Recovered

Manalive. I suspect that, had I not gone dancing on Friday evening, I would have gone straight to bed. The last few days of the week I had been propping myself up with Mountain Dew—and then dancing completely trashed me. I did next to nothing on Saturday, and my great accomplishment on Sunday was getting the garbage and recycling out.

Well, OK. I also started playing Final Fantasy X-2 on Sunday. I find the battle system much more confusing than that of FFX—it’s hard to tell what I’m doing to which enemy. It seems like the type of game that would appeal to Brian, but doesn’t appeal to me—that is, it’s a game where you explore and poke around and discover things, rather than a game with a huge over arching plot. I don’t play games for hours of levelling up, tweaking, or discovering every last secret; I like to take out the main story, and then move on with my life. And, while FFX-2 has a story that I can take out, it doesn’t feel (so far) like it’s even half of the game.

The dance itself was quite fun, albeit sparsely populated (seemingly due to the Battle of the Bands taking place concurrently in the quad). Saw Connor (who I haven’t seen in ages), met his girlfriend Heidi (name somewhat tentatively recalled), and said ‘hi’ to Kristina. I also met Mike and Kevin, two friends from a ballroom II class who I ran into frequently on the sideline. (In addition to being lightly attended, the crowd featured more males than females; this, on top of a limited knowledge of the various dances, meant even more time spent not-dancing than usual.) Eric even stopped by for a little while—he was there primarily for the Battle—and now says that he has verified that I can bust a move.

Luckily for my standing in Eric’s eyes, Becky asked me to salsa soon after he arrived. (I don’t really get asked to dance too often.) Also in my favor was that I was confident with some salsa moves, and that Becky was a very good follow.

The idea that this could well be my last ballroom dance—and, even if not my last dance, most likely was the last time I’d dance with a decent number of people I knew—wasn’t lost on me. As I tend to do when periods in my life draw to a close, I also distanced myself from the crowd (even more than I usually do) and took them in as a whole. I similarly distanced myself and observed my colleagues at the ends of middle school and high school. (I didn’t do that for college, as a whole, since I was pretty much the last one out.) I suppose it’s my way of trying to take a mental snapshot of the group, that I can better remember them in the future.

After the dance I pulled out and poked through my high school yearbooks. Time has finally distanced me enough from the stress of working on those things that, late Friday night, I was able to look at them dispassionately for the first time. (Three of my four yearbooks had my hands in their creation; the fourth—my freshman book—will forever be remembered as the Triangle Book.) I’m still quite proud of the layouts we designed for my senior book, on the whole; several (the academic, sports, musical, and prom spreads) strike me as quite polished, and I would guess (forgive me my pride) could compete quite favorably against other high school yearbooks. On the other hand, I wish I had put more effort into the activities and Spring Fever spreads—they appear quite lackluster, especially in comparison to the rest of the book.

Of course, there are always things that the yearbook printing company screwed up. For my senior book, the color section was completely screwed up; titles that should have been color-keyed to photos were not, and the print quality of the senior pictures was quite questionable. Some of the black and white pages were also printed with absolute black printed as dark gray, which was also kind of weird.

Aw, heck. For all the babbling I’ve done about this yearbook, I might as well get some pictures up to show y’all what I’m talking about. It’s a little late tonight, but I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.

 

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