The last two days had a weird bender-ish quality to them. (No, Craig and Mike, not a Bender-ish) quality. Due to certain Thursday and Friday things, I felt by mid-Friday afternoon that I needed to start early, so I finagled a guy one floor down into walking over to Dominick's. Dominick's is an outdoor cafe style bar, nice open patio in the back, that is seasonal and is a popular law school first stop because it's very nearby, its open all day and closes at 10, and sangria flows pretty fast and pretty cheap. Also, if you go to Dominick's you can pretty much count on running into other law students.

So we went and ended up sitting with this table of 5-6 other 1Ls, some of whom I knew a little bit, because they're in my section. (I'll talk about the section thing another day. Short version, we share most of our classes. Also key detail: I knew them a little, downstairs guy knew them not at all.) A few things resulted from this. One was my first trip to the dining hall drunk, for dinner. Two was an invite to a debate party. Three (indirect result) was that at said dinner, some people said, "Hey, do you want to go to Dominick's with us?" So more sangria was in order.

Then I cabbed it over to the debate party, where downstairs guy had already arrived, and was the only GOP person in the room. The night is slightly blurry, but by shortly after midnight only GOP man, our hostess, and myself were left. Not awkward. At all. It became clear that I was a third wheel, but she kept encouraging me to stay, either out of misplaced politeness or some other bizarro motive. Eventually, I took the lack of hint and she called me a cab.

The next morning I went to an apartment tailgate for the Little Brown Jug game, and our hostess from the previous night had begged off for want of sleep. Yeah.

The game was nerve-wracking, both because it was close and we were mostly down, and because the scoreboard kept flashing, "Temple 16, Pitt 6," but all's well that ends well I suppose. At the game a Berkeley grad I'm friends with said there would be various Cal and USC fans/grads gathering at a sports bar for the big game of the day. Again nerve-wracking, but 3 for 3.

The night's plans were a small wine-and-movie gathering off-campus, that turned into a wine-and-whine party, but I was fine with that since I'd already seen the movie that we didn't end up watching. It was the type of grown up party where people baked things and put garnishes from Trader Joe's on things. After the prior 24 hours, it was probably the type of quiet night I really needed. As much fun as I'm having in and around the dorm, I do feel like I need to start hanging out with the grown-ups more at some point.