My twenty-first birthday could not have been more ridiculous or fabulous than it was. This was most likely due to the great number of friends and random people on the street whom I shamelessly informed that I love my birthday, in the days leading up to December. You know that all-encompassing thrill and obsession that the average five-year-old vibrates with when her birthday is coming up? You know, the “Oh my god, I’m only four and 364/365ths for another four hours! Ahhhh!” feeling? Well, whether it’s lucky or insane, this spirit has been preserved in my annual celebrations—except for the counting part. Math isn’t my thing—parties are.
It’s amazing what people will do for you when they know that you’re pretty much guaranteed to flip out over it. My entry into the ranks of the drinking population of Boston was celebrated over a period of about two weeks wherein I drank every single day and virtually gave up sleeping, and the only food I remember eating was hastily acquired in the interest of drinking more. And because this all took place at the end of the semester, that meant I completed all of my finals while drunk. (Except the one that I missed entirely because of the boy in my bed—whoops.)
Since the actual day of my birth fell on a Monday, I planned for it to be pretty low-key, given the whole having-to-go-to-class-the-next-day thing and all. Went to the BU Pub for a couple ceremonial drinks, since I could, but the friends I went with somehow turned it into a Boston bar tour through the ten-degree weather. One of them lost her phone, which was later found in her bra. I almost ate the origami flower in one hand instead of the chicken finger in the other. And I’m fairly certain I did the splits more than once, in more than one bar (it’s apparently my go-to drunken party trick).
Then there was the actual party—on the weekend, when normal people go out. I’d already been drunk for five days at this point, but now I was dressing up for it. In a wonderful stroke of genius, my roommate had organized a James Bond Pub Crawl, thus allowing for all the girls to dress like sexy Bond girls and guilting the guys into wearing tuxes (and I may have told them they didn’t have to get me a present if they dressed up). The night was perfection. A friend who had flown out from California for the occasion was lost between bars two and three when she wandered into a fire station. I gave my shoes to another friend. Being a massive lightweight, I’d had enough to drink that I probably should have been dead a few times over, but the alcohol gods kept me going all night without even an inkling of a hangover.
The walk home was slightly more difficult in having to keep one girl from going home with strangers, realizing we were barefoot at 2 a.m. on Commonwealth Ave., and getting a short-lived piggyback ride from Christian, a nice boy walking his bike home while holding his broken light saber. That night ended in the amazingness that is challah grilled cheese sandwiches, but the shit show continued.
Went to the back bar of Our House (around the corner from the foosball tables), where I got to pick drinks out of “the book”—I can recommend Sex in a Hot Tub only because it’s the one thing I remember drinking. I edited my entire final movie project with a beer in my hand, and my professor thought it was somewhat incredible. Inevitably, since I was treating my body like the rum-punch bowl at the assembly hall (read some early-nineteenth-century literature; you’ll get this reference and be very sophisticated—like me), I got a pretty nasty case of the flu. Thus, I added a healthy dose of NyQuil to the mix, and a few more naps. That didn’t stop me from attending $1 draft Thursday night at An Tua Nua upon request. I was not so sure I wouldn’t collapse, but I got a couple assurances that someone would catch me, so I danced and drank with energy that came from god knows where. I also vaguely recall agreeing to be somebody’s little spoon.
