2023 Summary: Part 4
Dance
I’ve never been one to dance at weddings. I was fine dancing ballet as a kid because I was told the order of steps to do. And at SCA events, I’d participate in the medieval English country dance. Again, there was a sequence of steps to memorize. But improvisational dance? That was not me.
I decided it was time to get out of my shell and learn how to dance without a script.
At the end of September, I finally went to one of the Queer Tango Collective’s Saturday gatherings and learned some tango basics. José announced that the collective would be holding its first-ever beginner class series, so I promptly signed up. I started trying out other local tango classes and practices too.
New look
In October, I cut off half my hair. If you’ve known me less than 10 years, you’ve probably only seen me with my hair pulled up into a braid crown and covered. I stopped cutting it in 2009 to see how long it would get. It almost reached my knees a few years ago. It stopped getting any longer.
Since switching to working from home, I stopped covering it consistently. My coworkers started seeing me leave it down. I finally decided that I now had the information I wanted (how long it would get), and I wanted to try a new experiment. My hair is a mix of curly and wavy, which I get from my dad. My mom has straight hair, so she couldn’t teach me how to handle my hair. I had frizzy hair that I tried at first to tame with a hair straightener before finally covering it and ignoring it. I wanted to finally learn how to let my waves be waves. And so, I got a curly cut, leave-in conditioner, and hair gel.
And well, I’m dressing different these days, too. Now that I don’t live with a mosquito infestation, I’m starting to wear short sleeves sometimes and knee-length skirts instead of always covering down to the wrists and ankles.
More adventures
At some point, it occurred to me that I had, over the course of 2023, been in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. I was only missing South America for inhabited continents. Meanwhile, at work they said that, although I started July with my vacation days run down to 0, I had to take more time off before the end of the year. No, I cannot roll over half a year’s accumulated vacation days into 2024. Well, then. My Argentine colleagues would occasionally ask me “so, when are you going to visit us?” I figured it was time to answer that.