I noticed that I left out a few gaping holes in my personal narrative of the past three months. Some of these oversights were noteworthy events that lent some color to my otherwise-unemployed life.
Namely, these are:
- FIRST NYC Regional Championships Weekend
- Cris's party weekend in Atlantic City
- Scott's Boom-Bachelor Weekend Bash
First thing's
FIRST. If you've been reading along up to this point, you'd know that I had been involved as a volunteer mentor with a group of high school students at a relatively failing school in a relatively failing part of Brooklyn - helping to design, build, and program a human-sized robot for a regional competition. Well, sometime in the beginning of February, after 6 weeks of frenzied work, we shipped the robot for inspection and then began a waiting period of two months. And after that long wait, on April 6, we arrived at New York's Javitz conference center for the FIRST Regional Championships. I both volunteered as an event coordinator (manning the so-called Pit Information Desk), as well as a mentor for my team that weekend. Long story short, we placed 40-something out of 60 teams. Clearly, a failure by any competitive standards. But I was proud to be a member of the team, and all-in-all I think the students, teachers, and administrators involved had a pretty good time. See how happy they are in the picture (after our final, successful, round - already knowing that we didn't make it to finals).
Along with everyone else I seem to know,
Cris is getting married this year. His wedding is in August. Apparently unrelated to this matrimonial affair, he organized a man-only trip to Atlantic City with shenanigans (alongside gambling) in mind. I decided to refer to this as a bachelor party at some point, only to later realize this was really a birthday party. He'll excuse me if I can't make it to the "real" bachelor party in Boston later this summer. A lot of gambling, a fair amount of drinking, and very little sleep happened. I remember being in our hotel room and turning on a lot of lights and getting frustrated with curtains trying to take a picture, only to be told by co-shennanigites, not too politely, that I had my sunglasses on. (I remember this because I'm still being reminded of it by some of them every time I see them, which is relatively a lot because everyone is getting married and having related and unrelated parties all the time!) Anyways, what turned out to be the thesis of the weekend was an exploration into the mysteries and realities of a certain chick who we not-so-endearingly nicknamed Lauren Borgata. This was a girl that one of the boys (let's call him Moe) flirted with for most of Friday night only to embarrassedly terminate his delightful evening by excusing himself from the table to throw up. Now, if there was no money involved, this piece of trivia may have transpired unnoticed, but a bet was made about the likelihood of said Moe's ding-dong making contact with said chick's wet parts (kids, excuse my crassness, but this is what male adults do when they get together on a faux-bachelor party weekend). So, the losing side of the bet made it their agenda to extract some joy out of tormenting Moe to make up for their monetary loss. The rest of us just joined along as is customary in these circumstances. Besides insulting Moe's ding-a-ling's prowess all weekend, we also started hypothesizing about Lauren who showed her class by adding her digits as "Lauren Borgata" to Moe's phone before she split. That is how the nickname Lauren Borgata came about. At some point, there was even a desperate attempt to find a matching "Lauren" from AC on Facebook. In the end, she turned out to be a pastry chef and a surfer to boot. She could've been the one, Moe. (if this has offended anyone I truly apologize and breathe a sigh of relief I didn't divulge the really bad stuff)
Scott's real bachelor party took place a few weeks later in a fun house in the middle of nowhere in the southern part of Adirondack park. The house was wacky, in some good ways and some bad ways. It was big enough, but the living room was a bit small, and the TV was a relic, which took some out of the fun of late-night Wii bowling (but surprisingly not enough to stop us from doing it until 5am). We had loads of food (I'm still eating leftovers!) and many many cases of cases of beer and other alcohols. We had a fire pit, and tiki torch oil, which made for great pyrotechnic displays (and arguably helped to start the fire as well). We had a tiny pool, with a diving board at water level, and waters at below freezing temperatures - I would say testicle size for most attendants that weekend was below their normal average. We played lots of sports. We had a volleyball net (which did not stop some people from trying desperately to put up a separate, more rickety net - a project that was abandoned after an hour, and when we started playing badminton without them at the volleyball net). BTW, I suck at badminton. We played touch football. BTW, I suck at football. A Frisbee was tossed as well, and Todd got it in the back of the head while BBQing. We had a half day of water sports - tubing, wakeboarding and water skiing. I tried tubing twice and I felt muscle pain in my forearms where I never noticed I had muscles. I tried to water ski too, but after two tries I gave up - it took too much effort to get into the right position just to have 2 seconds of flailing around and getting your body dragged through what feels like a solid wall of water. 2 of the 3 bathrooms flushed properly. There was a human-sized statue of a
personified hot dog pouring ketchup over its head. There was a trash can called
Mr. Swallows with a top the shape of a man's face with a huge gaping mouth. One of the bathrooms was decorated with a half-wall made out of blackboard, with many attempts at wit written on it - like "we aim to please, so please aim!" As you can see in the picture, the deer head in the living room saw some action as well... It felt like a good time, so I assume it was! And if it seems like it was tamer than the Atlantic City weekend, it is only because I'm trying harder to censor myself after the whole Lauren Borgata spiel above... For more pics of this event, visit
this album.
