first round

(5) robyn w/kleerup, “with every heartbeat”
vs
(12) Cupid, “The Cupid Shuffle”

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/2/24.

Elliott Vanskike on Robyn’s “with Every Heartbeat”

Me, Not Dancing

The Beatles cover of the Isley Brothers’ cover of The Top Notes’ “Twist and Shout” was released in March 1964 and hit #2 on the Billboard charts in April. The pace is slower than The Top Notes’ amped-up R&B workout and faster than the Isley Brothers’ strut and stroll. Lennon’s voice sounds desperate, slightly unhinged, as he shout-sings the song’s imperatives (shake, twist, shout, work it on out, let me know you’re mine). Dictating the moves, like good dance songs do.
I was born a few months before The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” was released in the U.S. At some point in early 1964, my mother wrote in my baby book, “The Beatles are the rage. They are singers.” My mother didn’t really keep up with music, which maybe explains that understatement: Beatles = singers. The top 5 slots in the Billboard chart in the spring of 1964 were all Beatles songs. Even someone as out of touch with pop culture as my mother could not have been ignorant of a cultural force as totalizing as The Beatles in 1964. Still, she devotes more space to the “big fad” of hootenannies (“folk singers get together and sing and play their guitars and banjos”). If folkies jamming at hootenannies loomed larger in my mother’s mind than The Beatles while “Twist and Shout” was tearing up the charts, it would explain the vexing relationship I’ve had with dancing for most of my life.

Me Square Dancing, Slow Dancing

If you spent time in gym class in the 1970s and 1980s (and maybe other decades) you probably endured the dorky indignity of square dancing, which was not really dancing but was decidedly square. There were really no moves to learn—square dancing in gym class involved only bowing, walking, and turning around—but there were new terms to learn. Do-si-do, allemande, promenade. These commands, accompanied by fiddle music, would squawk from a record player on the gym floor. Cowed, most of us just did what the record said as unenthusiastically as possible, waiting for the period to be over. If the activity was uncool, the cool kids still took the opportunity to pair up, picking each other in the ruthless ritual that separated the beautiful and the athletically gifted from the social outcasts—wrong clothes, weird hair, bad breath, too poor, too smart, too dumb, weird name. It was excruciating and we hated it. The best outcome was being picked by someone you knew as a friend, so you could just get through it together. The worst was having to partner with one of the cool kids, who somehow ended up with you, and would roll her eyes and complain to her friends as you held hands and allemanded around the square.
Worse by far than square dancing was slow dancing. Slow dancing was what happened when the gym teacher didn’t want to do his job that day. It was worse because it was sprung on us unawares, worse because you had to partner up and dance close, worse because the gym lights were turned off and the music was slow. I was raised in a strict religious household and was not allowed to go to school dances, which made the idea of having a slow dance on a random Tuesday in a darkened gym before lunch period all the more dread inducing. I had no idea what to do at a slow dance, but I knew it would be humiliating and it invariably was. The relief that flooded my endocrine system when—having been excused for a dentist appointment one day—I showed up with 5 minutes left in gym class and realized it was a slow dance day was strong enough to buckle my knees. By mere happenstance, I had dodged a slow dance—one day struck from the series of the most embarrassing days of my teen years. Surely, I could just take a seat, wait for the period to end, and go to my next class. But no, I could not, for the gym teacher told me I must dance. When I said there was no one to dance with, he pointed me toward a girl sitting on the far side of the gym and issued the imperative, “Ask her.” I approached the girl and realized as I got within a few feet that it wasn’t a classmate but a college senior who had been student teaching in the girl’s gym class. She accepted my invitation to slow dance and tried to put me at ease with conversation, but there was no side-stepping the gym teacher’s bait and switch or the burning shame I felt.

Me Dancing, Finally

Somehow, I put the humiliation that defined dancing behind me and finally began to dance in college. And by “somehow” I mean alcohol. And by “dance” I mean combine idiosyncratic moves that were located somewhere on the spectrum between Elaine Benes’s hitchhiking spasm lurch and Elvis Costello’s knock-kneed Frankenstein lurch. But it kind of worked, as long as I didn’t care what I looked like, which is, of course, where the alcohol came in. Even buzzed, I was never outside my own head—never just surrendering to the music or allowing the rhythm to get me or letting myself get down. I needed to plan my moves, so I had to know the song. I was no longer getting orders from The Beatles or a square dance caller or my gym teacher, but I had internalized the imperatives. The call was coming from inside my head.
Some of this dancing was solo, seeking. Years before I heard my first Robyn song (“With Every Heartbeat,” which I swear I’m getting to) I was dancing on my own at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey. I would put on a thrift store suit, wear dress shoes with slippery bottoms so I could whip my ankles around (a signature move to this day), drive to the club, drink a few beers, wait for a song I liked (“How Soon Is Now?” was guaranteed to get me out on the floor), dance near a group of people in the hopes of dancing with somebody, and invariably leave on my own after going on my own in the hopes of meeting somebody (but I’d skip Morrissey’s crying and wanting to die).
The other place I’d dance was at the Holiday Inn by the regional airport near my parents’ house. This wasn’t as depressing as that sentence makes it sound. The bar could be lively. The dj played a lot of  80s FM staples (Duran Duran, Human League, Loverboy) but also some disco and R&B. During summers home from college, a friend and I would get dressed up, drive there, and she would wait for me to get inhibitionless enough to be able to dance. When a good song came on, we’d do a weird mix of couples swing dancing and trying to copy each other’s solo moves. We were by far the youngest people in the bar and sometimes the only people dancing. Maybe the older folks who mostly just sat and drank were easily impressed, but we were often asked if we were trained dancers (whatever that meant). Mostly, I just think we were energetic and into the music, and I was buzzed enough to cut loose (but with a plan). My collar would get sweaty, I’d loosen my tie, and flare my jacket as I spun. The Holiday Inn bar by the regional airport near my parents’ house was probably the most fun I’ve ever had dancing.

“None of These Boys Can Dance”

But even when dancing was at its most fun, I could tell I wasn’t having the same experience as other dancers—the ones who didn’t need to become unselfconscious before they could dance because they were too absorbed by the music and how their bodies felt to worry about what they looked like. They were in the moment, not in their own heads. From the outside looking in, dancing is ecstatic, emphatic. It’s driven by passion and extinguishes ambiguity—what else can you do but dance?
Here, finally, is where Robyn comes in. Very few of her dance songs give themselves over to hedonistic abandon. The bpms make them dance songs, but they’re not all heart or booty. You can cut loose, but the lyrics cut against you. As Jayson Greene points out, in her most delirious songs, “Robyn brings an element to the cresting wave that is less common: melancholy.” (One of my favorite reaction videos, has a guy listening to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” for the first time and saying, “This could be good at like a rave or something . . . maybe. I think raves are more happy than this.”) “In “Hang With Me,” a bright, galloping disco number, Robyn describes a friendship poised on the point of tipping into love but seems to suggest it’s better to keep things murky:

And if you keep it tight, I’m gonna confide in you
I know what’s on your mind, there will be time for that too
If you hang with me.
Just don't fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me ‘cause it’s gonna be
All heartbreak, blissfully painful and insanity if we agree
You can hang with me.

The ambiguity of that friendship–relationship line comes up again in “Be Mine.” If it ever existed, the love is in the past (“you never were and you never will be mine”) and, in a spoken interlude, Robyn describes a chance encounter with her maybe-ex and his current girlfriend: “You had your arm around what’s-her-name. She had on that scarf I gave you, and you got down to tie her laces. You look happy . . . and that’s great. I just miss you, that’s all.” The song doesn’t go all in on resentment or despair. It acknowledges a fraught situation. Someone she loved is in love with someone else. He’s happy, she’s OK with it, but she misses what was or might have been.
The more you look at Robyn’s catalog the more you realize that she writes about relationships from a place of ambivalence more often than not. In addition to “Hang With Me” and “Be Mine,” Robyn’s huge hit “Call Your Girlfriend” has the speaker coaching the guy she wants to be with that he needs to take an important step before they can be together (“it won’t make sense right now but you’re still her friend”). In “Do It Again,” the couple is having sex but are stuck between starting a real relationship or staying friends (“we should not be friends, we’ll just do it again”). A whole subset of Robyn songs are about robots with human feelings who are in love (“Fembot,” “The Girl and the Robot,” “Robotboy”), exploring the uncanny valley between human and machine. Taken together, these songs suggest that Robyn isn’t writing about relationships that are ambiguous; her theme is the existential experience of being unsettled or uncertain and relationships are just her chosen metaphor. All those songs of in-betweenness are dance songs, but many of them come with spare, acoustic versions accompanied only by piano. So, there’s a tension between floor-fillers like “Hang With Me,” “Be Mine,” and “With Every Heartbeat” and their somber, down-tempo shadows that just compounds the tension that already exists between a hard-charging anthem and lyrics that emphasize the muddledness of living. In Robyn’s world, you can have bangers, but they come with some Sturm und Drang.

“None of Them Move My Intellect”

“With Every Heartbeat” isn’t Robyn’s most popular song. That would be “Dancing On My Own,” a song that is single-minded in its defiance: Nobody wants me, my world is trashed, I’ve tried as hard as I can, fuck it, I am dancing all night. The song starts off with an insistent bass line and the intensity builds until 2 minutes and 40 seconds in, when Robyn sings the pre-chorus a cappella followed by a solid measure of rapid-fire snare hits, and you feel ready to cry or explode with joy or slam yourself into something really hard. But “With Every Heartbeat” pulls off something just as cathartic, but more dizzying. Robyn marries a propulsive tune and production with an atmosphere of ambivalent resolve. She’s uncertain but she’s pushing on. Here was a song that brought the overthinking to the party. I finally felt like I’d found dance music that was for me. That said, the video for “With Every Heartbeat” isn’t much to speak of. A miniature Robyn walks backwards and then runs through a stark landscape of geometric shapes until she’s apparently squashed at the end. The production values are low-rent enough that you keep waiting for her Pony Pal Pokey to make an appearance. If not for the fact that Robyn’s short, angular haircut caught my eye, I might not have turned up the speakers on my laptop enough to hear a song I’ve listened to more than maybe any other over the last 15 years.

But when I did, I was greeted by a four-on-the-floor beat with, floating above it, a hollow, minor key buzz that cycles through a descending pattern before Robyn’s fragile-sounding voice hesitantly enters with the first of the song’s many tentative statements: “Maybe we could make it all right.” When she gets past the second “maybe” and is on the third “could,” the bass kicks in with pulsing 1/32 notes, and the sense of steady movement in the music becomes irresistible. Except that the song doesn’t progress lyrically. It stays mired in “maybe”s and “could”s and in Robyn’s repeated assertion that things won’t change and she won’t look back. There’s no real chorus in the song, which contributes to the listener’s disorientation. We’re in a maze of recursive statements that don’t seem to be moving us through familiar song structures. We’re not getting anywhere, and Robyn is walking but she’s dying with every step she takes. And then all the trappings of a dance song drop away, and we get a 20-second string interlude that yields to producer Kleerup’s beloved arpeggiated synths. What comes next should be the chorus. The drums and bass kick in again, and the cycling pattern of buzzes is replaced by bright, popping synths. But what this all builds toward is just the same line sung over and over and over again: “And it hurts with every heartbeat.” That insistent line has the title of the song embedded in it. It’s accompanied by the reasserted swell of the music and it’s where an uplifting chorus should be. But in place of a soaring resolution, we get a continual reassertion of Robyn’s wounds. The more she walks away the more hurt she gets and it hurts every time her heart beats. The song clocks in at 120 bpm—the rate of a human heartbeat—to drive home the inescapable tempo of her suffering. Ariel Rechtshaid, whose producing credits span Madonna, Vampire Weekend, and Charli XCX, captures the wrenching tension of “With Every Heartbeat” when he observes, “There’s, like a pain met with euphoria in that song.”  

For years, I’ve been trying and failing to set my brain aside and just dance. But overeducated, overthinking me didn’t notice until I sat down to write this piece that “With Every Heartbeat” is a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story from Greek myth. If you don’t remember your Bullfinch’s (or haven’t seen “Hadestown”), the story goes like this. Orpheus is a gifted musician who plays the lyre and sings so gorgeously that no one can resist the sound. His wife, Eurydice, dies and is taken to the underworld. Orpheus ventures to hell with his lyre to rescue her. He plays so beautifully for Hades that the god tells him he can take Eurydice back to the land of the living, as long as she walks behind him and he doesn’t turn around. Orpheus is about to reenter the sun-warmed earth with Eurydice just behind him when doubt creeps in. He loses his nerve and turns around. His final view of Eurydice is of her being snatched back into hell for eternity. Orpheus begs for death so he can join his beloved. The gods grant his request, but with a cruel twist. His voice is too beautiful to lose. His body can return to Eurydice, but Orpheus’s head must stay with the living so he can continue to sing his beautiful melodies.
Of course, unlike Orpheus, Robyn stays the course and doesn’t look back. But her reward is pain. Orpheus’s steps guide him toward resolution and redemption (if he can only persist). Each step just brings Robyn more heartbreak. There’s really only one track on Robyn’s most recent album, “Honey,” from 2018, that even approximates a dance song—the lead single “Missing U.” But it’s more of a wind-down, the kind of song a dj plays toward the end of the last set to ease you off the dance floor. It burbles along in a sad, detached way, but there’s no peak, no contrasts, no catharsis. The second song on the record, “Human Being,” is an invitation to dance, but it’s a desperate ask, like someone clinging to flotsam after a shipwreck:

I’m a human being
Where to go?
The streets are so cold
Stay in my arms
Dance with me

The music backing the words is blasted and bleak, showing the influence of dubstep’s cavernous sonic nightscapes. Given the forlornness of the music, Robyn probably doesn’t need to drive the point home, but the lyrics push on into the uncertain darkness:

There’s no resolution
No honey gold
There’s no final union
There’s no control

Rather than the heedless abandon of dancing, the song evokes an almost existential feeling of abandonment. The thirteenth time Robyn sings “I’m a human being” and begs her partner “don’t give up on me” we don’t feel any closer to connection, ecstasy, relief or any of the things dancing might deliver.

Elliott Vanskike is a writer and editor in Takoma Park, MD.

@twonnet on Twitter
@twonnet.bsky.social

Altruistic and Self-Serving: m Gookin on Cupid’s “The Cupid Shuffle”

“I’ve been thinking about your walk-out recently,” I told Mei Ratz last August, just before the start of the school year. As a junior in high school, Mei organized a schoolwide walk-out. My parents were outraged by what they saw as the local newspaper’s—my current employer—overly dismissive coverage of a serious issue. Mei says that the support of teachers who told students they wouldn’t be teaching anything during that class period is really what made it successful. 
Whoever deserves the credit, Mei’s courage and community organizing paid off. The next year, when I was a freshman, Mei was still there, captain of the girls swim team; the principal she had been protesting was gone.
My local school board has been making headlines around the state recently, forcing a dedicated educator out of the school district, penalizing a student for completing an assigned class project, trying to redefine “book banning” so it doesn’t include removing books from library shelves. They’ve also instituted a draconian drug testing policy for all student athletes, likely aimed at the Native American kids on the teams. My day job is to stick to the facts, so I usually can’t make these kinds of sweeping opinion-based claims—but here, I can say what I feel. Now kick, kids; we’re due for another walk-out. 

According to the Guiness Book of World Records website, in 2007 “Cupid Shuffle” set the record for the world’s longest line dance, with over 17,000 people dancing in the streets of Atlanta. For a few glorious years, the Cupid Shuffle was the biggest line dance of all time—not figuratively, but numerically, statistically. It’s since been outpaced, but you put it on at any wedding or birthday and you’ll see people out dancing; the Cupid Shuffle has staying power like few other dance songs besides the King of Kings, the Macarena. 
There’s something about a line dance—dancing individually but as a group, watching your neighbor but never touching—that makes it hard to escape. The prescribed hop and stomp to the beat grab even those who don’t know how to dance. No thoughts, head empty, now walk it by yourself.
Wikipedia would disagree with this assessment, but I believe that line dances were probably invented before fire or cooking or any of the things evolutionary scientists say “make us human”. 

*

When I was in high school, the coolest place I knew to go to was El Toro, a crusty old honky-tonk eternally decorated for Christmas. One night a week, they’d pull a partition out, tell the folks at the bar they couldn’t take their drinks onto the dance floor, and let the high school kids come dance. 
I didn’t know much about country swing; my mom tried to teach me the waltz when I was 10 or 11, but had despaired of her efforts about two minutes in. In grade school music class they taught us a few basic moves, so I wasn’t totally adrift, but my first night at El Toro was mostly spent learning how to not make my dance partner fall on their face. But more than country swing, more than two-step, honky-tonk bars love line dances, and when “Cupid Shuffle” came on I knew exactly what to do. 
El Toro, in a town of 400 half an hour away from my childhood home, was bustling on those nights, hot with the sweat of what seemed to be countless dancing bodies. A friend of mine met the man she married right out of high school one night on that dance floor, and I remember hearing rumors of parking lot fist fights Monday mornings at school. It closed not long after I graduated.
Even though I’ve pulled all kinds of death-defying stunts since, and no one ever actually told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t go there, El Toro remains, in my mind, the most daring adventure I’ve ever attempted.

I can't really say if there actually was a line dancing craze in the mid-2000s or if it just felt that way to me. Dance crazes have existed as long as there has been dancing; things fall in and out of favor as something new excites people just as the old becomes dated. 
Dance in the 2000s wasn’t like dance is now, or like dance was 20 years before, either. Jumping, gyrating, dropping as low to the ground as you could manage while staying upright and on your feet—occasionally you’d see someone start breakdancing, and a circle of seagulls hungry for either awe or embarrassment would form around them on the dance floor. 2000s dance was club dancing; aside from the spectator sport of breakdance, it was small, confined, a deliberate combination of sex and space-saving restraint. It was, also, quite frequently fairly boring.
The fundamental appeal of a line dance—or any other called dance—is that it is virtually indistinguishable from the Hokey Pokey. In a previous March Xness, an essay made the case that modern notions of sexiness derive from blue jeans; I think the appeal of a song everyone moves to in joyful coordinated repetition is the opposite. The Macarena's lyrics are about sex and betrayal, but that doesn't make our enjoyment of its dance any less childlike. 

*

My second pick for this tournament was Bowling For Soup’s “A Really Cool Dance Song”, which wasn’t on the longlist but makes its own case for inclusion in its very title. When I was in college, my roommate and I would often each sit on our own beds, facing each other with our backs against the walls, working on our respective projects and listening to my Pandora. I can’t work in silence, and she said that she liked to listen to music while working, too. I don’t remember what year or which dorm, but I remember one time that “A Really Cool Dance Song” came on.
“This is really good,” she said, surprised.
I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “It’s a joke,” I told her, oblivious to the offense forming on her face. “It’s making fun of this kind of music.” 
I lived—and worked and studied—with the same roommate for most of my college career. We parted ways on bad terms, in part due to my own inability to navigate when to use what words.
It’s funny to think that if someone had had the foresight to snatch up “Cupid Shuffle” before me, I could now be reminiscing about the ups and downs of college rather than high school. Both were tough times for me; my high school life was rigidly structured, while college was freeing but dangerous. I always had too many projects and not enough time, or too much time and not enough projects. 
The Cupid Shuffle isn’t a joke, but it isn’t serious, either. Like a lot of music of that era—post-pop-punk enough for politics to no longer be cool, still pre-hipster—it’s fundamentally about a physical pleasure. Dancing is fun, it says, come on, I’ll show you. 

*

When “Cupid Shuffle” was released in 2007, I was 14, fresh off spending a month backpacking with a group of total strangers in the Wyoming backcountry. My freshman and sophomore years of high school are something of a blur, but I think it probably took a year or two for the song to reach us, the way things always did then.
Central Wyoming is about as far from the “Cupid Shuffle” music video as possible; the video, which features a TV news crew documenting an enormous line dance that’s sweeping a city, makes the case for the Cupid Shuffle as the next big dance craze. It wouldn’t take much for a dance craze to take over my hometown, big enough by Wyoming standards but small pretty much anywhere else – although, given our reputation for strongly divided opinions, maybe it would take a lot after all. 
When my name came up in the Xness lottery I didn’t even have to think about what songs defined dancing in that era for me: “Cupid Shuffle”, “Low”, maybe one or two others. I was in junior high and high school in the 2000s; these are the songs that I associate with everything from homecoming to prom, and nostalgia is a powerful thing. Whether I liked these songs at the time or not is inconsequential in the face of remembering how I strung lights around the high school cafeteria, balanced on a step ladder, in preparation for junior prom.

He's not a rapper, the titular Cupid tells us a few lines into the “Cupid Shuffle”, and this probably isn't zydeco. So what is "Cupid Shuffle"? A line dance, certainly, and it could probably be safely called hip hop. The only real clues Cupid provides for what he thinks the song is are that it's new, it's for people of all ages, and he's from the "dirty South". 
A preacher's son from Louisiana, Cupid supposedly got his stage name from a performance of 112's “Cupid” that showed off his vocal talents. If you listen to almost any other song he’s recorded, you can hear why someone might give him a nickname that celebrates him as a virtuoso—but in 2012 he failed to make it past auditions for The Voice when he sang "Cupid Shuffle". It isn't a vehicle for incredible artistry, but an accessible call out onto the dance floor. 
Does it matter what "Cupid Shuffle" is, or whether it's technically impressive? Cupid is a fantastic singer, but his biggest hit doesn't require or make use of his level of talent. The true genius of the song doesn’t lie in an individual performance.
A good song never dies, Saint Motel instructs us, it just reminds you of where you were. By that measure, for me at least “Cupid Shuffle” is either one of the best or one of the worst songs; each sliding step a firmly present now, each kick a hundred overlapping memories. 

*

With one or two exceptions, my mom’s family and I don’t really get along. Not in the sense that we don’t like each other, but in the sense that we don’t know each other. They all grew up together in the endless cornfields of Minnesota, and I spent my childhood a thousand miles away in the steep-sided foothills of the Rockies; they liked to party and race around on motorcycles and play baseball in the field behind my grandparents’ house, while I was an inside kid whose definition of “inside” included the remote Western backcountry, passionate about reading books and whitewater rafting and not talking to people I didn’t know.
Even so, at my cousin’s wedding a few summers ago when “Cupid Shuffle” came on I found myself in a line with a cousin to either side, aunts and uncles in front of and behind me, all of us kicking our feet in imperfect synchronization. And that’s what a line dance gives you that no other dance can, I think: instant community, just-add-water connection, gasping laughter shared with a cousin you’ve never known how to talk to. Just let the music come from your soul, so all of your people can stay out on the floor. 

There is a freedom in structure, and a structure to rebellion. Anger may be motivating, but I’ve found that in the long term, rage is less productive than connection.
The thing I know about victory from high school swimming is that it isn’t about who goes the fastest. It doesn’t matter if your team has the greatest swimmer in the state, it matters if you have the 20 swimmers who are hot on their heels, racking up second and third place victories. Winning isn’t about one person being the best, it’s about everyone being that little bit better.
“Fourteen,” Mei Ratz corrected. “You need 14 mediocre swimmers to win; I worked it out.” 
Maybe the smart move—the competitive move—would have been to talk to Cupid himself about this essay, get the weight of his 8,000 twitter followers behind us. But this essay isn’t about Cupid, not really; it’s about high school, and line dancing, and togetherness without uniformity. I sat down and talked to Mei. 
Mei’s told the school board how she feels about their choices. The issues at hand have changed, but Mei’s still the same leader she was on the eve of the debut of the “Cupid Shuffle”: empathetic, adamant, thorough. Someone who makes change by reaching out. She didn’t know that she was community organizing when she led the walk-out, she explained, she just did it because she cared. 
“You can’t qualify community by likeness, that’s exclusion,” she told me. “It has to be organic, because people want to come together, like a line dance; it can’t have such rigid rules that you fail immediately.” The beauty of a line dance, we agreed, is that everyone moves together, extending each other the grace of taking it just seriously enough for it to be sincere and not awkward or embarrassing—but still with room for people to move differently or miss a few steps. Dancing isn’t comfortable; it’s energetic, it’s work. But that’s part of what makes it fun. 
“Maybe that’s where we learn community, is in dance,” Mei said. “Community should be joyful. When we’re scared, it’s hard to line dance.” 

M Gookin grew up in the winningest swim town (that didn’t care about swimming at all) in Wyoming. She took ballet and jazz dance classes throughout her childhood, on which she blames her struggles with being spontaneous on the dance floor. She now writes for a living, and spends her time playing Dungeons and Dragons or trivia.