My entire life has been a rotating spectrum of social ineptitude. One day I may interact with other humans perfectly normally and the next may be a smorgasbord of awkward situations. This has resulted in my ineffectual attempts (or one could say avoidance) with the romance department, leaving me perpetually single on Valentine’s Day. In the spirit of a holiday based on correctly interacting with a potential partner, here is one of my finest moments…
For senior year prom, my friend’s friend was my date. Being completely incapable of communication, I spent most of the dinner drawing on the napkins of the restaurant and the ride to the dance consistently checking to make sure that my legs were equidistant from one another so they would appear normal and relaxed. For the most part, I considered the dinner and drive a success. I neither made an absolute fool of myself nor completely alienated those around me into questioning their reasoning for letting me be in their prom group. Once at the actual dance, situations changed.
I normally am not a huge fan of dancing with other people because it typically involves grinding, which I am clearly not able to do without a) giggling or b) turning it into some sort of swing dance where I don’t have to touch my partner. Maybe I have a problem with touching, who knows? So the dancing portion of the night had started to give me all kinds of anxiety. How could I avoid grinding with this kid without forcing him to abandon me?
My solution? It started off with me attempting to turn every song into a fist pumping jam. This, however, slowly turned into me doing crazy combinations of moves I learned on Animal Planet from shows about sloths with the “research” I did on YouTube after the shows in which I watched sped up videos of sloths. A friend of my date had been dancing near me, and my weird routine somehow encouraged him to challenge me to a dance battle. Sometime later that year I learned he had been on cocaine, which should give you some insight into how I dance without even being on any drugs.
Just when I thought I would never be recognized for my dance skills, a circle started to slowly form around us. This would be my first and only dance circle, and it was against a coked out lanky kid from the right side of town. While I can’t say for certain, my classmates were probably only watching us in confusion rather than in admiration of my skills.
Realizing the situation I was in a little too late, and after a little too much enjoyment, I stopped dancing and just stood in the center of the circle for about a minute before slow walking my way out followed by power walking to the bathroom where I sat for the rest of the night.
So the next time you feel bad about being alone on Valentine’s Day, just picture me sitting with my 12 pet rocks and seven stuffed, mounted, dead cats, reminiscing about that event we all hold sacred until it happens: the senior prom.
Want to break Meg’s bad romances this Valentine’s Day by teaching how you really shake ‘em down? E-mail her at mburnton@wisc.edu and show her how you bust a move. Otherwise, bring your pet rocks and join in her reminiscing about senior prom.
