Sheridan’s Blog

Not much going on lately…sleep, gym, work, etc. I prefer to sleep on the weekends, which seems to have sent boyfriend into a shock spiral – Why? Why, Sheridan are you still asleep at 10am? WHY? He can’t handle it. I’m so trashed by the time it gets to the weekend, I fall asleep before midnight and am no good to go out. The other week when we drove over to a gathering in Doncaster, I was almost falling asleep at the wheel on the way there, and was naturally not in the party mood when I got there. I just fell asleep and let the people party all around me.
This new behavior has led me to believe I am re-enjoying my independence. I enjoyed it the first time around, now I am re-enjoying it. It’s much better now – I don’t care as much about what everyone else is doing or thinking (actually, I don’t think I could care less). Is this what it feels like to get older and wiser? I like it a lot. I wish I had felt like this years ago.
The reason I am falling asleep before most toddlers is the sheer amount of work I’m doing. I’m at work all day (which actually involved very little ‘work’), but usually before that, I’m hitting the gym like an Olympic athlete. And sometimes after work as well if the mood strikes me. When I fell over (the first time, just after I got back from overseas, not the subsequent many other times since) has encouraged the exercise, as I attempt to bring my ankle back up to speed with the rest of my body. It’s taking forever. I can jump on it and run on it, but if I stretch on a bizarre angle, it collapses (much like a K-mart folding chair under the weight of a morbidly obese woman).
I was also physically taken apart recently by a brief Foxtrot with a really big man. He was so tall and powerful and I was quickly overcome. I had the sensation of wanting to be closer to him (to make the dancing easier or insert other plausible excuse). Then when I got back to my chair after it had finished, the lady beside me drew her claws and spat ‘You’re breathing very heavily after that one’. Yeah whatever. Although, she may have had a point since I did a Jive earlier and barely elevated my heart rate. So boyfriend will now be taking lessons. Or at least lesson. I feel it might be easier to generate some chemistry with someone I already have chemistry with. Oddly enough, my teacher and I have the same chemistry as a brother and sister dancing together. It’s making it difficult.

Anyway – there’s lots happening in the coming weeks – office move, New Zealand, Melbourne Show, boyfriend’s/my birthday, various other birthdays, world domination, etc. I gotta get to bed.

I am working very hard on getting fit and very buff for shows later in the year. There is nothing more motivating than seeing yourself in costume and then realising other people are going to see you in costume as well. Especially when said costume consists of little more than a bikini. I have a hot new personal trainer. I don’t mean hot like he’s hot or anything, but he’s really ace at what he does. And I guess he’s pretty hot in the other way as well, but I don’t want to get into that mindset (sorry, if you’re reading Nate, you are fairly hot, but I don’t really think of you like that). Anyway, I do a lot of exercises and have cut out one of my favourite things – breakfast of croissants or bacon and eggs. And also, welcome to stretching! You know it’s bad when you can’t lift your arms. And then he tells me to massage my arms. WHAT?? Massage my own arms with my own arms? I did try this momentarily. It hurt. I’m gonna kick Nate’s arse next week, the bastard. If I can move my legs after he’s finished with me.
I have a dance show in a month or so. The terror has started. Why do I say yes to these things? Why do I then obsessively ask myself why I say yes to these things? Every now and then I get quite agitated about it. At the moment we’re working so hard and going over and over and over the one move (three steps, if that) for an hour until it’s ideal. And then we might get to the next move. Words cannot describe the level of frustration when you can’t get your head to go a certain way while your feet go another. But after months of head choreography, I can actually look into the mirror as we dance and see the progress. Although sometimes I get dizzy and confused and look at the wall where there is no mirror.

Minding my own business on my way to work the other day, I was suddenly aware of a dolloping kind of sound atop my head. Yes, a bird had, indeed, defacated on me. The feeling this evokes is generally not one of joy or happiness. Yet apparently it’s deemed lucky when this occurs. I can’t possibly think why. What is luck, anyway? Is it just the result of deliberately partaking in an avoidable gamble? Rather than get bogged down in the luck philosophy (which is why this post has taken several days to write…this is what I miss about university), I have gone the path of least resistance and focused on luck as a cultural construct instead.

Take the Kikuyu tribe of Kenya, who believe saying the number ’10′ is bad luck. As the legend goes, in the beginning there was a man called Kikuyu and his lady-friend Mireia (I love that name). Anyway, the story goes that they were to bear nine daughters from their little place under the fig tree on the slopes of the mountain. My wiki-research tells me that when the girls came of age, their father prayed to the applicable god for husbands for his daughters. It goes that the husbands were provided by way of that very same fig tree. And if you’ve ever seen figs growing on a fig tree, you may begin to understand what I’m currently visualising. Here’s the weird part – supposedly there was a tenth daughter, but because of the dislike of the number 10, she seems to be largely ignored. In fact, I can’t even find her name anywhere. I guess she was just referred to as ‘full nine’. The other daughters go on to have clans named for them. There is no further talk of ‘full nine’. After several fruitless attemps to glean some more information on her, I have given up. Sometimes the internet doesn’t have all the answers (or I don’t have the right questions). Just so you know, the Kuyuku tribe is still active in Africa, and depending who you ask, make up 22-35% of inhabitants there. I do wonder whether they’re ok with giving a non-verbal signal of 10 (ie – holding up two hands, or even writing the number 10 on paper).

And the Kikuyu are not the only kooky ones. While we’re on numbers I thought I’d have a look into the unlucky number 13. The ‘internet’ yields several suggestions as to why 13 is considered unlucky, and also informs me that the dislike of the number 13 is technically called Triskaidekaphobia. And it really has the number 12 to thank for its demise. Twelve is considered a complete figure, if you look around: there were 12 Apostles, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 months in the year, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 gods of Olympus, 12, 12, 12…13 seems to be surplus to requirements.
A Christian explanation cites Judas as the 13th member of the Last Supper scenario (and the traitor, thus bad). Or, a Norse-God-type arrangement explains that 12 gods were having a party at Valhalla (their version of heaven) and in came a 13th god, a party-pooper by the name of Loki, who arranged for the death of Balder (the god of joy and gladness, no less) with a mistletoe-tipped arrow. What’s more, the god Loki persuded to kill Balder was the blind god of darkness. How did he make the shot? When Balder died, the entire earth was darkened. 13 brings darkness.

In China and several other Asian nations, the number 4 is unpopular due to the Chinese word for 4, si, having stark similarities to the Chinese word for death (also ‘si’ but with a different intonation, I gather). The number 4 seems to share similar notoriety with the number 13. Cases of people avoiding living on the fourth floor, or entire buildings denying the existence of a fourth floor are common. This is not just petty fear – there’s even a proper noun allocated to this collection of behaviours -Tetraphobia – fear of, or aversion to the number 4. Apparently in Taiwan, they have gone to great extremes to avoid 4, by removing it from all vehicle registration plates, residential addresses and phone numbers. They can fix all this up by adding an A to the previous number (3a, 36a, etc). Some other places like to use the letter ‘F’ to designate 4. Anything with a 4 in it (or perhaps near it) is Bad News.

On that note, as it approaches 18:07 on 05/08/08, I feel now is a lucky time to sign off and go get dinner.