There are two types of people in the world.
Actually, there are many more than that.
My mistake, I miscounted. I’m an English major.
What I was going to do, before math so rudely interrupted, is try to describe for you the main differences between the people who go to downtown and the people who go to Midtown. (I live at Three-Quarters-town so I consider myself uniquely qualified for this assignment.)
This is an extreme oversimplification (which is, coincidentally, my favorite kind of oversimplification).
You see, Midtown is a place for, for lack of a better word, “partying.” By partying, I don’t just mean in the traditional sense of getting drunk, losing your car keys and sleeping on somebody’s bathroom floor with a roll of toilet paper for a pillow. (Although, that can certainly result from going to Midtown.)
The atmosphere in Midtown is a sort of pseudo-classy, peppy, dance-till-you-drop-then-breakdance exuberance.
Everybody there is simply so happy!
The obvious downside is the cramped spaces and sweat in your eyeballs from some tall dude lifting his arms up while you’re standing next to him during that one Drake song (you know, “Für Elise”). But those are minimal as long as you have the money to pay the covers and buy overpriced drinks and hop from club to club until it’s 3 a.m., you’re screaming and your voice is straining.
Downtown is slightly different.
Where Midtown is exciting, downtown is more laid back. That is not to say downtown is less booze-drenched — the crowd in downtown is much more interested in alcohol, especially beer, than is the Midtown crowd.
Midtown is a place for happy people to go and keep being happy, because YOLO! Downtown is a place for more world-weary people to go and drink because life is like that joke from Annie Hall (the one where two women are staying at a resort in the Catskills and one says “Man, the food here sucks” and the other says “Yes, and such small portions!”). Downtown is more of a place for introspection. Midtown is for extrospection. Is that a word? I feel like it should be.
That is, the scene in Midtown is based on a conception of “fun” that involves dancing to some song you’ve heard on the radio 300 times simply because you have heard that song on the radio 300 times, and that makes it awesome.
That conception of fun is overwhelmingly dominant in contemporary American society. In it, the signifier “fun” is encoded with its normal meaning of something like “a feeling of enjoyment” but also links to signifiers like “dancing to dubstep,” “amusement parks,” “social gatherings” and, more generally, “interaction with giant groups of people who have similar conceptions of fun.”
This is not inherently bad. It is a conception that has passed into our culture through mass media — Jersey Shore and the advertising industry have had a large hand in this enterprise.
But it has resulted in an entire culture of people who can’t be convinced of the relative value of a party/song/dance/book/religion without being reassured that a bunch of other people also think that it’s good — which is, in and of itself, problematic.
I don’t mean to be “that guy,” who stands up on a soapbox wearing two pairs of flannel pajama pants and no shirt, moaning about “sheeple,” because I’m so much better than you with my cool hipster ways.
I like following the crowd, too. It’s fun! There are a lot of people there, and a lot of them are really cool!
But there are some times when it’s all right that nobody comes to your party, so you end up drinking hot beer on the porch and yelling about deconstructionism at passers-by alone. That’s pretty fun, too!
If you want it to be, anything can be fun.
That, dear friends, is why you should read Derrida. I’m serious! It’s fun!
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays. You can contact him at opinions@alligator.org.
