Dancedancedancedancedance!

Oy vey. I want to fall on my face into a comfy bed occupying a room cooled to exactly 68 degrees and sleep for 5 hours.

This weekend was a whirlwind of spontaneous stress - much less stressful than planned stress. Friday night, I headed over to the NCSU studio to meet my new partner. To meet him! For the very first time! We danced a little bit of samba, and then he had to run.

We met next morning with A for 2 hours of coaching. My pardner, I'll call him Salsa (he's an amazingly talented salsa dancer), has a lot of natural skill. Despite being a self-proclaimed "nerdy physics PhD student," he is tall, athletic and graceful. We worked on jive for an hour, and then samba for a half-hour - and then A taught Salsa int'l tango. Like, taught it to him, right then and there. He didn't know it before (which is fine, since we were only dancing Latin).

I went home to sleep for an hour, then... Off to Maryland, dance shoes and coffee in tow.

D.C. was a nightmare. I got lost in the mondo construction, all alone, and called Julie (dance team captain) to let her know where I was. I also called Caspian, and morosely informed him that I was lost somewhere between D.C. and Baltimore, in the woods. After a few U-turns, I found a highway I remotely recognized on a map I had glanced at earlier in the day and magically found my way to University of Maryland. Victory! Just in time for dinner at Potbelly, and then it was social dance time till around 11 PM. Salsa and I spent most of it practicing.

Made it to my lonesome hotel room and fell into a tiny corner of the king-sized bed. I woke up, applied my comp makeup, pulled my hair back severely into a bun, and booked it back to UM - for two lessons in Standard and Latin - and then the competition began! I had hours to wait before my events, so I chilled, watched, cheered, competed in the for-fun dance events (won 5th in fun chacha!), ate granola bars, practiced on the sidelines, etc.

We ended up winning 5th overall in Latin dances! :D Fabulous, since we only met a couple of days ago!

Man, the marathon deal of chacha/rumba/jive/samba subsequently with a 20-second break (if that), three times in a row for quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals is a nightmare. Chacha is taxing. Rumba is a nice break. Jive is like a pair of swing-dancing cheerleaders on crack. It takes concentration to apply any finesse to samba after all of that. There was a time in finals jive where I looked desperately at Salsa, pretty sure I was going to run out of energy right then and there... But the music ended and we could stand there, beaming and staggering and radiating heat. The best part.

Left after awards and drove home in blinding rain and thunderstorms to arrive around midnight. Whew!

I have 9 blisters. The balls of my feet feel like they've been attacked with a meat tenderizer. Let's not even talk about my hips. Hell, even my neck hurts! What doesn't hurt?!