Dancing Chemistry

My birthday every year is typically a bit of a bust: December birthdays are a pain. My mom actually tried to pin the inconvenience on me this year, but I’d say that she’s far more to blame for it than I am. It’s hard to control anything when you’re a made up of two cells, with half of your DNA in one body and half in another. The separation makes it a bit hard to get your thoughts together.

As a kid, December birthdays sucked because you always got the cop out “Christmas/Birthday” gift. As a teenager it was awesome because you had much more buying power. In University the timing was bad because it always came right around the last day of classes and everyone was in the middle of lab exams, or the campus bars and restaurants were packed with students celebrating the end of classes, and then everyone went home for Christmas. I typically cancelled my birthday and rescheduled for the first weekend after classes restarted in January, so that all the out-of-towners were back in. I've actually done that so often that most of my University friends think my birthday is in January. Now we’re all so busy that it usually gets lost in the shuffle of work, family obligations and more complicated travel for even more out-of-towners. I’ve more or less reached the point where I couldn’t care less about my birthday and whether or not it gets celebrated. I wasn’t even going to plan anything but was receiving pressure from various people to at least do something small this year.

Last night I went out for Greek with Paul, Cara, Gary, Tara and Steve, which was nice and involved cheese set on fire, which is always good. We got a prelude to old-school bar dancing with the pounding music (which was very dance-club like for belly dancing), the dim lighting (we were in an incredibly dark corner), the flashing, squealing and penis-themed headgear (there was a stagette at the next table) and the smoke (many skewers of meat on the grill filled the place with a smoky haze).

Cara, Sarah, Chantal, Kristy and I went out dancing afterward at our usual location and I have to admit that I was feeling a bit old when we got there. While picking up guys at the bar was never ever my deal, it’s hard not to fall back into the usual habits of feeling like an unattractive wallflower. I didn’t end up feeling that way for long since a lot of the music was very familiar. In fact some of it came out when I was in Junior High, which is kind of hilarious. They played a song that came out when I first started going to bars and a herd of girls cheered, which cracked me up. We ended up doing our usual dance away from the overly friendly guy who was trying to touch one (or more) of us inappropriately. (What is with that, by the way? When is it okay to grind up against a girl when you don’t even know her name and likely haven’t seen her face? If you’ve had that much to drink, we’re really not interested.) I even got my butt grabbed on my way back to our table and that hasn’t happened since Whyte after the last Oilers Stanley Cup run (and that may have been someone just trying to pull their way back up to the surface of the crowd).

There’s something about moving to a beat in a crowded room, packed cheek to cheek (usually not the facial ones) with strangers. It’s like chemistry: increased heat + increased concentration = increased rate of reaction. Music and dancing, while they can be refined and cultured in some forums, are primitive and tribal at the bar and tap into some deep ancestral social imprint in the brain. All I know is that dancing makes me feel good and I will keep on doing it as long as there is music to dance to.