Friday night, Friday night, Friday night's all right.

On Friday night this one guy was telling me about the first cheap liquor he ever got hammered off of, Black Velvet... In middle school he accidentally came across some where his parents kept it, under the sink in his house, next to the Drano.

Before that, though Friday night post-seminar dinner at my prof's house was a trip. She made chili for the entire class, which made me really, really happy. It only could have been better if she had sent some leftover chili home with everyone, because there's nothing I love better than some chili and a cup of hot coffee in the morning. But, she didn't, but I had a fun time anyways.

The one French guy in my class who I talk Spanish to had gotten one of those full-head buzzcuts, and I told him it was a "power haircut", and very forceful looking, and I would do a black power fist and hold it out in front of me every time I said the word 'forceful' to him when I was complimenting his haircut. He asked me if it was "French tough", and I told him that was an oxymoron, and when he told me to fuck off, I said I was kidding, and that we should go find an immigrant and kick the shit out of them because no matter how hard they try they'll never be French.

My one doctoral student's husband does modern art, and me and him got a German student talking about how the German government funds a lot of artists and how whenever he's home in Berlin the thing to do is to go around the city with friends and drink and visit art installations. I then told them that for me, there is no better art exhibit than the interactive art exhibit that that one artist made where goldfish were put in blenders and were set out so people could hit 'frappe' if they wanted, because it told you about people's souls. My one doctoral student's husband said that it was juvenile and gimmicky, and I agreed that it was a gimmick, but I said the gimmick really, really worked, since who wouldn't want to hit the 'frappe' button, and that tells you something about people, too, though as it turns out, they didn't, and they thought the exhibit should be shut down, so I was like, "If you were there and you saw someone going to hit the button, would you reach out and stop them?", and they were like, "Of course not," and I was like, "Well, that tells you something about people's souls too," and I started talking about the Milgrim experiments and how people could be complicit in fascism because of social pressure not to interfere.

After this me and some other people started talking with the Frenchman again, and somehow the philosopher Leibniz came up, and since I don't know philosophy, I did that cocktail party-trivia thing I always do (e.g. my conversation thread about stuntwomen I always bring up; at cocktail parties I really don't talk with people, instead I always keep interjecting slightly relevant trivia and completely derailing conversations), and talked about how when Leibniz was dying on his deathbed in his 80s, he bragged to his friends with his dying breath how he was dying a virgin and had never known the embrace of a woman.

They said that was bullshit, so then I told them how Descartes used to nail puppies to walls to dissect them, since he wanted to know anatomy and thought that animals couldn't feel pain.

Then, of course, they also said that that was bullshit, but they wanted to know which histories of philosophy I had been reading, since they wanted to read them too.

A couple hours and several more glasses of wine later, my one prof was saying several years ago how when her mother died and she and her sister were cleaning out her house, she found her first book, which she had dedicated to her parents, in a Ziploc bag tucked away in a closet. Her mother had never read it, she said, but her mom always put things she wanted to preserve in Ziploc bags, and she started saying how parents can have their own way of honoring things, even though they may not quite get what you're doing.

The coffee shop on campus that day, too, had been selling gallons of milk for a dollar because someone forgot to cancel that day's order and they were overstocked right before break, so I had had two gallons of milk I was taking around in a plastic bag, and I had tucked it in the snow outside my prof's house to pick up and take home afterwards... I figured it was white milk in a white bag in white snow behind a bush where you couldn't see it from the street -- in the fall I'll have to tuck chocolate milk in a paper bag into a pile of leaves! -- so if someone found it there and decided to steal it, they would need the milk more than I did and it was only two dollars, so what the fuck did I care, though of course it was still there when I left and so I picked it up and took it not home, though, but to a nearby bar where everyone in my seminar decamped after the dinner-and-drinks thing at my prof's house had finished up. People proceeded to get hammered, and the milk was a good joke prop. When people were ordering cheap shots and being like, "Man, I so do not care what I drink next," I would hold up my plastic bag all hanging low and distended with two gallon of milks and be like, "Milk?" That kept getting funnier and funnier, and on the fourth time a guy actually accidentally snorted back whiskey into his nasal cavity, he was laughing so hard, like drunk people do. He wasn't drinking Black Velvet, though; he was drinking Old Crow, someone else entirely was drinking Black Velvet.

When people, too, were asking me why I had that much milk, I would hold it up and give a big smile and say with a mug and a semi-theatrical voice, enunicating each word distinctly, "I love to save," and then I would tell them the story about my one friend's dirty aunt where that was the punchline of a story once when I was interacting with her.