three months and one week

into 2006 i attended my first party of the year. if i keep living at this rate i have three more to go before auld acquantance be forgot. anyway, i consider tonight to be one of life's mini milestones and a very big first: the first social function of my first job out of college.

throughout the madness of free drinks, chips, salsa and laughs i felt so, how you say, grown up. hell i even wore a freshly-ironed dress shirt with a tie, not because it was required but because (get this) i wanted to. i just assumed that's the type of outfit worn to these sort of things. but a suit's just a suit. reminders of my youthful inexperience revealed themselves whenever i was caught in conversation about things which i have neither a fucking clue nor the desire to know about. matters such as house-hunting, cheating spouses, and proctologist visits. but seeing as i'm the second youngest person at work, i'm not sweating it.

it went down at a mexican restaurant on la cienega a few blocks down from the school. present were pretty much all staff members, a few parents, and a handful of both in the tipsy (is this word still used?) category, myself included. i can't really describe what it's like being around drunken elementary school teachers and playing (read: winning) bingo in said company then stumbling outside to loosen my tie and have a cigarette outside a closed trashy lingerie store under an indigo sky illuminated by neon signs promising LIQUOR and TOTALLY NUDE GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS.

if anything, the evening was oddly reassuring and reminded me that for the most part, i'm doing all right.