End of season do
Last night was the end of season celebration for my volleyball club, Jets. This will be henceforth referred to as the "end of season do", do being the word that Scottish people use to refer to events of a celebratory (and of course, drunken) nature that do not occur regularly. So, what would be called a bachelor party in the US is here called a stag do. Someone at work moving? A leaving do. You get the picture. Now attempting to write the pluralisation of do is, for me, the trickiest bit. Dos? Do's? As much as I hate to see a superfluous apostrophe, I am inclined to write do's, as most Scottish are. Please don't judge me too harshly. When in Rome...
The club rented out the venue space at the Scottish Book Trust (hey, free publicity! I really should get a kick back), which we have done for the past two do's (Casino Night and Race Night). It's actually a lovely space, wasted on pissy dickheads like us. We never use the amazing mezzanine/balcony level and I have ceased trying to get people up there. You would think with the amount of fornicating/hooking up going on in the club (that will have to be another entry, my lovelies), someone would be up there, snogging.
I'm not sure who decided this - cos as I mentioned before, we are just a group of immature and drunken nobs - but we had a catered, sit down meal. It was nice enough, for a meal that had probably been cooked at 0430 and sitting in warmers all day: just only a touch dry. Prizes were given out. I didn't get one, so we will swiftly move on to what really matters: the dancing.
I decided rather early on that we would be dancing after dinner and I figured I would collate a playlist. This is not an easy job for your dear blogger. I have rather peculiar taste for the EDN, i.e., I need to hear bass in the music to dance. This eliminates all of my favourite DMX jams that I'd probably dance to. This meant also that I was moaned at about not have The Birdie Song. To be fair, I thought he was being ironic when it was suggested. Unfortunately, it was procured on someone else's MP3 player and when played, all was right in the Jets world. What can be said that I'm more reassured about a dancing situation that includes the misogynistic and homophobic 'Where da hood at?' over the flipping Birdie Song? We'll need years on that therapy bench for that.
After numerous shouts of "One more song!", we managed to get the wastoids oot the door of the SBT and on to our next destination. Now this always throws us for a loop. While we are united in our utter devotion to volleyball, we have disparate tastes, ranging to people who have to the Birdie Song on their fucking iPod to metalheads. Nothing satisfies the lot. In the past, we've gone to shitty places like Stereo where they only serve vaguely alcoholic Kool-Aid (those are alcopops to you UKers) to the masses of 12-year-olds they admit and shitty aeroplane hangars/tin cans/dead traps. Yes, I refer to the hell hole Drop Kick Murphys, where as God as my witness I will never step foot in again. Even if I could cure cancer, world poverty and get rid of my ham hock arms with one foot in the door of the place, I'd never go there. Slimming of the thighs would have to be thrown in on that deal, but God's not down, saying I'm being too greedy and all bets are off.
I've learned that if one person says "Let's go to ___!" the loudest and most fervently and walks quickly in that direction, the drunken herd follows. I know if confidently insisted on going to the bus station, a dozen Jets would herd over there, with me as their shepherd, looking for a Diet Coke and vodka and a place to sit and take their shoes off. Luckily for them, I led their sorry, gazeboed asses to Espionage.
Now the 'Naj is kinda like a date with a nice, but nerdy geography teacher your mother set you up with: it makes you wonder, "Is this the best I could do on a Saturday night?" But you're in, stuck, and there's nothing you can do and nowhere to go. When you're in the Tardis-y like maze of the 'Naj, all space and time cease to exist. We could have been there 10 minutes or 11 hours, I could not tell. There could be 4 floors or a million. It is our Matrix. Evil lurks in every corner to try to prevent us from our ultimate goal - getting out in one piece: harpy drunk girls; hen do's wanting loads of attention (yes, yes bitch - you're getting married. Get over yourself); dudes who can't dance, trying to lure your beautiful compatriots away.
May I digress from the Matrix analogy for one moment to address this very sad phenomenon of the boy that cannot dance? It is endemic here. I am not even going to entertain any arguments that it's cos I'm in Scotland, the whitest place in the world. And I'll tell you for why: 1) Some white boys can dance (I met a few in my time in NC, but only a few!) and 2) Even the brothers and other brown folks here cannot dance. Not even a shuffle. They do not even have the ability to look cool, let alone sexy, while they stand by the wall, instead just looking weirdly creepy and strung out.
I've lost some steam and there's plenty to read here. I'll get back to you about other stuff later.
The club rented out the venue space at the Scottish Book Trust (hey, free publicity! I really should get a kick back), which we have done for the past two do's (Casino Night and Race Night). It's actually a lovely space, wasted on pissy dickheads like us. We never use the amazing mezzanine/balcony level and I have ceased trying to get people up there. You would think with the amount of fornicating/hooking up going on in the club (that will have to be another entry, my lovelies), someone would be up there, snogging.
I'm not sure who decided this - cos as I mentioned before, we are just a group of immature and drunken nobs - but we had a catered, sit down meal. It was nice enough, for a meal that had probably been cooked at 0430 and sitting in warmers all day: just only a touch dry. Prizes were given out. I didn't get one, so we will swiftly move on to what really matters: the dancing.
I decided rather early on that we would be dancing after dinner and I figured I would collate a playlist. This is not an easy job for your dear blogger. I have rather peculiar taste for the EDN, i.e., I need to hear bass in the music to dance. This eliminates all of my favourite DMX jams that I'd probably dance to. This meant also that I was moaned at about not have The Birdie Song. To be fair, I thought he was being ironic when it was suggested. Unfortunately, it was procured on someone else's MP3 player and when played, all was right in the Jets world. What can be said that I'm more reassured about a dancing situation that includes the misogynistic and homophobic 'Where da hood at?' over the flipping Birdie Song? We'll need years on that therapy bench for that.
After numerous shouts of "One more song!", we managed to get the wastoids oot the door of the SBT and on to our next destination. Now this always throws us for a loop. While we are united in our utter devotion to volleyball, we have disparate tastes, ranging to people who have to the Birdie Song on their fucking iPod to metalheads. Nothing satisfies the lot. In the past, we've gone to shitty places like Stereo where they only serve vaguely alcoholic Kool-Aid (those are alcopops to you UKers) to the masses of 12-year-olds they admit and shitty aeroplane hangars/tin cans/dead traps. Yes, I refer to the hell hole Drop Kick Murphys, where as God as my witness I will never step foot in again. Even if I could cure cancer, world poverty and get rid of my ham hock arms with one foot in the door of the place, I'd never go there. Slimming of the thighs would have to be thrown in on that deal, but God's not down, saying I'm being too greedy and all bets are off.
I've learned that if one person says "Let's go to ___!" the loudest and most fervently and walks quickly in that direction, the drunken herd follows. I know if confidently insisted on going to the bus station, a dozen Jets would herd over there, with me as their shepherd, looking for a Diet Coke and vodka and a place to sit and take their shoes off. Luckily for them, I led their sorry, gazeboed asses to Espionage.
Now the 'Naj is kinda like a date with a nice, but nerdy geography teacher your mother set you up with: it makes you wonder, "Is this the best I could do on a Saturday night?" But you're in, stuck, and there's nothing you can do and nowhere to go. When you're in the Tardis-y like maze of the 'Naj, all space and time cease to exist. We could have been there 10 minutes or 11 hours, I could not tell. There could be 4 floors or a million. It is our Matrix. Evil lurks in every corner to try to prevent us from our ultimate goal - getting out in one piece: harpy drunk girls; hen do's wanting loads of attention (yes, yes bitch - you're getting married. Get over yourself); dudes who can't dance, trying to lure your beautiful compatriots away.
May I digress from the Matrix analogy for one moment to address this very sad phenomenon of the boy that cannot dance? It is endemic here. I am not even going to entertain any arguments that it's cos I'm in Scotland, the whitest place in the world. And I'll tell you for why: 1) Some white boys can dance (I met a few in my time in NC, but only a few!) and 2) Even the brothers and other brown folks here cannot dance. Not even a shuffle. They do not even have the ability to look cool, let alone sexy, while they stand by the wall, instead just looking weirdly creepy and strung out.
I've lost some steam and there's plenty to read here. I'll get back to you about other stuff later.
Labels: end of season, night out, volleyball
posted by Autumn at 15.5.11
6 Comments:
how do you know no one was hooking up on the mezzanine level?? ;) haha cant wait for your follow up blog post about that...
Do tell my friend!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm so glad you're blogging agagin. You make me laugh!
And btw, I didn't even get this link from the FB - I KNOW your address, m'dear. X
you have made my brain explode. all these years i thought saying "the (something) do" was a weird Brigitte Neilson-ism, as having to travel thru Italy, New York, and Las Vegas with that cray-cray lady made me spend a lot of time with her. and it was always "the (something) do." she is NOT SCOTTISH so to discover this is a common Scottish-ism that all these non-dancing sun-deprived people say all the time?!!? totally re-arranges my inner lexicon.
I've never heard of someone actually reqesting the Birdie Song. And I want to point out over here it's called the Chicken Dance and is only done at wedding receptions and kindergarden plays.
thank you, that must be it, the bass. i was trying to explain to a friend why her dance party music usually sucks and why i can't dance to it, and i was not making sense. (this year in particular i've been mostly hanging out with these large groups of white friends in their 20s, and wow, are their dance parties interesting. i sit around talking in the kitchen like a jaded old person or take photos so as not to have to dance to a terrible mix of black-eyed peas, journey, jason derulo, and top40 club hits i have vaguely heard in stores or non-dancey songs that supposedly are cynical favorites at white dance parties.) i was like, it should involuntarily make you shake your booty and not even the occasional top-40 autotune trashy-beat psuedo hiphop on their playlist is not it. she's like, well what kind of hip hop, and i, being really out of it at the end of the night, am like, 'uh, dmx' (i was thinking of some 90s dmx song with love just then, probably) and then was like, 'uh, no. not dmx.' so you are right. (btw, random, but did ye know that tinie tempah is getting big here with his big written in the stars hit? the rap is good but it's a terrible song, ftring this microwaved americanesque poprocky chorus that sounds like about 3000 poprocky pseudohiphoppy hits and choruses. this sort of formula is a guaranteed hit becoming its own genre that in my annoyed opinion. blah blah blah)
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