thomascolthurst

I got pretty discouraged after handstand class today because, honestly, I am going through just huge paradigm shifts about how handstands work and nothing feels the same anymore. Not only did I totally break my jump-up, it's making me feel like I've been wasting my time until this year.

If I wasn't learning this then what the hell was I doing? Preparing my tissues for the load, I guess.

( Three insights. I really want to draw this out as a comic, but for now you get words. )

So now some of this is very actionable and has given me a whole new set of cues to try, but everything feels unfamiliar. Stuff I slacked on before suddenly feels intensely critical, and I have no idea if I can put these new understandings together into a functioning body movement. Like: what the hell have I been doing all this time? I've never in my life, until today, focused on trying to keep my scapulae wide during a jump-up! But when I do, the freedom is uncontrollable. I've fixed something critical in my understanding and completely destroyed my intuition.

Sigh.

It's a sleepy sleepy Monday, which it probably is for a lot of people because a) it's a holiday and b) we are having a nor'easter here, which means rainfall. Many cozy feelings are thereby created.

Weird number of postponements and rejections this week:

• Major News Outlet said no to my first crossword puzzle submission, although they did it in the nicest way possible. Not a form letter. They gave real feedback about what they liked and didn't, and encouraged me to try again. Joke's on them, another is already in their queue and I have two more in progress with different collaborators. One of which made a ton of progress this week!


• I was supposed to meet with my financial advisor. It got postponed, but in preparation for that I did my numbers for the year so far and looked harder, especially, at my latest six months of spending. Insert some annoyance, here, with my budgeting program... but I fixed things up until I believe the data, and the good news is that I'm spending less this year than I have any year since 2021. Even with all the circus lessons. This stands in contrast to the returns from the market so far, which don't feel real or make sense to me at all.


• I was supposed to close on my stupid new condo tomorrow. Guess what got delayed again. This time it's most proximally the town's fault. *shrug* At least other people (Unit 2 buyers in the same building) are providing urgency on it now; they can wake me up when the sale is actually happening.

Some other happenings:

• It's been... six months since I retired? I think I'm planning to do a 6-month update post on LinkedIn, but my biggest lesson is that six months aren't enough. I never expected it to be, but now I know it's not, and that's conceptually a little worrisome. The larger milieu of politics, finance and tech seems messed up, and apparently all I can manage is dropping out and playing dead.


• My neighbor suddenly got rid of all the ivy that used to cover our front yard! I knew she wanted to pull it back from the house, but didn't realize she was going to remove ALL of it until it was already done. I was startled. But I also remembered telling her to do what she wanted in the front, and the time (at my last address) that I was trimming hedges only to have the older woman upstairs yell at me in the street. So I simply expressed mild surprise. Maybe it was time for a change anyway.


• I had coffee with my walkover coach, who is pregnant with a donor egg, and talked her through some of how it went with me and Birdie and E&V. I need to do more follow-up on that since, weirdly, E is going to be in town next week, and probably my coach would rather talk to the egg recipient than the donor.


• Went climbing with jadia, which was super fun except when I confidently failed the belay test by engaging my circus rope-pulling circuits (in circus you NEVER let go of a rope entirely but it is considered OK for it to slide through one's hands; in rock climbing it's the opposite; and both endeavors consider it a significant safety concern). This spun off a conversation on a Discord server I'm on, in which apparently belay technique maybe has also changed in the last 10 years, but my particular cross-wiring was almost certainly circus. We were prepared to fall back to the auto-belay routes which were really fun, and I also got to be belayed on a nasty no-hands-section climb that made my legs all shaky.


• More social: dinner with a bunch of Zillianaires, which... was honestly pretty exhausting. Overall positive, but way out in the boonies in a house that made me slightly twitchy.


• Backbend progress -- both a contortion class and a walkover class in which I did New Things and my body graciously put up with it. I've been working out twice a day, most days this week, which is on the high side.... but there's a lot of joy happening and I'm not injured, so I got a tub of creatine and am going to carry on as long as coach availability is this good. There'll be downtime later.
  

It's a lot, right? The time I used to spend on "work" has exploded into a lot of smaller things, and I know that what is important can get lost in here's the pile of random shit that happened. But if nothing else, this is true to my experience too. I think life is good. I miss my squirrel, who's been away for two weekends running, but that will end soon.