Paramasturbatory Illusions

When I tell the story of how I got into hip hop choreo, there’s the short version, and then there’s the long version. When I don’t want to bore the hell out of everyone and lose my audience, I tell the short version: “Through a friend.”

That’s not an exciting story at all, and the long version isn’t that boring. It’s an intricate, seemingly disconnected series of cause-and-effect, a long chain reaction affected by other chain reactions. It doesn’t seem to be going in any direction at first, but bear with it.

- During my junior year in high school, 2006, DDR was dying, so black John got me into breakdancing. I quit permanently at the beginning of 2007 due to lol-drama between me and John.

- In 2007, a guy named Jon randomly messaged me on Downelink (the gay Myspace) and told me that I looked like his friend QA. I humored Jon and agreed to start talking to QA.

- Somewhere in my conversations with QA, he briefly mentioned a summer teaching internship called Breakthrough. I saw it as an opportunity to teach my very own French class, but the deadline had long since passed. I forgot about it after a while.

- In March 2008, I randomly recalled that one conversation with QA about the teaching internship. I couldn’t remember the name of the internship, and I figured that the deadline would’ve already passed. However, I decided to dig through my AIM logs anyway to find the name of that internship. I found it and discovered that I had two days left to do the Breakthrough application. I worked till the early mornings on it.

- I got the job, but then I found out that I couldn’t teach French for an elective. So, I had to think about something else. I looked back into my past and decided that it was time to revive my interest in breakdancing so I could teach it.

- After the summer, I decided to continue pursue breakdancing into college, and I vowed not to do any other form of dancing because breakdancing was probably the least gay of them. Admittedly though, I wasn’t too into it.

- When signing up for my winter quarter classes back in Fall 2008, I wanted this one Hum Core class for this one time, but that wasn’t available so I had to get another. I was kinda satisfied, but one random day a month later, I decided to check class schedules again and found that a another class for the original time I wanted opened up. Of course, I switched to that one.

- Winter Quarter started in January 2009, and there was no one really noteworthy in my class. I will mention that there was a tall Asian guy named Sam; he became important later.

- UCI held Vibe 14, one of the big SoCal dance competitions. I went because I still had a slight interest in breakdancing and wanted to see the breakdancing club perform.

- I had planned on going to Vibe early but ended up oversleeping, so I got stuck in the back of the line.

- Competing teams were practicing in area close to the back of the line, and that was where I spotted Sam practicing with CADC.

- CADC won, and I congratulated Sam in class the next day. We bonded over dance.

- He told me about Kaba Modern audition workshops.

- I didn’t want to go without Cameron, but Cameron didn’t really wanna go.

- While Cameron and I were walking back from the student center the day of the first workshop, he ran into his friend who convinced him to go. Since he was going, I was going too.

And those audition workshops were how I got into dancing.

All of the above was a summary of a really long entry that lead up to this entry:

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“all things”
Written May 30th, 2009 (Excerpted)
The path of my life that has led to the person I am today is so delicate and fragile. One different tiny detour in that path could’ve led somewhere totally different. I ponder, what would’ve happened if Cameron and I left the arcade five minutes earlier or five minutes later. At the moment, leaving a little earlier or a little later didn’t seem like it mattered at all. But then we wouldn’t have run into the girl that had convinced Cameron to accompany me to the Kaba Modern audition workshops. If I had never accidentally fallen asleep before [Vibe 14], I would’ve gotten in line close to the front and would’ve not seen Sam. If I had never decided to randomly check the schedule of Hum Core classes, I would’ve not known Sam in the first place.

And going all the way further back to two years ago, if I never bothered to reply to the weird message from Jon on Downelink, I never would’ve met QA, never would’ve heard about Breakthrough, never would’ve forced myself to [relearn] breakdancing as a last minute resort, never would’ve actually gotten interested in breakdancing. It’s possible that I might’ve taken the same Hum Core discussion class in Winter Quarter, but I definitely would not have gone to Vibe 14 without my interest in breakdancing. And yeah, my whole path of becoming a hip hop dancer would’ve fallen apart with one detour that I did not make very early on. And it could’ve still easily fallen apart if I did not make any one of like, eight other detours.

Look at where I am. I’m a (beginning) hip hop dancer now. I once told my dancer friend Kevin, “I just realized that I really love dancing. This is the most fun hobby I’ve had since I quit DDR.” As nerdy as it sounds, to say that I love something as much as I used to love DDR—that’s really huge for me. DDR was six or seven years of my life, and I’ve won competitions and made some great friends through it.
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I’m beginning to rethink that theory, that one tiny change in the past could’ve led to me never getting into hip hop dancing.

What if it was actually bound to happen? As in, meant to be? As in, fated?

Sam wasn’t the only one who told me about the Kaba Modern auditions. Alfonso told me about them too. So all that stuff about choosing my Hum Core class and sleeping in for Vibe might have not mattered.

Would I have gone to Kaba Modern auditions if Cameron didn’t go? Possibly. I was always prone to making last minute decisions due to getting really bored at night in Irvine.

And what was my reason for doing breakdancing and nothing else? Because breakdancing was the least gay. Cameron changed my attitude about all gay things toward the end of the year, and with my views changed, could I have been more open to giving choreo a try?

And let’s not ignore the obvious: I was going to UC Irvine, the “dancer” school. All of our three competing teams, Kaba Modern, CADC, and Common Ground placed in the top five at Hip Hop Internationals at Las Vegas. It would be hard to avoid going to any kind of dance workshop throughout all four years of college. Everything that happened before me going to Irvine might as well have not mattered.

I never asked for this. To start dancing. To fall in love with it. I feel like I’ve made a lot of sacrifices for dancing, and those sacrifices included bits and pieces that made up part of what I had envisioned as my future. I had a plan, a grand master plan, my own self-made destiny that didn’t include dancing at all. But unexpectedly, dancing did come along, and I guess it just threw things in total different directions. It’s a concept that I still have trouble fully understanding: fate coming in and throwing off the destiny that I had made for myself, as though I really am supposed to not have a choice in creating my own destiny.

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“all things” (Continued)
There are some choices that I make because I can see the consequences, but then there are some choices that I make that lead to consequences that I could have never dreamed of. And it just happens that the latter type of choices happen to be big life ones. And, since they’re such big life choices that lead to consequences that I don’t see and understand at the time I make them, can I really say that I’m in control of my life?

I want some sense of control and assurance that my life is not just a random and hectic path leading down to my destruction, so I think it’s plausible to say that other people have some control over my own life. That’s reasonable. After all, it’s a well known fact that our lives are shaped by the way other people come into our lives. But really, when Jon messaged me to tell me that I looked like a friend of his, did he really intend to give me the choice of becoming a dancer? Nope.

So who’s in control of my life?
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Gotta love fate.