Night of a Thousand Tears

I went to the growing-in-repute "Night of a Thousand Beers" for about a half hour tonight, thinking I would have a semi-good time, and mostly just felt like a loser. This is about as big as parties get at Hampshire, and it's one of those things where if you don't know a lot of people you end up sort of wandering around trying to find an anchor point that never comes. Except this is in a room crammed with people in a great exponential excess of the fire code, so you're basically just being propelled around by the crowd, which is fun for like twenty seconds and gets really old after you realize that any human interface apart from inane five-seconds yell-eractions are impossible. (And yet you always see these cool-ass cats just hanging out on the wall, sipping a beer and carrying on a convo like they're at the fucking yacht club. How do they do that? These people should die in jail.)

I like to get drunk in a comfortable environment, and thankfully life at this college provides many instances for such activity. But going to big parties makes me feel like I have no identity. I really am like a social ghost at these things--and in general. I just kind of float around, and float through people, and they can see me, but no connection can be made. I knew a bunch of the people there, but I might as well have been a stranger because I can't seem to get in the same mode of frantic revelry as everyone else.

When I walked in the door I heard "[my name]!" from like three different directions. This happens sometimes, and it is always very exciting, and yet it never seems to amount to anything. I find when people yell my name out it's not necessarily that they're overjoyed to see me but they're rather reaffirming their own involvement in some social spirit that I seem not to be privy to. I don't mean to be such a downer, but it's like, when someone I know says something to me and and I can't hear what the fuck she's saying because there's a hundred people yelling in this room and I'm being pushed up against a wall by a beer-hungry mob, so all I say is "I'm being pushed up against a wall" and I sound like as much of an idiot as you'd expect, what else am I supposed to do next but go home and listen to fucking Nine Inch Nails and write in my sad goddamn blog.

Also my family is poor.