The Duc Pond

Friday night was Gina and Melissa’s party. The drinking was kicked off when Catherine and Jon arrived at around 10. Cat and I took a shot of Goldschlager, which was the beginning of the most drinking I’ve ever done. By the end of the night I had had 2 shots of Goldschlager, 2 shots of what I think was called Red Death, 2 rum and cokes, a Corona, and half a strawberry daiquiry. I kept insisting I wasn’t drunk because I could still do calculus. I discussed my disdain for Paul Wolfowitz too. I kept asking people if I sounded coherent since I felt like I still had most of my faculties. I had expected drunkeness to disable me more. I was a bit disappointed.

Saturday was the Zwan concert. We left later than Catherine had wanted to since I was still trying to fix a bug in her program. Then we drove a pretty long time in the wrong direction and had to turn around. Then when we got to Philly I missed a ramp for the Ben Franklin Parkway (not the bridge). Then we (i.e., Catherine) figured out where to go to get back on track for following the directions from Yahoo Maps that we had, which turned out to be totally wrong. Finally, she said we should go down to 6th and 7th streets and look for the Electric Factory down there. Sure enough, that’s where it was, quite far from where our directions had it. So half an hour after the doors opened we finally made it in and missed the opening act. It wasn’t so bad, though, since we found a nice place on the second floor from which we could clearly see the stage.

The concert was great. The set list was (thanks to spfc.org): Lyric, Declarations of Faith, El Sol, Don’t Let Me Down (by the Beatles), Honestly, Settle Down, Desire, Yeah, Jesus, I, God’s Gonna Set This World on Fire, Heartson, Riverview, Baby, Let’s Rock, Mary Star of the Sea, Endless Summer, Of a Broken Heart, and Spilled Milk. If it wasn’t on the Mary Star of the Sea album, I didn’t know what it was (including the Beatles song; I need to brush up on my music knowledge). Billy didn’t say much, but he did laugh at a poster that a fan had (we couldn’t see it; I still want to know what it said!) and noted that Zwan was stuck in Philly. Paz kept playing her bass sexily and was on the violin and keyboard too. Everything sounded great, but I think the drums drowned out the guitars too much. Afterwards, I got a gay-looking shirt for $20. It’s pretty damn gay looking, but I still like it. It’s retro. And it’s not my fault Zwan chose to use a rainbow for their album.

So all was great, but afterwards we stopped back at the car to get stuff and we wanted to drive back and park at or near the Electric Factory in an attempt to meet Billy. Unfortunately all the streets leading to the inner city were blocked off by cops and I accidentally left the city. On the way out on the Ben Franklin Bridge we saw that traffic coming into Philly was super congested. I still don’t know why all that traffic junk happened, but it was pretty damn annoying.

And that is all! I went home Sunday after visiting Melissa briefly. I did a total of 400 miles of driving this weekend. The only car trouble I had was that the brakes were maddeningly noisy.