Thursday, September 20, 2007

Dance

I am fascinated with dance. I don't have the time to study it, although I've always wanted to take some lessons, but I'm fascinated with the way that a person, or two people, can move together to a beat and make something beautiful out of it.

I don't care if it's ballroom, salsa, techno, or hip-hop, or step teams, dance is great. I love to dance, even though my skills are mostly self-taught and lean towards the "if you're having fun, to hell with anyone who thinks it looks dumb" side of things.

Because of my fascination with dance, any movie with dancing as it's focus is something I'm going to watch.

If it has the added bonus of Antonio Banderas in it, well, I'm all over that....

Bad People, Good Horses

There is one kid in my riding class that I honestly think is trying to get kicked out. He's skipped classes entirely, ignores the "no running" and "no riding between the barns" rules, and just acts surly and not at all like he wants to be there all the time.

There's a bet going on amongst some of the rest of us on whether Marylin, our instructor, will kick him out or not.

If he were in JJ's classes, he'd already have been kicked out. Unfortunately, there are a lot of us in Marilyn's classes, and she just can't watch us all at once, and Mr C (the aforementioned student) manages to pull his crap when she's not looking, most of the time.

This is the same young man who insists that what I need is a set of spurs like his for Bubbah, because "A horse misbehaves because they don't respect you."

Maybe your horse misbehaves because she doesn't respect you, but I have a feeling that most of the time she's just pissed off because you're jabbing those pig-sticker spurs into her and then yanking on her head. My horse "misbehaves" these days because he doesn't know what I'm asking of him. When he gets it, he does it happily. Such as yesterday's right side pass. Once he grasped what I was asking of him, he did it beautifully.

He just didn't understand why I wanted him to go both ways.

Your horse, on the other hand, is developing a hard mouth, a leaping start (from those gigantic spurs) and a bad attitude. Mine is getting softer on the bit every day, he's listening to me and he's begun to look forward to our rides, because when he does well, he gets affection, attention, and rewards.

I really do think that Mr C is trying to get himself kicked out. My best guess is that he decided shortly after Marilyn didn't hail him as the pinnacle of horsemanship on the first day that he didn't want to be here, but mommy and daddy won't let him drop out.

Hopefully he doesn't manage to ruin his horse before he manages to get kicked out. The whole class would be better off without him.