Just a few days ago I was sitting in my office and a ray of sunlight hit the facets of a stone in a necklace that I wore around my neck and threw gorgeous sparkly patterns on the wall opposite my desk. Every time that happens I’m taken back to a time when I was a little girl sitting cross-legged on the wooden floors of a dance studio, wearing a turquoise leotard with my name embroidered in pink thread on my left shoulder and soft pink slippers with an elastic band across the top of the foot that was hand-sewn in by my mother. Miss Larkin would often start our lessons by pulling a delicate pair of slippers from her bag that were embellished on the edges with rhinestones. She would hold those shoes up high so they would catch the light from the windows and throw “fairy-sparkles” all around the room. She would then tell us that a dance studio was a magical place and show us how ballerinas walked (gently, with toes pointed out, arms held out at sides). She taught us how to move with grace and purpose, as well as how to stretch and arch our backs into bridges and baskets for the fairies. Miss Larkin didn’t believe in tutus and recitals–she believed in practice. Which we did.

Though I went to dances when I was in high school and college, I’ve rarely danced in recent years (except a brief stint to teach myself some bellydancing moves in an unsuccessful attempt to strengthen my hips and abs). For me, dancing is just too much a fight with gravity (and technology) to produce much pleasure.

Speaking of which. Gravity. Ugh. Yesterday as I was sitting at my desk and doing my work (not being distracted by sparkles), I felt a mechanical vibration run up my leg. I thought that maybe I’d left my cellphone in my pocket, but then quickly surmised that it was a vibration coming from my robotic knee, which was a warning that I had 15 minutes until the battery would run out of juice. I had an inkling that something was awry with my knee a few days ago, and suspected that it wasn’t charging well when I plugged it in at night. But…I didn’t suppose that I was running quite so low. So I rushed home to see if I could fix the problem. And on the way to get upstairs to the charger my juice ran out completely, my knee buckled under me, and I fell to the floor. There’s nothing like a fall to humble me, to make me remember just how fragile every step is for me. Luckily, I was just a bit bruised from the fall and not hurt too much. After fiddling with a few things on my leg I think I’ve got the knee working well enough to make it until I can see my prosthetist.

Some days it seems such a hassle to have a knee that fails so easily, that needs such constant repair, and that I can never fully trust to hold my weight. Every awkward step belies my dependence on a functional microprocessor and on expensive components that are not flaw-free. When I see ballet dancers like in the video below I wish (sometimes, desperately) that I could move with their ease.

But…though I don’t move like they do, I think I’m a dancer anyways–someone who lives in her body, who knows the pleasure of being flexible and strong, who can pick herself up off the floor after she falls, and who believes in persistent practice. Perhaps that’s the real lesson learned from Miss Larkin all those years ago.

Danse(s) from Sosh on Vimeo.

(hat tip to Allison for the video link–and for bringing back such tender memories)

There’s this fetish out there where some people are turned on sexually by amputees.  It’s called apotemnophilia.  Some of the folks who have this condition desire amputees sexually and some want to be amputees themselves.  To be honest, I don’t understand either proclivity.  However, I will say that over the years I’ve met some perfectly nice folks with these leanings and found them to be harmless–even if they are unusually curious about my body.

But occasionally I come across some not-so-perfectly-nice things in connection with this condition.  It tends to happen often on flickr, when someone asks to be my ‘contact.’  When someone sends such a request, I typically click through to their profile or their photos to see if I know this person or to find what we might have in common (because, I do love photography and flickr is one of my favorite social media spaces).  Oh, but today, as has happened more than a few times before, I didn’t see any lovely landscapes or kitties.  Instead, when I clicked through to the profile I landed on a site with terrifically graphic and disturbing images of women’s disembodied limbs [scrub, scrub, scrubbing my eyeballs now].  What I saw…I can’t understand or be tolerant of–it’s simply sick.  And it’s one of the main reasons that I don’t watch slasher horror movies or attend zombie walks.  My life has enough of the zombie already.

Posting this with a picture of a pretty kitten–a small attempt to overwrite the ugliness dancing around in my brain right now.

Last night I noticed that my leg didn’t seem to be charging correctly–the microprocessor in my bionic knee needs to ‘charge’ every 30 hours or so, or it runs out of juice.  The charging cable that I use for the knee has some simple LEDs that indicate whether it’s charging and how much juice is left in the battery.  And last night one of those lights (the one that indicates whether it’s charging) didn’t seem to be working.  But it was late, so I plugged it in and figured that the light was broken and all was ok.

But of course it wasn’t.  When I donned my leg this morning I realized the battery was completely dead.  Ugh.

I have a second charger cord, but it was already packed in one of the moving boxes, and I wasn’t sure which one.  And, it seemed as though the problem might not be the charger but the leg itself.  I started panicking a bit, thinking that I’d gotten some sand in the computery-parts when I went to the beach a few days ago.  And I was already imagining that this uber-busy week was going to get a lot more crazy if I had to get a ‘loaner’ knee and send mine back to the plant for servicing.

But…after about 20 minutes I found the other charger and the microprocessor seems to be taking a charge just fine now (fingers crossed).

Sometimes I resent my reliance on technology–I don’t want to be so physically dependent on cords and batteries and computers.  But I also fought for years to acquire this technology for myself, knowing that this type of knee would give me the mobility that I craved.  Recently I read a Journal entry that I wrote just after I got my first bionic knee.  I was traveling in Paris for the first time and found that navigating the uneven cobblestones was a breeze with the new knee, and I knew that if I had analog parts that I would have probably fallen repeatedly because of the uneven pavement.  I felt so fortunate to have access to the technology that gave me mobility under those circumstances.  And I still do, even if it means that my Monday needs a bit of a ‘re-boot.’