Happy Salsa-versary!

We have now been dancing salsa for a whole year! I guess women's day is an appropriate time for this post because I feel that through salsa I am working through a few women-related issues that I have always found confusing.

For one, I have accepted that sexual tension exists and it is okay. If you accept it and set boundaries accordingly, then you are in a good place. Your boundaries may be different than other people's. It is important that you figure them out for yourself. For example, Giora and I feel comfortable dancing with other people and letting each other dance with other people. Not everyone is.

Salsa has also done loads for my self confidence. When I used to dance with someone who is a better dancer than I am, I would feel like apologizing the whole time for not being able to follow a certain move, or even worse, for the way that I move. Well guess what? Now I look good. No alcohol needed. A few weeks ago at the end of a dance someone said, "You know, you're fun to dance with" and I believed him. No more dance complex.

It has been a wonderful journey outside of my comfort zone.

Thoughts on children

Today I was lucky to spend some time with my brother, sis-in-law, and nephew (Mr. Cutiepants). They are such a beautiful little family. Seeing them always gets me thinking about having kids of my own.



Living in Tel-Aviv, it's easy to forget that having kids before age thirty is even an option. On the one hand I feel a bit envious of my friends who already have a kid or two. They are doing things right biologically and get to be young parents. On the other hand, I want to milk the most out of my twenties. Spend my money on travel and city life, not childcare and diapers.

I will just carry the image of little grabby fingers and sweet gummy smiles in my mind until the time is right.

So shoot me, I'm skinny

After two days of fever and congestion, I found myself at the doctors office. I wanted to discuss my illness. The doctor wanted to weigh me. "You know, you are very thin." she said. "Do you eat?" she asked me.
"Yes, I eat," I said, responding somewhat sarcastically to her presumptuous question, "I probably eat 100, no maybe 1000X healthier than the average person. I make sure to get enough protien, fiber, etc and to not eat too much junk."

When she bothered to look at my health records she noticed that I've been the same weight for the past seven years. This of course points to the fact that my weight is stable and that I'm healthy.

"You can afford to gain some weight you know," she continued. Because I already make sure that get enough nutrients and have a vegetable based diet, I guess what she meant was that I should add more crap to my diet to become a pimplier, more sugar-addicted version of myself. Or, maybe that I should stop working out 2-3 times a week at the gym , stop using my bike for transportation, and never dance salsa again. That way I could grow my ass, lose my muscle tone, and conform to her idea of what a normal body should look like.

It was quite obvious that she had a grossly oversimplified understanding of the relationship between nutrition, weight, and health. Still, I resented having to justify my body to this stranger when all I had come in for is to check whether I should take a strep test.

I would expect more from a doctor.