In Continuum.

Having been to the United States only once in my life when I was eight years old, a lot of things that I know about this place since then has been from television shows, movies, books, newspapers - the media. I was eight years old back then when I first got through the customs at the airport, stepping out into the unfamiliar Californian sunset and meeting a close family friend for the very first time. I believe that was the first time my family went out on a vacation somewhere, and I remember every itsy-bitsy detail of that trip. Everything from my stay in Los Angeles, Disneyland, the San Diego Seaworld, the trip up to Seattle and then eventually ending in Vancouver, Canada. I remember a great many details from that trip, but I don't suppose the eyes of an eight year old could have seen the real side of this country. As the years wore on and I became older, one of the great many sides of the United States was the idea of parties that they love to throw. It started with Hollywood movies I suppose, and their frequent depiction of high school or college students throwing elaborate and wild parties at their homes, sometimes for no apparent reasons at all. It almost always ends up in a great big mess, with torn sofas and spilled drinks, with vomit everywhere and a drunkard asleep on a rubber float in the middle of a swimming pool. Such were the images that I brought along with me to Buffalo, the parties and the drinks and everything else that are suppose to come along for the ride.

I've never been one for parties, if you don't know me enough already. The exclamation mark in the title of this entry almost makes it sound as if I enjoy them. Well, to a certain degree, that may be true, to be perfectly honest. With the right crowd of friends, with the right atmosphere and the right occasion, a party of sorts can be enjoyable and fun even if it is coming from me. I am not usually a fan of parties, or clubbing, or any kind of social activities that involve big groups of people that I don't know very well, huddling and shoving each other in the dark to loud music that I don't enjoy very much. There are a great many things about clubbing which I do not necessarily understand, and there are a great many things about my distaste for clubbing that clubbers do not necessarily understand either. It isn't something wrong, I feel, it's just something I do not always want to engage myself in. With that said, I've always thought that house parties are in a completely different league altogether. You don't get that a lot in Singapore, and the reason is probably because of the fact that there are clubs that aren't too far away from where we all live. Besides, any kind of noise after ten o'clock in the evening could invite policemen knocking on your front door, something which you do not want.

So, I am the kind of person to prefer a simple gathering of friends, coming together and just hanging out. It doesn't make sense for me to try to beat the speakers in a club when trying to ask my friend how his life has been, or try to raise my voice louder than I should when trying to answer the same question. From my not-so-extensive experience at clubs, the thing that I've realized the most is that I hate straining my voice, and the club is pretty much where that happens a lot, at least for me. Before coming over to the United States, the image of house parties has always been that of soft lights, good music in the background, and a bunch of friends sitting around in a circle and drinking while talking about their lives with cushions in their arms. That has been the perfect image in my head, and I suppose I'd jump for any opportunities to do that when it arises. However, things are not quite the same as I have pictured all along ever since I got here. Parties aren't exactly what I have in mind, and they are somewhat different from what I've been used to, or comfortable with for the most part. To be honest, I think the movies highly exaggerates what happens in a college party, because not all college parties are like that. Still, it can't rise out of nothing, and you can see why the depiction are so rampant in films we see nowadays.

Before my trip over here, my girlfriend told me not to do a great many things. She told me not to take drugs, not to have sex, not to pick up smoking, and most of all - not to drink. For the most part, they are demands that aren't exactly difficult to meet, since I am not particularly adventurous when it comes to putting foreign objects into my mouth; I don't imagine American girls to be particularly attracted to a scrawny Asian guy; I haven't been a fan of neither smoking nor drinking before I came here. Drinking runs in the genes, I suspect, because my father and his brothers are great drinkers. I have the ability to hold my liquor, but that isn't a limit that I want to test with shot glasses any time soon. I'd rather keep the occasions when I have to drink alcohol to the bare minimum, and I'd much rather remain sober and to tell stories about my friends' embarrassing experiences by daylight. I intend to hold true to those promises and not do those things while I am here, and I have been sticking dutifully to them, save for that one time when I had a steak with alcohol in it. People always say that when you are in a country like that, you don't go out and look for drugs - drugs come and look for you. In my head, I pictured bags of marijuana growing legs and then knocking at my bedroom window with a match in their hands, asking me to burn their heads off. Well, that has never happened before, but I realized how easy it is to obtain drugs if I truly want to look for it. Hell, my friend's room mate has a bong in her living room.

It is easy to get those things in this place, you know. Drugs, sex, smoke and drinks, those are integral parts of a great many college around here, and not even the cold weather can stop people from doing them. Alcohol has been the most prevalent form of those things that has surrounded me in my stay here, with my room mates being party animals for the most part, with every weekend being their playground of sorts. Ever since I got here a little over a month ago, almost every weekend has been party nights, sometimes on two consecutive days too. I've been invited to these parties, but I've always declined their invitations for a great many reasons - legitimate ones at that. I've had to attend a football game early in the morning this one time, and to head off to New York City on the other. They've offered me drinks, but I've always told them that I am allergic to alcohol. In a way, having seen my father get drunk so many times over the years, I am mentally allergic to those drinks, and would much rather stick to my orange juice, thank you very much. Anyway, most of the time when they have parties in my apartment, I'd be in my bedroom and minding my own business. My in-ear headphones have been really helpful because of how well they block sound out, and I even wear them to sleep even when I am not listening to any music. After all, there has been occasions when parties would last all the way till the next morning.

This is usually how a party starts in my apartment. Two of my room mates have been knowing each other for a very long time, and they have common friends between the both of them. So what happens is that you'd see them shuffling around the kitchen trying to organize the furniture, putting on more clothes than they normally would around the house, and then you see cartons of beer being brought out from the back of their cars. Then the door bells start to go off one by one, and you hear them going over to the answering machine on the wall and asking for the password. I never really caught the password before, but it isn't something that makes a lot of sense anyway. So the friends would start to pour in, and then you will hear the music being played really loudly in the living room, with the dial pushed all the way up and the floors would then start to vibrate. If it is crazy enough, the table in my room would start to vibrate as well. They have this giant stereo system installed in the living room, and the same playlist goes over and over again whenever their friends are over. They have everything from Smash Mouth, to the Bloodhound Gang, to the latest hip-hop or rap songs that don't make any sense at all. You know, the one about them being on a boat, or the other one about hotels, motels, and holiday inns. Yeah, you know what I mean.

People from around here seems to love rap a lot, and that genre of music seems to be a big thing here. Rap is everywhere, and I daresay that the only song that hasn't been somehow remixed into rap is the national anthem here. Everything is rap here, and even the country music is rap. OK, maybe the country music is still country music, but I will not be surprised if someone adds a little bluegrass to rap in due time. Hell, even Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega has been turned into a backing track of some rap song I heard a couple of weeks ago. That goes to show how popular it is over here, and everybody loves it. The thumping bass would penetrate every wall and every floor, and every window around the house. It is not possible to operate properly with the music turned up that loud, and even harder when the patrons of the party and jumping up and down to the music, and then laughing hysterically every once in a while. I steal glances at the living room whenever I make a trip down to the bathroom, and they are usually scenes you don't want to last the whole night. Beer pong is something that they love to play, and my room mates actually keep a score sheet of it on the fridge. It usually just involves them throwing a ping-pong ball into cups filled with beer, and that is the only game that I have ever seen them play - ever.

On a particularly hectic night, I was in my room and getting ready for bed because I had an early football game to attend at the stadium, my room mates were partying with a bunch of their friends, and with the same old playlist turned up louder than supposed to all through the night. I think they stopped at about three in the morning, and I remember everything from the beginning of the night till that point to be somewhat dreadful, to be honest. I experienced the party through everything that I could hear through the walls, and it sounded like a crazy party to me. At one point, one of my room mates was asking somebody else to fuck the couch, and then there was a dreadful scraping sound of something hard against my wall from the other side. They then started to sing about them being on a boat, and then there were a lot of running around and even more jumping around. I remember coming out of the bedroom and going to the bathroom for a shower at one point in time, and everybody has pretty much lost their minds by then. I didn't really look at the mess that they created because I know that the thought of clearing it up would be Hell, at the very least. Of course, I wasn't in charge of clearing anything up, because I am not their slave or anything. It's just the thought of my apartment, or at least a quarter of it is mine, being thrashed up by a group of drunkards just because they wanted to have some fun.

When they left, I went out of my bedroom to survey the damage, and here is what I saw. The first thing I saw was the shoe in the hallway - just one. Then there was the table that they used to play beer pong on, but the cups were not all on the table at this point in time. I saw yellow liquid spilled all over the table and dripping from the edge of the table, and for some reason I thought that it was urine or something, which I'd not be particularly surprised. Crushed beer cans were thrown everywhere on the sofa, the kitchen counter, on the floors, and the entire room smelled like vaporized beer. It wasn't a pretty sight, and I had to make my way carefully through the wreckage before I could take a sip of my orange juice from the fridge. Don't get me wrong, I think my room mates are really nice people. They are just into a kind of party that I am not particularly excited about, if you know what I mean. I am all for chill-out sessions and everything, but don't expect me to go wild in front of people that I don't know very well. I suppose when it comes to "making friends", this isn't necessarily what I had in mind in the first place. There isn't a lot that I can fault my room mates with, because as much as they mess the apartment up, the almost always return it back to the original state. They take a while, but they do it, you know? Ask Joel about his room mate and the used socks, that is a hilarious story.

The last party that happened was the night when I had to leave for New York City. Yes, they were playing the same songs and the same game in the living room, only it was somebody's birthday party and they were all prepared to get drunk and high. When asked if they remembered anything from the previous night, none of them remembered anything. I'm not sure if it is still fun to throw a party like that when you can't remember having fun at all. Perhaps the fun is in the forgetting, who knows. Anyway, so I saw a little bit of that party, and it was about nine o'clock at night when it was already out of control. I had to take an overnight bus ride all the way to New York City, and I wanted to clean up a little before the trip. Just as I was about to enter the bathroom, I noticed that the toilet cover, instead of it being on the toilet itself, was on the sink instead. Confused, I looked over the edge of the toilet and realized that someone has managed to clog it up with used toilet paper and shit. Yes, somebody used my bathroom and managed to clog it up with his or her shit, causing everything to overflow. I told my room mate about it before I had to go, and I told him that somebody has better fix the toilet before I come back. It was indeed fixed, and I am just glad that I managed to escape that night.

That was Friday night, and by Tuesday morning, there were three bags of empty beer cans blocking the front door to my house. Apparently, there was yet another party over the weekend, and I was fortunate enough to miss that one completely. I knew there was a party from the smell that lingered in the air, and I was glad that I got the morning to myself for the most part as the other two room mates locked themselves in their bedrooms, knocked out cold. I am generally OK with their parties, since they do not mess up my bedroom or anything. Besides, I am not exactly the kind of person you'd find in bed at twelve midnight. I sleep usually when their party moves on to someone else's house at around three in the morning, and my in-ear headphones have been doing that job wonderfully for the most part. It's just the thought of my neighbors downstairs, and how they must have reacted to my room mates' jumping and screaming and music. I'm not sure if there has ever been a complaint against my apartment, but I don't suppose that is going to stop anybody from partying their heads off here either. Anyway, I have recently gotten my hands on a form that allows me to break my apartment's lease earlier than the contract. On the form, there is a column whereby I could put the name of a person I know who is going to take over my apartment if he wishes to. I thought about Naz at first, since he is the only guy I know who is coming over to UB. But then again, considering the parties and how he detests clubbing, I don't think I hate him or anybody else as much to put them through what I have gone through. That part of the form is still blank.