A most peculiar compilation of disjointed narrative & idiosyncratic observations

So last night was the little dinner celebrating the end of the program. Then there was a party at this one girl's apartment, where she lives with a host grandma. The poor old lady...I don't think she was prepared for so much drunken American obnoxiousness! When I got there they were just about to start playing Cup Flip. You play it in teams as a relay race. When it's your turn, you drink the beer (a small amount, it would take several rounds to get to a full cup of beer's worth) and then put the cup on the edge of the table and use your finger to gently flip the cup over so it lands upside down. The next person can't go until you've accomplished this. Beirut came later, but I didn't play. Both of these games need to be played at the next Root Beer kegger though!

I guess alcohol acts as a social lubricant for most people, but for others it just brings any obnoxious tendancies to the forefront, especially when consumed in mass quantities. So people who tend to act sort of out of it are even more so. People who tend to beg for attention do so even more. Even little strange things are enhanced a little bit by a little drink. Like there's one girl who goes crazy at the thought that anyone could do or think anything differently from her, a craziness that she expresses by questioning the offender with condescending laughter and a tone of voice like "Wow, you're a real idiot, everyone look at this idiot here." I don't mean big things, no, very small things. The kind of idiosyncracies that most people wouldn't even notice or they would notice in the background but not say anything. Naturally she does this to me a lot, heheh. But, as an example, last night a guy just sorta picked a book, Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen, up off of the shelf and kinda paged through it a bit and the idle way that people will do with things that catch their interest. Her: "Why are you holding that book? You're not going to read it here, are you? Haha." Him: "Um, nooo...it just looked interesting..." and etc. explanation of actions, explanations that really shouldn't be necessary but are because she won't let it go for like 5 min. First off, how many people would even *notice* something like that? Let alone say something. Or even if saying something, going on about it like doing so is a huge attack against the Way Things Should Be? I just don't get it... I bet she was one of those little kids who would yell things like "Daddy, why does that man's face look so ugly? Why is that lady walking funny?" and her parents didn't respond with enough shushing and flustered apologies to the people in the area. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was just the alcohol that lowered the "Whoa, I find that slightly unusual so I'm going to attack you for your idiocy" threshold to such an unbelievably low level, but that's one annoying tendancy that got raised to the level of surreal!

(I wanted to use the words "bemerken-observe" and "Umgebung-general area" here. Der Sigh...)
Ah heck, I#ll start using German words here if I feel like it. At least it's not Japanese! >_>

As for me, I had a bit of a Schwips at times, but it disappeared really quickly as my body did its work of metabolizing, so my tendancy to say weird things, but slowly and hesitatingly, late at night, was slightly increased for short periods of time. Maybe. Bier doesn't seem to affect me, fake-German that I am. It was mostly the free sekt at the dinner. That stuff is crazy!

But the really weird stuff was with the three who drank way too much. So much that it failed to be a social lubricant and just makes stuff awkward. Well, maybe it was a social lubricant for the rest of us, who I guess might have come together a little in our group efforts to get one of the guys into a taxi and away from more alcohol and to keep two other guys from getting in the same space with each other cause someone was totally gonna be verprügelt if we let them within arm's reach of each other. And this is two guys who are friends, and who had definately been full of drunken cameradie at the beginning of the evening. I think one of them just said stupid drunk stuff to the other und so weiter. Men. Feh! Bunch of testosterone-filled manliness-provers! So it was a little worrisome, but it all ended ok, as far as I know. I left my bike locked up at the train station though, and I couldn't go back to get it when I remembered because the trains only go on the half hours that late on a Friday. As it was, it was about 3AM when I could actually go to bed. Fun night except the end part though. And I actually woke up *naturally* after 8 1/2 sleep, like people with *normal* brains! So there's something to be said for staying up really late when you don't have time to sleep but don't like setting alarms. It's probably because I've been forcing myself to get up early a lot so I have time to work. And now it's past 3:30 and I still haven't started on that paper I was supposed to work on all day today. Ah well.