I'll Have History With A Side Of Swimming, But No Dance

......So I've been neglecting the blog. Ooops. But to be completely honest, I don't think I've ever had a busier semester. The classes I am taking are not that much harder than any of the other classes I've taken here (to tell you the truth, they might even be easier), but just as I suspected, writing a senior thesis is draining the life from my body. ....Okay, so that's a bit of a stretch, but only a bit.

I really want to do well on my thesis and so far I'd say it's coming along. But that also means that any free hour I have is spent working on my thesis and I basically have no free time left--weekday or weekend. I took off last Thursday night and Saturday night for hanging out with a friend/the campus Halloween Party (whooo!), but I really haven't had any time to just chill out and watch a movie or just do nothing. I'm like a hamster on a wheel...although much less fuzzy.

And now that I am back from October Break, it's time to start picking classes for next semester. Crazy, I know. FYI: Please don't remind me that this is the last time I get to fill in my little online sheet and constantly change my mind on courses and rearrange the order of the classes that are the most important for me to take--unless you want to make me cry. But on a more optimistic note, I'm pretty excited for my next selection of courses and I think that if everything goes according to plan, I can leave Vassar feeling fully satisfied.

One thing that I do not plan on taking again is dance. For the past three years, I have taken a dance course about every other semester. I took two course from modern dance, and right now I'm working on taking a jazz dance class. Actually, I take that back--I'm working on SURVIVING a jazz dance class. Why? Because I am the world's worst dancer. The title isn't exactly flattering, but trust me--I'd rather have that title than be forced to watch myself dance. When I was taking modern dance, I wasn't exactly good, but at least it wasn't painful to watch. But jazz dance on the other hand.... well, that's another story.

I'm a pretty athletic individual and I swam for six years between middle school and high school. But as soon as I step onto the dance floor, it looks as if I'm just learning how to walk as I stumble into what is supposed to be an arabesque but ends up looking like I tripped over an invisible staircase. I think most of the time the instructor tries to ignore me because if we spent the entire class going over what I did wrong, I don't think we'd get past the first exercise. Instead, she'll instruct those in the group who look like professionals in comparison as I sort of hobble along and make a sad attempt at what is supposed to be a dance move whenever I feel like it's safe to humiliate myself again.

Now, everyone has their on-days and their off-days, and you're all probably thinking that I just had an off-day today. But compared to the average person, my on-days are like off-days and my off-days are, well, extra-off if anything. It doesn't help my case that I had virtually no dance training as a child and my classmates seem like they've at least taken some form of classical dance. I'm pretty certain that the rugby player in my class decided to take it as a joke, but I end up making him look like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. When I walk into Kenyon Hall on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm not walking into my dance class, I’m walking into my own worst nightmare--where all eyes are on me as I trip over myself while trying to doing twirls across the room, saying as if I were Derek Zoolander: "I can't turn left!" What's even more humiliating is that my mom was a dance instructor at a studio in Cleveland when she was about my age, and performed shows at discos back when they were cool. But somehow I was born with two left feet and I have no idea where they came from; a recessive trait, perhaps? I'll never know for sure.

So right now you're probably thinking, "So why do you keep putting yourself through this if you think it's comparable to torture?" Good question. As a Vassar student, I guess I'm kind of masochistic by nature. But as myself... well, you could say I'm probably crazy.