( pleasant-sounding accolades for gay people go here )
Exposition
In most dance classes, people stand in a circle, and every so often each girl will switch partners by moving to the guy on her left. Or they all go to their right, or maybe the guys rotate instead. You get the picture. Pretty much every place I've ever been to calls this "rotating" -- perhaps, because from a birds eye view you see half the circle rotating. Every so often the person playing salsa instructor says "rotate!" and you suddently get a new dance partner. This is a great idea because then you aren't stuck with someone who can't dance, and you get a chance to dance with a lot of different people, and if there are too many guys or girls, they'll probably get a chance to dance with someone at least every other time the person calls "rotate."
Not-so-rising Action
Some guy published a not-yet-peer reviewed paper proving P!=NP. I know about it the P!=NP paper; my thanks to the twenty people who separately told me about it all day today. So for that reason I stayed up half the night last night eating junk food and working on my algorithm that is supposed to prove P=NP. I'm at a point where I think it works and pretty much no one else in the world believes me, which is actually the status quo.
Anyway, I woke up with a stomach ache, and consequently didn't eat breakfast or dinner, and arrived at dance class tired, lightheaded and sort of hungry. They were teaching one move I actually liked, though, and wanted to learn, so I stayed. I just breathed deep and tried not to think about the ice cream store downstairs.
The class was going well. I learned the move I liked, and I even started experimenting with it when the teachers weren't looking. About 40 minutes into the hour and a half class, I notice two guys dancing together. The one guy was doing the girl's part--I mean, "the follows" whatever. Figures; the dance studio I was going to is in the middle of the gay neighboorhood in Seattle, and Seattle's gay neighboorhood happens to be larger than most small towns I've been to. People who like living here think its awesome that Seattle's gay neighboorhood is bigger than other cities, but for me, it just means there are way more bars that I have to pretend to be interested in but manage to avoid going to. Girls I meet seem to be under the impression that gay bars have better music and better dancing, but in my experience its always the same crappy techno and no girls.
I was hoping the two guys dancing together had come to class together and were out of the rotation--sometimes people like to dance with one person the whole time. However, I checked back over there after a few rotations and the guy doing the girl's part had moved. Suddenly, I had a situation. The girl that I started the lesson off dancing with was now on the other side of the room. Using her position as a baseline, I estimated how much time it would take for the guy doing the girl's part to reach me, and the results were not good: he would get to my side of the room well before the lesson was over. Damn hour-and-a-half lessons; with shorter lessons, if you are familiar with the teacher, you can guess which way they will make people rotate and stand in a certain spot that gives you the best chances of not dancing with a particular person, like, for example, a really annoying girl that keeps giving you incorrect advice.
I could have left, easily, but I was taking the class with lady friends, and I've been told that people don't like it when I disappear without saying goodbye, and I didn't want to do anything that would make me look homophobic in a dance class being taught in the one dance studio in the middle of the gay neighboorhood and also being taught by two girl instructors (one doing the guy's part)--not if I wanted to keep taking classes there, and I do. The only thing I could think of, was try to calculate the average rotations per minute, and when the guy got near me, duck off and hide in the bathroom for about 5 rotations. Unfortunately for me, I was just too tired and weak to figure all that out and people might wonder why I was in the bathroom for so long. Other methods of escape, like just sitting out and looking as tired as I felt, bounced around in my head but to no avail.
Another kind of Anti-climax
I froze. I didn't act, and before I knew it I was dancing with a guy. It was absolutely gross. His hands were rough, and dirty, and I had to touch his shoulder, and it pretty much was just like when you get a physical and the doctor tells you to turn your head and cough, except that this lasted way more than ten seconds (Thats What She Said). I did the move over and over again, looking off in the distance and pretending that I was focusing on the counting, and listening, hoping, longing for the salvation that finally came in one word: "rotate!" And he went away. I even looked at him right at the end of it, to be polite. When the class was over I managed to leave without making eye contact with him.
Denouement
It felt, indeed, more awkward then every Michael Scott moment in every episode of the Office. It was worse than every bad dance I've ever had--not just combined, but multiplied. It was worse than spending six hours next to a fat girl on a red eye to Philly. It was worse than being stuck near a bunch of fat, nerdy kids playing D&D with cheesy poof slime on their fingers who haven't showered in the last 42 hours and who are screaming about orcs having sex (this is a real memory; please don't ask). It was also worse than the time this girl invited me out to a "block party" that turned out to be some kind of gay pride event and I was stuck in one tiny block with roughly...that one girl, three hundred men wearing clothes that made me wish I was blind and a fat guy wearing a dress plus rainbow mascara for an hour* before I decided the girl I was with did not have the looks or personality to make it worth it to see that many dirty old men in thongs, and just left her there. I remember ripping the cheap drink bracelet off my wrist, hoping the images in my head would follow it into the trash.
*admittedly, this gender ratio was still better than most computer science classes, sans fat man in dress
To put things in perspective, dancing with a guy was not quite as bad as the car accident. I managed not to say anything negative about...about it to any of the girls I knew in the class--I'm pretty sure they are huge fans of guys dancing together. Fortunately, I don't think they even noticed it happen.
Epilogue
Eh, whatever.
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