Cleaning Up on the Floor

2nd day of monsoon 2006 by Flypig, on Flickr I’ve come to believe that the condition of my bedroom reflects my current state. I’m not a clean freak, but I do tidy up periodically. In the interim between my bursts of Stepford Wife-like activity, my room deteriorates from “spic-and-span” to “lived-in” to “monsoon aftermath.” When it’s neat, I’m neat, but when it’s a mess, I’m a mess.

There’s no set trigger for me to start cleaning up, but last week the switch flipped to “On” and I put my room to rights. Each time I do this, it’s like hitting my internal reboot button, instantly clearing all the collected junk from both room and mind. It’s invigorating and catharctic and makes me feel like I can take on anything. Plus, I have a floor again — at least, one I can actually walk on and not trip on piles of clothing or paper.

Dancing Lovers by Autreyu, on Flickr Having a floor is important when one wants to practice dance moves in the privacy of one’s room. I know it’s only been a few posts since I talked about the hiphop dance class I attend weekly, but the gym pulled the schedule rug from under us. Now, instead of Hiphop Grind, we have Nike Rockstar Bollywood. Yes, you read that right: Bollywood, and it’s being launched in Fitness First gyms in the Philippines this month. This means that instead of just straight hiphop and R&B; steps, we’ve got to master stuff inspired by Indian dance. And we’re stuck with this choreography for the next two months starting from today.

I’m not aiming to be the next Aishwarya Rai, but I felt like such a goof today since I kept making mistakes and basically messing up on the floor. What made it doubly embarrassing was that there were only five of us in class, counting our instructor (who is still the same guy who led us in Hiphop Grind). I really did stick out like a sore thumb, to overuse a cliche.

I made it through the class without dying of shame, and I’ll probably be back for more punishment next week since I’ve got nothing better to do on Monday mornings. Ü Seriously speaking, though, I enjoy the challenge of mastering something new. The instructor warned us that the moves are asyncopated and aren’t based on the 4- and 8- beat counts that we’ve been used to. He wasn’t able to show us the entire routine today because we kept messing up, but I’m sure we can clean it up eventually. Now that I’ve practiced the new moves on my clean bedroom floor, I find that they’re not as difficult as I initially thought. Hopefully, enough practice will keep me from turning the dance floor into a disaster zone.

UPDATE (July 13): Today was the formal launch of the Nike Rockstar Bollywood workout at the Fitness First Ortigas branch, and I went so I could get the extra practice time. The workout is divided into four parts: the warm-up, the across-the-floor, the main choreography, and the cool-down. The steps are definitely easier the second time around, and I realized that most of the later move combinations were introduced in the across-the-floor section (where you do a move and try to work your way across the dance floor at the same time) and in the warm-up.

We had a different instructor since it was a different time, but I was the only one who had done the Bollywood workout prior to the launch. Of course, I really tried to work it (teacher’s pet much? Ü). After class the instructor and I were both at the front desk for a time, and he tapped my shoulder and said, “See you next week, okay?”

Oh, yes, you will.

UPDATE (July 18): They rescheduled the Nike Rockstar workout to Tuesdays at 6:30am, so I can still get my Hip-Hop fix on Mondays. Woohoo!

Check the Nike Women Philippines and Fitness First Philippines websites for more details about this workout and class schedules.

Tags: ,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *