Delicious Dinners

I don't think I've had dinner alone even once since I moved back in to the dorms. That might be business as usual for some people, but considering last year you could probably find me eating alone at least 4 nights a week, this is pretty impressive. I suppose it's just one of the benefits of having blocked with a bunch of really cool people mixed in with some luck of having a floor of pretty nice people, too.

Dinners for us are quite an occasion. See, although we're a bunch of pretty good friends, we're all so different, and no two people epitomize our differences like Alice and Mark. She loves to party, get high, go crazy and get drunk. He love math homework so much he'll wake up at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning after a 4 hours of sleep so as not to waste any minute he could be sinking his eyes into a juicy linear algebra textbook. They both love to have fun but in the most polar opposite ways possible.

They're both outrageous, too. Alice is outrageous because she's loud and ridiculously funny and that's who she is. Mark is outrageous because he goes to such great lengths to preserve some sort of internal purity. He refuses to do as much as kiss or hug a girl until he gets married!!! NO HUGS TILL MARRIAGE?! Dang, I must say I haven't heard that one before.

And yet, our dinners are so great precisely because Alice, Mark and everyone else somewhere in between these two polarities manage to sit down together almost every night for dinner. Most of the time Alice and Mark just make fun of each other, or perhaps to be more correct Alice makes fun of Mark and he fires back about her loose morals and how she's part of the "aggressive subset" of females. The rest of us just sit there and laugh and feed off of the energy. What makes it so great is that no one takes any of the teasing too seriously, it's all in good humor. Even Mark gets a good laugh... and I think he's really getting his first shot at being social in his life.

Bon appetite, y'all.