Much more affective is the other end of the spectrum—the people that are essentially my favorite in the world, my friends and family. I realize this sort of post becomes redundant at a point, but its still crazy.. The parties also are coming to an end. Seeing my friends at all is coming to an end. Granted, I already have new friends who I am looking forward to seeing more. Its a weird trade off though. My new friends will be neither better nor worse than my current friends, and yet they will, in a manner, usurp their position (Machiavelli would appreciate this). I truly hope to and plan to keep in touch with a lot of people here, some specific people especially .. and yet, it shall inevitably change.

At the same time, as I said, there is a meaning in all these ends, it means that I am really, truly headed off to college, headed off to MIT. And as I should be, I am excited. In 3 days, probably about 67 hours, I will be in Cambridge, MA. Things are falling into place for a new beginning in the midst of the ends. And I know that before long the number of beginnings will GREATLY overshadow the number and scope of the ends and ultimately I shall be fine. And yet, all the other lives shall go on without me.. shall progress, develop, hopefully prosper. It’s very strange.. I can’t focus on just my own progress.. I’m just not Maciavellian enough.

So, to all my friends that I am leaving here in Virginia Beach, to all of those off to Blacksburg, Baltimore, Fairfax, Charlottesville, or wherever, I wish truly wish you all the best. Lets us do our best to keep in touch!

~Donald

P.S. In other news: I saw my Freshman Advising Seminar assignement today: FASAP. ^_^.

I have awesome friends. Now I know that we all think we have awesome friends, but oh well, I just wanted to get that out of the way. Though this entry series is ostensibly about “routine” things, and parties are not actually routine for me, being the anti-social one that I am, I think the fact that there were two in the last week make it totally legit!

Anyway, first I wish to clarify what I mean by “party”. According to the M-W dictionary a party is (amongst other things) “a social gathering”, there is no problem with this definition for my events. Urban dictionary however describes a party as first “something I never get invited to”, since I went to these, NO! .. it second defines it as “When everyone gets together at someone’s house, get drunk, consume illegal substances like weed and coke, and trash the place completely.” This is equally, if not more wrong than the first definition!!

My friends and I party in a different way. In fact, I’d say the only constant is probably houses and couches. There are no drugs (except caffiene, on occasion) and only sometimes music or dancing. Also, some of the dancing may be in absence of music.  Anyway, some select activities from two parties of last week:

• A seated airsoft battle. Yes, I did just say that I was a pacifist, but I have to say I am against real violence. And truth be told though I may have had a bit to do with starting this, I soon sat it out. Anyway, long story short.. my friend left out his Airsoft guns and so he got shot with them. Thats karma for you.
• A first grade style story time. In addition to being awesome, my friends are a bit odd, and while this manifests in many ways (other “games” this day: how many people can we fit on the 3 person large couch? 9 how many feet can we fit on Donald’s face? .. apparently 8 .. though that was something I could have done without knowing), one way it manifested was that a friend brought this book to the party :When this book was thrown at me and I was told to read, I did so, with feeling, and a different voice for big foot, and showing the pictures to everyone. It was definitely odd, but also very fun. I highly recommend this book for a laugh. If you want to know what it is like, there’s an excerpt on Amazon and a page spread shows up on google image search.
• Watching Mythbusters, specifically the Shark Week episodes of Mythbusters. This is to say, we used Shark Week as an excuse to party, and its a perfectly good one. Okay, so we didn’t actually pay that much attention to Mythbusters, but we did sit on a couch (this couch is huge!! it can comforably fit 9 people (if you are curious 2 people were different than on the other couch)) facing vaugely in the direction of the television. Anyway, in the spirit of shark week, some of my friends, who are better artists than I, made shark week foods.
  

  Seal Melon

  

  ...with a shark wound

  

  Possibly from this shark-o-melon

  

  ..with its teeth!!

  

  Sadly it could not be satiated on these fish heads (which were full of salmon)

• Finally, we watched the 3 acts of Dr. Horrible which is most excellent. To those of you who missed it, it was a short (42 minutes) musical written during the WGA strike, directed by Joss Whedon (of Firefly, Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, etc. fam) staring Neil Patrick Harris (of Doogie Howser, Starship Trooper, and Harold & Kumar fame), Nathan Filion (also of Firefly fame), and Felecia Day (best known for roles on Buffy and her popuar online series The Guild). If you are still with me after that sea of parentheticals, I highly reccomend you check out Dr. Horrible. You can download all three acts from iTunes for $4 or you can watch it with commercials at: http://drhorrible.com/mushortio.html ). It is hilarous for the majority, and then has a bit of an artistic turn at the end. Anyway .. that is all I will say about it, but check it out!

Anyway, that is just a selection of the activities that went down at parties with my friends in the last week. Personally, I think our varied definition of party is far superior to the urban dictionay one. We never know what will happen, but because we are pretty awesome its pretty awesome.

</ “Minipost” >

~Donald

P.S. I hearby define “minipost” to mean “post of arbitrary length but more than likely containg a bulleted list of some sort”