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      I mentioned in my last blog post that I don't swear. Which is true. I don't. Now, I'm not morally opposed to cursing, and it does not offend me personally when others do it. In fact, I don't bat an eye anymore when I hear curse words spewed by peers or people on TV or strangers walking down the street. I remember during subbie year, possibly freshman year too, innocent little me would wince or even say, "don't say bad words" when a friend would curse in front of me. Now, I even gently tease one of my friends sometimes who is a few years younger than me because she freaks out when someone says a bad word in her presence.

      We read an essay earlier this semester about a mom who let her child have a short time of word freedom every day. When I was younger, I don't think there were any explicit rules in my house about words my brother and I could or could not say. If I had spontaneously started swearing profusely at age 11, yes my dad probably would have scolded me, but there were never rules because Neil and I never created a need for them. I don't think that strict swearing rules, complete with punishments such as washing the mouth with soap, are necessarily a good idea, because, just as the essay said, this will just encourage kids to want to swear more at school or elsewhere. Just having a positive role model (Neil) who refused to swear taught me not to do so myself.

       Curse words are a strange phenomenon in language and slang. They are words that have been somewhat removed from their original meanings and, somewhere along the line, given heavily negative connotations. In most every language, curse words fall within the categories of either vulgar and inappropriate or religiously offensive. Their only useful modern purpose, aside from strong exclamations, is to add emphasis. However, there is almost always a good alternative or synonym to use instead of the curse word. Or it can be removed altogether with no effect on the meaning. If this is the case, then why should I add these curse words to my common vocabulary?

       I have had people tease me for not cursing, calling me "innocent" or "cute." I have also had peers try t pressure me into saying "just one bad word," not believing that I really don't curse. I sometimes feel like I'm not taken seriously in that respect. One time, I was getting very frustrated with a machine at ballet, and I accidentally said a word I usually wouldn't. My friend laughed when I freaked out about it. "That's not even really a bad word. Why do you care so much?" she said. I was unhappy because I wanted to uphold my own personal rule about not swearing. I can't give you one reason why I don't want to curse, it just doesn't seem necessary to me, especially when some people may find it offensive.

Not Making This Up

        If you see me at school and I appear to have makeup on my face, stop right there. There are three possible explanations for this: the person you are looking at is not actually me, you need to get your eyes checked, or the world is ending. Oh wait, or I couldn't get all my eyeliner off after a dress rehearsal the night before. Wait, also if it's Halloween or spirit week or something and I really need crazy blue eye-shadow for a costume, sure, but that hasn't happened to date. Okay, fine, that makes five (however unlikely) possibilities. My point is, I am not someone who wears makeup to school. I don't really have one good explanation for why exactly, and I've never really thought that hard about it before today. It's just a thing (like how I don't curse, no specific reason, it's just a thing, and that one could be a whole other blog post by itself). 

        It's not that I objectively hate how I look with makeup. My ballet stage makeup sure, I think it looks awful, but it only is really supposed to look good from 20 yards away under bright lights anyways. But the kind of makeup that I would hypothetically wear to school, I'm okay with it. In fact, if I'm happy with how my makeup looks, it boosts my confidence a tiny bit. Even throwing on a bit of mascara (the most I think I've ever worn to school) can make me feel better about myself for pictures or an interview. I guess for me, my rejection of wearing makeup to school is more of a personal practicality and comfort thing. (In no way do I think never wearing makeup to school is the optimal way of life or preferable thing for everyone, it just is for me.)

        First of all, and this isn't necessarily the most important of the explanations, I can't imagine adding the time into my routine to do my makeup in the morning and take it off at night every single day. I don't get enough sleep as it is, and chopping more of that sleep off of every day would be tough. I know, no one said it had to be every day, but I like routines in the mornings, and deciding last minute that I feel like I want to wear makeup that day would not fly with me. Another practicality issue is that I'm not all that great at doing makeup, despite the hundred times I have had to do it for ballet. I know this would get better with practice, but I wouldn't even know how to start.

        Another reason I don't wear makeup to school is for personal self-confidence reasons. I have always been a very self-conscious person. At least half of my mind always seems to be on wondering what other people think of me and how I am presenting myself every moment of every day. That is not necessarily a good thing, I know, so something I have been working on recently is trying to make sure that the person that people see when they look at me is really me. It's not the girl I think I want to be or the one I thought was cool when I chatted with her waiting in line at Einsteins. Part of that is just caring less about what people think of my actions. Another thing is worrying less about my physical appearance in other people's eyes. I have been very self-conscious about the little things of how I look for a long time, and I am only just recently learning what it means to appreciate my own appearances how they are. I think that makeup (outside the context of ballet) makes me feel like someone else, not me, on the outside. I am not a person who wears makeup, so when I do, I feel like I'm masking myself to look like someone else. None of this is to say that makeup is bad for everyone; many people feel like makeup adds to, or at the very least doesn't mess with, who they are when they are at school. I just don't think it's me specifically, so why should I wear it? 

        I wore makeup to homecoming (more than just mascara) and it was weird. I would catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and have to do a triple take. I did not feel like me, or at least the normal me, with enough makeup to change how I looked. Don't get me wrong, I looked nice and it was fun to feel pretty, but it was a strange experience and I still don't know how I feel about it. I wouldn't do that at school on a normal day, though.

        So if you see me at school wearing makeup, the world is probably ending. Or I'm dressing up for something really, really special. It still won't be too much makeup though. Not on me.

        (The irony is that as I finish writing this, I am at home wearing a full face of stage makeup from our dress rehearsal tonight. The stage is different because makeup is necessary there.)

Is It Worth It?

        I have been having a mini crisis in my head recently. Let me share it with you. My mini crisis comes down to my life as a dancer. I have been dancing for 65% of my life, and although I have sacrificed a lot for it, including my social life and physical health much of the time, I love it. In a college app short answer I recently wrote, I said, "Ballet is my passion." Thinking about it, ballet is really a major part of my way of life. I dedicate at least 26 hours of my week every week to ballet, not to mention the money spent over the past 11 years. If you look at my Facebook feed, it is at least half filled with pictures and videos from major ballerinas, ballet companies, and ballet groups. I love dancing with every inch of me when I'm on stage or rehearsing one of my favorite pieces. I love seeing myself improve in my extension and turns over months of hard work. Every compliment from Deanna feels as valuable, sacred, and rare as pure gold. However, I am giving up a lot to do ballet. Is it really worth it?

         In 8th grade, I had to make the momentous decision of choosing between soccer and ballet. (I chose ballet, as you can tell.) However, it is not true that that decision came easily. I remember experiencing a lot of emotional turmoil about it. I had been playing soccer for just as long, if not longer, than I had been dancing. I loved soccer games. Soccer and ballet were jointly my two passions, and I had to choose ballet over soccer. Watching the Uni soccer games this fall, I had a strong feeling of wanting to be on the field again in orange in blue (I played for IFC), playing outside defense. I sat on the bleachers at every game I could make it to, saying to myself all the things a normal person would yell to the players. I was not confident enough to yell it, but I was happy knowing that I could still understand everything and critique the plays.

         Ballet, due to how time-consuming it is, has prevented me from feeling like a normal high school teenager sometimes (okay, maybe more like most of the time). There are so many shows, social gatherings, and events, that I would have loved to go to, but there's always ballet in the way. Ballet takes a lot of time, and although that time commitment really is necessary for progression as a dancer, it has an effect. I have to constantly tell my friends "sorry I can't, I have ballet," or, "I really want to, but I can't miss ballet tonight." Teenagers are supposed to spend tons of time with their friends, boyfriend/girlfriend, and/or just enjoying freedom without all the responsibility. Sometimes I feel like I am missing out on all of this, and if I have to give one reason, it is that ballet doesn't leave me the time and energy necessary for this.

        On top of all of this, I am never physically healthy anymore. I have had chronic knee problems since freshman year. I had a stress fracture last year that has been threatening to reappear for the past 12 months. My ankles and back never feel quite right anymore, and at the moment, I am self-diagnosed with tendinitis in my hip flexor. I realized the other day that I cannot remember the last time that I went through a day of ballet without feeling like I was in pain in any way. I have realized recently that I am sacrificing my lifelong physical health for ballet now.

        So if I am sacrificing so much for ballet, is it worth it? I think it is for me right now because it is a huge part of my life and I really enjoy it. If I stopped dancing right now, I could see myself sitting around my house feeling lost. When we have a break from ballet for even a few days, sometimes I find myself dancing subtly without even thinking about it. It is a part of my life that I would not be able to give up easily. It also makes me really happy, so for the moment, I can't imagine having to stop dancing. Even when I was in a boot last year, I went to ballet every day to do part of warm-ups and watch the rest of class. I think ballet is worth it, but will I still think that is 2 or 5 or 20 years? I don't know.

A Little Backstory of Myself

So, I’ve been posting on my blog about some pretty serious things recently, so I thought today I might reflect on parts of my childhood that I really enjoyed and that make me happy to think about. This means my life as a Tewks-cap. There is a family that lives behind us with three kids. My brother and I and those three kids came together as the Tewks-caps (a merging of the last names). Granted, it was Tewks-cap-manns or Tewks-cap-sons or Tewks-cap-schiems at different points when other kids joined in for a bit, but it was always, at the very least, the Tewks-caps. There were five of us in the main group, with the oldest of us being five and half years older than the youngest (me), but no less friends for the age difference. The best part was, the Tewks-cap backyards (because we saw no difference in who technically owned which) are connected by a path in the back of each.

We engaged in some pretty crazy shenanigans for young kids. We blew up small firecrackers (donated by a neighbor because it was illegal to sell them at the annual block yard sale) in our backyard; we constructed huge K’nex structures for every reason we could think of; we shot b-b guns in the basement (don’t worry, those of us without glasses hid behind pillows); we built igloos big enough to stand on the inside (we were not as tall then) and sled on the outside; we used ripstiks, bikes, and scooters to videotape cool tricks on the concrete patio; we put many more things on the grill than should have been there; we made “skirons” out of skateboards and ironing boards, and much more. I looked up to the three older brothers so much because they directed every activity and always seemed to know what they were doing (however unsafe). Liz and I, being younger than the brothers and less than a year apart, stuck together and sometimes were assigned to photograph the quidditch games or refill the water guns for the older brothers, but we were always watching and learning from them, including how to construct the perfect paper airplane, down to the inches of scotch tape and size of paperclips necessary to weight the nose and tail. (I honestly don’t find it overly surprising that the three older brothers are currently in college or grad school studying railroad engineering, aviation, and mechanical engineering.)

As we have gotten older, we have gotten more busy and less able to spend hours on end together daily. With three of the Tewks-caps at three different colleges, reunions are few and far between. However, when we are together, some things will never change. When the Tewks-cap squad comes together, usually now the Tewks-cap-schiems, we have fun and act like siblings again. We always play ghosts in the graveyard, which is perfect in the conjoined backyards. We also play often Mario Kart Wii in the basement, using the “losers walk” method of rotating turns. The last time we were together, we even did stupid stuff with not enough safety precautions. We threw (and shot from water pistols) liquid nitro fuel onto an open fire in the backyard. We also doused bricks in it and lit them on fire on the grass. After going through several bottles of the fuel, we pulled out sleeping bags and fell asleep under the stars together. This is something that made me feel like we were kids again, doing stupid stuff for fun in our yard and knowing our parents didn’t care, as long as they knew where we were and we didn’t get hurt too badly.

Now that I have told you more than you needed to know about the Tewks-caps, you should also know that it has had a lasting impact on me. I am not nearly as adventurous, spontaneous, or reckless as I was then, but I can say that I would not be any of those things at all if it wasn’t for the Tewks-caps. We were crazy and not the least bit logical, but it has taught me a lot about what is really important to me in my life. I need to ignore the tedious and mindless work sometimes and just enjoy my life as a kid and as a human in this world. Also, through the Tewks-cap bond, I have had an amazing support system for my whole life. They have given me as much love and guidance as I have ever needed. It saddens me to think of leaving it behind next year, especially as my parents may move back to the West Coast a few years later, but my two families will always be there for me and I will always be a Tewks-cap. We still borrow recipe ingredients from each other often, we still get together for birthdays (who is still left in town, that is), I will always be able to call Liz up and talk to her for hours, and we will always be the Tewks-cap kids, no matter where else life takes us and how old we get.

I Am Maggie

I’m a dancer. You will know that if you have read my previous post, or if you have ever had a decently long conversation with me. I don’t try to hide it. That’s part of who I am. The problem is, that’s not all of who I am. I am more than ballet. I am more than what I put my time into. Sometimes I forget that, and sometimes that’s lost on those who don’t know me very well. My public identity is, at times, too tied to ballet.

When I first came to Uni, my public identity was variable based on who you talked to. To most of the school, I was not known at all. That is, I had no identity. To my brother’s friends in his class and above that, I was “Neil’s little sister,” the cute, younger, female clone of Neil Tewksbury (except to Marie Su, who knew me from ballet, but she’s the exception). To a few of the freshmen, I was “Neil’s sister.” To others of them, I was one of the pretentious subbies who had decided to skip subbie math. In my class, however, there was a huge variance. To a few people in my class subbie year, I was just a girl who played IFC on the U13 team. To others, I was Sophia’s friend from ballet. Also, I already had spent at least a few years of school with 11 of my classmates in middle school. To them, I had a complicated identity that probably included my nerdiness, my quietness, and the fact that I did ballet and soccer.

Almost as soon as I stopped soccer, or a year before, ballet took over my life. To be fair, I did stop soccer because I physically could not do both it and ballet, so I wasn’t very surprised. But still, it was weird that freshman year, ballet was one of only three extracurriculars I participated in, and the other two took up little time. I became known as just one of the ballerinas to people who didn’t even know me at Uni. “Hi I’m Maggie.” “Nice to meet you. You do ballet, right?” It got old quickly when I often had to prove myself as more than just a dancer. Some of my teachers ask about ballet all the time and that’s the only thing they know about me. Again, it gets old.

This semester, I’m taking a class at the U of I and working at a lab on campus. In both places, everyone knows me as the high school student pretending (not too badly sometimes) to be a college student. No one, or few people, know that I do ballet. It’s refreshing because at the lab, we chat about Champaign and school and all sorts of stuff. No one ever asks about ballet or makes any assumptions because I’m a dancer. To be fair, it is getting better at Uni now that I am a senior and talking to people about college apps, school, and other stressful senior year stuff. Also, I don’t mean to say that people are ignorant. I think the issue is instead that ballet takes up so much time, it is easy to forget that I do other things too, even for me sometimes. I am more than my sport. I am Maggie, and that means so much more to me than ballet.

I Am an Athlete

I would like to say this: ballet is a sport, despite the fact that it is sorely misrepresented in much of popular media, and the definition of “sport” should be expanded to fit it. You may be thinking I’m just really bitter about something someone said to me recently. No, I am actually serious about this. Ballet is an activity — which, as you probably know, I do — that is often underestimated and/or misunderstood by the general, non-ballet-dancing public. I understand that not everyone has to love, fully appreciate, or even watch ballet, but the quantity of images in the world like the first one below drives me crazy. Ballet is not a place where a bunch of little girls in pink tulle prance around all day. (Not to say little girls never wear pink tulle and prance around in ballet, that’s just not the whole picture.) What is left out of a lot of popular media is the physical and mental aspects of ballet, especially at higher ages and in more serious classes.

First of all, we are athletes as much as a soccer player or a gymnast is. Most of us have trained for years to reach the point we are at now, and this is not a stopping point. Someone could not start ballet and in two years of hard work expect to get close to the level someone is at if they have been training for six years. I have 16+ hours of scheduled class and rehearsal time per week during most of the school year, but I’m at the studio for 22 hours per week. We work on stamina, muscle precision, and technique, making us physically fit in a very unique way. Being sore from class is our typical state. We work through pain on a daily basis (ask any dancer, it’s more true than it should be). Also, I don’t think anyone could watch a ballet and say we are not athletes. I don’t think this would be that much harder than an intense club sport, but that’s my point. Ballet should be considered a sport.

Not only are we working physically, we also push ourselves mentally. During any individual moment of dancing, there are a minimum of ten things we are supposed to be thinking about to dance as well as we can. Also, as you might expect, the choreography we perform is not improvised, and our movements and body placement are very specific, especially when dancing in a corps (group). In the case of CUBallet (the company I and eight other Uni students dance with), we rehearse each show for 10-20 weeks before performing it, and no rehearsal is ever repetitive or pointless. When we are dancing, moreover, we have to make every movement look effortless and smile as if the pain in our feet wasn’t making us want to cry. That is emotionally taxing. When we get to tech week (on weeknights), we are at the theatre and working — not doing homework, putting our feet up, or otherwise having down time — from at least 4:30 to 10:00, often even longer. I wish I could say that when we get home, we can go to bed, but this is unfortunately not the case. We start homework, eat some dinner, and soak our feet in buckets of ice water before going to bed. This is probably not that much harder than a not-school-affiliated theatre tech week or maybe a club sports tournament, but that’s my point. Ballet is just as hard as those, and should be treated as such.

The most annoying thing to me is when people make me feel like ballet is less than what it is. Saying “oh yeah I used to do ballet too when I was five” or “do a spin for me” just makes me cringe on the inside before responding, “oh that’s cool” or “what kind of turn?” It’s the little things that add up. At the subbie retreat, we did an activity where, without talking, we had to get in groups by our favorite sport and act it out. One of the subbies and I stood next to each other and started doing pliés (a basic and yet integral piece of ballet). We got weird looks but we are dancers and want to be seen as such. Again, I realize that not everyone has to love ballet (there are plenty of sports I don’t love but still respect), but I want it to be recognized as a sport and dancers to be recognized as athletes as much as swimmers, soccer players, and gymnasts are. At the end of the day, we are all hard-working athletes whose time commitments deserve a little respect. I especially want medical professionals and physical education teachers to see it as a sport so that they can best help their clients or students who are dancers (especially because we have a tendency to get injured and ignore it for three weeks before admitting we need help). Besides, ballet is as hard as any sport. It’s as physically and mentally exhausting as a sport. Please call it one. On the simplest level, I want to see more pictures like the one on the right in popular media instead of the one on the left.

I'm Stressed and I'm Not Alone

Stress is part of our lives at Uni, and in life in general. We are usually teetering on the edge of sanity, one step away from an emotional breakdown at any time. But where do we get this stress from? It seems like we get it from work and expectations we and others set for ourselves. Every time one task is completed, two more rush in to fill its place. We are always being weighed down by things we have to do. We are all so busy, and it seems like we never get a minute to just breathe and relax. Even as I’m writing this I feel like I haven’t taken a mental break in a while. I wonder why we are all so over-scheduled and high-strung all the time. I think that part of the issue is that there is the absurd idea at Uni that in order to be an impressive student and college applicant, you have to drive yourself nuts with a huge quantity of work and a severe lack of free time. Unfortunately, I have bought into that, even if just for the reason that I can’t say no to an extra-curricular that I enjoy or am passionate about, so they just keep piling up. Every time I have to drop an extra-curricular from my life, I procrastinate too long on telling the person in charge so that I can change my mind at the last minute if I want to, which I often do. This results in too many big time commitments combining into a 12-hour day of busyness before homework can even start. The time goes down and the stress goes up, like in the Atwood machines we learned about in physics, except in this case one side goes up more than the other goes down.

How do we address the stress we feel from school and extracurriculars? To be honest, I feel like we don’t really address it. One popular strategy is to complain about it to each other (which is easy cause we’re all experiencing the same thing) and then go back to all the work waiting to be done. This doesn’t actually relieve stress. It just makes us more high-strung because in order to put the stress into words, we have to conceptualize the roots of it, making us freak out more. The other popular strategy is to procrastinate. We have a tendency to fight the smaller and nearer battles first, ignoring the big battles until they catch us off-guard when it is almost too late. This also increases our stress because it just makes everything hang over our heads more heavily and for longer than necessary. Because of our flawed strategies, the stress increases in an exponential pattern.

Where this blog post begins to seem “meta” is when I mention that this particular blog post has caused me stress because it had added to all the other things I need to do by tonight, however small each one might be, such that I am now overwhelmed by my to-do list for this evening. As I'm writing this, there is a actually a to-do list sitting on the table next to me with not enough things crossed off of it. This is caused by my procrastination and an attempt to get enough sleep earlier in the week, jeopardizing my sleep now. I think that the stress I have is only multiplied when college applications and everything pertaining to that comes into the equation because there are so many things that need to get done in that realm and so little time to do them. The nice thing is, just as with homework- and extracurricular-related stress, college app-related stress is something all of my classmates can understand. At Uni, just like we are shoved into over-using "smart" for silly reasons, we are forced to over-work ourselves and test the limits of our own sanity.