Not all those who wander are lost

It is a strange experience to be both part of and not part of a subculture.  I've experienced this a number of times.  I attended the DOTA 2 International Tournament off and on with a friend who was visiting.  Everything about the tournament was familiar:  the ambiance (felt like a typical con), the excited personalities of the other attendees, etc.  The only thing I didn't get was the actual screen.  DOTA 2 is a somewhat unique 5 on 5 game based on a user mod made for the Warcraft 3 back in the day.  It was grown into something of a phenomenon.  A very complicated phenomenon.  Perhaps you've heard talk about the difference between knowing the mechanical rules of chess and actually knowing how to play.  DOTA 2 takes that concept a thousand steps further.  I have, technically, played a game against bots.  I have no idea what was going on in the tournament games, except that whenever people in the audience started screaming; when I knew someone was about to die and watched the scoreboard.

Some of the people we were hanging out with at the tournament with were stayed in a hostel.  I've never been in a hostel before, but when we visited them for a few beers, the atmosphere felt like everything I had imagined traveling would be like.  Tons of friendly people all over the place, chilling out, free from their daily routines and comfort zones.  My routines have gotten so bad that when its a nice day out I have no idea what to do with it;  enjoying it becomes a chore and I try to decide how to get my bike to the nearest park (soo many hills) and then I think about how my ex girlfriend loved being outside on nice days, and I play video games alone in my apartment just to spite her.  Not sure how effective that is.

Anyway, I feel the travel bug coming on.  I was sitting in a bar for the "after party" of this tournament, watching a bunch of nerds dance surprisingly well to techno music, and musing over how the gender ratio was literally, strictly worse than the gayest gay club on capitol hill, and all I could think about was traveling.  Right now is a terrible time to travel.  I am thinking about my next move in my carreer, and I have side shit going on, and blah blah blah what if I just dropped everything and spend my life savings to stay on Ibiza beach for a summer?

Now. Strippers.

I have been in strip clubs before.  In fact, going to them kind of ruined the idea of strip clubs as mysterious, evil hives of scum and villainy where girls are abused and degraded and etc.  That is basically bullshit.  They are so un-evil is almost mundane.

Anyway, I elected to go to a strip club recently, and holy shit were they aggressive.  I admit, when you abstract away everything a strip club is, the thing I'm really paying for is just to be in a place where girls 1) exist and 2) are friendly and 3) approach you.  Sort of a "in soviet russia girls approach you" joke, but true.  I know that most guys just go there to carefully review their visual assets, but my favorite part is talking to them.  Fake or not, I love their personalities.  And I don't have to worry about coming up with what to say because they do small talk like its their job.

Now, in this particular strip club in Seattle, it was a bit extreme.  I couldn't sit for any length of time without one of them descending upon my like a hawk, sitting on my lap, making fake conversation for a minute and then trying to get me to pay for a lap dance, and then constantly up-selling the type of lap dance (there is more than one kind!  and they always cost even more money) and hounding me to buy more.  One possible reason for their aggression was that strip clubs in Washington state are not allowed to sell booze, which possibly forces the girls to take it upon themselves to ensure that we make bad decisions.  I was not prepared, nor even capable, of saying no to that many pretty faces.  It is literally something I've never had to do before.  I didn't even have the words.  I went to the club thinking that I would lose some singles while sitting at the stage, and then splurge on one or two lap dances.  I lost count of how many lap dances I got, but 10 wouldn't be too far off.  I am now hundreds of dollars poorer, and all I have from it is a memory of 10 different girls rubbing their boobs on my face and 2 of them doing an Oscar-worthy job of pretending they were actually interested in me.

So lets recap.  I put off buying a $500 air conditioner for four years in a misguided attempt to be frugal with my money.  Then in one night I drop even more money in exchange for...essentially nothing.

So, where do we go from here?  Do we continue as planned, trying to set up these side projects, switch jobs, etc?  Do we start planning a trip somewhere?  Do we start going out clubbing more often?  None of these choices are easy, but easy is boring anyway.

I have had this idea of collecting 500 dance rejections.  Why?  Because I hate it when I'm salsa dancing and I ask a girl to dance and she gives me some bullshit excuse.  Hate it.  So I thought I would try to make the rejection a thing I try to acquire, in order to negate my negative emotional response.  Feasible?  Not sure.  But gaining the ability to ask every girl in the room to dance, smoothly, without caring when anyone thinks in an important step into becoming an unstoppable dance...monster.  What I could try, though, is telling myself that every ten dance rejections I earn a lap dance at the strip club from one of the girls that pretended to like me.  Because going to bed after paying a girl to smash your face into her chest is more pleasant than going to bed after ten girls told you they need to "finish [their] water." 

Then again, I should probably never set foot in that place again.