I was a different person back then

Please don't ever make me go clubbing again.

Photo by A J. on Unsplash| Do not want.

I used to go clubbing in my early to mid 20’s. People who I’ve befriended later in life (or even during, honestly) have found this fact to be dubious at best, as everything about me, from my entire personality to the way I dress to the fact that I am often the most introverted person they know- and when they ask me what I did over the weekend and every time I go, ’nothing,’ with zero elaboration¹, do not paint me as someone who has willingly gone clubbing more than once.

On one hand, I’m glad I did because a few of those times it was kinda fun and interesting; many moments where I’d be like, ‘Wow, now that’s a story!’ (It wasn’t.) The other times I faced it as some societal duty: this is what my friends wanted to do, and due to my extreme FOMO and need to fit in, so shall I. However, it will be on them to direct me on how to do my makeup, because to this day I’m still unsure of how that all works.

I even used to have club outfits. At the time, it was really easy: the nice pair of jeans, a ‘going out top’ purchased for 8 - 15 bucks at a Forever 21 that we literally bought that day, big earrings and either a chunky necklace or a multiple long dainty chains of varying length. Also heels or wedges, which were often the part I spent dreading the most. This was the late 2000’s so trust me, I looked the part when I had to; I even used to get my hair chemically straightened at that time. You wouldn’t be able to pick me out of the crowd.

To be honest, the most amount of fun I had was when I managed to find the perfect amount of alcohol consumed within a specific time frame- very rarely did I achieve that exact moment where I was feeling great, loving my friends and not being self conscious on the dance floor. These moments only really lasted like 15 minutes, tops, and often very dependent on the company I was with and the standards of the club.

If the music sucked? Bad time. If my friends were causing drama or we had that one girl who did not know when to stop drinking? Bad time. If I got almost completely sober waiting for my friends to be done and I became aware enough that my feet hurt and I was disgusting and sweaty and I suddenly felt very awkward being there? Bad time. If an offensively aggressive dude hit on me? Bad time. If nobody hit on me? Bad time.

I’ll just accept that my time spent was just… time spent. I think I was on the more fortunate side that my friends did not go off with random dudes and disappear into the night for dubious hook ups and one night stands, so I got to miss out on that drama and danger. We stuck with each other; we entered together, we left together, oftentimes we all went to the bathroom together- I sometimes wondered how common hooking up actually was or if we were the prudish outliers. The rules changed of course, when boyfriends were included, but that had little to do with me.

One of the most tiresome ‘I’m too old for this shit’ times: in Las Vegas, for a bachelorette party. The club was mostly outside but the music was still pounding, the dry desert and lack of humidity wreaking havoc on my contacts and ability to blink. While the bride-to-be got plastered and had to be yanked away from the swimming pools to keep her from falling in (she may or may not have ended up taking a running jump into one later), another friend chatted with an attractive guy while his not-as-hot friend got stuck wingman-ing for him, thereby ending up standing around with me. It was a little insulting, the way he was very clear in that he was simply doing his duty as a bro, entertaining me, the leftover, something he definitely wouldn’t have chosen to do himself.

So I decided to entertain myself by pretending not to know what Cornell was (his alma mater) and watching him get more and more agitated as his attempted bragging was kneecapped. “Wait, Cornell is real? I thought they invented it for that show, The Office,” I’d said, playing dumb. “Are you sure it’s an Ivy League?” He already thought so low of me. I think I called him Andy Bernard to his face.

He was doomed to have a bad time the second he opened his mouth at me. You’re welcome.

And then a little bit later, at a different club, we got kicked out. I don’t remember how or why, but the girl I got stuck being wingman-ed for, got very belligerent and may have started antagonizing the bouncers, who probably told her something very rational like, “Hey, don’t throw your drink at people,” so she responded with throwing the entire glass and then we, as a group, were told to leave. She threw up a double handed middle finger salute as we were corralled towards the exit, as if she got in the last word.

Then, to top off the night, the bride’s token gay bff slipped away and played blackjack and lost $400 dollars in 7.534 seconds on our way back to the room.

So, a standard Vegas weekend.

Surprisingly, one of the best? Another bachelorette party, this time with my old high school friends, a totally different crowd and type of people, and I think that made all the difference. We partied at a VIP table, cordoned off from the rest of the crowd, at a venue a few blocks south of Washington Square Park in NYC, where an 80’s cover band absolutely blew me away (I was usually a hip hop person at the time). I didn’t care that because of the rain, there were no cabs, that I limped home to Chinatown in my 4 inch heels; it was that much fun.

My most medium of times? I dunno, every other time? Once, on my birthday I was like, sure, this is what people do, and we went to this lounge in the Lower East Side and it was the definition of mediocre… A guy came up to us and pushed a drink into one of our hands and was like, “I got this for you!” Which we left on a table because what the fuck? It may have been the worst attempt at roophie-ing one of us or some poor earnest dude who’s never been to a bar or interacted with a girl before and was just trying his best.

I’m not knocking on the whole experience though; it’s simply not for me, especially now that I’m much older. I don’t regret any of it, but if you try to drag me to one today, I will physically fight you.

1. Or I could go into a monologue about, I dunno, re-potting my plants that would make Steve Carell’s character’s rambling explanation of his journey in making egg salad in the The 40 Year Old Virgin movie sound interesting af.