In da club

Dave's girlfriend Jessica's (note that I'm calling her Jessica and not her real name, Jess, because I wasn't no English major and have no idea if the possessive form of her name is Jess' or Jess's) birthday party last night was downtown at the same club my birthday party two weekends ago was hosted at: Sound-bar. For me personally, the evening was noticeably not as fun as it was for my birthday, and the biggest reason for this is because other than Dave and Jess, I didn't know a single soul there.

Clubs are only fun if you're there with about ten other people you know, because that's the best way to drown out the techno music. Although, judging from the looks of all of Dave's no undershirt, dress-shirt-unbuttoned-down-to-sternum dance buddies that showed up, apparently there are people who like this shit.

Not me. I'm more a Sports bar/Irish pub, beer mug banging kind of guy, and when I take pictures of my friends, I'd prefer that their heads aren't completely covered from the smoke of a fog machine.

But of course, there are birthday parties to be had, which means that once in a while I'll need to enter a club even if I only know two people.

The reason a dance club is not where I'm in my element is because my socializing strengths lie in my quirky sense of humor. I need to be somewhere where people can hear me talk, not where the bass booms so loud that it tickles my nostril hairs. It's hard to be a stud in a looks-come-first atmosphere when there are other dudes armed with waxed eyebrows and Eiffel 65 ringtones. You try impressing a girl at the club by screaming the black penis story into her ears over the loud music, and you tell me how much more successful you are at charming her than someone with glowsticks.

Resigned to a night of social mediocrity, but feeling a little embarrassed about going into the bathroom every two minutes in order to let the time pass, I did what any pathetic fool would do: I walked around the club in circles, over and over and over again. I just kept on looking around, pretending I was looking for my friends. This killed a good thirty minutes of the night. When Dave finally grabbed my arm and asked where I had been for the past half hour, I replied, "Oh! I couldn't find you guys earlier! But here you are. Whew! Glad you found me!"

Another great time-killer -- and I know for a fact that many of you out there use this technique -- is to open up your cellphone and stare at it. This is what I do whenever I arrive too early in meeting up with people at a bar: since I don't want to look like a total loser I will repeatedly open up my cellphone and start up fake conversations with it, while praying silently that my friends come soon. It was funny last night, because I kept punching random numbers into my cellphone as if I was texting someone, and one of Jessica's (Is it Jess'? Or Jess's?) friends looked over my shoulder and asked me why the phone number I was typing in contained 18 digits.

Don't get me wrong. I did try to be a cool dance club guy at one point during the evening. I saw this Indian guy walk up to a girl, singing along to a song, rolling his shoulders up and down with so much style that in even darker lighting I could have mistaked him for a black guy... and she danced with him! So I did the same. I walked up to a girl, made eye contact, and I smiled while pretending I was singing along to Usher -- when I was really just silently flapping my lips -- and then I started rocking my head back and forth and doing the only dance move other than the Electric Slide that I know how to do: wiping the "dirt" off my shoulders. The girl just stood still and looked over my head, scanning the club, pretending that she was looking for her friends.

I ended up staying till a little past midnight, making sure that I could be there for the countdown to Jessica's (someone please tell me what the possessive form of Jess is) real birthday. After walking aimlessly around the club one last time, I gave Jess a hug and asked her if she had a good time.

"Yeah, I had an awesome time! We should come here more often!" she said.

And I said, "Yeah, or maybe we can go to McGee's. Or Timmy O'Tooles. Or ESPN Zone."

And she screamed, "What? I can't hear you."