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.

Reflections: Beautiful Minds

Beautiful minds? you're thinking. But that's a pair of... feet. Yes, and those are confident feet, many would say. (I'll tie this together in a moment.)

I'm still doing readings each week on a Blog Talk Radio show, and an interesting theme came up this week. I don't really like the term, erotic capital, but the concept makes sense. There are a mixture of traits that together go a long way to creating interpersonal attractiveness. The host brought up something interesting: He said it really came down to confidence. I would surely agree that the purely physical was only a small part of this nebulous thing, that the charisma and mystique were created more by the things a person did: how they dressed and otherwise 'put themselves together', how they carried themselves, how they interacted. I would surely agree that those things are often associated with confidence. But it doesn't mean they equal confidence.

I'm thinking back to the movie "A Beautiful Mind" which I saw nearly a decade ago. That woman... oh, she had that nebulous thing. The way she blazed into his office -- the fictionalized John Nash's -- when he was an up and coming professor. At first, I didn't like that woman; she seemed shallow. But, oh, did I like her as the movie progressed. I talked on and on about her that evening: the woman who dug both feet into ground when things went crazy.

Is there a biological reason for people for people to be attracted to confidence? I daresay there is. What about associating that blaze with standing one's ground? Ah, perhaps there is. The problem is that a lot of the things on the it list -- the erotic capital list -- have as much to do with polytropism as they do with confidence.

Reflection: Supine

That's quite an old picture, but it relates to the (soapbox) topic of the day.

I am lucky to be (for the moment at least!) earning most of my income at home writing. It's not just for mental reasons that it's easier. Some days I do several hours of work laying down. It's very common for me to research laying on my side and then compose paragraphs in my mind while lying very still on my back. After a while, I will sit up in and type quite a bit in a short time. If it appears that I spend half an hour immobile and then half an hour writing furiously... well, often I have been working the whole time, and far more efficiently than if I forced myself to sit up at the computer.

I imagine there are people here and there who have been diagnosed with chronic fatigue, or migraines perhaps, who have low muscle tone in their necks. For me, it's not bad enough to be a migraine -- the discomfort just toes the line between tiredness and headache -- but when I was a child, I called it a headache... and I was ignored. I remember that when I started morning kindergarten, I complained of daily headaches. It was because my teacher got after me when I rested my head on the desk, and my neck simply did not want to hold head up for three hours at a stretch.

I still feel better physically when I don't have to go too many hour at a stretch with my head unsupported. I even suspect the neck issue plays some role in the body ache issues I get sometimes -- like maybe it adds a bit of physical stress and brings my endurance down. I've always (when I've had the option) done a fair amount of my mental work lying down... especially the composition stage of writing. I have a great verbal memory, so I can do that! Yet to display so much of what looks like immobility... I imagine that has contributed at times to people seeing me as less mentally capable than I am.

Reflection: The Illusion of Privacy

There are parties downstairs at my apartment building a couple times a year. We munch, we chat. Someone that I have spoken to at those occasional gatherings -- and said hello to on the elevator now and then over the years -- said a curious thing. He said he has wanted to talk to me at times, but I seem like a private person.

Private? That is very much not how I see myself (and it is probably not how people see me who communicate with me mostly online). It tends to floor me when people say that. I think the misconception stems from people mistaking indifference for resistance. I am not more resistant to people getting in my face; I am simply more indifferent... to those who don't.

Once again, it's underwhelment masking as overwhelment. I am drawn (when I'm drawn) to people who are more intense than the norm, more emotional, more over-the-top, and often more needy. Interaction has to simply sizzle. Normal interactions tend to pass below the threshhold needed to... to stir up anything at all in me beyond the intellectual awareness that, hey, there's another human in the vicinity. The irony is if that person had been more in my face, they might have broken through that false veneer of privacy. Some people have created strong bonds that way. The illusion of privacy is more apt to vanish if you're the kind of person who (marvelous in my eyes!) can't contain your energy within your own borders.

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.