Angels in Black Skirts
I was almost in Sarah Mitteldorf's Irish dance recital this Saturday. (By the way, that's like the final stroke in the painting of my awesomeness. I've always thought that I was capable of being good at anything. And although I'm not actually gonna be in it, because the guy who wasn't going to be able to make it actually is going to be able to, the fact that I was going to learn all the steps in the three days and be decent means that I'm apparently a good dancer of all things.) And today in rehearsal I watched Sarah and Devon and Hillary doing their hard shoe part of the dance. They were amazing. They were like three angels in black skirts. The word that came to my mind was "grace". "Grace" is a word that used to go hand and hand with "beauty". It's a word you think of when you think of those classy 50s movie stars. Nowadays you don't hear it so much. I wonder if that doesn't have something to do with how our feminine idols in this day and age are trashy, empty-headed bimbos like Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears. I wonder which way the causality goes. Regardless, I wonder why we don't demand more grace in our screen divas. Maybe it's because people don't dance in the movies anymore, not really. Not unless we're talking about Step Up 2: The Streets. They don't dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
"Grace" has always been an interesting word to me. On the one hand it describes something very physical, an elegance of motion and action. But on the other hand it means divine redemption, the righteous light of God. It's transcendental in that way. How many words have a tactile meaning as well as a theological meaning? Not many. (It even has intermediate meanings. Consider the phrase "social graces".) But even in its physicality it has a degree of abstraction. It's a difficult thing to describe. It's not the same as agility or charisma, though both are laudable qualities. I'm reasonably agile on the soccer field, but I'm not particularly graceful. And I can be charismatic on stage in some sense, but again, I don't think anyone would call me graceful.
The long and short of it is this: from now on, "grace" tops my list of attributes to look for in a girl. I'm not sure what it was before. Probably "hotness" or something like that. Not that this list always corresponds strongly to whom I end up with. But maybe this is a step in the right direction. I ought to take measures to date a better class of girls. Or so I've been told. And so I'm starting to believe. This isn't a panacea for my attraction to slutty chicks who encourage my self-destructive streak. But you know. Baby steps.
I'm moving back to Chicago soon. Big changes of context like this always excite me. Like starting high school, starting college, or this. You don't get terribly many in life and they're an important opportunity to learn from the choices you've been making and change things up. It's hard to make changes in your life without this kind of context change. I've learned a lot since coming to Reed and I want to make the right choices in the future. Of course, I have to decide who I want to be. That's the hard part. A big part of me does, and always has, wanted to be Barney on "How I Met Your Mother". (Neil Patrick Harris may be the funniest man in show business, by the way, but that's a different rant for a different livejournal entry.) That's kind of the direction I'm heading in. But that's not exactly what I want to be. I think I want to be some combination of Barney and Alan Shore on "Boston Legal". This isn't to say that I want to be a womanizer, as both of those characters are. But I do fear being tied down. And justifiably so, I think. My biggest regrets are always the opportunities I passed up to do something different, to strike out away from expectation and routine and normality.
I remember in third grade, we were sitting in a semi-circle in class one day, and the teacher went to each of us and asked what we thought the answer was to the question "Which weighs more, a pound of books or a pound of feathers?" I was the last to be asked, and everyone before me answered "books." And I knew the right answer. I KNEW it. There was no doubt in my mind. But for some reason I said "books." And the teacher cheerfully, pedantically explained our ignorance to us. And I sat their stewing. That pressure to conform is still something I feel and something I fear. But you have to know which points are worth swimming upstream for. And that's where I have difficulty. But I want to be a flamingo like Alan Shore and I want my life to be legen ...wait for it... dary like Barney's.
"Grace" has always been an interesting word to me. On the one hand it describes something very physical, an elegance of motion and action. But on the other hand it means divine redemption, the righteous light of God. It's transcendental in that way. How many words have a tactile meaning as well as a theological meaning? Not many. (It even has intermediate meanings. Consider the phrase "social graces".) But even in its physicality it has a degree of abstraction. It's a difficult thing to describe. It's not the same as agility or charisma, though both are laudable qualities. I'm reasonably agile on the soccer field, but I'm not particularly graceful. And I can be charismatic on stage in some sense, but again, I don't think anyone would call me graceful.
The long and short of it is this: from now on, "grace" tops my list of attributes to look for in a girl. I'm not sure what it was before. Probably "hotness" or something like that. Not that this list always corresponds strongly to whom I end up with. But maybe this is a step in the right direction. I ought to take measures to date a better class of girls. Or so I've been told. And so I'm starting to believe. This isn't a panacea for my attraction to slutty chicks who encourage my self-destructive streak. But you know. Baby steps.
I'm moving back to Chicago soon. Big changes of context like this always excite me. Like starting high school, starting college, or this. You don't get terribly many in life and they're an important opportunity to learn from the choices you've been making and change things up. It's hard to make changes in your life without this kind of context change. I've learned a lot since coming to Reed and I want to make the right choices in the future. Of course, I have to decide who I want to be. That's the hard part. A big part of me does, and always has, wanted to be Barney on "How I Met Your Mother". (Neil Patrick Harris may be the funniest man in show business, by the way, but that's a different rant for a different livejournal entry.) That's kind of the direction I'm heading in. But that's not exactly what I want to be. I think I want to be some combination of Barney and Alan Shore on "Boston Legal". This isn't to say that I want to be a womanizer, as both of those characters are. But I do fear being tied down. And justifiably so, I think. My biggest regrets are always the opportunities I passed up to do something different, to strike out away from expectation and routine and normality.
I remember in third grade, we were sitting in a semi-circle in class one day, and the teacher went to each of us and asked what we thought the answer was to the question "Which weighs more, a pound of books or a pound of feathers?" I was the last to be asked, and everyone before me answered "books." And I knew the right answer. I KNEW it. There was no doubt in my mind. But for some reason I said "books." And the teacher cheerfully, pedantically explained our ignorance to us. And I sat their stewing. That pressure to conform is still something I feel and something I fear. But you have to know which points are worth swimming upstream for. And that's where I have difficulty. But I want to be a flamingo like Alan Shore and I want my life to be legen ...wait for it... dary like Barney's.