On Dresses and Dancing

At the St. John's UMW retreat last fall, we were asked to reflect on a time we experienced "a new normal" in our lives. "New normals" tend to sneak up on me, and even with lots of time for reflection this semester, there were a few that have slipped in almost unnoticed. 

I’ve had a lot of I don’t ______’s.

I don’t dance.

I don’t twirl.

I don’t giggle.

I don’t wear dresses.

I don’t play games.

You get the idea. Living with abandon is not something I do well, or, if I’m being honest, at all. I am typically extremely calculated. I even try to calculate my moments of abandon…see my former post on control (that paper turned out well – I worried about it without reason, as usual).

Dresses are my new normal. After two months of walking everywhere, eating well, and not being obscenely stressed, none of the pants I brought with me fit. Because the weather has been nice (comparatively), and because pants sizing is confusing here, I've been wearing dresses and cardigans every day to class. I've suddenly become fashionable. Or something closer to fashionable than I have been in years past.

Taking a day off each week to do anything - from nothing at all, to wandering around Aberdeen, to (like today) reading up on research sources - is another new normal. Not eating meat is another. I think I just stopped buying it and didn't notice.

The strangest one yet though, came today. Today is Wednesday, which means that I have no class. It's a weird scheduling thing here - class on Wednesday mornings is rare, and class on Wednesday afternoon does not exist on the timetables. Having made it through the chaos of last week, trudging through a truly awful tutorial last night, and celebrating it with a new friend and ice cream, I was in a particularly good mood today. I spent the day organizing research files, reading through a couple articles on theodicy and trauma, and then eventually, got hungry. I went to the kitchen, turned on some music, and started hacking a sweet potato into cubes.

On my day off, with Macklemore blasting in the kitchen, sweet potatoes cooking in a bath of thai curry paste and coconut milk, and naan warming in the oven, I started to dance. Not a lot. Just a little. Just enough. I danced, and it took me until I was folding spinach into the curry to notice. 

Whoa. When did I start doing that? The question was certainly aimed at the present dancing, but I was also searching my recent memory for when dancing in my kitchen (or at all) had become part of my life.

Cooking Indian food on a tiny stove while dancing to hip-hop/rap, is not my norm, but even as I'm surprised at myself, I am secretly loving this new kitchen dancing reality. 

The curry, by the way, was delicious.