After school special

I went to go eat dinner with a bunch of law school buddies last night, over at someone's studio near Lincoln Center. The baked ziti was good, the wine was free-flowing. We were sitting around his living room and somebody pointed out what was on the bottom shelf of the coffee table - a plastic baggie, a lighter, a small box of blunts...

"Stems and seeds, stems and seeds," someone was saying. Mentally I was trying to remember what that meant, because I knew I had heard that before, but I wasn't quite - OH MY GOD. MARIJUANA.

I had never been in the same room as it before. It lay there limply - there wasn't much left. Everyone started talking about this apparently epic night last week, when they returned from a solid six hours of boozing to get high and watch movies. Two people started comparing dealers. "Do you know Andres?" "Do you know Turkey?" Somebody mentioned some other drug they had ingested that night. They talked about pot dates.

I was shocked. I didn't say anything about my narcotically-virginal self, or how I had to ask my parents what pot smelled like. I didn't say anything about how when I first moved here I would nearly break into a run to get away from the dealers in Washington Square Park, who walk up to you with a smooth yet insistent whisper, "Smoke? Smoke?" At dinner we somehow avoided comparative drugs stories, which I was grateful for, but it was a very odd night. The whole time I was preparing some kind of Nancy Reagan/Just Say No quip to avoid the issue.

I'm going to school with a bunch of casual potheads... maybe it will be that much easier to make law review. I don't know. It was weird and funny and kind of sad. Mostly shocking.