Subculture

The first “subculture” which I belong to that comes to mind first would have to be the Tuesday Nights I spend at Bar Louie with my friends. Every Tuesday my friends and I attend Bar Louie’s “One Dollar Burger Night” with much enthusiasm. There, we simply relax and chat about anything we can think of. There are no pressures or issues sitting on our backs as we bite into our 1/3 pound burgers, topped with anything you can think of. All we have to do is sit back, drink our ice tea and discuss the world around us – what classes drive us up a wall, what cool thing is happening later in the week that we better not miss, or even get into a silly argument over whether the Packers or Bears will fall out of contention in the NFC North. Strangely enough, the restaurant is the only place I feel that I can actually just “let loose” for a while and not care about what others around me might assume about my personality when they see me. This subculture to any outsider may seem like a regular habit of something to do for fun, but to us it actually is a very important event.

The one time I missed our outing I just did not feel in the right mood for the remainder of that week. I felt disconnected from my regular routine and did not get the chance to relieve myself from all the mental weight I had picked up over the previous week – it was infuriating. In the end, when we walk out the door of Bar Louie with our stomachs stuffed and our wallets a tad lighter, we find ourselves back in the midst’s of Chicago and fall back into the all-encompassing culture of anonymity without a place to feel at peace again truly until the next week.