I have come to a fairly definitive conclusion that the club scene is not my scene.

My first club experience was last weekend, when I went to an 18-and-up club with a group of friends to celebrate the fact that the youngest of us was finally 18. I danced alone for the 3� hours or so that we were there, while my friends... didn't exactly dance alone... but I had fun, anyway. I decided I just needed to try harder next time.

So when the four of us returned to the club last night, I donned the finest slut regalia I own, along with a pretty good impersonation of self-confidence. "Ain't nobody gonna ignore me this time!" ...

I looked good, if I do say so myself. I took my friends' incessant advice to actually make eye contact (gasp) with guys on the floor. I shook my ass when the rapper man said to. I still danced alone.

It was only for an hour or so, this time. At that point, a relatively good-looking guy came up and started dancing with me.

--WE NOW INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST TO MAKE AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT--

i can't dance. i like to think i have Rhythm, but i am completely lacking The Moves. when i was 11, a really hot guy asked me to dance one time, and i was so embarassed by how bad i was that it took me until junior prom to get out of my shell enough even to be willing to try again. i know i can't dance, but dancing is fun so i do it anyway, as long as there are no mirrors in the vicinity. most people seem to understand.

--AND NOW, BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAM--

So, this guy starts dancing with me, and strikes up the only kind of conversation you can have in a place where cigarette smoke and sweat stench crowd out sound waves almost entirely:

"What's your name?

"What?"

"I said, what's your name?"

"Kat."

"What?"

"Kat."

"Pat?"

"Yeah." (surewhynot)

"How old are you, Pat? 18?"

"You can tell, can't you?"

"What?"

"I said, you can tell, can't you?"

"You just have a lot to learn."

"What?"

"I said you have a lot to learn!"

I won't quote the rest of the conversation, but it essentially boiled down to, "I've been watching you. You look good, but you can't dance worth shit." Then he walked away.

This was followed by three hours of sitting at a table, nursing wounded pride and fielding questions as to why I was sitting in the middle of a nightclub writing in my notebook. Hey, you know what? I would write in my notebook while bungee jumping if the mood struck me. After 3 hours of it, though, one of my friends got mad at me for being depressing, so I decided to appease her by dancing some more.

I made a discovery...

There are guys in the world who are worse dancers than I am.

I danced with three different guys who all defined the term "White Boy Rhythm", one because he was pretty cute and astonished me by asking me to dance, and two because no one else would dance with them and I felt sorry for them.

These guys were impossible to follow. I wanted to grab their faces and tell them that the reason they have music when they have dancing is that there is theoretically a correlation between the two. I kept my mouth shut, though. I just relished the fact that if I found the most desperate guys in the place, I could stop thinking about how I wasn't dancing and worry instead about what it said about my self-respect that I was letting guys rub up against me as a public service.

By 3:30, I'd accumulated an ass-grabbing, a neckrub (this was from a hot guy...!), and a handshake, in addition to the aforementioned, completely unrhythmic pelvic thrusts.

At that point, we went to Shari's for sustenence of the edible persuasion... we as in, my three friends, the three guys who had picked them up, and me. But by this time, I'd decided to scrap the ill-fated attempt to fit into my traditional gender role and actually had more fun in this totally awkward situation than I'd had at the club.

And so...

By the time I rolled into bed at 5:30 this morning, sun peeking over the horizon and making the East sky look all pretty ocean-green outside my window, I'd made it be as good a night as I could make it be.

But I'm still done with clubs.

I just have to find a scene where being attractive is not contingent upon being a good dancer, unless it's the Macarena or the Chicken Dance. *Those* are The Moves that I do have.

Besides! If my attempt at being female *had* worked out, I'd have had to quit the "anti-girl" diaryring. That could have been tragic. I am, after all, as anyone who knows me will attest, rather proudly unfeminine. Now you all know one of many reasons why.