~Tuesday~ For some reason—and that would be that lady’s endearment (“boo”) yesterday to the boy on the cellphone who had to run across the street to catch the bus—I was singing (and I use the term loosely) Nelly’s Dilemma to myself. As I was boarding the 7:45 city bus, a kid ran up to the stop and got on behind me.
At the Conifer and Gorman stop, I considered hopping off the city bus and hopping on the Wolfline bus, but ended up not doing it. There were probably six or seven students waiting for it, and not wanting to have to stand if the bus was too crowded when it arrived, I did a quick calculation of where we were in the semester. It’s right on the cusp of when students with early morning classes start dropping—or skipping—them, so I didn’t want to take the risk.
That was an ad on the bus for the upcoming “Discover Downtown Scavenger Hunt,” which incorporates the use of The R Line, the free downtown circulator bus. What caught my attention about it was the website on it, that I at first thought was grammatically incorrect—if you can apply grammar to URLs. It was www.yourhere.com, which I at first thought was wrong as it would be “you’re” here. However, after a second I got that it was a play on The R Line: YOU R HERE, which I sort of—potential grammar confusion aside—liked.
This morning at work, we had what will probably turn out to be our last staff meeting with our manager, which my officemate and I have every Tuesday from 9:00-10:00. In this meeting our manager usually passes down whatever she learned the previous day at a “Steering Team Meeting,” which is a meeting with her the other five or six people who report to her boss.
Since my boss is retiring on September 30th, and my officemate is becoming my boss, both of them attended yesterday’s steering team meeting as a sort of crossover exercise, so they both had things to fill me in about that they learned at that meeting. We also talked briefly about the doling out of my boss’s duties, what would go to me and my officemate, and what we’d like the new person we’re going to hire to do.
From 1:00-2:00, the three of us met with my boss’s boss, where we sort of re-hashed the same things with him, just to make sure everyone’s on that proverbial same page before the chapter ends in a couple of weeks. Metaphors, schmetaphors.
The season premier of Glee was on tonight at 8:00, and I called to see if they were going to have it on at Flex, but they weren’t. I called Legends to see if they were going to be showing it on The View side, which is where the TV/music monitors are, and I could immediately tell the guy who answered wasn’t where he needed to be in terms of a Glee fan.
He said, “Oh, yeah. I like that show. I can turn it on.” If he were a true Gleeist, he would have said, “Oh my god! Yes. It will defintely be on. No question. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
At any rate, I got there at about 7:50, and since I wasn’t sure the door guy was the same person I’d talked to on the phone, I said, “I’d like to come in under two conditions: 1) You’re going to put Glee on, and 2) There’s no cover charge. I’m not willing to pay to get in, but I am going to buy drinks and tip you, though.”
He laughed and said, “There’s no cover charge tonight, and yes, I’ll put on Glee.”
Although, I was the only one there, I watched it with a world of folks, in a sense. I was following the backchannel of tweets about the episode on my phone, and some of the comments were absolutely hysterical. I can’t even count how many times I laughed out loud watching that episode by myself in that bar. This is how I described it afterwards:
It would appear that there will be yet more diversity (something I love about this show) on Glee this season with the introduction of a blond boy, a Filipino girl (with a phenomenal voice), and what I’m guessing turns out to be a transgender character. A veritable rainbow coalition.
After the show, I stopped by Flex, where the long local nightmare of Tuesday night drag has finally met its demise, and they’re now trying “College Night.” Zach—who’s adorable—was bartending, and he was hopeful for a crowd, although at 9:15 there were about four of us in the bar.
I told him I’d actually seen a flier about tonight at the bus stop on Hillsborough Street, and he said, “Yeah, I actually put that up. I was all up and down Hillsborough Street today with tape and a staple gun.”
One of the other three patrons there was this girl sitting at the opposite end of the bar from me. She didn’t look any more than sixteen to me, really, but I didn’t think she could even get in the bar if she were really that age, and I didn’t see any XXXs on her hand, which is used to indicate patrons under 21.
So that was perplexing, as well as her gender expression. She had on a white t-shirt, under which it looked like her breasts were definitely, and tightly, bound by some kind of repression mechanism, and she wore her pants hanging off her butt such that half of her underwear (checkered boxers) were showing.
There were so many thoughts that went through my head as I tried not to stare, while at the same time trying to read her gender expression and understand her intent:
- Okay, actually, whether you are a boy or a girl, you seem too young to be in here.
- You being here makes more sense if your intent is to express as male or masculine, as Flex is pretty much a “guy bar.” Not that women aren’t welcome there, and they do come there, but it is unequivocally a gay male bar—even if management would like to make it seem otherwise to increase patronage.
- I can’t tell by your voice if you are expressing as male or female or masculine or feminine.
- I’m glad I’m not attracted to you on any level, as it would all be way too confusing to try and sort out.
- As an added ambiguity, you are wearing your pants hip-hop style, and while I totally understand that this style isn’t unique to people of color, it’s certainly not commonplace—at least in my experience—to see it on a 16(ish looking) year old white boy or girl.
Before anyone gets on a soapbox about stereotyping, gender conformity, racism, and close-mindedness, I’m not making a value judgment about anything here. I’m just trying to sort out a lot of cognitive dissonance.
I left Flex at just before 10:30, where even though the “College Night” fliers said, “The party starts at 10PM,” there were only about four more people in there than when I’d arrived, only two of which may have been college students.
I continue to be amazed at how Flex hasn’t yet—in spite of the plethora of the things they’ve tried in order to get increased business in there on Tuesday nights—hasn’t yet just succumbed to closing that night, and Monday nights, too, truth be told. Not that I want it to, but I’m just saying from a business perspective, I can’t believe it hasn’t happened yet.