"he's okay, but he's not leading with his body"

it's not really all that easy to narrow down a single discourse community i would want to write about. DCs are about recognition, but they're also about how i see myself. which community would i choose to best represent me? various people know me as a teacher, a student, a southerner, a born-again detroiter, a baker, a homebrewer, a comic book collector, a sci-fi fan, a runner, a dancer, a foodie, a feminist, an advocate of class issues, a sometimes-member of Occupy Detroit, a critical theory fan, etc. it's not that often that someone knows me as all of those things. and it's a little paralyzing to have to choose just one.

i still think, maybe, that dance is probably the thing that i think of most (after teacher and student) when i want to describe who i am. it takes up the most of my free time. it certainly takes up more of my disposable income than other communities i belong to. and in terms of dance, i would probably say not just dancer, or even just swing dancer (because that's actually a lot of different dances) but lindy hopper. i *can* Charleston, Balboa, East Coast Swing, Blues Dance, etc, but i do Lindy Hop the most, and i get most excited about learning new things for it.

in terms of what we value or believe in. we believe in learning new stuff -a lot of us go to exchange dances all over the country. when we do this, we usually end up sleeping on the floor or couch of a total stranger. we let people sleep on our floors when the exchanges are near us. we're big into being social. we say hi to new people, we ask new people to dance. we try to be welcoming, because that's important to us. some groups, like tango, are really hard to break into. not lindy. we value people who can fit their dance to the music. we value style. styling is really important. you can be a technically very good dancer, but it'll be your styling that makes you great. i'm sure there are other things, but those come to mind first. 

i'm not sure what all i could use to talk about this community. maybe my DETLX shirt from a couple years ago, which is funny...but only if you dance. i also crack up *every time* i watch this video, which i suspect is incomprehensible to a lot of people, and uses a lot of the terms that LH dancers use. i want to use something other than the etiquette page i showed in class, because that's sort of designed to help new people become part of our group, and these two examples are more things you'd have to be in the group to "get."