darxus

OKAY HI!

Some good things I have done recently:

*Actually tried to get some real sleep in a real bed some of these nights? Of course, I'm only just getting to words now at midnight, so that's not really great for continuing the trend, but at least tomorrow is an incredibly mellow day at work.

*Done a _lot_ of nostalgia-searching old hard drives for interesting things. This is mostly in the pursuit of flirtation, because of course it is, but also in the pursuit of having a good time with nostalgia!

*Found my old ipod, it's got about 5k songs on it from circa 2013. I am _very very_ enjoying listening to them, even though it's annoyingly a little jank on the headphone jack and I only get input from the left headphone.

*Went to Pinewoods for the Work Weekend! This was SUCH A GOOD WORK WEEKEND! I did lots of very good work! Lots of scrobbling in the sticks and leaves! Getting put in charge of a work crew that immediately unionized against me! A little bit of knitting! No swimming because it is wayyyyy too early in the season! Showing new friends my beloved Home, complete with dead mice and horrible bathroom paintings!

*Work is exhausting right now. We're close to the end. But not close enough. But I'm making it through, and that's pretty good!

*Got to have dinner at Willow and Alexander's house, which involved a lot of looking at their wedding photos and then joining Willow in chanting "put it on" at Alexander until they showed us how pretty their wedding suit was. I am always pleased when my blanket "I will do all your dishes in exchange for food" offer actually gets taken up.

*Last night's exec meeting was _thoroughly satisfying_ and then I had enough energy to run a bunch of data about my class and the data was REALLY GOOD! I still need to actually use it to write my AGM report, but my AGM report is gonna mention shit like "Yeah, I've had over 80 people try my class out, and half of them have come back at least once" which is _fantastic_ kinds of numbers actually.

*I dunno man, like, my life is good and weird? I've been trying to lie down on the bench on the back porch for a little while every day when coming home from school and that is really nice? I do need to stop getting endlessly distracted from words so I can go to bed, so I guess that's all here for now. G'night!

~Sor
MOOP!

So, I was poking around some old journal entries today, and found this gem¹ from 2012. It's me, saying I'd like to start a dance, host something regular. A chance for my friends to get together with me and do a wide variety of fun stuff.

It's from me not-quite-a-year out of college. Bright and a little naive and always the kind of optimistic that says "what if I could get all my friends to come dance with me!?". Not really thinking about the stress of balancing schedules and the difficulties in advertising and promoting and ensuing the regulars have reasons to come back and the new people have reasons to try it out and everyone can have some fun. I do appreciate the part where I say "in an ideal world I'd just pay for it myself".

It took me twelve and a half years after that post to have the first instance of GenderFree SCD in Somerville. It's not Oella North --this is not an open format "whatever kinds of dance we feel like" melange. It's just Scottish, with a waltz thrown in at the end.

But tonight I was one of twelve dancers, and it was a week with no "newbies" as it were. I looked around at one point and my brain said "I am here with my friends!" and that is true, that is what it is. One of the friends is someone I only met because of this, because she found it random and started attending regularly. Some of the friends primarily do other dance forms, and this is how I am slowly dragging them into SCD. Some of the friends are more experienced than me. One of the friends is my high school friend!

It was twelve tonight, and I think at least 2/3 of the April nights had seven couples. This wasn't even everyone who's shown up more than a few times! I have _regulars_ and I have enough regulars that it feels increasingly like I have something _sustainable_. There are still more steps to go to reach the highest dreams, but oh gods, the dreams that have already come true are so amazing!

part of the genesis for this is the idea of having a space to do Scottish Country where no one cares about your gender or who you're dancing with

I have _successfully given myself that space_. I built it with my own two hands, except that's not true at all, I built it with my own community and all our hands together! And we are continuing to build it, and expand it outwards. A floor where we care about each other's genders in the sense that we love and respect these myriad identities, but no one thinks any of them have anything to do with where you dance.

Tonight we were doing presumptive dances from Book 55, and it felt _so good_ to approach that as a team and a puzzle. We tried out four of them (part of my words goal for tonight is to type up the notes so I can pass those along) and it was great fun! I don't think we would've done so many if we'd actually had beginners this week, but we didn't and so it was marvelous!

It felt good also to be able to make eyes at each other about the various divisors being so clunky about their language. And also, honestly, to be in a space where I could start us off with "hey y'all, I think I'm gonna just do a mental find/replace on role terms" and have people think that's dandy.

And if I'm being extremely vain and just a little smug, it felt really good to be in a space where we tried one of the dances that CambridgeClass tried Monday night. I didn't dance it then, my observation from the side of the room was "hm. That seemed. Semi-disasterous". The two people who did dance it then, seemed to like it much better tonight, and several of the rest of us thought it was extremely good as dances go.

And yeah, a little bit of that is me! I am good at teaching and I'm especially and increasingly good at teaching this class. But a lot more is that I successfully recognized the space that wanted to exist, and bullied it into existing. I built it, and they came, and by they, let's just say, well. The dancers!

It's real great and it makes me _abundantly_ happy, every single week.

I hope you are also happy!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: 2012 02 06