Debauchery—or not
I've never been to a bachelor party before.
Of course, by most people's standards I probably still haven't. There were only seven of us, including the bachelor himself, and though there was plenty of drinking, it wasn't exactly what you'd call debauched. For that matter, at least three of us weren't drinking. Food, alcohol, and poker, in a house by the beach; a pleasant evening, but no wild party. Not, mind you, that I'm complaining.
One of the main things I (re-)discovered is that people have a variety of different approaches to playing poker. I wrote a long rambling discussion of this, but it wasn't very coherent, so I removed it. For now, I'll just say that I ended up quite a bit up on the evening, but that that was partly 'cause I introduced a game (and, for that matter, a category of games—the idea of the high/low game) that I'd had a lot of experience with but that almost none of the others had ever played before, and I unfortunately failed to make sufficiently clear what kinds of hands to expect. Since the game involves a lot of betting rounds and the raise limit was higher than I'm used to, that game ended up costing people a lot more than I'd expected. Oh, well.
The evening did remind me that I miss playing poker. Yet another thing (like roleplaying, hosting story readings, and cleaning the apartment) that I'll do more often when I become independently wealthy.
The poker game also reminded me that one of the people I used to play with was still, last I heard, in critical medical condition. : (
Anyway, to conclude the story of last night: a couple of us left Santa Cruz at 2:30 in the morning, which put me back home around 3:30, and in bed by a little before 4. And then I woke up at 7 something, and kind of half-dozed for a couple hours, and eventually got up. So that's my excuse for greater-than-normal incoherency here.