that place.

Notice: I'm going to break my self-imposed rule and get uncomfortably personal here for two reasons: one, because I'm hoping somebody who's going through the same stuff as me might read it and get something out of it, and two, because I want people to know what I know now about God.  Some of you have actually heard some of this from me before.

My world fell apart on November 11 of last year, when I found out that my dad had left. They say divorce is really hard on the kids, but what they don't tell you is that it's hardest on grown-up kids.  A little kid doesn't understand very much about marriage or what the family is supposed to look like; they just grow up accepting a skewed form of normalcy (this is not at all to say that divorce is not hard on a kid - it's perhaps the most traumatic experience a kid can have).  But when you're older, you already have ideas of the way a marriage is supposed to be, and of the way your family is, and a divorce shatters them all to pieces.  Everything you ever believed to be true, to be real, to be reliable, is suddenly just . . . gone.

They always tell the kids, don't blame yourself. And I think I know why.  Divorce is incomprehensible.  The brain doesn't like incomprehensible stuff, so it tries to rationalize it, to make it fit.  In order to make something like that make any kind of sense, you find somebody to blame.  Most kids love their mommy and daddy, so they blame themselves.  Me, I blamed my dad.  I won't go into any of the reasons for that except the obvious one: he was the one who left.

Eventually though, I had to come to the realization that I still love my dad, and nothing will ever change that.  No matter what his reasons were, I still believe he was - is - wrong in his actions, but I can't be mad at him, not forever.  And I can't put all the blame on him either.  I can't shut him out, and I'm starting to discover that I don't even want to.

That puts me back in the state of having this huge, incomprehensible thing in my life, and not knowing what to do with it.  If anything, I'm now more confused than ever.  I can't make the pieces fit together this time.  It doesn't make sense; it's all wrong.

Where is God in this?

The day I found out my dad left was a Sunday.  I go to church in the evenings, which meant that after finding out my dad had to move out, I had to face church.  Luckily, I go to the kind of church where people are real; you don't have to glue a smile on and pretend things are okay when they aren't.  So I didn't.  But when I got there, we happened to be doing something different that night - it was called "Celebration Sunday" or something, and instead of the usual format, we just sang praise songs the whole night.  As you might imagine, that was really, really hard for me.  How do you praise God when your entire world has just been shot to pieces?  How can you even find Him to look at Him when everything around you has shifted and you don't know where you stand anymore?

At my church, we have a few songs that we sing nearly every week.  Some people don't like it, but this is what happened that night: I saw the words and heard the notes that I'd heard so many times before, and I realized something very important: God hadn't changed, even if everything else had.  I thought my foundation had crumbled right under my feet, but that night I realized that there was still something holding me up, and it was Jesus.

I started crying.  I couldn't sing any of the words or even look at them.  I could only listen to the words, hearing them as if for the first time.  I don't remember very many of the songs we sang that night (I say we even though I wasn't singing, because my heart was understanding), but I do remember the one that goes like this:

Savior, He can move the mountains
My God is mighty to save
He is mighty to save
Forever Author of salvation
He rose and conquered the grave
Jesus conquered the grave

As I stood there crying in the middle of Celebration Sunday, my roommate Audrey and my boyfriend Justin put their arms around me and just held me for several minutes.  And I think that's when I knew that God was right there with me - that He had been there all the time. I knew that whatever had happened and whatever was about to happen, I could get through it.  It wasn't so much Audrey or Justin - it was Him, and they were the ones He was using to hug me and let me know that everything would be okay.

Do you know that song "Held" by Natalie Grant?  I heard it yesterday on the radio, I think for the first time since before my dad left.  I started crying again because it so perfectly matched what my heart had been feeling since that day.  Here are some of the lyrics, the ones that apply to me:

Who told us we'd be rescued?
What has changed and
Why should we be saved from nightmares?
We're asking why this happens to us
Who have died to live, it's unfair

This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held

This hand is bitterness
We want to taste it and
Let the hatred numb our sorrows
The wise hand opens slowly
To lilies of the valley and tomorrow

This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held

There's a part in C. S. Lewis' book Out of the Silent Planet when Ransom asks where Oyarsa, the sort of God-figure, was when a part of the earth was destroyed.  The reply he gets is, "Where he is now."  And maybe that sounds really canned to you where you are, but to me, in the midst of an inner earthquake so to speak, the only thing that kept me from falling was realizing that God hadn't left or changed or forgotten about me; He was still there, and at that moment, He was holding me.