Reflection: Flexibility Revisited

I am revisiting once more the concept of flexibility: How is it that I appear unusually flexible -- indeed hyperflexible -- to friends, yet never scored well on test of flexibility? I was sub-par throughout all my years of P. E., and was, in fact, the worst person in my class in gymnastics activities, performing like a person with joint limitations. (Flexibility wasn't the main reason I was eventually placed in adaptive P.E., but let's just say it wasn't helping.)

Sometimes it takes years to define the perimeters of something; some crucial detail eludes me. Here goes: Tests of flexibility are generally done with the legs straight/ extended. It appears that, for me, though, the ability to bend at the waist depends, to an unusual degree, on also having bent legs. In P.E., students are asked to sit with their legs extended and then touch their toes. The act of sitting with my legs extended is in itself uncomfortable; my range of motion in this position is pretty limited. But if I bend my legs deeply -- sitting on my feet, say, or sitting in yogi position -- then everything changes. I can not only bend my body flat against the ground, but I'm so comfortable I could sleep that way. (Sometimes I do.)

Pictures taken here and there, across my life, are suggestive of loose joints. If you look at the picture in With Legs Crossed, you'll see a small child with some unusual posture. In that pose, it almost looks like my legs detached. Either that or they were pretty durn short... which they weren't. I doubt I could do a toe touch, though, even then. By the time I started school, at any rate, that task was way out of reach.

Once again, I've got to get on my soapbox and say that it's not just about physical capacity. If we look at how a person acts in one context, striking as it may be, we can get into some trouble generalizing or making predictions about how they'll perform in other contexts.

Reflection: With Legs Crossed

I have been sitting here, working on a stack of freelance 'cert' articles, this time on the subject of yoga. I have been sitting with my legs crossed and my feet elevated in such a way that... well, the netbook does fit very nicely wedged between the balls of my feet. It's a healthy position for the netbook, too -- good air circulation so it doesn't get overheated.

I haven't found equivalent ways to celebrate any of the other health professions.

Things have been crazy time-wise. The articles are rather a blessing. One very different freelance gig was a disaster; it taught me after 35 or 40 hours -- that my eyes can't track across the rows of a spreadsheet. It's been a lot of 12 hours, but much of it has been at home. (Doing a little teaching, but couldn't be out in the schools too much and still get done what I need to.) Sometimes I go out to Online Coffee the first hour they're open, to get a free hour on their computer with the purchase of a coffee.

It's getting a little less wild, time-wise. SquidAngeling is over for the season. No more trying to read spreadsheets. Writing gets a little faster, too. There are a couple blog posts I begun, but didn't finish. They may appear under this one later.

This morning, I learned that if one wants to train to be a yoga teacher, they may have to, say, do a handstand in the middle of the room. I would have made a bad yoga teacher, I will note. Joint flexibility is high -- muscle flexibility and strength very low. I'm gaining the vocabulary needed to discuss many things.

Reflection: Going Around in Triangles

I have written about the different (contrasting) things that people have thought they've seen in my posture: Sometimes they've seen fear. Sometimes they've seen flexibility. There's a fair amount of illusion in both those perceptions, and it occurs to me those two contrasting illusions are actually coming from a common source.

I bend my arm inward, or upward, at the elbow, and again at the wrist -- a posture that forms a triangle if there's space (or a cat) in between. I do something similar with my legs. Lounging around with limb-triangles pointing off in all different directions, or tangled up with each other in the position that teachers call criss-cross applesauce... well, that looks flexible. Standing with that same sharply bent wrist and elbow-- ah, now the pose looks fearful and self-protective. But strumming a guitar with my arm in that triangle, perception changes yet again. Now I am simply told my posture looks a bit off. Finally we have an observation, devoid of false inference.

There's a picture of me even younger, eleven or twelve, holding a bell pepper out toward the camera -- a little bitty girl holding a little bitty lightweight pepper -- and you see the same tight, popping muscles you see here in this picture. There's another picture of me that age with (ack!) bare upper arms, and you notice something else -- that there's such low tone in the upper arm that it actually looks concave. Women tend to know what their worst physical feature is! Mine are my arms: such obvious muscle tone irregularities if I don't hide 'em with sleeves.

Muscle tone irregularites ... There's your flexibility. And there's your fear.

Reflection: Sometimes You Picture Me (2)

This picture is made from a snapshot someone took back in my co-op days. I uploaded into a frame and used it in a personal post, some months back, about body language and illusion. It was one of the few posts that I've written that I hesitated to publish. One of the ways that people have misinterpreted body language is that they've thought they saw fear in contexts where it didn't exist. Of course there are also more harmless illusions created by body language...

In co-op days, a housemate (I generally don't name names, but it start with 'J' and rhymes with 'mud') said, "You must have been so good at gymnastics when you were growing up."

I laughed. "In all my years of PE, I couldn't touch my toes -- couldn't even come close."

"How could that be?" he said, in his Mud-like manner (bemused, but not disbelieving).

It took me the better part of a decade to come up with a partial, non-scientific explanation about something that's mostly a 'nothing issue'. The interesting thing isn't the explanation; it's that it took me so long to come up with any reason at all that sounded plausible -- as it has been with some far deeper life issues. I tend to know in advance when my words are going to sound flat and unbelievable and I've made the choice in those situations to simply... not try. There are reasons, other than fear of not being accepted, to be mum about who you are.

Put yourself for a moment in my... leotards. Imagine: When people watch you, day after day, carelessly turn yourself into a human pretzel, it's gonna sound hollow and clunky when you say that in PE, you were gasping and wincing trying to bring your fingertips much more than halfway down your calves. (How can that be? I mean, really, how can it?)

Now you're not losing opportunities in life because you create a false illusion of flexibility, but other false do illusions carry with them losses. Yet it can take years to explain away those illusions in ways that don't sound hollow and clunky when they hit the floor. Because you yourself don't know how something can be, only that it must 'can be' because it is.

As for the toe touching thing, this is my partial explanation. It was always was difficult for me -- more so than the average person -- to bend at the waist when my legs were straight. It was always easy for me -- more so than the average person -- to bend at the waist when my legs too were deeply bent. Just put together a bit funny, I guess.

Reflection: The Hand Holds the Key

My little finger wanted me to write this.

Today I was out walking when I became conscious of my middle two fingers tackling the little finger, yanking it so it was perpendicular to it's previous position, and holding it down. The little finger was very appreciative: Ah, that felt good!

No, I'm not just writing this to be silly. I came up with a phrase for something. It occurs to me that some of my postures that are the oddest -- and most comfortable -- are variations of "bend and lock": First bend a finger, arm, leg inward and rotate it differently than the way it grows out of its socket. And when it's rotated to wear it feels comfortable, grasp it, lay on, wedge it somewhere -- yes, somehow lock it into place... but not for long, because a lot of other things are waiting to be bent and locked, too. (Hey, the little finger had it's turn.)

The things we can look at and only think we see. You might look at me and notice that my fist was clenched, but fail to notice the reason: One clue is apparent when you look very closely and observe that the other fingers are curled around the little finger, holding it in that perpendicular position.

Memory: Conversation on a Bus

On the bus, there were 2 people ahead of me -- separate seats. I was sure they were both men; they had men's voices. Everything they said I tried to assimilate into my original assumption: 2 men talking.

One of them talked about a change in appetite.

"Are you pregnant?" the other asked.

"Heck, no," came the reply. My assumption at that point: They were clowning around. It did seem they kept the joke up a little long, but what the hey...

The one said soething like, "In another 20 years, when I'm too old to have kids..." Again I was a bit puzzled. I mean, can't men have kids at any age? But maybe he meant in another twenty years he'd be too old to raise kids...

It took me rather a long time to challenge my original assumption: that here were two men talking.

Reflection: Older and Shorter (Haired)

I think that's the shortest I've ever cut my hair. It suits my face, and age, better, I think. I can look such different ages -- in life as well as in pictures. Part of the effect hinges on the smile: A smile completely changes the contour of my cheeks, and of my face as a whole -- more so than it does for most people.

My cheeks look better curving outward than inward. It's not just cares that give the illusion of lessening. It's years, too, provided (and this is strictly between you and me, of course!) that I "wash that gray right out of my hair". Yep, I did say that... Some people freak out when they see the first gray hair. Not me -- because I was so young then. I had my first gray hair at age 8, and it's increased slowly ever since then, hitting critical mass -- becoming noticeable, I mean -- by about 30.

Despite the stray grays, I looked much less than my years through my teens and somewhat beyond. As for my thoughts and behavior -- well, sometimes they struck people as much older than my years, and other times as much younger. I think that a part of that is that I pretty much bypassed adolescence. We're all so much past adolescence now, and in my eyes that's a good thing.

Memory: My Hands (Are Small I Know...)

I don't think I was intentionally clowning around in this old photograph; my hands were simply making themselves comfortable by hitching a ride. I have a batch of pictures, taken when I was about four, and in shot after shot, those hands steal the show. I don't have many old photos -- I don't know what my brother did (or did not do) with the pictures that remained in the apartment after my father died. I'm glad that I do have this batch. There is an odd rhyme that I made up when I was a child: "Goodness knows, the puppy's pose/It's more to life than what it knows." Indeed. It may be that those hands (and arms) are a clue to the things I was diagnosed with and the things I never was. It may be that my posture (and few people who've met me have failed to note the posture!) is a clue as to genetics. Time will answer.

I wrote in an earlier post (Modeling the Latest in Hypertonic Arm Posture) how people have often interpreted the arms-drawn-up-to-the-chest posture as fearful. But in multiple pictures, you can find a bright, laughing four-year-old with her arms drawn up like a chipmunk -- it's indicative merely of muscle tone. Hand wringing is also a neurological thing. It's no sign of distress, but it can be a source of distress when people misinterpret it. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but my body language has often caused people to invent some other person, with an entirely different set of strengths and weaknesses.

Walking near Madrona Grocery Outlet -- the area where I was once grabbed and robbed -- I find myself singing, "My hands are small, I know, but they're not yours, they are my own." In some ways that song may not seem to fit me. Ah, but it's my heart that I give away to other people! My hands are, and always have been, my own.