Tonight, I'm Dancing

Pre-performance pictorials with my beloved kids.

I have an aversion for dancing. I've always been enthralled by graceful bodies doing those awesome moves, but my own body just can't imitate them. Even if I force myself to like dancing, I just can't. I can undulate like mad, even dance around a pole when I'm drunk, but I can never dance an organized dance. Not even the simplest folk dance. Not even the simplest childhood field demonstration calisthenics. No way can I memorize the steps, the movement of the arms and the head, and when you have to do them all together, I just go crazy.

Among all medical doctors, I probably have the poorest memory. It was such a wonder I even made it through medical school. My head just can't figure out all those little details about biochemistry, physiology, all those memory work we had to get over with. I can't remember stuff, especially the important ones. For me, remembering all these academic nitty-gritty was the hardest thing a medical student had to go through. Eventually, I found out that body memory is worse. My body refuses to remember patterns of steps, arm movements, head twists and hip thrusts and arm jerks and all those supposedly graceful movements. When I do them, the grace disappears and all that remains is a ridiculous set of uncoordinated movements.

Masks off. With incoming chief resident, Dexter.

But tonight, I'm dancing. For the last time as a member of the UP College of Medicine, I'm going to go on stage for my one minute of ridiculous moves. I really don't care how I would appear. I'm doing one of the things that I hate the most in order to make a statement: sometimes we are able to do the unthinkable, simply because we have to. The year 2008 was all about that. So I guess I deserve this one minute of absurdity under the lights. I'll savor it. And I will be the first one to laugh at myself. After all, the evening is called Tao Rin Pala. Humans as we are, we laugh, we cry, we make fools of ourselves in life and in love. But somehow, we still end up dancing.