I Want to Go Into This Club
I don’t really believe in love at first sight besides maybe when it comes to life-altering obsessions I’ve had. First Friends episode I watched (The One when Chandler in a Box), Bad25, the pilot of How I Met Your Mother, the first paragraph of the Infernal Devices etc. All those things I was a minute into the experience and suddenly, I couldn’t think about anything else. My love at first sight with How I Met Your Mother was when I watched it for the first time when I was twenty years old and a sophomore in college. I watched it all the way through for a second time in the fall of junior year.
When I think of my dorm room I lived in junior year, I think of me watching How I Met Your Mother. I would get back from cross or track practice or the library and turn on How I Met Your Mother. I would plug my laptop into the HDMI cord that was plugged into the TV and push play on whatever episode I was watching at the time. I would pull on an old faded crewneck that was my grandma’s or an old cross country hoodie, joggers, and climb on to the breaking futon that sat in front of my roommate’s TV.
Some of my favorite nights my junior year was me in my comfy clothes on a Saturday or Sunday night gorging myself on a Domino’s cheese pizza or Papa John’s breadsticks and watching HIMYM. I was more content with that lifestyle back then in college.
My roommate, Kat, was at her boyfriend’s apartment often so I had the room to myself a lot. Kat would walk in the room to grab some things and walk in on me watching the show. It was her first exposure on how obsessed I was with the show. I would tell her I was Ted and she was Marshall. She honestly is and not just because she is from Minnesota. How I Met Your Mother was the show I journaled countless times in my journals about different storylines, the characters, how much I related to the show, or how much it reaffirmed how I believed that everything happens for a reason. Long story short, the show is one of my biggest love stories.
Twenty year old me watched the HIMYM episode of “No Tomorrow” for the second time, laying on the futon in my sweats, and biting into a piece of Domino’s cheese pizza. I was going to be twenty-one in a few weeks and the upcoming spring would mark my first legal St. Patrick’s Day. I watched Ted celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in all the wrong ways and thought I wanted to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day properly by having a day of merriment. As I picked up another piece of pizza, I thought someday, I was going to take a picture, post it on Instagram, and use a caption about having a better St. Patrick’s Day than Ted did in 2008.
If you’ve seen the show How I Met Your Mother is the king and queen of flashbacks and flashforwards. The show shows a lot of flashbacks to Lily, Marshall, and Ted’s college days or their first years out of college living in the city together, Barney as a twenty-three year old fresh out of college in his hippie days, or Robin’s days as Robin Sparkles in Canada. Plus, many more. Needless to say, as the show goes on, we get a good idea of who the squad was when they were younger.
In season one, episode five, “Okay Awesome’’ Lily, who is a kindergarten teacher, is talking to one of her coworkers, Claire. They are both twenty-seven, but Lily feels Claire is more grown up than her and her friends. During naptime one afternoon, Claire is saying to Lily, “Austin and I spent Saturday night at the most charming bed and breakfast. It was so nice. What did you do this weekend?” Lily thinks back to her weekend at McLaren’s chugging a large beer in ten seconds and burping at the end of it with her friends cheering her on. I love that Lily chugged a beer in ten seconds, but her exchange with Claire led to her saying to Marshall, “Claire is my age, and she and her husband do all these classy grownup stuff. Maybe we should start doing some grownup stuff.” So they hosted a wine-tasting night in their apartment with Claire, Claire’s husband, and some of their other friends. Later in the episode after Lily and Marshall have both ditched their attempt to have a classy wine night at their apartment, Lily is sitting outside the club Awesome with Robin. Robin tells Lily, “Why are you becoming this person? I heard that in college you flashed a campus tour group on a dare.” She responds with, “Once on a dare. The other times were just for fun. I’m not in college anymore. I’d love to go back and be that person again, but you can’t move backwards, you can only go forward.”
If you were watching the show in order for the first time you wouldn’t know who the squad was when they were teenagers or in their early twenties since this is season one episode five. But if you were watching the show back, this exchange between Lily and Robin might feel more authentic. We see Lily in high school and college dress in all black, dyed black hair, heavy eyeliner, and wearing combat boots. The trio is shown spending their college days partying, smoking a lot of weed, and doing reckless things like Lily diving headfirst into Marshall’s car after stealing a shirt full of alcohol. In season eight episode twenty-three, “Something Old”, Marshall and Lily are packing for Rome, and find the red beanbag they bought when they first moved into the apartment. We get a glimpse of Marshall, Lily, and Ted’s first night in their apartment when they were twenty-two and had just moved to New York after graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In the shot of the trio sleeping on the beanbag in their otherwise empty apartment with their rest of their twenties, the city, and postgrad life at their fingertips. But in this shot, Lily is back to having red hair as if she is putting her college and teenage years behind her meaning she is back to being a redhead and stopped dressing in all black.
Lily saw Claire who might have been the same age as her, but was on a different path and timeline than her. She got in her head and maybe thought she shouldn’t be chugging beer in under ten seconds at the bar anymore. She thought she should maybe leave that behind along with the rest of her young adult self, but after she tells Robin about not being able to go backward, Robin says, “Um, pause… you can go wherever you want. I guess the question is where do you want to go?” And Lily responds, “I want to go into this club and find my fiancé.” It was as if at that moment, Lily realized she was only twenty-seven years old, and she could still have reckless, wild, fun, twentysomething nights in New York City. So she lifts up her shirt and flashes the bouncer which then he lets her and Robin into the club. She finds Marshall, and they start dancing and making out on the dance floor of the club which older Ted says, “So, Marshall and Lily rediscovered their youth.”
I am the person who fully grabs my youth by the lapels and never wants to let go. I try to jump on every opportunity and never want to stop dancing in the fountain of youth. By doing this had led me to some fun night outs, but disclaimer: I’m not saying going out is the only way to conquer your youth!
This episode of How I Met Your Mother makes me think of the different kinds of going out there are. Ted, Barney, and Robin were going out to a club while Lily and Marshall were having a wine tasting in their apartment, but at the end of the day, they were all hanging out with young people and drinking on a weekend night. Yes, Marshall, Lily, Claire, her husband, and their other friends were trying to be more grown-up and classy, buuuut we know how that worked out. I love thinking about the different types of night-outs, especially the time I had my ultimate night out on St. Patrick’s Day in 2022.
So back when I was twenty and lusting over having a wild, raging, reckless, and memory-soaked St. Patrick’s Day as Ted and Barney did in 2008, I was thinking about my next SPD. I held that thought until a few months later when it actually was my first legal SPD which happened to be on a Saturday. Earlier in the day after Saturday morning track practice, I put on my ugly green sweater that I wore for ugly sweater events around Christmas. I wore it around throughout the day until I changed into a different, green shirt to go to the college apartment party and bar later. The apartment party my friends and I went to was a rush before we walked downtown seeking green beer only to discover they were out at the bar we had wandered into.
I ended up not taking pictures that day so I didn’t use the caption I had been imagining until four years later when I was twenty-five and celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, Ireland. I was in the midst of my graduate school year in Glasgow, Scotland so my friends Nathalie, Aby, and I made the short flight over to Dublin for the holiday. In the morning of SPD, we got dressed up in our gear. We took pictures on our friend Niamh’s balcony before heading out to the parade. After giving up on the parade after realizing we weren’t going to see anything with the amount of people there, we headed to our first bar of the day. I ordered a Long Island, and Niamh got us a round of Baby Guinness shots. We gathered around the table and took the shots. Aby got given a hat with the Irish flag on it, but I put it on my head at one point and continued to wear it throughout the day.
Throughout the day, I was proud of myself for maintaining a good drunk. A few weeks before Nathalie and I visited Aby in Liverpool where we went to Bottomless Brunch. We drank a lot of prosecco at the brunch which you know how bad prosecco can mess you up, so you can assume how we were feeling as we walked out in broad daylight after the brunch ended. We went to a fast casual Chinese food restaurant, and the workers there definitely knew we were out of it. I thought I was going to die in that restaurant eating my Lo Mein. Of course, I did the responsible thing after eating and drank three more cocktails at the bar we went to afterwards and a big bottle of Blue WCKD back at Aby’s flat once we got back.
In Dublin, I never felt like I was going to die and felt great all day so one point to Hufflepuff. We went to three different bars and one club before coming back to Niamh’s flat. After over twelve hours of drinking, we put frozen pizzas in the oven. Nathalie was sitting on a chair smoking a cigarette on the balcony while Aby was sitting on the ground next to her. I was still in the kitchen drunkenly staring through the oven window at the pizzas as Nat shouted from the balcony, “Ella, don’t burn the pizzas!”
That line became an inside joke that we would all say to each other to this day.
The next morning after Aby and I woke up on the couch in Niamh’s living room, I fished for my phone out of the cushions. I grabbed it with the reflection of the screen revealing black makeup smeared under my eyes and a hat with the colors of the Irish flag still on my head from the day before. Apparently, I put my pajamas on, but didn’t take off the hat.
I took a selfie of myself at that moment that I posted on my story covering my eyes with the clover emojis.
I also clicked on the post on my Instagram feed of pictures of our St. Patrick’s Day that I posted before I passed out with the caption reading, “Having a better St. Patrick’s Day than Ted did in 2008.”
Twenty-five year old me made twenty year old me proud that day.
A recurring scene that would pop up in my year in Glasgow was Nathalie, our friend Rachel, and I getting drinks at the Counting House in Merchant City. Nathalie and I would leave our apartment making the less than fifteen minute walk to the pub where Rachel would be walking from the train or subway station to meet us there. Every night we went we would shoved ourselves in any tiny table they had available where people were drinking around us since the Counting House is usually crowded. Eventually when it got nicer in the spring and summer, we would sit in their outdoor seating area with the city energy of George Square dancing around us. I would order my usual, which was a pornstar martini pitcher or a pint of Kopparberg cider. Our nights at the Counting House are one of things I miss the most from Glasgow. The laughter, the grad school complaints, our lives in the city, the companionship, the promise it offered for a start of a great night, the cheap, but delicious drinks, and overall, the fun it always brought. Some nights at the Counting House we three got drinks with us leaving at midnight when they closed. We would hug in our buzzed states before Nathalie and I walked back to our flat, and Rachel rushed to make the last train back to the West End. Or it was us pregaming there before heading out somewhere else.
A year and half earlier when I was twenty-four years old, my friend and I sat across from each other eating Pancheros burritos on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We found ourselves having a deep talk as we ate our burritos. It was an hour before we were walking from the Graduate hotel where we were staying to whatever bar we stumbled upon. We walked past the many cute houses that are in Ann Arbor, and my legs were enjoying the walk after my seven hour car ride from rural Illinois. I was moving to Scotland in a month, and I came to say goodbye to my friend who lived in Michigan. We had been seeing each other almost once a month over the spring and summer meeting up in Chicago which were days full of bliss and never wanting the present moment to end. This time though I made the trip to Michigan to say goodbye to my friend. We ended up sitting outside one of the bars in their outdoor seating area. We ordered cocktails and appetizers as the sun poured down on us as if it was reminding us to soak up the last of the summer bliss. Happiness was exuberating me as I sipped the maroon colored cocktail. It was the first night of my visit, and the vibes of the summer night were as refreshing as the drinks.
Obviously, college parties, partying all day on St. Patrick’s Day, brunching too hard on a Saturday, having summer night drinks, or sipping on pints at pubs are various forms of going out. The times I have gotten dressed up, gone to bar after bar before ending the night in a sticky club on a Friday or Saturday night are memories I’ll always cherish. At times I have caught myself thinking my friends are more ahead of me in life as Lily did, but that is just irrational thinking due to a societal timeline. Lily and Marshall kept having various forms of wild nights whether it was at McLaren’s, in their apartment with their friends, at the occasional wedding, or the times we see the squad going to a club. They were out there making memories just like I am.
And Lily ends the failed wine-tasting night by saying, “I’m going to barf. Where’s my purse, where’s my purse? (Sleeps) I’m okay.”
A way many night-outs can end. ;)
P.S: And if in case you were wondering, I didn’t burn the pizzas! ;)
