Dance Obsession

For the umpteenth time since I started dancing, I've been labelled as effeminate. Perhaps it’s the outfits, perhaps it’s the hand actions or perhaps it’s just the notion of prancing around, but whatever the cause, it has certainly garnered me unwanted attention (READ: heckling).

Excluding Intuition Centre, dance has been the main focus of my life. A large chunk of my monthly salary goes towards paying for lessons, a significant proportion of my time is spent practising, and sometimes I wonder why.

Lately I’ve been trying to rationalise making my life revolve around dance: I tell others that I simply don’t want to be mediocre in anything I do, and that I think dancing is fun. In retrospect, I think I’m trying to convince myself more than anyone else.

I don’t deny that dancing is fun or that I hate mediocrity. But I don’t think I loathe my current dancing abilities so much or am so hung up on dance to justify my present dance obsession.

I think it’s because of her.

I hate to admit it, for I think it’s so stupid, but somehow self-delusion can only go so far. I guess I would prefer to model myself after Richard Gere’s character in Shall We Dance, who starts learning dance to get to know Jennifer Lopez, but eventually grows to love it. That seems more dignified than plain-old learning dance to impress a female friend, which relegates me to the league of secondary-school teenage boys. Ugh!

In fact, in this particular instance, I’m probably more foolish than them, since there’s a higher chance of Hell freezing over than us getting together. On hindsight, I think the actual reason for my dance obsession has evolved from wanting to impress her to just wanting to have a single perfect dance with her. As much as this sounds incredulous, I simply want to share a dance with her that I can remember her by, a few minutes in a dream world, far away from the harshness of reality.