It's alright. Cuz I'm saved by the bell.

If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five

Hello! Yep, it's taken me til Thursday to write about this past weekend. That should be a pretty good indication of just how fun (read: boozy) it was. The weekend itinerary looked like this: Friday, pick up Paul from the airport. Have lunch with Paul and Richard. Prepare for Friday night fiesta at my apartment. Saturday, swimming. Saturday night, ten year high school reunion.

Anyway, like I said, Friday night I had a little fiesta at my apartment. Well. It was intended to be a little fiesta. My plan was to invite over a handful of people (maybe ten?), cook Mexican food, have a few beers, chit-chat, reminisce, then call it a night. However, by the end of the night, my fridge had been ransacked, my liquor was gone and there were roughly 734 empty beer cans strewn about my balcony, kitchen, living room and bathroom. It's appropriate that the fiesta fell on the same weekend as my high school reunion, because it ended up playing out just like a high school party -- people showed up that I didn't know (kinda), there was secretive drug use, people stole beers, it got a tad too loud...all that was missing was a fist fight and some girl crying about her boyfriend and it would've been 1998 all over again. But it was good. The people I "didn't know" were actually people from my graduating class who somehow caught wind of this fiesta. It was nice to catch up with them though, and all-in-all everyone was very friendly.

Fanny came over too.* We spent a little time together, and I tried to be as attentive as possible, but I spent most of the night kinda floating around and talking to everyone. Anyway, by the end of the night there were between 30 and 40 people on my balcony and in my living room. Considering the size of my apartment (it's small), that's pretty remarkable.

*Quick update: more on this tomorrow, but Fanny and I went out to dinner the Wednesday prior to the fiesta, so I invited her over. She brought a friend, who my brother drunkenly tried to hit on. His pick up line, Casanova that he is, was this: "Do you like men?" As she paused to consider whether she was offended or intrigued, he quickly made up her mind for her by calling her a lesbian then referring to her as "Adriana." Her name was Melissa. My brother, ladies and gentlemen!**

**I've decided to lift Andy's asterisks device, which he lifted from a Kansas City sportswriter named Joe Posnanski. We'll see if it lasts. Sometimes tangents are a little too long for the ol' "side note" parenthesis. But anyway.

The Fiesta!
Richard's got a lot of love to give.The aftermath.
I felt less than stellar on Saturday morning, but managed to drag myself to lunch with Regan and Richard. We went to Chili's (side note: there are no Chili's in NYC. The closest one is somewhere on Long Island. Regan loves Chili's. And since Chili's are plentiful in Texas...well, that's where we went). When I got home, I decided to clean my apartment. It took an hour and a half. Again, my apartment is tiny. I threw out five trashbags. I washed every single dish. I vacuumed. I lit candles. I sprayed 409 on the counters. I folded sheets and dragged a heavy-ass futon back into the closet. Finally, finally my apartment was back to normal. So I showered and dried off and put on some shorts and plopped down on the couch. And grinned sleepily at the prospect of watching TV and slowly slipping into a coma. Then I realized I had to leave in an hour to pick up Paul and head to the reunion. There would be no napping.

So I picked up Paul and we were both tired. We'd both been up til 4:00 in the morning the night before. We got a cup of coffee. It didn't help. We went to a sports bar and ordered beers. Sigh. This helped. We got shots of tequila. This helped tremendously. And then. We went to the reunion.

To be honest, I was indifferent about the reunion. I wasn't excited but I wasn't nervous either. More than anything, I was curious. And even that curiosity was pretty muted. I did have one nagging concern about the reunion -- when I'm in a bar and I see someone from my high school, my first thought it always, "Shit. That guy went to my high school. I hope he doesn't want to talk to me." So the idea of seeing hundreds of people from my high school? I just didn't know how I would feel. This ended up not being a problem. I hadn't factored in the "reminiscence" factor. There really wasn't any "reminiscing," per se, but the atmosphere was very....I don't know. Happy. I was expecting a lot of dry conversation. "So, what do you do? Where do you live?" But really, it was more like, "Hey! I haven't seen you in forever! How the hell are ya?!"

I also did a lot of staring. This was where my mild curiosity kicked in. For the most part, people fell into one of seven categories:

"Wow, that guy/girl looks exactly the same as he/she did in high school."
"Wow, the years have not been kind."
"Good christ, he/she got fat."
"Oh my god, she looks amazing. So hot!"
"Holy shit, that girl is really pregnant."
"He was a dipshit then, he's a dipshit now."
"Who the hell is that?"

Anyway, after some pictures were taken ("Guys! We need all the guys!!"), the reunion ended and everyone spilled over into this bar/club. Then that ended and everyone spilled over into an afterparty. I ended up getting to bed at (gulp) 5:30 and felt like absolute garbage on Sunday, but all in all, the reunion exceeded my expectations. I had way more fun than I thought I would. I was genuinely happy to see these people. It helped that I was rip-roaring drunk, but you get the idea. I collected some phone numbers and made a lot of empty promises about keeping in touch and hanging out again. It's okay though. I'll see them at the 20th.