billythehickly ballroom

First of all: from now on i'm going to avoid names at all times, and if i absolutely have to use one i'll just make one up.

events towards the end of the entry get a little bit out-of-order, but you hardly notice.

had my grads a while back.
this was a little bit of a problem with regards to finding a date. i had one gal as a back-up in case i couldn't find someone else, cos i was lookin for a gal that could maybe possibly be a date date perhaps.
this in essence was the problem, as it was then i realized that there are amazingly few girls i don't have complicated pasts with. i mean i've professed my undying love to just about every girl i know (give or take a few hundred) at least once.
i trawled through bebo looking for someone i know well enough for this not to be completely out of the blue, but not well enough that things are complicated. and also no girls that i know to be in a relationship.
this narrowed it down reeeeally far. so far in fact that it took me ages to find a match.
my mother kept suggesting people (which automatically crossed them off the list) so i had to look even harder.
eventually i found one girl who i knew peripherally, but knew to be a good person, well cultured, friendly, pretty, the whole bundle of "eligible without being intimidating". she was a bit taller than me, but i could overlook that.
well technically i couldn't...
anyhoo. i asked her on bebo, she said yes. i got her number, date set, tah-dah.
to put a cherry on it my mother had never heard of her, so when she asked me who she was i could just say "you don't know her" and leave it at that.
cos she constantly asks me who my friends are, if i mention anything at all to do with people she asks me for names, how i know them, what are their parents like, what are their religious affiliations, how many people are in their family, where do they live, the works. so i do my best to just cut most conversations short.
my dad on the other hand takes little-to no interest other than to make the occasional angry comment about what a colossal disappointment we all are. or how much he hates all our friends.
anyhoo, back to women who aren't my mother...
actually, now that i think about it she does come up again a few times in this story...
on the run-up to the big night i reserve the suit, run into a guy i haven't seen since sixth class.
not much to say about that really, just the usual banal stock phrases people usually use in small talk. we didn't see eye-to-eye six years ago, i doubt we're soulmates now. we wished each other the best of luck in our respective futures.
i got a green waistcoat. not much else to say about it...
on the day i put it on and then i'm told (guess who by) that i need to get a corsage for her, and that i have to, have to, have to buy her a drink, and that i should have reserved a shirt with a wider collar (i always leave the top button open due to an unusually large larynx)
so there's a rush to call her and ask her what colour her dress is, to co-ordinate, then to go to the outto-lunch florist in the rain, come back twenty minutes later and ask for a corsage, get told that she'll call the person who makes the corsages to come in. i come back another twenty minutes later to pick it up, get told that i didn't actually make an official reservation, reserve it, go home once again and wait another twenty minutes for them to deliver it.
it's at this point that my mother says "behave yourself, now" i say, "yeah, okay" she says "cathal, behave yourself. alright? alright? behave yourself." i say "yeah, okay" she puts her hand on my shoulder and forces me to look her in the eye as she talks "behave youself. alright? behave yourself. i mean it now, behave yourself." i say "yeah, okay" she says "cathal, i mean it, behave yourself. alright? BEHAVE YOURSELF." i say "yeah, okay." and she's still eyeing me as if i'm about to explode in an orgy of... well, orgies.
then we get into the car, and halfway through the 45-minute car journey to her house i realize i've forgotten the tickets. she says she'll go back and get them after she's dropped us off at the hotel (that last sentence would be so much happier if you change just about every circumstance to it)
we arrive at her house, her mother knows my mother from way back (everyone does, she can rarely watch a show without knowing one of the guests). we take the pictures, i give her the corsage, then my mother, like she's making a remark about the weather, says "he's been told to behave himself now, haven't you cathal? he's been told to behave himself." and this is in front of the date, the date's friends, the date's mother, and the date's little sister.
oh how one of us laughed...
we get the lift back to the hotel (if only...) and wait in the foyer while the tickets are retrieved. that gives us half an hour to nervously catch up, both of us noticing that i seem to know every guy in the building (there were two different grads on) while she seems to know every girl. we also discuss pirates and ninjas. i prefer ninjas, she prefers pirates. she tells me it's talk like a pirate day. angry at myself for forgetting it again, i go into overdrive pirate talk for about 90 seconds before it wears thin. i tell her about doctor mcninja. things start to loosen up a little bit, but we're nervous as hell, so that still leaves tension hard to walk through. we get the tickets, we're let into the big hall, i realize then that i don't have ID either, so i can't get booze. i contemplate asking for someone to go to and from home a third time for this express purpose, but i don't for an hour or two. in the intervening time a moderately good band play, we take pictures, we get our pictures taken, by friends and pros, (the pro ones look awful) we eat delicious food (though the gravy was lousy), we talk about points, about college, about what we're all wearing, about movies, we gossip about people who aren't there, the usual fun-fuel.
people start drinkin', people start dancin'. one gal in particular is eager to get me dancing, not with her, just in general, because apparently i'm a good dancer. for the time being i decline.
regarding this girlfriend-of-a-friend, i constantly get this weird feeling she's coming on to me. but lately i've getting this feeling from every girl i see, so either something's wrong with me or something's fantastically right with me.
my date keeps urging me to phone up for an id, and eventually i cave.
she's already downed a bit, so she's starting to talk a little bit more, but she's still a bit unwilling to do much more than drink and talk with the girls she knows.
the hall is starting to segue into disco, as a few start to get up and shake it.
i go downstairs and wait for the card, a crowd are smoking outside. i shuffle into the background of one or two photos. the car arrives, i take the card, say thanks, say goodbye, then walk back into the hotel before she has a chance to initiate conversation.

i head right up, show off my card in which i still have short hair, i show them weird way it was taken so that the two sides of my head look like different people due to the way the hair falls (one looks like damien, the like sid vicious).
i get a carlsberg and immediately regret it. i give sips to a few of my friends and they all agree it's disgusting. we talk about how hard it is to find beer that doens't taste like torture.
halfway through the pint i throw in the towel and get a JD'n'Coke instead. muuuch better.
after i've downed a bit i'm a bit looser, so i get up and dance a little, not so self conscious now that i've got alcohol in my system and the floors full of other people doing the same thing. quite a few girls stop and look at me dancing, at least one going on about how good i am.
i'm an erratic mover, so i go through highs and lows of dancing pretty quickly.
i sit down, take a few more sips, go looking for my girl. she's in the queue at the bar. i get the feeling i might be painting her like an alcoholic here, but honestly she was just getting boozey to try and alleviate her natural nervousness. like me, just with a higher tolerance level to get past.
i go over and talk to her in the queue, she's a bit giddy. i'm not finished by own drink yet, so i leave her be and go to talk to everyone i can find, taking shitloads of pictures as i go. i have a vague plan to try and repeat the success of my results night article, but with pictures this time, but in the end i didn't bother. this isn't really a newsworthy thing, just a little bit of public diary. the article was more an objective view of a universal experience.
i try for a few experimental angles, i try to get interesting images, i try to find the people i want to remember. they're alright on the viewscreen, but blown up a bit they ended up lookin a bit amateur. which they were...
i get another drink, drink it a little faster this time obviously. i think it was then that i started dancing a bit more. didn't seem to bad from my point of view. but as good as i may-or-may-not be on my own, i'm simply useless trying to dance with a girl. i don't know where to begin. mostly the group just forms mosh-pits. i go for a few walks around the corridors, a few trips to the bathroom. naturally the toilets and sinks got filled with paper pretty early on. no matter, alcohol doesn't really work the way of the first, and few of the guys seemed to be in much of a headspace to focus on hygiene. i splash my hands at least, i think i used soap once or twice. when you're on the kind of free-flow alcohol gives you hands aren't really that necessary anyway.
I run into a friend in the hall, who did a lot better than me in the big bad exam but is still repeating because he didn't get dentistry. i can't remember what he was talking about, but i said something about whether or not i should try to make it into a date-date, or would that just ruin it. he agrees with whatever i said, i agree with whatever he said.
while i'm on my second JDC, and quite langered, i start shooting the shit with my ladyfriend. it's a lot easier now we're both sauced, but the nervousness is still in the air. but we talk about all kinds of stuff, she tells me she has low self-esteem because her brother used to insult her a lot, i tell her i have intimacy issues because i have a ridiculously overprotective mother. not quite a postcard-perfect freeze frame, but we had fun. she asks me why i asked her to my grads when i barely know her. i don't answer because the answers long, i'm too drunk to tell it, and even if i told it right it would kill the mood like a pipe-bomb. i tell her i'm supposed to buy her a drink, as i've already told her a few times that night, but this is the first time she lets me. i go down to the bar again and get two JD'n'Cokes. i'm stood there staring blankly at them before i'm reminded i'm supposed to use the money in my hand to pay for them. someone says something funny, maybe me, maybe her, she giggles, she kisses me on the corner of my mouth. not like an impulsively romantic kiss, just a burst of random affection kiss. do to where she kissed me it felt as though she missed her mark, but i'm not sure if her mark was a bit further off the edge or a bit closer to the center. either way, i'm too drunk to be able to form a visible reaction. think i might have raised my eyebrows.
as we walk with our drinks i mention how i'm actually even drunker than i feel because it doesn't kick in until about ten-fifteen minutes after you drink it, so i'm piling up a lot more alcohol than i think. by the time i've finished the sentence (which takes a while) she's emptied her glass. i'm a little crestfallen as it sinks in just how much of a harder drinker my date is. we're chillin' on the huge stairs, back to talking about ourselves and miraculously not sounding self-important. she asks if she can have a sup off mine, i say no, but she's already taken it out of hands very slowly. my reflexes are shot. she gives it back and tells me she does that a lot. i wax on about which one of us is really the more drunk, taking into account how much we've drunk and what our tolerance to it is. she tells me me she had a shot of absinthe before a came to pick her up, so she probably wins.
we're babbling like crazies, we're giddy, we're whimsical, we go back into the hall, i start dancing a lot more. a LOT more. i fall down a bit. i start break-dancing and when i open my eyes people have formed a ring around me. i look it not in the mouth and start rocking out. people start cheering. every move i need is at my fingertips at a moments notice. i still fall down once or twice, but no-one cares. by the end of wonderwall i'm a bit wrecked. dance with my gal a bit, yak a bit, take a few more pictures, hugs all round. it's about two in the morning, we decide to call it a night. we head downstairs to the foyer. i call for a lift, she calls for a taxi. i wonder should i take the minutes that are in it and chance my arm that something might come of all this. in the i don't, as ever. i hug her goodbye, i get into the car alongside my dad and we head away home. i spend most of the journey home trying to focus enough to text her.