A very bad one-night stand

Let me tell you one little thing I’ve learned about one-night stands: If you want one bad enough — and you don’t have three eyes or a cleft lip — you can make it happen. I consider them some form of recreational drug I can’t say I take often, or even seldom, but when I do, it just feels groping around in a college dorm room all over again.

Guys in bars pretty much go to said bars to graze, horny beasts in white striped shirts that smell of Burberry or Sean John. And, oops, girls in bars are probably there to play the boyfriend game. It’s almost a cruel trick of nature: Thanks to loose morals, text messaging and a total lack of social navigation skills in this new world, we’re all in the same place wanting different things out of the night. I’m not saying all girls want to find a boyfriend when they go out, but I really rarely hear one of my friends say, ‘I just want to find a piece of ass.’ And they’re pretty slutty.

As a girl who is somewhere in between a boyfriend hunter and an ethical slut, I like to be in my ’sweet spot’ when out drinking. I like to be witty, charming and cute … hopefully just a mildly more confident version of the person I am while sober. I do not like to be bombed, drunk dialing my parents and dropping my cell phone in the toilet … it just doesn’t send out a ‘take me home to Mom!!!!’ vibe.

But that’s what usually happens. And that’s when the trouble begins.

I end up in strip clubs or in the lairs of 30-year-old men with aquariums in their living rooms. I end up spilling into cabs with my friends, accompanied by strangers whose names we repeat over and over in order not to call them something ridiculously off the mark. I end up around drugs and bad people, strippers and cheating husbands. The world of drunks is marked by one sick culture, but it’s a very happening social calendar.

The last one night stand I hopefully ever have saw me being horribly, horribly cruel. If the worse thing you can do to a man is damage his pride while he’s trying to seduce you, well, I gutted him from nose to navel:

Me: Okay! I’m bored
Strange Ass: What?!
Me: I’m bored. I don’t want to do this. You’re jackhammering.
Strange Ass: WHAT?! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST SAID THAT!
Me: I’m sorry. What was I supposed to do? Just lie there?
Strange Ass: Oh … well, I guess you have a point. At least you spoke up …
Me: Yup. Sorry. Night!

The gods are merciful. When I woke up, my conquest was long gone.

What I’m trying to say is that over the years, the drinking culture has somewhat impossibly shot my standards up. It’s just that feeling of having done this all before, and when you can take sex with people you don’t like or respect at face value, it’s pretty much worth nothing at all.

But don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel one way or the other when I hear about my friends notching up their bedposts, because I know once upon a time that was me. And who says, one night, it won’t still be me? Eh, passing judgment in these situations is silly. What bothers me, I guess, is the seemingly universal feeling that girls shouldn’t do what a lot of us do all the time, i.e. get it on with no strings attached.

And if I do end up, again, in a situation where I hook up with someone I don’t know that well or respect (and I probably will), whatever. They only have to last one night.

Coldplay giving away song!

Coldplay is going the route of other culturally-savvy bands (Radiohead, for one) and offering a free download of the song “Violet 4:11″ from their upcoming CD, “Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends.” Download time begins from the Coldplay site at 12:15 p.m. Londontown time … which means 7:15 a.m. for us Eastern-timers. The single will be available for one week, and “Viva” drops June 12.

I can’t wait.

A girl walks into a bar.

About five years ago, I got my first fake ID. I was 18 and it was three days after starting college in Chicago. I paid 50 bucks to this random stranger in another dorm, and he made me and three friends absolutely atrocious Michigan IDs on his bubble-jet printer. The lamination peeled up around the edges and the ink was so faded you could barely make out the features on our faces.

But here’s the thing: they worked everywhere we tried to use them. Chalk it up to being a girl, with girl friends, walking into a bar.

So since then, I’ve been in probably about seven thousand bars. I don’t know what it is about the city of Chicago, but I swear it must be the most boozer-friendly town in our great nation … you can’t trip and fall without landing in an establishment that stays open until 4 a.m. for your drinking convenience. Thanks to this fact, I’ve told insanely personal things to strangers, kissed even more of them and, sadly, woken up in horror next to a select few.

I’ve wondered lots of times what, exactly, the appeal of a bar is. But I suppose it’s pretty obvious: Close up a bunch of frustrated, emotionally-stunted people up in a room, give them cups full of colorful liquid and watch the sparks fly. What’s not to love? I suppose bars let us do and say things we can’t anywhere else — when was the last time you groped a stranger in the supermarket check out line? — and I suppose bars are just things to do when we’re too lazy to try to be interesting. Instead of planning a dinner party or bowling outing, why not get drunk and burn your mouth on frozen pizza at four in the morning, while some strange middle-aged man fashions you a tulip out of a cocktail napkin?

Then comes the concept of the dance floor in the bar. This is universally recognized to be a disaster: Once you’re ready to get up on stage and shake some ass to horrible music, you’ve reached the point of no return. I’m one of those girls who gets out on the dance floor and doesn’t come off until it’s last call and my makeup has smeared down my face. My friends are more the type that like to hang back in the corner and fend off approaching males with mean eyes and bitchy comments.

That’s another interesting thing about bars — if you spend too much time in them, you learn to hate and mistrust the opposite sex. After years of learning that guys will tell you anything you want to get you to sleep with them, I tend to either take them for what they’re worth or ignore the whole lot of them. I have no idea what bars, cell phones and generally sluttier behavior are doing to damage the act of courtship, but I have a feeling all of them combined are a death sentence. What’s the point of even taking a girl out to eat if you can just feed her $2.50 bottles of Miller Lite on dollar beer Tuesdays? What’s the point of dating a guy when he’s exactly the same as the other dude across the room nursing a Jack and Coke?

I don’t have much of a point to make about this. I was just thinking about bars. I think I should stay out of them.

Leggings: Friend or foe?

I was in Britain two years ago when I first noticed women wearing neutral-toned leggings under shapeless tunics or impossibly short miniskirts. When I arrived back stateside in December 2006, the trend was just about to catch on in a big way. I’m going to admit it was amazingly trendy and urban-feeling for awhile, and I distinctly remember asking myself why it took so long for such an obvious accessory to catch on.

But once a fashion trend trickles into the suburbs, the general rule is that it’s probably already out of hand. Leggings went from black to grey to velvet burnout or disco-silver. The dresses covering the leggings got shorter until women were actually just wearing normal-length T-shirts over painted-on leggings (read: Lindsay Lohan).

Now, I’m not saying leggings are as bad as other fashion bandwagons women tend to jump on, like those disgusting, scrunched-up tiny tees that magically fit everyone, but I think leggings should be used in moderation. This is a little list of guidelines I am going to print out and tape to my refrigerator every time I’m tempted to be irresponsible with my leggings collection:

1. Gold leggings may be worn from December – January. Throw plum leggings out because those were obviously a mistake.

2. A camel-toe check must be completed before I exit the house in any questionably-short “dress” or “tunic” that is actually better-described as a “stretched out T-shirt.”

3. Leggings are best with flats.

4. Never wear leggings with flip-flops unless I’m going the county fair.

I have a feeling I’ll ignore rule #4, but let’s remember I’m from Indiana. You can take the girl out of the cornfield, but her love for flip-flops and boys who work in lumber yards will just never fade.

So, leggings: Are they friend or foe?