Not like I even get invited to the big ones.  Last week, I went to a small get-together at my friend’s house.  The plan was for 5 or 6 of us hang out, play video games, eat pizza and watch horror movies.  Unfortunately, as is very often the case, things did not go according to plan: people heard about the event one way or another, so there ended up being many more people than we had hoped for.  Before things got hectic, we were happily watching Saw.  Then more and more people started arriving, and before we knew it we had a party of 15 people.  And there was alcohol.  

I was thoroughly surprised; the people who brought the booze were the people I’d least expected to drink.  For a while, there was just one bottle of vodka that got passed around.  I thought that was bad enough because there were only about 8 of us at the time, and I’ve seen some of them drunk.  Take me and a couple of my more responsible friends out of the equation and there are 5 people sharing a half-liter of vodka, without any perceivable plan to stop drinking until that bottle was empty.

I was almost relieved when more people started arriving, but like all the peaceful things in life, that relief was short-lived: somebody decided it’d be a fantastic idea to bring a huge (and I mean gallon-sized huge) bottle of spiced rum to the party.  

I wound up surrounded by drunk people – with the exception of the host and a few of my other friends – and boy was that an unhappy experience.  Before I knew it, one of my male friends was hitting on me and cracking a ton of kind of creepy, sexual jokes.  Another downed 11 shots of vodka (or so he says) in all of 40 minutes, and, football helmet on head (I don’t know where that came from), was completely prepared to launch himself down the stairs headfirst.  I found myself hauling him by his shirt away from the staircase, only to have him throw a hissy fit at me for stretching out his shirt.  

I felt kind of bad having to leave my host-friend and other sober friends there to fend for themselves in that sea of drunken stupidity, but I had promised my mom that I would be out until no later than 11pm.  To be honest, I didn’t know how much more babysitting upperclassmen I could take.  I can imagine this is how they might have turned out:

They say, “the more, the merrier,” but I must object: perhaps the drunk ones were happily incoherent for the short period of time before they found themselves lying in their own vomit, but I can honestly say that there was nothing merry about being one of those to watch after them.  Nothing merry at all.