whoooo!

I dread all of Krystal's parties. I dread the mighty horde of college students that take over my apartment and courtyard. I dread the possible breaking and stealing of items that belong to me. I dread the police coming over and being in a rotten pickle. I dread not being able to sleep for hours because screaming "WHOOOO!" is such a popular party game. I dread being greeted by the smell of beer when I walk in the apartment for the next week. I dread walking out of my bedroom the next morning and finding a strange man passed out on my couch. I dread all the infinite number of possibilities of parties gone wrong that my head can come up with.

These parties, I think they're important to Krystal. She likes the scene, and for some strange reason, she likes the scene to appear in her own space from time to time. So I try to be a good roommate and let her have them every once in a while.

You can't deny the party girl her birthday party. Last Tuesday, Krystal left the world of teenagers and joined the rest of us twentysomethings. One of our neighbors was having a birthday, too, so that's double the party. Double the party, double the kegs, double the horde fitting into double the three-bedroom apartments.

I don't like beer, which usually puts me at a disadvantage at these parties. So I generally don't drink, while drunken idiot after drunken idiot in a great organized queue of drunken idiots comes up to me and says, "Nah, you just haven't tried this kind. It's good."

We took care of this issue early on. Nick took a trip to the grocery store to provide Ashley and I enough premium malt beverages to last the evening. Pansies that we are, that took about a six-pack. We started at 9 pm. By 10, we were definitely on the far end of sober and slowed down. (Although, I stopped drinking completely by midnight and was good for another three hours after that.)

Funny thing about alcohol. I don't know much about chemistry, but when you combine 1 part Sandra with 1 part alcohol, you get this amazing chemical reaction that results in The Girl That Just Won't Stop Talking. Add the short attention span, and you get the idea. I spent the evening talking to someone for a while, very very fast, then walking away and saying precisely the first thing that popped out to someone else.

I remember the party. I was not so intoxicated that my mind neglected the filing cabinet of my memory. I remember the people I talked to, though I had more trouble than usual with names, I remember the chair I got off the roof, I remember the WHOOO-ing I shushed, I remember the water I drank, and I remember going to bed. I also vaguely remember some confused dreams about inebriated people. I think they were dreams.

Like the dread, the early morning bathroom break always happens. At some point in the middle of the night, I woke up feeling nature calling, or rather screaming at me. I poked my head out my bedroom door and looked around. All was quiet. The front door was closed and locked, the music was off, the lights were out, and there was a big wet spot on the floor, but nothing is perfect. I was satisfied that we had again managed to live through another party with our lives, sanity, and police records intact.

Now, I said I remembered the party. That is completely true. But throughout the next day, I was repeatedly reminded of my own behavior the night before. After which I would pause, wonder if I did/said that, and then go, "Oh yeah. Maybe I shouldn't have said that."

Maybe I should not have yelled at the guy eating cookies. Maybe I should not have told the girl in the blue shirt her breasts were hanging out. Maybe I should not have walked up to the Middle Eastern guy and said simply, "You're not white." The theme of this paragraph is that maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut.

Then I received my reviews. How what I thought surely would be called "drunk" and "insensitive" turned into "candid" and "funny". I can't decide if that's really how people would normally react to that sort of behavior or if they were just drunk too. I've been refraining from saying exactly what I'm thinking for years, and here I find that maybe that's what people like. Her breasts were hanging out. The guy was not white. And what was that man doing in our cookies anyway?

I say all this, but I know I'm not going to change. I'm going to be just as antisocial as before and leave the Sandra of Friday night under the bed until I pull her out for another evening of social drinking. Krystal's friends will go back to thinking that I am the "shy and quiet" one (honestly, the nerve) and figure that it must have been my fun twin sister that night. One of them already told me that I'm no fun when I'm sober.

Yeah, she's no fun when I'm sober either.