In this week’s Culture Column, Jesper Lodin laments the feeling of growing old in the nation world, and doles out some advice on alternate places to go.
Hm… I seem to have come down with some slight nation fatigue. Like I wrote in my last column, nations are marvelous social venues and you should absolutely go there and bla bla bla bla, bla bla, bla bla bla (garble garble), but all that holds true somewhat less for people like me who’ve been increasingly droopy fixtures at nation clubs for longer than some of these new freshmen have been alive, give or take a few years.
I mean, jeez, me and my personal Pokémon team of compadres went to Lund Nation’s freshman party, more out of habit than anything I guess, and I nearly spat out my asparagus when I realized, mid-conversation, that I am now halfway to fifty. And yet I continue to look like a botched attempt to recreate Prince Joffrey as a custom character in Wrestlemania for the Xbox, while the new male students keep coming off the adolescent assembly line manlier, taller and more dismayingly handsome every year, despite them being all of, like, 12 years old according to my calculations. What the crud?
Sure, nation clubs have always been some pretty tough sexual bazaars, and racing up the stairs to Lund’s Penthouse in particular always brought to mind the sort of upriver climb that pacific salmon undertake in order to get to mate one final time before they die, but still… When did it all become such a slog? It used to be that I could just have a few shots and turn into a suave tornado like Jim Carrey donning The Mask or something (that’s what it felt like anyway. Could be that I’ve just been stumbling around inviting people to a party in my pants all these years) but lately it’s been more akin to a tired old Ewok banging on the foot of an AT-ST whenever I go up against a fresh shipment of these mint-condition, unlimited-edition Ken dolls.
Sure, I was never exactly part of the bourgeoise in the sexual class struggle, but I used to make do, and got with some really cool women over the years as a result. I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of dork loser, that’s just a recent development (and don’t mind the picture here to the right, I was having a bad face day). It’s just the nation grind, man… At my age, it’s becoming plain undignified.
Still, I’m not hating on the young bucks or anything, the onus is pretty clearly on me. Perhaps the nation gods are just telling me to Get out of the way! Shoo! Quit hogging all the good Life! Well, in any case, there are some passable alternatives to student nightlife in Lund, and I thought I’d list a few of them.
Hercules
Decent but unremarkable club at Stortorget, aside from the exorbitant entry fee of 100 SEK for non-students, which you don’t want to incur by plum forgetting your nation card. I mean, then you might just be tempted to try and both win the fee back and woo the lady dealer in one fell swoop by betting your entire savings account on 6 and 9 at the blackjack table, which is an absolutely fantastic, surefire way of Not Accomplishing Either Of Those Things, but hey, it’s your call.
Gloria’s
If Lund’s Penthouse is an elevated salmon spawning ground, Gloria’s is a secluded prehistoric lagoon where even a particularly uncool, outcast old salmon can plop down from the future and find himself proclaimed the Prince That Was Promised by an awestruck choir of all sorts of ancient sea-creatures (okay, that’s enough metaphors for today). Insulting ageist similes aside, Gloria’s a good place to go if you’re interested in meeting people with more life experience than just being a zygote and sitting around watching Netflix all day.
Ariman
Popular and authentic pub that attracts a mix between tired old revolutionaries and young intellectuals. A lot of smart, hip people like it, so if engaging in some light, exhilarating discourse on the semiotic significance of lamps in contemporary Latvian cinema sounds like a dynamite way to spend a Saturday night to you, step right up. Me, I’d rather go someplace more plebeian and/or less mustachioed instead.
