Late Night

My mom told me this evening that she ran into my first 1st grade teacher Mrs. M (I was in her class for about 6 weeks before being transferred) at the library again. She told Mrs. M about my having successfully moved to NC, having been at a party this weekend to meet my new classmates, and enjoying it enough that I stayed until the very end of the party at 2:30 a.m.

Mrs. M said something to her about whether or not she had told me that I had a curfew.

My mom replied that it's kind of hard to tell your 35 year old daughter that she has a curfew.

Mrs. M said that she would not have been able to resist telling me (were I her daughter) that I should have been home by midnight.

My mom and I got to share a huge laugh over this. I told Mom that as long as I am living under my roof, I have to live by my rules. Maybe it's a good thing Mrs. M didn't realize that I also consumed alcoholic beverages at this party; surely she would not approve. (Although I really did limit myself - I had about 2 glasses of wine, none after midnight, at which point I switched to ice water.)

And of course, even if we assume that somebody has the right to tell me when to get home, by my reading of Jane Austen novels, etc., it would be my husband, not my parents, at this point.

By the way, the drive home from the party was insane. It was all of five minutes away, but I saw only one other car on the streets during the drive, and I think that was one of my classmates. It reminded me a lot of driving home from Sonic at 1:30 a.m. after working the closing shift during high school. Very quiet and peaceful and not much in the way of street lighting. Utterly unlike coming home to an apartment with an I-35 street address in Austin.

As for the party itself, I met many of the 2nd year grad students and 4 of the other 1st years. I am the oldest person in the group (who attended the party, anyway), though there is a guy (coincidentally, from the Austin area himself) in the 2nd year who is 30. The rest of the people I met are, I believe, 25 or younger - just out of undergrad or only a few years out. This didn't seem to make any difference to anybody other than for moments like somebody asking me about gaming systems of my youth; I got to say that I got my first computer in 1981 and explain the entire phenomenon of typing in lengthy BASIC programs from PC magazines, getting my sister to help me debug them only under duress, and recording the programs on regular cassette tapes that easily took a half hour to load later.

Four of the five first years have an interest in social or social/personality psychology (one guy was only there briefly and I didn't talk to him about his research interests). When I mentioned this to Robert, he said that it makes sense that the social people showed up at the party. Indeed, I suspect the cognitive people were still thinking about it, the perception people didn't see the benefit, the industrial-organizational people thought a party to be inefficient, the clinical people were too depressed, the neuro people were too nervous, and the development people weren't ready.