Home Posts tagged "contra dance"

Tag: contra dance

Things You Didn’t Know About Me

I’m a collector of lists. I used to keep a list on lined paper of every movie I’d seen; I still keep an equivalent list for books, although now it’s on GoodReads. My TBR list is fearsome to behold. My browser tabs are equally fearsome, on more than one device. I’ve got long lists of things to watch on all my TV/film streaming services, and things to listen to on my podcast app. Sadly, all the lists are growing. It might be that I like making lists more than actually consuming the media, the way people (ahem) buy books faster than they read… Funny thing about podcasts. I always swore I was a visual learner, couldn’t do audiobooks, much preferred transcripts over training videos and online newspapers over radio or TV news. Then…well, things changed, I needed to rest my eyes more and had to get my story fix somehow. I started out with a queer SF audio drama (Moonbase Theta Out) and have been really enjoying a short-story podcast (LeVar Burton Reads…yep, I’m a child of the 80s and have been a fan since Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I will listen to that man read anything). Most recently, I’ve added a couple of non-fiction/self-help shows about neurodivergent self-care and housekeeping (Struggle Care) and decluttering (A Slob Comes Clean). Maybe I’ll finally end up hooked on Welcome to Night Vale. An early adopter I am not! Speaking of being a late adopter, after some 7…

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What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Last time, I mentioned an upcoming road trip and dance camp (summer camp for adults!). Well, I’m back, and have just wrapped up a week of staycation immediately following that. By the time you read this, I’ll be back at work, le sigh. Dance camp was…well. It was awesome, but it was also a lot. I spent much of the time trying to manage the heat and humidity (no AC!) and deal with all the peopling (lovely people, but…). I’ve gotten a lot more sensitive to both as I get older, for various reasons. I promised myself not to feel badly about skipping out as much I needed to, and it was interesting to notice myself developing strategies and finding a rhythm as the week went on. Some favourite memories: And I managed not to get heat stroke, sunburn, or *ahem* any sort of illness, thank lork. I got home a week ago Saturday and spent my staycation (in between long walks with my spouse) gradually unpacking and making baby steps towards getting the house in order. It doesn’t look much different, yet, but I’ve had the energy to push through mental blocks on a number of objectively minor things that have needed doing for a while. So I’d say the goal of R&R was a success. Now back to real life in 3…2…1…

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Contra Dance Love

This time last year, I was writing about contra dance and all the things I love about it, inspired by a weekend of dancing that I’d just gotten back from. Well, that’s an annual weekend, so the more things change… Since I wrote that post, I set in motion a big change to make my home dance community more LGBTQIA+ friendly, and turned into a community leader (!!!) in the process. The change was painful in some ways, but it’s completed now and the community is thriving, with lots of new energy from some younger, newer dancers who would not have felt so welcome before. Right now, I’m a committee member-at-large, because shepherding that process AND doing our twice-monthly newsletter was too much. So instead I’ve been rewriting parts of our website, networking with organizers of dances in other cities, going to the occasional committee meeting, and posting dance-related memes from our Facebook page. Every once in a while it hits me that this isn’t just an activity I do, this is my community. At the dance two weeks ago, a friend and I were floor managing–doing setup and tear-down, and monitoring things during the event–and a couple of minor crises popped up. (They were both related to the fact that for a while during the event, nobody in attendance had a key to the venue.) We nabbed the other committee members who were there and solved the crises, then worked together to set up new systems so they wouldn’t…

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Adulting

At the start of this year, I got back from vacation, looked around at the state of my home, and declared that January would be Adulting Month. What I had in mind was things like “make some appointments that I keep putting off” and “clear the junk out of my home office”. (I guess decluttering is the new weight loss resolution?) But apparently the universe didn’t get the memo. I’ve written before about how contra dance has helped me grow. Well, the past few months have presented a whole new challenge. See, I’m on the organizing committee for my local dance community. A few months ago, we started talking about changing how we do things. It’s a bit esoteric and not essential to my point here, so I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that it’s about inclusivity. (If you really want to know, read the fifth paragraph of my last post about contra.) Here’s where I admit that I was the one who officially got things moving (after months of unofficial talking). Suddenly I found myself on the front lines along with two other women. We were planning out how to introduce it in such a way that everyone felt heard and included, even the people who liked the status quo and had never thought about doing things differently. I was writing copy for our website and newsletter. I was vetting the survey that my co-planner put together. I was talking to other dancers to find out…

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Contra Dance Geekery Strikes Again

It’s been a while since I’ve written about contra dance in this space. Rest assured, I haven’t stopped doing it! I just didn’t have anything new to say. But I have attained new heights of contra dance geekery. I just got back from a full weekend of dancing in another city — Friday evening, all day Saturday, all evening Saturday, and Sunday until late afternoon. (Why yes, my feet did hurt after that. But so did my smile muscles.) I carpooled in a minivan full of dancers, along with our dance shoes and twirly skirts and snacks and other, less important things. (Here’s a short YouTube clip from the weekend so you can see what I’m talking about. There’s a “caller” who has taught us the dance before the live music started and has continued to prompt us occasionally — you can hear her now and then. Contra is all about patterns of movement, rather than footwork.) We spent a good chunk of the drives geeking out — dissecting the various dances we’d done over the weekend, or talking about the finer points of technique (momentum. It’s all about momentum. Except when it’s about patterns), or plotting the best way to convince our local group to change some of the heteronormative terminology. (That last is a debate that’s sweeping the wider contra community across North America. Short version: We’ve traditionally called the two dance roles “lady” and “gent”, but those terms no longer map very well to the genders of…

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Adventures Come in All Sizes

Do one thing every day that scares you. Have you heard this saying? (Interestingly, although it’s often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, the true author is Mary Schmich.) That’s a bit of a stretch for most people, myself definitely included. But regularly doing things out of my comfort zone? That I can handle. If I remember. Ruts are easy; adventures take work. My most recent adventure: a dramatic haircut. I had my hair all sorts of lengths when I was younger, but it’s been in long layers, between chin length and shoulder length, for many years. But I’ve been thinking for a while about long pixie cuts, and short bobs (and doing enough research to know what to call the haircuts I’m interested in!). I just haven’t dared to do it. This weekend I finally took the plunge. Now I have a very short straight-across bob with bangs — think 1920s flapper hair. It’s cute as all get-out, and very different. I like it. But even more, I’m excited to play with different cuts now that I’ve realized that going short isn’t so scary after all. Other scary and/or new things I’ve done so far this year: Wrote a back-of-the book description with Kit for City of Hope and Ruin (it took a lot of drafts, let me tell you)…not to mention going through all the stages of getting this novel ready for publication Gradually slid into helping to run the social dance series I’ve been attending for years — I’m…

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