At work I was in a meeting with two of my bosses, and they got to talking about what they do for stress relief. Both of them watch their own favorite sports, and were saying how riled up they can get. I said that while I like watching a few of them, I've never been able to do that with sports, excepting maybe for the Rocky movies of course. They asked what I do then to calm down. I said I just bottle it up and shove it down and let it fester until it either leads to a heart attack in my mid-forties or explodes out in a totally inappropriate fit of anger likely at a family reunion or Christmastime. But they retorted and said my dancing is a good outlet.
Yes it is true that I do tend to get a bit animated at work when anything by 'Girls Aloud' comes on my Pandora stations; however, I haven't been out dancing in several months. Notably because it is anything but a stress relief. Here's how I got started. My bud and I were out on a Friday night getting shakes downtown. As we were leaving the restaurant a guy walked by us with 3 attractive girls wearing nothing and going to one of the local clubs. My friend and I looked at each other, he said "I'll take salsa if you take salsa". I said "Yes you will" and we took two semesters worth of salsa classes. So let's be clear. We didn't take salsa with the intention of learning salsa. We took salsa to meet hot girls. This backfired on us. Oh, we met lots of girls. But not quite the ones we had been hoping for. In salsa there is a lot of arm raising and twirling, so when a girl wears a dress if she isn't a fan of razors, you may very well end up with some hair in your face that isn't from her head. Oh my. But after a while my friend and I did get pretty good at it and we felt ready to try going to some of the clubs that have salsa nights.
First off salsa dancing starts just before tomorrow. That means that as soon as I start, I was supposed to have been in bed hours ago. And since the point is to try and meet ladies, I have to get all dressed up. Just playing that game is stressful enough. It's salsa. The people on TV where suits, maybe I'm supposed to wear a suit. Or maybe since it's a night club, I should wear clubbing clothes. But if I wear clubbing clothes it might just look like I'm trying to hard to make myself look good, so maybe I should try business casual. But then I look like a golfer.
So now we are there and scoping out the place. The trick is not to seek out the 8-9s because it's hard enough just trying to sum up enough courage to talk to them let alone performing new dance moves. Instead we go for the 5 - 7s which fall into the wife hot category of the lust scale (see Mushroom Cake). These are girls who can get the job done and probably have fantastic personalities which makes them ideal wives. Now we've finally picked out who we'd like to ask to dance. But there's still a problem. This is farm country. There are Mexicans everywhere, and of course they're out in droves on salsa night. These guys know salsa, which is a huge confidence drain. And that's probably the biggest problem of all. Not only do you have to summon enough courage to actually go up to a complete stranger and ask if she'd like to dance while she's surrounded by all her friends, not only do you then have to do these dance moves that prior to which you've only practiced in a formal classroom setting, but you have to do all of this with confidence.
One night I did all of this. I went up to a pretty girl and asked if she'd like to dance. And amazingly she said yes. We were both new at it so we tried to practice the few moves we knew, and the whole time we were talking. And for about 15 minutes we chatted it up and danced. It was fantastic, I was so happy to have actually been able to dance with someone. Then she introduced me to her boyfriend.
Yes, dancing is such a stress relief I couldn't imagine what I'd do without it.
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