គ្មានការរំាជីវិតគ្មនន៍យ: Actually, it means something

I've been spamming the heck out of my Facebook wall tonight, so I decided just to write a short post about it because I've been so up in arms -- and sort of surprising myself in the process.

The background is this: this week, for Saturday concert, I was told that there were no slow songs to dance because the singer had their own team of dancers. At first, I just accepted that, hey, whatever, but when the concert came on tonight, I found I wanted to watch it. If the dancers are good, I thought, no problem, but if they aren't, I'm going to be upset.

It was a singer that's been on quite often, some big star, that was featured, but the thing was, he sang two slow songs, and no dancers were present. There was a group of dancers doing a traditional dance, but the longer the concert went on without slow dancers, the more agitated I got, and when he finally came on with dancers, it was for a disco song.

The dancers weren't bad and he had clearly rehearsed with them, which is actually something I've been wanting to see from the stars, so there was that. But what about the slow songs? Where were the dancers? And if they weren't performing, then why, I demanded of the television and my flatmate ad infinitum, weren't we invited?

I was actually quite ticked off about the whole thing -- the having their own dancers, the lack of slow dancers, the lack of my dancers, everything. It wasn't reasonable -- hell, they're a giant corporation, they can do whatever they want, and he's a big star, he can do whatever he wants.

But then I had to step back, and I realized something kind of surprising: I care about this job.

I know. All I do is complain about it. But when it comes down to it, I'm proud of the work I've done and the improvements made under my watch, and whatever happened with CTN or the singer meant nothing, but it touched on my pride (That's my stage you're taking away from me...).

But beyond that, it actually touches on a much deeper thing in me, which is that I love what I do -- dance, and creating dance -- beyond all reason.

The tattoo on my leg, and the title of this post, reads "Without dance, life is meaningless" and gets a lot of funny looks. People read it at stoplights and kind of laugh or give me weird looks. Sometimes, with a bit of a teasing voice, they'll ask if I like dancing. But what I want to say is, you don't understand. You don't get it. Dance is in my very bones, above anything else in the world. If my family asked me to stop dancing (which they never would, but just to prove a point), I'd choose dance first. If a man ever asked me to stop dancing, I'd choose dance first. Without dance, I am lost.

But not only do I love what I do, I take pride in it. That's why, although I'm not required to be at CTN for the live concerts, I'm always there, because I want to see it -- and not just the clips in the background you get on the television. I need to see the whole picture, how the space works, which parts work and which don't, and I get upset when things go wrong. It matters, and matters deeply, that I do my job well, and never stop improving.

All things considered, the poor singer probably didn't deserve the wrath I was sending his way, but along the way I learned a pretty important lesson about a job that some months ago, I was considering running away from.

Duly noted, universe....