Filling my niche

Over the weekend I read a story in the Washington City Paper about an internet site that has become extremely popular in our nation’s capital. Late Night Shots is a by-invitation-only social networking site made up of (relatively) young working professionals who tend to frequent the same subset of bars in the Georgetown area. The average member is someone who comes from a well off family, attended a preppy college where he/she was in a fraternity or sorority, and likes to party. This is how the writer describes this groups social scene, both on and off line:

 

"Then the bearded one in the middle busts out with this: “Do you like anal sex?” I squint. I’m confused. “Do you do anal?” he repeats, head bobbing with excitement. The litany continues. Do I want to take it in the ass? Have I ever taken it in the ass? My silence is taken as an affirmative and he announces that this interview will go no further unless he receives a hand job. I retreat into a hole carved out during similar sessions in high school and head for the door.

 

Later, at home, I decide to find the fellows online. It’s easy to do since these were no run-of-the-mill meatheads. All three are members of Late Night Shots, a very exclusive, invite-only social-networking Web site. The anal-sex proposition came from John Tabacco, a 25-year-old graduate of Georgetown Prep and Denison University. His friends were both graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

Late Night Shots caters to Washington’s hard-partying preppy crowd. Think of a new generation of young Republicans getting trashed at St. Elmo’s, hooking up, then writing about it at 3 in the morning. The bar-scene-themed Web site launched in late spring 2006 and has since branched out to four other cities. But it’s nowhere near as popular anywhere else as it is here in D.C. Founder Reed Landry, a prep-school boy from McLean, Va., claims he has 14,500 members and that a third of them visit the site every day. He and partner Neel Patel say they make enough money from Google ads and banner ads to abandon outside employment."

 

Reading the article reminds me of the crowd that I very much wanted to be a part of when I was younger and made me wish I was a twenty-one year old frat boy so I can try to hook up onto that scene. But one of the (few) good things about getting older is that you better understand who you are and I have since realized that this is really not the my scene. When I lived in Virginia I knew this girl and her sister and they would invite me to all their parties. These parties were unlike any of the other parties I normally went to. It was there that I first played beer pong and flip cup. These parties made me feel like I had accomplished something, that I had found acceptance among a group of people that others wouldn’t normally associate me with. It wasn’t much later (literally I realized this as I was writing this post) that I realized that these parties did not change who I was, they simply made me feel differently about myself momentarily. I kept in touch with very few of these folks because I had build very little in terms of relationships with them, most likely because we had a very little in common to begin with (except, of course, that a lot of us went to UVA).

 

Instead of spending my nights trying to out party a bunch of frat boys, I am better off allocating my social and intellectual capital discussing theology with the guys in my bible study or drinking with graduate students in the English department in Milltown, both of which I have done in the last seven days.