And so I emerge victorious from the black depths!

Welcome back. Sorry it's taken me this long to update, but I am indeed back at Mudd and the semester has gotten underway. Today's title refers to my first time in a darkroom since senior year of high school. I'm taking intermediate B&W photography this semester and the darkroom here is somewhat different than what we had in high school. It's also in the sub-basement of the physics building. Next to rooms with really big lasers.

In other news, I decided not to continue with Russian this semester, so in addition to photography I'm taking Philosophy of Mind on CMC, Clinic, Tools, and independent study with Professor Dodds. It's a light semester with only 12 units (I can't get on the Dean's List for this semester because of this, for instance), but I think I'll be very happy with my decisions.

In addition to all the academic classes I'm taking I also am taking 2 ballroom dance classes on Pomona. Pomona has a dance department whose students study modern dance, ballet, and other expressive dance forms. Mudders can take those classes for Humanities credits (that department is where I did my humanities concentration in Movement Studies, actually), but the ballroom dance classes are perhaps more accurately called "lessons" and are taken for PE credit (0 credits at Mudd, but you're required to take at least 3 pe classes before you graduate. I think I'm up to 10 now, 2 of which I helped teach...). The head of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, Paul Roach, is a recent Pomona College alumnus and teaches the ballroom classes. He's a very funny guy and has a unique style of teaching dance to large groups that I find to be very similar to the style employed by my martial arts instructor before I left for college. This semester I'm taking Silver (intermediate level) International Standard Dance and Silver Social Dance.

Standard is Paul's personal favorite dancing, and it is much more commonly danced in competition than socially (except, perhaps, for weddings you rarely see it in social situations) so that class is very exacting. That class drives us very hard for technique. The 5 Standard dances are Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Quickstep and Viennese Waltz. This semester we are starting with Waltz and then moving on to Tango. Last year Liz and I took the Bronze (beginning) International Standard Dance class in which we spent most of our time on Quickstep, but also learned some Waltz and ended with Viennese Waltz. I've never danced Standard Tango and I'm really looking forward to that.

The social dance class is one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. Bronze Social was alright, but the goal there was mostly to teach an enormous group of people the basic steps to a number of common dances (Cha-cha, Salsa, Triple-Step Swing, Polka and Lindy) and to try to get people out of their shells and make them more comfortable in social situations (while Mudd is the most technical school of the 5-C's, the others are no slouches and the difference between college students and high school students is, in some cases, only spelling, so social interaction can be a foreign concept to many people.

Silver Social, on the other hand, is an amazing class. Paul deliberately told us not to form lines like most of the dance classes and the result is a very organic and fairly chaotic group of fairly good dancers who are learning how to be themselves while dancing and look good while having fun on the dance floor. It is more fun than I can do justice to and I suspect will be a very, very good source of stress relief later on in the semester.

Dancing is fun, and I'm really glad I started taking these classes while I was at college.

~KMarsh