I started out my Halloween adventure this year in the same way I’ve been doing everything since I left South America – with uncertainty. I’ve learned that I have no trouble making important decisions quickly and logically… if I’m in an emergency I don’t freeze up, but instead take quick action. However, when I’m not in an emergency and my decisions don’t really matter, I freeze and find myself unable to make the simplest decision. My options for this year were to fly to San Francisco and re-start my trip here and now, drive to Maine to visit Justine and her roommates, head into Boston for the evenings, or just stay home and do nothing.

Well, Boston was put off the options due to a winter storm warning, and staying home in Medway wasn’t ever an attractive option (sorry Mom and Steve, just… yeah). So my options were to fly to San Fran, or head up North. Now, to head to San Fran I would have to get everything packed, figure out where I’m staying, and deal with last-minute airline tickets. If I headed to Maine I’d be staying in New England longer, be missing “slut-o-ween” in one of the most hedonistic cities I know of, and would be delaying my adventures yet again. Not a good set of decisions.

What finally helped me make my decision was my buddies Dave and Jig, who are currently living in Tulsa, working and saving up for their own place (and possibly a real Honeymoon someday :P). I hadn’t seen them since their wedding, and figured that, if I delayed flying to San Fran, I could stop in on my way over there and visit with them for a few days. Getting to relax, hang out, and possibly have some AMAZING steaks cinched the deal, and so I packed my bags, got my costume together, and headed up to Old Town Maine.

Thanks to my iPod’s “just play random songs that I probably like” setting the drive itself was pretty quick, and the five hours passed pretty painlessly. I got there just in time to see Justines roommate Allegra run into the apartment, yelling that she needed 34 cents. Mmhmm, thats right. 34 cents. I guess she was a tiny bit short to buy Pizza, and the place wouldn’t take cards or checks for one reason or another. Luckily we were able to raid the couch for some spare change, got the pizza, and averted a catastrophe of epic proportions. Seriously… Pizza’s one of those foods that you don’t always want, but when you do want it? My god no one get between a person and their slice.

We ate, we drank, we relaxed, we picked costumes and got changed, and we drove out to Umaine’s campus for the party. Originally (when I decided to go) we were going to a club, but the girls decided that it was too expensive, and that the Campus party would be pretty solid. Not too surprising, to be honest… Old Town has MAYBE two bars, and the “club” was actually housed in a converted office trailer. Mmhmm… like you see in Trailer parks. The school party, on the other hand, was rather large and impressive, with lots of free food and snacks, and an impressively large dance floor with a cool balcony around it. We grabbed some quick treats, poked around to see what was going on (they had Tarot readings!) and then meandered ourselves to the dance floor.

On the floor we met up with some other friends, and started to get our groove on with a passion. Or… we tried to. Unfortunately the DJ was a mix of completely-shitty, jaw-droppingly bad, and amazingly ADD. Seriously… he wasn’t mixing any of his own stuff, was using iTunes to DJ, and went directly from Trance music to Nickelback to Skillrex. Yeah… dance to shitty pop to Dubstep… and he was surprised everyone kept yelling at him to stop sucking. Luckily one of the girls dancing with us was a stripper (seriously, she is. And if her dancing is any indication, she’s a damn good one), so she was able to keep moving through everything, and thus the party didn’t die out too badly. But it never really got itself going too well, and so after two hours or so we were all ready to head out and continue the party back at their apartment. Where there was booze. And actual good music.

We searched everywhere at the party and finally herded everyone back into the car. It took a while… I’m really sad that the DJ was so bad, because the party was HUGE, and if he had been able to mix a beat with any skill that could have been a party to rival anything San Fran can put together. Meh, you win some and you loose some. Next time I’ll know to bring some Chloroform and a good DJ.

Anyways, we headed home, and immediately proceeded to get the real party started in an impressive way. The primary aim of the evening pretty quickly turned into “help Allegra get herself amazingly trashed”, since she had never been knock-down drunk before (according to her). We did a round or two of shots, and then dived into the most dangerous of games… drinking five-fingers. You know the one, where you hold up five fingers and say “never have I ever ____”, and then the people in the game who have done that thing have to put down a finger and take a drink. Whoo boy… I am impressed. I’ve only seen someone go from Sober to Trashed quicker than that once, and that one time was at a wedding where the poor girl hadn’t been allowed to drink all day. Allegra wasn’t able to walk without the walls help within 20min, and inside of 30min she was pretty much confined to making out with the floor. I kept partying with the other roommate Steph for a bit, but after a while we noticed that Allegra had been “heading to the bathroom” for quite a bit longer than is normally necessary, so I decided that I should play the white knight and go check up on her.

Ohh boy… and I thought the story of how Big T and I started hanging out was good..

(Ed Note: short version of it… Big T decided that he’d be a good host one day, and every time a guest took a short he would take a shot as well. After a while of partying we noticed he was missing, and finally found him three stories down, locked in a random bathroom “praying to the porcelain god”

So I knocked on the door, and she told me it was unlocked and that I should come in. She was laying in the tub, muttering something about hours and Body-Mass-Index charts. Turns out that she was keeping herself in the “recovery position”, and trying to calculate how quickly her body would be able to process the alcohol. Mmhmm… Allegra’s a nurse, and went into full panic-mode, only remembering the many stories her professors had told her about drunk people dying. Well, I was thankfully able to convince her that she wasn’t going to die, that everyone gets drunk (she wasn’t even that drunk… no spins or anything!), and that she should probably not try to sleep in the bathtub, seeing as she had work in the morning.

By promising that Steph and I would take care of her and make sure that she didn’t leave the recovery position for at least an hour I convinced Allie to come back and hang out for a bit. Honestly the night went pretty quickly towards the “sleep time now snore” zone, seeing as Allegra was completely out of it, Steph had been napping while we was in the bathroom, and it was nearing 4:00 in the morning at that point. I debated trying to get Allie back into her own room, but ended up just calling it quits and passing out on the bed in Stephs room… not really a bad thing, getting to crash with two girls… even if one of them was ranting in her sleep about acid reflux and alcohol processing-speeds.

The next day Marc and I went into work with Justine at the YMCA rock climbing wall and spent most of the day clambering around, setting new routes, and generally being horrible role models to the kids who were climbing there. Seriously… we set like three new routes, rolled two kids up in climbing pads like burritos, taught one 7 or 8 year old girl how to do a heel-hook, and helped a cute high-school couple perfect their awesome-climbing-pose technique. Yeah, it was a really fun day 🙂 The hours honestly went really quickly, although when I went to type this all up my arms were complaining pretty loudly about the workout they had received. I wasn’t able to finish a few of the “challenge” routes that Justine’s supervisor had put up, though I did have a lot of fun showing some little kids the proper falling technique (and emphasizing its importance with my elbow-scar).

After we closed up the gym for the day the three of us headed to one of Marc’s old apartments to visit a friend of theirs, since they needed my “specialist opinion” for something that they wouldn’t explain. Turns out they needed my Jew-Mojo – Marc’s old roommate Common had been baking bagels all day, and Justine was planning on buying a dozen or so from him. I guess his new sneaky-plan was to start an in-house bakery, and sell stuff at the weekly farmers market… pretty cool way to earn a few extra bucks, if you ask me. We sat, ate bagels, bouldered around the apartment, and even watched some cool music videos, all the while I was wishing that we had some cream cheese. The Bagels were good though, and with my “Jew-approval” rating, Justine threw down a few bucks and we headed out in search of Nachos.

On the way over to campus we made a quick pit-stop at a “peace garden” that Marc and Justine said I should see. And by “should see” they mean “holy crap it will scare the pants off you”. And yeah… I still haven’t found those pants. Their gone man, scared completely off. Because this peace garden was a SCULPTURE garden, one populated by small brass sculptures of little children running around. And it didn’t have lights, so you’d just see the hint of an outline before walking right into a little girl taking a puppy for a walk. And the sculptor was either not that good, or seriously messed up… most of the statues had something vaguely wrong about them, something you couldn’t place right away. Example, one of them had its hands reversed. Yeah… the thumbs were on the bottom of the hand, and the fingers curled in the wrong direction. Little things like that.

Anyways, Nachos. I guess Umaine really doesn’t trust its students to be alone at night, because they were having a second Halloween event tonight This time, instead of a party, it was a “come eat Potter-themed snacks and watch the new movie!” style event. Pretty neat, if you ask me, especially since they were showing Deathly Hallows Part 2, which still hadn’t been released on DVD yet. That, and the fact that they had an epic amount of food – ice cream, cookies, brownies, and even hot cocoa. They had everything… everything except any form of meat, or Nachos. Seriously… the one thing that I wanted they didn’t have. Damnit. I did console myself by comandeering an entire plate of brownies before we left though… the servers were cleaning up and throwing everything out, so I figured I may as well save the brownies for the girls and myself. And seriously. No Nachos. Screw them.

After depositing the brownie tray back at the apartment I flip-flopped about whether or not I wanted to go to the Loj in the morning, or to leave right then. For like an hour. Seriously… great at important decisions, horrible at stupid ones. I finally fell back on the “If I don’t know what to do, just go somewhere new” tactic and headed out, saying goodbye to Justine and Marc and Steph (Allegra had gone to visit her folks). I did make sure to pack a few brownies and a coffee for my trip though 🙂