Today was simultaneously a great success and a great failure. The failure came in the form of a missed chance to take the second of my three practice actuarial exams: when it came time to sit down and work on the sucker, I realized that I felt like crap. My body ached all over, I had a congestion headache, and on top of the congestion I had a—for lack of a better term—brain cloud. (Rather than being a fake medical-sounding term that causes me to eventually throw myself into an active volcano, this just means that it felt like there was a fog preventing my thoughts from being thought very quickly.) So I passed on the exam today, figuring it wasn’t worth wasting.

The great success was in the form of the ballroom dance this evening. I was darn close to not going (brain clouds and whatnot), but I had told Renee and Adam that I would be there, so I went. Oddly enough, I didn’t see them there; either I missed them (I’m always late to dances), or they didn’t show.

This evening I both danced more, and was more chided about not dancing enough, than ever before. That more dancing is good I shouldn’t have to argue; I’d say that the chiding is a positive, as it indicates how many friends and/or acquaintances I’ve made—that people care, to some slight extent. Robin hooked my arm and pulled me out on the dance floor almost as soon as I had arrived, which was fun (I fortuitously appeared just in time for a salsa), and I continued to chat and/or dance a good deal as the evening continued. Talked with Mandy for a while near the end, and discovered that she’s “never going to get married”; despite her (joking) insistence that I was the devil, she was willing to waltz with me.

Perhaps the development with the most potential for future interest occurred right after the final dance of the evening, when Kristina (the New Gal at work) tugged on my shoulder to say ‘hi.’ She seemed genuinely surprised to find me at the dance (I’m always amused when people are surprised by something I do—mostly because it’s a rare event, I guess). I wonder if this discovery will affect work in any way; most likely not, but it tends to be a cold day in heck when my Real Life and my Work Life coincide.