So You Had a Bad Day

I suppose everyone has mood swings from time to time.  Had one of those days today.  Will explain more in a bit but just some wave of sadness hit me while I was waiting for the lesson to start.  That always puts me in bad place where nothing feels right and I get down on myself.  There are days when dance can lift my spirits and there are days when I get into a funk on a lesson and I just have to leave the studio.  Which is why I’m now here writing this and not staying for the studio party.

I can’t really pin this on anything.  Could be the continuing slightly existential crisis I’m having around work.  The fact that I have to get up every morning and drag myself into a job that no longer has meaning to me.  And I have to decide whether I wait and see if things will get better or just bail and be done with it.  A couple of things this week triggered that a little more than usual.

But I wasn’t in a bad mood when I got to the studio.  Come lesson time and JoNY is still talking with her previous couple and scheduling a lesson and I see OwnerGuy starting a lesson with someone else.  I guess he’s decided that we only need him for one of our lessons.  Kind of wish he would have said something but the Famous Franchise has their rule that you aren’t guaranteed an instructor so they are free to do whatever they want.  I will have to quiz him on Tuesday to see if this is really the future.

And Z is out with a wedding couple and they’ve started and I’m still sitting at the table waiting for JoNY.  Tick Tock.  There is supposed to be a five minute grace period so your 45 minute lesson is really only guaranteed to be 40 minutes long.  But we are getting close to 10 minutes past the lesson and JoNY is still dealing with her previous couple.  Surprisingly, it was Z who called over to her to give her the “get to your next lesson” look.  It may not have been that, I wasn’t really watching at that time.

So I’m on the floor with a couple doing their wedding dance and OwnerGuy who is doing a progress check with his lesson.  The progress check is on certain dances and so they need the music for that and the wedding couple needs the music for their song so we are third priority.  Oh, and the guy decides he wants to see how large his wedding floor is going to be so he knows how much space he has to work with.  Nothing at all wrong with that except that he puts a chair on the floor to mark the corner and it just happens right in our normal path for both the Waltz and Viennese Waltz.

And I totally get that there are times that when other people have a greater need for the music.  It just wasn’t the night for me to end up feeling like an afterthought at the studio.  On other nights, I probably could have handled it better but tonight it just hit me with a wave of “what am I doing here”.

It didn’t help that the studio faces west and OwnerGuy has decided he doesn’t want curtains on the windows in front of the studio.  Understandable, except it means that the sun streams into the studio.  And, it bounces off the cars in the parking lot.  So, I was executing a move and trying to keep my focus up and out and I ended up having a ray of sunshine bounce off a car and right into my face.  You don’t normally expect to get the sun in your eyes when you are inside but it happened.  Have to tell you that it makes it hard to stay focused on what you are doing when you are temporarily blinded by the light.

As for the actual Waltz and Viennese Waltz, I’m not the best judge right now.  There were parts that didn’t feel good and then I started to imagine other parts that didn’t feel good.  Plus we had to keep dodging the wedding couple and they were hard to predict.  Then there were the chairs and I’d sometimes have to stop and/or rotate something in a strange way.  Then JoNY would say something and, in my mind, I was thinking “Well I could have run you into the chair”.

So pet peeve time.  I hate it when I’m on the floor and people are doing a bunch of different dances and sometimes it means I have to take something in a different way.  And then I get the “well you need to work on floorcraft” or “well what are you going to do at Showcase”.  First of all, if there is anything I’m somewhat confident about, it is my ability to move around the floor.  Secondly, at a Showcase, everyone is doing the same dance.  There is some predictability to the movement.  If I’m doing a Waltz while OwnerGuy is doing a Hustle and Z is there with a clipboard taking notes, then I don’t really know where they are going to go and there are times I can’t take the step down the floor where you want to because they aren’t going to move.  OK, rant over.

The other problem about these lessons with JoNY is I’m not sure what we are supposed to be doing.  Is it just practice?  Is she supposed to be trying to teach me something?  We get into these places where we get messed up and she often can’t fix them so we have to write it down and wait for OwnerGuy to work on it.  Last thing I want to do is practice something incorrectly.

Anyway, as I said before, a lot of this is just some venting and some emotions surfacing that need to get out.  The lesson was not as bad as I think.  Parts of both dances were moving better even though I have a hard time accepting that.  Just had a bad start and it put me in a bad place.