I had just moved into the city after visiting my old roommate Steve a few months prior. After a night getting drunk with one of his friends – a gay dude who shared a similar distrust of the two women who ordered cheeseburgers and chili fries rather than drinks while refusing to chat – and another night seeing bands too hip for their own good, it seemed the right idea. I savored a few weeks at my parents’, sitting on the couch in my underwear trolling Craigslist for jobs I may or may not have been qualified for and lining up as cheap an apartment as I could find. With a job cleaning lab equipment lined up to remind me that my degree was worthless and a nondescript room open in a neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification, I packed my shit up and grabbed a flight.

The first few weeks convinced me that I had made the right choice. I only worked half-shifts while I was being trained (although I question the necessity of learning how to wash a beaker) and spent the rest of my time and all of my money watching obscure bands at dingy bars with Steve.

Soon, however, his next term of law school started up, and mixed my unnecessarily odd working hours, we hardly crossed paths. My coworkers started talking on Tuesdays about which happy hour we’d attend that Thursday. Happy hour usually just consisted of me watching the rest of my shift get shit-faced by seven o’clock and try to fuck each other before stumbling home to their wives and husbands. The three day buildup to the event helped me pass my free time, but eventually I started ditching happy hour early to wander bars by myself.

After a few weeks of skipping out on my coworkers – the first time I tried to say good-bye early, my boss yelled “PUSSY!” at me all the way out of the bar, so I just snuck out after that – I stopped going altogether. I didn’t expect to find the promised land by striking out on m own. I just wanted to avoid ever having a drunk middle-aged woman conspicuously rub my thigh after she complained about her kids to me all day at work.