It’s a Celebration!

Recently, some good friends of ours signed a lease on an apartment of their own after living with family for almost a year. This is great news, and a blessing, and an answer to prayer, and we are so happy for them.

The news spread quickly on facebook, of course, and my friend reported that she had been doing my goofy happy/money dance around.

Now, my happy dance and my money dance are two separate dances.

The money dance is an homage to the character Anya from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  It’s a re-creation of her Dance of Capitalist Superiority that she does when closing out the cash register, and I can’t link to it on YouTube because of perfectly valid copyright restrictions, but you can buy, rent, or borrow the DVD and look for it if you are so inclined.  I break out the money dance when a short-term investment goes particularly well, or when I’m closing out the cash register at a volunteer gig and it’s a good number, or when I rake in a lot of gold on the Warcraft auction house — not so often any more, since I’m hardly playing WoW at all.  I’ll do the money dance when my kids’ classes reach 100% participation in our school’s annual fund drive this fall.  The money dance is not about greed (much).  It is about recognizing that you need money to do good stuff.

The happy dance makes a rarer appearance.  I recently broke it out when we painted our dining room, and the color was good.  I did the happy dance about the trees we planted, particularly the huge ginkgo in the front and center of our yard, and I will do the happy dance again when it makes it through fall without producing berries.  My kids provoke the happy dance on those rare occasions they get up and dressed for school without drama, and if I ever get around to making plane reservations to go visit my friends in California, New York, Washington, Delaware, Baltimore, Pennsylvania, London, and most especially Switzerland, I will do the happy dance, because I love to travel, and because I have the best friends in the world, and because it will mean that I’m not spending all my travel time and energy and money flying down to Houston for tests every month or two.

A good friend said, “I bet you did the happy dance when they told you you that you were out of the woods, that you should consider yourself cured of cancer, that you only have to go down to MD Anderson once a year.”  No.  Doing the happy dance over not having cancer any more is like giving Yasser Arafat or John Hume the Nobel Peace Prize for the simple act of ceasing to be an inciter of civil unrest.

I’ll save the happy dance over stuff that makes me happy — like my family becoming functional again, or my friends finally getting a great apartment.  For the good stuff.  If you want to see the happy dance for not having cancer, then you do it.