Vacation and procastination

First day back after a vacation is always great. Sort of. Especially if it was a two week vacation. In my opinion, two weeks is the ultimate. You get time to relax, but you don't loose too much muscles and stamina.

Anyways.

First day back your muscles are nice and relaxed. I'm always amazed by how easy it is to do splits, and how high I can kick my legs. It's so nice! And then at the same time you need to struggle to find muscles you normally tense all the time. Which is less nice.

Second day is okay. You're a bit sore, but not too much. You're still nice and loose in the joints, although they're starting to tense. You're finding the muscles (turn-out especially).

Then third day arrives. That's today, for me. Getting out of bed is painful. Moving is painful. I haven't tried to stretch too much yet, but I know it's stiff. Everything hurts. And yet it's not that bad. We only had one week off, after all.

It's just, I didn't expect to be this sore. But looking back I see why I was wrong.

There are three reasons:

1. The state of my body before vacation. I was exhausted. Mentally and physically. I became a bit unsocial, because all energy went into forcing myself to still work hard (not so fun considering last day before the vacation was valentines day and I had kind of made Boyfriend promise we would do something and then I was too tired anyways...).
Also there is a small chance that I had a mild version of kissing disease (Boyfriend has it, and even though the doctors say he's not contagious right now, he still might have been earlier, and belive it or not, we kiss a lot).

2. Pedagogic exams have started. Before the vacation, pedagogic classes were pretty chill. We would maybe move a little bit, but most of the time was spent sitting down talking. Which was nice, because it's the last classes of our longest days. Now that we have exams we can't really relax after hip-hop (mondays) or the guest teacher (tuesdays).
Modern pedagogic is not that bad. We do half a class, then we have a break, and then the other half. Jazz is worse. It's a full hour jazz class. And because it's another opportunity to work on your technique, and because you want to support the classmate who is teaching you do full out. Kind of a wake up call for the body when you've spent a week...

3. Procastinating. We have a lot coming up now. The pedagogic exams I mentioned above, a solo performance next week, Stückchenweise (which I'm not part of this time), film project deadline, dance history presentation... And because it's me (and because my last name puts me close to the top of the class list) all deadlines are pretty much at the same time. So I saw this vacation as an opportunity to be able to work on all projects and finish as much as possible before school taking my energy again.
And that totally did not happen. Because when it comes to procastinating and doing things last minute, I'm way too good to stop now. So my vacation was spent in bed, eating cake and watching Moomin episodes on youtube.

And now I'm completly stressed out. Yay!!

I survived!

Examination is over! And I've recoverd from my hangover that I'd like to blame on the adrenalin although there might be som alcohol involved...

So someone might be curious how a dance examination happen. Well. I woke up in the morning, rolled out of bed and in to the kitchen, where I found this:

Which immedatly made my day a little better.

After a shower and som lunch I went to school.

First we had a warmup with our modern teacher. It was the one we normally do, only our teacher had to remind us to breath a few more times than normal. And then the exam started.

Our teachers and the school headmasters filed in and sat down by the mirrors. The music was turned on. And we danced. To be honest, I don't remember much of it. I just went for it.

The hardest part was switching modes. From doing ballet exercises to do a modern combination and then a Fosse-inspired jazzcombination.

It all went well, I know that much. But I turned my brain on in jazz. I started thinking. I fucked it up. At least the last pirouette.

After one hour it was over. At first everybody cheered and hugged and jumped around, but then the adrenalin slowly disappeared and everybody turned quiet. We sat on the floor waiting for the teachers to end their conference. Dreading it, beacause when they were finished we'd have individual talks with them.

People cried. I was one of them. I'm not going to tell you why or what exacly the teachers said, but some I will share. Like my jazz teacher told me to find fire and try myself out. Which is basically code for "get out of your head". Suprise!

And I was asked why I dance. That's what's been occupying my mind pretty much ever since (save for my drunkest hours last night) and that was what I was going to write about today. But I think this post is long enough as it is, so I'll save it for later.

Anyways. The day was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, and it ended with a swiss fondue party in a (swiss) classmates appartment. Pretty good ending if you ask me.