Last month I finally reached that long-awaited milestone, my 21st birthday. In America, the 21st birthday is pretty much the last good birthday, the last one where you can say, "I gained something on this birthday apart from more years and more wrinkles!" OK, that might be overstating things: All birthdays bring fun things like more experience and new memories, but come on, that hardly stacks up against being able to legally buy alcohol.
Leading up to my birthday all of my friends were in a frenzy of planning and helping me decide how to celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime event. Unfortunately, having your 21st on a Wednesday when you have a quiz at 9 a.m. the next day is not very conducive to a raging night of revelry. Long story short, for my 21st birthday my friends and I had a nice long dinner with no partying at all. Scandal of scandals, I was not terribly disappointed.
No one is ever going to call me a party animal; quite possibly I am legitimately a little light on the fun scale. I like quiet evenings with a controlled noise level and plenty of personal space. I am enough of a control freak with a tendency towards clumsiness that being really drunk kind of terrifies me. If my last column was about how I am secretly like a 5-year-old when it comes to eating, this one is about how I am secretly like an 80-year-old when it comes to just about everything else. I haven't bought a humidifier for my room yet, but who's to say I won't when winter rolls around.
The upshot of my apathy toward going out and having fun is that I didn't actually end up going out to bars until last weekend, nearly a month after I turned 21. Shameful, I know. So after some studied passive resistance, I clocked a new life experience.
The first thing I learned about going to bars is that apparently, and I am still a little skeptical about this, they don't get fun until after 11:30. If this is true, I am never going to get along with bars because having to plan a preemptive nap is just embarrassing. I also learned that letting even your most benevolent friend choose a drink for you without providing any preference specifications leads to struggling to sip what very well might have been a potent mix of antifreeze and Drano.
Possibly the most educational part of the night was the bar with the dance floor. There I learned the oh so important lesson that dance floors and I do not mix. It's like oil and water, but with embarrassment instead of salad dressing. Even as we walked up the stairs I could feel the weight of dread pressing upon my chest (though it turned out that it was actually just the feeling of the bass beat in my sternum). As we stepped into the crush of humanity inhabiting a stunningly small geographical area, I tried to flinch away from the contact on all sides. Bar dance floors are very detrimental to maintaining a personal bubble, especially since it turns out that one person can only flinch in three directions at once, maximum. The sound waves of the incredibly loud music combined in a stunning example of destructive interference with my brain waves and the multiple strobe lights made me thank my lucky stars I was not an epileptic. Now, add to this picture a tall, gangly girl attempting to dance without really having much success and you will have a complete picture. Extra points if you can also manage to envision my fellow misanthropic friend and me shouting, and not hearing, creative complaints at each other. When we finally dodged and weaved our way out of the bar, I heard the glorious sound of boring freedom prevail over the ringing in my ears.
So, as I'm sure you can gather, that bar experience was not for me. I know that some people love it, and honestly I'm a bit jealous of those people. They go out and have fun letting loose. I went, I saw and I was conquered. Maybe one day I will be able to appreciate the bar culture, especially if I move to a town full of older people or perhaps to a different country. For now, however, I am either not mature enough or too internally elderly to really get into it.
Alex's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at a.davis@cavalierdaily.com.
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