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101.6°

I currently have a fever of 101.6° and feel awful. Fortunately it's probably just a cold virus going around rather than the Flu (>102°). Luckily I took a sick day this morning, but now I will be behind at work when I am back (grr).

I'm pretty sure I caught it on Saturday night at a 'trendy' nightclub in downtown Seattle. My friends and I were sitting around Saturday evening playing Guitar Hero II when somebody suggested going to Trinity (beware, gaudy website design), since they had heard that it was a place where all the cool people apparently go. Unfortunately a bad bout of groupthink occurred, and nobody spoke up to mention what a horrible idea it was before it was too late.

We went downtown and after an infuriating search for a parking spot, we had to wait around for some friends of a friend, and then wait around for one of their friends. By about 11 PM we got back in the car and drove down to the club. Another parking nightmare ensued and we were forced to park in the bottom floor of a ratty parking garage / apparent homeless shelter. There was a giant pool of water on the floor, which our noses discovered had a very high urine content when we opened the doors to the car. We paid $9 to park, but the machine ate the cash and didn't print out a ticket. A strange acting person who claimed to be the garage attendant wandered by and said that we would be OK without the ticket. Not wanting to pay $10 more to park somewhere else, we decided to risk it.

The line for the club stretched to the corner of the block and was moving at a snail's pace. After waiting for an hour and a half while getting solicited by numerous homeless people, shoe shiners, prospective line-cutters, and one bizarre guy whose modus operandi was apparently to stand next to us silently until we paid him to go away (we didn't), we got inside. After paying the $15 cover charge (!) we got to walk around inside what can only be described as an underwhelming dance club (though it's supposedly one of the 'best' in Seattle - it makes me wonder about the others). There were the requisite dance floor packed with hot sweaty people flailing their limbs about in some attempt at 'dancing', the blaring techno music that prevented any attempts at verbal communication, the disgusting floor covered with all sorts of interesting looking liquids (which you perhaps fortunately could not see very well since it was too dark), the three bars with a bouncer crew constantly shuffling you toward them, and finally a closet-sized 'lounge' with some ratty-looking old chairs and couches ('antiques' apparently). After walking around and making the disappointing observation that the answer to the question of "where's all the rest of the place" was apparently "there isn't any", we settled down in the lounge and observed people, only discover that we were just about the only white people in the entire club, the rest appearing to be Asian college students (or older wannabes thereof). As we attempted to hold a conversation, one of my friends actually made the suggestion that we should "buy like 25 drinks to make it worth it" (at $9 each of course - perhaps he meant in the per-hour sense of 'worth it', rather than the per-dollar sense).

After getting rubbed up by some slutty looking drunk girls (among other things), we made the wise decision to leave. Fortunately my car had not been vandalized, and we were able to get out of town through the bizarro-world of 2 AM downtown Seattle traffic, while witnessing only 3 or 4 near-accidents and one actual one (it appeared that a hooker and a John had started a little early while driving through an underpass on Broad (heh) Street and jack-knifed their car into a street wall).

So in retrospect I can think of 5 or 6 points at which it would have been easy to contract a cold virus from a random diseased stranger.

Despite all of that, I did actually manage to meet and talk to 3 or 4 girls a little bit, which is about 100% more than I would have met if we had continued to play Guitar Hero all night (but we probably would have unlocked all the songs in the game and gotten some XBox Achivement points.. It's a difficult choice ).

So that's one way to meet new people, and it only cost me $30, ringing ears, a headache, and a nasty cold a few days later. I think I'll try a few other ways of meeting people before doing that one again.

Anyway, time to turn in for an early night's sleep...

After all that, some corporate shills (ahem, 'Buzz Marketers', I mean) jammed a tacky ad for the same club I was at into my window.