NUMINOUS: January 2008

Friday, January 25, 2008

monster friday

There's really no other way to describe nine hours of class/seminars on Friday. After being diligent for a week and getting up early (8AM counts as early in my universe), I've been slowly slipping. Today I made it to my 9AM class on time, but not early enough to grab a cup of coffee, which is the absolute last resort when my body feels like a pile of goop and my hands move two seconds behind my brain.

9AM-Noon: Corporate Finance
Noon-1:30: Seminar
1:30-4:30: Empirical Asset Pricing
4:30-6: Macroeconomics

I realized why I've been so obsessed with dance in the past month or so. It's really incredibly simple: people move when they dance. For someone who spends approximately 95% of her waking hours sitting, doing anything on two feet seems like heaven, especially something artsy and incredibly sexy like Latin dance. For most of my life, I've been told that I have a brain. For these dancers, they've probably been told that they have feet. And legs. And a butt. And a chest.

What amazes me about dancers is how confident they are in their bodies. I know it sounds stupid since they've been dancing for as long as I've been in school, but I wish that I had even 1% of their confidence in my appearance. Of course, they do it for a living, and I can't compare with make-up two inches thick, heels three inches thick (both women and men), skirts four inches long, and manufactured tans five times a year.

As a dancing ignorant, amateur latin dance is so much more vibrant than ballroom dance. There's a heady combination of playfulness and seductiveness in the essence of the samba and cha cha cha, and especially the former in jive. The rumba is the most romantic (and most complicated), while the paso doble is my personal favorite of the five, being overly dramatic and so highly stylized that it's only danced in competitions. It's the dance that make men look ten feet tall and absolutely pumped with testosterone.

I love the combination of technique and the showmanship. There's no possible way to dance latin well if you're not a performer and willing to flaunt it a little (or a lot). As a wild child at heart, I love the flavor of exhibitionism and pageantry exhibited as sex appeal. Although there's nothing wrong with elegance and especially in dancing, it can get in the way of the basic dance. Despite the sex appeal, latin dance is still extremely structured. There are requisite moves in each of the five dances, and variations on the rest. I guess I still can't get over how absolutely feminine the women look (and some of the men as well). One commentator stated that latin dance was all about the contrast between the male and female form, and it's striking when you see a couple that's balanced exactly so. I'm convinced that I'm not a dancer either in this life or any other, but I love watching the energy and colors flashing by.