No, Really

YOU GUYS.

I have always wanted to learn to belly dance.

For those of you who know me, that is an outright laughable thing to say. I am a quiet, shy girl who loathes dancing of all kinds (or so we all thought), not to mention that I have yet to find even a one-piece bathing suit that fits my idea of modesty. I honestly have no clue why one of my glaring contradictions (a girl has to have a few glaring contradictions in her life) is that I want to belly dance.

I was reminded of this a week ago today while at my Pleasant Grove market. A theater group was performing Romeo and Juliet, but the market was starting to slowly fill with other performers, ones who jangled when they walked, flowed in the breeze, and had black screening over their otherwise bare stomachs. (This is Utah County we're talking about.) We had started cleaning up when the belly dancers finally went onstage, but I stopped to watch them anyway, and wished that I could forget my booth altogether.

I love how a good bellydancer moves, especially the separation between hips and torso. I mean, that's just crazy! "Lemme just be perfectly still from the waist up while my hips are gettin' all up in your business," I'd say. Though belly dancing is not all about the hips; often the arms get into the action too. And the hair. There is always a lot of hair. (There's another reason why I cannot be a belly dancer - my hair is, by my estimation, about six inches too short. At least. You never see a chick all swingin' her hips about in a jangly bra and skirt with her hair cut just below her jaw. The cropping is in the top, not the hair.)

Maybe it's just that I want to wear the jangly, flowy outfit, like people who buy designer jogging outfits to lounge around the house in. I have often noticed that I very much admire certain styles but feel that I could never pull them off, or that I'd have to apologize for dressing like that. "Sorry," I'd say to the indie girl I met in the street, "I'm not really like you at all. I don't listen to obscure bands or shop at thrift stores or anything. I just really like the look."

So no matter how much I want to belly dance, I think this is one dream that's not coming true. The hair, outfits, the dancing; it just wasn't meant to be.