Human and Dancer Aren't Mutually Exclusive

According to a 2008 Rolling Stone interview, in The Killers' hit dance single "Human," the first lyric in the chorus is actually "Are we human or are we dancer?" It wasn't "denser" or "dancers," despite what the great internet debate was arguing.

The lyric itself was apparently inspired by the Hunter S. Thompson claiming that America was raising "a generation of dancers." While Thompson's quote was grammatically correct, Brandon Flowers "took it and ran" and made it less "correct" because grammar is irrelevant.

The important thing about the use of "dancer" versus the grammatically correct "dancers" or "denser" is that it makes "dancer" and "human" both adjectives. With the addition of the "s" to "dancer", the last word in the lyric becomes a noun. You lose the parallelism. When you use "denser," the song can completely change meaning. But when "dancer" is used an adjective, it becomes a state of being and the lyric states a supposed truth: one can't be human and also be "dancer."

But what even is "dancer"?

When I still lived in Wisconsin about a decade ago, I was enrolled at the The Backstage Studio in Ripon, Wisconsin  to learn how to dance. Most of it was fairly simple: shovels, ball-and-chains that resembled the "Charlie Brown" from the Cha-Cha Slide, twirling and being cute. I was a good dancer for a chubby eight-year-old. However, I stopped dancing when I moved to Kentucky because my parents claimed that there wasn't any local dance studios in Winchester, but I've always kind of missed it.

Today, an old friend of mine from the dance studio posted some pictures from this year's dance recital, ten years since my last recital. The same teacher was there and everything. It was sort of weird thinking that since I've moved past the Mason-Dixon line, this little dance studio with a small and, in retrospect, kind of sketchy waiting room and a shiny wooden floor, stayed alive with a lot of the same people. It stayed alive.

In that moment, I knew I was still "dancer." I was no longer a dancer, but I was still "dancer." While I could never, and still can't, do a cartwheel and I've always been pretty clumsy, I still had the spirit of "dancer." I still liked to leap onto my wing and spin around. I still twisted in place when I was waiting for something. I still felt music pump through my veins more than blood sometimes.

But was that what Flowers or Thompson had in mind?

Maybe "dancer" meant a carefree young person who didn't listen to the words but swayed to a beat because understanding causes problems and ignorance is bliss. Maybe "dancer" meant somebody who took on the world and made it their oyster after leaving everything behind. Maybe "dancer" meant a lover, not a fighter. But what does that make somebody who's "human"? Is that somebody who is calculating and cautious and weighed down with problems? Is it somebody who thinks? Is it somebody who is fighter?

And why are they mutually exclusive?

That's the thing, I don't think they are. Even when I don't even really know what Thompson or Flowers had in mind, I don't think anybody is 100% human or 100% dancer. It's just one of those things.

The second lyric in the chorus is "my signs are vital; my hands are cold." Is being "alive" and feeling "alive"
the same thing? Maybe that's what Flowers is getting at. Maybe humans just exist while dancers feel "alive."

But what a better time to feel alive?

A Semester on Infinite Loop

My name is DJ and I have a coding problem.

While everyone else would watch hours of Netflix, play guitar, or do some kind of sport thing, I find my face lit up by the bluish tint of a computer screen while I not-so-mindlessly hammer in code that really has no real purpose other than to waste time.

As I sit back down as everybody else is Procrastinating Coders Anonymous mumble "Hi DJ," I should probably give you some background.

I'm almost locked into my dream school. I spend a decent chunk of my afternoons helping juniors troubleshoot their Mathematica and another chunk of that looking for my Differential Equations book.

And I have the worst case of senioritis ever and it sucks.

How do I deal with an increasing workload coming from Cherry Hall (English 300) and an increasingly terrifying game of Russian Roulette at Snell (Physics 256)? I code. I make prototypic character (literary not the primitive type) in C++ and rosaries for Catholic friends in Mathematica. I would cry, but at this rate it might end up being in binary. 

All of this combined, it feels like I'm stuck in my own loop:

while(haveSenioritis){

 semesterEnd = false;

} 

And it doesn't look like haveSenioritis is going to become false anytime soon.

At the beginning of the semester, Tim, the director of the Academy, told us that we were going to blink and suddenly this semester would be over. Beth, the residential life head honcho, told as that the days were long but the weeks and months were short. Right now, I don't really believe them. I feel myself trudging along and while there are some highlights, it feels like the days never end, Saturday is eons away, and there are amounts of work that I need to do that are in that limbo of "pressing" and "non-pressing." I'm stuck in this infinite loop until the universe realizes that time standing still is a bad idea and gets its act together.

I know that I'm not the only one and the world doesn't revolve around me. I know that the semester will end and I will probably get ridiculously nostalgic and wonder where it all went. Until then, I reserve the right to angst. Because angst is a part of growing up, and while I'm legally a "grown-up," I'm not done yet.

So, my fellow Procrastinating Coders, I do have a problem, but maybe coding isn't so bad. It's just the sheer quantity of it. I can't code myself into having a glorious GPA or a good time. Maybe at one point I'll realize that I might be a high school senior, but I'm only just that. I'm still a sophomore in college. I'm still not legal to drink. I've never paid taxes. Coding is just a coping mechanism, like eating Nutella with a spoon or aggressively cutting paper. While it may not have the physical health risks, this isn't healthy. I should probably stop at one point.

But I'm still stuck in this loop and until some external method gets sucked into the loop with me and breaks it, I'll be stuck waiting for the BSOD at the end.