One of those days?

February 17, 2008

For me this had to be the worst SOS night in over a year. It was very crowded so their business is doing just fine. Yet it felt empty in many ways to me.

My dancing sucked all night. My best guess is that I was not really in a good dancing mood at the start of the evening, and throughout the evening I had more depressing dances compared to inspiring dances. Bluntly speaking none of the dances tonight would have qualified as inspiring – nothing better than pretty good and even those were quite rare. After the third or fourth song, things turned really bad thanks to a partner who decided to finish the dance prematurely – it was quite bewildering and my best guess is that she did not feel like dancing tonight (and I was enjoying the song too!). Either that or there’s something wrong with her psyche. In any case I don’t think I recovered afterwards, and things never got any better than okay for a moment here and there. By the end, I was avoiding asking people I would normally have because I was lacking confidence badly.

The musical selection was … I don’t know. I don’t know whether to blame the music for my form or blame my form for not enjoying anything including the music. It was a weird night. Sylvester played three (!) Bachata including two in a row! That never happened before! There were two Cha Cha as well. Also there were some Salsa selections, which left me bewildered – like the one played right after two Bachata songs in a row (with caveat that it did give me one of more successful dance of the evening with another caveat that the song seemed to go on forever and I wished it to end sooner). As evening progressed, I found myself skipping song after song even though I felt ready to dance again before the song started. The song I liked the best but did not dance to was a version of Ublabadu I had not heard before – quite earthy sounding.

There were other unusual bits about tonight. I was asked to dance Bachata! I think I was too surprised to do it well. It did not help that we got started more than half-way through the song. Did it happen because I seemed nice? Another unexpected occurrence was that in the middle of another (Salsa) dance, I noticed that my partner seemed to be struggling with her timing, and it felt as if she was slipping into On2 timing. I asked her if she would prefer to dance On2 and switched to On2 when she said yes. I think she did better with On2 although I think I ended up struggling a bit. I really hadn’t planned on dancing On2 at SOS until I became much more comfortable with it. It would be nice if I could call these highlights of the evening except it wasn’t that good. I think I might be finding it difficult to be happy and cheerful lately. Oh and also Mario was there - apparently dragged along by Shaan after returning to London this afternoon.

Why was I so bad tonight? Is it possible that I somehow was dancing well above my level while I was still recovering? Maybe I was dancing with less inhibition then? Or perhaps my timing is more confused after Tuesday On2 dancing for past two weeks? I don’t know. I hope it was just a really bad luck of many things going against me all at once. Maybe I’ll be just fine next time around.

I skipped the last two songs – combination of not liking the songs enough and wanting to avoid missing the train home. On the train home, I finished A Canticle For Leibowitz and started on American Psycho.