"We can whack each other's balls all we want"

My med school orientation was Monday and Tuesday, and today was the first day of classes. Everything seems to be going OK so far.

Sunday night there was a small MS1 (MS1 = first year medical student) gathering. By the time Dr. Shock (which is what I'm calling cool roommate now) and I got there, the party was winding down. There was a fiece game of beer pong going and Dr. Shock and I were invited to play. Dr. Shock had never played beer pong before and I only played it once, apparently by a completely archaic set of rules. The game is pretty simple, on each side of a kitchen table (or I guess you could use a ping pong table) 10 cups with a small amount of beer are placed in a pyramid, much like a set of bowling pins. One team of 2 people throws 2 ping-pong balls towards the cups on the opposite side of the table. If they land a ping-pong ball in one of the cups, the opposing team has to drink the beer in the cup. If the throwing team makes both of their balls into the cup, they continue to throw. If they miss one or both shots, the opposing team then gets a chance to throw. Cups that have been emptied of beer are removed from the playing surface. The winning team is the one who makes ping-pong balls into all 10 cups first. The losing team must then drink the beer from all unemptied cups at the end of the game. Personally, I enjoy drinking beer so I feel, as I do for all other drinking games, that the logic of the game is backwards. The winners of drinking games should be the ones who get the majority of the drinks. To the winner go the spoils, no? One more rule of the game is that once the ping-pong ball hits anything other than beer on the toss, like the table or a cup rim, it can be deflected by a player away from the target. So on a bounce off the table, I can bat away the ball before it gets near any of my cups.

After the rules were explained, Dr. Shock needed a clarification of when it was OK to block shots.

George, his partner, said "We can whack each other's balls all we want."

Yeah, I know. That was a lot of reading for a pretty piss-poor payoff.

The med school chartered the class a boat tour around Manhattan. The event quickly got the moniker of "Booze Cruise". Though I thought it would be more stuffy than that given that upperclassmen and some faculty were going along, it fully lived up to its nickname.

Dr. Shock and I smuggled vodka on board disguised as little bottles of spring water. I was convinced that we were the smartest, most conniving people in the world to have dreamed up such a fiendish and underhanded plan. About 20 minutes into the cruise, I realized that everyone (and I mean everyone) had little soda or water bottles with them that they only occasionally drank from.

After the cruise we went to a bar called 420 Bar. Being from CA I assumed this meant that the bar would be Ganja friendly, but it turns out that the street number of the bar is 420. The best part was that the bar is at 420 Amsterdam. When I pointed out the irony that the bar is located at 420 Amsterdam and that Amsterdam Holland is notorious for drug use and we all know what 420 means, most people looked at me like I was just some drunk guy rambling on about nonsense. Well, in all fairness to them...

But the bar being at 420 Amsterdam is kind of funny.

We have a wine and cheese tasting tonight. I'm thinking that the wine is the reason most people are going. I'm not sure you can get a group of 20-somethings to a cheese and cheese tasting. Dr. Shock wants to pre-party before the event so I better sign off and get some alcohol cushioning in my stomach.