Oops, Weekend with… people? Heeeelp

So the last time I went to a swing dance event, it ended with my ex lounging like a lord in the corner of a dance hall with ladies lounging all around him like coily pretties. Like seriously. And me a sitting misery by myself hoping someone would ask me to dance and at the same time hoping someone WOULDN’T because I didn’t really know much how.

This weekend, I go to try again. Guess how I’m traveling there? With my ex and another dancing dude. In a car.

Guess how I’m coming back? Who the eff knows? I’ll figure it out sometime during the weekend. Like the ex.

But I’m going to try something as an introvert headed into social dance territory. I’m going to keep a diary of the weekend of little tidbits of my thoughts, then I’ll copy them all into this post. Let’s find out what comes back…

At the hotel

Have a view of f*ck all. Occasionally a train trundles past. I took a few pics of things on the way here.

Note how to kill a conversation: ask the two divorced people in the car how long they were together.

What my roommate said before we went out: “What are we still missing?” *looks at her feet* “My shoes.”

The interior foyer of our hotel, the gladiator lounging with his sword and a glass of wine just ‘cuz drinkin’ the blood of his foes:

Typical Czech Brno with a tram and church:

Add a bit of sunlight…

Even the buildings that are falling into ruin are pretty here. The sunlight on the right-hand windows makes it golden…

This is supposed to be their rendition of a bus, or maybe it’s a tram loool

Typical gothic Czech Republic, just missing a few bats:

And this tower…

…has this (in)famous crooked furl of decoration (top center). A friend I showed the picture to asked me why it’s crooked but I don’t know 😀 The lady I was with pointed it out, and we were in a hurry to eat haha

Alright, so I looked it up, and here is the story of the twisted turret: apparently, Pilgram, the sculptor, started work on the tower and asked for an advance. The city councilors, however, were less than forthcoming and reneged on their promise. This irked Pilgram, so he had his stonemasons carve the tallest tower turret twisted. When the city councilors summoned him to demand he fix it, he said their words were as crooked as the turret, and so the turret would stay to display their perfidy to the world. Then he vanished and they searched for him high and low, but all in vain.

Supposedly he contributed his skills to St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.

And as for this next pic, I just thought the window display was a pretty combination of colors in an already pretty building. But the blatant “Come buy” sign down below cracks me up:

How Saturday went

Apparently I can manage to dance so badly that I can even traumatize a skilled professional. Go, introvert…

At the audition to determine our level, I got put in the lower level courses probably because I’m too nervous to dance well even though I should know a lot after four years, but the oddest thing is my ex was also put in my level and he’s been dancing almost 9 years.

Unless someone thought we were a pair and put him in the lower level course with me so we could stay together… oops.

How Sunday went

During one lesson today, they told us to turn sideways so we could see ourselves from the side in the mirror, and the guy partnering with me at the time was like, “Ai ai ai, I shouldn’t have done that with my pot belly.”

And I said it’s fine, that I’m the opposite: vychrtla (like emaciated / stringy-skinny).

And he says something like: “Does that mean you’re concave and I’m convex and we fit?”

My mind: ABORT! ABORT ALL ATTEMPTS AT CONVERSATION, INTROVERT, WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT!

I’m a wreck (I left this note although it’s actually not related to my feelings at all, just a note to look up a song that was playing with this in the lyrics.)

Turns out it’s this Imagine Dragons song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqKZM9JMJls

The instructor teaching musicality discussed what the greats like Mozart and Bach would think of what our music has descended to nowadays. He had a whiteboard where he drew their intelligent reactions: “What?” and “??!” 😀 After all the work the masters put into blending and combining, to have musicians nowadays follow a basic formula (intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus (repeat 1x), bridge, chorus, outro), with modern musicians not even having to play an instrument because the computer puts it all together, well…

On the way home, the guy driving the car asked my ex, “How the heck did you end up in the red [lower] class?”

Me: “They probably needed to even out the male leads in the lower course so there’d be an even leader-follower ratio.”

My ex: “No, at the audition, I danced an upright and honest red level.”

Which made everyone laugh because it sounded like he danced precisely to get to the lower level (and he’s taught swing dance courses before so…).

Kiddos, I wrote nothing else with regard to the weekend! Now I’m home with my neighbor yelling “Do prdele!” (“Sh*t!”) at something or other (thin walls).

And since I got home, guess who has kept me within view at all times:

Zulejka!

Excerpt time! From Heiress of Rebellion, which God willing I’ll publish sometime in 2022:

She fled through the corridors, a barefoot princess clutching an indigo cloak over a ruffled white gown, her white-gold spirals of hair twisting behind her.
Her mad dash ended at the castle portcullis, where magic burned through the soles of her feet and yanked her to a violent halt. She nearly sprawled on her face.
She landed hard on her knees, her palms smacking the cobbles, her fall padded by the gown, and her cloak pooled around her like a flowing blue ocean.
A curse encircled her ankles. Like iron shackles melded to the castle wall behind her, invisible manacles stung through her flesh—and tautened when she dragged her leg forward in an attempt to crawl to the street beyond.

And if you’re still here and feel like you want more of my words, here’s my shamelessly copied weekly info for new Sonya addicts: feel free to join the newsletter I haven’t been writing (but intend to), join the patreon I’ve been seriously neglecting (but want to resume), or check out my books I don’t want anyone to buy (for realz cuz it’s my old writing and I’m like nooo, don’t read it…) before I unpublish even more (like I unpublished my dystopians).