20 Apr 2010

R: On Sunday I took a barre a terre (floor barre) class at Peridance Capezio Center on 13th Street. I thought the class would be the floor warm-up of the modern dance class I took my freshman year at William and Mary. Yeah...not so much. Barre a Terre is basically ballet lying on the ground. The idea is that you can learn technique better without the burden of balancing body weight against gravity. You condition and lengthen the muscles while learning proper body alignment.

It was a good class, with lots of encouragement and gentle correcting from a very nice instructor, but I struggled, like a lot. Naturally I was the only student in the class without a dance background, and of course, I have been in pain for the last two days. Who knew I had so many muscles in so many places?

C: I made my end date with Harvard more or less official today, giving myself an extra two weeks off than originally anticipated. In the spirit of the move, I began packing some things up around the apartment. I started with the small book collection that has been "shelved" along the base on my platform bed. I've never been much of a reader, but I enjoy a good book every now and then.

As I squeezed them into the box like puzzle pieces, I realized what an eclectic library I have amassed: dictionaries in Spanish, Tagalog and French (none of which I've managed to master); various Greek/Roman classics (I really loved and miss my CLCV courses at Wellesley with Prof. Gilhuly); a Book of Spells (not the "eye of newt" variety; a gift from my best friend since childhood); an assortment of books on social entrepreneurship (from a course by the same name I took at Harvard last year); a handful of non-fiction, murder-psychoanalysis accounts (I'll be reading While They Slept on my way to Nigeria - side note: rescheduled for mid-May); some VC Andrews novels from home; and - despite an exorbitantly priced, but impressive, private school education - perhaps my favorite book of all time, Harold and the Purple Crayon. Although a lot of them were required reading for school, I am still fairly impressed with the fact that I have read most of the lot from cover-to-cover.