Jeepers Creepers, Rick's and Skeepers

So by now you all know that I start looking forward to the weekend starting Sunday morning. Given that we just started a new quarter I don't have as much on my plate now than I'm going have in the coming weeks, so I can afford a little more FingertheBlog Time than normal. On Thursdays the business school has a mixer with another one of the graduate schools, as I've previously mentioned in past posts. This past Thursday was the Medical School. Basically there was one girl/lady/woman/future doctor who was attractive and all my friends wanted to speak to her, but instead we just watched from afar and made a few hours worth of awkward eye contact. Finally one of us went up to her and asked, "do you have a boyfriend?", she said yes, and then we all left. At that point we were on Main Street, a healthy 20 min walk from where most of us live. Being that is was cold out, I was wearing a sport coat and jeans. I'm not trying to get sick. We walked two blocks down Main Street to another bar and stayed for just a short period of time. It was about 1:15, the bars close at 2:00.

It's not my fault that Rick's, one of the campus bars, is a block from my apartment. It's a natural stop on the way back home. So one of my buddies and I decided to jump in a cab and head to Rick's to catch the last 45 minutes of a Thursday that had otherwise been mediocre. Just to tell you about Rick's, it's in a basement and it's dirty. The bathroom stalls have no doors, a la jail (or so I'm told). The floor is linoleum, and they have carpeting which probably hasn't been cleaned since Pabst actually won their Blue Ribbon back in the 1800s. So that's the scene. Despite it being a disgusting bar, people dress up. It's not uncommon to see girls in heels and dresses. So after splitting a couple $4 pitchers with my friend it's getting on 2:00am and the "ugly lights" are about to come on. When you're dancing with some girl at 2am and it's dark and you've maybe had a couple too many sodas you really can't tell what kind of hand you've been dealt, the ugly lights come on and reveal all. There's nothing flattering about that lighting. You're sweaty and nasty, your pupils start to dilate, and you look you just came back from the gym. I've seen guys on the dance floor acting all cool, impressing some girl, and come 1:58a they're a wreck, and all they're thinking is "please don't have a mustache, please don't have a mustache, please don't have a mustache". The ugly lights can be a game changer, they really can. Imagine having the lights come on and seeing this...





In the dark, she's got nice smelling long brown hair, and she probably just another sorority girl. When the ugly lights come on, she's Danny Trejo, Hollywood actor.






So the ugly lights came on and I start talking to some girl (without a mustache), and the girl's friend comes over, pulls her aside and says, "Only the creepers are still here" clearly referring to me. I've been called many things in my life, but a creeper hasn't been one of them. Kind of taken aback I said, "oh so because I'm wearing a sport coat I'm a creeper. I'm soooo old and creepy because I have a sport coat on huh?" She kind of shrugged, looked somewhat apologetic and then left.

I don't understand. A guy wears a t-shirt like this and he's cool....
and a guy looks like this and he's a creeper...
That's Bond. James freaking Bond. He wears a sport coat. Is he a "creeper"?

Moving along to Saturday...after watching Michigan pull off quite the comeback against MSU a bunch of us went to Scorekeepers, aka Skeepers. Just to give you some idea about Rick's and Skeepers, it is pretty obvious when looking at the patrons that it is mostly an undergrad scene, and it isn't a coincidence we end up at one or both places a few nights a week. Skeepers gets packed at around midnight and at that point everyone's mingling and hanging out. I see a girl who I met on Halloween so I go over and say hello. I say, "hey I'm John, we met on Halloween, what's going on?" She looks at me and says, "Halloween was a looooong time ago" and then turns around. For the record, Halloween was three days before (stupid), but I got the point. She was one of those horrible, sorry, "haaarrrible", Long Island girls, so maybe I should've expected as much. I apologize for that sweeping generalization, but even if you are a sweetheart from Long Island even you know that there's something in that drinking water that turns some of these Long Island girls into some of the saltiest women on the face of the Earth. I'm not going to get into that though, because I'm writing a dissertation on it for release later this year.

But getting back to the story, I couldn't understand what was difference between Saturday and Halloween that would cause this girl to act the way she did. Taking a self-inventory, I noticed that this time I was wearing a sweater over my buttondown, as opposed to just a buttondown. Surely that wasn't it, or was it? Not 20 minutes later some girl comes up to me and says, "you're not from here are you?" I say, "no, I was living in New York before I came to Michigan and I grew up in Connecticut". I asked her where she thought I was from and she said, "another country", to which I responded, "like England, or like Bulgaria?" She says "Israel". Now I may have the map of Israel written all over my face, but given the heavy NYC/LI area contingent there that night I was far from being the only Jew up in the club. I literally could not understand what the hell prompted her to say that, and then I asked, "is it the sweater?" and she said, "yes".





Sweaters and Jews go together like...
peas and gefilte fish? Who knew.







Unless it is a text book for a class that you know is going to kick your ass, don't judge a book by its cover. Two nights. One night a "creeper", the other night a "sweater wearing Israeli". Are undergrads naive and a little dumb, undoubtedly. Will I continue going to Rick's and Skeepers, undoubtedly. But in case my tastes just aren't appreciated up in Michigan there's always Washington and Lee.


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/10/30/education/edlife/20071104_Trendspotting_Slideshow_index.html