So, I went home for Christmas, which was great! It was so fun to be with family and to especially play with all the little people. My two littlest nieces, Maggie and Kara, were just little heart melters and it made it hard to come back. Before heading back to Nashville, I stopped in Salt Lake for a few days to spend New Year's and see some of my friends. Some would ask why I didn't want to stay home for New Year's Eve, and my response would be "Well, I could either stay home and watch my parents go to bed at 9 p.m., and then watch the ball drop in Times Square on the TV, or I could go hang out with my friends and stay up til at LEAST 12:30 a.m." That has actually been my tradition for the past few years. Christmas with family, New Year's with friends. It's just how I roll. So, the night started off with me going to dinner with some friends at the Lucky 13 bar (we went for the burgers, not the booze). We heard they were the best burgers in Salt Lake, and I would have to agree. We then were going to go back to the house of my friends where I was staying, and hang out with some more people there. Just kind of low key. Ironically, I ended up doing one of my least favorite New Year's activities, which is going to the Institute dance at the Salt Lake LDS Institute. I agreed to go with some people on the condition that we would only be there for an hour or so, but leave before midnight. This did not happen. We were there past midnight. I am going to focus this blog post on why Institute dances are unpleasant and a horrible place to meet new people.
Picture this: thousands of single young Mormon adults all together in one place, music blaring, dancing, and cramped together. I don't know who always has the bright idea of turning the music on so loud that you can't have a normal conversation without yelling, but they need to be told to stop.
Reason #1: Music (or any noise) that is listened to at a very high decibel for long periods of time damages hearing. You can call me a grandma all you want, but it's time to face the facts, people. This is the ipod generation, and people are damaging their hearing right and left (no pun intended:). That ringing in your ear that you hear when you walk out of stadium concert, dance, or Chuck E Cheese birthday party? Yeah, that's called tennitus. That means that the little tiny ears in your hair that pick up sound waves and transfer them into your ear drum have broken off. And they don't grow back. That is why I always carry a pair of ear plugs in my purse, because you never know when you will be getting into a loud decibel environment. And be careful on listening to your ipod too loud. If you can't have a normal level conversation with your ear buds in, then it is too loud! I seriously will invest in hearing aid companies, because I can guarantee that everyone is going to be needing them. Anyways, sorry to be the Debbie downer of ear loss problems, but I just want to inform the world!
Reason #2: Awkward. How awkward is it to meet someone, and then have to get right up to their ear to tell them what your name is, where you're from, and what you do? I mean, you don't even know this person and you are already close enough to smell what kind of perfume or cologne they're wearing, or if they even showered that day. You can try the yelling approach, but yelling "WHAT!?" in between each question or answer gets really old after a while. I usually end up just saying "Oh, that's cool!" even if I don't know what they said. I seriously can't remember that I met at a dance with loud music. This tells me that the interactions in these environments are forgettable.
Reason #3: People are not drunk, but act as if they were. Now, I'm not saying that you can't act silly every once in a while. I myself, act silly many times a day. But if you are trying to make a good first impression, don't act like you're five. At this particular dance, they passed out Martinelli's sparkling apple cider for everyone to drink at the stroke of midnight. There were some guys (I really didn't see any girls doing this. Just an observation) that took some of the bottles, shook them up, and then sprayed them all over the crowd. What a great way for a girl to think "Wow, that guy is so mature. I would really like to get to know him better." False. I was thinking "Why? Why are you here? Why don't you do that somewhere else? Why am I single and you have all these girls following you around?" Anyway, I digress. There were also some guys that felt it was ok to come up and dance uncomfortably close to me in a not so "LDS standard" way, if you know what I mean.
Reason #4: You never can tell a person's real age is until it's too late. I remember a particular dance that one of my roommates and I went to. We went to a party/dance that was mostly college kids. My roommate and I were in college, but as graduate students. We were not used to staying up very late, since she was a full time teacher and I was a substitute. We were going through familiar motions of not being able to hear any conversation, having complete strangers come up to us and dance inappropriately, but we had some friends there, that we were having a somewhat nice time with. So, midnight came around, and people started to go home. A cute guy that started talked to us and invited us to an after party. We were a little confused, thinking that the after party was just kind of fused into the party we were already at, since it was Soooooo late. He said that he and his roommates were having some people over at their place. My roommate surprised me by saying sure, and so we got his number and address and agreed to come over. We were yawning as we drove to the place, and were wondering what people do at these so called "after parties." We obviously had never been to one. Well, we got there, and it ended up being him and his three roommates and probably twenty girls, all under the age of 22. My roommate and I were 24 and 25, or 25 and 26 at the time. We walked in, and immediately all the girls looked over and gave us the look of death. How could we just waltz in there and take any attention from the four boys? I don't know how we did it, but the guys actually were talking to US, and not the other girls. But, we did find out that all those boys were younger than us, and about 15 minutes after our arrival, we said, "Well, we better get to bed. We usually don't stay up this late." I think the guys were a little turned off by our demanding sleep schedules, and we were a little turned off by their younger age. Maybe if we had been in a place where we could have been able to hear and carry on a normal conversation earlier, we would have avoided the whole incident of getting death glares from the little girls, and disappointing the little boys with our old age.
I could go on and on about different reasons why Institute dances are a painful, awkward experience, but I don't want to be here all night. In all seriousness, there have been some success stories with people meeting at Institute dances and then end up dating or getting married. And the positive aspect of me going to the dance was that I got to be with my friends, and see a lot of people who I hadn't seen since I moved from Salt Lake. So, overall, the Institute was a good place to reconnect. I was thinking this to myself, just as some guy walked up, yelled "Happy New Year!" and threw a cup of water (I hope) on us. Maybe we should have stayed at the Lucky 13, because the people who were actually drinking were not acting as drunk as the people who were completely sober.
But really, I loved spending time with my peeps, and they were not like any of the ones that I described above:) And it just shows how much I love them because I chose to be with them in one of my least favorite settings. Haha! But, as you can see, I am smiling, and that's how I came into this new year. So, Happy New Year! And here is to all the horrible YSA dances, because you know I will be coming to more.
HaHa!!! So true. Sad, but true. Why are there so many freaks???
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