I won’t go into why, because… well, I just won’t. It’s a few things. Suffice it to say that my playlist is once again full of short, angry women singing paeans to explosives and Stockholm syndrome. If Naomi (hi Naomi!) had made an album, that would be all I’d be listening to at the moment.
It started on Monday morning and didn’t really let up until sometime last night. But Monday was far and away the worst, and by about 4:00 all I wanted to do was get into bed and cut the day short. I couldn’t, though, because I had my first belly dancing class.
Thank god for belly dancing class.
You guys, I had NO idea how much I missed it. I was kind of dreading it because I’d enrolled for both an intermediate class and a beginner class (as a refresher on the basics), but the intermediate class was cancelled and I really wasn’t sure that the beginner class would hold my interest. It did, though. And in a beautiful moment of synchronicity, the song we’re using for our choreography is a drum solo that Shiva used ALL. THE. TIME., and that I love beyond all reason.
Which is fortunate, because I was a bit doubtful about the instructor, Zahara. I had looked her up beforehand and found some promising stuff, but when I got there and found that she was about 12, excessively perky, and a burlesque and circus performer as well as a belly dancer… let me put it this way: I’ve been indoctrinated with the idea that belly dancing, while it is sexy, is not about being sexy. The sexy is incidental. And that’s a really important idea to belly dancers (particularly those who grew up with it as part of their culture) because that’s what divides belly dancing from erotic/exotic dancing. Simply put, belly dancers are NOT strippers and they’ll thank you to remember that. So it came as a bit of a shock to find Zahara giving tips (like about posture and where to hold your hands) by saying that something was or wasn’t sexy.
I suspect that this was in large part because many of the students seemed to be, well, the sort of women who’d pay more attention if they thought something would make them more sexy. (Which I find distressing for a million other reasons, but they’re not people I’ll be seeing outside of class, so fuck ’em.) Whatever the reason, I was really put off by it; but when she played the music for the first time I changed my mind on her completely. What can I say, I’m fickle. And it didn’t hurt that after only one hour she invited me to join her invitation-only (read: upper-level) belly dance troupe. Which: bless her heart, because even when I was dancing twice a week I was still mostly unco and useless, so it’s probably for the best that it doesn’t work with my current temping schedule. But that’s not to say I won’t talk to her about it again in the future.
XOXO
Link du jour: I wanted to put in a link to the drum solo, but I only ever knew it as Rose’s Drum (Shiva called it after Rose-whom-he-saw-dance-to-it), and Zahara gave us the wrong title/artist for it in class. I’ll post it when I get the right information. In the meantime, here's a sample of what I've been listening to.
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