My long-standing friend Josh Lilienstein is in town for the weekend, leading up to a med school interview this Monday. And, bucking the common wisdom of a quiet weekend of preparation, he instead spent yesterday rocking New York, beginning shortly after his arrival by Jet Blue red-eye from San Francisco when we headed into Central Park at 9:00am with a bottle of Hennesey and some Starbucks paper cups.

The day went happily downhill from there, with the two of us slurring through a slew of topics; one of the brightest people I know, Josh also has an exceedingly broad range of interests and knowledge, allowing us to – in the course of fifteen minutes – somehow skip from women to adipose biochemistry to Italian liquors to political theory. And while, at varying points of the day, we were more sober than at others, I don’t suspect we ever crossed below the legal blood-alcohol limit for safe driving. Thank god for New York’s subway-centric life.

So it was still not entirely sober that we headed uptown to Morningside Heights at 10:00pm, to meet the girl I’ve been blogging about, along with one of her college best friends and her literature PhD cohorts. Needless to say, I was a bit freaked out, as meeting friends is a crucial moment in any nascent relationship. Inevitably, at some point down the road, you’ll do something to make a girl really, justifiably pissed off with you, and having her friends either rooting for or against you almost always decides your fate.

While I normally wouldn’t much worry, as more than a few of my friends have pointed out, this was essentially our fourth date in just over a week – about the same tally that I usually hit in the first month of dating. So, basically, I really didn’t want to screw it up.

The grad student party we first collectively hit was, admittedly, a bit short of the Platonic college party form (which ideally includes such elements as ‘chug! chug! chug!’-shouting keg-stands and someone dancing on a table with a lampshade on their head), though I spent most of the first hour or two less concerned about the surroundings, and more concerned about just-starting-to-date etiquette. Within the larger party, she and I were privately carrying out the ritual of a middle school dance: slow progress from furtive across-the-room smiles and eye contact, to adjacent leg-brushing sitting to, finally, eventually, standing naturally next to each other, slightly intertwined, hand on back, arm around waist, or (most adventurous of all party stances!) hand in back pocket.

Through it all, it was actually her friends that saved me, as, fortunately, really liking people is far easier than simply pretending to. With each conversation, I eased back towards my natural self, as I discovered that literature PhD students are pretty much exactly my favorite sort of people: intelligent, neurotically over-analytic ones passionately pursuing some relatively obscure topic of interest. As the girl’s closest friends turn out also to be attractive, articulate alcoholics, by the time we left the grad party to head to a nearby bar, I was happily convinced that I’d actually look forward to spending more time with them all.

And, mainly, I realized that I’m looking forward to spending more time with her. So when, a little after 3:00 in the morning, Josh and I finally bid the group adieu, as I kissed the girl goodbye on the stoop of the bar and she asked what I was doing Monday night, although I said I’d have to check my calendar to see, I was pretty sure, whatever it might be, I could probably rearrange my schedule.