After work I feel a particular need for peacefulness. I don't know why. But I can sense that need when people start talking on the phone around me. I become more sensitive to it. I get annoyed. Normally no one is talking on the phone, but when someone does, it sounds unusually loud. After staring at the computer the whole day I guess my mind needs some rest.
Last day of the first month of my so-called new life. Often when I reflect back at some period, I am always so astonished by how short it is while how much has happened. Perhaps it's because this kind of eventful short periods is more likely to make me reflect. The new job, the new building, another heartbreak, the sudden turn of events for my best friend's father, and of course, all the snow I can imagine in a single month, and more. Not to mention the New Year's Eve milonga. I would like to think that now that my life is different, simpler, more structured, there would be fewer things to do. But somehow, I always fill the void with something.
My weekend I mentioned briefly on Saturday. I think I mentioned the new wave of people taking the beginner's class, the so-called bootcamp. I went without any intention of dancing, since they didn't need any help. I wanted to watch the beginners. Their overt enthusiasm for tango made me happy. I don't remember myself being very enthusiastic about tango in the beginning. I just remember being nervous that I couldn't even lead an "ocho", the most basic step after simply walking. People always asked me why I started tango. Of course, a girl was involved, but it was a friend. It was one of those stories of the same theme: girl wanted to be just friends, I got upset, but finally I relented and let us be friends. Now I am glad we never dated. She was so weird, even as a friend.
Lest this start to sound like sour grapes, let me continue with tango. Why I stayed with tango is much more interesting than why I started. But I am not here to write about that either, because the answer is really long and deep, etc, and at least my dear sister doesn't want to read anything long. And I don't want to go into some rant. The pertinence of my connection with tango is that watching the beginners trying to do all these what I now consider simple moves (but not necessarily easy) made me happy. I could feel my heart smiling, especially when I see couples trying to do this together. Few things you can do on a date that is more fun and romantic than taking a tango beginner's class together. Watching couples taking their first lessons together is like watching children discovering romance, all the awkwardness without the drama.
That was it: tango without drama. Later that evening I was walking with a tango dancer who had only started a few months ago. She wanted to understand what was up with all the drama in a milonga, especially at a New York milonga, why people seem so mean, so cold. The simplest answer is that it's a social dance between a man and a woman, a lot of trust and distrust come into play, a lot of the real interactions in society get to play out before you even start dancing, before you even know with whom you want to dance. We don't all want to dance with everyone just as we don't all want to be friends with everyone, especially not romantic friends. But we can still be nice, giving the minimal love even enemies deserve.
Still, I took a pause from all this silliness of life and tango and I watched the smiles on these beginner's faces. Some weren't smiling; being Ivy League students some inevitably took upon tango as yet another academic challenge to overcome, and you can see the same face you'd find when they are trying to overachieve in their next paper or midterm. Still, on none of the faces was there the scars and fatigue of seasoned tango dancers that I see a lot. That is not to say tango is bad, just as real scars can be great signs of wisdom.
Tango is also my main means of making friends. At least for the past five years. And so it was no surprise that last night after the classes were over, the teachers and others in the club, including me, got together and had dinner. We knew one another at least a little bit. But even if we didn't, as in a festival, we would instantly bond and go to a restaurant and laugh and chat, as if we were old friends. Very few activities I can think of would allow such quick surge of camaraderie. Tango is something I hope will help me make some friends in New York, once I move there. I already know a lot of people, and it's very comforting that many of them have expressed their impatience for me to move and join their community.
Of course, New York will be for me a wonderland of museums, opera, concerts, and soulful streets in which to ambulate. But I can't really make friends with strangers in a museum (though some gay Frenchman tried making friends with me at the Met once).
While I don't want to have just tango connections, I am confident that with some people I can make other connections, not just tango. One of the teachers stayed at my place overnight, and even though we didn't know each other well, we got to talk a lot before and after sleeping. There's something about the way I talk to people that makes them open up a lot. I don't know for sure if that's a gift or a curse; making people open up too fast has sometimes made them regret it and run away from me. But in any case, I hope tango will help me get some connections in an otherwise very rough city of people at least as cold and mean as some of those found on the dance floor.
So I've survived my first month. I even forgot about the eventful food poisoning (as I have said, as bad as things can feel at the moment, I quickly forget about most of them). The next step is finding a place in New York. It already sounds a little scary. Whom I am leaving behind? Friends I don't really get to see more than a couple of hours a week. Who will I meet? I don't know. I just know that I will have me.
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