And a Big Panama With a Purple Hat Band!
Some work days are really, really worse than others. You keep bumping into technical problems, and looking for workarounds where none should be needed, and having to debug a stupid piece of code you yourself wrote poorly, and before you know it it is night already and you have lost your damn day.
Despite the fact that you went to a very interesting talk earlier on, attended a good class, and actually solved the heck out or four problems that should never have existed in the first place.
You're in such a poorly mood that you have to drag yourself out of your apartment to get your butt to swing dance class, when swing is your favorite dance of all times and you absolutely love that class. But drag yourself you do, and boy are you right to. Because what a blast! You push the door of this dance room and it's a different world entirely.
People wave to you and smile. One guy compliments you on your jacket and two girls tell you your shirt is cute. Good thing you forgot the Fedora hat, you would have been near to blushing, because let's face it, you just rock that hat. Then the music kicks in and guys want to invite you but tonight you're leading and the ladies smile about it. There's not enough of them though so you keep alternating between both roles during the whole hour. You learn new moves and you work yourself out trying to give your partners the right momentum and meeting them in the right place at the right time. There's a guy who comes in to take pictures and he's all over the two ladies dancing together.
Then the last song fades off while you twirl one last time and everybody gets back in their shoes and waves goodbye and smiles. Two members of the tango club arrive, one is carrying the amplifier, and the music starts pouring out as you confirm the time and place of the next swing practice while changing back into jazz shoes. You walk and ocho and walk and ocho and walk and ocho and work on some adornments. Then the president of the club arrives and she's in a hell of a mood because she's just learned her advisor is retiring at the end of the week. So you chat some, and ocho some more, and keep talking while doing so. The two of you practice your molinetes together, you just stop talking for a while, front, side, back, side, front, side, back, side, front, side, back, side.
Then the both of you just give up and talk about how you want to go back to Europe, about couples and marriages and open relationships and social pressure, and you kind of just want to weep because it's about the first time in more than four years you meet someone in this country who doesn't look at you like you suddenly started speaking a foreign language while walking on your hands when you express your opinion on these topics.
Then you dance two or three songs for real, and slowly walk home while discussing various club-related topics, from the milonga you cannot attend on Sunday to the posters you're putting up in all possible places. In your right hand you hold the CD where one of your friends engraved some movies of your evening out dancing last Friday and a post-it with the contact information of a dancer to add to the mailing list.
You get home and get ready for bed and you couldn't care less about the simulations you haven't started running, the post-doc you haven't really started looking for yet, the informal deadline you are not going to meet, and the paper that isn't writing itself on its own. Something at the back of your mind vaguely wonders what it is you are doing in a computer science PhD program and why on Earth you want to remain in academe, but then you just remember that your projects, all in all, kick ass, and you slide under the covers with a smile on your face.
But not without having written a blog post about it, because, hey, that's what this girl does.
