I hope you dance

Dancing is one of those few things in the world that can magnify someone's personality or change it all together. A shy person in real life might be a demon on the dancefloor, while someone who's outgoing might be petrified of the Chicken Dance; or, the shy person might retreat further into themselves, while the outgoing person will bust a move or moves the whole night.
This is a metaphor I'll hopefully be able to finagle into something meaningful by the end of this blog post. Let's see how things work out.
Tonight was the first annual SED Spring Fling.
I'm all for spring and fling, so when my fellow teaching-types invited me to go with them, I was all for it. It also seemed like a good way to get back together with the SED kids that I had been separated from for basically the whole year. By virtue of my major, I have to wait until next semester to take ED 100/101 Intro to Education. However, ALL of the other SED freshman have taken it already, so I had classes with none of them. I love being the ONLY Science Education major in my class.
Anyway. Tonight was the dance. We all got spruced up and stuff, and, looking very spiffy IMO, went to Bertuccis for dinner. After a lovely Italian dinner we headed over to Hillel house for the party.
Now, SED is a small school, so we didn't exactly expect the house to be a-rockin. But, even given the tragically finite size of our population, the crowd was definitely less than spectacular. But, I knew a lot of the freshman who were there and it was really nice to see them all in the same place again. Even if some of them were more wasted than a leprechaun on St. Patrick's Day. But I digress. Hoping that the dancing portion would make my $10 ticket worth it, my friends and I hit the dance floor. The result was...dissatisfying. The music itself was pretty good, but the DJ was terrible and didn't know how to cross-fade or put music in a good order to dance to. This resulted in a lot of getting on and off the dance floor for BS music choices.
I even surprised myself with the amount of times I pulled out the Judgement Face. I am not ashamed to admit that I judged the DJ and the party. A lot.
So that was basically the climate of the evening.
Now, I have a small bit of a crush on one of the guys in SED. We'll call him G. I've followed his Facebook, we've talked on AIM for a grand total of maybe 5-10 minutes, we're not exactly "friends." But, I still want to get closer to him and see what happens. Me, being the wuss that I am, follwed G with my eyes for pretty much the entire night. Never even said "Hi" to him. My excuses? "Oh he's with his friends." "Oh he's sitting down." "Oh it's awkward because I don't know if he knows I'm gay or if he's really out..." So I basically shot myself in the foot with that thing. The worst part of it is, I felt worse and worse about it as the night progressed. I started inventing reasons for why it was a good thing that I hadn't spoken to him, and that I should just wait until next semester anyway.
I can't live with that.
I want to either get over it, or make a move.
I want to compare it to my non-SED friend and his girlfriend who came to the dance with us. They're both really close friends of mine, and I was glad that they came. The guy is kind of quiet, and dancing is definitely not his thing. I knew that his girlfriend would want to dance at least a little bit, so before we even left the dorm I mentioned to him that he should dance at least a little bit at the party. We went back and forth the whole night, about how awkward he is, about how he doesn't know how to dance, about how it comes naturally to me and not to him, etc. But, less than an hour into us being at the party, he came onto the dance floor and danced with his girlfriend for a little while. Honestly, he didn't look half bad. He maintains that he was miserable the whole time, but after we sat down for a little bit, we all went back out onto the dance floor and he danced with her again.
If he had never pushed for something that he wanted, he never would have had the experience of finally dancing with his girlfriend.
If I had actually tried talking to G and made an effort to make a connection, maybe I'd have a new friend to talk to, maybe more, maybe nothing at all. But at least I would have tried, right? I would have taken a risk and obtained a new experience.
That's why I got in a slump at the dance, because I didn't allow myself to try.
Yoda says, "Try? There is no try. There is only do." Or something to that effect, I'm not sure of the exact quote. If I had DONE something, I would have a new life experience, a new memory, maybe many more future memories.
One of my favorite people in the world always reminded me: "If you want something bad enough, you'll make it happen."
Tonight, I guess I didn't want it bad enough. Maybe, in the future, with someone else, in a different time and place, I will want it bad enough. All I can do is hope that it's worth it.
And, if it isn't, I hope I have the necessary things in place to continue on, moving towards bigger and better things.
If I get the choice to sit it out or dance,
I hope I dance.

_~* and as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual *~_

[z^3]