If you’ve been reading this site since I went back to school in 2002, you may remember that I used to spend my Thursdays getting sloshed at a bar in the Village with one of my professors and a number of other philosophy majors. And that professor is of course Al, who’s now a good friend and one of the only people I go to clubs and shows with, since we share the exact same taste in music.

During my senior year we sort of disbanded our weekly drinking sessions for reasons of money and sanity - while some of us had Fridays off as college kids often do, the whole thing was murder for everyone who had to work or be somewhere the next day, and we were spending more money on booze than I would have thought possible for a bunch of students who didn’t have a lot of money in the first place. (We ended up all going out at least once a week anyway, just not at that same bar. But we had good intentions, really!) Al mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that he had decided to resurrect our Thursday nights for his current students, so I stopped by the other day to see if anyone I knew would be there.

It was really strange being in that bar again after something like a year and a half. All the waitresses I knew and loved had left, and even the bartender was new, but everything else was pretty much the same. Except that they had added french fries to their menu of passable pub food after years of adamantly refusing to serve french fries.

The other thing that was strange, of course, was that I’m not an NYU student anymore and I don’t have Fridays off. I have become one of those people who declines to join everyone else when they decide to move to a different bar for cocktails at 10pm. I am now the loser who says “Oh I couldn’t possibly, we have a client meeting tomorrow morning that I need to be alert for.” And even though I stopped at four drinks and was home by 11, I was still mildly hungover on Friday. It just doesn’t seem fair.