"And let's begin the cha-cha."

Howdy, lovelies! Today, was my first taste at half of our PE schedule this term: ballroom dancing. The other half is self-defense, but considering we are doing ballroom lessons with our brother school, well. Obviously ballroom has been more discussed.

Frankly, I was terrified as hell. Anyone who knows me personally will know I was born with two left feet and the coordination of an octopus on land. I have few talents, and none of them fall under the dance/movement category. So, not only was I going to make a fool of myself, I was going to make a fool out of myself in front of people I didn't know, from another school, who also happened to be boys.

So I walked into the hall, fifth period, half of the year tens with me, and saw the same amount of boys sitting on the hall steps, watching us as we went in. Which was extremely weird. And then, they told us to get into a circle and less than two minutes later, a boy had a hand on the small of my back and I had one literally slung over their shoulder and we were given dance steps to copy.

After the initial shock and the awkwardness between the two parties (because if you thought there was no awkwardness, you are sorely mistaken), we quickly exchanged partners and did the first round of the circle in about ten to fifteen minutes. One Direction played, much to the girls' chagrin; as much as we wanted to sing and flail, it was obvious the boys were judging us so we remained poker-faced and continued doing the steps.

Although I'm not the tallest one in my grade, I was probably taller than a couple of the boys I danced with, which is awkward. I have to mention now - we all danced with each other. I danced with every single boy in that hall. Sometimes, it was weird, particularly when they had hid their hands in their jumpers (well this was one occasion) or held you particularly tightly, or really cool when you met up with old primary school friends and danced awkwardly together.

I think the two quotes of the day have to be my title post, with a response that came from the boy I had been dancing with: "... Did she just say the cha-cha?!" and also "The walk of shame!" after pairings got messed up and to right them, a boy had to walk across the circle as everyone watched.

After an hour, we had nailed the first dance steps we had learnt, which was a pretty impressive achievement. I might've gotten extremely dizzy when doing the twirling (I am not even going to elaborate because that was embarassing), and it was finally over. After getting instructions to 'mingle' (which barely happened because we were all turtles) the boys left and we just discussed VCE because, you know, that's a normal thing to be doing after your first ballroom lesson with boys.

It's not like I didn't have fun, though. Despite it's awkwardness, I got over it rather quickly after apologising to nearly every boy I was dancing with for not being able to dance. Most of them were rather sweet, telling me to not worry about it and that they couldn't dance either. I pulled jokes with the boys I knew ("Oi, my arms aren't that bloody long!") and laughed with my friends. I wouldn't have minded doing it next week, but then we're doing self-defense.

According to Mary, it is extremely awesome, so I'm also looking forward to that too. So, ballroom dancing wasn't so bad as I expected - who would've thunk it? And now I leave you to your thoughts. It was essentially about 100 kids goofing off and being really uncoordinated.

Because I'm me, I'm going to say that although it was awkward, it was pretty fun.

Yours in weirdness,
Tash.