My sister just graduated from high school, which means that yesterday we hosted the obligatory graduation party at our house. Obviously the best thing about graduation parties is the food. There was taco salad, pasta salad, quesadillas, meatballs, deviled eggs, baked beans, punch, cake, and cheesy potatoes as far as the eye could see. Also, because my mom knows how to throw a party, there was pineapple rum slush, and that was delicious.
The only bad thing about throwing a party, aside from the fact that my mom stresses me the fuck out because she is so ADD it hurts and cannot stop moving for one second when she’s hosting people, is that we have so much leftover party food, and I’m going to be eating quesadillas and cheesy potatoes for every meal for the next three weeks. That I could do without.
The taco salad that I ate in bed this morning though was clutch, given the abhorrent state of hangover in which I found myself after taking an unnecessary amount of shots at a Buckeye Lake bar with Gretchen, Taylor, and Kate last night. Oh and also, have you ever heard of “icing“? Because it is, without a doubt, the most idiotic of all college binge drinking rituals I have ever heard of, and until yesterday I had managed to evade becoming a victim to it.
What it means to “ice” someone is this: you present them with a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and they are forced to get down on one knee and chug the entire bottle. Apparently some people think this is fun, and it’s become a phenomenon on a lot of college campuses. I, however, think it’s a fucking first-class ticket on a high speed train to vomit world, and I was embarrassed not only that I was being forced to chug a Smirnoff Ice, but also that I made a really poor show of choking it down because it was too sweet, too cold, and I’m just bad at chugging and I don’t give a fuck. Taylor and Kate are bitches, but I love them, and Gretchen and I exacted our revenge so it balanced out, I guess.
After the “icing” incident – or was it before? I have no idea, the night got hazy quick – we made the apparent mistake of asking a random guy standing near our table to take a picture of us. The guy obliged, but after taking the picture he decided to sit down at our table uninvited and strike up a conversation with us. It wasn’t that big of a deal until he brought his friend over, who had gray hair, looked old enough to be my dad, and was missing a tooth. The guys were nice enough, but they weren’t getting the obvious message that we weren’t that interested in talking to them. First of all, we gave them fake names, which I think they caught onto fairly quickly since Taylor kept forgetting and calling me by my real name (“My name’s not Lynsey! It’s LAURA!”) and we essentially ignored them because we were too wrapped up in the mile-a-minute drunken conversations we were having with each other about zucchini fries and fiances and boyfriends and nonboyfriends.
The first guy had already gotten on my nerves by rejecting the first take of the picture we asked him to take of us because he deemed that I looked like too much of an idiot for the picture to be a good one. He didn’t use the word idiot, but he shook his head at me because of the dumb face I was making at my lime slice in the picture, and insisted on taking another, better one. The waitress who brought us the zucchini fries earlier had done the same thing when we asked her to snap a photo of us- I smiled like a moron like I always do in pictures, because I’d rather look stupid on purpose than look stupid when I’m trying to look nice, which is what always happens in every single damn picture of me. But apparently my face was too moronic and she didn’t get the humor it was intended to add to the obviously really serious bar photo, so she insisted on taking another version. I’m pretty sure I look awful in all four of these photos. What else is new?
Anyway. If it were up to me, I would have told the guy that my name was FuckOff just to avoid any confusion about our level of interest in getting to know him from the beginning. It was clear that we were preoccupied with talking to each other, and if Taylor’s blindingly large diamond engagement ring wasn’t a dead giveaway that she wasn’t available for the sloppy post-bar rendezvous I think these guys were hoping for, then the fact that we were blatantly ignoring them the drunker we got should have given them a hint. Guys amaze me with the levels of purposeful oblivion they can reach, but it definitely could have been worse.
We took a cab home, and my second experience with a cab in Licking County was not quite as unbelievably sketchy as the time Gretchen and I took one home from the Pub, but it was still pretty fucking sketchy. Listen, I know it’s Licking County and everything, but are these cab companies seriously so broke that they can’t invest in a fucking meter in their cabs? I mean what the hell is the point? This guy could be robbing me blind for all I know, and the fact that any cab driver has the audacity to think that I’m going to do math to calculate the cost of the cab ride is just…well, it’s audacious, and I don’t like it. The time that Gretch and Jason and I took a cab home from the Pub, the driver kept shining a gigantic flashlight on the dashboard to see how many miles we had gone, and when we asked him to give us an estimate of how much it would be he started rambling about base payments and cents per mile and all kinds of nonsense that did not mean a damn thing to my alcohol-soaked brain. Step it up, Licking County- your shit is weak.
When the oblivious older men were bothering us, I couldn’t stop thinking about this standup clip by Iliza Shlesinger about physical indicators that tell you a stranger is crazy. Hilarious. If you’ve never watched her standup before, you should, because she’s really funny.
Dressed to Chill 