Ombailamos

back to the dance floor?

When I was looking back, I realized that Mr. P and I have had a sort of three-year cycle going: one good dance year, followed by two in which we didn't do much of anything.  Our last good dance year was 2013, so we are due for another one.

But what is a good dance year going to look like for us now?  We are far behind where we were in 2013, in terms of fitness and also in our basic dance vocabulary: in all of 2015, we went out social dancing maybe four times.  No shows, no competition, no nothing.  We are making an effort to increase our social-dance frequency, but we really are at a point where we have to practice at home to remind ourselves of stuff we know how to do socially.

This is a prime example of "use it or lose it."

On the plus side, we do recover stuff pretty fast.  Fitness recovery is going to take longer than proficiency recovery.

We had a bit of a powwow to discuss what we want to do with our dancing.  It's been Our Thing from the very start, and having developed few other leisure activities, losing the dancing meant we did next to nothing besides watch TV and read.  It's no wonder we got unfit. I want to get back to it, in a fairly serious way.

And I don't want to perpetuate a three-year cycle.  We don't have time for that any more - I mean time in which dancing is going to be available as a regular social/leisure activity.  If we are in L.A. for another 15 years - max - a three-year cycle would mean a maximum of five good dance years.  

That's not enough.  We need to find a balance that keeps us actively dancing every year.

We discussed whether we want to go back into training for competition.  I do; Mr. P isn't averse to it.  But we need to be strategic about our approach.  Did we want to try one of the single-dance circuits, like West Coast Swing or Argentine Tango?  Either would be a good way to get better at social dancing in those styles.  But we decided that we want to stay in our style - American ballroom.

We'd already discussed that trying to do American style 9-dance was pretty much out of our reach: we don't have the time, or the budget, to do coaching for nine dances; and we can't rehearse American Smooth at home, which means even doing rounds would require renting studio space.  

Not to mention that a competition ballgown is mighty expensive, but I already have several decent options for rhythm costumes.  Our first time going back out, at least, wouldn't involve costume expense.

So it looks like it will be Rhythm, with occasional forays into showcase numbers where we can work in other styles.

Another of the reasons for choosing Rhythm is that I can put the routines together myself, for the most part, and only pay for coaching to polish them.  When you are dancing on a budget, you have to think of these things. 

I started looking over the last choreography I'd written - back in 2014! - and found I now mostly don't like it.

We've watched some recent professional competition footage, and I could try to make our stuff look like that.  Once we're fit again, we could execute it.  But I realized that I don't really want to do that, either.  Our last time out, I was focused on doing stuff that was kind of on-trend.  It didn't really suit us, and it wasn't all that much fun to dance.

What would be most fun, I think, is to make routines that are as close to social dancing as possible: routines that look and feel like lead-and-follow dancing, where our technique and our connection are going to be the things that stand out.  

As fiftysomething amateurs we are never going to look like thirty-year-old professionals: the moves that look good on them simply won't look good on us.  And we've heard enough times that our connection is what makes people want to watch us, that I am finally going to take that as my starting point in making the routines.

I've already written a new cha-cha routine that I really like.  We can practice it at home, and dance it socially, and I think it will be fun.

Now I need to take those ideas and apply them to the other four dances.

Our technique will need some work - you get sloppy when that's not your focus - and we'll need coaching to make our styling the best it can be.  But at least we have a plan.

reading list: December 2015

Finishing out the year with some new stuff and a couple of old favorites.

132. Murder for Christmas* Thomas Godfrey, ed. A collection of short stories set around the holidays, embellished by introductions by the editor, including this one which made me snort: "The name Thomas Hardy has meant surefire gloom and doom for a century ... First depression sets in.  Later only electroshock therapy can restore the will to live.  No one has ever gone to Thomas Hardy for light reading."  The Hardy story included is actually quite entertaining.  :-)

133. Intentions* by Oscar Wilde.  My favorite part was the last essay, The Truth About Masks, which has to do with costume and production design for the theatre, and with specific notes about Shakespeare.

134. Act Like It* by Lucy Parker.  A smart, articulate romance about two smart, articulate actors in London.

135. A High-End Finish* by Kate Carlisle.  In which a small-town girl with a construction business gets tangled up in a series of murders.

136. This Old Homicide* by Kate Carlisle.  In which small-town shenanigans continue.

137. Crowned and Moldering* by Kate Carlisle. In which a fifteen-year-old disappearance is solved and a terrible high-school counselor is brought to justice.

Note on the above three, generally: I could do with a lot more construction and a lot less gossip, but these are small-town cozies, so ... .  The milieu was just attractive enough, and there was enough entertainment value, to keep me going even though the mysteries are not very mysterious and there is a lot of repetition.

138. A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong* by Cecilia Grant.  A very good, long Regency novella.

139. Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes* by Maria Konnikova. An accessible treatment of brain science, psychology, and other approaches to rationality.

140. Countdown to Lockdown* by Mick Foley. An odd pick for me, I know.  :-) Learned a little about professional wrestling entertainment, which certainly does not appear to bear much resemblance to a sport.  Lively writing by what seems to be a nice guy.

141.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead* by Tom Stoppard. Another case of a "classic" that I just don't get.  There is some good commentary here on "Hamlet" but getting to it is damned annoying.

Rosencrantz: Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all.

me: this essentially describes the whole play.

142. The Danger by Dick Francis.  In which a kidnap-prevention specialist finds himself handcuffed, naked, to a tree.  Being a badass, he uproots it.  I had forgotten that part since the last time I read this one. 

143. Flying Finish by Dick Francis.  Another of my all-time favorites, this one features the strongest romance in any of Francis' novels.  It is also the book that prompted me to write a fan letter, which Mr. Francis answered - an artifact I have carefully kept.  (note on the Dick Francis itinerary: I recently read Risk, which features a kidnapping.  That prompted The Danger, which is set partly in Italy, as is Flying Finish).  

"I found out between one heartbeat and the next what all the poets throughout the ages had been going on about.

... holding hands surreptitiously under her coat, as if by this tiny area of skin contact we could keep alive the total union of the night.  I had never wanted to hold hands with anyone before; never realized it could feel like being plugged into a small electric current, warm, comforting, and vibrant, all at the same time."

 

Also from Flying Finish:

Air is curious stuff.  One tends to think that because it is invisible it isn't there. ... But air is tough, elastic and resistant; and the harder you dig into it the more solid it becomes.

spring cleaning, paperwork edition

The annual paper purge is underway.  The first thing to go was - as usual - the backup paperwork from Tax Year +8 (that's 2007).  There was a LOT of it - our tax backup is gradually getting smaller, 2007 was kind of the high point (or low point, depending on your perspective) in terms of volume.

I have enough mental bandwidth this year to do something which is rather overdue, which is to rationalize all of my investment/retirement paperwork so that it is all in the same place and so that the life story of my money is made clear.  Right now it is ... less than clear.

Like most people who work in corporate offices, my retirement plan is a 401(k).  Also like most such people, every time I change jobs I have to make a decision whether to roll over the 401(k) or keep it separate.

Since I prefer simplicity, I have chosen, historically, to roll over my retirement accounts.  So far I have rolled over ... at least three times; and have another rollover to do imminently.  My current employer's 401(k) plan will be the fifth or sixth I have participated in.  I may have a mental block about some of this, or my failure to remember whether I had a 401(k) with my very first law-office job may simply be AGE.  It was a long time ago, y'all.

Note: some people choose to cash out their 401(k) accounts when they change jobs.  This is a BAD IDEA unless you are absolutely desperate for money to live on.  If you are not going to another job that offers a 401(k), roll the old account into an IRA at the brokerage of your choice, and leave it alone.  

For what it's worth, my old 401(k) is with Schwab and they have done just fine with it.  The previous incarnation was with Citigroup, and they also did just fine with it.  The key is selecting low-cost investments that have a reasonable rate of return and require very little manipulation.  Every manipulation costs you money.  My money is in low-cost Vanguard funds and it gets rebalanced - by me - once a year.

There were other, more-or-less tax-advantaged accounts along the way; all of which have been closed out, with maximum possible attention to tax consequences.  I had a Roth IRA, for example, to which I was not contributing after a certain point, because to me it made more sense to contribute to a Health Savings Account (HSA). I learned that I could roll over a certain amount of the Roth money into my HSA.  I did so, and the balance remaining was less than my original contributions; since they were made with after tax dollars, I could simply close the account and withdraw that money as cash.  It went into the Great 2007/2008 Debt Payoff because that was the greatest possible return I could get on those dollars.

The most confusing accounts were not tax-advantaged, and I was happy to get rid of them.  The amount of money earned by these accounts was trivial, especially in view of the stress and confusion occasioned by the notion of "cost basis."  

If you are financially independent, with nothing to do but money math, by all means keep money in non-tax-advantaged investment accounts, and have fun with that $*#&@&!! capital-gains reporting.

Or of course, pay an accountant to do it, if you can find one you trust to know what they are doing with cost basis (not to mention Schedule C business deductions.  We used an accountant for a few years, but I didn't trust him, which is why I have done our tax returns myself for most of our marriage).

A good brokerage is also a financial management company and should, of course, provide you with regular reports which will tell you exactly what the tax consequences of your transactions are.  However ... the rules on these things change constantly.  Every year, basically.  Looking at my various year-end statements, I would struggle to tell you if I needed to report anything from a given account in a given year, and I am not an idiot.

Anyway, for people like me (full-time-employed and not completely in love with money math), my advice is to keep it simple.  Not as simple as just a savings account earning .03% (though you should have one of those too), but a helluva lot more simple than a Scottrade account.  

In a 401(k), your contributions are deferred income.  The contributions - and earnings - are thus pre-tax, so when you are eligible to take distributions you simply pay tax as if the distribution is new income.  None o' this cost basis crap.

The point is that I am positive that all necessary taxes were paid (we pay a lot of taxes), but the narrative is sketchy, and for me narrative is everything.

If all goes well, my current employment will be the last employment in L.A., and I would like to get all my ducks quacking neatly in a row so that the next decade is free of questions.

what I require in a published writer

Well, it is a new year of kvetching and I have a lot of catch-up blogging to do, so it is a good thing there is plenty to kvetch about.

Today's kvetch: the inadequacy of editing.

I recently read a romance novel, don't know if it was self-published or not, but here's what I think:  ESPECIALLY if a book is self-published, the writer owes it to the buyer to deliver a product that has been edited.  I don't mean professionally edited; ain't nobody got time (or money) for that.  

I mean pay attention to what you are doing, and fix the mistakes you find.  And read the book before you hit publish.  Not just once: read it three or four times, straight through.

There are certain things that are very easy to spot if you use an actual word-processing program, because these things will tell you if your syntax if borked or if your spelling is wrong.  And yet people allow misspellings and syntax errors to persist.  Alas.

(Note: I have caught errors in my own published stuff plenty of times.  What do I do?  I fix it.)

The novel in question provoked my editorial spleen based on a different, less obvious oversight: poor word choice.  Not just poor: incorrect.  "Fellatio" does not actually refer to an act performed either on a man or a woman.  It is gender-specific.  Using that word to describe an act being performed on the heroine leads one to speculate that the woman is a hermaphrodite, which nothing else in the story would support.  Ergo, an error; and one easily corrigible through the use of A DICTIONARY.  Or, you know, Google.

She did it again in a different context, during the heroine's internal monologue, using the word "imbibe" when she clearly meant "imbue."  Now, neither of those words is likely to occur in the average person's internal monologue; but choosing the wrong one indicates that the writer is perhaps trying to sound fancy by using words she doesn't know.  It was not a fancy story about fancy people in a fancy place.  Plain language is best - I have this on the good authority of Mark Twain.  "Imbue" is not an overly fancy word but most people would convey the meaning in a different way - especially in the privacy of their own heads.

A second recently-read book, a mystery, provoked me through a manifestation best described as follows: either the author did not read the thing all the way through, simply typed and published; or the author was intentionally inflating the word count by repetition.  Because this author made the same points, sometimes in identical words, multiple times throughout the book. A simple read-through would have prompted the realization that "oh I already said that."  Now, this was not a self-published book; it was one of a series by an author with two series in print.  So the professional editor, if the book had one (they don't always, anymore) was either inattentive, or considered that inflating the word count was desirable.

There was something else strange about the mystery: the characters are always "grabbing" each other.  I don't know anybody who "grabs" people.  Is this a thing?  Are there small towns where everybody is just grabbing everybody else all the time?  

If someone grabbed me by the arm I would possibly punch them.  I would certainly say something pretty sharp - unless they were trying to keep me from falling down the stairs.  You can grab my arm to prevent me from falling; I won't punch you for that.

Anyway, whether this is a legitimate cultural thing or not I can't say, but it was very distracting to read about it over and over again.  It was not a long book.  Repeating something like that more than twice in a short book is ... well, inattentive at best.  There are other ways to state that character A wanted to get the attention of character B.

Especially if you are trying to inflate your word count.  Just sayin'.