Anyway, continuing for on for the rest of you...
So [Львица], [The Question] and I went to a "paint party" called Dayglo at a joint called Epic on Friday night. I really had no idea what to expect - I must confess, other than a little trip to the Gay 90s on an empty Thursday night last year, I've never been clubbing. At all.
I'd say this event totally made up for it. I spent half of Friday trying to figure out what to wear. The dress code was supposed to be white shirt, all white if possible, but blue jeans were okay. It's incredible how little white I have in my wardrobe - I actually had to borrow a shirt from [Львица] as all of mine were dress shirts and thus not paintable. The club wasn't strict about the rule but everyone was mostly in white. This was to allow for the full affect of the paint to take hold. See, what happens is everyone gathers on the dance floor and the DJ plays music and, after like an hour and a half of being in the club, you get paint squirted at you, in this weird meshing of several different art forms. It's pretty cool and it was a major life tile experience. Except for one, little tiny problem...
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| See how dedicated I am? Blogging while still covered in paint :D |
Okay, two. Or three. I'm such a schmuck, making something as epic as this sounds grounded in my reality. But you want my take? Here it is. I like dancing - I'm not the best at it, but I do like it. However, I'm not a fan of how in clubs, you never have room to move without being on the edges and then it's just awkward. This was that to the extreme. At the beginning it was totally fine, we had lots of room. Then, as more people came in and pushed forward, we were slowly being squeezed in a vice-like fashion to the front. I escaped to the back for some fresh air, ran into [The Question] and regrouped with [Львица] Then it was back to the dance floor for the same process - more vice-like squeezing, this time with some guy trying to dance with me, which I was cool with at first. DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY DANCED WITH A GUY BEFORE. Unless you would count the uber gay guy who attacked me at a Halloween dance last year. And that was more dancing around each other. I guess I should mention that little fact since I didn't realize it until just now. Well, another life experience made. And what follows is definitely an experience.
This guy starts dancing with me and I'm fine with it until all of the sudden he leans forwards, sniffs my hair or something, then licks the back of my neck. I realize now that, even if he'd been someone I knew, even if I'd know what he looked like, even if I HAD wanted him to do that, I probably still would have been freaked out. I just don't like people touching my neck - unless I really, REALLY trust them. God knows why; I tend to forget until people touch me my neck without asking and then I flip out (like a friend of mine from high school, [uber gay] used to pretend to strangle me - don't ask - and one day I just tweaked out). Great little imbedded phobia there. So, needless to say, having a random stranger repeatedly lick my neck was not cool. I started to push his hands away and then he grabbed on - hard - and tried to do the same thing again. So then I shoved his hands away and tried to flee, positioning myself near [Львица] and [The Question]. That worked at least. Until another guy came along later and aggressively tried to dance with me, but by this time I was sick of people touching me and I moved away. I realize that this is partly due to the fact that "Aunt Flo is visiting" and any touching below the waist is totally unwanted. And I had a really unsettling dream the night before to put that sort of thing in a bad light (I won't make you suffer the details; it was creepy, moving on). But also, there is a difference between putting your hands on my waist and putting your hands on that area where my legs meet my torso (whatever the anatomical word might be). Yeah. So, my feeling that men are pig right now is not totally without reason (obviously not true, but I'm worn a bit thin, so bear with me).
Then the REALLY intense mosh pit began, where I fell and got pulled up by my some very kind girls, got my face squished between two bros' shoulder blades (dude, there were a lot of bros there. There were so many bros that they had to dance with each other, I swear) and lost an earring (the second one in a week. Damn it!) Then I got the weight of at least two quarterbacks forced on me as people swayed backwards and forwards in this... well, mob, basically. A big, sweaty, music-obsessed mob. A big sweaty mob that carried a man dressed as an alien in a plastic ball across the crowd (that was pretty incredible; the ball went right over my head). Then I got splattered with paint - which was SWEET - the wet, gluey-kindergardeny smell of the paint sweeping across my face in bold neon pinks and blues as music thundered in my ears and people cheered. Then I fell over and got crushed by people which was NOT SWEET as I had to scream at them until they got up off of me. But I did get the proud honor of walking through downtown Minneapolis with paint smeared across my face, watching the cops slug a guy who was harassing them, studying the long lines of people filing into clubs and seeing [Львица] get mistaken for Kate Winslet (by a possibly drunk man, but nonetheless, an easy mistake to be made :D). Go to paint parties - people will mistake you as someone famous. It can happen.
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| I fought aliens with Kate Winslet. Win! |
Now my body is aching, I can feel the parts in my back that got twisted in weird directions and had weight forced upon them that I couldn't support. I still smell the faint scent of paint lingering in my nose. It wasn't an AWESOME party - it needed WAY MORE PAINT. And more space. Then it would have been fricken amazing. I did have fun and it was definitely and experience. I guess going to events like that just makes me feel like a freak, because I'm not really into clubbing, I'm not into huge parties. I'm not that sort of college kid, and I guess some people think I'm not really experiencing college if I don't go and do that shit. Well, I went and did it. But it's just not... ME. I totally support the people who can whip out on the dance floor and tear the place up. It isn't that I don't feel secure enough with my body to dance, it's that I don't feel RIGHT dancing there. It's like my body wasn't built for those sort of moves - I don't have super curves, my arms hate getting involved, I'm super short. I'm just stubbornly old school - I like swing, tango, waltz - ballroom dancing. I swear I got time warped out of the 1940s or something. I also don't know how to deal with guys like those at the club. I want guys to take the lead, but not to force their tongue on the back of my neck. At least I'm strong enough to push them away - but how someone could put up with that if they didn't want it is beyond me. It was DISGUSTING - and the dude totally needed to shave. In short, I guess I don't feel like myself there. Which makes me feel bad. [Львица] really likes clubbing and she doesn't know anyone who she'd feel comfortable going with. But I feel like I don't know anyone who doesn't want to go clubbing. That's the "college" thing to do - where girls meet guys, where you stay up on hip pop culture stuff. And by not going to that, I feel like I'm missing out on so much.
But college isn't the same for everyone. It's can't be. We were just talking about in my psychology class how we overestimate things, like how many of our peers drink or how many people do certain things. I suppose the people who go to clubs are just more talkative about it than the people who maybe go swing dancing or just go for a pint at the bar. Or maybe it just sounds more exciting and so the clubbing people are more apt to share it than the people who just had a night dancing to big band. I don't know. All I know is that I shouldn't feel like a freak for having these opinions, and yet I still kind of do. Alas, my own weirdness confounds me. But there were elements to clubbing that I liked - the feeling of the bass reverberating in the toes of my shoes, the synchronous movements as everyone on the dance floor moved in the same way, the appearance that I had just fought aliens as I walked home with paint smeared across my face. There are parts of it there that I like, but too much of it feels... not accessible or understandable to me. But that's culture - there's parts I'll understand, and parts I won't. And the parts that don't fascinate me in their own way.
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