Dance fever...

So the big hit gift of the Christmas season was the free download StepMania game that I tricked out with a dance pad and PS2 to USB adaptor shipped straight from Taiwan.

Because I’ll be darned if I’m going to spend $300 on a “game system” (then another 40 on the dance pad and 50 or whatever for the game itself – how is that a system?) to get the official Dance Dance Revolution when doing it my way costs 30 bucks and you can import your own favorite songs and choreograph your own dance steps to them. Chalk up another point for being cheap.

After two straight days of dancing fool-ery I decided to give us all a break and took C to the MAG to see the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit before it goes away. I’d been running that morning (I really want to do a 5K in under 30 minutes this year, so I’ve been upping my mileage…) so the two of us were kind of limping around the museum. C said just one leg was sore after the first day of StepMania, but after the second day, both were kind of lame. She wanted me to fetch her a wheelchair to get around in, and idea I quickly nixed. Then the guy in line behind us said I should do it – we might get in quicker if we could play on the sympathy of the line wardens. Nah, we both had to tough it out.

(mis)remembrance of things past

J was banging around a Bryan Adams song (Run to You) on the guitar t’other day – it made me laugh, and then I had to ‘fess up… A couple of weeks ago at work I heard a different Bryan Adams song (Heaven) on the radio. While it’s not my favorite song ever, I got a warm fuzzy feeling listening to it, since it was the first song J & I danced to (way back in high school, right before we started dating). Lovely romantic feelings were soon replaced, though, with the conviction that if I mentioned to him that I’d heard it and thought of us way back when, his reaction would probably be a dismissive “that stupid song? I hate that song” type of thing. I was so sure that he’d go into music critic mode and not spend even half a minute remembering that moment in time, that I started getting angry. There’s probably not a thing in the world that would make him stop and remember something between us and think fondly of it. Typical. Men are such thoughtless jerks, &c. I even had to tell one of my co-workers how pissed I was, and why.

Then I thought, wait – when I heard the song at first it made me happy – why couldn’t I just stay with the happy? Now I’m pissed at J and he hasn’t done anything – what’s with that? I’ve suffered at slights real and imagined before, but now I’m suffering because of a purely theoretical slight. And you know if I’m suffering, down the line J will be suffering, too. But there’s nothing real here to suffer over – it’s all just smoke.

When I realized how silly that whole little emotional feedback loop was, I felt better.

So I confessed to J the whole story and how sorry I was that I’d been thinking ill of him for no reason, while he, all unsuspecting, was minding his own business.

You know, he said, I do think that song is stupid.

Then I remembered that Heaven wasn’t the first song we danced to. It was All I Need. No warm fuzzy feelings there – it’s really stupid (unfortunately the song’s so lame that I guess I did a little creative editing of my memories).