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.
Posted by Katie 
