New Years with the 28 year old frat boys

How to describe my new years party. Everyone close your eyes, ok that that doesn’t work because then you can’t see what I have written. Picture in your head a fraternity party, your typical party with crazy guys, crazy girls, lots and lots of alcohol all inside a house with crazy decorations from panty rooms to the elk head on the wall. Now take this exact same group of people and continue forward about 5 years.

A good friend and I come to this house that is in Fort Mason, a former military base now run by the national park service that rents out the buildings to civilians. This 8 bedroom house is absolutely huge and for a front lawn it overlooks the entire bay, a killer view. There are summons by the park commission for previous parties that were excessive in either noise or length framed and mounted throughout the house. An actual zebra head was mounted to the wall of the dance floor room while other rooms had the simple décor of movie posters and alcohol signs. Smoke detectors lay disconnected and laying on counter tops while doorbell wires lay coiled up around hot water pipes. They had rented two bartenders and a DJ, which compared to a fraternity party was near identical save for the quality of the alcohol. The dress underwent transformations from jeans and t-shirts in college to jackets, ties and even the occasional tux now. For you see these are all now young professionals just starting their career. Squirming threw the crowd one overhears conversations of entry into sales, marketing, PR, consulting intermixed with tales of travels and start-ups gone bad. Cornell, Yale, Oxford, Harvard were the most common alma mattas which explains the level of people, equally smart and then stupid when it comes to business as compared to drinking.

Prior to midnight there was the usual titillating conversations of wealth and knowledge from those in their jobs for the first times in their lives. Post midnight it morphed into drunk dancing (always the best kind, or at least we think it is at the time), random hookups (what would a party be without) and of course copious drinking. Dancing and drinks don’t always work, for as dancing gets more wild, drinks get dropped. The more drinks dropped, the slippery the dance floor becomes, causing more drinks to be tipped. A vicious cycle that yielded humorous results. The house and party rapidly started to look like a scene from any random MTV reality show.

As someone who was in a fraternity without a home and thus whose fraternity parties were limited to the occasional few a year, it was less of a flashback and more of a window into movies describing such a scene. You can change the dress, improve the alcohol and increase the net worth, but people don’t change. All this is to say, I had a great time. Great crowd of people, all just there to have a good time. Unlike college no dirty drunks, although the girls still on the couch crying about something or other has not changed with age and maturity. My favorite is when a couple of guys came into a room with my friends (females) and myself. One of them was digging one of the girls but before he would sit down for conversation he wanted to make sure he was not jumping in between her and me. Now that kind of respect you didn’t find in college, not wanting to throw off another guy’s groove. How cool is that, major props to Brian. Stumbling home at 3:30am and absolutely collapsing on my bed (alone) made for the ultimate conclusion to the night.

My thanks to T for the invite and a great time (although my dancing was certainly not up to par, and yes I dance like a white guy).