Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to...
I met a girl tonight. Sort of. Her name is 6a8efbe7677f555bb9accb43745d2a29. I am willing to admit that md5sum is not the best method of obscuring people's identities, even worse than the silly names. Let me put it this way: she had the same name as Libby's little sister. Most of you probably don't know Libby, but you can still figure it out.
I was at Century Ballroom with 'bb9 and two of the girls that I meant in Century's classes before I ran afoul of their mandatory gayness policy. I was having...slightly better than an ok time. Then, this girl comes up and does that thing where they just stand near you hoping you ask them. I've gotten burned by it before, but now that I know about it, I knew what to do. The song was a bachatta. Bachatta, for the purpose of this post, is...well just think of it as the latin dancing equivalent of that lame hug dance that we all did in middle school. Except is it not lame, but very very sexy.
So girl was hot. Her face was delicious, the kind that draws my eyes in and makes me wish I could stare all day. In fact, that's what I'll call her: Delicious Face. Excellent red dress, the kind where the fabric does this thing where it comes up into triangle shapes over the girls boobs--triangle shapes because they are tapering down into thin strap things. In my opinion, that dress usually looks stupid, but she pulled it off. Man, and I think it was sparkly, too. Might have just been in my head. She was like, radiating.
Anyway, she seemed interested in dancing close enough to tell if I thought she was attractive, but I elected to keep the peace because I very much did think she was attractive, and doing the sexy hip popping thing* in Bachatta is hard enough without trying to rub your crotch against someone with a lower center of gravity while moving sideways.. We talked some. I have enough trouble thinking of things to say to hot girls, and we were dancing on top of that. She said she comes dancing once a month. This will become important later when you find out that this story ends the same way all the others do.
After our dance, we parted amicably (read: we both had a good time and aren't running back to our friends to say how much the other person sucked). I wanted this girl. My hormones told me there was a 90% chance I'd be willing to trade rings with her someday. I realize that sounds creepy and premature, but I have found you can tell a lot about a girl from the way she looks, the way she walks, the way she dances, the way she talks, and the way she plays Unreal Tournament Classic. I had 4 out of 5 right there.
Anyway, my plan was to wait a song or two so I didn't look pathetic and then ask her to dance to a salsa song. Meanwhile the DJ took a break in the music either for some performance I didn't care about, or to get a couple people out there for birthday dances**. Every time there is a guy out there celebrating his birthday at Century Ballrom specifically, some other guy joins the line of girls and dances with him--perhaps just because of
I digress.
After whatever stupid thing they cleared the dance floor for, there was more dancing, and then I had the problem where every time I tried to go ask Delicious if she wanted to dance, someone got to her first. I decided to wait it out and drink a bottle of water, which took longer than I thought, and ended up wasting an entire song standing three feet away from this girl, trying to drink this water as fast as I could. I later realized that blowing an opportunity to dance with a hot girl in order to not waste the last third of a $1.50 bottle of water is one of the dumbest mistakes I've ever made.
I finish drinking my water and some other guy asks her to dance. I was pretty nervous anyway about talking or dancing with her, and most of me was relieved that I'd get out of it for another song. But then another guy asked her to dance. And another. And then many more anothers. It turns out, this girl is a regular, and despite only going like 1 a month, every guy that is way better than me knows her and wants to dance with her.
My friends had left, except for 'bb9, who I am incapable of dancing with because she dances something that I assume is genuine Cuban salsa, and I dance LA-style. The number of girls was dwindling. I wasn't finding anyone to dance with. I saw that Delicious was free. She wasn't standing on the edge of the dance floor, and she was back where you sit down, but she wasn't sitting yet; she looked like she wanted to dance. I was on the other side of this enormous ballroom, at the stage, where I was when we danced that bachatta. I walked around to ask Delicious to dance. Hawaiian shirt guy got there first.
Hawaiian shirt guy is more than a regular; he's a fixture. He's always there, skulking around the dance floor asking girls to dance. First of all, he is wayyyy past 30--possibly 40s or 50s, I have no clue. Also, he is skinny. He often wears a hawaiian shirt but didn't tonight. He is basically bald where it counts, but has chosen to grow out the ring of hair that remains, unusually long, and occasionally does a comb over. He's shy. He's nice. I am not exaggerating when I say he does the nice thing from nice guys finish last. I never see him standing and flirting with girls; he just always walks up and offers his hand in a really gentle manner and asks them to dance. It is easy to tell that he goes dancing all the time, but in all that time he hasn't joined any of the little social cliques that form. I can't remember ever seeing a girl's face light up when she sees him, or a girl running up to him for a dance, or anything to suggest he's formed a meaningful connection with anyone. His algorithm for finding girls to dance appears to be just like mine. For this reason I am honestly afraid that I will end up like him someday.
Anyway, so thats who hawaiian shirt guy is. I was still 20 feet away when he got to her first and asked her to dance. She said no, or shook her head, and then said why--girls love to do that, add little reasons like "I'm tired," etc. Those little reasons are helpful, because if they choose, they can give you a clue that they really are tired or something, and they aren't just saying no because they think you are creepy / always have a hardon / are high / hate dancing with you.
You might think this girl, Delicious, was still available, after having turned down hawaiian shirt guy, but in the salsa scene it is not so obvious. There is this ettiquete thing, for better or worse, where a lot of people consider it rude to say no, and super-rude if you say no to someone, and then yes to someone else. I can understand that--it kind of crushes a guys confidence when some girls like "no, I'm tired," and then two seconds later some other dude walks by and she jumps up to dance with him. One of my favorite teachers, Sonia (or Sonya?), always said if you say no to anyone you should sit the rest of the dance out. The reason I'm telling you all this, is because it means that if you are about to ask a girl to dance, and you see her say no to someone else, she is almost certainly going to say no to you, either for whatever real reason she had for saying no, or because she doesn't want to appear rude, or maybe she's really picky and wants to blow you off for the same reason she said no to him.
So I was fucked. I looked around. The crowd was thinning out, and there were like no other girls standing around that I could find. I didn't want to spend another song standing near but not dancing with an extremely attractive girl, and I was tired, and I have to buy krispy kreme donuts tomorrow, so I just left.
In retrospect, maybe I could have sidled up to her and tried to talk to her about...something.
In other news, tomorrow I have to buy donuts. We are possibly turning off this old piece of software that we all hate. I realized that on such an occasion it might be appropriate to buy donuts. One of the only conversations I've had with the hot girl at work was about where Krispy Kreme was located. So, deliberately not using google maps, I walked over to her office (she is some kind of project [manager] ninja) and asked her were that krispy kreme place was. She pulled it up on google maps for me. I left. Not a brilliant move, no, but kudos to me for getting up and crossing the line out of my comfort zone when I thought about it. I don't usually move that fast.
So, anyway, now I'm buying donuts tomorrow. I'm going to walk in with three boxes and tell my team I that I was under the impression that we might be turning off
Oh...yeah, I was going to write something about how I'm so used to failing with meeting girls that I didn't even know what to say...I can't remember. It was probably not a very interesting detail anyway.
*the secret to the hip pop, as one girl told me, is to just completely straighten the leg below the hip you want to pop; it pushes your hip up naturally. I can't claim that is the correct way to do it, but it seems to work great
**birthday dance: when its your birthday, and you know the people running the club, they clear the dance floor and you spend a song surrounded by people of the opposite gender and you spend the whole song dancing with them while everyone watched.
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