It was my roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack’s, birthday on Sunday, so I took it upon myself to throw him a “party” on Friday night. I wanted to reserve a private room somewhere so he could “mingle” and “work the room” and “network” and “invite hot girls in to enjoy his bottle service, ifyouknowwhatImean”, but I couldn’t get the bars in our area to agree to give me one unless I promised to bring a hundred people and buy a buffet for them. So I gave Jack two non-reserved-room options:
1) a divey Irish bar that my friend Jeff said Jack would like, with a pool table and ping-pong and darts and, like, 1.5 stars on Yelp, or
2) a stylish 1920s-style speakeasy with artisan cocktails and small plates that promised to not have a wait to get in despite the super-high rating on Yelp.
Of course he picked the dive. I hemmed and hawed and suggested that maybe we should just go to dinner instead, but he said it was his birthday and going somewhere nice was going to make him feel old. I said, “Do what you want. People have to pretend to like it,” but I really meant, “I know I’m supposedly planning this party for you, but there’s not a chance I’m going to stay for more than a half an hour.”
But it turned out to be this toooootally not-horrible bar that was not tiny and not crowded and not sticky, and people who said they weren’t going to come came, and everyone played games and caught up and ate wings, and no one got celiac disease, which is apparently common among the Irish, along with small penises. I don’t know. Google it.
Our friend Nik and I left and slogged through the ice and snow to pick up Kamran at his apartment and then took a cab to a sushi buffet in Koreatown called IchiUmi that’s as big as a football field and always full. On the way, the cab driver–who was Southeast Asian and may hold different ideas about hilarity than we do–told us a long-winded joke about three men who were 86 years old. One of them died, and the other two went to his son’s house after the funeral. “How old was he really?” they asked the son, and he replied, “92.” The two men looked at each other and said, “Should we go home?”
And then the cab driver laaaaaughed and laughed and said, “Do you get it?” And the three of us laaaaaughed and laughed, and Nik said, “Do you stay or do you go, right?” And we all laaaaaughed and laughed.
No idea.
Jack and the others didn’t make it to the sushi buffet before it closed, so we met them at a nearby KyoChon that had pretty walls:
Jack is making an important drunken point
Kamran is moody
The guys really love CVS
It was one of those nights where everything worked out just fine and we felt young and unstoppable in New York City. I didn’t give Jack a hard time for not making it to the sushi place, and I had nothing bad to say about the bar that I expected to hate, and I didn’t get stressed about running around with snow-soaked hair. But then we went home at midnight, because we actually are old.
Happy birthday, Jack!
