May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead.

I was trying to come up with a way to talk about the weekend before last without it coming off as drunken debauchery, but I don’t think that’s really possible.

Wednesday

Mik’s birthday. We sat around on the second floor and drank beer. It would have been an unremarkable evening, but at some point we transitioned into the sort of old school No. 6 conversation we haven’t had in a while. It’s not really significant what we talked about, it’s more the depth to which we analyzed and debated things. We derived, for example, the conditions for negative population growth given rates of adoption by gay parents and an imaginary fraction of adopted children 'going gay'. Sapo, Anton, and I lasted until after sunrise, then went to sleep. I skipped all of my classes. Oops.

Thursday

On Thursday night I went to the gym for a couple of hours. I was feeling energetic, so I figured I might as well take advantage of the situation and do something productive. The plan was to go home afterwards and study Chinese. My motives, obviously, were pure and noble. I got back from the gym, a little bit wobbly from 2 hours of picking up heavy things and putting them down again, and as I walked into my hall Anton, Sapo, and Mik informed me that we were going to the Thirsty Ear (the grad student pub just down the street) for karaoke night. Thirsty Thursdays have been a tradition for us for a long time, so I’m not really sure why I thought this one would be any different. I guess usually we send out an email to the list sometime in the afternoon declaring that we’re parched or dehydrated, and that’s taken as a statement of intent. We didn’t do that this time, so I naively thought I’d be doing homework.

The Thirsty is under a grad student dorm. You go down some stairs and into a side door and you’re in. There are no signs; it's all very speakeasy. The Thirsty's appeal lies in the facts that it’s less than a five minute walk door to door, that we know half of the people there, at least in passing, that you can show up in anything from preppy chic to your pajamas, and that a pitcher is $7. The karaoke is incidental, and we don’t usually take advantage of the opportunity until we’re several pitchers in.

On Thursday we closed the place. That’s not uncommon for us, but when I say we closed it I mean that very literally. We bargained with the bartender to give us a couple of free pitchers well after last call in exchange for stacking the chairs and moving the tables to the sides. When we got back to the house we continued to drink, and an inspired someone had the idea that we should go streaking across the soccer field next to the house. The plan appealed to me very much. Streaking seemed like classic collegiate buffoonery that I should at least be able to cross off of the list. So before we could think about it too much we were running downstairs and out the door, removing clothes as we went. Unfortunately my compatriots are not fellow countrymen, and they started bitching about maybe losing their visas if caught. I tried to convince them that it wouldn’t happen, but in the end we settled for running across the field in boxers and boots. Anton and I knocked on the windows of the dorm on the other side, surprising a few people, and then we ran back. The rest of the evening was spent watching scenes from Top Gun and debating which song was the theme. It’s not, as we originally suspected, Danger Zone. I’ve always felt that the iconic song from the movie was Take My Breath Away. Went to bed during sunrise number 2.


Friday


(Most of this is sort of a list. I think I’m writing it too long after the fact to really get into the storytelling, so you get a recitation of events.)

Went on a liquor run and a grocery store run for supplies for Saturday’s Founder’s party, then came back and sat around drinking. I didn’t feel like joining the crowd going to see Fast Times, the local cover 80s cover band whose shows we frequent, so I sat on my bed with Adri and Lizzie drinking and reading old letters written by Sixers in the 40s. Lizzie was working on her speech for Founder’s Day, so she was trying to come up with ways the house had changed. Some of the letters were pretty cool; one written in 1962 or 63 was talking about the formation of the Peace Corps, and all of the problems they thought faced the then-new organization.

The crowd at the bar had met up with the New York Sixers who’d come up for the weekend, so when they came back after closing time a party immediately started downstairs. My evening gets pretty fuzzy from then on, but I know it involved streaking across the field (for real this time) with Anton and Dimitrios. As we started running, having just abandoned our clothes at the fence around the field, I turned to Anton and said, “You know, when we come back those clothes aren’t going to be there.” We made it to the dorm across the field and back, and sure enough we were conspicuously naked and our stuff was gone. As we hunted around the house for our clothes there were an awful lot of cameras and flashes, so I guess running for public office some day is out of the question. I wore a piece of paper and Anton had on a shower curtain until someone took pity on us and gave us our pants back.

More drinking ensued. Sunrise number 3. Sleep.

Saturday

I started my day by making homemade sour mix, which is really simple and tastes awesome. I ran some last minute errands to set up for the Founder’s party, organized the bar, and started mixing drinks. I learned how to make a pretty good Manhattan and an excellent Cosmo, two drinks I’d never served before. It’s a lot more fun to bartend when you have a stocked bar and people want cocktails. The stuff I serve at our open parties is all plastic-handle dreck with coke or juice in a red Solo cup. Even using real glass makes a difference. Whatever… I guess I shouldn’t worry about serving the 17 year olds with fake IDs shitty drinks, they don’t know any better, anyway.

Dinner was prepared by Kenji and was nice, but other than that I spent most of my evening making drinks rather than consuming them. My drinking goal for the evening (yes, I sometimes have those) was to expand my horizons, so I drank gin and tonics until I didn’t hate them quite so much anymore. I’ve found that the secret is a squeeze of lime and drinking it all while it’s still really, really cold.

The night was made a bit weird by a visit by an asshole, powertripping MIT cop and some intra-house conflict. Rui and Conor nearly got into a fight when Rui got pissed off at him for stealing his cigarettes and started shoving him. Conor doesn’t smoke; he was just fucking around. Also, Conor’s a pretty competent judo practitioner (judoist? It should be), and in his defense he didn’t break Rui, he was just sort of keeping him away. Hashem and Evros were fighting about something, too, but I don’t really know what. There are a lot of people living here who don’t like each other, but it almost never results in real anger and certainly not violence. This was also weird because these aren’t people who don’t like each other, they usually get along fine. I’d say that there was something in their drinks, but I probably mixed them. So I’ll blame the food instead.

I went to bed before sunrise. I also got up and went for a run on Sunday, which surprises me.

Anyway, that was my weekend.