2+2 equals 5's and the Goons Get-together's

Ever since I graduated, my mom has been more lenient--that is, my curfew has been extended from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. As a plus, she refrains from calling me a minimum of twenty times; today, she only called me five times. After surprisingly meeting "the gang" at Soft Stuff while with my family, I went to the house of one of the members of "the gang." In truth, he's only an acquaintance even though we've met several times now--we don't really talk until we're forced into the same room with a couple of mutual friends. Even then, our one-on-one conversations are probably limited to "pass the hot sauce" and "where's your bathroom?" It's all very funny because before I left, my mom asked me if she could go along (to which I responded with awkward chicken movements and incomprehensible clucking noises). She wondered what the kids nowadays do for fun.

After I came home twenty minutes after my curfew, she promptly proceeded to come into my room, plop on my bed, and question me about my whereabouts. Who is he? Is he Korean? He's in college? Where? What's his major? What do his parents do? Is his house big? As the conversation drew closer and closer to nonrelevant subjects, I could hear the gears in her head snapping into place to produce a flawed equation in which 2+2 obviously equals 5. What will you do if he asks you out? After a brief moment of there she goes again I loudly replied, "If he was interested, it would have happened a long time ago."

It's even funnier that all we did at his house was play rock band: I took over the drums (on easy) and the guitar (on medium), Claire wailed out on the mike, while the guys rocked out on the remaining guitars. Funnier yet, our asian band was called "The Goons." The characters we created were awkward masterpieces: our main singer had red eyes, the main drummer was the size of a hippo, and one guitarist had pink hair while the bass guitarist with the neon hair was obviously anorexic.

After the conversation with my mom, I thought about how "the gang" became "the gang." Before we were all really just loser-ish. None of us were in stable relationships; the relationships we had with each other consisted of sweaty hand-holding and innocent conversations at bookstores. We were bound together by our mutual failures and a fervent dedication to getting into a good college. Today I wonder why we are still together. We've all changed in one way or another. And I'm not just talking about my hair and/or the changing fashions from comfy T-shirts to stiff shirt dresses. The things that had once bound us together are gone. Some are in so-called "perfect" relationships and others have no one, while a few outliers are into hook-ups and booty calls. Some of us are in college while the rest are going into college. We are now bound by nothing except for the fact that we had once known each other during more loser-ish days.