Weekend. From. Hell.
Nov. 24th, 2003 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieIt stuck with me--and really for most of the team, not just me--Friday though today. Oh, yeah.
Friday, we learn that Hannah invited her boyfriend down from Vermont to watch the competition. Didn't bother to tell us he needed housing. So he squeezed himself into a tiny freshman dorm room at Ohio State along with me, Hannah, and Ale, plus our host, Emma (thankfully her roommate was out of the room all weekend, or we would really have been screwed). So that pissed us all off to start with. Then I was in Hannah's car with her and said boyfriend for the ride to the OSU campus, and we managed to get lost. For two hours. Finally made it to the room, dropped some stuff off, and went to the convention center to watch the pro competition going on (it was about 8:30 at that point). What should've been a ten-minute ride actually took closer to an hour, 'cause we got lost again. Beautiful. The pro comp was excellent, though. These were the semi-finals for all categories, plus the theatrical dance showcase (part one). Theatrical dance is essentially pairs skating without ice. Maybe some combination of pairs and ice dance. Either way, it was basically all really, really cool lifts, and I could name a good number of them by their skating name. There was one couple that was so, so, SO good. I don't know their names, but wow. They were amazing. Definitely got a standing ovation. Another couple did what looked like Cirque du Soleil stuff--very gymnastics/contortionist stuff.
Both Saturday and Sunday, the team didn't really do so well in the comp. Granted, it's nationals. Half the schools in the country with ballroom teams are there, especially the big ones with well-funded teams that have lots of graduate students who take private lessons and stuff like that, so we don't usually win much. But this time I don't think we won hardly anything--a couple of the newcomers won a ribbon, and Ksenia and Pavel won their Gold Latin events, but that was it. A lot of the time the people from our team didn't even get called back. I did a lot of reading for most of the comp.
I did, however, get to dance, which was more than I was expecting. But I'm not so sure that for half of those dances, I wouldn't rather have just watched. See, there were lists of leads and follows seeking follows and leads at the registration table, and there was one Bronze lead who needed a partner for everything. That should've been our first clue. Anyway, Allyson, Dawn, Valerie and I split him up, and I got the Smooth section with him on Sunday morning. We figured out pretty quickly why he didn't have a partner. He was a complete and total jackass. He couldn't even keep on the beat, much less do any steps with decent technique, and he spent the entire two days criticizing all of us on not knowing the steps he did. In fact, as we were in line for American Tango, he said that he didn't actually know anything besides the basic and "whatever steps are the same from International Tango." News flash, buddy--there aren't any! And then when it came time for Viennese Waltz (Bronze Smooth was Waltz/Tango/Foxtrot/V. Waltz), I told him that I really, really didn't want to do it, because I can barely do that dance on my own, much less with a partner I've known for all of fifteen minutes. And yet before I knew it, I was dragged back into line and we were doing Viennese Waltz. I felt like intentionally falling just to embarrass him, but decided against it because I didn't want to screw up another couple's chances if they had to avoid us. I knew that out of a hundred or so bronze couples, there was no way we would get called back, but I was still praying to anyone I could think of that we wouldn't. Plus he was, as Valerie termed it, our "knight in shining B.O." Yeah. Fun, fun. Not. Plus he was seriously creepy with the wanting to holding our hands while we were waiting in line to go on the floor (and there were four heats for each dance, so it was a long while). Ick. Plus, when I told him he was dancing Latin that afternoon with Valerie (whom he had earlier practiced with), he got this disgusted look on his face and said, "Oh, Valerie," like it was such a chore to dance with her. Bastard. God, he was such a jerk. I really wanted to slap him for that remark and for one he made about Kenyon being "that college in Ohio that always has a lot of girls." Granted, every word of that is true, but the way he said it...ugh.
So, yeah, that was probably one of the most uncomfortable thirty minutes of my life to date. And then that afternoon Allyson and I did Latin. It was much more fun, because Allyson is a great person and doesn't creep me out, like smelly guy from the morning. We had fun holding up traffic in Samba (we don't know any traveling steps that she could lead), and she learned that Jive and leather pants are things that should never, ever be mixed.
It was fun to cheer for team match later that day, even though our team didn't place in either the American or International style matches. Ah, well. Saturday night's pro comp was also really cool to watch--it was the finals for everything, plus assorted extras. One of these extras was all the champions of the junior categories coming out to do an exhibition. The youngest looked to be about five years old. They were all better than us. All four of them. I can't do half the jive moves that the little kid couple was doing, much less the older kids. OMG. They were adorable, but kind of scary at the same time.
The other extra was showdances from the finalists in Standard and Latin. We only stayed for the Standard ones, but...heh. They had a lot of cool, cool stuff. One couple did a quickstep, and they originally had costumes that looked like black pants and black long-sleeved T-shirts with "shoe shine" written on them (the song was "Shine Your Shoes" or something). And then about a third of the way through, they music crescendoed and they each pulled a string, revealing that, no, they were actually wearing Standard costumes. It was like a magician's trick or something. Another couple came out all in black with black sunglasses--and then music from the Matrix ("Clubbed to Death," specifically started playing. So. Freaking. Cool. They did a combined Tango and Waltz to the music, complete with slo-mo moves a la Neo and Trinity. Oh. Yeah. That was so the best part of the comp.
And if you think the bad news ended Sunday afternoon, you're so wrong. This morning my flight left at 8:05. We were supposed to get up at 5:45 to get to the airport with some time to spare. Evan's alarm didn't go off.
We got up at 7.
Miraculously, we managed to make it to the airport exactly fifteen minutes before my plane took off. Thank GOD there's no one in the Columbus airport in the mornings. I ran through check-in and security, and boarded my plane at 8:02. The lady at the check-in counter was nice enough to call the people at the gate and tell them to wait for me while I got through security. Even worse, I'd told my parents I would call when I got the airport, but for obvious reasons, I didn't have time to do that. So they were worried to death, I was worried about them worrying, and combined with storms and turbulence from maybe a couple levels above hell (it wasn't that bad) I was a very unhappy person for the flight. The plane was also fifteen minutes late getting into Nashville because of the storms we were flying through. AUGH!
But. Now I'm home, will be home for a week, and it's all good. I reacquainted myself with the dogs and cat, went to the library to get a book for my English paper, got a white blouse for choir, and have generally gotten some stuff accomplished. Now I think I'm gonna veg out for a while, catch up on some sleep (two straight nights with less than four hours of sleep isn't much fun), and then start on all the work I have to do this weekend. *sigh*
no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 06:14 pm (UTC)(Okay, don't mind me, I'm a little stir-crazy - it's been raining heaps the last few days.)
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Date: 2003-11-25 11:59 am (UTC)Mwah! Sounds like a frightening enough curse to me.
(Okay, don't mind me, I'm a little stir-crazy - it's been raining heaps the last few days.)
Ew, rain. I'm so moving to a desert when I graduate... *shudder* Hope the sun comes out soon.