for me, vegas is a vacation from being overinhibited, in the highly overinhabited yet uninhabitable city of complete uninhibition. --tammy bloemzaken

it seems appropriate that so close to my two year blog anniversary, this post is written while nursing a detoxification from a two-day food, alcohol, and social binge in the wholesome city of las vegas.

after all, if any place marries together the themes of being twenty-something -- doing good and being bad; getting up and going down; religious conviction (i.e. oh g-d, do that again) and godless pursuits; being old enough but sufficiently immature; and straddling the hurdle between knowing the right decision and making the wrong one anyway -- it's sin city.

for those of you whole are too important to read the details of this reflection, i'll give the summary up front. in short:

• the only reason i made my flight out was because it was delayed.
• i blacked out on friday night. but only after winding up on my back in the hotel hallway and visiting a lobby trashcan.
• i have an unaccounted for bump on my right knee.
• saturday involved a football filled with 3 cans of redbull and a quarter handle of vodka. and a purple inner tube.
• i kicked a little kid in the head.
• the only reason i made my flight back was because i was too hungover to oversleep.
• oh yeah ... and i had to go through extra groping super screening security at the airport because the guard thought my driver's license photo was terrible.

i'm not sure whose idea it was to go to vegas. but however it happened, i wound up going with a handful of people i know from work, meeting up with a handful of people i know from school, and trying to get fondled by a handful of people i didn't know at all.

as i was doing the country's largest ultimate walk of shame -- going through security in the las vegas airport -- i realized that one of the biggest struggles during this season of my twenty-nothing reality series is not really having a core group of friends like i had in college.

you know: the ones with whom you said "what are we doing for dinner tonight?" instead of "do you want to do dinner tonight?" and "fuck me" instead of "fuck you." i think of it as being a social floater; gabe thinks of it as leaving-one's-options-open-for-a-better-opportunity-to-present-itself.
i mean, i have some truly incredible friends. but we're not exclusive.

i thought my relatively new business-school-imposed floater status was a punishment for not having a background in private equity or investment banking. but it turns out that most of the unattached graduate students i know echo this social situation. i would argue that it fundamentally makes the twenty-something experience a more solitary transformation of self-discovery as it allows for an iterative process of redefining oneself. and it goes without saying that it perpetuates a lot of masturbation.

i don't mean to impose anymore meaning on a set of 36-hours than it justly deserves, but in reflecting on the few moments i remember from the weekend, part what made this trip such a milestone of accomplishment wasn't the self-stamina necessary for continual debauchery. or the self-control in gambling. or the self-imposed spontaneity. (which, you must admit is a huge success for aforementioned control freak.)

for me, what made this trip a remarkable feat in my own development was reaching outside my comfort zone and still having unfiltered, uninhibited, and unadulterated (albeit not necessarily un-adultery-ated) fun.

and i think that in the end, it's the random
acts of kindness
groups of people
opportunities to grow up despite growing (and going) down, that ultimately define the twenty-nothing experience.