Block Party

One of the houses on campus consists of five round buildings with eight apartments in each of them. Most call them "donuts," some call them "spaceships" for no reason. The communal centers have different things in them; three have downstairs/upstairs while the other two have laundry rooms in the basements and giant, empty chambers on the main floor.

Two years ago I lived in the donut with the Spiritual Life Center upstairs, which I thought would prompt me to go to Jewish services more often, but then they started holding them in a different building near the dorms. We couldn't even go up there to hang out because the door was usually locked. It was kind of a shame. The next year, some friends of mine lived in the donut below the Queer Community Alliance. This was set up much like the SLC, but it was better: it actually had a bathroom, a fridge and plenty of free condoms. (Also, pamphlets with titles like "I Think I'm Gay. What Now?" I don't know, probably blow somebody?) It also never seemed to be locked. When I got drunk over there on the weekends we would invariably wander up there to score mixers from the fridge, play drinking games on the folding table, climb the rafters and any other shenanigans we could think of. On somebody's birthday we even had a pinata (I can't quite remember, but it may have been filled with condoms). The other bi-level donut has an overstuffed, informal library on the bottom (from which we stole a chair for our living room) and an empty space on top called the Centrum Gallery that's used for concerts and readings and stuff. Getting drunk up there during final project showcases is kind of dangerous; the lack of ventilation and abundance of natural light make it sweltering in the late Spring.

I always thought the giant chambers above the laundry rooms were wasted; people leave bikes and boxes and junk around the edges, and we house visiting ultimate teams there during our tournaments, but they're so big and accomodating, it feels wrong not to have events there. When I lived there I had vague designs on talking to the other apartments about a building-wide party. I don't know how much of an issue it would have been to convince them; we were cool with the next-door neighbors, and I knew the kosher house kids across the way, but there was also a group of Asian women who didn't seem to speak much English. In any event, I brushed off the thought as a pipe dream and we contented ourselves with our wild, vodka-soaked living room brawls.

Last weekend, some kids pulled it off. Somehow they managed to convince their entire donut that a dance party in the middle of the building was a good idea and had a double birthday themed as a Hollywood gala event (they actually had a red carpet leading into the center). I was already pretty drunk when I got there but it seemed like a lot of work had gone into it. The lighting was perfect, dark and ambient, and the DJ booth loomed authoritatively along one wall. The space really was perfect for this sort of thing--there were a ton of people there but it was so big that you had plenty of space to navigate anywhere and dance without hindrance. At one point my friend, echoing earlier exploits in the QCA, shimmied up the wooden pole in the middle and sat in the rafters a full story above us; I wish he'd had confetti to throw over the crowd.

I don't know if it was the drinks mixed with the medication I've started taking or the heightened atmosphere of the whole scene, but I kind of went crazy that night. I'm used to getting blitzed and jumping around like an idiot, but for some reason this time I felt I had to be more insistent. I think I kept grabbing one of my friends and directing her to some moral imperative, but I can't really remember the gist of it. Anyway, I ended the night having a smoke on the porch with a sophomore and grilling him way too intently on his love life. Sometimes I confuse not giving a fuck with just being a nuisance.