Party on (but not too much)

I went to a party in Wisconsin last weekend. Yes, Wisconsin. They know how to drink there, and they put cheese sticks in their alcoholic beverages, at least in the mornings.

It was fun to escape into a bubble universe for the weekend and live in a land where everyone is happy to see you and there is much dancing and revelry and ass-squeezing. (I’m looking at you, jenfu.) I am a bit disappointed no one flashed me or made out with me, and the raw food restaurant made my face so splotchy that it caused my fellow diners to frantically search for an antihistamine, but overall it was a high time. It was a place where my only responsibility was to make sure my bus buddy wasn’t left at the laser tag arena.

But now I am back in my day-to-day life and there are many responsibilities, like scheduling a conference call and picking up a friend from the mechanic and finishing a client’s site. It is tempting to contemplate a life where every week was a party week, yet I think the regularity of such revelry would destroy the properties that make those events so magical. It would also destroy my liver.

If every weekend was a party weekend, it wouldn’t be special at all. It would just be the weekend. Part of the fun of a party is that you get to escape from your regular life. If the party became your regular life, eventually you would seek to escape that. Anything that is fun and fulfilling has the potential to become a rut. It is an endless, annoying, vortex that circles around and around and sucks you in before you knew the whirlpool had formed.

And as much as I liked everyone who came to party, I know that if we all hung out 24/7, eventually there would be fights and disagreements because that is just what happens with human beings. There are very few people I could hang out with on a daily basis without beginning to fantasize about smothering them in their sleep.

So, it was a good weekend, a weekend I’d like to have again, but all the weekends in between are what make the fun never end.