Dear God, I’m tired. I’m tired of smelling like the cheap beer I wasn’t drinking but that some overly enthusiastic stranger spilled down the back of my dress. I’m tired of being hit on by the kind of people who I would normally cross the street to avoid. Oh, and I am BEYOND tired of bars in general. Whether you want to admit it or not, here are 10 reasons they seriously suck:
- The music is always way too loud. Whose idea was the loud music in bars? It takes any point there might be to going out to be social and just flushes it down the toilet. It means that having a conversation with friends or strangers is virtually impossible and witty banter turns into drinking silently near people and occasionally yelling “WHAAAAAAT???” in each other’s ears. WTF?
- They’re expensive AF. Wow, are bars expensive. If I wanted to lose this much money in one night, I might as well just set my cash on fire and invite friends to stand around and watch the flames and share a couple bottles of four buck chuck with me. Honestly, it sounds like a better time than the average night at a bar.
- They’re always way too crowded. Any halfway decent bar is known by everyone else in the city to be halfway decent and is therefore absolutely mobbed. And if I’m going to be crushed and deafened by loud music, I’d better be at a concert and able to get a commemorative t-shirt afterward.
- The drinks are usually terrible. Let’s just all admit it once and for all: alcohol tastes bad. It’s fun, I’m not denying that, but it tastes like what it is — sugar pooped out by yeast. Not only that, but you pay for a $10 cocktail that contains so little alcohol that it might as well be juice. No thanks.
- There’s always some kind of drama. I’m sure it’s not you, but if you don’t know who it is in your friend group, start worrying, because there’s always one person who cannot handle the booze — one person who gets all belligerent or overly sexual or straight up sloppy and everyone has to spend the rest of the night babysitting that one person. Inevitably, instead of a night out with friends, it turns into a night out with three friends and a giant angry 4-year-old who won’t let us take off her jacket and heels and put her to bed.
- The guys are relentless. Ugh, the men. Okay, yes, I look smokin’ tonight, I acknowledge that — but that in itself is not an invitation to be a creep. In fact, I could literally be wearing a t-shirt that said “try your creepiest pick up line out on me” and I would still be skeeved out by some guy coming up to me in a dark room with loud music and shouting in my ear that I have beautiful skin.
- Your friends act like losers when they’re drunk. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m friends with two sets of people: my friends when they’re sober and my friends when they’re drunk. My friends when their sober are a hilarious set of kickass feminists who do not hesitate to lean in and get stuff done. My friends when they’re drunk range from mopey sad sacks to hair-trigger balls of incandescent rage. Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely a sweet spot when liquor facilitates a free exchange of ideas and just generally makes everything funnier and better. But that lasts about half an hour and the rest of the night is just generally a trainwreck.
- The giant TVs are always blaring some awful sport or CNN. Why is this a thing? That we had to have enormous screens stuck everywhere, all the time, always? I thought I was coming here to chill with my friends. If I knew I was just going to be forced to sit and awkwardly watch TV, I could have done that at home in my pajamas.
- There’s too much pressure to be hip. Nothing about what I wear to the average bar is comfortable. My feet are killing me, my eyes are burning from the makeup I’m sweating into them, I’m either tugging my skirt down to keep from flashing people or pulling my top up for the same reason, and just how the hell does everybody but me know this song?! I hate being hip. Just let me be a normal blob of a person. I’m fine with being a blob.
- The bathrooms are disgusting. I’ve had way too much to drink and I have to pee like crazy. All I want to do is break the seal but the bar bathroom is undoubtedly disgusting and is likely to contain some combination of vomit, pee, used tampons and trash — sometimes all of the above. Ew ew ew ew ew ew. NOPE.
