Life After Connecticut College

....Things got rolling on Friday when Mitch and I picked up Laurel at Conn's own Shain "Yearning for Learning" Library and hit the road. We arrived at Jaime's place, which is either in Allston or Brighton (no one knows for certain where one ends and the other begins; they're sort of the Siamese twins of Greater Boston towns), in record time and consequently were among the first guests to arrive. It had actually been a pretty hectic week, so I was eager to starting having some fun (as opposed to most of the time, when I hate to have fun). Fortunately, fellow Class of '07er Cornelius "Gardenburger" Hardenbergh (that joke was especially clever considering he is a recovering vegan) was already in attendance, so I chatted with him for a while. We had such a good time catching up that by the time I looked around the party was in full swing! Immediately something seemed askew, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I discretely polled Mitch, Cornelius, and Laurel to see if any of them had sensed something similar, but none had detected anything out of the ordinary. Perplexed, I decided to to put it out of my mind and assume that nothing was wrong. A while later, however, it struck me: the ratio of dudes to ladies was about 7:1! Certainly this is not unheard of, but after being at Conn and its 60:40 female:male ratio for four years, I felt a little out of place. Laurel, on the other hand, seemed to have no problem being on the receiving end of the advances of every eligible male in a 100-yard radius (Mitch and I are not allowed to hit on Laurel because, as she says, we have already entered the "friend zone"). The rest of the party went fine; one of the highlights was a keyboard, bass, and drum machine jam featuring me and '04 Camel Nate "Was Naked on the Poster Advertising His Senior Recital" Peirce, during which I was forced to lie on the ground while playing keys since no one had a keyboard stand (I'm willing to suffer for my art).

The next night was the WTF/Rustic show. During the day, we had our first practice session in over 2 years (our songs don't exactly call for virtuosity). As I mentioned in a previous post, Rustic is definitely WTF's favorite band, so we wanted to play as well as possible. Duncan, one of our singers/guitarists, has pretty much modeled his life after that of Rustic's lead singer Dave Gutter (that's actually his stage name; his given name is David Downspout). Thankfully, we sounded good at the show, but really we just wanted to get our set out of the way as soon as possible so that Rustic could start. As expected, they played an incredible show. During the encore, they even brought Duncan's sister's boyfriend Joey (the first person to ever get a Welcome to Florida tattoo) on stage to air guitar and dance. They also shouted WTF out during their set and held up one of our t-shirts! The best part, though, was when Dave signaled for Nadia, the ex-girlfriend of Wes (the other singer/guitarist in WTF), with whom Wes had broken up only 2 days prior, to come on stage and dance! I should note that this young lady is very, very attractive and made an excellent on-stage danger, so much so that Tony, the drummer from Rustic, made a stripper joke about her when she got off the stage (no one makes stripper jokes about me anymore; I guess I'm not as young as I used to be). It was certainly one of the more memorable WTF shows to date.

Yesterday was significantly less fun but noteworthy nonetheless. Since Laurel is still a student here at Conn, she needed to get back to campus to take a final exam. So, we all bundled up, Mitch and I borrowed a few shovels from Jaime's neighbors, and we started digging out my Camry. Because Mitch and I are so manly and muscular (go with it), we had that thing cleared out in no time (Laurel provided moral support). The roads actually weren't too bad, though I took it slow on the highway just to be safe. A car behind us on the Mass Pike actually skidded out and flipped onto its side! When we finally got back to New London, I dropped Laurel off on campus, bought a pizza with Mitch, headed home, settled into the couch, and watched football all afternoon (because, once again, Mitch and I are so manly).

Tonight I'll be starting my much-delayed Christmas shopping (it's much-delayed because the mall is my second least favorite place in the universe; my least favorite is of course Temptation Island [Editor's note: that joke took me over 3 minutes to come up with]), and then tomorrow is the ugly holiday sweater party, so I'll be sure to update y'all again soon!