High Five From Myself

I sometimes receive high fives from past versions of myself when I feel like I'm doing something that a younger version of myself would think is cool.

Bending the space-time continuum to ensure that present versions of myself feel adequately psyched up is a challenging exercise, but one always worth the effort. I should explain.

As a young man I made the decision to supply future versions of myself with mementos of my brilliance. It was, at first, difficult to discern the most effective way to do this. I'm not very photogenic, so pictures of myself giving me a thumbs up would have been more mortifying than encouraging. I never really understood the mail system, so mailing myself letters of encouraging would have been very challenging. Even if I had been psychic the fact that Canada Post can't find my address to save their damn lives (I live at a 1/2 address...in unit A) would have a Back to the Future-esque letter to future me completely inconceivable.

Hence my decision to send forward high fives..the most righteous of fives.

Awesome pun? High five

To better explain how this works, if I did something awesome and unexpected as a younger man...for example, managing to speak to a girl without sweating too much on my palms and saying something extremely stupid and mildly offensive I would send myself a high five. Scored the game winning basket? Send myself  a high five. Scored perfect on a test? Send myself a high five. Go on a swing-set without getting so nauseous that I puke? You get the idea.

A particularly good "Your Mom" joke... high five

While all of those examples seem rather pedestrian (minus the girls one...did I ever mention how bad I was with girls?) the sum of the events that shaped your late childhood and adolescence add up to a pretty decent stable of high fiveable moments.

Why did this matter? Why do the delusions of a pretty weird little kid still translate into an ego boost for a 21 year old, soon to be graduate and real human? Partially because I'm now a deluded 21 year old rather than a deluded child...but also because receiving high fives from a less complicated version of yourself is, actually, a genuine pick me up.

I didn't think this through when I was a child, but looking back on it as a (slightly) wiser young man I think that acting in a way that younger you would be proud of is actually pretty cool. If I am being entirely frank, most of the time I like the younger version of myself more than I like the current version of myself. He may have been a bit rounder, completely incapable of playing sports, lacking all ambition that didn't involve the high score on a video game and completely incapable of communicating with children his own age but he was still a pretty legit character.

The younger version of myself tended to call things how it was. He went out of his way to do things that were nice (most of the time) because that was what the good people in the cartoons taught him to do. He also treated absolutely every person with the kind of respect they deserved without having to prompt himself. He rarely, if ever, made pre-judgments of the people around him and accepted absolutely anybody and everybody as a friend. (Maybe he did that last one because he was in sorry need of more friends, so not quite as legit.)

I say that because life is like this. 

I'm watching a lot of my friends post about their graduation this week, and have had a lot of chats with them about how they think going out and being a real person is going to be. My impression from those conversations is that being a real person is tough. It takes a lot out of you to be a responsible and functioning individual in a society where banks are out to screw you for the rest of your life because you looked at them funny and the only people that know you in the city you have to relocate too because that was the only place that offered a job is the student loan representative that is half-threatening to break your knees with a bat. These challenges can wear people down physically, emotionally, and morally, and it can sometimes be cool to look back at a younger version of yourself, even if they were covered in goobers, and receive a high five that tells you that things are going alright.

I think the best feeling in the world would be to know that a younger version of myself would look up to me and think I was cool. I'm starting, however preliminarily, to look at the rest of my life. I'm frantically trying to make connections, foster closer relationships, evaluate where I want to be, what I want to be doing, who I want around me. When I'm doing this, it is sometimes helpful to remember that the people I used to look up to when I was a pretentious, snotty, little 8 year-old were all going through something similar and managed to carry themselves, not only with grace and respect, but in a way that I thought was unbelievably cool.

It helps me to believe that I might be doing the same thing, however imperfectly, and that is why I covet those high fives from a younger, stickier, stupider, but much more together version of myself.

/endpreaching

Why Men Don't Belong in Clubs

I've been talking something through with a dear friend and we reached an irreproachable stance on a defining issue of our times.

I hate you

Men do not belong in clubs.

Allow me to walk you through the logical processes behind this genius deduction. First, we should analyze the reasons why people would actually want to go to a club. By my count, you can go because you like the music, you can go because you like to dance, you can go in search of companionship, you can go because you like the atmosphere, or you can go because you literally hate money and are trying to find the most efficient ways to waste it. Absolutely none of these things appeal to me, and I would be much obliged if you were to let  me elucidate in excruciating detail why.

First, websites such as Grooveshark, Youtube, and Pandora have made access to music free, convenient, and even added a phenomenal you-can-control-the-volume-so-that-your-eardrums-dont-explode-and-bleed-all-over-your-friends-option should you desire it. Not only is music easy to access, you are also able to choose it at your leisure. With the click of your mouse you can do what, in clubs, is traditionally reserved  for drunken valley girls/Canadian Jersey Shore wannabees with no filter who are willing to scream ridiculous things at DJ's just trying to do their damn jobs. 

Second, I can't dance. I have never been able to dance. I am a self-conscious person by nature, and the thought of flailing my arms, legs, and hips around like an idiot reminds me so much of my childhood attempts to run, play sports, and talk to girls (all of which I sucked at) that the thought of doing it literally makes my brain want to crawl out of my ears, find a baseball bat and hit me in the legs until I will stop doing it.  I wish I could explain to you how bad I am at dancing but the sheer number of characters I would need to sacrifice at the ruined alter of my dignity to sufficiently explain how atrociously, even nauseatingly, bad I am would warrant a feature length independent project. I would add that I am not the only person that feels this way (I hope) and if at any given time you were to compile a list of the 50 worst dancers at any given club, all 50 of them would be awkward males like myself. In short, unless you are in the rare group of men that can actually dance, or are in possession of the Herculean amounts of self-confidence it takes to just dance anyway, this option doesn't really appeal.

Third, the regulars at an average night clubs are unapologetic douche-lords and I hate their faces. By no means does this extend to everyone at a club. Most of my best friends love to go out and I respect their decisions, but they are normal people that happen to be at clubs. The "regulars" to which I am referring are the sorts of people that almost certainly live at the club. You never see them during the day, they are freakishly tanned for people that you know have not seen real sunlight since their 17th birthday and the only thing more confusing than how they manage to spend so much money on drinks is how they manage to spend so much money on hair products. If you are going to a club to scam on a member of the opposite sex these are the people you are invariably going to end up running into.

Fourth, the atmosphere. I'll keep this one short. If I wanted to spend what seems like an eternity jostling around in a dark, unventilated, underground hell-hole that reeks of overpriced, watered-down rum and Axe body spray I would have accepted that offer to go hang out with Charlie Sheen. In short, I hate the atmosphere in clubs more than GHG's hate the atmosphere of the Earth.

If you want to go a level deeper, the only thing worse than being a Man at a club is being a Man in a relationship at a club. This is the definition of a no-win scenario.

I literally dance like that...but worse

Option 1: You leave your girlfriend alone and hang out awkwardly, maybe with a friend, near the side of the club. Within 5 minutes you are going to realize that by standing at the side of a club staring blankly at the surroundings you could not look weirder. The only logical things that any person that happens to look at you while you haunt the outside of a dance floor could conclude are a) you are leering at every woman in the club and are worthy of extreme contempt, or b) you are so crippingly socially awkward that you can't dance and have therefore relegated yourself to timeout like an overgrown pathetic child. (I realize option b) is probably the truth, but nobody wants people to think that about them)

Option 2: You dance with your significant other. Bear in mind that there are only two ways this can go.

A) You give your significant other space and just sort of dance nearby but not too close. In this situation you look like someone who is trying to pick but are such a bad dancer your advances are being continuously thwarted for the duration of a full evening. Everyone has seen the guy that awkwardly tries to get close to a girl while she shimmies away using her friends like human shields until the awkward butt-face takes a hint and now you look like that guy.

B) You dance with your significant other like a normal person at a club dances with another person and you look like one of the aforementioned J-Shore rejects scamming on a random. This is also an unappealing judgment to have thrust upon you. 

In short, going to the club is like a Catch 22 mailed by express post from Satan himself. Given a million years, and an infinite amount of resources I don't think I could find a thing that better preys on my childhood insecurities and effectively overloads my senses with things that offend me.

I wish I could say there was some moral to this story. I wish there was some way I could wrap up this rant with a pithy statement or clever zinger but, in truth, all I really wanted to do was to talk about how much I hated clubs.The answer? More than you could ever imagine.