risky business

Oh, my friends. Oh, my friends.

Here's the gist of what happened last week:

My parents went away for four days, foolishly leaving me, a frustrated and bored  23-year-old, alone in the house.

You can bet your bottom dollar that I threw a party.

So here I am, recovering from a hectic four-day extravaganza, definitely wanting to share it with you -- and, of course, I have no pictures. But to be honest, I think the pictures would sort of lie. It'd lend a sort of timeline to the whole experience, a deceptively neat-and-tidy visual representation of what, at some points, felt like a huge clusterfuck.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Where do I even start?

I guess the first thing you need to know is that my parents' three-story home in the South Jersey suburbs became a boarding house from Thursday to Sunday -- some people, like the BFF and Matt, stayed all four days, some, like April and Dru, stayed just one night. But either way I don't think I really realized how intense and exhausting it was going to be.

Everything culminated in a boozy party on Saturday night, which I was hoping would be raucous and full of debauchery, but it was actually pretty tame, and I'm glad that it was, because I had enough of a mess to clean up on Sunday morning without having to mop up vomit. I mean, people got drunk. I'd say that many were buzzed and some were inebriated, but no one was trashed. I certainly wasn't. I was too stressed out about whether people were having fun, or whether we had enough food to go around, to do more than nurse my drink.

When the night was over my mind was buzzing and I felt pretty insecure about how much of a success the whole endeavor had been. I'm still sort of on the fence about it.

Some parts were fabulous like,

1. the mornings -- when Matt and I stayed in bed chatting and flirting before we'd go downstairs and make breakfast for everyone.
2. doing party prep with the BFF  -- baking/icing cupcakes, juicing a million lemons and limes for the atrociously bad margaritas, throwing on makeup at the last minute before everyone got there -- it's a little taste of what it would have been like to be roommates.
3. when my sister semi-ironically iced Matt by hiding a Smirnoff Ice in an oven mitt and basically forcing him to look inside.
4. Sunday morning, when me, Matt, my sister, her friend, the BFF, April, and Dru all miraculously woke up around the same time and proceeded to spend the next four hours lounging around, eating bagels, and watching 16 and Pregnant. 

And some parts were decidedly unfabulous, like 

1. when I got woken up in the middle of the night because my sister's friend thought she was having a medical emergency. It freaked me right the hell out for about 11 seconds before Matt jumped in and defused the situation much better than I would have.
2. when I realized that I didn't have any idea where I would hide the trash and empty bottles, which resulted in me and Matt fighting over whether or not he should have to drive around my town and find a dumpster to hide them in.
3. the moment that I suddenly remembered that I'd completely forgotten that I was supposed to register for Spring 2011 classes this weekend. I was so upset that it almost ruined my whole weekend.  

But we didn't have to go to the ER (thank god, because not a single adult that stayed in the house this past week has health insurance). And I didn't have to make Matt go on a dumpster-hunt, because we figured out a legal (well, more legal) solution to the problem. And it turns out that registration started late Sunday night, so I hadn't even missed it at all, and I was able to get into all the classes I wanted to get into. And although I was still cleaning the house right up until my parents came home today at 5:45 PM, I managed to get the house back in working order. 

I don't want to jinx anything yet (my parents have only been home for a couple of hours, so it's too soon to tell), but I think I might have pulled this off. I'm exhausted and I'm going to sleep for the entire day tomorrow, but I think I pulled this off.

Freakin' sweet.