This is how I make the drink tech staffers know as 'apple pie.'

Ingredients

cheesecloth

2 sticks cinnamon

20 cloves

20 allspice berries

2T lemon juice (~1 lemon)

2 cups sugar

2tsp vanilla extract

1½-2 cups everclear

1 gallon apple juice, not from concentrate

Directions

Put spices in cheesecloth. Bash until cracked a bit. Put cheesecloth hunk in pot.

Find out how far up in the pan 2 cups of juice rises. Mark something with that level (like a straw), and add 2 more cups juice. Simmer down to 2 cups, and take your time! The longer the spices steep in the juice, the more flavor you'll get.

Remove bag, add sugar, stir until all sugar is dissolved. Add lemon juice, extract. Stir.

Add back to juice in original container. Add alcohol. Shake or stir to combine. Taste—I sometimes add up to about 4T of sugar depending on my preference.

Drink like a tech staffer: early and often.

Notes

1. Consider using cider, if you can afford it. It's more expensive, but the taste is right. Or, if you're making two gallons, make it with half cider and half juice.
2. Good spices make a difference. Don't believe me? I get mine from penzeys.com and I get asked how I got such a fabulous spice aroma into my pie. That's how. Spend the money. It's worth it.
3. More booze is not better. Be smart. Start with 1½ cups alcohol, and taste the finished mixture before you decide to make it more alcoholic. Experience has taught me that 2 cups seems to be the upper limit; any more than that, and the apple taste is blown away by the burn of the alcohol.

I emailed her this past week to tell her that one of her collegiate games has stuck with me; that I've infected others with it, and it shows no sign of stopping.At some point, just about every person who attends an American college and lives on-campus discovers one beautiful, innate truth: it's really fun to mess with the heads of your drunken college friends. It takes almost no mental effort on your part, and the rewards are so great that it's sometimes even worth staying sober at the parties, just so you can be the one to tell the stories about all your friends the next day.

(Or the day after. Or whenever they recover, so that they may bear sober and embarrassed witness to their own stupidity.)

There is a little-known corollary to that truth: that some fruits and vegetables are inherently funny. Through years of sociocultural training and repression, we have learned to steel ourselves against the silliness of their names. But it's the third to go, right behind inhibitions and common sense.

Mind you, not all fruits and vegetables are inherently funny. If you walk up to someone whom you suspect is tipsy and whisper the word "carrot" to them, nothing happens. Or "green peppers." Or "jalapeño." They'll look at you strangely, and perhaps ask if you're hungry.

But if you want to know if someone's had too much to drink, lean over to them and conspiratorially whisper the word "rutabaga." This has to be done with a look of perfect candor and innocence, as if saying the word "rutabaga" was as natural and common as saying, "Can you hand me another beer?"

If they start screaming with laughter, take their drink away. They've had enough.

Now, if you're the cruel (or thorough) type, you could run a quick second test to ascertain the effectiveness of the first. Lean over to them again and whisper the word "kumquat."

Again, if they scream with laughter, take their drink away—they've had enough.

The only potential problem is if you get in a group of scientifically-minded friends who think it's funny to try to make their friends spew drinks out of their noses. The end result is a group of semi-toasty geeks who are sitting around in your living room, randomly screaming out the names of fruits and vegetables to any available listeners.

"Kumquat!" "Rutabaga!" "Radicchio!" "Parsnip!"

At some point, half of the partygoers have to run to the bathroom because the laughter has constricted their bladders, and the other half have run to the kitchen to mix up more drinks to banish the memories of the names of the parade of fruits and vegetables.

You'd think we'd get tired of this game by now, but it hasn't happened yet.

(—and you thought your parties were weird.)

Ask yourself where you are. Maybe you know. Maybe you don't. With the absolute certainty that comes from a mind too exhausted to reason adequately, I know where I am. This is the balcony; this is the ninth floor of the hotel, and I am looking down on what has been one of the best days of my life. In the back of my mind, the litany of reasonable thought unspools, unwinds, comes loose: get sleep—get rest—why did I take all that caffeine last night?—where are my friends?—is my spouse asleep?—is he having fun too?—shouldn't I start thinking in complete sentences again?

It is a long way down, my mind says; the screaming-banshee noise of the cartoonishly-bedecked conventioneers is a distant, dull roar. There is a light-saber fight. There is a battalion of Klingons staring at a battle of storm troopers not too far from a cluster of medieval musicians.

Here, I am the freak—the girl dressed in nothing but jean shorts and a simple t-shirt, with only two fake locks of smurf-blue hair clipped at my temples and an empty cup smelling of apple pie. I realize that I am light-headed from leaning over the balcony, and lean back and throw away my cup. Somewhere, anywhere. If it wasn't a trash bin, someone will take care of it in the morning.

The semicircular elevators are made mostly of glass; their speed, combined with the radiant alcoholic fumes given off by guests, make me dizzy on the way down to the main floor. The floors flash by, barred balconies and fake hanging greenery and conventioneers clutching plastic cups in varying stages of emptiness passing above my field of vision.

By day two of the convention the jaded attendees have conjured up a blank stare. The perfect blank stare confers a blankness, an invisibility, upon the giver. In this freakshow-née-convention, the easiest way to be noticed is to stare openly at the garishly (and often inventively un-)dressed attendees. If you do not at least seem to notice, no one notices you.

Thus, it is three a.m. I am pacing the main lobby of the hotel, slowly, deliberately, trying to stretch my calves and stare without staring. I remind myself that for twenty thousand people, this is probably their one weekend a year to act up, act out their fantasies, and be someone other than the normal bill-paying drudges their lives dictate they must be.

I found a chair at the bar and watched, quietly, sipping water, fingers aching for the familiar pressure of keyboard and blank page. The words begged for recitation, phrases floating in and out of my mind as I repeated them in a desperate attempt to commit them to memory. My hope was for something, anything, to stick long enough for me to get home and get it written down.

The process of remembering is slow.