Nine (9)

Cloud nine: Where you end up after a particularly blissful Di Sarli tanda, perhaps.  I'm still at the point where I have to use enough of my brain consciously for navigation that being in this state is relatively rare.  But it does happen.

It's why I'm still here.

Ten (10)

Have you ever danced with anyone while you've been in a bad mood?  I have.  Most people I know have.  I've danced with people who've been in a bad mood.  It's never a good idea.  But what do you do?  Going and cooling off and calming down and chilling out will just take too much time.  Tango is meant to be the part of the week that reduces our stress levels, if we can't relax during that then what hope is there?

The worst is when you're in a bad mood because of the person you're dancing with.  Mutual politeness might prevent it being mentioned, but she's wound him up by dragging him out for a dance when he was desperately trying to get a glass of water, or he's wound her up by standing in front of her just at the moment she was about to successfully get a nod from the man she's been attempting to dance with all evening.

In all these cases, we're probably dancing with a good friend who has temporarily annoyed us.

We'll get over it.

But it's a pretty sad experience, being party to a grumpy dance.  They're another thing you get better at avoiding and preventing.  And if not avoiding or preventing, at least recovering from.

Counting to ten is an old technique for keeping calm in the face of aggravation and provocation.

Eleven (11)

The music is distant and tinny, today.  My legs feel slow and ponderous and as though they could float away from the ground at any moment.  Breathing is laboured and heavy.  The connection doesn't always happen.  Sometimes it will start this way, and then things will come right.  But not always.  It's possible to have a bad night.  We shouldn't be too mean to ourselves.  It doesn't mean we're going to be spending the rest of our lives dancing on the moon.

We'll be back to Earth tomorrow.  Or if not then, the day after.

Apollo 11 was the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon.

Twelve (12)

The seasons go by very fast.  It doesn't seem like long ago that I could tell people I'd been learning tango for six months or twelve months and they'd smile and nod and look impressed.  At some point I began saying '3 years' or 'four years' or 'five years', and people stopped looking impressed and instead simply started nodding their heads, as if to say 'seems about right'.  I assume this means I'm following the natural curve of tango progress.  At least people don't usually shake their heads in horror, so I suppose I'm not behind or under the curve somewhere.

But the years blur together.  When I started, I remember chatting with someone who'd been dancing tango for three years.  It seemed like an unimaginable investment of time to me back then.  And now, of course, I can see that there's not ever going to be an end to it.  Or I think I can see that.  Maybe in three years' time I'll feel differently.  Three years is a drop in the temporal ocean.  Three years just gets you to the point of realising that you've probably just spent three years working on the wrong things and ignoring all the right things.  And the cycle repeats every year or two or three.

There are twelve months in a year.

Thirteen (13)

What can you do about bad luck?  Not much, I think.  You can do your best to improve your odds of having accident-free dancing, but you can't ever completely account for the behaviour of others.  Who knows who's about to elbow their way into the ronda and tread on everybody's toes?  You can slot yourself in ahead of, or behind, or ideally between the most social dancers present, but sooner or later somebody's going to attack you with a hot cup of coffee on the way back from the kitchen or the bar.  You can have complete control over your movements and have lightning reflexes, but a slippery patch of floor will trip you up regardless.  Hopefully your bad luck doesn't take your partner down with you.

I have a horrible feeling it's contagious, though.

Thirteen is unlucky for some.

Fourteen (14)

The poetry is something I'm missing out on.

I don't understand the words.  Not as they're being sung.  I can look at the lyrics and work them out.

I need to do better at this.  I'm missing out on a lot.

When the songs are sung in my ear as we dance, I can feel the poetry, and the shape of what I'm missing.

I'm missing a lot of information.  There's often a contrast between the words that are sung and the tune that is played.  I'd like to feel that.  I feel it in people I dance with who do understand the lyrics.

There are 14 lines in a sonnet.

Fifteen (15)

There's often a bit of point-scoring, isn't there?  Some places just seem to encourage it.  Some others, even though all the same people attend, are relaxed and unhurried and friendly.  Not that a little friendly competition hurts.  If it weren't for that, who'd bother getting any better?

It's the unfriendly competition that's the problem.  I've seen people actively standing in front of people to block them from the view of someone else. I've seen people hijacked on their way back from the dance floor, before the next tanda has even begun to play.  Those who want to play by the rules tend to suffer.

When you win your first point in tennis, you get 15 points on the scoreboard.

Sixteen (16)

Size sometimes matters.  But this dance of ours holds another set of apparent contradictions.  The largest of people are often the lightest on their feet.  The smallest of people can feel the heaviest.  If you haven't been watching the dancing carefully enough, it can come as a surprise.  It's a beautiful moment when you embrace somebody who looks like they would be blown away by a faint breeze, and they turn out to be anchored to the ground.  And you can feel the floor and the shoes and the feet as though they were yours.

There are 16 ounces in a pound.

Seventeen (17)

A nice exercise in improvisation.  Throw a bit of random into your practice.  Every third or fifth or seventh step, go in a different direction than you would normally.  Break the patterns.  The patterns dig themselves in, you have to fight to break out of them.  I do, at least.  Maybe in thirty years' time, every direction will feel as natural as every other.

According to some surveys, if people are asked to choose a number between 1 and 20, they choose 17 a disproportionate amount of the time.

Eighteen (18)

Freedom from and freedom to.  This is what the mirada and the cabeceo offers us all.

Freedom from the creeps and crazies, and from the lead weights and unmusicals.

Freedom to vote with our eyes.  To see the whole room, and to make a choice of exactly who you want to dance with at exactly this moment.  And they have the freedom to say no, without having to say 'no'.

The voting age in many countries is 18.

Nineteen (19)

There are times when the dance is a battle of wits.

In a good way.

Like a game of chess or of Go, perhaps.

She refuses to take me up exactly on my suggestion, but slows it down or speeds it up or sometimes sabotages it completely.  When it works with the music and doesn't crash me into anyone else on the dance floor, I couldn't be happier.

She might challenge those patterns that I've fallen into.

A wake-up call.

Go is played on a nineteen-by-nineteen board.

Twenty (20)

Contact lenses.  Spectacles.  The solutions to short-sightedness at the milonga.  Those that wear glasses have their appealing little rituals.  The invitation to dance is accepted, the glasses are folded and secreted somewhere on the person or on the table.  Occasionally I'm asked to carry them in my pocket.  Occasionally they're pushed up to the top of the head.  Some people keep wearing them while dancing, which can pose interesting logistical challenges with respect to head position.  The dance ends.  The glasses-wearer is escorted back to the table on which they can find their glasses.  The ritual concludes.

20/20 vision indicates normal human visual acuity.

Twenty-one (21)

I don't know the difference between sprituality, religion, psychic powers, paranormal occurrences.  Well, I do. But to me they all make the same sense.  In the end, I can't see that we're more than just the sum of electrical impulses flashing through the brain.

But when those moments happen.  Those moments.  You know the ones.  When they happen, and the only thing that's in your head is the music and the movement and the conversation with your partner, I think that must be what people mean when they talk about the soul.  For those moments, perhaps we really are more than the sum of our parts.  More than the sum of our partnership.

The soul was measured as weighing 21 grams by Dr Duncan McDougall in 1907.

Twenty-two (22)

You want to dance, but the quicker you choose to dance with someone the less likely you'll make an informed decision about whether their music will mesh with your music.  And with the music.

You want to sit, but to sit means to reject invitations from the people you want to dance with.  To sit briefly risks sitting perpetually.

You want to impress the person you're dancing with.  But the stronger that desire, the less free and natural is your dance.  Limbs stiffen up and movements start to jerk or stutter, or your lead becomes a murmer or a mutter.

Some days, you just can't win.

One definition of Catch-22:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Twenty-three (23)

A birthday vals.  Secretly quite liked, though protested against, by the birthday celebrant.  Always a sweet moment.  Sometimes slightly resented, especially if the chosen vals is one that we all want to dance to.  And the star of the show, the birthday boy or birthday girl.  Not necessarily always the one to be the centre of attention.  But this is their moment on their day.  A whirlwind of partners who have maybe fifteen seconds each in which to fulfil their purpose.  Their purpose: to make the star shine, look good, feel good.

When you have 23 people in a room, there's a 50% chance that two of them will share the same birthday.

Twenty-four (24)

A day without tango?

Not really possible.

No milonga, maybe.

But there's music to listen to in the car, on headphones in the lunch break, on the radio in the evening.

There's a walk to practice whenever we walk.  I feel that, as a leader, I have a lucky break in this.  I can practice my walk slightly more discreetly than a follower.  Who would tend to practice walking backwards.  In high heels.

There's a blog or an article or something else to read.  Someone's thoughts that I'll have never thought about before.  There's therefore something to think about, too.

Arrangements to make, photos to look at, people to coordinate with, muscles to stretch or knead or exercise.

The problem with having a day without dancing, is that it's all too easy to fill it up with too much tango.

There are 24 hours in a day, give or take.