Day 11: Evacuate the Dancefloor

The weirdest thing about Highland is its obsession with dance. The obsession isn't the weird part because every small town is obsessed with something: something they're good at, something to form an identity around, something to make you proud of the otherwise you live, or more likely to temporarily forget the otherwise shitty place you live.

But dance. Fucking dance. Dance in all its dark and pathetic forms. Pom dance, jazz dance, hip-hop dance, and worst of all lyrical dance, which basically involves looking really emotional while rolling around on a dirty floor. Apparently we excel at all of these. 

You wish parents could steer their kids to more worthwhile pursuits, like chess maybe, or Model UN. But no. I guess dance provides the greatest vicarious thrill.

Women are sad to start out with. You live in Highland, or you watch Dance Moms (or the new spinoff Dance Moms: Miami!) and you see that age only makes things worse. I do all three of these things. (This is why misogyny is one of my major problems.)

But now we're making our young males dance. Out of the 100 or so dancers at my sister's recital on Saturday, 12 were male. We have a male dance team at the high school. We also have a winless football team. They really fucking suck. A fucking 0-9 football team and 10 potential future star quarterbacks are thrusting their groins and tap-dancing to Luke Bryan dance remixes*. But he has a dick! And he's dancing! What bravery and courage! And all for art!, if that's what you call aimless movement to Lil Jon's "Get Low."

I don't mind dance, besides feeling like a pedophile while watching it and worrying about the actual pedophiles that certainly lurk in the audience. I cringe at the mustachioed fathers in the crowd yelling "Do your thang girls!" And simultaneously I realize this is my future, a lifetime of yelling at my progeny, wanting them to do all I never could, wanting to relive my own athletic glory days**, wanting to escape the hopelessness and desperation that seem to come once you reach a certain age. 

Let us all hope I live this out on football fields instead of packed auditoriums.

*Really. They souped up the beat to "Rain is a Good Thing" and had this 10-year-old guy do a tap routine to it. When I was 10 I spent most of my time unleashing predatory dinosaurs on my guests in Zoo Tycoon. Any objective psychoanalyst will tell you my childhood was better and, as a consequence, my adulthood will be way more awesome.

**If you consider golf a sport, which you shouldn't. Pussy shit, but I could actually play pretty good and all. My kid will be much more manly and athletically talented. I will not let him take the easy way out. IT. WILL. BE. FOOTBALL. (Or chess. Or Model UN. Or theater. Or anything besides dance or golf, because really, golfers are douchebags, and dance is just fucking awful. Do anything other than those things and I'll luv u 4evr, unborn son!)