I thought I might write about my Saturday night to note the contrast between one of my Saturday nights and one of Allen's Saturday nights, in a "How the other half lives" essay. I wouldn't say, I'm entirely different than Allen in terms of he's living it up and I'm not. I do tend to have less people to go out with and usually just go out by myself. There could be a number of things explaining this: I could be a loser, I could not be good at planning things, it could just be luck of the draw, I could have bad and unreliable friends. Although, I'm not closed off to the possibility that I'm a loser, I'm going to blame my living situation (still with my parents) and that Allen is readily in conctact with more people. I notice, he sometimes writes about going over to his neighbors house or partying with his roommate. I too socialize with my neighbors across the street, but it's a family of four whose kids are just hitting puberty at the moment (i.e. the son is starting his own rock band in the garage).
This weekend, I had the goal of arranging with some friends to watch the Final Four games. Why? Well, I just need a certain amount of social contact just like everyone else and I basically called every friend on my cell phone list and no one was available. I spent maybe 2 or 2 1/2 hours trying to arrange this and think of all the friends I had around here who might want to go watch the games with me so it was frustrating. It used to be a lot worse around here. When I took a year off from college, this felt like an empty town and last year, I had a lot of Saturday nights where I couldn't find someone to hang out with when I wanted to. I used to be so frustrated about that: I was pretty popular in high school and each of the two colleges I went to so why would I have so few people on my speed dial? Lately, I don't feel like my social life is that bad. I've reconnected to a number of more people from my past this year and going to grad school part time has given me a little more of social life this year. Since I tend to complain about this a little at home, my family says I should try joining more groups and stuff, but I think I'm doing ok, socially. I just don't have any friends on this particular evening to hang out with.
But whatever, screw my friends, I can just go out by myself and just meet people at the bar. I think after college, I need to set goals for myself more and control those things myself. I generally have categories for these goals: assignments in grad school, miscellaneous, writing, jobs, social, physical/exercise. The social one can be problematic because it depends on other people, and I can't control what they do.
So my plan is to just go to a few bars because I'll probably bump into someone I know. I also bring a few school books because I figure if I don't meet up with anyone and i just stick to myself watching the game, i'll just do some school work. Honestly, I always bring around school work because I never know when I'll feel in the mood to do it. Bringing school work to a bar works on so many levels too, because it usually sparks people's curiosity and becomes a decent conversation starter.
There's a group of three people at the sports bar with an open chair and I'm pretty much engrossed in the game, so I just ask to use the chair. At some point, there's two guys and a girl, and at some point they ask me what I'm doing since I'm going through a book at a bar, which sparks their curiosity, they seem pretty interesting and then they leave. Then two guys are sitting at my table and a little later, two girls ask them, do you mind if we take these seats? Obviously the answer is "do we mind? we're thrilled!" but yeah, they play it off, like we ordinarily don't like girls who show cleavage around, but we'll be charitable tonight. Then the two girls sort of introduce themselves to me but more towards the two guys and they immediately start hitting it off.
So the mathematics of the night are working against me and I'm reminded once again of the consequences of not bringing a wingman along when you go out. I even just pretty boldly ask, do you guys want me to leave, do you need the seat, and they were like no, why would we want you to leave but one of the girls, Erin, says no it's all good, but when we get to the game, we won't be very talkative. None of the girls are particularly attractive anyway and they're all in their early 30s, I think. But yeah, it's nice to talk to girls. I ask Erin, one of the girls, what team she's rooting for, and she says UNC. I tell her I'm leaning towards Kansas but I like all the teams this year. There was some heated discussion about who would win and all. You know, I'm not sure how agreeable you're supposed to be with people to make a good impression. Cause I know you turn off people pretty easily when you dislike things they like but you sound kind of like a zombie if you're like "yeah, that's neat," "great." I'm not really trying to pick up girls, per se. I went on a couple dates with a girl recently and that ended my "Girls don't find me attractive" insecurities.
There is a girl in the bar wearing a Kansas t-shirt who's incredibly hot, however. She's standing up and there are limited seats so I decided to go up to her while I was out of my seat and ask if she was looking for a seat and she and her friend (oh shoot, there are two people, the mathematics work against loners like me once again) were like "yeah, we totally need seats." That's good that I have something they might want. I was eager to kick out the current people sitting at my table if I could but I told them that in a little bit people at my table were clearing out. I asked her if she liked Kansas and told her I picked Kansas to win my pool but I thought UCLA might win it. I think if you sound too agreeable to people it looks like you're just trying to say anything to please them, I don't know. We had some talk about where she's from, I went back to my seat, trying to look out for an opening for those girls.
Anyway, fastfoward to the second game, where Kansas and UNC are playing and Kansas is dismantling UNC and I'm starting to get thrilled at this because wow, Kansas is doing so well. I go over and talk to that Kansas girl once more and say, "yeah, Kansas is winning. They're going to win" and she has two or three male friends from work hanging around her now. One of them is like "What makes you say Kansas is going to win?" I think he wants to see if I am just talking out of my ass just to make conversation with the girl (maybe he wants to get with her too or feels overprotective and doesn't want me around) or maybe he wants some actual sports insight. He seems irritating to me. I think we all just say dumb things at bars and parties all the time to make conversation. When I say "how about that? Kansas is winning, i think they're going to win the game," no I'm not providing expert sports' commentary and analysis, I just want to reenter the coversation, duh. He's an Asian guy that smiles a lot, and I'm going to make a generalization here (as in it surely doesn't apply to everyone) about people from East Asia (Taiwan, Japan, China, and the Korean Peninsula): Asian people are very positive around everybody and extremely affable although slightly less individualistic: There's a lot of historic background and cultural context I can use to explain this but it would take a whole other blog entry to explain. Unfortunately, I'm not like that though and this Asian guy will better be able to maintain at least a friendship with this girl than I will. Anyway, with the pressure of competing with this smiling Asian, I really can't think of anythinig else I can say to this girl in conversation other than "I like Kansas' basketball team," so I go back to my seat a little while longer.
The game's going on for a while, and I don't say too much to the girls as the game's going on. Some more of the girls' friends have arrived. One's a teacher who's kind of interesting to talk to since i was a substitute teacher in her school system. The other guy at our table seems pretty cool too (it was originally 2 guys but one left). They're texting a lot and I ask them if they're texting Roy Williams, the UNC coach, as a tease to the fact that Williams is losing badly. The girls get pissed off. Becuase I badmouthed UNC a little earlier, I try to say that I like both teams. Then they get pissed off a little more down the road when I jump into their conversation, and the girl gets mean and says "Remember, I told you don't talk to us during the game. We're in game mode. I'll get mean" I was trying to say, ok, that's fine, and then I said, I like that you're self-aware of the fact that you're mean during game time. But in response to that line, she got angrier and struck back and was like "DON'T TALK DURING THE GAME." Then she starts talking to her friend, the teacher, and the other guy and said "I didn't want to be mean to him but I told him not to talk to me during the game", blah, blah, blah. I don't think that it was mean for her to explode at me, and I appreciated that she apologized and explained the context in which I was being mean, but what actually was mean was when she talked about me in the third person to her friend and her newfound friend (the other random guy) and how much I annoyed her and how she didn't want to be mean. Then again, maybe I was annoying and/or lack social skills. The problem is, once again, how disadvantaged you are looking for a good social experience when you don't know anybody when you get to the bar. I felt kind of crappy about the whole thing and in an awkward situation. Yeah, I should have just left, wrote it off as a loss and moved on, I wasn't even attracted to the girl anyways who was 8 years older than me, anyways. I really was too lazy to move though, so it was awkward.
I had an idea for trying to make lemons out of lemonade of the situation: I literally wrote Erin a letter. I pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and started writing in cursive too: "Dearest Erin, I am sorry for the inexcusable act of trying to make conversation with you during the game. I hope you'll find it in your heart to forgive me. I was only trying to make conversation but perhaps I'm not very good at it. I must bid farewell, but by for doing so I must confess that I am a Kansas fan and it looks like we're walking away with the game." I thought it was kind of fun and unconventional and made me feel like less of a loser and imagined it might be fairly memorable. One of Erin's friends, Chrissy, noticed I was writing a letter and she was like, "what are you doing?" When I told her what I was doing she said "that's a little wierd," winning her 1st prize in least favorite person I met the entire night. She didn't think I was interesting enough to talk to the whole night before that, so she wasn't clearly interested in me then, she only was on the watch against suspiciously wierd activity (which, to her credit, I guess is something you have to do more at bars than other places, where the vast majority of people there are ultimately trying to find someone to have sex with). I think the point of going out is to try different things on different people and see how they work, hence you gotta do unconventional things or you'll get the same result every time. Besides, why spend your life trying to fit other people's definitions of normal. All I know is writing the letter made me happy and probably made the reader happy, who cares about anything more than that?
It was around that time that I finally bumped into a friend of mine from grad school who's always trying to get poeple in the class to organize and have a good time, so I wasn't a complete loser I had someone to hang out with. I walked away with Shawn, and didn't even stay for the girls' reaction to the letter, which i probably would've wanted to do the most. There was one girl that was moderately attractive at the table, and maybe that would have really impressed them in some way down the road, who knows. Shawn said he was going to D.C. so he was already with his group of friends and I decided not to go but I got his number, which is a major acheivement because Shawn is usually always out and will make future situations like these much more preventable and he's a lot of fun.
I stopped by Mexicali Blues where there's this pretty cool bartender (a cool bartender makes a difference), and I bumped into this girl from high school who i once sort of kind of dated (as we were transitioning from friends to more than friends I started telling my friends and everyone else the news that i was dating her and that kind of echoed back to her and that put things to a halt and then I did something that was kind of a jerk thing to do, but she was pretty cool, she invited me to her graduation party which was a good time) and she was always really cool. I caught up with her but she was on a date with someone else, it was kind of awkward, I was like I should go and she was like "no, I'm not going to kick you out" or something. but why would they keep me around?
She said she was on facebook, so i'll look her up. I couldn't leave the bar because the game was becoming so suspenseful and engrossing though, so I watched for a few minutes, then went across the street to the Clarendon Woodward Grill, I saw an open seat next to a pretty hot girl, so I sat in it, pretty good opening, i asked who she was rooting for, she asked who i was rooting for, that had a couple minutes of really good conversation, her boyfriend came out of the bathroom and picked her up, and she wished me good luck.
At this point, I wasn't trying to order alcohol but just watch the rest of the game because it was so exciting and I felt like sitting at a bar the guy might want me to order something, so I left the bar, went across the street to the Tapas bar, and there was some girl blocking the screen. Also, good news, Kansas went up 7 points in the length it took me to cross the street. The game was so close to the end, that I just tried to look around her.
I thought I might try to go back to the sports bar I started at. Maybe, those girls were there and would be like "haha, we loved your letter, you're a cool guy after all" or i could just rub it in that kansas won.
After the game the place had turned into a dance club and I'm not that comfortable on the dance floor. I think another problem with the club scene for me, at least, is you will get rejected in ways big and small multiple times throughout the night along the way to possibly getting accepted in ways big and small by other girls, and that can hurt if you don't like rejection. I sometimes wish for the old-fashioned days of school dances where you ask the girl to dance and she says yes or no, rather than sidling up to them and reading body language, cause it's good to know if you're grinding on them is being welcomed or going to land you in prison. I spotted the girl on the Kansas t-shirt again, but she was with her group. I could have at least tried to talk to her once more, but didn't know what to say, and I was getting tired. I was thinking that their might be some small reward if I go through the whole process of going to the dance floor and akwardly trying to make my way though it, but it didn't seem worth the effort. I looked at my watch, 11:15 and saw that maybe I could catch that Amy Adams rerun of Saturday Night Live if i went home now. So I brought myself to accept giving up on the night, and took a cab home. The good news, it wasn't an Amy Adams rerun it was a new episode with Chris Walken as the host, and if anyone's seen Chris Walken on Saturday Night Live, that's something not to miss.
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