To The Chiropractors.

I’ve been to the chiropractor twice this week – a new record, I think.  Tuesday was planned; a friend recommended her chiropractor who was a dancer, so she’s helping with that aspect.  But today when my ankle was still hurting (since Monday) I desperately called my regular chiropractor and got an appointment with him this afternoon.

This chiropractor is the one that knows to lighten up when I come to the office or I’ll be too nervous for anything to crack back into place, so he let down his official Dr. face when I walked into the office.  After exclaiming that this most certainly must be “National Melody Gets Injured Year” I tried to explain what happened to my ankle.

Well – I didn’t really have anything to say, because I couldn’t remember hurting it and so I just pointed to the spot where it hurt and then sat down on the table.  (Ok, so somehow I managed to find a lot to say, but it wasn’t really anything important.)  Customarily, he started probing my ankle and turning it this way and that; with each new direction he asked me if it hurt.  One thing hurt a smidge more, so I commented, but then offered that it didn’t hurt too bad.  He countered: “I know, you would have gone ‘ahhh ouch!’ if it had.” (His imitation of my reaction was quite precise – in falsetto and everything, lol.)

After some more diagnosing, he started pulling on my ankle.  Finally, I had to hold onto the table and he gave one hard yank.  A very loud pop resonated in the office as my ankle went to it’s rightful spot and I lay there in shock; there hadn’t been pain, but the pop sound was enough to make my insides quake.

“That was loud.” he commented factually.

“Well, I just had to be dramatic.” :-P I said, trying to shake out the quivering.  (He laughed at that – and this guy rarely laughs.)

After a few minutes of letting me calm down (his words precisely) the Dr. told me what happened.  Somehow, my tibia bone, which ordinarily rests on this ankle joint – he told me the name and I can’t remember it, starts with an M though – the bone had lodged itself deeper into the joint then it was supposed to be. Thankfully no ligaments or muscles were injured at all, so now I just have to rest the foot a bit more. (Ha! reasons why that is impossible will be disclosed soon ;-)

~Ellie

Begin Again.

I’m in a bit of a quandary here.  (And this is a different one then the chicken/egg Car/Job situation…)  Several years ago (come to think of it, it must have been 5 or 6 years ago!) my family switched churches and I hopped around for a bit before finding my church.  I fell completely in love with the church except for the fact that the service was at night.  It seems like everything else in my life tries to schedule itself for Sunday nights as well.  Basically, I ended up not being able to go very frequently; now having been in FL for the last two years, I’m realizing that I might just again be going church looking.  I know I’m going to be having lots of things going on Sunday evenings, and I don’t want to constantly be missing church.  The trouble is that this is the only church I really loved.

So now I’m trying to decide if I should just go when I can, or should I find a new church…  Most of my friends who went to my church have moved out of the area, so it wouldn’t be that major to go somewhere else, but I don’t want to.  I want my cake, and eat it too – as the saying goes.

I guess there’s just something hard about starting over again. and again. and again.  Me, who has always been a social butterfly and loved meeting new people suddenly has no drive to make new friends.  It’s weird, but I feel like the older I get the less friendly people seem to be.  We just get set in our patterns and ways that to be fully welcoming and friendly is unthinkable.  Maybe I’ve just been around the dance community too long.

But back to churches.  I’m just frustrated that the one church I want to invest myself in is at a time that goes against the career I feel strongly to pursue.

Come to think of it.  I guess it really doesn’t even matter, because I don’t have a car to go anywhere anyway.  So it turns out that this really does revolve around the Car/Job conundrum after all :-P

“the sun’ll come out, tomorrow…”
~Ellie 

The Importance of Details.

Many an organized person will be quick to stress how important every little detail can be for success.  Many an unorganized person will be quick to agree – and wish they thought of every little detail.

This morning I took it upon myself to find a great chiropractor that works with dancers.  Considering the last chiropractor I tried offered the advice: “you just need to stop stretching,” I specifically wanted to find someone who understands how dancing works and would be helpful in figuring out what was wrong with me.  So off to google I went.  The very first hit was just what I was looking for!  This Dr. had been a professional dancer for many years and then went into chiropractoring because he saw a lack of knowledge of dancers in that field.  He now runs a thriving office.  GREAT!  Then I realized the importance of details.

This doctor is located in Arizona…

~Ellie

Everything Changes.

Well, I see now that I completely failed to blog for a while there.  I had such high hopes of faithfully posting, but alas, it just did not happen.

In the interim of my last post and now, I graduated.  From all the hype about college, I thought I might feel a tinge of excitement or pride or something.  But somehow, I just don’t feel like I went to college.  Sure, I stayed in a dorm with strangers and I took a bunch of classes, but what was so great about that?  I’m now trying to figure out a job that’s going to pay off my zillion dollar debt.  (not to mention the fact that I don’t have a car; I’m just in one of those ‘need money to get a car. need a job to get money. need a car to get a job.’ situations.)  Anyhow, my family came and picked me up and the whole drive home I was hoping to feel at least some sort of excitement or pride or something, but no.  Maybe eventually I’ll figure out what I’m missing, but until then, maybe I’ll pretend to be excited.

Aside from that.  I’m home again.  And it’s a little odd.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my family dearly and want to be here.  But at the same time, I feel almost trapped.  It’s like, here, I’m happy and don’t want things to change.  But I know they will, and being here – where there is so much familiarity – just makes it harder.  Coming back to something I held dear only to have there be changes is proving more difficult then I thought.

A friend’s mom always says that God will not take away something good from your life without replacing it with something just as good or better.  So for now, I’m clinging to the hope that one of these days, a change will happen that will be good…

Me.

How to Ride A Bike

Most people learn how to ride a bike from a young age.  However, not everyone is versed on how to ride with a flat front tire.  So I have taken it upon myself to give you the directions.

Now, be forewarned, I have tried to ride with flat back tire, and it didn’t not work.  Perhaps some are able to figure out how to ride, but I am going to focus on the front tire.

First, you must pump the tire so you think it will be fine.  Then about halfway to your destination it can deflate.

Second, with the newly flattened tire, you’ll have to slow your speed down quite a bit.  If your tire is bent like mine you’ll have to pay extra attention to staying straight, because as you are riding very slowly, it will be difficult to keep the bike upright.  *If you happen to keep a pair of training wheels in your bag, this would be the time to attach them, however, if you don’t have training wheels, then continue reading.*

Third, be prepared to use your legs to help stop the bike. You can try to use the brakes to help, but because the tire is very squishy, the brakes will squeeze the tire without slowing it down at all.

Fourth, remember that corners are going to be tricky.  With a flat tire, as the bike starts to tip, you might end up riding on the rim of the wheel instead of the tire.  This means you will need to come to a slow creep in order to keep the bike upright as you round the corner.

And that, my friends, is how you ride a bike with a flat front tire.  Please let me know if you have any questions.  I am quite experienced in this field and will do my best to assist in any way I can ;-)

~Ellie

Earth to Ellie.

Hello World!  Yes – I am still alive.

It’s simply dreadful how much I have neglected updating you, but the last 8 weeks of classes kept me doing homework almost every moment of my day.  (And when I was not doing homework the last thing I felt like doing was writing…)  There were so many things that happened that I wanted to blog about, but I kept forgetting to write them down; so here I sit with nothing specific to write.

My spring break felt like a dream.  Not in an ethereal, blissful sort of way…  It was as if I fell asleep dreamed for five minutes that I was home and then someone shook me and I realized I was still in FL.  I am fully aware that I did go home, but it was particularly a whirlwind of a break.  To give you an example of how busy I was, my twin and I didn’t even get a chance to get together!

Friday morning proved to be an adventure for sure.  I was supposed to have a Chiropractor appointment at 8am.  Yes, 8 am on a friday morning.  Considering I have no car anymore, my mom and I took my dad to work (which meant I had to get up around 6:45am…) and then drove down to the dr’s office.  All during the drive, I kept trying to get my phone to turn on and it simply wouldn’t.  Having just charged it the day before, I thought it was a little odd that it wasn’t working, but there was nothing I could do about it.  We got to the office, and after filling out a bunch of paperwork, I handed it in around 8.  By the looks of things, I got the feeling my appointment was going to start late.  Around 8:20 my mom got a call from my sister.  A look of concernment crossed her face, and after a few “uh-huh” “ok” and “I’ll be right there” she hung up and told me what happened.  My sister’s car had run out of gas: in the driveway.  She was getting ready to leave for school and her car would not start, so my mom had to drive all the way back home to get her, drive her all the way to the school, and then drive all the way back to the chiropractor’s office.  I told her not to worry, there were plenty of magazines to keep me busy until she got back.

Off she went and there I sat.  My eyes carefully tried averting the box of donuts – quite unsuccessfully – so I sat there thinking how yummy they looked and how long I had been sitting there.  Thankfully, a nurse soon came to rescue me from the view and she took me for a tour of the office.  It was very impressive looking – all the equiptment for whatever you could need – there were 6 adjustment rooms.  That seemed a big silly, because why would one doctor need six rooms?  Then I found out there was more then one doctor working there… Anyway.  Because it was my first time at this office, they had me watch this video about the benefits of chiropractory.  Seriously?  Yes.  Why I would need to watch this when I was already at the chiropractors didn’t make sense – it only made me more nervous because I saw them cracking other people.  This video was also clearly made in the early 90′s…  But finally after watching this video, the doctor came in and was very helpful.  (I discovered that I apparently over-stretch :-/ try explaining that to a dance teacher when I don’t have all my splits yet…)  Eventually I found my way back to the lobby (my tour of the place left me quite turned around) and paid.  As I went to sit down to wait for my mom, one of the nurses looked out the window and said: “I think your mom is here; she drives a minivan?”  Yes, that was her – it was 9:20am.  That has got to be the longest experience at the chiropractor’s I’ve ever had.  But at least I felt better!

Later that day while costuming shopping, we wound up lost about an hour from home – but that’s another story…

And now it’s time to get my mind back into gear.  I have seven weeks of classes left until I graduate.  This is gonna be crazy.  But now that I’m finished my online class, I promise to keep you updated a bit more regularly.
~Ellie

Faces.

I have made a discovery over the last two days.  I make a lot of faces – but that’s not the discovery.  The discovery is that I have certain faces for certain things.  Apparently I never quite grew up and still play pretend.  When I take ballet, I pretend I’m a ballerina and have a ballet face (calm smile, lifted chin, bright eyes).  Tap is accompanied by a huge grin reminiscent of a Shirley Temple dance.  And I also have a singer face.  See, I don’t exactly think of myself as a singer, I take on the character of a singer, and therefore have a singer face.

This extraordinarily random thought process was prompted by my voice lesson on Wednesday.  I haven’t had a voice lesson in about 3 years, so I was very excited.  We spent the whole lesson breathing (well, the teacher was breathing and I was discovering something I thought I had been doing my whole life somehow was incorrect…) and vocalizing.  There came a point when she looked at me and kept telling me to relax my face, first my eyebrows then my jaw then my lips etc.  Confusion burst out in my mind because I was simply vocalizing with my singer face – the one where your eyebrows are slightly lifted, you’re smiling just a touch and singing five notes on the vowel “eh” is the most sincere thing you’ve ever done (slightly CelticWoman esque).

In instructing me to practice without said face I came upon a conundrum. (not sure that’s the appropriate word, but I like how it sounds…)  What would it be like if I sang as me?  Stop.  What?  But I don’t sing?  Part of what I like about musical theater is that I’m someone else when I sing.  Vocalizing fits into the category of being someone else, too – um, somehow.  I stood in the mirror trying to figure out how on earth to  sing up and down the scales without my singer face; not being a pretend person was entirely difficult.  So I came up with a plan.  I simply need to pretend to be someone who doesn’t make faces when they sing.  But that didn’t quite work.

So now I’m in the process of discovering who Melody the singer is, while trying to breathe silently :-/  Thankfully warming up won’t always take up the whole lesson and I can get back to being the me who heartily enjoys being someone else :)

~Ellie