STO: Teenagers scare the living shit out of me

Tuesday marks the end of my teenage years. Birthdays have always been an interesting part of my life. A summer birthday has led to some uneventful July twenty-seconds as Boston-area residents habitually head to the cape or camp or whatnot and I have rarely spent my birthday with friends. Past birthdays have ranged from a parent-thrown party in June when I was 10, a full day in Driver's ED class complete with 2 trips to the RMV because I didn't bring my birth certificate the first time, to a day in Washington DC on a social service trip in which my parents neglected to call me to driving around in circles on my 18th and then spending the day isolated in Connecticut. So Greg and I disagree on what birthdays are about - he doesn't like the pressure of "needing to have a good day" on your birthday and thinks it should just be an ordinary day. I disagree. It's the one day of the year where people celebrate you, unless you're Barack Obama and the date is January 20, 2009. So of course I threw a party on Saturday. Note: I don't quite remember the circumstances of this picture.

Saturday morning and afternoon was a little high stress for me as I got the apartment ready and talked on the phone with various guests all day. My computer's speakers are broken so I needed to buy a speaker for the music and headed over to 海龙, the giant electronics mall that is abuzzing with Asians obsessing over cameras and mobiles. I looked up the word for speaker, 扬声器, and headed over with a fat wallet and a sense of optimism. I returned with an electronic pig. As ridiculous as it looks, I'm very proud of my little piggy - all the speakers were either animal-shaped or large multi-pieced iPod docks. For 450 kuai I had this spheroid shaped thing with two speakers for eyes. So I plug it into my computer and start blasting Sweetest Girl and life is good. I had made the salesperson plug in the pig and prove that it worked beforehand but I was still nervous about its functionality, because in China so many electronic goods are broken. Ok so I lean onto this pig and suddenly the volume drops. Fuck. I can't even find where you adjust the volume, there's this little Bass knob on the back but that's not it. I start banging on the pig and at first nothing changes. After one particular bang the volume totally dies. Wonderful. Dejected, forlorn and tired, I reluctantly look up the Chinese word for volume, drag my pig back to the electronics superhub and go back to the salesman, who promptly shows me that the sound is working fine. I blubber around for answers, and to my immense shame, the salesman shows me that pressing down on the ears of the pig adjusts the volume. My pig and I were blushing the whole taxi ride back to my apartment.

After cleaning up my apartment, buying cups and more beer at 7Eleven, I head out for dinner at this wonderful little pizza restaurant called Kro's Nest with Charlie, Saloni and Christie. The bbq chicken, onion and mushroom pizza was legit, delish and like all other food in China, terrible for one's digestive system. I hurried home from dinner as the party was scheduled to start at 8:30. I had a shot of Absolut vodka with Saloni to start the night but things were really lowkey for a while because no one arrived until like 9:30 and as of 10 o'clock, there were like 6 people here. Then everything blew up, and after a few drinks and what seemed like 20 minutes, another 10 people arrived and I changed the music from my "pre-game chill" list to the "party list." Lots of people brought a few drinks and Christie even brought a birthday cake. I had a whole set of amusing rules which no one really followed, but the best one was definitely the punishment of baijiu for any perpetrator of a party foul (which included me). In some order, I took a shot of jack daniels with JD (who despite being 10 years older and not knowing anyone else was really the life of the party) and then another one with Lisa, sharing a Corona with Kate, choked back on some baijiu, played some Kings, and told at least 5 different people to "look for the foot massage place" while trying to find my building. We also had an ice-breaking session, where I made everyone say their name, what they're doing in Beijing, and why I'm awesome. The best quotes from that session were from Christie, "I like eating chocolate," and Angela, "Cal is awesome because although both his parents are Chinese, he looks like a HALFIE."

At some point around midnight the party really went nuts. We broke out the cake which served a function in addition to dessert. Lisa told me to come over and when I obliged, she slapped me in the face with a piece of cake she had hidden in her pocket. It got everywhere, all over my shirt and face, it was ridiculous. I'm pretty sure I took off my shirt after that. Everyone at the party surprised me with a birthday card with at least 15 signatures. Around 1 or 130am I made everyone leave the apartment and head to Lush. This included a brief stop on the bridge in the middle of the complex, where I think at least 5 of us guys peed off it. Absolutely shameless. The cops walked over to us when that happened but I think we were miraculously spared.

I woke up this morning sleeping with a decidedly wicked hangover. Among the battle scars in my apartment this morning: about 20 open containers of alcohol and a quarter of cake strewn across two tables, broken tiles at the base of my wall, sprite stains on my laptop (the only residual effect is a sticky left clicker), a piece of cake on a plate on top of my air conditioning, a page of my notebook filled with the rules for King's, and my favorite shot glass in several pieces :(. Nothing really terrible though, like a dead body or a pile of vomit, and all totally worth it. Anyways, this was the best party I had ever attended. I think from this point out, my time in Beijing will be more cultural, healthier and more academic as opposed to alcoholic. There's still a lot of stuff I want to do in this city and having an awesome party is no longer one of them.