The weekend could be summarized in one haiku.

So Friday night my friend Amy and I drove down to Portland to go to the Portland Lindy Exchange. First off, the Crystal Ballroom is mad cool. The floor is air-cushioned, which offers the effect something like that of dancing on a very firm trampoline. On the faster songs it was fun sometimes to stand back and watch the floor ripple. Aside from the visual effect, it was a dream to dance on, considering how much give the floor offers, and thus takes off your joints. I danced with people from New England, Chicago, and a flurry of other places. Had I known that there was an after-dance (from midnight to 6am) I might have geared up the energy to go, but as it was I was tired, and we left Portland around midnight:thirty.

Amy and I wandered around Olympia pretty much all day on Saturday, which was really nice. We had breakfast at Darby’s and later went to Chopsticks for Bubble Tea and green tea icecream. Seperately, good. Together, entirely too much sweet. It seemed like EVERYWHERE we went, every store and shop and restaurant was playing swing music. It was the soundtrack for our day, and all I wanted to do was dance. It’s hard to get a shy girl to dance with you in an antique store, though, where things might be broken.

Saturday evening I dropped Amy off at her house on the way to Seattle, and arrived at a party around 10:30 in the p.m. for some jiggy conversational action. The girl throwing the party is a friend of my sister’s, and used to be my babysitter. She’s a Cornish grad, so she knows all sorts of interesting artists and dancers and such types, which made for a fun crowd. Her downstairs neighbors are a band, so they came up and played, and there were a few dance performances at points that were fun to watch. We left after a couple hours and I crashed at my sister’s place.

Sunday we went to breakfast at Mae’s and then went ice skating. It’s the second time in my life I’ve ever been ice skating, and though it was hella fun, I think I prefer roller-skating, honestly. Plus, I had to pay constant attention to not run over little kids. Which is true when rollerskating as well, but seems more dangerous when you have sharp metal objects attached to your locomotive shanks. I guess, for the kid, it would be the difference between a crushing death or a slashing/stabby death. Hmmmmm…

Later, we went and watched “Night Watch” at the Neptune Theater in the U. District. I liked it a lot, and I’m interested now to see how the rest of the trilogy plays out. It’s nice to see good films coming out of Russia, and it was fun to listen to Russian. As a Russian film MADE to be seen by an American audience, they got to plan the subtitles out ahead of time (rather than just tack them on as an afterthought), and therefore had some really neat subtitle effects that I’ve never seen used before. Some characters practically gathered their energy and shouted the subtitle at the other character, in a very illustrative fashion (giant subtitle lashing across the screen), while some dripped, and some glowed, and while most were white, some were red or orange. In a word, it was neat to see subtitles included as an actual part of the artistic process.

I got home around midnight on Sunday, and went straight to work Monday morning. My bed smells like dangerous dreams, and I’m constantly torn between throwing myself into them or holding them at arm’s length. It’s all completely ridiculous.

Just like anything worthwhile.