The School Dance
For my entire youth, I was terrible at relationships with women, even when the stakes were relatively low.
Even ignoring my fifth grade false start, I’ve had many awkward, uncomfortable, and confusing interactions with the ladies over the years. Sure, I was friendly with some girls, but sixth grade hormones re-contextualized things in ways I wasn’t prepared for. I barely had any romantic confidence, and if I somehow managed to summon my still-developing balls to talk to a lady, I would lose 90% of my brain function. Words would spew out of my mouth all at once, confusing anyone within earshot. It was like a superpower, but the only thing I managed to do was give my enemy a ringing headache, and my “enemy” was actually someone I wanted to be friends with. Shout out to testosterone, the Harvey Dent of brain chemicals.
As weird as I acted when I liked a girl, my behavior was even more strange when I found out a girl was interested in me. The first time I remember it happening was at a dance in junior high school. I’ve mentioned previously that I had a rough time during these years of my life, so allow me to pile on the sorrow. Being at school during operating hours felt like hell, but being there after hours was even worse. After quitting HTML club, due to disagreements with management (my math teacher Mrs. James) on how to operate, I tried to be inside the school building as little as possible. To me it felt like being set free after serving a prison sentence, only to volunteer to stay in prison longer. I abhorred social events in the same building. School dances were the lowest point in that pit of despair.
I tried to avoid dances for the most part. Occasionally I would buy a $10 ticket during the school day, then decide when it was time to go that I “wasn’t interested.” I was just too anxious about the logistics: would my friends be there? Would Jenny be there? Would she, or anyone else, want to dance with me? I felt like Stoop Kid trying to leave the stoop. These intrusive thoughts consistently kept me from having a good time. My experience with school dances was watching other kids enjoy themselves while I stood on the sidelines watching. Our dances were also held in the school gym, so the metaphor of being a bench-warmer was disgustingly clear.
Of course, I wasn’t the only loner. I spent 99% of my time talking to my buddies, who were frequently in the same situation. Occasionally, a song I really liked would come on, such as Good Charlotte’s The Anthem, and I would dance like a maniac for 2.5 minutes until the excitement wore off and my haunted subconscious would start to torture me again. My sense of self worth was awful, and kept me from noticing how much I enjoyed the act of dancing, regardless of how painful it would have appeared to a spectator. It’s funny to reflect on how much I cared about what others thought as I danced to a song about not caring what someone else thinks. In the moment, I enjoyed flailing my arms around like I was trying to sell used cars. But minutes later, I would be telling myself I was a loser for dancing alone. Again, I could never have won this Academy Award without hormones. Thanks, testosterone.
The most dreaded aspect of the night was the possibility, and in my case certainty, of being partnerless for the last dance. I don’t know where the tradition came from, but our school dances ended with the full, unabridged, unabbreviated, feature-length ballad Stairway to Heaven. What used to be an enjoyable 8 minutes of appreciating a legendary rock masterpiece turned into a jealous nightmare of watching my peers smile and make cute eye contact with each other, and fall in love for the first time. Those happy demons. If only there was some way to avoid it… oh, and ask someone to dance? NO! After a public dancefloor rejection early in my career, I thought I would never have the good fortune to dance with a lady. I whined about it like a career ending injury, when it shouldn’t have even taken me out of the game. Like the band Lit, I was my own worst enemy, and would soon extend my own anxieties to someone else.
One cold winter night, I went to a dance where I, unsurprisingly, did not dance with anyone. The reason that sucks extra is because there was a gimmick at this “Winter Ball” called the “Snowball” dance. The way it worked was that everyone stood on the sides of the gym, while two people started dancing in the middle. After some set amount of time, those two dancers would go find different partners, and the four of them would dance. I was glad I wasn’t out there: all those eyes would give me performance anxiety. After another twenty seconds, they would find new partners, and the dance floor snowballed in size until everyone was dancing. Almost everyone.
At one point, I decided I was on board with this. When most people were dancing, I thought someone would have to ask me soon. I thought this was a guarantee! I thought this meant I would finally be able to dance with someone, anyone. Unbeknownst to me, the ratio of boys to girls was skewed towards the boys, meaning that once all the girls were on the dance floor, there were a few boys that never had a partner. If you can believe it, I belonged to this upper crust of humanity. To make matters even worse, this was the same gym I had Physical Education class in, which meant I was standing on the exact same sidelines where I had been the last person picked to play dodgeball mere hours before. Now I found myself last place in personality.
I had nothing left inside. I was a hollow shell. For the rest of the night, I mostly mulled under a basketball hoop, remembering how I failed at basketball tryouts only a few weeks before. Yay, sports. I was praying for a catastrophic impact event, when I heard Stairway to Heaven come through the speakers. At first I was relieved to have just one more moment of torture before making my escape, but then something happened that I had never thought possible. A friend of mine, Michelle, came up to me and asked me if I wanted to dance. Karma! Who cares that I missed out at some snowball dance orgy. I was finally getting my shot. I also knew and was friendly with Michelle, so it would make sense that I accept and dance and have a good time, right? WRONG.
Now that the opportunity arose, I got it in my head that I would embarrass myself if I accepted her invitation. The “logic” was that since I had never done it before, I would look stupid, step on her feet, or do any number of other embarrassing things. I collapsed under the pressure of my own self hatred, and told Michelle I wasn’t interested (even though I was!). She walked back to the other side of the gym, and we literally stood under opposite basketball hoops for 8 minutes. We were like two next door neighbors shooting hoops on their own nets, rather than playing together. I would probably have gotten over a lot of the anxiety by just doing it for the first time, but some mental block kept me from saying yes. I don’t think I can keep blaming testosterone for this level of stupidity.
After that, I stopped going to dances. If I wasn’t going to enjoy myself, why keep going? I was living in my head so much that I wasn’t able to enjoy the moment. Michelle and I were still friendly for years after that, but I don’t think we ever talked about what happened that night. I hope she never felt as bad as I did. Over the next couple years, my hormones got more manageable. I never reached Kevin Bacon-level moves, or angrily danced on a Volkswagen, but I eventually danced with someone for the first time. It was way less scary than I expected, and actually more boring than dancing alone.
Then I learned about grinding in High School, and that was the shit.
Anyways, here’s my recipe for a BLT.
Ingredients:
Right off the bat, this isn’t a BLT. I actually hate tomatoes in their raw form, so we will be using a much better fruit often mistaken for a vegetable: the avocado. Don’t get “Dave at a middle school dance” nervous about it, as the avocado is a huge improvement over the tomato. The flavor is better, the texture is smooth rather than snotty, and the way it all combines with the bacon is a divine concert conducted by Chef Mozart himself. I really hope this delivers, because I built it up a lot. I’ve got to manage expectations better.
12oz Bacon
1 Piece Green Leaf Lettuce
1 Avocado
Farmhouse Boule (Bread)
Mayonnaise
½ tsp Garlic Powder
½ tsp Cayenne Powder
½ tsp Salt
Black Pepper
Equipment:
How many recipes have I made without using bacon? I can’t believe it’s been this many months without a heaping helping of heavenly hog. We can change all of that right now, as long as you have a stove and a pan. That’s it. Not many barriers to enter into the business of biting boars. You’ll also probably want toasted bread, so figure out a way to give that white bread a nice crispy tan.
Frying Pan
Tongs
Paper Towels
Plate
Small bowl
Toaster or additional frying pan
Active prep total: 15 minutes
Clean up: 8 minutes
Here it comes. As a child, you struggled to find yourself. You dwelled on negative experiences, which led to more negative experiences. But that can all change right now. From here on out, you will learn from your mistakes. You will separate the things you do control from everything else, and then you will act on the things you can control. As you improve yourself and get better at whatever it is you are trying to accomplish, small but positive experiences will lead to full on success. You’ll go a long way with a positive attitude, coupled with a drive to be better than you were yesterday. Let’s kickstart the improvement process by making this succulent swine sandwich.
Instructions:
Carefully place bacon strips in a frying pan at medium heat. If you have a splatter guard, use it. What do bacon and camels have in common? They both spit at you, so protect yourself when you are able. Do not crowd the pan. You want every square inch of your strips to contact the pan. It may take a few extra minutes to cook all the bacon, but you will avoid aggressive spurts of oil, and cook the bacon more evenly. This is the way.
As the bacon cooks, the fat melts into grease, and the muscle fibers begin to contract. The bacon shrinks. The bottom side of the bacon will turn brown and become crustier and crispier. I’m telling you this so you can decide when the bacon reaches your ideal crispiness. Just make sure it is brown and crispy, or cook it for 7 minutes on each side if you are having trouble determining when it is done. DO NOT EAT RAW PORK. Doofus.
While the bacon is cooking, you can make some avocado smear. Cut up your avocado in any way you know how, but please throw out the skin and pit. If you eat either of those, it is your fault. Gross. Combine your Avocado, ½ tsp Garlic Powder, ½ tsp Cayenne Powder, and ½ tsp Salt in a small bowl, and mash it all together with a fork. Make sure to keep checking on the bacon.
When the bacon is almost done, toast up 2 pieces of bread. A toaster works great. Otherwise, improvise. Grab another frying pan and a can of nonstick spray, and figure it out. Sure, you might burn some pieces, but you will learn. That is the name of today’s game: make mistakes, but don’t repeat them. Is this too extreme a lesson for toast? No, it’s the right amount of insane.
When the bacon is perfect in every way, move it to a paper towel covered plate. This will absorb the excess grease, and prepare your bacon for the sandwich. Now it’s perfect in even more ways.
Assembly time! Grab your now toasted bread, and cover one side of one piece with mayonnaise. This will be the base of your sandwich. I prefer to go light on the mayo, but I hate light mayo. The real stuff will do nicely, and you can use less of it if you’re trying to be healthier. A little goes a long way.
Get a piece of washed (no dirt/sand/truck residue) Green Leaf Lettuce, and place it on the mayo bread base. Now things are starting to look like the front page of a food blog.
Take that bacon and load up your sandwich. Use as much or as little as you want, but just know I used six pieces and got a tummy ache. It hurt, but I see it as a positive since I won’t do it again. Learn from the failures so you can eventually talk to women. Also, sprinkle some ground black pepper on the sandwich. That won’t help you with women, but the failure will literally taste better.
Finally, smear some of that delicious avocado on the unused slice of toast. Lay it on as thick as you want since it will easily cling to the bread. When the toast is avocado-ed, complete the top of your BLT skyscraper, and take a moment to say a thank you to yourself. You put in the work, now it’s time to reap the benefits..
That’s what I am talking about. The hot, crispy bacon plays perfectly with the avocado, creating a crunchy, chewy, savory, and holy experience. The ingredients combine in your mouth in a way that needs to be experienced to be described. Even then, your words, much like when you were in Junior High, wouldn’t be enough. Spewing nonsense would only serve to confuse your friends and turn away strangers. But today that doesn’t scare you. Today you realize that some things just take time to work out. You aren’t a bad person, you just need to learn how to do something new. Do not let a single interaction define your life. Take your seat in the pork penthouse, and use your status as Chief Eating Officer to give yourself a moment to figure out how you want to handle the next situation. Maybe when someone offers to give you something you want, take ten seconds to figure out how to reply rather than just saying no. Making decisions out of kindness for yourself and others is a much better way to go through life than constantly having anxiety and being afraid of everything.
Or, I could be an idiot, but you’ll have to try for yourself. If worse comes to worst, you’ve still got a BLT (A).
Join me next week for more Meals and Misfortune.
