The Nightclub Issue

I feel I have blogged excessively over the past month despite in September thinking I had given up, but this issue persists too much not to write about. I briefly talked about hating nightclubs in Sydney where people go out with the sole intention of groping backpackers, but at least that was a cultural experience. At university, I still hate nightclubs. If they were all unexpectedly shut down tomorrow, I'd be wandering amidst all the protest riots saying "Oh well, never mind, why don't we just go to a nice pub?"

It's currently twenty past five in the morning and I had the lovely experience of fleeing the university nightclub at half one, by myself, in order to escape from Gropey 'Would you like to come back to my room' McInappropriatetouching. I was under the impression that I was generally feeling all right until I got to my room and cried out all the vodka. The thing is, it wasn't actually Gropey himself who upset me, it was the fact that I feel like I'm in the 0.5% of people who would not like to go back to his room because I don't actually know him. That's the problem with nightclubs, you don't actually know anyone except for the people you arrive with, because (mostly) everyone looks and dances exactly the same. Which is not to say that I never enjoy myself; if I'm with nice people and there's no expectation of groping and it's one of the rare occasions when I actually like the song then I have a good time. Except I had a better time last week, when I was in a slightly quieter bar and one of my friends suggested that we left at eleven, bought ice-cream, and sat in the corridor in our pyjamas watching Pulp Fiction.

Really, nightclubs combine a selection of the things that I hate: annoying, repetitive music which seems to be from an album called 'Songs to play in nightclubs about being in a nightclub,' people who make me feel like a Jane Austen character for thinking that emotional intimacy should, in an ideal world, come before physical intimacy, and pretending that I can dance.

I am, reassuringly, absolutely fine because just before escaping the nightclub I managed to find Catie and screamed in her ear (not because I'm rude, but because that's the only way to communicate) that I was leaving and the reason why, so no-one thinks I am a) passed out in a corner somewhere, or b) With Gropey McInappropriateTouching.

One day, hopefully, I will be thirty and nobody will ever expect me to go clubbing. That applies to both nightclubs and clubbing seals. Which is also bad.