Footloose, Justin Timberlake, and Sam's Goodbyes

One of the most disappointing things about this year is the realization that I’m no less socially inept than when I started. After moving away from home to go to college, then moving away from college to go to Israel twice, then going home again, and then finally coming to England, I feel like I should be an expert in social interaction by now. After all, I’ve had to try to make new friends pretty much every nine months, much like professional surrogacy, minus payment/babies/giving birth/everything.
No, it doesn’t matter that I’ve had to meet an entire cast of new people and try to befriend them more often than some college boys wash their sheets—put me in a room filled with people, even people I now know, and I will still make strategic retreats to the restroom. Yes, if you’ve ever suspected me of going to the bathroom far too often, it all makes sense now.

Mostly when I retreat to the toilet I stand at the sink and think to myself, “Oh God, what if someone I don’t know particularly well tries to hug me?” Because, obviously, that would be the end of the world. Even worse, I panic about the prospect of people talking about boring things, simply because I think I’m physically incapable of pretending to be interested. And then everyone will think I’m horribly rude. No, much better that they think I have some kind of tragic bladder condition.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few days. Along with Footloose.

See, Footloose comes in because I’ve been a bit sad saying goodbye to yet another group of people I’ve surprisingly come to like. And for some reason listening to “Footloose” more times than I’d care to admit in a public forum has been my way of dealing with the sadness.

On the plus side I’ve forgotten about the number of “GOODBYE FOREVER!”s I’ve had to endure this week. The downside, however, is that I have realized something that destroys Footloose for me. As a completely shit dancer I find myself more confused by movies like Footloose than I do by the concept of the Trinity. Yes, Footloose. You are more confusing than the idea that God is both three and one. You are more confusing than flawed math.

See, how can teens in a town that for most of their lives had outlawed dancing still dance better than me, someone for whom dancing has always been legal and often encouraged? Either the premise of Footloose is flawed or my natural dancing abilities are so sub-par that I should seriously consider seeking advice from a medical professional.

Anyway, thoughts of my social crapness and dancing crapness led me to remember something I wrote back in Israel three years ago. Here it is, in edited and censored “glory”:

Tonight in a bar some Justin Timberlake song came on. I wish I could tell you the title, but I know it only as “that song that embarrasses the shit out of me.”

(Strangely enough, 24 year old me knows what the song is...)

Back in 9th grade, 14 year old me took a dance class at school. I wish I could make my dear loyal readers proud (all four of you…); I wish I could tell you that I’m a great dancer.

And, wish fulfilled, I’m going to tell you that I am indeed a great dancer. A fantastic dancer. 

In my room.

At home, by myself, I am the greatest dancer the world has ever seen. My moves range from the smooth to the silly to the obscene. The problem is that the second anyone else can see me, I can’t dance. I freeze up. I’m embarrassed to even tap my feet to the beat in public. People who might not know me as well would say that I don’t like dancing, based on how they see me freeze up in clubs or at dances. This is a lie. Secretly, deep down, I have to stop myself from jumping on tables and going all out when I hear music in public. Especially if it’s a Mika song. Maybe it’s because I’ve done lighting/stage managing for too many musicals, but I even find myself struggling to refrain from dancing to the PA music in seemingly innocent places, like on the bus or at a pizza parlor or at Aroma. Basically, I’m a closeted Breslover, except with a larger arsenal of dance moves involving my ass.

So anyway, I thought taking this dance class would teach me some basic stuff so that I wouldn’t totally freeze up when I’m around other people. I’d still probably never fulfill my (then) dream of breaking out into a song and dance number in the middle of the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but I figured that there was some kind of healthy compromise I could reach. I figured a Level One class would be filled with beginners, like me, who had never taken a class before and who knew nothing about dance.

Boy, was I an idiot. The people in that class…. Let me put it like this: it was like being in a Level One French class with only native Parisians.

“Beginning Dance” consisted of me, my two friends, and apparently the entire cast of the film “Center Stage.” And my two friends, those fucking traitors, turned out to be halfway decent.

I’ve blocked out most memories of that class from my head, but when I cringe in utter humiliation at the mere thought of being in a dance class as an awkward teenager, clear moments of extreme embarrassment come to the front of my mind. I remember doing an interpretive dance about the creation of the universe (complete with dialogue: “Expand…expand……revolve revolve revolve….wither….wither….wither……..apocalypse. The End.”) I remember doing an exercise with the entire class that involved leaping like graceful gazelle across the wild grasses of the Serengeti. Okay, that’s what it was supposed to look like, and somehow everyone else in the class actually managed to pull it off. I on the other hand managed to look like a polio-crippled elephant jumping up and down in frustration.

…

But the worst part by far was the Justin Timberlake dance. This was what the teacher really focused on. A dance to a Justin Timberlake song. Needless to say, I was terrible at it. For one thing, I couldn’t remember all the steps—sure, remembering long passages of epic Roman poetry in its original Latin was a cinch for me, but the second you try to get my feet to remember anything besides how to walk…well, you’re in for trouble. And even when I could remember the steps, I couldn’t pull them off. A lot of the moves involved trying to look, for lack of a better word, “sexy.” You know, for example, you can’t just move your ass from Point A to Point B in a straight, efficient line, but rather you gotta put some attitude into it. Or something. Don’t ask me, I’ve never really understood this stuff. 

Frankly, the mere thought of me trying to act sexy is appalling enough to turn even the straightest of men gay. As a favor to the general public …, I decided that the best thing I could do for the dance would be to do try to be as unsexy as possible. I tried imagining that I was dancing in a church. And also that I was a nun. I’m not sure which church would have played a Justin Timberlake song in the middle of services, but oh well. This is what got me through dance class.

So anyway, every time I hear that song, my head always goes back to 9th grade dance class. That song was the background to all those memories.

When it came on in the bar, I realized that the song would now also be the background to the memories of this night. This song is what I heard when I was interacting with people. 

It made me start comparing the two experiences. Here’s Justin Timberlake singing as I stumble my way through dance class way back when. And here’s Justin Timberlake singing as I interact with people in a bar setting. Justin Timberlake and Me, the dancer. Justin Timberlake and Me, the person interacting with other humans.

I gotta say, of the two ……I’m a much better dancer.

Hanging out with a cat.

From 10/4/11 and 10/3/11
So I pretty much sat next to Lauren Cooper today. And, much like the adults in those sketches, I had not the faintest idea how to get young Lauren to shut the fuck up. But that truly deserves its own blog post, and I can only write about it after the homicidal urges have subsided. And when I say homicidal urges I actually mean the urge to drown my sorrows with cheesecake. Which I am doing right now.

Instead today I’d like to talk about a cat called Gemma that I became friends with on Monday. Being the socially awkward and inept person that I am, she might very well have been the ONLY friend I made on Monday. I’d like to think that the fact that I am fully aware of my awkwardness kind of puts me one step ahead of, say, PhD students, but this might be a purely theoretical distinction.

Anyway: Gemma. The chilliest cat in all of England. So basically I just sat with her outside for about half an hour. To be honest it wasn’t all that interesting. And quite frankly the only reason I sat with her in the first place was that I just thought she was ill. Mostly because I think all cats look ill. Probably because they’re not dogs.

So I was just chilling—okay, I have to interrupt myself here and say that the English people I’ve met have overwhelmingly used the word “chillaxing,” which is something I thought only dweeby 14-year-olds in the Midwest still said because they thought it was still the done thing in California. But apparently it’s still going strong here. Anyway. So I was just chilling with Gemma, waiting for someone who knew cats better than I did (basically anybody) to walk by, but no one came. So it was just me sitting with this cat who was making this weird moaning sound that I assumed at the time was a cat swan song but that I guess in retrospect is just extremely posh meowing that apparently American cats don’t do.

And my response was to just stroke her. Every now and then I’d stop stroking her because I was afraid she was dying and I really just didn’t want to turn today into a day in which I stroked a dead cat. But then I thought that would be really uncharitable of me, and the key word of the house today seemed to be “charity” (well, that and “cake”), so I continued stroking her and desperately prayed that she wouldn’t die. At least not while I was touching her.

I kept talking to her, calling “Gemma!” quite a bit, because I figured that when you do that to dying people they hang on a little longer. (“Gemma, you’re going to be fine. We’re going to see Venice, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how you wanted to see Venice, Gemma? You just gotta hang on.”) While remaining slightly doubtful as to whether or not it works on cats, I thought it couldn’t hurt. Having briefly considered whether or not meowing at her would be more productive, I decided that there was definitely a boundary of weirdness that even I wasn’t prepared to cross. So I just continued my little chat with quite possibly the worst conversation partner ever.

Finally someone did walk by and I asked him whose cat it was. Turns out she belongs to the professor who gave me my own copy of the New Testament in Greek a couple weeks ago. The same professor who, whenever he says so much as “Hello, Sam” in the hallway, causes me to cower in reverence and fear of his NT skills. This is his cat. (Urge to make “Magnificat” pun rising…)
Well, fuck. If his cat dies in my presence that’ll probably piss him off and then he’ll probably ask for the New Testament back. …HANG IN THERE, GEMMA!

The guy who came across my little makeshift vet office (Dr. Sam: I cure your pets with love and slightly squeamish stroking) seemed really unconcerned about Gemma, so she must be doing okay. And I’ll admit I didn’t really want to press the issue because he’s part of the ordinand crew, and they scare me somewhat for two reasons: 1) sometimes, particularly during mass, they wear dresses, and 2) I know they can just tell what an asshole I truly am, as most people can, but then they’re going to tell God about it, and then, well, I’m just totally fucked.

Casually waiting for the ordinand to round the corner, I started to get up, and as I did so I reflected on the fact that I just spent a sizeable fraction of an hour talking to a cat. And it was still probably the most productive thing I did all day.

But as I stood up and reflected a most horrific realization dawned on me: ooooooh Jesus have I been sitting in a bad spot. I’d been sitting Indian style right in front of the open door that leads straight to the kitchen. The way I was sitting you couldn’t see from the kitchen that I was with a cat. SO basically it just looked like I was camping out in front of the kitchen.

Look, I don’t mind if the cook thinks I’m just a hungry fatass who is sitting in front of the kitchen at 1 in the afternoon because she wants to be first in line for dinner at 7—in fact, I’d prefer that. But unfortunately I’m pretty sure that even before this incident I’d already managed to accidentally convince the cook here that I have some kind of an unhealthy obsession with him. To be fair, my passionate and extremely loud declaration of love for him when he served me my first taste of Indian food probably sent mixed signals.