Whoops.

Tonight there was a dance event at Shaft, a bar that's usually a gaijin hangout (foreigner) but today was chock full of Japanese dancers. The night was going quite well - there was some ridiculous battling going on among the breakdancers and more than half of the showtime performers were from my club and they all did a great job. And then ... things turned a bit sour. After showtime ended, some big time battling was going on involving everyone - the breakers, the poppers, the lockers, and even some of the hip-hop girls. Everyone from my club was getting involved, including a cute moment when Ono and Aiko, who I just found out are dating, did a short improv lock routine together. And then suddenly this old white guy (really dorky old white guy with his equally dorky but slightly younger friend) jumped in the middle of the circle and started dancing in a .. well.. old white guy kind of way. Whatever you're imagining is probably very accurate. I saw the two of them earlier get tricked by these two girls into buying drinks for them, which was funny to watch. Well anyway, they seemed pretty drunk, and the guy kept grabbing people and forcing them to dance with him - girls and guys. And it was fine and kind of embarrassingly funny the first couple times (like, these are the type of adult men the U.S. produces?), but the act was wearing a little thin by the 10th person. And then he started grabbing girls and dancing kind of gross with them when they clearly didn't want to. That particularly pissed me off. The dance floor started clearing out. Basically, if you had been touched by him, you left. I sat there though, hoping he'd just stop, annoyed at the arrogant way he jumped in and made everyone feel uncomfortable while probably claiming to try to make everyone have fun (just such a typically dorky-white-guy-in-japan thing to do), and telling myself "don't do anything.. don't do anything .. don't do anything". And then he decided he wanted to dance with me. I decided I wasn't going to pretend I was a Japanese guy and play along and instead decided to let my temper run a little. It wasn't such a bad conversation. I wasn't very mean. I didn't even swear. And none of the Japanese kids could understand what we were saying anyway. After we finished up, he went over to his friend and loudly told him what I said so I went over and gave them a bit more of my mind and then walked off. Don't worry Mom, there was no fear of a fight or anything, and if a fight did break out, I'm more than confident I would have mauled both of them. After all, one of my friends thought he was a fat woman. But MAN did the atmosphere in that place collapse after that. I didn't expect that to happen at all. Whoops. If they cleared out the dance floor, I helped keep it clear. I think one of the guys in my club (one of the breakers) was kind of pissed at me for doing it. Okay, so yeah I kicked myself afterward for doing it, but I felt like someone needed to say what none of the nonconfrontational Japanese kids could say and put the guy in his place. And he's lucky - if this had been the States, I'm pretty sure he'd have a lot of more problems than just me yelling at him.

Oh, and afterward I was pissed at myself for another reason - Hidetoshi, my closest friend and teacher in the club, who is ridiculously good at dancing but very shy with girls, had a cute girl come up to him with her friend and compliment him on his dancing and he let the chance slip with her; I should have helped him out since she was clearly attracted to him. He could have her number now but I didn't do anything! AHHH.

Instead we went to McDonalds to eat some late night disgusting food. Oh man has my life not changed a bit in some ways since graduating from Penn.