UltraCrepidate

My mother came over for a one week visit so I’ve been sleeping on my Fuff chair and Klik Klak for several nights now. The morning feels rough and unshaven. Stock market is free falling and I had to refuse a few social calls which overall, makes me grumpy. But the nagging is what makes work more pleasant than home.

It was the change over the year which transformed our interaction. I can read my mother like an open book and she feels like a fountain of negativity. Her mind is trapped in an ever ending cycle of worrying between self sacrifice, traditional values and money. Some of them from the society she was born and some of them from her marriage to my dad.

I tried to change her point of view, to make her see how pointless these pursuits are and why she needs something else, but the effort usually gets interrupted by the criticisms she expressed at the way I arranged my furniture, or how I left my workshop in disarray and my apparent lack of social life.

Nothing is ever good enough. I had to stand my ground several times in an attempt to stop her incessant questioning. Questions that criticize my decision, questions that demand my attention and questions that probe my secrets.

Living with parents is supposed to better financially as you share resources and support, but now that I’ve been independent for a decade, I am glad that I left my parents when I did. The benefit of growing up without their influence far out weights the benefits of home made meals and free rent.

Mom. Even though you did it unconsciously, I can’t help you if you direct your negativities towards me. I wish that you can step out of the role of my mom and find yourself.

“Peeeeteeerrrr….”

“Hummm?”

“Do you realize that you are living the dream that all guys dream of?”

I look at her in puzzlement.

“You got 3 girls in your bed you naughty boy.”

It took me a few seconds to reframe my mind to Miriem’s comment.

“Haha, you are right. And I did it rather effortlessly didn’t I?”

Being with her is always interesting because you can never predict the next crazy idea that’s going to come out of her twisted mind. The fact that she doesn’t really have a filter when it comes to the most inappropriate and politically incorrect thing to say doesn’t help. Which is why, we are such a great pair when both of us fire off into one of these strange conversations. For example, a conversation such as this occurred in front of a soon-to-be mom.

“I wonder what other uses there are for the umbilical cord.”

“Oh! I know! ……”

“Know what?”

“….”

“Not telling you, I am way off topic again.”

“Oh… You were thinking about strangling the baby with it?”

“Yeah.”

I have long since given up in hiding myself from her. She’s one of those people that inspires truth in you because she has the uncanny ability to understand your state of mind. Whenever there are arguments in the group, she’d be the one to restate my point of view in someone else’s frame of mind and vice versa. In short, she’s Deanna Troy from Star Trek, but without the schooling which all Psychologist goes through to learn discipline.

My first brush with tower defense type of games is when I was playing Starcraft. Since then, I’ve accumulated quite a bit of experience sitting in front of my computer and staring at these endless waves of lemmings that throw themselves at your super enhanced towers.

It’s some type of guilty pleasure that I never understand. Highly addictive for some reason I can’t grasp and at the same time, the biggest time waster you can ever find. I thought I am over this simplistic type of game until I read this damn review about the 10 best flash games. Which includes the famous Desktop Tower Defense.

Granted, the graphics are crap, but it combines the essences of tower defenses into it. I won’t go into the actual game play in an attempt to spare you this useless addiction. Suffice to say, that I wasted 3 full days mastering the buildings in this game and also completed the hardest challenge: The 100.

Why did I do it? I just can’t let go of a challenge once it started. Here’s a pic of my layout. Notice that there are 3 possible exits. These are used to direct the traffic flow. the whole maze is fluid and changes with the difference placements of towers at key points.

I just realized that I’ve said nothing good about dancing since I started blogging. Most likely because I know the benefits all along and its obviousness is as clear as day and light. The other reason is because I only realized its negative impacts in hindsight while looking back or contemplating on some new habits I gained. The sharp contrast of a normal life against the dance lifestyle brought about some interesting debates.

To prevent boring you guys too much with words, I’ve separated this into several parts. Part I will be focusing on the physiological benefits. So, without further ado I will present my case.

Adrenaline is a natural high

The only reason why my parents haven’t brought their full might upon me to force me to quit (even though it contributed to me almost flunking out of engineering) is because it doesn’t destroy my brain like drugs. The adrenaline high is a natural state and we do take advantage of dancing to bring in the state. Remember the first time you asked a girl out? The sinking feeling before you take your finals? Or The euphoria you felt after bungee jumping? Thats what it feels like every time you walk off the floor. It’s addictive and it cost a lot, but at least it’s healthy.

Health benefits

When you crave to reach the top, or when walking the path towards the top. The athlete is forced to combine a number of different trainings together in order to improve. To compete physically, one needs to do muscle training and cardiovascular training alongside the normal dance training. Just the fact that you do these will ensure that you will have a well proportioned body. If you like that, you’ll enjoy the 8 packs that comes along with dancing as well as never having to worry about your love handles.

Expertise in movement

Unlike body training, dancing helps you build up all the small muscles that are involved in stabilization and teaches you new ways of moving. There are quite a few morning where I wake up with sore muscles in places I didn’t believe had muscles. There are also new brain connections that I have to make which I never knew before. Imagine the frustration when you try to perform, for the first time, Mr Spock’s peace hand signal in Star Trek. Now imagine perfecting it so you can move to the rhythm with that. Then imagine doing the same thing for a couple dozen different places of your body.

You become more aware of the space that your body occupy and you have several options in movements you can use to achieve the same result as one which you were born with. I’ve had girls commenting that even a simple thing as opening door, I look like I am dancing. (I’ve since made an effort not to “dance” when I open doors or do normal things because I don’t want to draw too much attention.) I wasn’t actually dancing, my movements were just ingrained to follow the fluidity of dancing.

Perfect posture

Most dancers I know have the perfect posture. I say most because there are always exceptions. But compared to the general population, there are a higher percentage of people with perfect posture than your average day to day Joe. I am talking about the chin high, chest up, and I am the king of the world type of posture. The reason is very simple, because everyone else in this circle is doing it. And if you show just a slight difference from the expected perfection, you won’t place ever.

Today marked an important day when two departments in our company linked up to play Call of Duty 2 during lunchtime. The culture of gamers built up slowly, I can still remember that there used to be only the 4 of us in the old days.

When we found out that another department was playing as well, we were excited. It took a while to work around all the technical details due to our IT infrastructure, but we did it. Now, we get to enjoy lunch time fragging of ~20 player games every day.

Gaming has come a long way to general acceptance. Now I see it opening up a way to socially connect strangers in the same company. We are all good natured in my department and not crazy enough to want to stab someone when we get killed, don’t know about the other department, I guess we will see in the future.

I started practicing the basics repetitively again as a cheap way to stay fit during the winter.

Don’t know why I didn’t start doing this earlier. Most likely because of the shame I felt from my old dance partner’s passing remark in one of those late night practices that are filled with fights. I sat down, took and deep look and realized that this feeling of shame came from her. From a specific remark where she said dancing is not like a robot, doing repetitive moves like chop-chop. I disagree.

Lots has changed in my body since I last did this and I noticed some added bonus from a more muscular body type. For one, I have muscles to support certain moves now. I also realized that I don’t have enough of them to support more powerful moves. Second thing that I noticed is that I am very out of shape. The cardio I gained from cycling really doesn’t translate into dancing. If you want to know, I used to be able to do this for five minutes straight. Today I lasted for one minute.

From observing my breathing, I noticed that I’d inhale in a quick gasp, hold the breath and than exhale as I perform a power move. Exhaling helps in suddenly tensing up all the muscles in my body, helping me stop the momentum of a powerful step. Which also means that I cannot separate my breathing from my muscles. Letting breathing run with the intensity means  that I’d run out of breath from a lack of oxygen, but keeping it with the rhythm means I’d hyperventilate. Take chacha for example, approximately 4 beats in a second, 4 weight changes, 2 complete breathing cycle.

So the only solution that’s the most probable, is to separate breathing from the actual dance. If my memory serves me correctly, learning to separate my upper body movements from the lower body (and later, disconnecting the mid section as well) was painfully slow. It was like dancing with your brain and not your body and I couldn’t think straight after each practice.

I showed up at the reception early so I have time to setup my camera and test the lighting of the room. It wasn’t too great, comparable to that of a dancesport competition. My focus this day was on people’s reaction since there’s already another photographer with a 10MP camera for the official pictures. (He has 5 of these cameras) My Kodak P850 feels so wimpy beside his. We had a great chat and he let me use his camera for a while to try out the feel of higher end models. I was practically drooling by the end of the night. So smooth, so sweet, and the shutter has no delays. One of those, would improve my pictures dramatically. However, I am still your poor SOB from yesterday and cannot afford one. Unless of course, someone drops it from the sky as a gift.

THE COUPLE

Both Mark and Rui share a trait that I think is the reason that drew me to them in the first place. A hidden wild side beneath their casual conservative appearance. I think the meet outside feeling is created by the underlying maddening attempt at perfectionism. I arrived at this conclusion through their actions, especially on the nights when I took them dancing.

Mark is like me in some ways. When I challenged him to ask three girls for dances he started without hesitation. A feat most newbies chicken out on on their first dance party. His outward appearance of an everyday working white collar is only due to his commitment towards a long term goal. In reality, he only need an excuse before changing into your Indiana Jones. This, I can relate to and even though our friendship is fairly new and there are still some uncomfortable moment when we hang out, I believe the short lived discomfort are caused by the collision of different worlds and expectations. Rui definitely helped ease him into some of the Asian quirks that comes with growing up in such a society.

“Rui is special.” that I agree with. I didn’t believe it in the first place thinking she’s just another meek Chinese, but I believe it now after seeing her dance. By this time, I think some of you must feel incredulous at how I always evaluate a person based on their dancing abilities. I’ve asked myself that same question, but gave up when I realized that any model that is used to judge people will have flaws. I use “the way people dance” because it is the way I have the most experience with. The same mock authority you’d give a person who’ve had sex with hundreds of woman or a middle manager who’ve been working at the same place for 30 years. I have danced with hundreds of woman and believe me when I say I can tell a person’s character from their dance. Certain type of people dance in a certain way, that is just accumulated statistics.

THE FRIENDS

I’ve met Mark’s friends a few times before, Adrian and Dave mostly. Later on, Frankman and Matt. It’s a good group of people who’ve known each other since childhood, been through all the crazes and embarrassments together. It makes me feel like an outsider sometimes and completely miss some of the jokes that they tell each other, but lately, as we meet more and more often, I feel that I am slowly integrating into the group. What they’d do for each other, the comfort in the way they interact together is quite amazing. It feels as though, anything you do is ok. No judgment, no accusations. Just a kind and heart warming feeling of support. I am jealous that I never had this.

THE NIGHT

The wedding took place at Restaurant du Vieux Port located in the tourist part of the old port. Pretty fancy and upper class. Mark booked the room and we had an open bar. I held back a lot because both my manager and the big boss was present at the wedding. Nope, no smashed up Peter for everyone to see. I did, however drank enough to warm up to the idea of dancing in front of all my co-workers of course. I believed that I danced to a Rumba, a Hustle, a Merengue and a Swing for everyone to see. Which made me really self conscious of the fact that I finally did it which in turn made me feel like running away from all the attention. I ended up leaving early around 10:30PM because of that. I don’t like the fact that this made me self conscious and actually didn’t know that this is really, not such a big deal as I made it out to be. Discussing this with Mark has alleviated some of that, but still not enough to make me stay longer. That and the fact that I got a huge headache.

The man in front of me uses a lady’s wallet to hold his money, which surprises me a bit. I mean, I’ve seen big fat wallets filled to the point where it’s just a block of leather, but this guy is the first person who just gave up on the stereotype of what a man’s wallet look like. He spent about a minute or so with his wallet open before deciding which one to use. So, since the opportunity is there, I took a peak inside to gauge the financial world of our Jon Doe.

There are at least 8 credit cards in that wallet and several other points cards which I lost count of. No cash and a driver’s license. It is also made of fake leather. I can only imagine what a cluttered world like that feels like. Every time you buy something, you have to spend the same amount of time deciding which cards with which option to use. I’ve long ago heeded Apple’s design slogan which, incidentally coincides with my dance teacher’s slogan: “Less is more.”

I mean, I am guilty of having several different credit cards as well however, I keep them for complete different reasons. Which also means that they never shows up in my wallet. A quick peek inside my current wallet shows a bank card, a driver’s license, company access key card and one credit card. If possible, I’d like to do away with the bank card and the key card all together, but life lessons taught me two important lessons that made them stay. First, always have a backup source of money. Second, put your keys where your money is, you won’t go far with only one of them anyway.

I don’t collect points or use one of those 2% cash back cards because they are more of a lure to spend than saving money. Add that to the headache of redeeming the points, no thanks. I also, don’t like to switch my primary credit card for credit score reasons. A long history of responsible spending and paying debt is a must in great credit history. If must comes to must, I prefer merging it with a card from the same bank.

Moral of the story? You really only need 1 credit card, a second one as a backup in your life. However, if you are a financially savvy person like me, there are no rules.

Am I having a mid-life crisis? It feels as though my week just zoomed by and I don’t remember whether anything happened at all. It could be because I am settled into a routine again and I admit. The recent stresses of work drains me so much that I do nothing but eat and sleep at home during the weekdays. Weekends! Now thats when life actually happens.

My commitment to excellence has been faltering as well. I think the daily grind of the same thing is getting to me. Originally, I had planned to have several different major project going on at once so that none of my eggs are in the same basket. It’s a sound strategy of diversification, same thing I applied in investment. What I didn’t account for though, is that one major emotion in one project will affect all the others as well. You are essentially still the same person. Just like how the current sub prime mortgage mess is spreading to the major banks.

A week ago, I was in the happiest high. A week later, I can’t really say anything about happiness.

Telling them the exact truth does nothing to clear their suspicion. People are too used to their own personal library of proven statistics that a person cannot get to a certain level of skill without putting in x amount of time. I guess, I can’t blame them since I haven’t told them about my dance background yet.

It was easy for me to copy the correct form used by the best bowlers in vicinity, after all, it’s just one sequence of movement, I am used to copy about 10 in 1 hour when learning new routines.  Which is why, no one believed me when I told them that this is my 3rd time playing bowling, they gave me the same questionable glance when I told them that I only played fuzball about 4 times in my life while blocking some of their extremely fast shots.

What they failed to notice though is that even though I have a perfect form in bowling, my accuracy and ball spin is the equivalent of someone who only played exactly 3 times in their life. My score never reached 100 in bowling. Same thing for fuzball. I simply figured out that the best way to block a shot as defense, is the maximum coverage of space shared between the defense men and goalie.  It’s simple mathematicl calculation. Again, they failed to take into account that I can’t score anything if my life depended on it because I am not attuned to how to shoot hard.

The curse of the dancer gives you perfect form, but no real umph.

Nothing shut a person’s chronic complaining up faster than giving that same person a taste of responsibility. Yes, I am talking about “moi”.

Teaching is different. Right away I started asking: “Are students going to understand these jumble mumbo? I for one, have a hard time grasping it and I live and breathe tech.”

The added responsibility means that I spend all my day Friday in meetings from now on while still being expected to perform my original duty. Which, to my knowledge, is still 60% of the US high tech population. Did I mention that I’d be teaching Engineers?

Thank god for having a documentations department so I don’t have to spend extra hours at work playing with power points or recording short clips of me mouse clicking on various buttons of the interface. I can already see the angry red face of my clients when they call me to find out why certain thing wasn’t done:

“Uhh yes… I was making power point presentations.”

My actual answer at the moment isn’t much better though. The amount of multitasking I am doing is getting insane, I won’t give a number because that’s business secret, but I can confirm that I actually calmly told a client of mine this today:

“Do you mind holding on for a moment while I pull up your file? Sorry, I am in the middle of working on another project and it’s hard to switch just like that.”

It’s my way of saying I remember talking to you about it, but there are so many people calling me to day who greeted me with “Hi, this is so-and-so, do you have an update on that problem we reported last week?” that I just give up. Please, don’t be irritated when I can’t recall the exact details of which variable out of your 2000 line of code within 10 seconds of me hearing your voice. I do attempt to act like a robot sometimes, but I am only human.

I am whining again

In any case, the training requires a lot of planing and because whether or not a training is good or bad depend solely on the presenter I don’t have any wiggle room or scapegoat to blame. I have to make it good. God, I still have flash backs of my oral presentations in French during my first year in a French environmen. I had no idea of what the words mean and I just memorized the sounds. YES the sounds! 5 Minutes of them!!! Thankfully, I’ve grown up to be a modern homo sapient and can now derive meaning from the sound. Except the presentation will run much longer and I have to worry about boring my students to death.