Moonlight bowling and the afterparty

Even though I'm only 25, I'm already pretty embittered with working in the corporate world. My last job was pretty much corporate bureaucratic hell. Before that, I worked for a wonderful group of people owned by a terrible conglomerate. So my current job has been like a little slice of heaven. I work for a small Internet boutique owned by two brilliant guys who just broke 30. When I'm not busy being envious of their brilliance and success, I'm thanking my lucky stars that I work for a company that actually gives a damn about its employees.

Not to say that my job is perfect - it's stressful and I work long hours with no overtime. I have no dental insurance. But overall I am pretty friggin happy. My coworkers are decent people! Our company is NOT constantly driven by the bottom line! We make cool websites! Our clients are pretty neat too! Sick, isn't it?

Lately work has been stretching us all pretty thin due to deadlines and the upcoming holiday season and such. The higher ups picked up on this and scheduled a fun company outing for this week. We went moonlight bowling at Bowlmor. There was typical bowling alley food (pizza, mozzarella sticks, burritos, etc.) and typical bowling beer. The lanes were lit up in electric blue and the pins ranged from yellow to orange to neon pink.

Aside from the lanes giving no curve to our shots, it was pretty sweet. There were 6 teams and I was selected as a captain. Embarrassingly, I opened with 3 straight frames of 0's. But the second game was better - I scored 122. Our team kicked some ass -- we had the highest score in two out of three games. The only weak moment came when the alley shut our games off at exactly 8:30 PM, even though 4 of the teams were in the middle of our games. Lame. The alley's excuse was that another party was coming in.

Three of us broke 100 - I'm DB.

The party broke up a little too early for some, so many of us headed to Stand after for burgers and more drinks. I have to compliment their pleasant service. I was in charge of getting us tables, and I started by asking for seating for 8, which quickly ballooned to 15. They took it all in stride, though we ended up having to split our group between two tables. After some good (though frickin' expensive) pick-me-ups a posse of 10 hopped into some cabs and rode down to Horu's Cafe for hookahs.

Horu's was in a killer location - right across from Tompkins Square Park. I'd never been there before three in our group had. They took care of ordering - an Egyptian Pharaoh hookah and a Sex on the Beach hookah. I had never smoked one before, and neither had the other two girls in the group. The waitress gave us plastic inserts to put inside the hookah stem so we weren't sharing germs. We immediately rechristened them hookah condoms.

Horu's.

I was nervous about my first time, but it was painless. Just inhale deeply, and then slowly exhale the smoke through either your nose or your mouth. The novelty of it was very cool. We sat outside until midnight, when they asked us to move inside -- we were kind of causing a ruckus. Once inside though the smoke really started getting to me, and by 2 AM I was done. J and I live close to each other, so we split a cab home. The boys stayed out until after 5 AM. Our office is half empty today but everyone seems very relaxed. It was just what we needed.