My friend Emily wanted to celebrate her birthday by forcing us to hang out with her allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll day the Saturday before last, so my boyfriend Kamran and I picked up three vats of rainbow sherbet and a pack of rainbow Twizzlers and took the bus down to Tompkins Square Park for a noontime picnic. When we found the party, it consisted of Emily, who was in a birthday tiara, lest you forget who to pay all your attention to

and a handful of our other friends lounging on a blanket with an open jar of peanut butter in the middle of the circle. Kamran and I had come hungry, expecting a potluck, so I immediately thought, “Oh, shit, this is going to be the worst picnic ever,” and proceeded to eat all the paper party favors I could get my hands on.

Luckily, though, Emily’s sister-in-law, Lauren, came back from the dog run with the cutest puppy in the entire world, Penny,

and loads of food came out of hiding, including the beaniest bean salad, two whole chickens, pounds of lunch meat and mayonnaise, an entire German chocolate cake from Magnolia Bakery, and chopped fruits galore.

Emily had asked me to bring ice cream specifically to go with the cake and was a little upset at first that I’d forgotten and gone with sherbet instead, but then her brother, Nathan, thought to put the sherbet in the gallons of spiked lemonade that had gotten warm in the sun, and so we all drank it cold through rainbow Twizzler straws.

Which led to Emily’s mom getting drunk and hilarious and walking through the park with a party hat on

and everyone else generally having a great time, including me

but not including Kamran.

Naw, I’m just kidding. Kamran was a party animal

and didn’t even cut me when this happened:

Hey, Tracey, look at my bracelet!

Here’s a bad picture of Adam and Sonya just to prove they were there for posterity:

The only thing that sucked was all the poor people who felt like it was cool to step on our blankets and ask for our food in the midst of our being rich and merry. Now, I’m generally a pretty giving person, and I genuinely feel for people who have to sleep on the streets (although I firmly believe that if you can sit on a sidewalk with a pathetic give-me-money sign all day, you can stand behind a retail counter making money, too), but the first guy who approached us actually had the nerve to be MEAN about it. Here, I’ll recreate the conversation for you:

Asshole Poor Guy in Cargo Shorts with Backpack Who was Likely Totally Privileged and Had Annoying Well-Groomed Hair: Hey, can I have some of that food?

(Everyone shifts uncomfortably.)

Emily’s Sister-in-Law, Lauren: Sure, let me make a heaping plate for you, because I care about you, even though you’re an asshole and don’t deserve it.

(Lauren piles a paper plate high with bean salad, the most nutritious, delicious, and filling thing we have.)

Asshole Poor Guy: How ’bout some of that bread? I shouldn’t even have to ask, you know.

Me: Beggars can’t be choosers!

(The crowd falls silent, except for Chris, who says, “Ohhhhhhh, shit!” and wins my favor.)

Lauren: Absolutely no problem, sir. Here, take two slices.

The other ten thousand people who approached us were much cooler and much more appreciative, but they sure are lucky Emily’s family was there to be kind, ’cause I would’ve sent their asses packing had it been my birthday. And that concludes my right-wing conservative rant.

In honor of my very first New York City friend moving back to NYC for the summer after leaving us for grad school in Santa Barbara last year, I bring you . . .

Meredith was throwing a dance party at her friend Jordan’s apartment and asked us to bring a mix CD, because Jordan had been robbed twice in one week and was re-building her music collection. Boyfriend Kamran and I were on a huge Phil Collins kick at the time (and at all times), so we thought we were being soooooooooo hilarious by bringing a CD full of our Philfavorites. But they ended up using an iPod dock instead of the mix CDs and only people we didn’t know showed up, so after making all the film-related conversation we could with one of her friends, we started to feel a little like this:

For posterity’s sake, I tried to make it look like I was a part of the group and having a great time

but eventually we gave up on pretending and secluded ourselves in one corner with the iPod and plastic cups full of straight Malibu rum, and things took a turn for the better. Especially when we discovered a cabinet full of delights such as

and

and then decided that if no one else was going get down, we’d have to make up for it:

Worst video ever? But I love when I say “really get into it!” and then continue the same totally lame dancing.

Meredith finally took notice of our awesomeness after that and had to come over for some scintillating conversation

but then we left, because we didn’t want to be around when Jordan’s apartment got broken into for the third time.

BFFs!

Last Friday night, a couple of my friends wanted to get together for happy hour, so we scoured drinkdeal.com and came up with Benny’s Burritos, because we pretty much want to drink giant margaritas all the time. And giant margaritas we had.

For $3, they’ll give you a tumbler of margarita. For $6, you get a Collins glass. And for $9? The biggest beer mug you can imagine. My friends Beth and Charles and I arrived early to take advantage of the deal, which is only offered at the bar, and by the time I finished my coconut-flavored margarita mug, I was giddy. Poor Boyfriend Kamran showed up all professional-like in his button-down and slacks to find me howling and slapping the table at everything Beth and Charles said.

Despite the fact that they live together, Adam has a hard time letting on that he actually likes Sonya.

This is Charles and Kamran’s attempt to look like badasses. SUCCESS!

Fake smile!

Everyone else really sucks at taking non-flash pictures on my camera. Why didn’t I become the steady-handed brain surgeon I planned to be?

And that concludes the Requisite Pictures of People Having Fun portion of this entry.

Not to make this a restaurant review or anything, but I have to mention that our food was pretty great. I’m on a corn kick right now and made Kamran share the corn fritters appetizer with me, which was a plate of little fried balls that resembled hush puppies. And the consistency of their filling was pretty hush-puppy-ish, too, only with CORN added. Best thing you can imagine? I thought so. The burritos were mission-style, so they were huge and full of the stuff you usually see as side dishes. I had the Grilled Mango Burrito, which came with enough mango salsa to douse the thing, and Kamran got the Chicken Chipotle Burrito, which was spice-AY.

Adam was in the mood for foosball, so we walked toward B-Side on surprise! Avenue B. Halfway there, Kamran brought up Luca Lounge, the bar he took me to on our first date lo those many months ago, where we admitted to the embarrassing bands we liked and I made a joke about his timing me while I went to the restroom before remembering that old cellphone commercial where the guy who asks the girl if she wants to time him on the toilet was supposedly a douchebag. Kamran described the red velvet Victorian couches, the backyard garden, the whoa-clean restrooms, and our friends were hooked. And then we got there and found THIS:

Sadly, no!

It was CLOSED! Like, for GOOD! Just then, my best friend Tracey called from Ohio, and when I told her about our bad luck, she reminded me that she and her last boyfriend went back to their first date restaurant on their fourth anniversary, found it had closed, and broke up soon after. NOOOOOOOOOOO! But she’s engaged to someone way awesomer now, so it’s cool. Kamran and I agreed that if this means the end of the line for us, it’s been a good run, and we’ll part without tears and bitterness. Plus, their menu was still lit up outside, and that has to mean something.

We returned to the original plan of B-Side, where we opted for the $5 PBR-and-a-shot-of-the-cheapest-most-painful-going-down-whiskey-you-can-imagine deal. We went to the back room, which was twelve to sixteen hundred degrees but made up for it by having a hugely huge wraparound couch with no apparent rat damage and concert posters for rad bands on the wall. We chugged our whiskey as a group (OR SO WE THOUGHT, UNTIL SOMEONE FOUND A FULL SHOT GLASS LOLLYGAGGING ON OUR TABLE LATER) and then played several thousand rounds of foosball, all of which resulted in outrageous wins for Adam, because he has a foosball table in his office and is a bastard. My camera battery had almost completely died at this point, so I kept turning the thing on for a second and snapping a picture as fast as I could, which resulted in a lot of shots like this:

Yes, Charles is indeed wearing an entire suit. And Beth looks like a mannequin.

Sonya and Adam knew I was starting to get a little sleepy and grumpy, so they dragged us to Le Royale for Robot Rock, ’cause I loooove dancing to some electronic indie whatnot. We ended up having to wait in line for 20 minutes or so, during which time the same guy walked by twice with his girlfriend and said mocking things to us like, “Did you get in yet?” and “I heard this place really sucks.” And when we got to the front of the line, they were trying to charge us $10 to get in. And even though Kamran was going to pay my $10 like the gentleman he is, I refused. WE DO NOT PAY TO GET INTO BARS!

Except when the bar is fat cat, which charges a mere $3 for hours and hours of entertainment. Sonya has tried to get me to go there a million times before, but I’ve always denied her because she’s way too excitable about these sorts of things, and I figured it’d turn out to be super-lame. But there’s pool! And ping-pong! And chess! And Scrabble! And live jazz! And a bunch of dorky hipsters everywhere! It’s a massive (at least by NYC standards) basement with a bunch of tables and chairs for drinkin’ and gamin’, individual netted rooms for ping-pong, and the sort of music that makes you feel like wearing a flapper dress and smoking from an obnoxiously long cigarette holder. It helps that I totally killed Kamran at ping-pong manymany times in a row, but that’s neither here nor there. So I started out my fat cat visit feeling miserable and wanting to leave immediately and ended it by being the last one to want to go.

A+!

The morning of the start of my 24-hour culture marathon, Kamran asked me the names of the other two winners of the Time Out New York contest and the reporter who would accompany us on our outing and then kept singing “white people having a good time” to describe the events involving a group of people called Katie, Colin, Brian, and Meghan. My friends had encouraged me to “wear something cute that’s comfortable but also formal enough to fit in at a club, just in case” but I had rejected all of their advice and gone for Chucks, dark jeans, a very apropos baby blue t-shirt of Kamran’s with a drawing of a writer at a desk with his head in his hands, a black cardigan, and my dogbed-looking cape. I wanted to make sure that at all costs, it didn’t look like I was trying.

I rode the bus down to 7th St. in the East Village to Abraço, which is literally a coffee bar: there’s a counter for ordering on one side, and another counter for standing and drinking along the window that makes up the storefront. Wanting to keep my public restroom use to a minimum, I opted out of a drink and just stood at the window, replying to excited well-wishing texts my friends had left me the night before. A steady stream of people stopped in with their dogs and made familiar conversation with the owner, who had the greatest curly gray hair that flopped in his eyes as he brewed each cup individually from fresh ground beans. Had I been a coffee drinker, I would’ve been in heaven.

A little after 8:30, a tall blond guy with the sort of look that immediately strikes you as that of someone who’d never tell you a lie came in and boomed, “Are any of you here with Time Out?” The girl standing against the wall behind me and I both turned and introduced ourselves to him. He was Colin, the reporter, and she was Meghan, the other female winner. I had kind of expected her to be like me–a little less mainstream, a little more geeky–but she was a normal girl. Like, with regular girl straight long hair and regular girl make-up and regular girl boots and a pretty navy blue coat that any regular girl would own. I usually find these girls uninteresting, and they usually find me weird, but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, since we were about to spend 24 hours together. But then the first words out of her mouth were, “We’d better not be going to the Panty Party, ’cause I’m not wearing any panties!” And you can imagine how hard my eyes rolled.

Luckily, the guys were great. Colin had the best room-filling laugh and was one of those people who makes friends with everyone he meets, and Brian–who turned out to be Asian, completely wrecking the “white people having a good time” theme–was wearing a homemade shirt to advertise his blog (which I will also advertise here–peasandnuts.com–despite the fact that he refers to me as “another girl” in the sidebar) and planned to Twitter all of our activities for his friends. Our photographer, Jeff, had gone to school at the University of Michigan, which has the biggest and best rivalry in college football history with my school, THE Ohio State University, and had typical twentysomething good looks but was super-nerdy about how much he loved taking pictures and was therefore likeable.

Colin informed us that our outing was actually a contest to see who could go all 24 hours and that there were plenty of activities planned that were intended to tire us out and get us eliminated, so I got all nervous that we were going to swim the Hudson or participate in a 5k run. But it turned out that our first activity was very much the opposite of that–a sit in the sauna at the Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village, where hairy old European men in tiny swimsuits barked at us to stop taking pictures and close the door so the heat wouldn’t escape.

I wasn’t totally down with being beaten with oak leaf brushes and starting the day all sweaty, so I kept my sweater on and stayed in the sauna for just a moment, which I’m sure resulted in odd photos, but a girl has to have her priorities, you know, and mine was assuring that my hair didn’t get frizzy. Plus, the place was a little shady-looking

and there was a sign that read, “YOU MUST SHOWER BEFORE ENTERING POOL! Persons with sore of inflamed eyes, a cold, nasal drip, discharges, cuts, boils, or any other evident skin or bodily infections may not enter! No urination, discharge of fecal matter, or blowing nose in the pool!” I didn’t want to take my chances on the discharge of fecal matter part. Colin couldn’t handle the heat, and Jeff didn’t want to wreck his camera equipment, so we sat around the café area talking about music and reading articles hanging on the wall about how upset the men were when women started being allowed into the baths a few years ago and they could no longer walk around naked.

Next we went for dim sum at Jing Fong, which was one of my picks. It’s a huge banquet hall with outrageously flamboyant decor that you can only get to after what seems like a two-mile escalator ride upstairs, and there are stages along every wall filled with high-backed chairs that look like they’re meant to be used when the king is visiting. I’m used to pointing and grabbing when the food carts roll around, but as luck would have it, Brian spoke Cantonese to the waitresses and got us all sorts of weird treats like shark fin dumplings, chicken wings in rice rolls, and almond “pudding” that had the consistency of Jell-o but was strangely delicious.

Colin, Meghan, and Brian, for your reference

We tried our hand at ping-pong next at the New York Table Tennis Foundation, which was in the basement of an ordinary office building and was impossible to find if you weren’t looking for it. Three-quarters of the room was filled with kids getting lessons from really intense teachers, so we stuck to our one table and batted the ball back and forth for an hour,

the guys keeping their skillz in check so we girls could keep up. Because while I was ping-pong champion of my 4th grade 4-H camp, I haven’t really kept up my game since then. And Brian made sure I remembered that with this super-intimidating look:

Meghan was wearing this ultra low-cut shirt that wholly exposed her cleavage, and although she kept it covered with a long scarf for most of the day, she took it off for ping-pong and showed everyone that her bra just couldn’t keep those things wrangled. They were hanging down and falling out, and every time she lunged for the ball, all you could hear was the click-click-click of the photographer’s camera down her shirt. I felt a little embarrassed for her, but she seemed to be fully aware of what was going on, so I assumed that she’s one of those “all press is good press” types and applauded her lack of shame.

Next we went uptown to the Morgan Library, where Colin used all of his journalistic savvy to get us access to a closed event with Ian McEwan, who wasn’t talking about how Atonement the book is way better than Atonement the movie but was having a conversation about conversation with a Harvard professor in which they argued that so much of what we say in the English language is insinuated rather than explicitly spoken. Everyone thought it was cool except Meghan, who also accused me of falling asleep during it.

We took the subway fourteen million stops to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festival, which was also one of my picks and was more beautiful than I could have imagined.

Trees were literally falling onto the pathway with blooms, and petals floated down from every direction, especially when helped along by children with environment-hating parents.

Lots of Japanese girls were dressed in slutty Harajuku costumes, but my favourite girl was dressed as what reminded me of Little Bo Peep.

And now, to complain more about Meghan–she and I had walked together to the ping-pong place, and I learned that she’s from Laguna Beach, where Kamran’s from. I was telling her that he’s Persian and says that Orange County is full of these really slick, greasy Persians who are very much not like him, and she said that she’s also dating a Persian guy from the area. Even though I assumed that he was one of the greasy ones because she struck me as sort of a greaseball herself, I let it go without a word. She and Colin and I had talked about the dynamics of our respective relationships on the subway to the Garden, and I felt like we had a little more in common than I’d originally imagined, but by the time we were leaving the festival, I was done with her. I’m one of those people who generally thinks it’s polite to make conversation when you’re alone with an acquaintance, but she evidently viewed any time when the guys weren’t around as an opportunity to look at her BlackBerry. And while I’m one of those people who at least offers a smile–maybe even a gurgle of a response–when someone says something to me, she’s one of those people who’ll pretend as if you don’t exist. She paid plenty of attention to the reporter and photographer, though, so I expected the article to be entirely about her. But then it wasn’t. Which makes me think that Colin saw right through her.

We needed to catch a cab to Williamsburg, but there were too many people at the Garden and too few taxis on duty at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, so Colin made fun of Brooklyn and everyone else backed him up, since they all lived in Manhattan. It was so weird being with four people who weren’t at all impressed that I live in Williamsburg, which is a source of awe to pretty much everyone else I know. My location defines my personality, apparently.

Once we got to the bar where we were going to watch the Kentucky Derby–Pete’s Candy Store, where we play trivia on Wednesday nights–we found the place was overpacked with hipsters in wide-brimmed hats and southern-belle-type dresses, so we went instead to Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern, which only had a handful of old men inside. I put my fake money on Big Brown just because of his ridiculous name, but one of the guys had actually bet what was apparently a large sum of real money and was practically crying when his horse fell behind. Good times.

We headed back into the city to the Upright Citizens Brigade for an improv show, where we had some comfy velvet seats courtesy of Colin’s string-pulling, and where Colin laughed in my ear SO HARD.

I talked to Colin’s girlfriend all about being from the Midwest–she was from Michigan–and living in New York and how each of us reacts to going home for a week while we wasted time at a bar next door until a spot opened up at El Maguey y La Tuna, where I had what was either the best mole of my life or what tasted like it after a few margaritas, though it looks like chunky death in this photo:

Colin got into the Cinco de Mayo festivities with a sombrero,

but there was only a little cowgirl hat left by the time the waitress got to Brian, and he refused. The staff at the place kept emphasizing to Colin that they were the best Mexican in the Lower East Side, and I sort of believe it, because I also had this crazy jalapeño popper that was the most delicious thing I could imagine (until I got to the shrimp hiding in one end of it, I mean). Kamran doesn’t know that we’re eating every single meal there from now on.

The first of the sleep-inducing activities was a midnight showing of Alien at the Sunshine, but I loaded up on Mountain Dew and two different types of chocolate, so coupled with the fact that I’d never seen the movie before, I had no problem staying awake. Meghan knocked herself out of the competition by leaving for a while for a friend’s birthday party, and Brian kept putting his head in his hands but shielding his eyes so none of us could see them, so I tell myself that he totally fell asleep and that I won the contest.

Next we went to Cake Shop for their 3rd anniversary party, and it was PACKED. I was pumped to listen to cool music, eat some cupcakes, and relax among all the pretty people, but it was so crowded upstairs and down that we ended up losing each other, and I couldn’t see the band, and no one was dancing, and it just felt lame. So I texted Colin with, “I’m not having fun,” and went outside to call Kamran in hopes that he’d tell me to leave early. But he encouraged me to stick it out, and I’m glad I did, because next was

at Sing Sing, which was also my pick. Colin had a bunch of the guys at the bar mancrushing on him for his boyband ballads and his 90s raps, and I got a round of applause for one of my renditions. Even Meghan-who-hated-me returned to the group from her party and stood beside me so she could put her ear to my vocal cords. Which made me like her just a little, but purely in a superior way. A bunch of my friends were at a club down the street and joined us for the last hour or so, which was so awesome, and I tried to convince them to join us for the rest of the marathon, but they had been awake since noon and thought that was a big deal.

I did manage to get my friend/former co-worker Beth to come to Veselka for blintzes and macaroni and cheese, but only because she was visiting from California for the weekend and didn’t want to waste any time sleeping. Just as we ordered, though, our friend who she was staying with called and said that she had locked her keys in her apartment and that Beth had the only extra set. With her gone and with Meghan having left even before breakfast, we decided to skip the morning church service and Staten Island Ferry ride that were supposed to have been enough to put even Brian with his “I stay awake for 24 hours every Saturday” touts to sleep and call it a day.

I took the bus back to Kamran’s and arrived just as the sun was starting to crawl up over Brooklyn and the East River

and then I enjoyed a much-deserved hour of sleep before heading off to brunch. Because I am invincible.And also famous.

Comment Here

The greatest fun in living in a city where the majority of restaurants are tiny, unreplicable, and authentic is choosing to eat at a chain, which is exactly what we did for my friend Sonya’s quarter-century birthday the weekend before last. She’d been craving teppanyaki for weeks but hadn’t wanted to spend the money, and her birthday gave her the perfect opportunity to make her boyfriend Adam pick up the tab at Benihana. And we felt okay about it, you know, because the very first Benihana was in NYC. So shut up.

Kamran stocked up for the evening all baller-like,

and then we met Sonya, Adam, and Adam’s co-workers/couple-friends Dave and Sarah at the restaurant,

Look at Adam’s tongue hanging out!

where Kamran immediately filled me up with some crazy blue liquor so I’d quit talking about how much he hated the green pleated shirt Sonya and I had bought for me to wear especially for the occasion the night before. Sonya told us that in other parts of the country, the chefs–though obviously not Japanese–are forced to adopt Asian-sounding names just for show. Our chef for the evening was very not-Japanese and had the not-Japanese name Romeo, which very well could have been made up, too, but he used it to his advantage and cooked us up this very romantic rice heart:

He slid his spatula under the middle section and pushed it up and down to make the heart look like it was beating, which made all the girls’ hearts flutter. He flipped shrimp into the top of his cap and threatened to flip some at me when he could see how grossed out I was by seafood, but I totally ate the ones that he grilled for us out of guilt. Kamran and I each had a Rocky’s Choice, which was hibachi steak and chicken with soup, salad, vegetables and this garlic butter chicken rice that could have been a meal within itself. Sonya got a bowl of birthday ice cream on the house and offered it up to everyone, but the four of them were all, “Oh, no, we’re waaaay too full for that.” Kamran and I, on the other hand, were like, “Excuse me, waitress, but our meals are supposed to come with ice cream, and we want to be as fat as possible, so please bring it to us double-time.”

We decided to head downtown to get Sonya drunker, and while we waited for the subway, various naughty things involving Kamran’s super-sharp umbrella took place, including but not limited to what Sonya refers to as “the pimp picture”,

and this, which should probably never be mentioned again:

We got to The Back Room at 11, and after taking an unmarked set of stairs down to a tunnel, walking through an alley, and taking another flight of stairs up again, we finally made it inside the place, which is shticky with Victorian speakeasy charm.

The idea is that it’s still the 1920s and Prohibition is in full effect, so drinks are served in teacups and brown paper bags,

and the Asian folks aren’t in internment camps yet, so everyone’s merry (except Adam):

The plan was to get Dave wasted enough that he wouldn’t mind going dancing, because he’s not so into grinding up against strangers for reasons that DON’T MAKE ANY SENSE TO ME. But of course it was Sonya and me who got there first, as evidenced by this

and this

AND THIS,

which we took with the bouncer who was guarding the secret bookshelf-disguised door to the back room where owner Tim Robbins and all of his famous friends hang out. This guy in a prep school sweater kept shaking hands with the bouncer and slipping him folded bills in unknown denominations, but the bouncer kept denying him, and we kept making snide comments about him until our teacups were empty.

We got to Ruff Club (no, seriously, that’s what it’s called . . . !!!) at midnight, and it was their second anniversary, so there were loads of people standing in line in fishnets and white shoes. We took our place at the end, and then a kid behind us asked, “Do you guys know what this place is like?” I said, “It’s worth the wait.” Even though I’d never been there before. We stood for maybe ten minutes in the rain, which resulted in this super-homosexual picture of Kamran protecting Adam’s glorious hair:

Sonya and I had been shopping all week so we could compete with this and this and this, but after that ten minutes, the bouncers started separating girls and boys into two different lines so the girls could go in first, and we didn’t want to leave our boyfriends behind, so we ended up going to another unmarked bar. And despite the inclusion of songs by the likes of The Notorious B.I.G. and Sophie B. Hawkins, we danced and danced and danced until the sun came up. Or, you know, until, like, 2 a.m.

When you’re a Persian, a Korean, and a German, you naturally spend your St. Patrick’s Day eating . . .

My co-worker Sonya met Kamran and me for dinner on Monday night at Yakitori Torys for what has become our new favorite thing: random meats, skewered and dunked in sweet sauce for grilling. We’ve been going to a place in the East Village called Oh! Taisho regularly now since Sonya introduced us to it, but after knocking out all of the chicken gizzards and french-fries-dipped-in-cod-roe and other such nonesense there, we thought we were ready to try some softened chicken bones at Torys. That’s right; softened, grilled chicken bones. No meat. Just bones. Delish.

The place was full, so we got to sit at this table in the middle of the room that had a frame built around it and curtains covering it from all sides. We started off with a bowl of shredded chicken with bitter melon and fish flakes, and once I got past the fact that I was eating dried fish when I don’t even eat wet fish, I really enjoyed the saltiness that it added to the chicken. And after biting into the bitter melon, Kamran and I ruminated on the fact that even as twentysomethings, we can experience a taste that’s brand new to us. They were already sold out of a lot of the limited dishes, so unfortunately there were no chicken knees to be had, but we filled up on skewers and skewers of kobe beef tongue and pork with scallions and chicken with plum sauce and shishito peppers. Even better than all of those, though, were the steamed vegetables with wasabi mayonnaise and green tea salt. And my figurative hat is off to any restaurant that can make me like steamed anything. Kamran picked up our $100 tab, naturally, ’cause that’s just how he rolls.

There was a whole lot of carryin’-on in the streets that Sonya wouldn’t let us go home without adding to, so we stepped into a bar called the Pig n Whistle on 3rd for an Irish Car Bomb drank in time to a cheesy pop song, with me shouting slurred commands in the background:

I particularly love hearing myself saying, “Lefth guh! Lefth guh!” at the beginning. And, uh, I’d only had about two sips of my drink at that point. But at least I didn’t hold a squishface at the end of the video like Sonya did, thinking I was taking a picture rather than a video.

Here, Kamran and Sonya show the curdled remnants of their bombing

and then Sonya . . . gives me cheekwings? attempts to make me drink her curds? I have no idea.

Sonya shows off her green

and I show off my tongue

yet despite these shenanigans, Kamran thinks we need one more.

And then we spend the rest of the night trying to decide who’s drunker.

I win the contest when he finds me on my back in his bed, giggling and kicking the air. Hooray for fake holidays!

A couple of Saturdays ago, my co-worker Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, invited Kamran and me to our first night of bowling in New York. It was inside the super-sketchy port authority, so we were nearly-mugged and actually-raped approximately twenty times between the subway exit and the velvet ropes leading into the bowling alley, but there was a private lane and 176 ounces of beer awaiting us that made it well worth the pain and suffering.

Once we were inside, it wasn’t sketchy at all. There were people lounging around the round bar in the middle, and one whole side of the place had been made to look like a club with plush white seats and wispy white curtains hanging from the ceiling with little white lights all around. While we waited for our lane to become available, we stood near the racks of shoes with black and red size numbers on them, and Sonya gasped at a sign that read, “Black for men. Red for women,” thinking that it said, “For black men.” And then we made all sorts of segregation jokes.

We finally settled in our lane next to another double-date, and the two men in the party couldn’t stop looking at Sonya, which I enjoyed. Kamran and Adam jumped right into the game

but then got a little antsy when the beer took too long to arrive:

But when it did, it arrived IN A TOWER. And oh, the glory that ensued:

The greatest thing was that Sonya and Adam had absolutely no professional bowling form yet completely kicked our asses in the first two games. They’d grab some 15-pound balls, walk up to the line all calm-like, set the ball down with a gentle roll, and get strikes every time.

Meanwhile, I’d told Kamran at dinner beforehand that I have a bad habit of accidentally letting the ball go when my arm’s behind me and often end up flinging it back toward my resting opponents, and he’d suggested that I make a concerted effort to control that. So of course I did it on my very first turn.

Sonya and Adam were super-competitive and were cheering for each other’s every flub, but it was Kamran who proved the skilledest at drunken bowling and won the final game with the hearty score of 112. I think he was high on adrenaline from singlehandedly protecting the integrity of our beer tower from the grubby hands of a would-be thief. And by that, I mean that he told the guy, “Hey, uh, this is our beer,” and the guy backed off and said, “Oh, my bad.”

The tower was empty by 1:15, so we posed for some prom-esque pictures on the way out

and then did the robot all the way home.