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epitome of incomprehensibility
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I was dancing, not the laundry, though the clothes were dancing later in the thump thump bass of the spin cycle.
Spin class for the laundry, weight training and cardio for me.
I was restless because, in a productive mood, I'd washed an hour's worth of dishes from earlier cooking. I wanted to go outside and jog, but then I didn't because it's about -13 and slippery on some sidewalks.
So I was all, "Channel your energy into something else productive," and that turned out to be washing clothes. Clothes were duly sorted, basketed, brought to my parents' basement where the washer and dryer lurk.
In another room (I say room, though there aren't complete walls) stands an exercise machine. I am bad with this kind of vocabulary, but I'll try to describe it. There's a pad for lying or sitting on; attached to it are two exercises for arms, one for legs, and one that could be for both. You can pull down a lever-like weight, lie down and bench-press a barbell, or lift low-down weights sideways or forward.
Ah! It looks like this, but the pad part is flat, not tilted: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Genki-Fitness-Multi-Station-Weight-Bench-Press-Incline-Barbell-Home-Gym-Exercise/310524964648?hash=item484cbaef28:g:yqYAAOSw4~1cb8Wx
I played around with this a while. At ye olde tiny Christian school, when we had weekly gym classes at the Y, I remember hearing "3 sets of repetitions" for weight training. I managed that with the pull-down weight, but the barbell had 60 pounds (30 on each side) attached to it and I could only manage 3 sets of 3.
Dad says that the bar itself is 20 pounds too. So this is about 80 pounds. Still not heavy?? Ehhhh.
Anyway, I decided that going down to the basement to wash clothes should, sometime, involve actually washing clothes. I still felt restless, so I jogged in place while brushing extra dust off the socks and tossing things into the washer. The hard floor was tough on my calves, though, so I gave that up and started dancing around, putting feet beside and before and after each other instead of hopping. I kept dancing even when the clothes were all ready and I'd started the machine.
Soon I craved more room, so I went upstairs and started dancing around the cool, dark living room. I had a rhythm in my head but it didn't belong to any particular song. A bit of it was a jazzy imagining of "No Tears Left to Cry" that was like the version I'd made up, mixed with Philip Glass' Metamorphosis 1 (piano and tired mezzo-soprano).
Last night I'd looked up the song "One" from the musical A Chorus Line. I'd missed the choir practice where we'd done the first read-through. The melody is hard to get at first, what with all the chromatic bits, but after you're used to it, it's catchy and not so bad. One video had a scene from the musical: more and more people are joining in the chorus line. Men and women in gold suits with gold top hats, first in one row, then in two, three, four. More? There's a mirror behind them on the stage, so it looks like multitudes.
I wasn't thinking of the dancing, just of the song I had to practice, but before I shut the computer off I turned to "Singing in the Rain." In the comments, people said that Gene Kelly had a fever when he was filming the scene. Some said 103, some 102, some 100, some that the story was a myth. (Just to be contrary, I'll say 101, or just mouth the word "Celsius," in snooty Unamerican.)
You remember (some of) the things you see, though. Around 3 AM, I woke up shivering and uncomfortable so I wondered, "Hm, maybe I have a fever. Maybe then I won't have to work tomorrow. Wait, I hate fevers. The last time I had a fever I had a panic attack because I felt dizzy when I stood up. It was 39.5 (= 103?) Well, wait, I've had milder fevers since then. Like when I had a stomach flu. Don't tell me I'll throw up. Not as bad as having a high fever, but still unpleasant. But I don't actually feel nauseous. Why AM I shivering?"
(I was shivering because it was cold. But it took a while for me to get back to sleep, being nervous about other things in life - boring work stresses and worry about not being organized.)
The next day, this viewing of feverish dance resulted in a desire to dance. Feverishly, in the metaphorical sense. I twirled around the room, twisting, stepping, jumping, lifting myself up a bit by placing my hands on the armchair arm, and even doing a passable headstand on the sofa. I was exhilarated but a little worried why I had so much energy, and if I would be compelled to keep dancing on and on the same way I get waylaid sometimes by YouTube or comics or other sedentary stuff.
Perhaps one would expect me, at this point, to crash into something either amusingly or harmfully. Well, I'm no Gene Kelly, but I managed not to do this. Thinking of how I'd stop this, how I'd transition into another activity, I decided to keep on until I was reasonably tired out. That point came after I threw ten push-ups into the mix. I got up and I was too tired to dance, which felt satisfying. I walked around a little. No more dance. Maybe a little shuffle in my steps.
"So you are happy now that you're tired," the thoughts ran. "Freud would think that was a sublimation of sex, but it's really a sublimation of shoveling snow."
There is a drive now for shoveling snow. It's called shuffle the playlist. It's called the electric vehicle for the tenor, or mezzo-soprano whose mind is more tired than her body, but her body will catch up. And you can dance around the living room and now I need to put the clothes in the dryer. THAT's what makes the thump, the dryer not the washer.
I still need to do a bunch of things this week, but sometimes you have to just dance and then make the clothes dance and then sleep.
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