First Communion After Party

You want to party, but you have no friends? No problem. You want to dance, but avoid the discotheque because everyone else there is fifteen? No problem. You want to pound a few beers, but you're too poor to afford a six pack? No problem.

The solution is a good, old-fashioned first communion party. Or a baptism. Or a wedding. Or a baby shower. Or a birthday. If your family is large enough, there will always be some kind of party to attend. And there will always be food, music, and beer.

Granted, sometimes this means you get suckered out of a nice afternoon of lounging half-naked and drunk in your kiddie pool (can you tell I'm obsessed with the pool?), but life is full of compromises. The flip side is that you get to go tear it up with the fan-dam. If you're lucky, the hosts have decent taste in music and maybe even have hired a band. If you're less lucky, you get to listen to that one really awful song that Mexico is obsessed with, and you don't know what it's called, and you don't understand the lyrics, but you know you hate it, and it sounds like this:

Ma ma- maton,
dabby da-b daton
bla bla- badon...
[repeat for twenty-seven minutes]

Whatever the music, you can pass off your baby to aunts and cousins, and you probably won't see him again until either you go hunt him down or he poops his diaper. In the meantime, you can hit the dance floor, have a beer, eat some birria, eavesdrop on the intra-family scandal gossip, explain for the four-hundred and ninety-fifth time why your baby isn't wearing a sweater, speculate on how lousy Mexico will do in the upcoming World Cup games, and then have another beer.

Not bad.