Junior year is a scant few days away from coming to an end. Three finals and a paper, and I’ll be a free man, facing a trip back to NYC that coincides with jury duty, some more rest and relaxation surrounding Anime Boston, and then an internship in Massachusetts.

God that paragraph makes me puke. Yes, it’s a status update, but it doesn’t really say what I want to say, what I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while. This and that, little things that I never dug up the resolve to post about. Mostly because I was just never in the right mood, the one that used to strike me a lot more frequently than it does now. But sometimes you have to write. And so to get it out of the way, pictures of what Boston is like right about now:

It’s warm, it’s humid, it’s rainy. It’s a Boston spring transitioning into a Boston summer. My favorite picture is the last one, of a canned food drive in the center of BU where the man is doing all the work while the girls lounge and socialize around him. We had a few freak heat spikes, including a sweltering day of 93 that caused me to seek refuge in the well air-conditioned basement where I am employed, but it has settled into a stream of low 60s that stay humid enough to make it feel hotter.

(Insert totally smooth transition to massive dance geekery here!)

I still doubt that my personality has changed, but the rest of me sure seems to have done so. The most drastic shift has been the one towards ballroom dancing. Yes, towards. My first foray was way back in CTY, when I experimented with swing dancing, one of the Sunday extracurricular activities. Total failure. I was quite dissuaded from dancing, convinced that I would be terrible at it if I tried again.

It took a summer overseas, sociable coworkers, and a drink for good luck to convince me to try again. Modern jive nights quickly became the highlights of my week, and although I was not able to find it in the States, I dipped my toes into a much bigger pool by joining a ballroom dancing class here at BU. We tried rumba and tango, which taught me that not all dances for me. Rumba did not click with me, but tango was worth sticking with for another semester, as I signed up for another ballroom dance rotation and a class specifically for tango. Which is how I ended up here:

We had an informal competition in our penultimate tango class, meant to give us a taste of what an actual competition would be like. Most dressed up, although it was not mandatory, and my partner herself eschewed such garb. Elizabeth suggested I wear a black dress shirt, as this was in line with her image of tango dancers, but I didn’t own one and had to make do.

We practiced for a few hours on the two Fridays before the competition, which was as much for us to become familiar with each others’ dancing styles and patterns as it was for me to teach her a few new moves. Every leader leads and every follower reads a little differently, and so we had to be sure that we were on the same page. I knew that neither of us were on the same level as the better students in the class, so I brought in a few new moves from my first tango class to give us a fighting chance.

And we fought damn well, ranking fourth out of the eleven couples that competed. The top three were phenomenal, so I am more than happy with fourth. We all danced in a preliminary round, then in a very Drumline-esque fashion the teacher walked around the room tapping the shoulders of those who had to leave the dance floor. Tense. You were already spoiled: we were not tapped. Us six finalists then danced a final round where the teacher and the classmates who did not compete voted on who they thought was best.

We had one particularly flashy move that I made sure to whip out whenever we made our way past the audience. This spot of personal pride was waxed several times afterward, as a fellow dancer asked me to show him the steps and it would later become the last move we learned in class.

Finally, these are just for fun. Way back when when I came back to Boston after Winter Break I saw these Pepsi ads in South Station.