The sedentary life of a med student

Well I made it through another test on Tuesday. This was immediately followed up by a period of intense partying, which is traumatic for an introvert like myself.

It all started off on Wednesday. For those of you that have repressed this fact, Wednesday was Valentines Day. OSU had the fantastic planning to schedule a Suicide seminar on that very day. Luckily for us all there was snow/freezing rain/too-lazy-to-plow-the-road storm and we got out of school. This made getting the party together a bit harder, but we managed it.

One of the staples of Love Sucks is the soundtrack. The first year I had a soundtrack of 20 songs, split evenly between anti-girl and anti-boy songs. The next couple year this list blossomed to over a hundred. For LS3 I had a good 150 songs, but I selected my favorite 40 for the year and had that as the soundtrack. I’m now up to 220 songs, but made a new clean Love Sucks list of about a 100 and played that. As you’d imagine there are a great many anti-love songs that swear and I now have those segregated from the nice and friendly anti-love songs. So that was taken care of.

Decorations were a bit milder than some years. Rather than having a whole bouquet of dead flowers like last year I only had 2. I had collected a bouquet of dead flowers from a nearby florist (he told me to take whatever I wanted from the dumpster, and I did) but discovered after leaving them in my car as I went to school that they were putrid. So I settled for buying a couple roses and killing them myself. I left one by our heater and put the other in salt water. After a couple days I saw that the salt water was doing the better job and moved them both to this hostile environment. Next year I think I’ll try alcohol. I found a great party store that is very nearly a dollar store. We put up black streamers and black balloons and throughout the party we put together cynical valentines to decorate the walls. I had planned to burn a cheap box of chocolates, but we never got around to it.

The party went pretty well. I think we would’ve had more people had we had less inclement weather, but it was crowded as is, so it was no biggie. Over the course of the evening we probably had 40 people and averaged around 20. I don’t know if my invitations are heavily skewed, but my parties always end up with a high girl:guy ratio and I think we were hitting 3:1 at this particular event. The food is never as popular as I’d expect, but the ice cream bar and Better-than-sex cake were both reasonably popular. People made valentines, but the Girlfriend application that I made a couple years back was more popular. I now have a dozen to read through and make my selection. I set up a booth with Uno and playing cards (labeled Uno Is the Lonliest Number and Broken Hearts) but they weren’t used. But the chatting was fun and I think that’s usually the prime motivator bringing people to parties. Thanks to Catherine for her popup Phobias and Nightmares books, as they were quite popular as well.

The party rapped up around 10:30 so we could watch Lost. The Lost afterparty had a much lower attendance, just about 8 of us. But we were treated to an excellent episode and had some good discussion. In fact we had people over quite late and I wasn’t happy with myself the next morning. But LS4 was a great success and I plan on keeping the tradition alive until I’m hitched.

I followed up my party with another party on Thursday. Two of my friends here in Columbus have Valentines birthdays and because of my party they had their party the next night. It was a much smaller affair, with perhaps 10 people. We ate, smashed cake in people’s faces and played the ever popular (and inherently flawed) game of Spoons. But it’s a fun group and I certainly had a good time.

This was followed up by a party on Friday. This was another thematic affair: A Blanket Party. The groups of girls that threw it had originally planned it for Valentines, but again my traditional fest took priority. The catchline was “Nobody should sleep alone for Valentines” so they planned a snugglefest. Except no snuggling actually occurred. We weren’t there for the whole thing, but we didn’t even use the stockpile of blankets very much. Again there was a great deal of discussing/flirting and eventually a game of Pictionary. It was a very odd combination of Valentines pictures and pictures of diseases. I’m not really sure where this combo came from, but I did make a comment about not wanting to catch Smallpox at the party and I think they may have run with that. Again, a good time.

Tonight is our 4th straight night of “parties.” We’ve got a med student potluck shortly and will then head to an AD party. For those of you who aren’t in the know, AD is what cool people call Arrested Development. My AD experience is limited to watching a half dozen episodes with a girlfriend who was a huge fan. It’s a funny show, but I don’t think it really warrants having its own party. We’ll see how it goes.