Unfulfilled Dance Desires

I was NOT able to experience DC to the fullest this week due to, again, sickness. This is a good time to share my Mom's principle about health...

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Our health is like the "1" and the "0's" are all the things we want/need to do in life. As long as we have our health, we can do anything. If we don't have our health, none of the "0's" mean anything.

It's a powerfully true philosophy. I have been sick on and off for the last 3 weeks. I'm grateful my boss has let me work from home but I haven't left the apartment in 4 days and it's driving me batty.

It has been really hard for an active girl like me to be confined to my room in order to rest and recover. I felt semi-well enough on Friday night to go out and try a new dance place, but I didn't even end up dancing! It was a night of unexpected (and unwanted) adventure.

It sounded so great on the website - Latin, country, AND swing dancing all in one place?! I couldn't wait to get my dance fix. Jessie and I got there (it was at a cathedral-esque church) and were greeted by this sign.

I thought "oh, that's nice" and Jessie pointed out that it was a gay sign (hence the rainbow). Ok whatever. We looked around for the entrance, which led to a basement gym. We were over an hour late and there were only 4 guys there. "That's odd," I thought; Jessie wanted to leave because it didn't look that fun or worth the $8 admission. But we waited on the steps outside for Melanie to show up and tell her we weren't going to stay.

While we waited, guy after guy started passing us to go into the dance. "Where are all the girls?!" we wondered. Jessie asked one of them if very many people come to these dances and he said it depends, people don't usually start coming for another 45 minutes. He encouraged us to come in and said he would dance with us. I thought that was a strange comment because with only guys showing up so far, we shouldn't have any trouble getting asked to dance...

After almost an hour, we got tired of waiting and were pretty worried about Melanie not showing up yet. We decided to look in the gym to see if she had gone in without us noticing, and all the guys were dancing with each other. We finally realized this was a full-on gay joint! Soon after, we heard from Melanie, who said she got lost and asked 4 people about the place and they all told her it was a gay spot. Apparently, Dupont Circle is a big gay neighborhood. It's not that we don't like gay people but we all felt uncomfortable staying to dance.

So we said goodbye to that place forever and went to Georgetown to get frozen yogurt at Pinkberry. Sad. I really wanted to dance.

The rest of the weekend was full of studying and sleeping. I am so sick and tired of being sick and tired! I figured if I can't do anything exciting, I should at least eat something exciting. So I made myself an exotic-looking salad of spinach with fresh figs, drizzled with cranberry, walnut, and gorgonzola vinaigrette.

When you're sick and semi-bored, you have alot of time to think. And unfortunately, what kept coming to mind was the devastating thought that I will probably never get to dance on the BYU Ballroom Dance Company again. I was on it for 3.75 years and it all ended too soon. There's really no other ballroom environment like it, where the dance standards are high and high standards of the gospel are maintained in music, choreography, dress, and performances. We prayed before every performance - how amazing is that?! I have yet to find another form of dance or hobby out here to fill that giant gaping void ballroom left in my life...the search must go on

By Saturday night, I was semi-depressed and felt I had eaten pretty healthily, so I treated myself to delivery pizza

Domino's never tasted so good.

Prayers for me to recover my health are GREATLY APPRECIATED. Much thanks in advance!