When I was in college, I used to work at a horse therapy ranch called the Ride On Center for Kids. It’s a few miles away from Austin, and provides therapeutic riding programs. Mostly for children with autism, or cerebral palsy, or other forms of physical and cognitive challenges.
There were two main girls that I worked with, and they were sisters. One was seven, the other was six, and both were severely autistic. In our sessions each day, both sisters would ride a horse around the ring, and go through little exercises: Hitting a bell affixed to a post, grabbing a flag from my hand and placing it in a raised bucket. The point was to feel the horse’s rhythmic walking motion beneath them, and, feeling secure in that, perform tasks simultaneously. It was a trust thing.
But one of the sisters, Victoria, got overstimulated. Often.
When the weather was threatening, and it looked like it might rain, she’d kick her feet at my hands as I led her horse around the ring. She was worried, and couldn’t concentrate. I’d offer her a flag encouragingly, and she’d smack it away, as if to say: “Who can think about flags at a time like this!”
I have been feeling a lot like Victoria lately.
Do you ever get overstimulated for long stretches, and you don’t know why? For the past couple of nights, I’ve been staying up until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning — 3:00 last week — because it’s been really hard to turn my brain off. I’m not stressed out, necessarily. Just ON.
On those nights, when Ross is snoring next to me and I’m still surfing the Internet mindlessly, visiting all my favorite blogs and allowing my synapses to fire away, I begin to think that maybe I’ve gotten a little codependent on my computer.
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This is the first week in a while that I haven’t had aerial silks classes or samba school. Which is a giant organization of 50+ drummers and 50+ dancers, drummers playing samba beats, the dancers performing Afro-Brazilian sequences. I’m on the dancing side, and Ross is on the drumming side. I didn’t go to silks because we didn’t have any class this week, but do you want to know why I didn’t go to samba? BECAUSE I STAYED UP TOO LATE THE NIGHT BEFORE. Surfing the freaking web.
Now, I love the Internet. I really do. But if I’m not careful, it sucks my creativity dry. I so easily get pulled into a blog-reading and Facebook-lurking vortex, that by the time I pull myself out, I feel dazed and oddly out-of-touch. Which is the very affliction that social media is supposed to cure, right?
Anyway. Pardon the whining. The real point of this post was to hear about all of the non-computer hobbies you all are enjoying right now. It is summer! Half of my friends are teachers-gone-wild right now, waking up at 10:00am and brunching on their apartment balcony. They woke up at 10 because they went booty dancing the night before. On a Tuesday.
