dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with run whirlwind run

I've just come back from a little, sunlit walk into town with Matthias. We collected iced coffee, and watched dogs frolic on the lawns beside the cathedral.

The weekend began with two hours of classes in the gym on Saturday morning, after which Matthias and I headed into the market. It was warm, and sunny, and we'd prudently booked a table in the courtyard garden at our favourite cafe/bar — and then smugly watched multiple groups of people showing up and having to be turned away because everyone else had had the same idea and there was no more room outside. We ate lunch from the Indian food truck at the market, and watched the clouds pass overhead in the blue sky.

Saturday evening was cosy and quiet. I cooked this recipe, we shared a bottle of white wine that we'd bought at a wine tasting in December, and, after I was reminded of its existence on Friday, we watched Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run), which Matthias had never seen, but which we somehow managed to own on DVD. It was as good as ever, but given that I love a) Berlin, b) techno music, and c) self-sacrificing, resourceful women, I would of course say that!

This morning started with a gorgeous morning at the pool: I was (as I always am) first into the water, gliding back and forth for 1km in the clear sunlight. Then Matthias and I spent the morning after breakfast in the garden, digging up the ever-encroaching blackberries, and planting seeds for peas, corn, and spring onions in some of the vegetable patches. We'll see how all this goes — this year is something of an experiment.

Other than my ongoing Benjamin January and Roma sub Rosa rereads, I've finished two new-to-me books this weekend, one excellent, and one very good.

( My thoughts on two books )

Now I'm going to make a cup of tea, and sit with Dreamwidth for a while, before heading upstairs to do some yoga in the afternoon sun, and then make dinner. Honestly, this weekend has been pretty close to perfect.

Today's open thread prompt should hopefully be a fun one: what are your favourite pieces of audiovisual storytelling that rely mainly on the interplay of music, and the movement of human bodies?

This is not only about dance sequences, although of course your answers may be dance sequences if you like. Film, TV, theatre, dance performances, music videos, and any other format you can think of are all welcome.

Hard mode (optional): don't pick things from works that are solely or majority dependent on movement and music to tell the story (i.e. dance performances, musicals).

I'll stick a handful of answers behind the cut to get things started.

( Dance party )

What about you?

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is one of my most formative works of fiction, and one of the things I've always appreciated is that it rewards rereads, and different elements come to the fore depending on the age in which you read it. I read the first book as a teenager, and certain elements didn't make sense to me until many rereads later, in adulthood.

One such aspect is a thing the series says about learning. Its protagonist, Lyra Silvertongue, gains the ability to read an 'aletheiometer,' a device which allows her to ask questions (about future events, about hidden or secret motives — basically questions about things that she would not be able to figure out independently) and receive a true answer. She's a child, and she learns to use the aletheiometer without being taught — the knowledge just happens to her, in much the same way as toddlers learn to walk, and talk. (I mean, obviously it takes effort and repetition and mistakes for toddlers to pick up these skills, but they aren't consciously aware of this effort and it's not something that we remember in later periods of our lives.) All other characters who can read aletheiometers learnt do so as adults, using books, with painstaking effort, and they're not as fluent at it as Lyra.

However, at the end of the trilogy, Lyra loses her ability to read the aletheiometer. This loss is tied explicitly with her transition to adolescence, and impending adulthood. She is told that she will be able to learn to read it again, but never in that effortless way — it would be a life's work of scholarship, and constant, conscious effort.

As a child, this always struck me as pointlessly cruel, and although I understood that Pullman was making a point about the differences between childhood and adulthood learning, I always hated that Lyra had to lose her special supernatural power. However, once I became an adult myself and experienced these stark differences in ways of learning (even of the same skills!) my perception of this narrative choice of Pullman changed.

All this by way of preamble of something sparked by one of the responses to yesterday's Friday open thread: a skill that I learnt unconsciously in childhood, and then had to relearn in adulthood with much effort, and trial and error. I'm referring to the ability to build a habit of regular exercise. Because at least one person mentioned that they'd be interested in knowing how I managed this, I've decided to write a post on the topic. Obviously what worked for me is not going to work for everyone, but it may possibly be helpful to some.

( Cut for discussion of exercise habits, no discussion of body image, weight loss or related topics )

This has been, for various reasons, an extremely trying day.

Oh well, at least we have Tactical Sekt for moments of infuriated melodrama.

Watch on YouTube

(I mean, this is music that's made to be the soundtrack to a cyberpunk film in which the protagonist is pursued through a somewhat sinister underground nightclub in Berlin, y/y?)

It's snowing outside, and I am delighted! I've lived in the northern hemisphere for twelve years, and I still haven't got over my wonder (as an Australian) at frozen stuff falling from the sky!

This week I'm returning to people's prompts for the open thread. Today's prompt comes from

bruttimabuoni, and it is:

What good habits do you have — things that you do because they make you feel good, healthy, positive?

( My answer behind the cut )

What about all of you?

I started the day by running to Grantchester and back. I left the house around 6.30, and it was cold enough that there was frost on the ground, mist rose up from the river, and the cows loomed eerily on the empty fields. I followed the run with a long, slow restorative yoga session, and what with all that exercise I felt simultaneously strong, stretched, and relaxed by 9am.

Today is the last day of my strange, languid holiday at home — I'll be 'returning' to work tomorrow. I spent the morning cleaning the internal windows in the house, moving my seedlings around on the windowsill to ensure that they got maximum sunlight, and sat outside in the courtyard for an hour or so, drinking coffee, eating a few remaining Easter eggs, and writing in my paper journal and bullet journal, surrounded by a pile of washi tape and fountain pens.

*

I've been reading free short stories online. I've found them to be a bit of a mixed bag.

'To Balance the Weight of Khalem' by RB Lemberg is about being a refugee and a migrant, with magical onions, crossing oceans, and food as a metaphor for loss, grief, alienation and home. I found it to be gorgeous, gorgeous work, although I think readers will get more out of it if they know anything of Lemberg's personal history — if you do, the metaphors and allusions in the story are very obvious.

'The Time Invariance of Snow' by E. Lily Yu is packed with allusions to myths and fairytales where women speak but their words have no power. I found it an interesting twist on the Snow Queen story, but possibly a bit darker than I was looking for in the current climate.

'Little Free Library' by Naomi Kritzer was a little bit twee (and as a librarian I have mixed opinions about little free 'libraries') — about a woman who opens up a little free library and strikes up a strange relationship with an unseen borrower of her books who appears to have come not just from outside her neighbourhood, but from outside this world altogether. I enjoy stories about the uncanny and strange brushing up against our world, so it was satisfying, but a bit slight.

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I received a nice treat in the post today — a beautiful Pippi Longstocking postcard from

gingicat, to go with the recipe postcard I received a week or so ago from

schneefink. I'm really enjoying this uptick in physical mail, and hope it continues beyond the pandemic.

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I will leave you with some photos of cherry, apple, and plum blossom from around my neighbourhood. The trees here are absolutely gorgeous at the moment, and I feel very fortunate to still be able to go outside and be among them. Here's the photoset on Instagram, and here it is as a Twitter thread if you prefer.

Incidentally, if you are on either of those platforms, I'm always happy to be added (and add in return) Dreamwidth people. I'm

ronnidolorosa and

ronnidolorosa. Instagram is very much the clichéd range of photos of flowers, trees and food. Twitter has a few more ranty political retweets and outraged grumpy threads about being a migrant in the UK and how dreadfully the UK government treats migrants and refugees.

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I hope you all are having as restful a time as possible.

I'm always astonished at how much more I can get done if I have a slightly longer weekend. It's not so much the extra hours, but more the fact that I don't feel utterly drained by 2pm, the way I do on a work day. (I suppose most of my work days begin with me leaving the house before 7, walking for 45 minutes and then swimming a kilometre, before I even start my actual paid work...)

But today I have:

Chatted via FaceTime with my peripatetic mother, who has been moving from airbnb to serviced apartment to my sister's flat in Melbourne to the house of one of her sisters on the other side of Sydney Harbour, living out of suitcases while her flat is being renovated;

Gone into town to run various errands;

Done some rough editing of my Yuletide assignment, and completed the first draft of one of the treats I'd been planning (I just sat down at the keyboard, and 2000 words tumbled out);

Done a rather intense yoga sequence, curling and stretching in the afternoon sun as it poured through the bedroom window;

Read about 2/3 of The Silence of the Girls, being struck again at how perfectly Pat Barker writes Briseis's story (and the story of all the captured Trojan women), and how much she is able to say with so few words. I wish every Iliad retelling were like this.

Now I'm just waiting for Matthias to come home after work, and then I will slow cook pork shoulder with chorizo, white beans, tomatoes and potatoes, and rest. And there'll still be one more day of my 'weekend' left.

I've written a couple of reviews of recent books I've read: stories about sisters — The Five Daughters of the Moon by Leena Likitalo, 'The Jewel and Her Lapidary' by Fran Wilde, and Buried Heart by Kate Elliott (the Wilde novella is not technically about sisters, but it's close enough), and Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor, which seemed to be written with my id in mind.

Matthias and I seem to be getting back into running with little difficulty, after a break of about six months. I'm relieved. We're going in a race in mid-November!

I made pasta with tomato sauce using tomatoes, garlic, and basil grown in my garden. I guess the next step is to make the pasta by hand?

I'm in the process of germinating scotch bonnet chilli seeds so that I can grown them in the house over winter. This is a step up for me in terms of my garden.

I've written my Yuletide letter in good time, and am very happy with my choices of fandoms to request (even if they'll probably send me directly to the pinch hit list). Now I just need to figure out which fandoms to offer.

I have acquired dresses which are both comfortable and warm. This is something of a miracle.

How have your weekends been?

I have a brief moment of calm between a week that's been very full on, with lots of intensive teaching, and essentially a week with an event happening almost every night. This is mainly because the Cambridge Film Festival, and the Cambridge Festival of Ideas have pretty much overlapped this year. For someone like me, who has very low energy and needs to spend a lot of time doing quiet stuff at home, it's going to be fun but exhausting.

Coming up over the next week or so:

A concert (Aurora) on Saturday 15th

A film (American Honey) on Tuesday 18th

A concert (Birdy) on Wednesday 19th

A talk (

Nalo_Hopkinson) on Thursday 20th

A talk (on new media) on Saturday 22nd

Apple Day (basically show up and eat as many types of apples as you can) on Sunday 23rd

A film (The Handmaiden) on Monday 24th

A film (Toni Erdmann) on Tuesday 25th

A talk (Farah Mendlesohn on children's fantasy novels) on Wednesday 26th

A film (Into the Inferno) on Thursday 27th

I feel exhausted just thinking about it! But everything should be a lot of fun.

I wrote a new post on my Wordpress blog. It's a review of A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir.

Crossposts: http://dolorosa-12.livejournal.com/229772.html

( spoilers for Downton Abbey )

Life goes on in its up and downy manner. Today I edited half of my PhD chapter. This went relatively smoothly, although for some reason, after lunch I felt a wave of anxiety so profound that I ended up sitting on the floor, crying and sort of rocking back and forth.

I managed to get a grip by going out for a long walk in the pouring rain. There are two paths that I could've taken along the route I chose: a bike path that is higher up, paved with asphalt, or a dirt track along the river, muddy and marshy. I chose the river track, despite not having any gumboots. There's something profoundly satisfying about trudging through the mud, being lashed by the wind and rain.

But my point is this: I'm not always in a position to go for a long walk when these waves of anxiety (or depression, or, occasionally, rage) hit. I'm thinking of tracking these things by noting my levels of depression, anxiety and rage every day, but it struck me that these things fluctuate, and I should try to keep track of what is bringing them on. People who have any experience with doing this, do you tend to note your levels of these emotions multiple times in the day, or only once a day?