Stages of Graduate School Parties

Stage One:
Get awesomely dressed up, listen to Blondie on the way, make a stunning entrance--everyone turns, stares and ignores you. You spend the rest of the evening next to the vegetable dip not speaking to the 40something first year student. You get moderately drunk and notice with moderate awe that you are the only female to be wearing make-up. At the end, you severely judge everyone left as they launch into play by plays of apparently every show of the Fall season including Next Top Model and Project Runway. You haven't had cable in five years.

Stage Two:
Get somewhat dressed up, listen to the radio on the way, make an entrance and proceed to get as drunk as possible. Attempt conversation. You get stuck by the chips and talk to a stiff girl from the Midwest and talk about beer. You run away and find no one else to talk to and try to coax the cat out from under a bed or out from a closet. You're not exactly sure of its location.

Stage Three:
Get really drunk before you go, complain on the way there how much you hate these parties, enter and promptly find the guacamole where you proceed to drink even more. Still finding no one to talk to you, you wander the fruit garden and admire the lemon, guava and avocado trees and long for a garden of your own. You are shit faced. You are a 12 on the Richter scale of drunk, light and lines cease to make sense. Nothing is blurry, but everything is tilted. You find out that some graduate students are engaged in a marriage secret to the female's parents. You drunkenly bellow, C'mere! I want to have a talking to you and straighten this thing out. Now, what in tarnation is going on here? Are you getting any money out of this? Isn't she going to have to tell her parents eventually? Are you in a functionally gay relationship? Every few seconds mutter, that is some bullshit. Punch the Marxist in the arm and say, you better never do that to me even if I am a shiksa! In some small, not yet drunk part of your mind, you realize, you must leave before causing a serious problem.

Stage Four
Get dressed in a skirt because you got killer legs anyway, listen to M.I.A. on the way there because she's really rad, enter, and do blow in the bathroom on someone's iPhone. Attempt to engage in conversation. Again. Again. Nustle up by the Marxist as he is surrounded by The Intellectual, and The Older Poet. Frown. Crinkle brow. Leave to find The Younger Poet who ignores you, trying to pick up a fairly attractive blonde who is not receptive to his no skills mac. Decide to leave because its all boring and wander around the neighborhood until the Marxist finds you and coaxes you back inside telling you what he always tells you, the conversation he was having could have only been had by a select few people in the world and he was it, and if other people are having a conversation, just jump in and ask them to explain what the hell they are talking about, and usually they don't know. Decide you are fucked up enough to call up the girl who annoyed you at the last party, tell her she's an asshole, do more blow, then fall asleep on the couch until its time to leave.


Stage Five:
Get really pissed that you are no longer allowed at graduate school parties and the Marxist is going without you.