In all honesty, you stand to gain a lot.
We put huge premiums, when dating or seeking new friends, on people who are “cultured.” When setting up an OKCupid account, we know that we don’t want some toothless yokel who dislikes gay people on principle and has never left his hometown. But why don’t we want these things? If we’re being honest, we probably want someone who is able to expand our horizons and possibly teach us—I know, teach?! Us?!? But we’re the smartest people in the world!—something new. We want someone who is full of diverse interests and has filled his spare time with activities both enriching and challenging. Who wants to be with someone who is totally complacent in an unironic Dale from King of the Hill kind of way?
And yet, we often don’t demand this of ourselves. We picture our ideal best friend or significant other, and imagine someone who is able to integrate seamlessly into every gathering, from a pretentious book release party filled with faux intellectuals and professors tenured enough to openly hit on their more attractive pupils, to a round of foosball in a dive bar in which every surface is inexplicably sticky. But are we able to do those things? Most likely the answer is no, even if we would describe ourselves on dating sites or on a first date as “pretty cultured.” No one wants to admit that a vast majority of her free time is spent giggling at the neckbeards on the MRA sections of Reddit and chilling out with their cats—it’s just not sexy.
In order to break the cycle of no one actually doing anything interesting but everyone wanting someone with a little panache, we have to take the first step. And even if your motivation for signing up for that new club is specifically to sleep with higher and higher echelons of society, who cares? You’ll probably eventually get something more enriching or interesting out of the experience. You’ll meet people you would never have met in the dark recesses of a nightclub. And you’ll have something interesting to discuss at the next get-together among friends who are still firmly stuck in their Netflix-and–Chinese food quicksand. But you have to take that first step.
Go online. Find meet-up groups. Ask a friend who is heavily involved in salsa dancing or her adult-education painting classes. Get over your fear of looking ridiculous by acknowledging that everyone looks as ridiculous as you in the beginner class. Invest the little bit of money it takes initially and understand that not every dollar you spend is going to buy something completely tangible. Be your own motivational poster. Become that insufferable asshole at work who is always doing something fun and interesting and meeting new people. You can do it.
Chapter 4
GOING OUT
Or, How to Justify a $12 Cocktail by Screaming “This Is My Song!”
Let’s go out. Are there any three words that simultaneously mean so much and so little as these? If you’re in your twenties, it’s pretty much a guarantee that your friends, potential dates, or significant others are going to be hounding you to “go out” and ostensibly make the most of your evening every single night. Monday, your best friend got an office job, so you have to hit a club. Tuesday, someone got fired, so you have to commiserate over happy hour. Wednesday, everyone is hitting dollar draft nights at that bar that won’t stop playing “These Boots Were Made for Walking” as though that were ever a good song. Thursday has been Thirsty Thursday since you were sixteen goddamn years old. Friday is date night. Saturday night has open bar at that pretentious lounge until eleven. Sunday is for the Bloody Mary brunch that somehow bleeds into early Monday morning. It’s inescapable.
Of course, you can’t say yes to all of these; you would die either of alcohol poisoning or starvation from no longer being able to afford to feed yourself. It’s simply not an option, and even if you’re getting taken out on a date one or two nights a week, it’s not going to offset the cost of dancing in a circle with your friends the nights before and after. It’s simply not an option to do it all at once. And, let’s be honest, we can’t quite go out the way we used to. It’s tough but necessary to admit for a twentysomething that we’re “young” but we’re not “that young,” and constant binge drinking with friends is among the first things to get hacked off that list.
It’s fairly easy to get stuck in the social quicksand of going out every night to drink; it’s an obvious, universally accessible way to get everyone together and hanging out. It also enables everyone to be well-lubricated and capable of engaging in the various shenanigans and hijinks they won’t permit themselves in the unforgiving light of day. And despite the insistence of many bars on charging upwards of $12 per cocktail, it can often be fairly affordable. But even if you’re drinking at someone’s house and therefore spending less on your night out than you would seeing a single movie, it is clearly unhealthy to find yourself constantly drinking every time the clock strikes five.
On the other hand, nights alone with take-out Thai, a rerun of your favorite TV show, and browsing Tumblr for vegan recipes to laugh at aren’t going to be cute seven nights a week, either. Clearly, you need to strike a balance, but no one’s there to tell us where to set the limits. If we listened to our parents, we would never leave the house except to go to work, on bike rides, or to check out a new museum exhibit that doesn’t interest us. If we listened to our “party friends,” we would probably be addicted to crystal meth by now. If we accepted all the invites in our OKCupid inbox, we would become a less appealing version of a Katherine Heigl movie, perpetually rolling our eyes at lame first dates. (And/or we would become those heinous semihumans who literally only accept dates in order to exploit an unsuspecting suitor to get a free dinner, but those people are monsters, and you’re all cool and perfect.) There are many things we could be doing with our social calendar, and even with such pressing options on all sides, the balance can be struck.
As I mentioned before, we face a palpable divide in our twenties between those of us who have “real, big kid” jobs, and those of us who are left bowing at the altars of tips and retail. And though it is pretty clear that the “cool” ones—at least the ones able to look at friends with a subtle mix of pity and disdain at brunches—are the ones with professional jobs, this is one category in which they undoubtedly lose. Though having a professional job may provide you with the kind of disposable income that allows you to frequent clubs and lounges called Love/Hate or the Blue Room, it certainly doesn’t leave you with the ability to sleep afterward. Having to wake up at 7:00 a.m. every morning for a commute, followed by eight hours in meetings and in front of computer screens doesn’t exactly leave you wanting to scream at each other over David Guetta songs at the end of the day. Friends who work in the service industry, however, will be down as a clown to hit the after-hours club directly after their shift, and can do as many lines in the bathroom as they want, because their alarms are set the next day for a robust 4:00 p.m.
Undoubtedly the worst combination of these two is working at a coffee shop. Having done stints at two of them myself, I can say with confidence that not only does it leave you doing a job pretty soundly shit on by society at large, but it also requires you to wake up at 4:00 a.m. to start the morning shift. Why should any human being have to wake up at 4:00 a.m.? It’s the absolute worst in terms of sleep cycles, because it’s not working the night shift, but it’s not quite working the day shift, either, so it completely destroys your day. You get out of work around 2:00 p.m. and it’s as though you’ve awoken after decades of being cryogenically frozen; you’re not sure what time it is, what you are supposed to be doing, or who is even around you. Nothing makes sense. And even if you can adapt to starting your after-work life in the middle of everyone else’s afternoon, it won’t change the brutality of having to deal with people at 5:30 in the morning. If you can, I’d stay away from morning shifts at a coffee shop, as it will only serve to remind you that humanity is often at its cruelest when you are at your most tired.
But I digress.
We’re all at different schedules and levels of income, which means that finding a happy medium that pleases everyone when it comes to going out
is a battle in and of itself. You’re sure to have half your friends talking about how “This shit is so expensive” at literally any establishment you could go to, even if they only drink cans of domestic. The other half is always offering to go to these lavish parties on weekends that are hosted by a magazine, website, or what appears to be a high-class escort service. The fact that these people are often friends may be astonishing, and it’s likely they’ll stop speaking to each other entirely by thirty, but for now it makes for some tough weekends. The three options—dive bar, club, and house party—seem to each make less sense than the last when it comes to “having fun,” but these are our options as they stand.
The House Party: Are We Supposed to Be Sitting Down?
When you’re nineteen, a house party is exactly what it sounds like. You’re in a structure with four walls, you have no idea who owns it, and everyone is drinking out of red cups. No one brings anything to offer the host, people might steal an iPod, and you can be sure horrendous pictures of you will surface the next morning. There is no shame in walking upstairs into someone’s parents’ bedroom and having drunk sex with a guy who is studying anthropology and wants to work as a “community organizer.” You can just start dancing on the kitchen counter if things are getting boring. You’ll meet about a hundred people, twenty of whom you’ll add on Facebook the next day, eighty of whom you’ll forget forty-six seconds after learning their name. It’s a sordid affair, to be sure, but it’s quaint in its honesty. “We’re here to get drunk. Let’s not make this any more complicated than it needs to be.”
But as we make it reluctantly into our twenties, the entire idea of a house party and what it should entail becomes increasingly fuzzy. We all have a vague image in our minds about what “adults” do when they gather for an evening among friends, and we all have the same nagging sense that we are, more or less, “adults.” We have an inchoate fear that everyone else our age is inviting friends over for a refined evening of witty banter and intellectual debate around a mahogany table in a well-decorated dining room as they sip Chianti and laugh with smug satisfaction. There may even be cigars and brandy in the library, if the conversation turns political. They also probably share tips on how to best manage your railroad empire and clean your monocle. These savvy twentysomethings all know how to make an incredible Beef Wellington and tap-dance out of their kitchen as they serve it, laughing and smiling about how well-adjusted they are and how just incredibly together their shit is.
That is the dinner party of an adult, and, judging by how much of your furniture is still hand-me-down IKEA, you are not yet one yourself. But there is a grating knowledge that the “anything goes”–style Roman orgy that house parties used to be are just not okay anymore. So what do you do when there simply isn’t the square footage or kitchen appliances to host a real dinner event? We have these awkward, in-between affairs in which we kind of sit or stand in circles and kind of discuss things as we sip various drinks out of a mix of actual stemware and plastic cups. The topics of conversation and location are rather adult—you all have jobs to discuss and the apartment is at least marginally well-decorated—but you are still not quite grown-ups yet. It sort of feels as if you’re a little kid again, scooting around the house in your parents’ clothes and shoes. All the elements are there, but nothing quite fits.
Though the party may turn into something halfway decent by the 2:00 a.m. mark, when you’ve long since switched from Pinot Noir to Jäger shots, the process of getting there involves repeating the question, “So, what do you do?” over and over again, as you awkwardly stand against the kitchen counter. It all has the defeated feeling of the progressive, inevitable slide we’re all taking to having dinners with friends that end at a reasonable 11:00 p.m. and are followed by conversations in the sedan on the way home about how nice the brisket was.
You might come across the rare house party among good friends in their twenties that just feels as warm and broken-in as an old pair of jeans, one that doesn’t require the pretense of putting out the best snack trays and taking people’s coats to prove that you’re a big girl now, and those are wonderful, but they become increasingly few and far between. Whether because of geographical distance, or the fact that some of your friends have upped and started getting married/having kids, there are a million reasons why the easy and fun house party starts to dwindle down as you get older. Most of the parties in which the crowd is unfamiliar and the conversation is 80 percent introductions are all going to fall into this same kind of stilted rhythm, leaving the house party a dubious choice at best.
The Dive Bar: I Don’t Know What I Stepped in, But It Was Wet
I’ll be honest—I’m not a big fan of the dive bar. I know that for many of you, the idea of someone not liking a place covered with peanut shells and bartenders that scream at you if you don’t order clearly enough is nothing short of blasphemy, but bear with me. I’m not as high-maintenance as you might think, and my dislike for dive bars certainly doesn’t come from its more-than-fair price points. I don’t need to go somewhere fancy to feel as if I’m not accidentally mixing with the paupers. I just find that, in general, the ambience of dive bars is that of “Let’s strip this place of any and all charm so that people have no reason to pace themselves when getting completely shitfaced.”
From the old guy leering by the jukebox (that will only ever play Springsteen, as if by divine mandate), to the women who crowd the ½-square-inch of bathroom mirror that’s not yet covered with graffiti to fix their clown makeup, to every surface being dirty, wet, or some unsettling combination of the two—I just don’t like it. Add to this the fact that I consistently feel the need to “dress up” when I go out—for myself more than anyone else—and I’m usually left wearing a cardigan and knee-length dress in the middle of a sweaty dance floor at midnight, and it’s just really not my scene.
That being said, I am also profoundly cheap, as are many of my friends. Because of this—our near-allergic aversion to paying more than $5 a cocktail—I often find myself in such environments every single week. And I must say that, in all seriousness, the honesty and affordability of said bars are much appreciated, even if the aesthetic isn’t exactly mine. Especially for a group of friends who are, shall we say, diverse on the income spectrum, it presents the best combination of being able to get vomit-y drunk and still not feel as if you’re putting anyone out. Provided, of course, that you manage to grab a table early, watch over your belongings like a hawk, and stab your way to the front of the line at the bar/bathrooms, you can have yourself an incredible night.
Unfortunately, though, the entire concept of a dive bar has started to change its form in big cities, notably in cultural hot spots. What was once charming because of the owner’s complete lack of care for the upkeep of the establishment has now become a symbol of cool disaffection. It used to be kind of fun reading the various graffiti argue with each other in the bathroom stall as you pitied the girl next to you heaving what was clearly three days’ worth of food into her toilet, given that the drinks you would get when you left the bathroom would be a third the price of anywhere else. Now, “cool” bars that strive for some kind of “youthful, carefree”—let’s be honest, “hipster”—appeal leave their building in the same state of disarray, but continue to charge $10 for a gin and tonic. The dive bar aesthetic—or rather, its distinct lack of one—has been co-opted and transformed into just another strain of douche.
It’s arguable that the faux-dive is the worst choice you can make when hitting the town. It generally turns out to be the worst of all worlds between the outrageous prices, the crowd of twenty-five-year-old guys named Noah who are DJ/graphic designers, and the ambience that, even though this place isn’t actually supposed to be cool, you’re still not cool enough for it. The faux-dive is the bastion of the false, affected hipster aesthetic and—despite this word being generally overused into meaninglessness—represents all that is terrible about the idea.
While a genuine dive bar is not that hard to
find if you really scour a city or a smaller town—and the prices will still be more than reasonable—it’s getting to be a much rarer find. Neighborhoods are gentrified into oblivion if you leave them alone for more than ten minutes, and what was once a cool place to get stepped on while you screamed over $2 well drinks is now a place that you still have to walk through an underground cave to get to, but will now be filled with all the people you try to avoid when you’re working at the coffee shop.
It seems that the dive bar is a quickly fading option.
The Club/Lounge: Hey, Girl, Wanna Sit at Our Table?
Has there ever been a double-edged sword quite as sharp as a hot lounge on a Friday night? It’s this sort of ethereal place where the people are good-looking, the drinks have sentence-long names, and the lights are ice blue or brothel red—never in between. And yet, despite all its attention to aesthetic and cool, there are few places that make you feel like more of a loser when you’re there. At some point when you’re in a club—usually when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the austere bathroom mirror in your most painfully conjured-up outfit—you always think to yourself, “What the hell am I doing here? I clearly don’t belong here.” If you are capable of fully enjoying an evening out at a club without ever once considering what the spiritual and intellectual implications of your coming there were, I don’t think we could ever be friends. You must think far too highly of yourself for me to even think about talking to you.
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