Sometimes I feel old.

I heard a journalist on NPR this afternoon. She's written a book called NOT MUCH JUST CHILLIN' about middle school kids. One of the topics she was talking about was Grinding which she described as a girl and boy on the dance floor and he stands behind her, writhing into her butt while kids circle around chanting, "Go (girl's name), Go (girl's name)."

I just discussed this with a 20 year old friend of mine who chuckled and said, "certainly you know about grinding?!?" Uhm, no. The circling and chanting isn't mandatory, according to my source, but the dancing "like in a rap video" is pretty standard.

My middle school and high school years were a netherworld as far as dance steps were concerned. You could Dance Like Sting which was a sort of skipping, kicking dance as the once cool singer of The Police did in the video for SO LONELY. Or you could dance like a hippie which I once heard described as Washing The Ball (you've seen it...that wiggly arm motion, as if the dancer was wiping off the bottom of a disco ball). This was before the running man, the cabbage patch, you might get in a little bit of robot or The Wave. But no grinding.

Grinding seems to be a way of being explicitly sexual without actually having intercourse. My middle school seemed to have a lot of making out and Truth or Dare going on (none of which I participated in...middle school was very WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE for me) and while there wasn't any grinding going on, I don't think it would have been out of character for it to have happened.

And hey, you gotta love a youth subculture that can come up with a dance that makes the elders unhappy.

An instructor of mine last term said that culture wars always heat up in presidential election years and that there is always renewed focus on the bad influence of the media on Youth Of Today. So let's see if Bush ignores his Iraq debacle and miserable performance domestically and decides to focus on grinding.