You know the best way to keep yourself warm when the temperatures are in the single digits and you don’t have someone to snuggle with? Answer: Dance so hard that an invitation to hang your head out an open window is a welcome one.

That’s exactly what I did last night and into the wee hours of the morning. I went with some quasi-work friends to a local bar in a really cool old Victorian house. Every Thursday night (which used to be date night for me) the DJ there spins ’80s/early ’90s tunes. The kind of stuff where I know every single word and probably have some rehearsed moves to go with (yes, it’s cool to be me). We heard plenty of the classics — lots of Michael Jackson, some Don’t Stop Believing and I seem to remember unleashing the lyrics to both It’s Tricky and This is How We Do It.

Modern Friends, I cannot even begin to tell you how much fun we had. Just being able to cut loose like that … I hadn’t done that in ages. We started early and had the floor all to ourselves for a little while, but people started pouring in and after a while all we could really do was kind of bounce up and down, and that was fine too.

When the time came for me to start diluting my beer consumption with water, I retired to the third floor where I could lean over the balcony and watch all the people still dancing. There were plenty of singly people out just having a good time. There were the guys trying to climb on the rafters. There were couples dancing together and smiling. There was the gal at the bar who kept instigating dudes to fight over her (seriously, not worth it). There was the couple who exchanged tongue for two songs straight without coming up for air.

And of course it hit me that I used to do stuff like this all the time. Not the instigating fights thing, but going out dancing with my friends. My gal pals in Nashville and I used to go out dancing on a fairly regular basis. But ever since I’ve been in Knoxville, I’ve done nothing of the sort.

So boyfriend or not, that is changing right now.