I had my birthday party on a Saturday in August. After the party ended, a few of us went out to a nearby bar. Most of my family on my mom’s side is Ecuadorian[1], and my cousin from that side of the family was with us.
She was wonderfully drunk and is a natural people person who wants to meet everybody and talk to everybody, and this being eight hours into a birthday-party+bar Drinking Event, we were having random discussions about ethnicity, which somehow led to her drunkenly deciding I was 27% Latino, knighting me as such, and running around the bar informing various strangers of my new ethnic status. This led to a Latina woman inviting me to Salsa dance.
This was a disaster, because I have never enjoyed any sort of Spanish dancing of any kind; but it’s terribly rude to turn down a woman who has asked you to dance; so I agreed. Which meant I was stepping back and forth as multiple women gave me instructions at once on the Correct Steps, and which to do at what time, and at my best I only managed to sort of scoot forward at the right times and scoot backward at the right times.
And I don’t hate dancing! Especially 8 hours of birthday drinking in, I don’t typically mind dancing at all. I feel I am actually quite good at it when the right sort of music is on and I get to freestyle and dance however I feel like. The problem is that Salsa is Step Dancing. There are steps, and what it is to dance Salsa is to perform those steps. Google Search AI says that this is how you dance Salsa:
For the Leader (Starting with the Left Foot)
Count 1: Step forward with your left foot.
Count 2: Replace your weight in place onto your right foot.
Count 3: Step back with your left foot (or bring your feet together).
Count 4: Hold / pause.
Count 5: Step backward with your right foot.
Count 6: Replace your weight in place onto your left foot.
Count 7: Step forward with your right foot (or bring your feet together).
Count 8: Hold / pause.
Steps are hardly a Latin Dance phenomenon: Waltz, Polka, Tango; Cha-Cha, Merengue, Bachata; Square, Foxtrot, Contra; many such styles are based on steps. And all of them feel like putting on a straight-jacket, to me[2].
(But, like, also, I don’t know anything. I have never taken any time to properly attempt to get good at any of these. And I suspect that, if I did, I would find that there was more room for style and improvisation than I have appreciated, like how I feel that I am good at the Cha-Cha Slide because the way I right foot let’s stomp and two hops this time has more energy and style than how most people do it; and that good Salsa dancers absolutely do not feel anything like they are robots executing a pre-defined set of moves. But I don’t care! I feel like a robotic step-follower when doing all kinds of Step Dances and that’s why I dread having to do any of them (except the Cha-Cha Slide, which I inexplicably love for some reason).)
The things I wondered, while being the Salsa victim of a kind woman’s charming dance invitation: am I supposed to focus on dancing? Is the dancing supposed to be fun? Or is it an excuse to be in physical contact and eye contact with a woman? Maybe the point of the steps is so that participants need not think too hard about what move to do next, and can rather focus on eye contact and the feel of the other’s hand in yours? Or am I supposed to be finding little innovations to make it fun, and to just follow the steps to is to decline the experience of what Salsa actually is? Is the point to spend time with someone doing something, or is the point to be good at it and show that?
I never figured it out, but it got me thinking. In one sense, every activity is just an excuse to spend time with people. Say a woman asks me to go on a walk together. It would be completely bananas to wonder the things I wondered above: “So we just take sequential steps forward together along a sidewalk? How circumscribed! How little avenue for self-expression!” No! The walking is not the point, the spending time together is the point, so when you get tired of Sitting and Talking you do a little Walking and Talking.
That said, “every activity is just an excuse to spend time with people” doesn’t cover things like games. When I want to spend time with a friend of mine, sometimes we play chess. I don’t invite him because I am hankering to play chess, I’m actually quite bad at it; but at the same time, unlike walking, moving any random piece to any random square on the board would be ridiculous. It’s important, to the hang-out-and-play-chess activity, that I actually attempt to play good moves and win the game. Same with poker, or split-screen video games, or Go, or all kinds of competitive games. You’re a psycho if you try to Win at walking, but you’re an odd bird as well if you give no attention to a competitive game you’re playing with your friend and just thoughtlessly suicide all your pieces, even if the fundamental reason you’re playing the game is just to hang out. If the idea of Salsa is “as long as you can execute the steps, you’re good, and you can put the rest of your mind on enjoying your partner’s company”, then chess is quite unlike Salsa; you have to think hard the whole time.
But this isn’t just a difference between competitive and non-competitive activities. Playing a cooperative video game together also demands that you give at least some attention to doing well. If you run in random directions and click random buttons while the computer enemies are trying to shoot you, it might not take more than 20 seconds for your buddy to ask you what the hell you’re doing; and answering “we’re just hanging out, the game isn’t important” would be very odd indeed.
So maybe it’s a difference between things that have win conditions and things that don’t? But then, say you have met up with your friend to paint or knit or whatever, each painting your own painting; again, doing random mindless brush strokes on your canvas would be weird. You can’t win at walking, and you can’t win at painting, and yet painting as a social activity demands you Try in a way that walking doesn’t.
And then even among the classic card games, all of which are competitive, there are differences in how much you’re supposed to try. Poker, you must Try. But games like Go Fish or Uno almost seem designed to make it so that Trying isn’t a thing. In Uno, you are very limited in what cards you can play - you must match the number, color, or symbol on the previous card - and so the game is nearly mindless. I think it’s mindless on purpose and that’s why these two games are so popular, especially in elementary schools and among families: little kids get to play, they can play with adults, and they can even win against adults! If Uno or Go Fish had the potential for depth of thought and complex tactics, they’d lose half their player base, since little kids wouldn’t be able to compete.
And then it’s even more complicated than that! How much you are supposed to Try is different even for the same game, depending on the social context you’re playing it in. Consider playing chess at a bar with your buddy and compare it with tournament chess. If another of your friends comes up and starts talking to you at bar chess, of course you respond; you make a decent effort to keep playing your moves in timely fashion, but you’re definitely allowed to talk. Maybe you introduce this friend to your opponent and you all talk. Now imagine doing that at a tournament. It’s crazy. You can’t. Your friend has already made a terrible social error the moment he tried to have a conversation with you while you were in the tournament match. This makes perfect sense, because while playing chess at a bar is a social activity, playing a Tournament Match is very much not; there is absolutely nothing social about it. So even though the activity is superficially identical, there is critical difference in what you are actually doing, and thus in what is allowed.
And yet it’s even more complicated than that! I play a weird heavily-modified version of kickball. I’d try to explain it but it is ridiculously modified, and only played in two cities in the world: Austin, Texas, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, because the guy who invented it used to live in Austin and now he lives in Minneapolis. One of the social norms of this game is that it’s casual. There are big signs we hang up when we play: EVERYONE WELCOME. Not in the we’re-not-racist sense like the signs my neighbors have in their yards, but in the even-if-you’re-not-athletic-you-should-play-please-come-play-come-on-just-try-it sense. And it works. The game is really quite athletic, but we get old ladies and fat people and people who showed up in boots and jeans all playing together.
So, now, imagine, that you’re an athletic young guy like me who has played the game for years and gotten quite good at it. I’m running around the field, trying to tag runners out, and the speed and power with which I can even throw the ball at someone to tag them out is socially mediated. Beaning the hell out of some poor old lady who’s playing for the first time is, um, frowned upon. But another athletic guy who’s running and about to score? I’m going crazy, I’m lasering that ball as good as I can to try and get him out. And I might be trying to tag out the old lady ten seconds after I got the fast athletic guy out. So within that span of just seconds, I have to socially mediate the strength of my throw, the speed at which I run at a player, all this.
So while every game or activity we do with others is, at its core, an excuse to be with other people, there are all kinds of gradations in how much you’re supposed to Try. From walking, where you’re not supposed to try at all, and even speaking of Trying is a bit crazy; to chess, where you are supposed to try, but in which that Tryingness even varies among the different contexts you’re playing in, like against your friend vs. in a tournament; this social context consideration even becoming player-dependent for the kickball stuff; to non-competitive things like co-painting, where you should try even though you’re not trying to beat your co-painter; to Salsa, where I still don’t known how much I’m supposed to try. It’s all more complicated than I knew, and there’s a surprising amount of social intelligence you have to apply in order to Try the right amount.
I’m definitely missing out on the Salsa! However, I feel the word Collaboration might be doing too much work in your comment. One collaborates to walk, and one collaborates to play chess, but the expected level of Trying is different, and that’s the whole idea of the essay.
I had my birthday party on a Saturday in August. After the party ended, a few of us went out to a nearby bar. Most of my family on my mom’s side is Ecuadorian[1], and my cousin from that side of the family was with us.
She was wonderfully drunk and is a natural people person who wants to meet everybody and talk to everybody, and this being eight hours into a birthday-party+bar Drinking Event, we were having random discussions about ethnicity, which somehow led to her drunkenly deciding I was 27% Latino, knighting me as such, and running around the bar informing various strangers of my new ethnic status. This led to a Latina woman inviting me to Salsa dance.
This was a disaster, because I have never enjoyed any sort of Spanish dancing of any kind; but it’s terribly rude to turn down a woman who has asked you to dance; so I agreed. Which meant I was stepping back and forth as multiple women gave me instructions at once on the Correct Steps, and which to do at what time, and at my best I only managed to sort of scoot forward at the right times and scoot backward at the right times.
And I don’t hate dancing! Especially 8 hours of birthday drinking in, I don’t typically mind dancing at all. I feel I am actually quite good at it when the right sort of music is on and I get to freestyle and dance however I feel like. The problem is that Salsa is Step Dancing. There are steps, and what it is to dance Salsa is to perform those steps. Google Search AI says that this is how you dance Salsa:
Steps are hardly a Latin Dance phenomenon: Waltz, Polka, Tango; Cha-Cha, Merengue, Bachata; Square, Foxtrot, Contra; many such styles are based on steps. And all of them feel like putting on a straight-jacket, to me[2].
(But, like, also, I don’t know anything. I have never taken any time to properly attempt to get good at any of these. And I suspect that, if I did, I would find that there was more room for style and improvisation than I have appreciated, like how I feel that I am good at the Cha-Cha Slide because the way I right foot let’s stomp and two hops this time has more energy and style than how most people do it; and that good Salsa dancers absolutely do not feel anything like they are robots executing a pre-defined set of moves. But I don’t care! I feel like a robotic step-follower when doing all kinds of Step Dances and that’s why I dread having to do any of them (except the Cha-Cha Slide, which I inexplicably love for some reason).)
The things I wondered, while being the Salsa victim of a kind woman’s charming dance invitation: am I supposed to focus on dancing? Is the dancing supposed to be fun? Or is it an excuse to be in physical contact and eye contact with a woman? Maybe the point of the steps is so that participants need not think too hard about what move to do next, and can rather focus on eye contact and the feel of the other’s hand in yours? Or am I supposed to be finding little innovations to make it fun, and to just follow the steps to is to decline the experience of what Salsa actually is? Is the point to spend time with someone doing something, or is the point to be good at it and show that?
I never figured it out, but it got me thinking. In one sense, every activity is just an excuse to spend time with people. Say a woman asks me to go on a walk together. It would be completely bananas to wonder the things I wondered above: “So we just take sequential steps forward together along a sidewalk? How circumscribed! How little avenue for self-expression!” No! The walking is not the point, the spending time together is the point, so when you get tired of Sitting and Talking you do a little Walking and Talking.
That said, “every activity is just an excuse to spend time with people” doesn’t cover things like games. When I want to spend time with a friend of mine, sometimes we play chess. I don’t invite him because I am hankering to play chess, I’m actually quite bad at it; but at the same time, unlike walking, moving any random piece to any random square on the board would be ridiculous. It’s important, to the hang-out-and-play-chess activity, that I actually attempt to play good moves and win the game. Same with poker, or split-screen video games, or Go, or all kinds of competitive games. You’re a psycho if you try to Win at walking, but you’re an odd bird as well if you give no attention to a competitive game you’re playing with your friend and just thoughtlessly suicide all your pieces, even if the fundamental reason you’re playing the game is just to hang out. If the idea of Salsa is “as long as you can execute the steps, you’re good, and you can put the rest of your mind on enjoying your partner’s company”, then chess is quite unlike Salsa; you have to think hard the whole time.
But this isn’t just a difference between competitive and non-competitive activities. Playing a cooperative video game together also demands that you give at least some attention to doing well. If you run in random directions and click random buttons while the computer enemies are trying to shoot you, it might not take more than 20 seconds for your buddy to ask you what the hell you’re doing; and answering “we’re just hanging out, the game isn’t important” would be very odd indeed.
So maybe it’s a difference between things that have win conditions and things that don’t? But then, say you have met up with your friend to paint or knit or whatever, each painting your own painting; again, doing random mindless brush strokes on your canvas would be weird. You can’t win at walking, and you can’t win at painting, and yet painting as a social activity demands you Try in a way that walking doesn’t.
And then even among the classic card games, all of which are competitive, there are differences in how much you’re supposed to try. Poker, you must Try. But games like Go Fish or Uno almost seem designed to make it so that Trying isn’t a thing. In Uno, you are very limited in what cards you can play - you must match the number, color, or symbol on the previous card - and so the game is nearly mindless. I think it’s mindless on purpose and that’s why these two games are so popular, especially in elementary schools and among families: little kids get to play, they can play with adults, and they can even win against adults! If Uno or Go Fish had the potential for depth of thought and complex tactics, they’d lose half their player base, since little kids wouldn’t be able to compete.
And then it’s even more complicated than that! How much you are supposed to Try is different even for the same game, depending on the social context you’re playing it in. Consider playing chess at a bar with your buddy and compare it with tournament chess. If another of your friends comes up and starts talking to you at bar chess, of course you respond; you make a decent effort to keep playing your moves in timely fashion, but you’re definitely allowed to talk. Maybe you introduce this friend to your opponent and you all talk. Now imagine doing that at a tournament. It’s crazy. You can’t. Your friend has already made a terrible social error the moment he tried to have a conversation with you while you were in the tournament match. This makes perfect sense, because while playing chess at a bar is a social activity, playing a Tournament Match is very much not; there is absolutely nothing social about it. So even though the activity is superficially identical, there is critical difference in what you are actually doing, and thus in what is allowed.
And yet it’s even more complicated than that! I play a weird heavily-modified version of kickball. I’d try to explain it but it is ridiculously modified, and only played in two cities in the world: Austin, Texas, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, because the guy who invented it used to live in Austin and now he lives in Minneapolis. One of the social norms of this game is that it’s casual. There are big signs we hang up when we play: EVERYONE WELCOME. Not in the we’re-not-racist sense like the signs my neighbors have in their yards, but in the even-if-you’re-not-athletic-you-should-play-please-come-play-come-on-just-try-it sense. And it works. The game is really quite athletic, but we get old ladies and fat people and people who showed up in boots and jeans all playing together.
So, now, imagine, that you’re an athletic young guy like me who has played the game for years and gotten quite good at it. I’m running around the field, trying to tag runners out, and the speed and power with which I can even throw the ball at someone to tag them out is socially mediated. Beaning the hell out of some poor old lady who’s playing for the first time is, um, frowned upon. But another athletic guy who’s running and about to score? I’m going crazy, I’m lasering that ball as good as I can to try and get him out. And I might be trying to tag out the old lady ten seconds after I got the fast athletic guy out. So within that span of just seconds, I have to socially mediate the strength of my throw, the speed at which I run at a player, all this.
So while every game or activity we do with others is, at its core, an excuse to be with other people, there are all kinds of gradations in how much you’re supposed to Try. From walking, where you’re not supposed to try at all, and even speaking of Trying is a bit crazy; to chess, where you are supposed to try, but in which that Tryingness even varies among the different contexts you’re playing in, like against your friend vs. in a tournament; this social context consideration even becoming player-dependent for the kickball stuff; to non-competitive things like co-painting, where you should try even though you’re not trying to beat your co-painter; to Salsa, where I still don’t known how much I’m supposed to try. It’s all more complicated than I knew, and there’s a surprising amount of social intelligence you have to apply in order to Try the right amount.
From a fifteen-year-marriage to my Ecuadorian step-father, who has a huge extended family. I am 0% Latino.
Not that I’ve tried them all, or even most. But I have read that they have Steps, and Steps I cannot stand.