2006-08-16 - 3:15 p.m.
You know when you’re young and you’re dancing, it’s all good, right? You’re rocking, swaying, tapping, grinding, humping it out on the dance floor, right? You're not Christina Aguiler'a back-up dancers but you can get pretty freaking dirrty on the floor, raising a ruckus of sorts. Pretty much when you’re young, you can’t go wrong with dancing. I mean, it’s possible. But even really bad dancers just look “cute” or “adorably bad” when they dance bad.
And then at some point, as you get older, you start move in the way that middle-aged people do when they’re at weddings. You know, you’re doing the finger-pointing-up-in-the-air thing, your hips are more side to side than back and forth. There’s a little shuffle you add into your feet. It all starts to slowly go away. The sweetass dancer you were in the disco and at clubs suddenly turns into some 42 year old lady with a bloody mary in her hand at some baby shower yelling, “Di-ANNE! Turn this music UP! WHOO!” And some lady who just slipped off her beige pumps heads to the stereo, turns the dial up, and sways back and forth to TLC’s Waterfalls.
And we all think that we're immune, right? We assume when we're teenagers that we'll never dance like that, that we'll always be grabbing someone hips and rubbing up on it like a gerbil in heat. But in a sexy way, mind you. You think you'll avoid it, that aging will overlook you somehow. Well people, I hate to break the news to you but it's not true. It's happening in the world as we speak and it's happening to me.
I’ve started to notice the past few months that I’m slipping into middleagedpersondancing. I’ve never been a great dancer but I could dance some circles around most boys around. I never did splits or kicks or anything (that probably would have been too gay anyway), but I had some moves that shocked some people something. Lately, I noticed that my hips move in this really strange “I have a hernia”/”Where’s my pampers?” kind of way that’s really disturbing. I know I’m losing my hair kind of and my metabolism is coming to a slow crawl, but come on dancing shoes—give me another year or two. I don't want to be that sweaty overweight guy with a Budweiser in his hands clapping out of rhythm and yelling "Whoop, there it is!" at all the wrong times. I want to be some kind of older person who still rocks it out on the dance floor. Is this possible? Can we counter hundreds of years of people gone dancing wrong?
Or I fear when I return to the States in a few months, I'm going to be reduced to shuffling back and forth and doing the little baby steps with the arms moving in a train motion way dances. And is that what my two years in Turkmenistan was really good for? Making me middle-aged before my time? Turkmenistan, I'm only 24! Save me, before it's too late. God forgive me for my sins and place my wildly orbiting hips against the one who loves me most to Scissor Sister's I Don't Feel Like Dancing. It's all a balding, back-fat-bloating boy asks of you.
