-This week I crossed a landmark threshold in my tale of twentysomething life: I have now officially been out of college longer than I was in college.  Most likely I will celebrate this milestone and its implication of newfound maturity by getting so blindingly drunk that some chick at the bar will look at me in disgust and proclaim, “Karo, you’re so immature.”  But she’ll be wrong, because maturity and drunkenness are not mutually exclusive in my opinion.  In fact, the older one gets, the more important it becomes to get rip-roaring shitblasted on occasion.  It’s like chicken soup for the twentysomething soul.  Except, you know, the soup gets you really fucked up.

-I love Wasted Happy Hour Chick.  This is the girl who came straight from work to the bar and is still there at midnight even though her colleagues are all gone, she’s lost a shoe, and she’s been carrying around her laptop bag for seven hours.  Wasted Happy Hour Chick can usually be found dancing wildly by herself in the corner and is easy prey for Slimy Investment Banker Dude – who’s not nearly as drunk but has far fewer morals.

-I’m pretty sure the entire cell phone industry would collapse if it weren’t for people standing on line outside of bars desperately calling everyone they know to try to get in.  The guys are standing in the street, brows furrowed, phone on one shoulder and a finger in the opposite ear so they can hear better.  The girls are standing just behind the velvet rope, dressed completely inappropriately to be waiting out in the cold, and text messaging every guy they almost hooked up with once to help get them in.  And I’m standing halfway down the block calling all my friends to abort because there’s no fucking way I’m waiting on line.  Seriously, the bouncers should be sponsored by T-Mobile.

-Why can’t they make a beer can that tells you the temperature of the beer, kind of like those batteries that tell you how much power is left?  That would prevent me from thinking a beer is cold, when in reality, only the can was cold.  And how obvious is it that I thought of this idea while completely wasted and drinking surprisingly warm beer?

-I hate when a beer costs $4.50 in a bar.  I feel bad tipping fifty cents.  I feel weird pocketing the two quarters.  And I sure as hell ain’t tipping $1.50 for a Coors Light.  So I end up just ordering two beers.  People think I’m badass because I’m double-fisting, but really I just have a strange proclivity toward round numbers.

-Have you ever, for some random reason, gotten laid really early on a weekend night, like at 8pm?  This happened to me once, and when it was over, I went back out to the bar.  I can’t tell you what an exhilarating sensation it was to go out boozing knowing I had already hooked up.  I felt invincible – like when you get the Starman in Mario Brothers, except I didn’t start blinking.

-Being out of college longer than I was in college doesn’t bother me too much, though, because I still get to party like it’s 2001 on a regular basis.  After my college stand-up shows, I usually head to the line-free campus bar, throw my Amex down, and start ordering away.  The beauty of it is that $150 worth of drinks in New York ends up costing me about $17 on campus.  I was surprised to find this out myself – college bars actually have the same exchange rate as your average bankrupt Latin American nation.

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-I called Delta the other day and the automated voice asked me to enter my frequent flier number “one digit at a time.”  How the fuck else am I gonna enter it?

-I love getting emails from fans my age that clearly have had the same email address for like a decade.  It’s always like soccerplaya11@yahoo or something.  And I just know they haven’t participated in anything remotely soccer-related in years.  In fact, just writing me an email probably got them winded.

-I’m just fascinated by med students.  For instance, next Thursday is residency program “Match Day,” which is when all fourth-year med students find out where in the country they will be spending the next five years of their lives.  (Sounds a little like sorority rush but with neurosurgeons, doesn’t it?)  After finding out if and where they matched, our nation’s soon-to-be-doctors proceed to go out and get rip-roaring shitblasted.  But here’s the twist.  This year, Match Day falls on the first day of the NCAA Tournament…and St. Patrick’s Day.  In other words, it’s an alcoholic perfect storm.

-I’ve got a great new aerobic exercise.  It’s called: “try to get in and out of the gym as fast as humanly possible.”  I can’t believe that I used to work out for 90 minutes.  Now instead of timing myself on the treadmill, I actually start my watch when I get to the gym parking lot and see if I can make it back out in under twenty.  My all-time record is zero minutes.  I’ve accomplished it six days in a row and counting…

-My buddy Claudio lives in a six-floor walk-up apartment.  He says it’s “not that bad.”  I think that all walk-ups aren’t “that bad” until you get to the fourth floor, stop to rest, begin hyperventilating, then realize you have at least another flight to go before reaching your friend, while at the same time reconsidering how much you could really value friendship with someone who lives at such a high altitude, then finally just laying down on the stairs and hoping that someone either finds your lifeless body or builds an elevator, whichever comes first.

-And, finally, I think the war you wage each morning after going out boozing, over whether to get out of bed and piss, or just hold it in and hope to fall back asleep, is analogous to the general daily conflict in the lives of twentysomethings.  By not pissing, we’re ignoring the consequences of our actions and hoping that somehow everything will take care of itself.  But by getting up, we are conceding some control and acknowledging unwanted responsibility.  Of course, in college I used to just piss in an empty Gatorade bottle then throw it down the hallway in the general direction of the communal bathroom.  God, I miss those days.  Fuck me.

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