Monday's Events

As I said earlier, Monday night was a little of a downer. I had this grandiose idea that I would spend the entire night blogging (bloging?) and little other work would get done. Sadly only the latter half of that plan worked out.
At 10pm Shoshana and I staked our claims in a massive tent on the west side of the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver. In two weeks time I knew that the place would be hustling and/or bustling and I was looking forward to an evening and morning full of excitement, or at least something to do.
As it turns out, not only was there no work to be done, there was no internet to waste my time with either. Occupying space was/is my only task.
Shoshana and I reluctantly wiped the elated grins off our faces and hunkered down for a long night.
Over the course of the next ten hours we did what we could to waste the time. My girlfriend (and new roommate) Shannon was nice enough to bring a Monopoly set to us. The brothers Parker served us well; we Monopolied like fiends for a solid two hours until the last roll of the die. I lost. Card games also helped pass the time. We started with poker, utilizing whatever we could find as chips. I am proud to say I now know the conversion of landscaping rocks to Arrowhead bottled water caps. (5 rocks to 1 cap)
I ended up teaching Shoshana how to play Rummy as well. This was uneventful as the game was played on the tail end of our caffeine high and before our second, more slapstick, wind began.
Here we took a bit of a break. We both nodded our heads to our respective tunes, though I couldn't tell if it was the music's beat or the creeping hand of sleep that did it.
Around 3am we heard the big, big noise of what I can only assume was Hell's A/C kicked in. If it's been a while since you've been lucid at 3am, allow me to refresh your memory: The day's heat has more or less dissipated from the ground and the lack of sun is starting to take its toll on the average temperature. Needless to say it wasn't exactly warm in the monstrous tent, and when that conditioned air started to blow our way it was down right cold. So cold in fact that my only escape was jumping jacks outside the tent, where it was at least 15 degrees warmer. (That's in Fahrenheit for our overseas friends)
For those of you who have seen the clock roll from 11pm to 4am recently, you know that at some point in the night you receive what is known as a second wind, or what I like to call a "non-runner's high." The only issue with this is your second wind is never as reliable as the first. Personally, I become goofier and less attentive to my immediate surrounds and proportionately more attentive to whatever may or may not be floating in the air past my face.
It was at this point I suggested we play a game of War. (Link provided for anyone who had an active childhood that did not require mindless card games)
As it would turn out, this is the perfect game to play when the mind's zenith is a couple hours in the past. Basic math skills were not needed, really all we had to do was look at two cards and decide which was higher. There was some contention when the two numbers were close or if they happened to be the same suit, but all-in-all I would recommend War to anyone trying to kill time at 5 in the morning.
As the sun peeked over the sad excuse for a skyline that I call home, there was less than two hours left in my first shift. Thanks to War I missed the first rays of light, but I did get outside early enough to keep hypothermia at bay.
Eight o'clock came soon enough and I headed home to sleep through the first of my Tuesday classes. I was mildly perturbed that my internship had so far yielded no journalistic results, but I was happy to have a fourth of my workweek in the bag.