Listomania

Recently I've been playing around a bit with my Ultimate To-Do List. It's been almost 2 years since I started the list, and it needs some tweaking. I'm replacing some items that no longer hold great interest for me, that are unquantifiably vague, or that are simply never going to happen (94. Learn to be content in a moment without thinking so much about what comes next. Ha, and while we're at it, how about Become a princess and Be reincarnated as a house cat. That'll be the day).

It seems I haven't crossed off a list item since the beginning of January, but I've actually crossed one off and not written about it!

You may recall that CameraMan gave me salsa dancing lessons for Christmas. Well, during the time I was home for Tosca, we took 7 lessons. And not just in salsa, either—we learned fox trot, tango, cha cha, swing, samba, and rumba as well. And it turned out salsa wasn't my favorite. If I had to choose, I would say tango and cha cha were the best.

I realize I'm opening myself up to some mocking by saying this, but I honestly think that taking dance lessons improved our relationship. We had to depend on each other in a totally new way, and I think the way we handled it bodes well for the future—we didn't get defensive, we didn't place blame, we didn't ever let it stop being fun. Until the end, that is, when they aggressively tried to upsell us with more lessons. We actually thought about it a lot; regardless of how prohibitively expensive it would be to keep going, we both were enjoying ourselves so much, and we had made some visible progress in our dancing. But the thing is, it's not really an applicable skill in many situations, you know? It's not often that I'm called upon to break out my best cha cha. So we stopped, but it's given us a new love for learning things together. Maybe next we'll take tennis lessons. Or a cooking class.

And then, of course, we decided to move to Vienna, so we're wishing we had learned how to waltz. You know, for all the balls we'll be attending.

Sorry, I don't have a picture of us dancing, but it pretty much looked like this:



30. Learn to salsa dance, or at least to fake it.