Gentle Snowflakes,

I have been battling a fairly gnarly sinus infection for the past few days.  Thus, I have not been up for doing anything other than going to work followed immediately by me feeling sorry for myself.  Once I get some antibiotics next week I should be able to be more regular with the posts than I was this week.  Thank you for the understanding.

-Robinson

I know I just had a post on graduating from college and going into the real world, but it certainly had me thinking about some of the other transitions we also make in our lives.  As we make our transitions into adulthood we change our silly voicemails on our phones that have inform the caller to leave a message after the fart.  We might start buying more professional looking clothes for our job interviews with the hopes that we can use these clothes in our new jobs.  We might start partying a little less and focusing more on our careers.  During this whole process, something very interesting happens to our online selves as well as our actual selves:  we start to move away from chatting online.  The older we get, AOL Instant Messenger/chatting online becomes the thing we love to tell our friends we’ve outgrown because it makes us seem older to do so.

Josh:  Oh yeah, I don’t even go online anymore.  I’m just so busy being busy with the business busyness stuff.  I’m so slammed.  I haven’t gone online since… like… World War II.

Matt:  Dude, you were talking to me online from the other side of the apartment last week for two hours showing me pictures of boobs.  I could hear you laughing.  Also, you’re twenty-two years old so you couldn’t have been alive during World War II and furthermore the internet wasn’t invented.  So… yeah.

Josh:  Whatever dude.  George was the one on my computer.  He loves to go and mess around on my computer.

Matt:  You lived with George freshmen year.  He transferred to Rutgers.

Josh:  I’m so busy.

And so on and so forth.  While we get older we try to separate ourselves from the supposedly “childish” things we used to do and the adult things we are preparing to do. 

Regardless of what you tell your friends about your online communication habits, the fact remains that most people will graduate and they will need to get a new email address because their college only allows them to use the college domain name for so long.  Most people my age deal with this by signing up for Gmail.   Gmail is a free email service provided by the online juggernaut Google.  It has lots of interesting features that your cheap-ass college email service didn’t have, but more importantly it has a chat capability.  It is an unspoken understanding that chatting online with AIM is for lame immature farty pants, but Gchatting is for sophisticated, graduated business-minded people.

People who are Gchatting love to let everyone know that while they are Gchatting with you, they’re also at work.  This anecdote signifies that you have moved on from your college email domain, thus signifying a tacit acceptance of  intellectual status while also let’ting people know you are actually employed somewhere.  This denotes a certain level of professionalism and maturity as well.  The perfect sentence you can type on Gchat is, “I don’t watch television anymore because I’m so busy with work at my job.”

The fact remains though that people are still chatting online in some way shape or form despite what they say.  People who use Gchat do not also use AIM.  It is cognitive dissonance on a very simple scale.  People are shunning AIM because it involves chatting online, while also embracing Gmail/GChat because of its online chatting capabilities.  What makes it so college graduates subconciously embrace Gchat for the same reasons they cast off AIM?

Screen names.

People are unbearably embarrassed by their screen names by the time they graduate.  They’ve usually had the screen name all through high school and all of college.  It would be like wearing the same exact outfit every time you went out for eight years.  You’re going to get sick of it eventually. 

Also, after eight years or so, what you thought was cool at fourteen isn’t exactly cool to have as the representative of your online self at twenty-two.  Someone could have four degrees in astrophysics, but as long as their screen name was “QtDollPhace69″  you would think they needed a helmet to eat their Go-Gurt.  All screennames are embarrassing in some way and especially when you’re trying to explain to people the first time you instant message them, “Oh yeah, I picked ‘BallerSupreme420′ because I was really into basketball and weed when I was fourteen.”  You’re going to sound like a moron no matter what.

The beauty of Gchat is that we get to avoid this whole song and dance and use our real, human names and not our projected, online, fictional selves that makes some grandiose assertion about a nickname we wish we had, our activities in our free time, our favorite sports team, or our physical attributes we want the online community to take note of.  With GChat, the only sort of profile you have has your email address and maybe your picture.

With AIM it had all those emo song lyrics about that girl you liked, plus the red and blue text about the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 as well as some “deep” quote you heard in Philosophy 101 that made you sound really deep, but Nietzsche was really talking about the deconstruction of organized and meaningful theism in the seemingly nihilistic twentieth century religious landscape and not about the importance of drinking beer every Friday like you originally thought.

These are all the things we want to be able to hide in our new lives as college graduates.  We’re not ready to let everyone remember that we’re still kids with our own immature misconceptions as well as strange desires on how we want the world to see us as.  GChatting lets us hide ourselves in plain sight with our own names so we don’t have to pigeonhole ourselves into narrowminded generalizations based on our online personas we chose when we were just children.  The reality is that we still don’t know who we are, but graduating from AIM to Gchat allows us to sort it all out in the meantime so we get to still talk with our friends while sorting out our own personal ethos.

So I graduated from college.  Yep.  It happened.  I did it in four years too.  Yep.  So there it is.  I certainly learned a lot about politics, sociology, human behavior and history.  Maybe I don’t know how to solve basic word problems or what causes fog but I graduated.  Regardless of what I learned there really is nothing in the world that can prepare you for what lies beyond the hallowed halls of your university.   The only way to deal with the real world is to go out into it.  But what about the fact that there were people in the real world who, when we asked about life after college, just shrugged their shoulders and said enjoy to enjoy our time as well as a multitude other quaint pleasantries.   

As seniors in college we understood that time was wearing exceptionally thin and we would have to get jobs and do something productive.  It was okay to live with our parents still, but we really didn’t want to because sometimes you just want to eat cookie dough in your underwear.  Now that’s indepedence. 

What about all those fun images in beer commercials where there are young twenty-somethings enjoying their professional careers in large apartments… and beer!  Beer!  If only someone in the real world could have told me all the things I probably should have learned how to do once I got out of college.

Be prepared to be on the phone… a lot – When you get your own place and things break, it means you need to be on the phone asking someone in India (yes, I’m looking at you India) how to fix your Dell.  Or you have to be on the phone with your bank wondering why there was a one hundred and twenty dollar overwithdraw fee.  Has anyone ever tried to get their cable turned on?  Or talked to your energy provider?  It’s like trying to nail jello to a tree.   These were all the phone calls that your parents made for you while you were still knee deep in your four year vacation. 

You have to work to meet people - In the real world there are places to meet single and attractive young people, but nothing will ever compare to the undergraduate experience.  College is a giant pot of spaghetti sauce mixed with hormones, alcohol, people coming out of their shells, just a dash of loud music, and a healthy amount of lowered inhibitions.   You are constantly in the state of meeting guys and gals that you find worthy of your attention. 

When you do graduate though you will need to work a little harder because you’re at work all week and when you get home from work all you want to do is rock back and forth in the fetal position eating cold Spaghetti-O’s while listening to The Cure in your bath robe.  You have to introduce yourself boldly in the real world to really put yourself out there.  In college you’re already there, all you need to do is go out. 

You don’t belong at college bars – I know when you graduated you thought, “I could do this forever!”, but believe it or not, when you graduated, it was just the right time.  Once that looming spectre of steamed brussel sprouts known as graduation is upon you, it becomes something you accept and it turns into a bittersweet brownie of redemption and pride.  Once you’ve accepted this reality you can’t go back to college.  It’s like Lucy and Peter Pevensie in “Prince Caspian”:  sometimes you’re just too old for Narnia.  Don’t believe me?  I live down the street from Tulane University in New Orleans and you best believe I’ve tried to go to college bars and get back to Narnia, but I continue to learn the lesson that as soon as I walk in that I don’t belong anymore.

You can’t drink as much in the real world as much as you did in college – Everyone knows that college is a magical place where beautiful, smart, women flock and boys… and yes we are boys… boys are pretty much the same no matter what, but the point is that college is pretty flippin’ magical.  And college magic enables its students to seemingly defy the odds of what a human being can physically and psychologically handle.  This pertains specifically to alcohol consumption and required hours of sleep.  Your inability to drink as much is twofold. 

The first is the Harry Potter Theorem.  This theorem operates under the principle in the Harry Potter series which states that Harry was protected from Voldemort during the summers in between school years as long as he called his aunt and uncle’s house his home.  College is like this with drinking:  as long as you call your college your home you are protected by a magic that allows you to do ridiculous things with only minor consequences.  Yeah your hangover might be terrible on Saturday but of course you were going out in under seven hours.  There was nothing a little brunch and more drinking couldn’t cure.

You try this shit in the real world and for some reason your hangover the following morning feels like the exact opposite of what petting a puppy is.  I’m not sure what it is, but think about how great puppies are just as an abstract idea.  Now think of the exact opposite of that.  I’m thinking it’s a mix of the feeling when you put on a wet bathing suit combined with being Ann Coulter’s prom date. 

The second reason you can’t drink as much as you could in college is that you’ll probably get fired from your job.  Think about those days when you were hungover on the way to class when the most trivial things in the world seemed like brain surgery.  You would do what is called the Hangover Haggle.  This is a low-grade mental gymnastics where your responsible side tries to bargain with your actual, hung over self.

Responsible Self:  Get up. We have to go to Ethics today.  We skipped last week and Dr. Smith takes attendance because he will deduct points from our final grade for too many absences.  Oh God, we smell like cigarettes and shame.

Hung Over Self:  All right fiiiiiine.  You’re such a douche.  But we’re going to McDonald’s after class.

Responsible Self:  No.  Absolutely not.  It made us feel even worse.  Fast food does not cure hangovers.  You need water, fresh fruit, and vegetables.

Hung Over Self:  Chipotle?

Responsible Self:  Fine.  You know one burrito still has like 1,800 calories right.  You’re not eating again today.

Hung Over Self:  Fuck that.  We’re going back for dinner before night class.  And can we not walk up any hills today?  I don’t think I can handle hills today.  Plus I need my favorite sweatpants.  Where are my sunglasses?

Responsible Self:  No one will ever love you.

Now imagine if you had to go to work for eight hours like this.  Woof.

Everything costs money – In college you have that summer savings to chip away at for your spending money.  You worked hard for four months and it was really terrible but you made enough money to go on spring break in Cancun and buy shots for your buddies occasionally during the spring and fall semesters.  You go out to eat when you want to, go to the movies and take road trips.  But this is what you worked for.  You worked to enjoy the fruits of your labor.  Also, you don’t necessarily pay rent when you’re in college except when you live off campus, but your parents helped pay for that too.

However, when you graduate you start to notice that movies cost $9.75, groceries are really expensive, drinks cost much more outside the university area and Jesus Christ Canolis do you go through gas quickly.  I mean everything you do costs some sort of money that you’re earning and have to earn unless you want to amass a fairly sizable debt.  And that shit is really depressing because all the little things you don’t think about most certainly add up.  There needs to be therapy groups for this kind of stuff.  How did my parents do it?

Whether it’s a loss of a sense of frivolity or now that I have a degree, college seems like a faraway place that I will always look back at with a very deep feeling of melancholy, but all of us know that when we graduate we can’t go back.  All our lives we had expectations:  graduate from high school, go to college, don’t kill yourself, and finally graduate.  What now?  These lofty expectations that society has held for you since you were born have been fullfilled.  I feel like a twenty three year old child, but college does a funny thing because it makes it so you have expectations of your own and instead of just fullfilling the expectations of society, you actually become a part of it.  That is what is truly terrifying about graduation. 

I left the stove on for two hours the other day and kept complaining my house smelled like burning meat.  But these kinds of learning experiences are most certainly part of the journey.  Maybe not the burning meat part, but we have to make our own mistakes, learn what works for us as professionals as well as active members of society and we must wholeheartedly embrace the seemingly less frequent moments of levity and joy that seemed to come so easily when we were undergraduates.

 

I was watching television the other day and I saw a commercial for Miracle Whip, the mayonnaise alternative that, as far as I can tell, just developed a marketing strategy.  Now Miracle Whip has been around for just over seventy-five years after it was debuted at the World’s Fair. And in my twenty-three years on this planet,  I’ve never seen a commercial for it.  I’ve seen one of my best friends hit on a wild deer, but I’ve never seen a commercial for Miracle Whip.  It seems that Miracle Whip has finally taken an aggressive team of advertisers to let everyone know that Miracle Whip doesn’t fuck around.  Take a look at this commercial.

Here is what we have learned about people who use Miracle Whip:

• They will not keep quiet
• They’re not like the others
• They will not tone it down

Now this is the kind of marketing that appeals to Western individualism and counterculture where the individual rallies passionately against the bonds of conformity and thus trumpet their hyper-individuality through their consumption of a series of widely consumed products.  Pepsi does this by saying they are the voice of a “new generation” or “young people who love the shit out of Coca-Cola like everyone else, but need a beverage that assuages the guilt that comes with bleating like the rest of the herd of consumerist sheep”.  No one can tell me Pepsi tastes better.  If you do you’re lying to yourself and God.  Oddly enough, God is a Mr. Pibb kinda gal.  I know, right?

Doritos has also done a similar thing by marketing to counterculture individualism by expanding their flavors by making them “xtreme”.  This allows people to tailor their chip consumption based on whether you snowboard or hang glide.  The newest Doritos flavor is actually called “Che-eze Guevara”.  The chip that tastes like revolution! 

But looking back at this new commercial for Miracle Whip, one might think this is just another recycled marketing trick that is being utilized by Kraft (the company that makes Miracle Whip).  I wouldn’t blame you if you did, but if you look more closely at the commercial you can see something far more sinister.  At the 00:14 mark look at what is sitting on the couch:  a hipster (see number four). 

**CUE SINISTER MUSIC**

Miracle Whip is marketing to the hipsters now!  Someone get in touch with NORAD.  Holy tight jeans, it all makes perfect sense:  the faux rebelliousness, the hyper-individualism, the allusion to rock and roll, the anti-conformity.  What is the truly genius part that will lure the hipster is the creation of a shared past that there are people who are actively rallying against Miracle Whip.  Oh yeah, I forgot about the Barney-Reingold Bill (1934) that forbid the use of Miracle Whip in American households which spawned an underground movement of sandwich consumption that has been raging in the underground music scene of Brooklyn for the past seventy years.  There is even a special unit within America’s military to make sure the use of this sandwich spread does not become a culinary pandemic. 

All kidding aside, given that there didn’t seem to be much aggressive advertising for Miracle Whip until this commercial, and also given the fact that it has been around for seventy-five years, we can conclude that Miracle Whip has been, in fact, surviving by word of mouth.  And hipsters love word of mouth.  According to hipsters, that’s how all of the best music is proselytized.  In fact, the ideal hipster music show would be from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist where there is this amazing indy rock band that hates publicity and is performing a super-ulta-secret-double-stampies-no-tellsies-totes-for-realsies show somewhere in Manhattan.  The only way to find out about this totally rockin’ show is to have someone tell you.  Whoooooaaaaa (guitar riff).

Once hipsters pick up on this fact about Miracle Whip, I won’t be at all surprised ifthe next commercial for Miracle Whip depicts a scene of douchey frat boys with popped collars, listening to T-Pain and drinking Bud Light.  The lights will cut out at the party and when they come back on all of finger sandwiches from the party will have been taken (frat boys love finger sandwiches).  The camera will cut to hipsters ironically eating the finger sandwiches with Miracle Whip while rubbing their mustaches together.  Oh, and all the Bud Light will have been replaced with Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Why am I up in arms about this?  I love Miracle Whip.  I put it on all my sandwiches and it’s delicious.  My friends make fun of me for it, but not to the point where I’m a social pariah and have to set up a whole new set of friends that understand my penchant for alternative sandwich spreads.  And I’m concerned that Miracle Whip might be taken over by the overzealous counterculture that is hipsterism and I will be faced with a moral quandary.  What is more important, my principled distaste of hipsters or my joyful taste buds?  For those such as myself, we have a decision to make.

This post is for my dad who positively hates Miracle Whip and every time he sees it in the refrigerator his face looks like the dog shit in the vegetable drawer again.  My guess is that he would actually be happier if he did find dog shit in the refrigerator instead of finding Miracle Whip.  Happy Birthday Dad!

Texting is an important part of everyday life for most people.  You can send a quick message to a friend or quickly and easily let a loved one know you are thinking of them.  Our generation has developed very dextrous thumbs from this combination of chatting online, video games and texting.  Moving our fingers rapidly over a keypad or keyboard is as much a part of our existence as brushing our teeth or clubbing a baby seal.  That’s why our parents so often struggle with the concept of texting or even using their thumbs for things that we wouldn’t even think about:  this stuff simply didn’t exist. 

As evidence, next time you’re watching television with your parents and they have the remote and change the channel.  They will nervously teeter the remote in the middle of their palm and use their index finger to change the channel; poking randomly at the remate like a chimp and an ant-filled log.  Part of this is because their thumbs aren’t as nimble as ours and the other part is that we spend a lot more time watching television than our parents because they ya know… have responsibilities.  They don’t have time to figure out what the ”input” button is.

But thumbs aside, what I’m more interested in is that space in between text messages when you hit “send” and your screen says “sent”.  More specifically, when you’re texting with someone you like, texting becomes a peculiar point of anxiety.  Because let’s all be adults for a moment and put it out there:  unless you’re texting your friends or your parents, if you are having a text conversation with a girl or guy, you’re flirting.  And flirting is a fairly nerve-racking endeavor because we’re surreptitiously letting people know we think they’re pretty great.  You’re flirting which is w hy you immediately check your phone when you get a text to see if they’re returning the sentiment you so sneakily shared with them.

The most disappointing thing is when you’re expecting a text from that special someone and it’s your friend asking you what you want on your pizza.  And in that particular moment you hate your friend because you were expecting it to be the cute guy from Starbucks that you finally got the nerve to give your number to.  It’s not that you actually hate your friend, but it’s just that you wanted to flirt damn it and you really don’t need anymore drama queen moments from Cindy who can’t decide whether periwinkle is her color. 

 We like it because texting is a safer form of flirting where we get to keep ourselves hidden through our phones but still say intimate things to the people we care about.  It is a masked courtship that protects us from the forced intimacies of putting our own feelings on the line in person.  But what about when people stop texting.  It happens all the time.  You’ll be having some solid banter with the cute girl from the library when the messages just stop.  You were receiving fairly regular text messages every few minutes and the instant that frequency is broken your mind starts to wander.  Holy shit, what did I say wrong?  Should I have not made that joke about seals?  Is she part seal?  Was her uncle killed by a seal?  These are the kinds of absurdities your mind jumps to when that space and time between texts becomes irregular.

For guys, when the text frequency becomes irregular, they will generally assume there is another guy ruining things for them.  This will generally result in lots of grunting and maybe even throwing of objects, pets, cars, etc. 

In the same circumstance a girl will think it was something they said and will go over the transcript of their texts with their girlfriends to try to look for the Fibonacci sequence or anagrams in the text to try to actually decipher what the guy meant when he said, “Can’t hang tonight. the game is on.”  I bet he’s just really concerned about the situation in Pakistan or maybe he’s really getting into Romantic poetry.  But… if you rearrange the letters in “can’t hang tonight the game is on”, it spells “A Egomaniac Tenth Night Thongs”.  GASP!  I bet he’s seeing another woman.

When it comes to texting I think it’s important to have some ground rules to avoid this tension and discord.

1)  If you’re texting and decide to stop abruptly because you need to actually do things with your life, let people know you’re stopping the texting for the moment.  I think that should stop global warming or the Taliban.  I don’t recall which.

2)  If you stop to do something else, like keep your eyes on the road or answer the phone at your work, and the time between texts will become less frequent, then you should say so.  We can’t read your mind.  How can we know that you dropped your bowl of Frosted Flakes on your cat and now there’s a huge mess.  We start to worry!

3)  We will pick up on your texting style, but if you don’t want us to keep texting you or you actually want to have a phone conversation, let us know.

Now when these rules aren’t followed we get exceptionally anxious because we fear the worst, that our thinly veiled comments of flirtation were uncovered and, what is even worse, not well received.  I know people who have had meltdowns because So and So stopped texting them and they don’t know why.  It’s maddening to try to figure out because you keep sending text messages and then you text their friends.  It is beyond me why no one ever thinks to call.  Yep.  Just call someone on the phone.  It is quicker.  But I’m guilty of the same thing.  If I’m touching base with someone quickly about plans for the evening or whether or not I think the Yankees suck wastewater I will generally send a text.  Are we becoming more detached from human interaction or are we just revealing our own insecurities that allow ourselves to hold our true emotions at arm’s length.  Whatever the case, folks, let’s just remember to be more diligent about allaying the worries of those when we abruptly stop texting.

I personally am an advocate of texting but there are always problems that arise.  It’s important for us to be clear and concise with each other and our feelings… especially when we’re e-flirting.  And also to avoid talking about seals.  And using emoticons.  Those are ridiculous.

In honor of Halloween and crazy shit that usually happens as a result I would like to finish my final installment for a while about drinking.  Everyone loves low lying fruit, but you get full from it very quickly.  On Halloween you go out drinking and you do a bunch of weird stuff in a costume.  You might make out with Lilu Multipass or rub shoulders with The Incredible Hulk at a bar, but you know you are going to get into some strange stuff that you will most certainly regret in the morning.

The regret starts when you wake up and assess the damage.  You can figure out what your hangover is and you can also try to unravel what the hell is next to you in your bed.  These are the worst things to wake up next to after a night of drinking.

10)  Someone you don’t know.

9)  Someone you don’t know who is also homeless.

8)  Your prized horse’s head.

7)  The DVD case from The Notebook which means you most certainly did at least one of two things

• Watched the extended sex scenes from the Bonus Material.
• Called your ex.

6)  First Aid kit.

5)  Hair from your eyebrows.

4)  A receipt from a tattoo parlor.

3)  A hooker.

2)  Fast food wrappers.

1)  A dead hooker.

 

I’m lazy and have a cold.  Bear with me.  Tomorrow’s post will be better.

To my dear readers,

The third installment of Things That Go Drunk In The Night will not be posted today because I had to clean my house yesterday in preparation for the Halloween arrival of some of my best friends from Providence College.  I know I said it would be posted on Thursday and it won’t be.  This makes me a liar.  To make it up to you, here’s an embarrassing photo of me playing Xbox.

So this is a picture of me playing Xbox which is embarrassing unto itself.  However what is more embarrassing is that I am wearing what is known in videogame parlance as a “headset”.  The headset enables boys to talk to other boys who are playing the same videogame at the same time and strategize about the best way to kill things (zombies, aliens, Nazis).  The headset has a very funny effect as it creates the illusion that you can take yourself seriously at all.  Letting a girl see you wear a headset while playing videogames is a more powerful sexual deterrent than admitting you don’t watch “The Hills”.

What is even more embarrassing about the photograph is that I was using the headset so much that I broke it.  And I couldn’t very well stop playing videogames so I had to fashion a new headset by fixing the old one with a mandana.

The headset takes escapism to a new level that allows boys to feel like bad asses without ever leaving the couch.  Things become more unrealistic and therefore more enjoyable because it is amplified by the presence of other nerds doing the same thing.  This is called The Nerd Omnipresent Corollary as outlined in Newton’s How To Never See Boobies.

What is even more embarrassing is that I’m twenty-three years old. 

Happy Halloween!

You’re groggy, dehydrated and you have to pee.  You have a splitting headache and it’s later in the day than you thought.  You’re not quite sure where you are and you most certrainly would prefer death than any sort of movement.  You’re hungover.

Every Saturday and Sunday millions of people wake up hating their lives because of the terrible decisions they’ve made the night before.  Why do we do it if the outcome is regrettable?  Well, as the late Mitch Hedburg wisely said, “You won’t stop eating apples just because they eventually become apple cores.”  People drink because it makes them feel silly.  However, despite feeling silly, as in physics, for every action there is an equal or opposite reaction.  So if you’re really super hammered on Friday night then Saturday morning you’re going to be really super hungover on Saturday morning.  All people get hungover in a different way, but there are clear, common signs that are applicable to all of us.  Here is the common progression of everyone’s hangover.

Level 1 – Cloudy With a Chance…

You’ll wake up wearing the clothes you planned on but a minor headache and manageable dehydration.  The disorder you can look forward to will be minor, i.e. shoes and socks on ground as well as other potpourri and knick knacks strewn about.  There is nothing to be alarmed about if you find paraphernalia that points to you listening to Kelly Clarkson before bed.  This is all perfectly normal.

Level 2 – The Albatross –

Your room looks a trifle more disastrous.  You have to pee a little bit too much and you’re noticeably uncomfortable.  You might notice you left your socks on or your pants are only halfway off.  There’s an empty glass next to your bed which is about as useful as one of those yellow straws that comes with your Capri Sun pouch.  There is evidence of food consumption such as Cheez-Its or Tostitos.  Nothing to be ashamed of.  You’ve pulled up your computer and you’ve noticed that you were looking at pictures on Facebook from last summer.

Level 3 – Waterloo

You have a very unpleasant headache.  Your mouth tastes like a Gila monster has hatched eggs in it.  You’re wearing all of your clothes still.  You have food stains from your leftovers that you ate with your bare hands right before bed.  You have traces of your self-esteem left, but it plummets exponentially with the more drunk shrapnel you find.  You wonder how all of your clothes managed to get out of your dresser and onto your desk.  Your computer definitely has pictures of that hottie from class who you think keeps looking at you but it’s difficult to tell.  Good thing you sent her a friend request.  There is a trashcan next to your bed.  You peer into it carefully but thankfully there’s no vomit.  You’re just so responsible.  Despite this shred of order, your life is progressing towards irrevocable shambles.

Level 4 – Little Big Horn

You’re wearing your belt around your head and your roommate’s sweatpants.  You’re convinced someone cracked an egg in your mouth while you were sleeping and then minced a clove of garlic on top of it.  Clothes, papers and fast food wrappers are everywhere.  You’re missing your wallet, but you know that you wouldn’t have any money even if you did.  You’ll find it in the toaster oven later.  Your head feels like the Book of Revelations fed intravenously and you have random cuts all over your body.  You will vomit in ten minutes and you’ll ask God to strike you dead.

Level 5 – Murphy’s Law

You’re completely naked on the floor of your room.  You actually have your wallet but it’s missing all of your credit cards.  The only thing in it is a piece of paper with a drawing of a middle finger and a note to call a man named “Paper Staxx”.  The phone number has eleven digits.

It appears that someone cooked chili at some point during the evening that had Little Debbie Snack cakes and alfredo sauce as its main ingredient.  You find a receipt for seven hotdogs purchased at eighty-six cents a piece.  Your roommate will later inform you that you peed on him in the middle of the night and when he objected mid release you informed him not to worry because “it’s just a movie.”

You will check your trash can for vomit.  You’re relieved there are no visible signs, but your levity is short lived because your toilet looks like someone pureed a gerbil in it.  Everything that can go wrong most certainly has.  Your self-esteem is at -5 and you feel the need to renounce religion because no god would let its creatures feel this pain.

Part III on Thursday.

People like to get tipsy.  It’s an enjoyable social ritual that allows people to drink fermented grains and liquids in order to lower their inhibitions enough to dance and talk to members of the opposite sex.  Tolerances and preferences may vary, but the one constant is that everyone gets drunk if they have enough of the stuff.  Because everyone progresses differently on their drunk scale, it would be nigh impossible to discuss everyone’s progression of drunkenness during the evening.  Thus, it would seem to be more productive to identify the different kinds of drunks that you might see out and about during your drinking adventures.  Let’s face it:  these people are everywhere.

The Fred Astaire – Sometimes you just really need to dance.  People have a difficult time expressing themselves and they have an even more difficult time expressing themselves through the art of the dance.  And white people have an especially difficult time unless Journey is playing.  But sometimes the combination of bar music and alcohol hits the Sweet Spot which allows this individual to move around wherever they are in search of their dancing soulmate.  If Fate isn’t feeling cruel, drunk dancing people will find each other and have a ball together.  Other derivatives of the Fred Astaire include Guy Who Plays Air Guitar During “Freebird”, Girl Who Thinks Every Bar Is a Karaoke Bar, and People Swaying Side to Side Singing “Piano Man”.  Here are some Fred Astaires in action:

The Sloth  – You can see this person sprawled out on the bar still conscious, but barely able to keep their eyes open.  They still manage to be double fisting vodka on the rocks, but who are we to judge?  They will strike up a conversation with anybody in close proximity and the subject of the conversation can vary between the awesomeness of boobs to how not drunk they are even if Suzy says so.  This will be me in ten years.

The Good Times Guru  – This is generally a guy who has seen far too may episodes of “Entourage” and treats every drinking excursion to be the most “epic”, “legendary”, “Biblical” experience they have ever had.  This person proposes a lot of toasts and spits a lot while talking about “owning freshmen” later.  The Guru is convinced that the evening will end with everyone sleeping with Brazilian supermodel twins with a winning Powerball ticket in her knee high boots.  The only thing more unrealistic than the Guru’s expectations is his belief that he can keep going at the current clip all night with severe repercussions.  Relax, dude.  I don’t need Kahlua on my Quiznos.  All the Good Time Gurus think they look like this…

… but they’re really huge tools.  Shhh, don’t tell them though;  their egos are like cold eggshells.  They actually look like this, what Hot Chicks With Douchebags calls The Four Horsemen of the Douchepocalypse.

The Gamers – These are people who are very committed to two things in life:  getting silly and competing.  What better way than to combine the two?  Gamers can be seen at a bar or party playing quarters, card games or beer pong (Yes, Jon.  Beer pong) with the utmost of discipline.  Their commitment to the two disciplines leaves them drunk and tight knit.  Gamers are prone to a drinking life of isolation if they’re not careful based on the self removal from the general ebb and flow of a party. 

Drinking games do get very serious very quickly so the problem arises is that it isn’t necessarily appropriate to scream “asshole” at the top of you lungs at the conclusion of card game.

 

Spring Breaker – This is the girl who is seen taking a few too many shots, her clothes are becoming progressively more chaotic, and whose tenuous concept of bodily physics is beginning to become a dangerous situation for all around her.  She takes a lot of pictures with her friends with her tongue out while also making hand gestures that denote her general life philosophy of “rocking on” or “hanging loose”.  She will also have flailing arms, and will grab onto  non-wasted people.  The Spring Breaker has incredible durability based on the frequency that they fall down, bump into things and knock over drinks.  She will seem like the life of the party for about an hour before she has managed to piss off everyone in the bar and falls asleep making out with the coat rack.

The Monsoon – This is the girl who can’t… stop… crying.  Yes, there is legitimate chemical precedent for why women cry when they’re drunk, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.  The Monsoon can be seen attracting attention for one reason or another.  It’s probably because she thought of the ending of “The Proposal” and just became overwhelmed with how beautiful it was.  For those looking to comfort The Monsoon, beware of giving her more alcohol and of giving her hugs as her mascara will rub off on your shirt.  Plus, Jesus Christ, it’s not like you missed the pinata at your seventh birthday party.  Get over it.  You’re in public.

The Nomad – The Nomad is an extravert that becomes a trifle overwhelmed when they go to a bar or a party.  They are so excited by the prospect of being in public that they need to walk around the party just to check shit out.  Who is there?  Maybe there’s something exciting happening downstairs?!  Maybe I just like people almost a little bit too much and I have a difficult time standing still?!  Probably. 

The Nomad will drink faster just so they have an excuse to go find the keg to make the rounds people or go walk up to the bar to do the same thing.  The Nomad, based solely statistics, is more prone to tripping and falling when intoxicated because of their frequent mobility. 

The Nomad doesn’t have a particular look or any noticeable characteristics other than the ones mentioned, but reserach has shown they live in structures that look like this:

 

Look for Part II tomorrow.

Having your own space is amazing.  Whether it’s a room, car, cubicle, locker, or desk, our own space is very important to us.  It gives us a medium where we can express our individuality.  We are not all artists or creative geniuses but we all at least possess personal preferences.  I don’t qualify myself as a particularly creative person, but right above my desk in my apartment is a clipping about owls attacking skiers in Bangor, Maine.  This says two things about me:  firstly, I am really good with scissors, and secondly, I am terrified of owls.  If I am ever killed by owls, the moment right before I am savagely torn apart by their talons, I will think, “They finally found me.”  If this doesn’t convince you of the real intent of owls then we are already lost.

Digressions and owls aside, our space reflects who we are and it enables us to engage in a particular kind of freedom that most people in the world don’t have the luxury of enjoying.  So that’s why when our parents leave us with the house to ourselves we get a brief glimpse into the brighter side of homeownership and thusly individual expression and personal preference.  It is because we enjoy this brand of liberty so much that when the house is ours, we get really excited.  Here are some of the best things to do when you have the house to yourself.

Watch Rated R movies – Is there anything that harkens back more swiftly to the days of yesteryear than watching a movie you’re not supposed to?  Mom and Dad are gone, I’m finally allowed to watch The Mask.  Everyone knows Jim Carey is prone to inappropriate behavior.  Even as an ”adult” , there is nothing like sitting down and watching something profoundly adult in a space that, with the absence of your parents, is yours.

Have People Over -  This is a much trickier endeavor because you can’t invite people over when you’re at school.  One person tells another person and that person tells Charlene, who, everyone knows, has a big mouth.  Before you know it there are eighty people at your house, including several people you don’t know; some of which appear to hookers… or maybe your neighbors.  You can never really be sure with the Joneses.

The flip side to this is an evening with friends (drinks optional) where you are the esteemed host, bestowing your benevolent space on your friends to enjoy.  Let’s face it, people love dinner parties.

Shower – This might sound a little strange, but I think this is more particular to guys than girls.  Too many girls have seen Psycho and even more boys have seen it.   This film included, there are just too many instances in movies and television where something breaks into the house and “gets” the woman in the shower or immediately after she gets out.  Men take a shower because they secretly hope there is a robber, medium-sized monster or at the very least a zombie to be able to defend oneself against.  Every man wants to test their mettle against these foes especially when the man is most vulnerable.  It’s probably the closest thing an average male will get to being a gladiator.  Most of the times it’s just pesky old Whiskers spooking around in the pantry.  Everyone knows how she gets when she smells catnip.

Play loud music  – You won’t have to listen to complaints from your parents about your blasted rock and roll when you play it as loud as humanly possible when they aren’t there.  Let’s face it, parents equate everything that is wrong with our generation based on our music and what better way to really stick it to them than to show them you don’t care what they think than by playing your music when they aren’t there.  That’ll show them! 

Parents also believe that infernal rap hop is vile and ignorant.  I’ve never met an old person who can decipher a single rap verse, but they’re pretty inexplicably spot on when it comes to content.  I think it involves some combination of ”Dateline” and Oprah.  If we, as a Younger Generation, ever were engaged in a lengthy land war against the older generation, a perfect code would be to just have young people rap messages back and forth.  The country would be ours in a matter of weeks.  However, we would need to keep them around in case we had to balance our checkbooks.  Because really, how often do we use our checkbooks?

So, my gentle snowflakes, what do you like to do when you have the house to yourself?  I’d love to hear.  And please, let’s keep it appropriate.  I’m not going to say it, but I don’t want to hear about anything that rhymes with “schmornography”.