Another wasted day, another wasted night

There is nothing much more satisfying than waking up at 2 in the afternoon. It's kind of like my way of kicking the world's ass for a day. I remember four years of high school when I had to wake up at 5:45 every morning just so I can make it to my 8:00 class. The days seemed endless and every person became 5% more of a jerk. Now that I am in college, I wake up fully rested and the sun is already beaming on my face. I leave a few Nelson from the Simpsons-like "Haha!", point and laugh at the sun, and lay in my bed reading the paper before I go on with my life. People have asked me, "Don't you feel like you've completely wasted a day and doesn't it irk you that people have been working for nearly 6 hours by then?" In response, I say, "Hmmmm...NO!" I'm pretty sure that they won't be asking themselves that question at 7:30 in the morning, packed like a can of sardines in the 7 train, on your way to a job that requires at least 4 cups of coffee before you can truly wake up and realize, waking up at 2pm doesn't sound that bad.

I remember going to the drive-in theater with Adam, his two younger sisters in high school, and one of their friends. As we were in the car, having conversations about college and once in a while jamming to Rod Stewart, I often took myself away from that to hear what the three teenage girls were talking about. I don't quite remember, but that was only because it wasn't that interesting. From boys to petty and dumb jokes like "you're stupid, your face is stupid," the gap between high schoolers and college students is rapidly widening. There is an incredible shift from superficial talk through and through in high school to superficially talking about reality in college. With this in mind, I look into the interactions between the group of men I have grown up with through grade school, middle school, and high school, but we are now college men, only opening the lines of communication during slow summers and cold winters.

The group I am referring to is labelled 162. The name was originally from the elementary school the majority of us grew up in, and the parks that our hearts embraced through the years of conformity and braces and the metrocard. Without truly having a set lis of people who are considered to be a part of the clique, we have grown and shrunk through handball, basketball, crushes with the only two girls of the group, awkward birthday parties, repetitive stories, bowling, shooting pool, movie hopping, beer pong, video games, magic cards, and the newest obsession, poker. Activities plague our existence of a group and even the thought of having nothing planned out for the next several hours is unnatural to a group that is not accumstomed to just "hanging out" for no more than 15 minutes of "hanging out" someone will inevitably ask, "So what do we do now?" The strong glue that holds these relationships together are not the long, deep, intellectual conversations that lock college relationships together, but simply shared experiences, creating harmonies and choruses of laughter and ewwww and oh my god are you serious! and dude, that freaking sucks, so that we can leave each other for 6-12 months, come back and reminisce on the same stories, creating the same harmonies and choruses. We return to this comfort, half hoping we could just hang out for hours and hours on end, but half hoping we would be nothing more than we are: a bunch of elementary school kids in bodies of adults. The faces of each other remind of us a better time of hopscotch and seasaws and Mr. Softee trucks and kickball and Hannah Kim and Dana Elder and Bye Bye Birdie and shit was the curseword and life was limitless. Frankly, we don't mind to talk about the innerworkings of our soul once in a while, but at the end of the day, there is something strong and undeniable about the attachment we have towards one another, one past words and college locations and past arguments, one that is based on the undeniable truth we call time.

So let's kick back, give me some cokes, play some holdem, and say nothing but ha...ha...