cwphoto:

Last night, I went to a bar in town with Tim and an old friend.  The intention was to go play a couple games of pool and maybe watch some drunk people fight each other.  Instead, I noticed this cute girl at the bar and decided to drink there.
On Halloween, Tim and I helped the bartender up to her apartment.  She lives in the same complex that I do and was really drunk.  Because of this, every time I ordered a shot of something, she’d bring me a full glass and fill it to the top.  While Tim and Stephan played pool, I was getting alcohol poisoning.  The bartender and I talked about art, music, and philosophy just loud enough that the cute girl at the bar could hear and occasionally laugh at the shit I was saying.  I didn’t want to come off as some dude that just wanted to fuck her, so I played it as cool as I could and just occasionally locked eyes with her.  At this point of drunkenness, I thought I would wind up talking to the girl.  After all, she had an over-sized Andy Warhol purse, was covered in colorful tattoos and acknowledged me when I talked about semi-obscure indie bands like Margot and the Nuclear So-and-So’s and Grizzy Bear.
At the far left end of the bar were these two douchebags in baseball jerseys.  They kept prying me from my conversation to tell me how big of a faggot I was; how my dad’s hair was stupid and how I looked like I was strung out.  I laughed them off and refused to become the dude that I originally came to make fun of.  The best way to handle a situation like this is to just pretend you are too above them to acknowledge their testosterone.  When they made fun of me, I would laugh and raise my glass.  I told one dude to shut the fuck up, but he was considerably smaller than me and I was pretty sure he was bluffing about trying to fight me.  He was; and he did.
This is where a strange dichotomy was created.  By this time, I was hammered, and Stephan and Tim were at the bar talking about film-making with me.  We were on the far right-end of the bar, not paying attention to the sportscast on the TV and drinking effeminate-looking mixed drinks.  On the left side of the bar were these two dudes congratulating each other on how loud the other one burped.  They had on identical jerseys and talked about their glory days of high-school football.  In the center was the cute girl I was almost drunk enough to talk to.
By the time our conversation about film-making was over, I noticed the girl migrated to the table of douchebags.  I was immediately disheartened, obviously, but I was also surprised at how much the situation reminded me of high school.
Stephan told me that I just didn’t know what I was doing yet.  He told me that bar culture was different than regular culture and my only issue was that the douchebags talked to her before I did.  He assured me that if I tried to spark a conversation, I’d be in their shoes. 
I stared at the ice in my glass before realizing that I had already lost interest in the cute girl at the bar.  I tried explaining to Stephan that the girl weaved in and out of conversations about art, at the same time weaving through conversations of flatulence and baseball, eventually deciding that she was more interested in the testosterone twins.  She may have been drunk, fine, but that one move defined a personality trait.  Some women are just into assholes. 
He didn’t get it.  He told me I should have still tried to fuck her.

I just wanted to flirt with her.
Maybe the world really is just high-school.

Fuck.