Prom

Prom completely shattered my expectations.
I finished getting dressed-up and ventured outside around 4:15-4:30 to see all teh fellow imsa pplz in their best appearances. There was Schmidty and Rachel, Neal and Maribel, the 03A azn girls who are my friends, Zexi and Jenny, Martin and Sarah, and so much more. I was really surprised at how good Angela and Maribel looked. Neither of them spend a ton of time on their appearance regularly, so that when they did do their best, it was shocking, in an awesome way.
Erika looked great, though I still like her for what she has on the inside. Her whole family was there taking pictures. I'd already met her family, excluding the younger of her older sisters, who sported an attitude I didn't really take to. Her family in general is really nice, though.
We got on the bus around 5pm and set out on I-88 toward Chicago. I'm not talking some puny little piece-of-shit buses--these were full blown high-ass coach buses. Aww yeeah.
We arrived at the Shedd Aquarium. I noticed that there were a lot of staff members who came along. Molly, J.P., Nathan, Bob Hernandez, Dr. Deb, Dr. McLaren, Max McGee and still others joined us there. The first couple of hours was spent meandering around the oceanarium, where most of the marine mammals are housed: dolphins, otters, beluga whales and sea lions all live there. We saw the animals and took pictures and such, which reminds me-- I found at the end of the night that I didn't lose my camera!
After making Erika laugh for a couple of hours (I don't know why she laughs at what I say but whatever), it was time for dinner. We filed into the central room with the big Caribbean Reef exhibit in the middle. Around that tank were tables. Really classy tables. In the dimly-lit setting, these tables were set with lots of silverware and candles which floated on three glasses of water with varying heights. Our table consisted of me, Erika, Steven Cai, Abby Chao, Adam Novak, Kat, Martin, Sarah, Zexi, and Jenny (this is in clockwise order). My dinner was chicken breast in a creamy mushroom sauce with squash. The dessert was even classier--it was a chocolate mousse encased in a large seashell-shaped piece of white and milk chocolate blended together into a stripe pattern, with a few assorted berries as garnish. We toasted a few times, and while we were eating, a Shedd Aquarium staff member, wearing a wet suit with an IMSA Class of 2008 t-shirt on over it, dove into the top of the exhibit to feed the sea animals inside the tank as we ate. As he did, he talked to us through the microphone he had set up...I never expected anything like that to happen.
After eating the food, it was time to dance it away...for about three hours! I did random shit with Erika, as always--I consider being random and funny more special than basically having sex standing up and with clothes on, like many kids were doing, as expected. The biggest highlight of the dancing part was that I started my own conga line, along with Erika! I started doing a conga-like dance (more of a locomotive-type thing if you ask me), and Erika decided to grab onto my shoulders (so I think Erika deserves more of the credit). Then we passed by Maribel and Neal, and they joined on the back of Erika. Before I knew it, we had like fifteen to twenty people! For a period of the dance, I hung out with Macy and Kirk and a big circle of people in the back of the dance floor. That was fun. Oh, and we got rickrolled by Kuchenbecker, who requested the song. I tried to dance in the dorky way that Rick Astley did, but I don't think I pulled it off very well.
What's more, thanks to Kenny Higa, our prom won a contest for a 103.5 Kiss FM DJ to come to our prom. He was a kick-ass DJ, too, throwing in all sorts of monkey wrenches and keeping the night fun. AND we got Kate Voegele (whoever she is-sorry, I don't really know) to perform a few songs. She definitely has talent. The only thing I think that can make her singing better is if she just sings, and doesn't pull a Mariah Carey all the time, embellishing all the long notes with ridiculous amounts of pitch changes (I can't really emulate what I'm talking about in text format, so I hope you know what I'm talking about). She played "Hallelujah" which is an awesome song. It makes me wonder why I hadn't heard it at any previous dances.
Otherwise, I got to experience Dr. Kiely dance to "YMCA," and I thought I did the head motion to "What is Love?" pretty well. The majority of the songs were hip-hip -type songs, but there were some downright fun ones as well, like "YMCA," or "Jump on it." It was hella-fun.
At around midnight, we got on the bus to head over to Navy Pier to get on the cruise boat. Everyone was crashing by that time-it was just too damn late. The first floor of the boat was a lounge area with couches everywhere. By an hour into the cruise, the lounge had turned into a graveyard full of lifeless bodies. They were just too tired. Up one floor was the food area, and there was a lot of food. Some of the foods up there were veggies, chicken wings, cookies, and pasta (I think). Let's just say there was more than I expected. Another floor up was the dance floor and an outdoor deck on the front of the boat, where I spent most of my time. It was more romantic to be there...and it was windier, too. The fourth and final floor was all outdoors, and that was windy too. I was a bit tired, but I enjoyed it. We didn't get back to our halls until about 4:45 AM, which was shocking. It would have been earlier had Kafka never found that empty beer bottle on our bus. They searched all of our bags and came up with all sorts of ridiculous ideas for punishment (courtesy of Adrienne, I'm sure) and the whole bus was in uproar. It appeared such that they (probably just she) were more interested in seeing some punishment than actually solving the problem at hand. They were threatening to take away our Six Flags trip if no one came forward. But then Bob Hernandez got involved eventually, and things went fine. Honestly, I think it was a guest from off-campus who left it there, or someone from a previous trip who used those buses. No one did come forward, but I knew that the administration would never accept a rash way of handling the situation, and we still got to go to Six Flags in the long run.
Prom totally kicked my expectations in the weak spot. I had no idea what I was in for.


[to be continued, I'm going to sleep now]