Piece to the Puzzle

[At a salsa club]
Me: Why did you want to learn how to lead?
Girl: Because I want to dance with girls.
Me: Weird.

Yeah, I still have the gift.  Saying the wrong thing.  I think I managed to recover...something about "I am a big fan of girls dancing together."  The part where I think all men are ugly, and I hate it that people call it the "lead" and the "follow" here instead of "the guys part" and "the girls part" for the same reason I hate it when people refer to The Linux Operating System as "gnu/linux" -- I kept that to myself.  While we're on this subject, whoever is telling Betsy what I write here needs to stop.  She messaged me on facebook to tell me it was rude of me to wish a red shell upon her boyfriend, even though she never played Mario Kart, and still didn't un-un-friend me.  I know, right?  Well, I hope he gets hit by a blue shell.  How do you like that?  Seriously, who has never played Mario Kart?  Raise your hand.  If your hand is raised, you need to put the computer away, go outside and buy a Super Nintendo (or an "N64") and play some Mario Kart.  This is more important even than knowing who the A-Team is.  Well, maybe...oh man, if you don't know who the A-Team is....

I digress.  I will start from the beginning.

By some mysterious fortune, a craigslist ad I posted about finding a salsa partner received some actual responses.  Three girls responded, and two met up with me in real life.  They are both beginners, but they have potential.

The interesting part, is the beginner class that I elected to take with...dance partner candidate #1, had a lot of girls.  This was at Century Ballroom.  Way more girls than Belltown Dance Studio.  I'm not sure I've ever seen that many attractive girls in the same room in seattle--ok, thats a lie--I have.  Not often though.  The dance class was irritating:  it was taught by a bunch of Swing [dancing] teachers (I'm guessing) who kept using the incorrect name for one of the moves over and over and over again.  In Salsa, there is a move called Enchufla.  If you were drunk and didn't know much about dancing, it would look like what some people call the "inside turn" in Swing (I call it that-turn-i-do-after-the-first-turn-i-do).  Unfortunately, Salsa has its own inside turn, and it is not Enchufla.  The Salsa inside turn is similar to a cross body lead, and some people call is the Progressive Left Turn.  Also, these teachers were deliberately teaching everyone to dance too far apart.  Probably, again, because they were swing teachers and in swing you do dance far apart.  This was most irritating to me because I already dance too far apart, and learning to dance tighter, so that I can survive in a properly crowded club, is something that I have been working on for a while.  Its tough when you have long legs and get really excited.

But, whatever.  I did learn a new move.  And almost everyone in the class thought I was amazing.  That was cool.  Learning Salsa in Philly for a few years, from whom I am now labeling the best teachers in the world (one was from sweden), and then moving to Seattle and taking a beginner lesson, is basically the same thing as when we used to play Starcraft I on Battle.net in high school, but create new accounts so that the server would match us against beginners and it would be easier to win.  It works a lot better in real life though.

Some girls from my class seemed interested in me.  I don't know why.  I look pretty bad this month:  circles under the eyes, and a bad haircut because I did it myself with one of those shaver things that comes with big plastic pieces.  Most importantly, about what I was talking about a few paragraphs ago:  I made some new friends.  Female friends.  That want to go dancing.  Also, they are attractive.

I went to this club Halo after our last salsa class tonight with them.  We have plans to go salsa dancing thursday.  If I play my cards right, I could be dancing regularly with not only two, but three girls.  Mayyybe even four. 

Even without them, Halo on a monday night is apparently awesome.  There were so many girls there, the genders were evenly balanced for once and because I also knew people from this class I took, I was able to dance to song after song without long breaks in between trying to find girls to dance with.  Because of this I was able to actually get into it and the moves started coming automatically and I was able to dance to the music.  It was amazing.  I had been planning to teach the one or two girls from craigslist over a period of time, eventually breaking into the salsa scene in a month or two, but now I'm thinking I could just start going with the girls whose numbers I got tonight.  Dancing is awesome because it doesn't have a singleton rule like Dating usually does.  Of course, these girls are beginners too, but they have some natural talent.  I do need to find someone who dances at my level.  Speaking of which, I danced with the girl that used to ignore me from the last studio I went to.  I don't think she hates me.

Oh, and black shirt girl.  Yeah, I forget her name.

I am doing too much to keep track of.  I'm stressed from my boring ass job, and from keeping up with the flying, and now the dancing, and I haven't been able to try my latest 3-sat optimization cause I just don't have time.  Then there is the Settlers.  The guitar and the volleyball pretty much got dropped for a while, and I completely forgot I was even going to try to rock climb again.  Poker will have to wait.  I'm beginning to believe it is physically impossible to excel at all of those things at once.  Not without bringing a whiteboard to the rock gym.  And when will I have time to make a pirate themed Lego comic?

[edit]
Good salsa video--one of these moves looks like the pretzel