Feeling: triumphant
Listening to: 80s goth, way more fun than you think
Reading/Watching: Into Temptation

It's 11 o' clock, and I'm leaving my weekly karaoke night with friends and heading to my favorite club alone.

Normally I'll have at least one or two friends going with me, but tonight I'm on my own, and I've decided not to chicken out so I can go get my exercise fix (dancing wildly is addictive).

It's no cover, and 75-cent drinks, so one can have a very good time on about $5, which is what is currently in my pocket.

The place is dead. Like, really really dead. I arrive an hour after the place has opened, and there are less than a dozen cars in the parking lot. No line at the bar, no line for the bathroom, no one on the dance floor. This is ridiculous.

And then my lovely, darling little goth club begins playing Ladytron's Destroy Everything You Touch. There is no way I am sitting down during that song.

About a year ago, I officially stopped Giving A Shit about who might be watching me when I dance, and just thrashed around for fun, enjoying the way muscles and bones feel when put into concentrated motion. Stumbles are merely momentum carrying me into a surprising new position. Arms are as much to be used as legs. It is all about sinuous follow-through, and fuck-ups do not exist. And I am wearing great new shoes with sturdy, grippy soles. Nothing is stopping me. So I go, and go, and go, alone in the center of the floor for about four songs, until a few intrepid people begin to join me. Two hours later, there is a decent number, and I am still there, waving and flopping and twisting away.

When I finally run out of steam and step off to go to the bathroom, a girl greets me there by asking if I take dance lessons. "Like, do you study somewhere or something?" She is wearing a striped minidress and ridiculously high heels, and is what I would consider to be massively more attractive than me, so thin with her golden skin and big fluttery eyes.

I shrug and bluster about doing a lot of musical theater. It's what I usually say when someone compliments my dancing, which is not planned or choreographed, so much as utterly fearless and unusual. That passes for Good Dancing nowadays, when you're weird and don't care anymore.

See, I was the girl at the Fifth Grade Graduation party who danced wildly and enthusiastically, and was mocked by the entire class. The next day at school, kids were coming up to me and jeering about it. The boys in my neighborhood would do imitations of my dancing when they saw me: a line of giggling, spasmodic boys who broke into a sort of group epileptic fit and claimed that was what I looked like. I didn't dance in public again for three years, and even then it was stiff and controlled, doing safe things like the Macarena.

Nowadays, crazy and fearless is what people want to see. This is what people compliment me on. This is what gets strangers walking up to me, offering to buy me a drink or asking for my number (for the record, tonight's pack of friendly boys were very, very gay). This garners the envy of skinny hot girls in minidresses. It is baffling to me.

Haha. Take that, fifth grade. Bet the lot of you dance like rusty robots now.

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