do I really live here?

I opened the refrigerator in my house the other morning and was greeted by three neon-colored bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 (oh, how I miss my old roommate Ricky who sure loved him some MD) and three bottles - one a toxic blue color - of Boons Farm wine.

Now, we all have our MD 20/20 and Boons Farm memories. If you're not overflowing with stories of those sordid nights, then perhaps you were too inebriated to remember. Just the mere sight of the screw-top, white-labeled, fruity Boons Farm bottles brings me right back to high school, schwilling from the bottle with my girlfriends atop Winn-Dixie Hill (a.k.a. Make-out Hill) on the golf course (sorry, Dad). Boons Farm was the only booze we could stomach, and as I got older, I found maybe 85 percent of the women I met got drunk for the first time on BF.

And MD 20/20 made frequent appearances at my college house, though I am proud (and honest) in saying I never partook. Ricky loved it and shamelessly toted the bright bottles to parties. And I think he did it mainly as a joke, a party trick, a novelty kind of like the Alize poster we had taped up in the living room. We only wish we had street cred.

Herein lies my point. I am no longer in college and high school is a distant (OK not that distant) memory. And those two beverages had been so far from my beverage repertoire - until now.

Excuse me while I climb up on my high horse.

Really, I just saw the bottles, asked one of my roommates if I was seeing things, and laughed out loud at the absurdity that is my living situation. Enter my sense of humor.

I live with five other people, most of them only a little younger than myself, but it is very much a group house. Grimy countertops, garbage piling up in the kitchen next to a cooler of warm beer from beach trip two weeks ago, six jugs of milk in the fridge (three of them expired) and a random pile of white sheets near the washer that no one will claim.

For a while, every other day I would come home to a new roommate. Justin (the roommate I really like) called it the revolving door apartment. He's funny - drinks a lot of coffee, is always high and giggling after work, loves karaoke. Then there is a girl who is always - and I mean always - in her housepants and has two caged birds in her room (don't even get me started). Some other dude who doesn't say much. Ever. Then the dude who owns the house, who seems to have a horror movie obsession with African art. Seriously, we have 17 carved wood salad spoons with giraffes on the handles, maybe 43 masks and safari animal statues all laid obsessively on the tables of every room. I think he did a semester at sea. He, the 23-year-old kid who just bought a 5-bedroom house in Washington - again, don't even get me started.

This place is awesome.