From Airport to Bar in Sixty Minutes

Hey turds.

As some may know, I recently traveled back to the 'burbs of Chicago for Thanksgiving. My flight landed at O'Hare at 9:15pm. I arrived at my house (after much traffic) at 10:00pm. I met my dear friend, Annie, at the bar at 10:20pm. Good use of time, right?

Now, Annie and I really haven’t gotten the chance to catch up since I moved to Boston, so we had about a month and a half of things to discuss. Needless to say, both of our lives have been unusually eventful lately, so we knew this could take at least two beers.

About 10 minutes after we arrived, drunk dude #1 walks in to the bar, beelines (while stumbling at the same time) directly toward us, and introduces himself. He must have been at least 30, but acted like he was 18 tops. He bothered us for about 45 minutes, so I’ll try to make a long walk short: he tried to set us up with his creepy short friend who did nothing to keep him in check, asked us if we were married, accused us of calling him ugly, then called me ugly, shook our hands about six times, acted offended when he offered us up to the guy across the bar (him and I had a lovely conversation about hurricane Sandy), and left/came back at LEAST seven times.

To put it lightly, I wanted to cut off his testicles with a blunt knife. Whenever Annie and I finally had 10 minutes to get deeper into our conversation, #1 would stumble back and interrupt us. Additionally, Annie and I are both too polite to tell someone to fuck off, so I had a bad feeling that if we didn’t say something this would go on for the whole night. We’d continue our process of nodding, smiling, and conversation killing.

So I finally manned up and told him to please gtfo. Except I really said something like this: “I don’t want to be rude, but my friend and I haven’t seen each other for almost two months, and it’s getting really hard to catch up with you interrupting us all the time. So would you please just leave us alone?” Pretty mature/adult, right? And it actually did the trick. 10 points to Gryffindor.

Shortly after, drunk #2 made his move. He was at the bar with his grandpa, cute right? Not so much. His g-pa ended up falling asleep while his grandson was attempting to hit on us, and the bartender had to tell him he couldn’t sleep here. #2 stared at us for a good 30 minutes before actually coming up to us (which is super creepy, don't do that.), was from Bolivia, was very impressed (for some reason) that I knew Bolivia is in South America, asked us our names three to four times, and came up to talk to us four plus times. Uh-noying.

Essentially, we were the bar’s entertainment for the night. Two different groups of girls came up to us and apologized for drunk #1 and #2, and offered to come to the rescue if necessary. Which was very nice.

In conclusion, here are my tips to how to effectively meet people at a bar (types of people may vary):
•    Wear a blazer or long sleeved t+scarf.
•    Act engulfed in your conversation, that way people will know they should interrupt.
•    Don’t make eye contact with people. This is also apparently an indication that you want to be approached.
•    Go to the bar with ONE (this is very important) girl friend. Oh, and make sure you’re a girl too.

Shout out to Abby, HOLLA.