4am Chai

In kindergarten, my teacher wrote on my report card, "Very bright. Social butterfly."

Saint Mary's, Mrs. Brown is apparently still right (about the latter).

I had an exhaustive day with my dearest Ethiopian friend, Ribs. From the moment I picked her up from the terribly far and terribly named Bush Intercontinental Airport, it was as if her weeks of absence evaporated. This made me a bit more comfortable with the prospect of not having her around for the next three years of course. A wonderful exhaustive day. There were some difficult to answer questions about the psychology of family dynamics, bags/boxes/books, and our national (read Texan) pastime of eating. (As a matter of grave importance, I must go on the record as saying that I'm a zealous new fan of bacon & blue cheese hamburgers à la Baby Barnaby's. Aye.)

So, as with any great wine-kissed evening, we bade each other good night and headed to the comfortable solace of our respective beds.

This is until 11:30p.

"Hey, we're in the Village. Wanna hang out?"

I think I only hesitated for 0.2 seconds. My initial exhaustion vanished with the prospect of soiréeing with my favorite "browns (you'll have to ask Kiran about the origin of this moniker)." Within 10 minutes, the living room was again busy with the lovely Ms. Das (pictured under protest above), the nihilistic and equally sharply poetic Sharj, our cryptically sarcastic friend David, and of course our conspicuously sarcastic friend Kiran.

Sharjeel sipped away at his Veronica (1 part Crème de Cacao, 1 part Frangelico) as our suitably and conspicuously sarcastic friend Kiran, as usual, began to air his protests to the world. David, Rini, and I played audience to his hilarious tirade against various head of state, stupid people, and ironically flakiness. This was all topped off by a reviewing of our 2004 class skit "General Hospital." In order explain the inane BCM/Methodist Hospital split my friend Steph and I co-wrote this hilarious mock-soap opera with David cast as Luke (as in Saint Luke's Hospital), Lori as Nell (as in Cornell University), Steph as Bay (as in Baylor College of Medicine), and myself as Meth (as in Methodist Hospital). I'll have to post it one day, but needless to say we relived David's brilliantly cheesy performance as the handsome man-of-the-hour Luke. We must make another.

After a late night run to the supermercado, we made some ginger chai and called it a night...finally...around 4am with droopy smiles and what would be later sore abdominal muscles. Clearly must do this again. Fortunately, we didn't wake Kevin who is currently mercilessly tortured by the insanity of the gynecology department. Perhaps we can recreate the whole thing Saturday at Dancing Oaks.