Redeem Your Life with Dancing & Gin

I often wish my life wasn’t so extreme – I seem to have these terrible lows followed by unsustainable highs.  It has been this way since, well, probably forever (or at least since puberty).  I often tell people that  my friends and I worked harder and partied harder in college than anyone I know.  We would stay up all night (in the library that was open 24 hours) studying during the week – many of us had double majors with honors and studies abroad and took a foreign language and were in a sorority and were involved in music or acting or dance – and then we would blow off steam in a train wreck of partying all weekend long.  It would seem that nothing much has changed, except maybe my understanding of the lows and resultant highs and the frequency with which I hit them.

 

PMS, right?  It just sucks.  The older I get, the worse it is, and it is always accompanied by a bout of depression and a spiral of hopelessness as I run like a hamster with my cheeks stuffed full of food pellets from one task to the next, barely taking the time to breathe.  That wheel is spinning, all the damn time.  And when my brain chemistry changes for a few days a month, I can’t seem to see beyond it.  And worse, I can’t even remember the next month that I know perfectly well what’s going on here and it’s not my fault and it will pass and maybe I should just go ahead and drink that bottle of wine already.  Some things you can self-medicate.

 

Actually, thanks to my mom and her love of quackery, I drink Gin & Tonics when it’s that time of the month (I dink them other times, too) because, apparently, tonic water helps with cramps.  So there you go: G&Ts are good for you when you’re crampy.  It’s just science (fuzzy science based on something my mom told me that she heard from someone else who definitely isn’t a scientist).  You’re welcome.

 

One thing that is great about getting older is how little you have left to lose on the dance floor.  I saw 22-year-old me out there dancing this weekend in several of the girls at the bar, and boy was she insecure.  And damn, those heels were high.  When you’re old, have kids, are happily married, and don’t get out to dance enough, well, you just don’t care.  You dance for fun and because you love it and you have a much better time than you ever did when you were young.  So there’s a silver lining to the wrinkles-and-sag cloud.

 

Even better?  We danced in celebration of a friend’s 30th birthday to a 90s and early-2000s cover band.  There’s no faster way to take me back to every frat party I ever went to.  The only things missing were a backless shirt, belted jeans, and the aforementioned self-consciousness as I tried to look hot while dancing.  It was wonderful to blow off steam in that way, to hit that high and sweat out the unhappiness of my week with friends.  I wasn’t even hung over, merciful God.

 

I’m tired today, though.  The extra-hard workout Saturday morning plus four hours of dancing like a drunken idiot (we! did! not! stop! dancing! not! once!) plus getting home at 3 am plus getting up at 8:30 am plus not much sleep last night and yeah, I had coffee and chocolate cake for breakfast this morning (I am a great example to my children).  Which helped me deal a bit better with the fact that I had to carry a screaming and kicking Charles into school today.  But my hormones have leveled a bit, so even though I still want to stab myself in the eye about that kid and his tantrums, and least I didn’t have the urge to just get in my car and keep driving until I’m someplace far, far away and hopefully warmer than here (instead, I drove to work, where the power was out, whee!).

 

Next month, I’ll aim for less fatalism and more G&Ts, chocolate, and probably some sappy movies or something to dull the pain.  And I’ll try to get all the ironing done before I turn into a mess of PMS-driven angst so that it isn’t taunting me in my darkest hour (“You’ll never get me done!  NEVER!”).