Parties, Dancing, and Sexual Tensions

Hey everyone, long time no type. I would first like to congratulate Tina Camarador for a successful Samahang party that I heard made loads of $. You're awesome Tina!

As for the party itself, it was a good party in party terms: lots of people, pretty good music overall, but some of the stuff was more chill-in-your-living-room hip-hop rather than shake-your-booty hip-hop. It's just that toward the 2nd half of the night, I wasn't really in a party mood. A good amount of the time I spent as the wandering wall-flower, pick up somewhere mid-conversation, get up, sit somewhere else to meet a few other folks, but toward the end, it was mostly watchin' folks release the frustrations of college life on the dance floor.

Maybe it was just my mood last night, but I've tended to feel blegh at the last several Samahang parties, and never really been honest about it. For me, getting out and dancing at a Samahang party feels really, really awkward. I think what makes it awkward isn't the public dancing aspect; I've done so many musicals, plays, concerts, and public speaking engagements that performance and self-expression is totally not a problem for me. It's just that there is so much heterosexual tension on the dance floor, and for those who haven't been reading my journals since the beginning, ever since I broke up with my ex in high school, I've avoided heterosexual tension like the plague. There are still emotional scars that haven't healed, and if anything, have been reinforced since then.

"But Randy", you say, "that was FIVE YEARS AGO. And it was just a high school relationship. You should've gotten over it by now." You have to understand that time doesn't heal anything, it's what you do with that time that makes it productive or destructive. While I've come a long way and my confidence has never been higher in some areas (like feeling that I can handle finances, my writing and performance have become more sophisticated, etc.), I have almost zero confidence in romance, and my brief experiments with romance at UCLA have only reinforced that feeling of failure. Even a hint of it, like the public displays at a dance party, and I get that isolating feeling. That's how I felt at the Samahang party. I felt alone.

But don't think for a second that I'm not willing to party. If you want me to go clubbing, I suggest you take me to Rage, a gay club in West Hollywood. I went with Adeste, Marc, Marivell, and Aileen during the summer, and I honestly had a good time. When I was on the dance floor, I didn't feel that restrictive heterosexual tension that I felt at other parties. It's just you, your friends, and the music. That doesn't mean I don't get weirded out sometimes, like when half-naked gay men brush by (please put on a shirt...), but I get different vibes there. No wonder so many hetero women go to gay clubs; so you don't feel like you have to be on the defense from dirty men when you just wanna dance. I just wanna dance!

So anyway, if the last thing you were wondering is why I have a helluva more difficult time telling all you this in person, it's because I need the spell-checks and edits and the half-an-hour or so to really communicate what I need to. As I've said before, I love online journals.