Peeps from College Station

We're sitting on our favorite bar stools in our favorite bar in all of the land and it's too damn crowded.

"What the hell are the rugby players doing here?" I ask. I turn to the bartender. "Who are all of these people?"

"Rugby players."

Yup, I can smell a rugby player a mile away. Literally. Why do rugby players ALWAYS appear to have come from a game? I mean, come on, it's midnight. Do they ever shower? Do they stay in a perpetual state of rugby readiness?

"Mr. Tambourine Man is the longest song ever," Gigi points out.

"Yeah, you're right. This thing has been on for at least one pint," I agree.

Uh-oh, the song has changed and there's a rugby player strutting his stuff across the bar. Look, it's a dance-off! They make some sort of circle around the dancer and then link arms in a huddle. What? Are they playing rugby right now?

"Those boys are sloppy tonight," El Dilector says. Then, thoughtfully, "Well, it's not really a question of just tonight, is it?"

Gigi has to leave us, so El Dilector and I head to a hippie party in his neighborhood. We arrive and he says the same amount of people are there now as earlier in the night when he stopped by.

"Hmmm," he says, surveying the bonfire in a trash can, "I thought earlier it hadn't really gotten started yet. I guess this is it."

What the hell. We hang out for a while. El Dilector warns me that some girl who has a crush on him is moving our direction. She has weird skater hair and a piercing in her upper lip. Sort of where Cindy Crawford's mole is. She proceeds to weave a fascinating tale of getting dissed by a group of kids in her past because they were hanging out and living under a bridge.

"I didn't have any street cred with them because I actually had a home," she says.

Then there's a girl from College Station (it's actually disturbing that there is a very high number of people from College Station at this party…can Aggies give a girl hives?) who's talking about how badass her hair is.

"It's tight, right? Check it out, it's tight," she tells me. Tight? Your hair? And last time I checked, girlfriend, you were white.

Tight then spins her own story. Apparently when she was seventeen she stole her dad's car and drove to California, where she was picked up by the police and thrown in Juvenile Detention. As she's telling her story, she sets her beer near the fire.

"Burning plastic…" I tell the guy tending the fire. It smells awful, but Tight hasn't noticed that her cup is imploding. Fire Tender grabs it and throws it in the yard.

"So then…my parents, yo—they decide to LEAVE my ass in there, yo…what up with that? I mean, like, I know I was, like a bad kid and everything but man, I only had two pairs of underwear up in that joint! Can you believe that shit?"

"Your flip-flops are going to melt," I answer, as she has put her feet up in the same spot where the cup previously met with its untimely demise.

"Aw, shit I don't care. I'm going to move to Dallas and do hair and it'll be TIGHT and I'll be making all kinds of money!"

She's making my head hurt. Or is that the beer?

Then the Aggies are playing Horseshoes and there's some dude staring at me over the fire.

"I'm Cuban," he tells me. Heeeere we go…

"If you don't mind me asking, what ethnicity are you?" Cuba is asking.

-Shakira 12.15.03