Celebrating One Year Together

Welcome to the 6^th floor. Today's contributors are: Ann, Sara, Tabitha, Frank, Billy and Scott.

Subject: 1 year Anniversary

We had a semi-impromptu celebration of our one year anniversary of moving in here on Saturday. The anniversary was actually earlier last week, but Frank's brother John being in town gave us a good excuse to celebrate. Everyone invited a bunch of people over, including our neighbors within the building. It was actually getting rather cramped in the apartment. We haven't thrown many house parties before, so we were vastly unprepared for this one. Coupled with it being mostly spontaneous, it was borderline disastrous. We ran out of diet soda, then regular soda, and then everything but tap water, beer and a bottle of pineapple rum.

Soon after that, the beer dried up. Before long, it was just the six of us and John. We had some generic horror movie on television that no one was really watching, and I was trying to find something to mix with the pineapple rum . By this point, John had actually passed out on the couch.

“Okay everyone, here's my new concoction. I call it Desert Island”

“Desert Island? What's in it? Did you find something other than pineapple rum?”

“Just try it; I'll tell you after.”

“That's never good to hear.”

“That's disgusting! Is that Hershey's syrup?”

“Eww. Yeah, definitely disgusting.”

“Vile Filth!”

“I don't know; I kind of like it.”

“And what do you think, Billy?”

“This may be the crappiest cocktail I've had since that bartender made me that watermelon vodka mixed with Kahlua.”

Billy rarely gets very emotional or has any exaggerated reactions. In fact, he stated the above like he was saying “It rained today”. Many people mistake it for sarcasm, but it's just the way he is.

“Shouldn't you have tried it too Ann? What did you think of it?”

“Yeah, Ann! You've got to taste it, too. Here, try mine!”

Ann chokes down a sip, “Yikes! I'm sorry guys. That's positively nasty!”

“Well that leaves only one option!” Frank slurred, “Shots!”

“Here! Here!”

Expectedly, the night degenerated pretty fast from there. It's always interesting to see the different ways people act when they are drunk, and we were all pretty wasted that night.

Scott's a caffeine-overdose hyper drunk.

“Over/Under time! How long for me to get to 42^nd street and back? Anyone?”

“20 minutes!”

“You're on! Someone time me.”

Scott makes for the door, trips over the corner of the couch and sprawls face down into a pile of empty beer cans. Then he leaps up, raises his hands in the air and takes a bow, receiving applause from the rest of us. Peeling off a can tab that stuck to his forehead, he says,

“Did I make it?”

Frank gets forgetful and incoherent. This could be partly because he has to get up to use the bathroom nearly every five minutes.

“Make what? What were you doing..? Mine!!”

Frank leaps from his spot on the couch and crawls into the bathroom ahead of Scott, who was headed there after his Olympic caliber dive.

Tabitha gets a bit of an oral fixation when she's been drinking. She's always either chewing on or playing with something.

“Time for another shot for me!” Tabitha says, as she gets up to pour herself another shot.

“Hold up! You know you're not allowed to pour yourself drinks anymore,” says Scott, who's standing in the kitchen waiting for the bathroom.

“Why not? I'll be good. I won't hurt myself really!”

“That's what you said last time, and then you somehow managed to cut your left shoulder with the corkscrew. While pouring a beer!”

“Plus, right at this moment, you are chewing on a broken shard of glass from the pint glass I broke.”

Tabitha blushes and puts down the shard. “You're such a klutz. Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to make drinks either, Ann.”

“I am not! I'll make another drink right now and show you!” I start towards the kitchen and see Scott hopping around staring at the bathroom.

“Scott why don't you just use our bathroom?”

“No, I can wait. Your bathroom has cooties.”

“Cooties? It does not! What do you mean?” Asks Sara, but Frank comes out of the bathroom, and Scott bolts for it.

Sara may be the weirdest when she's drunk. She suddenly wants to get into intellectual debates. Depending on the day and the subject, we will engage her, but sometimes it's some obscure computer stuff that none of us understand. The lack of a debating partner rarely stops her tirade though.

“Did you guys hear about all the space junk that’s orbiting the earth? It's like a junkyard up there! We really need to do something about it. It reminds me of that Futurama episode where they encounter the giant ball of garbage from the 20^th century, and Fry has to teach them all how to litter.”

“I saw that episode! It was the one with the dog, right?”

“No Frank. I wonder what the solution is. Maybe we can knock it into the atmosphere and burn most of it up?”

“Billy can get very emotional when he's been drinking. It's funny because it's so out of character for him.”

“That's so sad; we even litter in space. Today I was so angry at these two twerps on the 6, leaving Starburst wrappers everywhere!”

“And then, there is me. I go into heavy-duty writing mode when I'm drunk. I start seeing stories in everything. I often wonder if I should attempt all the writing projects I have with a pitcher of beer. I'd be so worried about spilling stout on my laptop, though.”

“You don't drink stout. Stout is yummy, I love stout, I'd marry it if I could!”

“You're narrating all your thoughts again Ann.”

“Oops! At least I didn't insult Billy this time, right?”

“Nope, not yet. We're still good.”

Billy flashes me a huge smile, obviously happy I haven't insulted him yet.

I don't remember much after that. I must've attempted to write because I woke up at my desk, with 40 pages of the letter 'a' in Microsoft Word, where I'd fallen asleep on my laptop. John helped us clean up, and then Frank drove him to the airport so he could catch his flight.