Am I getting old?

Am I getting old or have I always been this strange?

Since it's my birthday, I want to do something really fun tonight and eat something really good for dinner.

After much contemplation this is what I decided on:

Dinner: tomatoes and cottage cheese, potato chips, and Peanut Butter M&Ms for dessert

Fun: 7-8pm go to the gym and watch the new episode of NCIS while I'm on the treadmill. Then be in bed with a good book by 9.

Yes, I'm totally excited about this. What is wrong with me?

-- Posted from my iPhone

Another reason I love to sing

When approached with the right attitude beautiful songs never get old. Each time we sing a song, we bring to it all that we have experienced since the last time we sang it. The technical growth reveals new beauties in the voice. Our life experiences bring new depth to the interpretation. I just sang a song that has been in my rep for more than 15 years and it was a totally new experience. I love that!


-- Posted from my iPhone

Deeper learning

You know what's sad is when you get so busy that you don't even take the time to ramble nonsensically on your blog. I started this post and got all of 2 sentences in before getting distracted by something else. But, I think this is worth coming back to.

In my Yang style Tai Chi class, since we know the whole form (Yang 24) now, we have started working on flipping it--doing everything to the right that we learned to the left. It is an interesting challenge, and it takes the learning to a new level. Sometimes by the time I get to class on Monday nights, my brain is ready to shut down. I know that some of the moves I learned purely kinesthetically, just watching the teacher and imitating her. As I try to flip it, obviously, the body feels it differently since it is a different hand or foot moving, so this really gives me a chance to go back and involve some analytical learning as well. And I'm finding that the better I get at flipping the form, the better I am the first direction.

For years, I've been talking to my students about using as many learning modes as possible. We obviously want to focus on whatever our individual strengths are, but if we use multiple learning methods, we know the material better. For example, if I was memorizing "I Enjoy Being a Girl", I would pick up most of the words just from listening to it and singing it several times. If draw pictures, I'll remember even more. If I make up silly actions (way more exaggerated than you would use to perform), I'll be even more solid in my memorization.

I've also found that there are times when we think we have learned something, but later realize that we just weren't ready to take it to the next level yet. Learning is very much influenced by how ready we are to learn whatever it is we are setting out to learn.

It's also true that sometime we understand things at an unconscious level before we really process it consciously. In writing my novel this past month, things came to the surface that I hadn't considered before. And in analyzing some symbolism (that I didn't even intend as symbolism) I learned something pretty profound.

I cannot imagine a life without learning. I crave it. I need it to exist. And life is more than happy to provide all the opportunities I need.

Another adventure over, at least for now

Today is the first weekend after NaNoWriMo and to be honest I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. I woke up this morning and wanted to go right to the computer to start writing as I did every non-work day in November. There are lots of things I should be doing, but I find myself wanting to write. The story is done, but there are places that I could go back and fill in a little more, especially near the end where I was just trying to get to the end of the story. But part of me also needs to be away from this story for awhile.

So, that was all a bunch of rambling nonsense about moving on after NaNo. NaNo teaches you to write, to just get the words out and not worry about editing. Obviously, I'm still stuck in that mode.

Here is some information about what I accomplished during November.

This shows my writing progress for the month of November. Yellow is a little higher than the daily goal, and orange is a little lower. Reds are exceptionally bad days and greens are exceptionally good days. As you can tell, I write best(or most prolifically) when I have big chunks of time. Although they encourage you to shoot for 1667 words a day and do develop a habit of writing daily, it just doesn't work for me. I achieved my goal, but did it in a way that works with my ADD brain. You can fight it, or you can embrace it.

To see a graph of my daily word count totals, you can go here.

I got off to a rough start this year, and there is a lot of crap that needs to be cut, but I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish this year. I actually finished the story and I wrote 26,600 more words than I needed for an official win.

Now, I'm going to work on catching up on all the things I put off because writing was important or fun, or both.