Girl and City

Friday night. DG and I are sitting across from each other in a booth at a hot new strip-club-turned-dance-club, the It spot of the moment. I’m swirling a glass of wine and she’s nursing a vodka tonic. Everything is awash in a crimson red. The place is nearly empty, the crowd has yet to arrive. The stripper pole looks both enticing and intimidating next to the empty dance floor.

…

“I got a feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good night
That tonight’s gonna be a good night
That tonight’s gonna be a good, good night”
DG and I are now in the middle of the dance floor, shaking and moving to the rhythm. We both have huge grins on our faces, drunk and happy. We sing along to this familiar song, knowing they’ll ring true tonight.

…

She grabs my hand and pulls me up to the platform. We dance around each other, as if we’re the only two people in the club. I’m oblivious to the two guys coming up behind us. Before I know it, she’s pulling me off the platform and pushing through the crowd. I look behind me just before we disappear into the crowd, the guys are looking embarrassed and their friends are laughing.

…

We laugh as we run away, returning to our spot in the middle of the dance floor. After a few minutes, I see a guy trying to dance with her from behind, so I put my hand around her shoulders and spin her to a different position. She sees a guy coming up behind me, and spins me away as well. Both guys leave feeling confused and rejected. We laugh. Tonight was going to be about just us girls.

…

On the way out of the bathroom, we run into a friend of mine, who had just arrived with some other people I partied with in first-year. We start dancing with them, our dancing duo now turning into a trio. The third girl, MG, spots a recently vacated stripper pole and points to it. I shrug my shoulders and we get up there, knowing that the rest of our friends are watching us. But when Lady Gaga comes on, all is forgotten and we just dance.

“I want your love and I want your revenge, you and me could write a bad romance.”

…

The three of us are dancing in the middle of a circle that our friends have formed around us. I feel a hand on my waist and a solid chest against my back, the faint smell of aftershave hovering above me. I throw my arm up in the middle of the song and accidentally hit the side of his head. “Sorry!” I gasp, as I turn around. I look up to see a tall Asian boy, one of MG‘s friends that I’d met once. I remember him to be good-looking, but tonight he is smoldering hot. DG winks at me and moves away with MG. TDH places his hand firmly on the small of my back and I melt into him, our bodies moving in sync to the music.

…

DG and I are waiting in-line at coat check, our faces gleaming with perspiration.
“Tonight was awesome,” DG says emphatically, her eyes shining. “This was the best clubbing night I’ve ever had!”
My expression mirrors hers as I nod. “Yeah, this was amazing. Girls night out at its best. I danced so much!”
“And did you see who you were dancing with? For an Asian guy, he was hot!”
I giggle, “I know, I couldn’t believe it when I turned around and it was him. Especially because we were dancing with all our friends, I didn’t think he would single me out.”
“That’s what makes it even hotter,” DG says with a twinkle in her eye.
As we exit the club, I say to no one in particular, “Tonight was a good, good night.” And I mean it.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me. It seems like I keep going clubbing these days, even though (I thought) I was over that scene.

More importantly, I get unimaginably bad hangovers now, and each time, I swear I’m never going to drink again – it’s that bad – and then, a week later, I find myself at another pre-drink. What is up?

I think somewhere between October and now, I realized that I have more sex appeal than I used to. I mean, I used to be more desperate and naive¹, and while that might be appealing to some (har har), now, I am an older, more confident version of myself. I’m also ten pounds heavier, but surprisingly, that hasn’t stopped guys from hitting on me.
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1. Sad, but true. It was especially bad in first year because I was so curious to explore this “party world” and I was getting over MFL. [↩]

Last Friday, I had two first-round interviews, both with firms I wanted to work for. The night before, I tossed and turned in my bed until 4am, finally fell asleep in front of the TV at around 6am, and woke up at 8am.

Even though I was functioning on two hours of sleep, I could not have been more awake. I did not have a drop of coffee the whole day.

After the two interviews, I spent the rest of the weekend worrying whether I would get a call for a second-round interview. On Friday night, I went out with some girls for Zee’s birthday. I hardly enjoyed myself as I was constantly checking my phone. Eventually, my friends made me take some shots with them so I would loosen up. By midnight, I was so drunk I couldn’t see straight, partly because I needed to shake off the stress of interview week and partly because I hadn’t drank in months and therefore my alcohol tolerance was nil. We picked up tons of guys that night, which is something I haven’t done since first-year. In first-year, I would have been flattered by the attention. It would have been a novelty to have a guy hit on me, buy me drinks, and want to dance with me all night. Now, I was indifferent to it. Even when I was dancing with a guy who looked like Justin Timberlake, all I could think about was my couch at home. I extracted myself soon thereafter and hopped in a cab, without even bothering to find my friends (I was sure they were each grinding some guy though).
On Saturday, I nursed my hangover while nervously waiting by the phone. On Sunday, I worked most of the day and wondered whether my phone was broken.

Today, I got a call saying I didn’t get a second-round interview. Fuckers.

—
EDIT: I just got a call from my second interview on Friday and I GOT A SECOND-ROUND INTERVIEW! In NEW YORK CITY!! Fuck yeah.
I had figured that since I hadn’t heard from them in so long (usually they get back to you within 10 hours of the interview), I was definitely not moving on to the final interview. The likelihood of a second-round decreases exponentially with the number of hours you have to wait. Well I waited FOUR AND A HALF DAYS but it all worked out. Three second-rounds out of six first-round interviews? That’s a pretty sweet ratio.

It recently occurred to me that if I put all my stories together and tied it up with a neat little theme and some subtle psychological character analysis, I’d have a damn good book on my hands.
I thought after this weekend, I’d have another excellent chick-lit-esque story for you, involving beautiful shoes, good wine, and mysterious men. While I do have a story that contains all of that, it also contains another rather serious and disturbing portion, which makes it difficult for me to recount with my usual dose of humour. But we’ll see how it goes.

Traveling is never my favourite part of these stories, because it’s hard to recreate the anticipation of an event after the event has already occurred. So I’ll skip over the part where I woke up at six am in order to catch a bus to the train station only to realize the bus was never going to come and then selling an organ and a limb in order to pay the taxi fare to the train station and then being literally one second late for the train I was supposed to go on. Skip all that and fast-forward to when I finally arrive in The City.
I was picked up from the subway station by WAF, WAF‘s boyfriend, who I will now call SubduedRageBoy (this will make sense later), and their friend, PotentiallyGayBoy. and whisked away to lunch. In the car, I changed into my new stilettos and used lunch as an opportunity to practice walking in them.
The food itself was not impressive, but the four of us had a good talk over lunch. PGB and I realized we had a lot in common, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we strongly suspect him of pitching for the other team, we probably would have made a really cute couple. Still, I can always use a gay friend; they’re usually the loveliest anyway.
After lunch we went back to SRB‘s house mansion and I started drinking. We still had a lot of alcohol left over from last weekend and I was determined to at least make a dent in the stash. Meanwhile, SRB and PGB were looking up hotels and planning our getaway to Montreal in two weeks time. Somewhere between my first and second glass of wine, I had donned a pair of rose-tinted glasses and felt as if the world was spinning with me at its center, that everything was right and perfect and everyone was lovely and sweet.
The rest of the afternoon seemed to pass at lightning speed (doesn’t it always when you’re drunk having a good time?). I must have been more buzzed than I thought because I almost sprained my ankle trying on WAF‘s heels and then laid down on the marble floor in SRB‘s foyer and pretended to swim. WAF reminded me that we were supposed to go shopping before meeting the girls for dinner, so I tried to sober up. But it was a long and difficult ordeal.

Finally, finally, when I was sober enough to walk on my own, WAF and I changed into our evening gowns cocktail dresses and headed downtown¹. We went to Forever21 and H&M and only ended up buying accessories, then clicked down the street in our heels toward dinner.
The restaurant we were meeting at was famous for their wine list, which was why I had picked it. The girls I’d invited were all chronically late, always, so I had figured we could just hang out at the bar and drink wine until everyone arrived. Unfortunately, the bar was closed (on a Saturday?!?! Do they not want business?), but fortunately, all my friends arrived relatively on time²! We ordered a bottle of wine, had an excellent dinner, and discussed politics and world issues school and boys and our futures as the most powerful women in the world.
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1. We got a lot of stares on the subway and on the streets. Clearly we were over-dressed for shopping. Maybe they thought we were escorts? [↩]
2. Except SSS who arrived dripping and cursing because she got lost and it was pouring outside and she didn’t have an umbrella, the poor thing. [↩]

First-year for me was a year of partying four times a week, drinking way too much vodka, kissing boys I’d just met, coming back to my dorm at 4am and then falling asleep outside my door because I was too drunk to fit the key into the keyhole. And I’d wake up feeling sick and hurting all over and I wouldn’t know what to do except run to the washroom and wait until it passes. And I’d swear to myself that I’d never drink again. Sometimes, by the time I’m done, it’s too late to even bother going to bed (if I actually wanted to make my 8:30 morning class) so I’d just go down to the caf and have a long breakfast with Zee, debriefing each other on the night’s events before dragging ourselves to class.
And then we’d do it all over again.

I didn’t really have a problem with this party-girl that had somehow appeared within me. As far as first-year university goes, this was the norm. But deep down, there was always a small voice saying – this isn’t you. You don’t wear makeup and show too much skin and click around in fuck-me heels. You don’t drink until you can’t see straight and you don’t make out with strangers.

Sometimes, in the middle of kissing some random boy whose name I don’t remember, or never bothered to ask, I’d pull back and look around. What am I doing here? How did I end up here? And who is this guy? He’s probably not going to call tomorrow, or ever. He’s probably not going to remember my name or what I looked like or even the fact that he kissed me. And then I’d push him away without a word, because there’s no tenderness in his kisses and no warmth in his arms.
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