Salsa and Socially Suspicious Situations

So here goes, take two on this blog-writing business.  I might also mention that I find titles to be a pesky part of writing, not quite so pesky as introductions, but up there.  This is particularly true in scientific writing.  Now and again inspiration strikes, but more of than not I spend a good few minutes staring at the blinking cursor before writing some horribly laborious descriptive title that will most likely induce a catatonic state in any reader before even advancing to the actual text.  Add this to the fact that there is only so much humor you can get away with in a title, and with the rise of the internet, gone, I imagine, are the days in which you could actually (well, nearly) get a paper published in the name of "Theodore T. Bear", who is in reality the stuffed mascot of your lab (more on that later, if I get around to it).  Ah, well. Perhaps in the course of my career I will find other ways of sneakily adding some humor to otherwise dry scientific writing.

But this is, not, in fact, a post on scientific writing!  Yes, you have probably read my brilliantly witty title (which I sure hope I come up with by the time I finish this post) and have known, all long, that this post is in all actuality about my experiences with salsa dancing!  Which, in this case, it is, although I am of course now horrifically tempted to do just the opposite in a hypothetical future post.

Now, what shall I say about salsa?  Well, an obvious beginning would be to say that I enjoy it very much, although not quite as much as contra dancing (hypothetically more on that later).  The rhythms* are infectious, the push and pull of the movements intoxicating.  I have generally found salsa dancers to be pretty welcoming, unlike the snootier types I've encountered from my brief forays into Argentine tango in Vancouver.  I generally have no problem finding people to dance with.

*Whoever decided rhythm should be spelled that way deserves a very special place in the toasty-warm afterlife of your choice.  A pox on the English language.

However, this is where the problem begins.  Salsa dancers, by which I mean the men, since I regrettably do not know how to lead salsa and few women lead, are often just a little *too* friendly.  Sometimes this is cultural - I often notice dancers of different nationalities will have different tolerances for physical closeness.  But I find the behaviors that cause me the most unease are to be found off the dance floor rather than on.  Dancing closely to a man doesn't disturb me as long as I know it means nothing off the dance floor, as long as I can trust that the man doesn't interpret my acceptance of physical closeness as an invitation for further intimacy.  It's when you get situations where a man seems to assume, because I smile at him, because I am polite and converse a bit on the side after the dance, that I must obviously have fallen madly in love with him and want nothing more than to follow him to the ends of the earth if necessary to share in his sweet embrace....  I'm talking about the creepy guy who, on meeting you once after a brief conversation, not only offers you his business card, but also offers you travel deals to Costa Rica and Honduras, tells you you should come work with his coffee plantation in Honduras, asks you to get coffee/dinner/lunch sometime as a friend*, etc.  I might also mention said guy is at least 10 years my senior.  And that this same man not only recognized me, but repeated the whole schpiel again after I ran into him again some 2 years later after having ceased salsa dancing for a time because of guys like him.

*Spoiler - this NEVER means "as friends"

Of course, this guy has never done anything other than "act" creepy, although he is definitely displaying some proto-stalkerish tendencies.  Nevertheless, his behavior makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable, to the point that it makes me avoid something I love.  Am I a coward?  Am I overreacting?  I wish I didn't have to ask these questions.

Why is that I always seem to run into these types at social dance events (with the notable exception of contra dancing)?  Is there something in the male dominated lead-follow relationship that allows creeps to come out of the woodwork?  I've found the only way to deal with these types is direct, rude, in-their-face refusals, which goes against everything in my personality, and leaves me with a lingering fear of retaliation on their part.  I don't like feeling like I should be always leave dance events in a pack of at least two for social protection against jilted creeps.  It drives me nuts that I no longer feel comfortable at a social dance without at least one off-floor friend to serve as a creep deflector.  I am pained when I hear stories of friends turned off to social dancing in their first forays into this otherwise wonderful activity because of interactions with these creepy types.  Every woman I talk to who's stuck with dancing has similar stories.

I suspect that there's a reason I see this type of thing more in ballroom style partner dances (salsa, tango, ballroom) than in contra dancing, where ladies and gents can do the leading equally, and the community dance styles means that creeps are more easily exposed and less easily tolerated.  Dominant/subordinate relationships might also be harder to establish, as the difference in expertise between the most experienced contra dancer and the least is not so great as the difference would be in other partner dances (there are no international contra dance competitions that I've heard of).  I wonder if there would be some way to impart this ethos to other dance styles without compromising the integrity of the dance.

I wish I could now turn around and introduce some brilliant, genius idea to turn the culture around, but honestly, I have no idea.  I suppose I offer my story as another to display the difficulties of being female, even in our "liberated" North American societies.  I shouldn't need to feel like I need friends/bodyguards to be able to dance safely.

On Introductions

I generally can't stand the things.  An introduction is, generally, this pesky thing that stands in the way of me and whatever I want to write.  Surely, if I just dive in and strew the jumbled contents of my over-exited mind across the screen pell-mell, you can follow, yes?  But, alas, this is not so, typically.

Crucially, an introduction forces one to choose what one is going to say.  Which, in this case, is an unknown.  Most blogs I've seen have an introduction of sorts laying out a goal for the blog, and in this case there is none, other than a hazy desire to write down for general consumption (now there's a scary thought) some of the reflections knocking about in my head, or perhaps things I've learned that might be of use to someone else.  I'm only starting this at all because my D&D game got canceled today, and I have an hour or so to kill before heading off to free Salsa, and an hour or so is insufficient time to bake bread, or do laundry, although it is probably enough time to do some cleaning, but I'm deciding it's not on the unassailable grounds that I don't feel like cleaning right now.

Perhaps I shall tabulate what I might write about, with absolutely no guarantee that I will ever actually get around to it.  My accentuated tendencies towards superlative verbosity make it rather unlikely I could ever manage to keep to some sort of schedule, given the difficulty of balancing the time commitment necessary to relinquish all my most-favored multi-syllabic words to the screen with the myriad other distractions I am so skilled at creating for myself.  (Case in point - the preceding paragraph consists of two sentences.)

Possible topics:

• Matlab and the joys thereof
• An idiot's guide to processing gravity data
• Social dancing and the joys (and travails) thereof
• A miser's guide to starvation avoidance in Vancouver
• Easy (and maybe some not so easy) styles to do with long hair
• Musings on feminism and geophysics
• Volcanos
• Reflections on culture
• Harping and Celtic music
• Miscellaneous rants and diatribes

I anticipate this being an interesting experiment.  Now that I've written that, I suppose I must follow by setting up the proper proposal for said experiment.  Flex those grad student muscles, as it were.

Hypotheses to test:

1. The readership of this blog will be limited to a handful of my friends/relatives
2. I will actually write more than 2-3 posts total
3. What I write will be of value to someone else

Methodology:

1. Finish, and publish introductory post
2. Finish, and publish, additional posts
3. Wait
4. Conceive a ridiculous quantitative way to tabulate the results, if possible by using 3-D isosurfaces in Matlab.

(To do: write more real-world proposals so I can satirize them more effectively)

Another thing I despise: conclusions.  As this would be the "tell you what I've told you" part of the writing process, here's what I told you: I'm writing a blog.  The blog will contain stuff, most of it completely unrelated to the other stuff.  People might read the stuff, and I might write other stuff, that people might then also read.  The people who read the stuff might like it.

(I am rather fond of the word "stuff".)

El fin.