Balancing: more worth it if it helps other people.

I like a_kosmos's idea of collecting good things that happen in a jar over the next year. I'm a bit less interested in good things and more interested in things that make me feel like I'm doing some good in the world... I often doubt that I'm doing things right, and it's nice to remember that sometimes the things I do have positive repercussions.

Case in point. Balancing work and acro is insanely hard, but this Facebook message makes me want to keep doing it. Especially the sentence I put in bold.

This might be kinda weird, but you totally inspire me! I only got to meet you briefly. However, the fact that you manage to balance being such a badass with having a pretty serious, intellectual career is awesome. You've definitely helped in my decision to go back and finish my engineering degree. So thanks for rocking so freaking hard. <3

P.S. Any tips for training handstands?

This girl is a sexy hoop dancer who I met at Divine Play, and it fills me with glee to think of her becoming an engineer on top of that. I think it's amazing that I had anything to do with such a decision. All I did is meet her and teach her how to do a flamingo lift, and show off how awesomely gentle my bases are (acro over asphalt = trust time). But you never know when you're influencing someone. So motivating.

In which travel is broadening... a bit...

Trying to take note of the small perspective-openers that I encounter on this trip. All of them are tiny, but better to focus on these than on the annoyances.

1) From a book I read here: I always liked Vaclav Havel's definition of hope, which is not that something will come out well but that something will make sense.

2) When I had temporarily lost track of my husband, my MIL pointed out that she heard plumbing and that indicated that maybe he'd had to take care of something. I realized that in a single-famiy home, hearing water in the pipes DOES tell you something about where someone is. I'm so used to multi-families that I'm not attuned to little things like that; water in a pipe could be coming from someone in any unit, anywhere.

3) Some people turn off the wifi at night because the router uses electricity. This is foreign to me (wifi should be like air -- gah, don't turn off the air!), but they're right. The router does use electricity and I guess they're not always using it.

4) Several different thoughts about sitting on the floor (I love sitting on the floor). I read on this vacation that having someone sit on the floor is one way to portray youthfulness in theater. And my mother also told me a story about sitting on the floor once in front of her own parents, and having an insight about how they'd have pulled over a chair for anyone else; seeing it as a politeness thing. We had a nice conversation about both these things while I stretched.

5) Mama Leone's chicken soup. Nom.

6) House by the Side of the Road by Sam Walter Foss. The last verse is great.