Nights Like These

Just a warning, I am graduating from university in 2 days and just said goodbye to half of my friends who all live abroad, so this entry will be very cheesy, and lame and whatnot- but I wanted to write it. Also be happy that it's the length it is, because it definitely was about three times longer before. Enjoy!

Today was one of those days that I know I will look back upon forever, and always with a huge smile. It was a sad day, but a great one as well. 

My beautiful tagine- with 15 pieces of chicken
stuffed in there!

Yesterday was spent preparing a feast for all of our friends to say good-bye and have one last hurrah. Jenn and I labored in the kitchen (seriously I rarely cook) where I managed to pull of a Moroccan tagine dish for 15 people. We also had stuffed peppers, Israeli salad and couscous. The whole end result was fantastic - and delicious. 

We also had white t-shirts that we all signed and left notes for others on. We took over 200 pictures on Jenn's camera. We drank Sangria out of a tub. We went through 5 bottles of wine, a bottle of tequila and 2 bottles of Smirnoff. We ate some more. 

It was so much fun, but also incredibly bittersweet. I know that I will see everyone again (we all plan on reuniting in Chile in December and then Brazil in 2014 for the World Cup) but it is definitely still an end of an era. An end to salsa dancing til the sun comes up. The end of watching scary movies and watching Simon hold back his fear by swearing in Spanish. The end of five hour dinners together and long walks exploring DC. But a great end, and one that I will always remember.

Everyone in their shirts

After the dinner Simon and Pablo still needed to pack for their 6am flight and move out of their dorm. Naturally, because they are men, they hadn't packed a thing. So Jenn and I (mostly Jenn, I passed out for a solid hour on the floor) had from 2am til 4:30am to pack up their entire lives and somehow get them on their flight home (it is a miracle we accomplished this). After we waved them off to the airport and somehow tried our own tears, we realized that because of the adrenaline of the night and the intensity of everything we still were wide awake. So we grabbed a bottle of champagne, two cups and decided to cross off another thing from our bucket list: watch the sun rise over the National Monument from the Lincoln Memorial with a bottle of champagne. 

My victory pose at Lincoln Memorial

And we did that. And it was beautiful. And I didn't have a camera so I will never have a picture to show anyone, but I will always remember this night. And the memories we made, and the friendships I created. And of course, I ended the night with the one person who started it all with me, my best friend Jenn. And the most beautiful, amazing, incredible, awesome thing is is that our adventure is just beginning. Even though we graduate in two days and go our separate ways for awhile, in 3 months we are going to board a flight and begin a new adventure by moving to Chile without any job prospects, without anywhere to live and with knowing just a handful of people. And yet, there is no one else I would want to share that adventure with. 

To all those who loved every day to the fullest and created the lives they wanted, I dedicate this entry to you. Thank you for reading!

Party in the USA

Last day, while I was laying in bed in my pajamas and watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants when I saw on my Twitter newsfeed that Obama was set to make an important decision at 10:30. Naturally, I flipped over to CNN and Wolf Blitzer was also sitting around checking his own Twitter to try and figure out what was going on. My roommate and I were betting that it was Libya, especially with all the news of NATO bombing and killing the son of Qadafi. As the minutes ticked on, however, Twitter started exploding about the death of Osama. 

Another friend of mine online was also closely following it. Well let's face it, I go to GW- everyone was closely watching it. And as time kept passing and Wolf kept getting those annoying little 'dings' on his Blackberry, I looked at my roommate and said "I kind of really want to go to the White House right now". We decided that we could always watch the speech later and then we booked it to the White House.

Spiderman saving the day

As we step out of the elevator of our dorm, I hear the "Team America" theme song blasting in the streets and college kids running around with flags tied to the their back. We decide that it's only a couple of blocks away so we are going to just run there. So we start sprinting down the streets and you can kind of feel this amazing energy in the city. 

When we got to the White House, there were only about 50 people there. Within minutes, there were hundreds and within the hour- thousands. People were screaming, singing everything from "God Bless America" to "We are the Champions". The air was electric. I think the last time I felt anything even similar to that was in 2009 with Obama's inauguration. And yet, this was still different. It felt like we were all letting out a huge, collective sigh of relief. 

Everyone outside of the White House last night were college students. That meant we grew up in an era before we were told that we had to be afraid. A time before when we received little airplane wings from pilots and weren't concerned about which color threat level we were in. We are a lucky generation in that we got to straddle both sides of a very different America: one that was blissfully unaware and protected and one that has become scared to a point of paranoia. We were kids when our teachers collected us in school gymnasiums and explained to us in the simplest words possible on how we had been attacked and thousands of our fellow citizens had died. We were young when it happened, but we still all remember that day. Where we were. What we felt. The day after. The first time we felt it was okay to laugh.

I don't really know who keeps a skintight costume of an
American flag handy, but I'm glad he does. He stole
the show.

That is why I think the demonstrations outside the White House were so celebratory. It was not about the death of a single man, a man who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. It was more about us reclaiming an aspect of ourselves that was taken away from us: our belief in our country again as that infallible, indestructible protector. We ran through the streets, we honked our car horns, we sang sons and cheered "Cancel finals!" We were kids again. We weren't scared about terrorists, we weren't thinking about our tense bipartisan politics or the the complexities of foreign affairs- we were just kids hanging off of trees and playing in the streets. It was one of the most beautiful things I think I have seen in this country, and I am so incredibly proud I was able to be there to witness it.

Week in Review

So folks, I have (almost) officially ended my first week of my last semester of university. It was surprisingly awesome. Monday I headed off to work at the job which I love. I'm basically a glorified switchboard operator, but everyone that I work with is so amazing and kind. There's the mailroom guys who I can always joke around with and who call me "Kardashian" and mock me because I when they were talking about the Jets I had assumed they were enthusing over West Side Story and not a football team. There's Mikey who is always down for a spontaneous duet of anything by Whitney Houston and of course there's an endless slew of awkwardness and office politics that makes me determined to never have a career in which I would be confined to a cubicle and the only highlight of my day is when the pie truck comes around. (Seriously the sight of grown women grabbing their purses and running to each other in high-pitched squeals about blueberry pie makes me contemplate divorcing myself from the human race).