Reunion in Vegas

Wandering

Seventeen. Saturday night, at a brightly-lit event space in the Las Vegas Grand Prix Plaza. Late 2010s pop songs played quiet enough that conversation was easy. Overhead screens showed slideshows of group pictures. I stood in a crowd of mid-twenty-somethings, lining up next to one of the two open bars, getting my third drink, another glass of that lavender lemonade vodka cocktail.

I had no expectations for the Class Toast, and few for Pi Reunion itself. MIT’s undergrad classes are quirky like that, having transcendental-numbered reunions. The Class of 2023, pi years after graduating, had our reunion in Vegas. The schedule was mostly nightclubs and dayclubs, whatever those are. Clubbing didn’t excite me, but enough people I knew were coming that I might as well go. Toast was a good opportunity to talk to people I hadn’t seen in months, maybe years.

The bar was my excuse to bounce from one group to another. Saying hi, catching up, promising to follow up later. Slipping into the crowd, heading to the bar again, counting the standard drinks I didn’t have to pay for, inching toward my tolerance. I pulled out some skills I’d forgotten I’d practiced and knew how to do: navigate a crowd, carry a conversation, get drunk.

Five. Thursday late night, at Hakkasan Nightclub in MGM Grand. I told myself I’m going so I can say I’ve tried it, as if I hadn’t already made up my mind about disliking it, as if I would’ve gone if Victor wasn’t going too. In our hotel room, I convinced Alan to come too. We had no idea how serious the dress code was, so I erred toward overdressing and wore a full button-down. The two of us booked an Uber with Sameer and Victor.

I walked into this alien place, but at least I was with a bunch of nerds. We walked past barren hallways, through metal detectors, and up three flights of stairs. Blue lights submerged the venue. Stanchions blocked the way to the tables, most empty. The bar was mobbed, and the disco was half-full. From the top of the stairs, I could pick out the MIT alums in the crowd, sticking out with awkward dancing. I wanted to leave. I didn’t think I’d make five minutes, let alone fifteen.

My teeth clench. My legs pulse with my heartbeat. The vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve, regulates involuntary functions like breathing, digestion, and heart rate. Latin vagus, “wandering”, as in vagrant or vagabond. Vagus in Vegas, huh? I shoulder through the crowd to meet the others. The eyes are the turn signals of the body. I stride. A school of fish parting around a shark. In the phenomenon of a contact high, a sober person experiences an altered state of mind by being around others under the influence. I am around people I know, now. That wasn’t my heartbeat. That was the bass, the rhythm. I wish I brought earplugs.

Time slipped. The floor went from half-full to full. I muscled through and headed to the bar. My wallet bled a little when I bought a glass of soda with too much ice. Strangers started smoking. We stayed for an hour: an earnest shot. I motioned to leave, and we took a Lyft back.

Ten. Friday night, at TAO Nightclub, in the Venetian. My limbs were held together by elastic rope, expanding in ways they hadn’t since seven years ago, when that eighteen-year-old in Quezon City spent some nights during his gap year partying, or enacting his notion of partying, like the first time I got so drunk I vomited the next morning, but it was worth it for a night of being the life of the party, dancing with a crowd watching, dancing with a crowd dancing, in that pop-up food court in Katipunan with the bright white lights and secondhand speakers looping the same playlist every night—and how different was that, really, from TAO’s dim red lights and DJ blasting obscure house music—when the dance floor was the same, when my arms and legs had been coiled all this time, waiting for a comfortable moment to expand, a moment they didn’t get in Hakkasan the previous night.

The difference was the crowd. This Kickoff was only open to Pi Reunion attendees, so barring plus ones, everyone was an MIT ‘23 alum. But having more mutuals with someone had no effect on how nervous I was around them. The music was quieter, but still overloud compared to those Quezon City nights. Maybe it was because I drank two Red Bull vodkas. Maybe there’s vibes-based differences in the atmospheres I wasn’t privy to. Or maybe there’s less to it than it seems: I felt free to dance because I wasn’t expected to.

Three songs. I had more stamina, back then. The floor went from empty to half-full, and this time, I’d take some credit for filling it. By the time I’d recovered enough to dance, the floor was too full for me to enjoy.

Seven. Friday noon, at Encore Beach Club, in Wynn Las Vegas. The swim test is one of MIT’s undergrad requirements. So when I said, over breakfast, that I wasn’t planning to come to Encore because I didn’t know how to swim, Jayden and Freddie were surprised. I explained that in lieu of the swim test, you could take the class instead, which I passed via attendance and effort. The pair expressed incredulity at my inability to learn, so they proposed to teach me at the beach club.

The mood was saying yes to things I didn’t think I’d enjoy, letting the current push me any-which-way down the stream of places-to-go. My excuse of not having swimwear was rebutted by Freddie, who offered to buy me trunks at the CVS across the Strip. The eleven AM start time was a miscommunication, as they didn’t start letting people in until noon.

Sunscreen, a Moscow mule with too much ice, and scalding stone floors. A pool three-and-a-half feet deep, which we made do with. Breathing and floating and falling and flailing and failing. Flashes of panic whenever my face got submerged. Frantic feet pointed downward to find the pool floor. They laughed; I laughed.

I suppose if your expectations are that low, any positive motion is a success.

Biggest

One. Thursday early afternoon, in LAS. The previous night, I learned via Alan that Krit and I were on the same plane. After alighting, Krit and I made our way to Alan’s gate.

The three of us walked to the rideshare pickup area. I was delighted by the nature of the advertising. No B2B SaaS ads, no TV shows, no dating or delivery apps, no beauty products, no colleges. Instead, there were shows, resorts, restaurants. Add the constant slot machines, and this airport had no pretensions about what passengers came here to experience: entertainment.

Thirteen. Saturday noon, walking to Liquid Dayclub in Aria. I’d just gotten brunch with Freddie in the Cosmopolitan. I came via the Bellagio walkway, and I was delighted to learn it also connected to the Vdara, which itself had a short, covered, outside walkway to Aria. These walkways between resorts reminded me of MIT’s tunnels: liminal spaces, spanning a range of altitudes, whose haphazard layouts make clear that they’re an afterthought.

The MIT tunnel system grew organically as buildings were added to the main group, over several decades. I assumed these walkways had a similar story. The adjacent Bellagio, the Cosmopolitan, Vdara, and Aria resorts are all owned by Blackstone and operated by MGM Resorts. Most Pi Reunion event venues were also siblings, with Hakkasan, TAO, Liquid, and Omnia all operated by the Tao Group.

Sitting in the Aria walkway leading up to Liquid, and looking up all this info, I found myself sketching an analogy. Conglomerates and narratives, accumulating primitives, hoping the glue’s strong enough to hold.

Twenty. Sunday afternoon, at Sphere. Size was Sphere’s claim to fame, and it delivered: it rivaled the heights of the nearby towers, and its exterior screens made sunlight look dark in comparison. Victor and I took five double-sized escalators to get to our seats. This took ten minutes.

One wall was decorated with a triangular grid of repeated geometry equations: Snell’s law, the law of sines… the apex angle of an isosceles triangle? We’d later find a small sign linking to Sphere’s The Science page, which includes lines like “Area of a Sphere was used to calculate the square footage of the Exosphere, which features 580,000 sq feet of LEDs — a creative canvas so bold and bright you can see it from space!” The artifice of making things seem overly important tickles my bones.

The film itself was an abridged AI-upscaled version of The Wizard of Oz (1939), with gimmicks like haptics, wind, paper leaves, and felt apples. It was uncanny, yet somewhat enjoyable, more as a marvel of engineering than as a work of art. No less worthy to experience, with the right framing.

Two. Thursday afternoon, at Bellagio. We passed by the Fountains of Bellagio, which Alan recognized from Ocean’s Eleven (2001): an artificial lake with hundreds of water nozzles and thousands of lights. The Lyft driver dropped us off at the main entrance, through a grand driveway with rugged tiles.

The Bellagio lobby set the tone: gilded floors, gilded walls, gilded ceilings. The casino’s slot machines, despite being the same as the airport’s models, seemed brighter here. Hotel staff with suits-and-ties stood next to felt-covered, deserted tables of blackjack, poker, roulette.

I remarked that we’ve gathered so much wealth as a society that we can have things like Bellagio. People spend money to look like they’ve spent more money. Alan countered that, as a society, we spend our wealth on datacenters and GPUs. I wish I’d countered with “how is that any different?”

We checked in, dropped our stuff, and registered for Pi Reunion. Alan asked what I was up to next, and I said I was headed to an arcade in Chinatown.

Variance

Eight. Friday afternoon, at the Atomic Testing Museum. More people filed into Encore Beach Club, so I left for the museum.

I felt torn about visiting the museum alone. Several friends went to Sphere to watch Wizard of Oz, after someone organized a trip on the Pi Reunion Discord. Others were busy or uninterested in the museum. I could’ve stayed at Encore and talked more, but the pool was getting full, and the heat was discouraging. It felt like a waste to do anything alone during Pi Reunion, when there’s so many people to talk to—and wasn’t talking the reason I came to Vegas?

The Atomic Testing Museum was more cultural than science-y, and it made me wish I took more Science, Technology, and Society classes at MIT. I was struck by the rhetorical parallels: we’re racing because we don’t want others to develop capabilities first; nothing will be as important to the future as our work on this project; we respect your right to protest against the national defenses that enable your protests. I enjoyed my two-and-a-half hours, and the only thing that could’ve made it better was having someone to talk to about it.

Sixteen. Saturday evening, on The Deuce, a bus going up the Strip. I’d just watched the Blue Man Group, at a theater in Luxor Las Vegas. When friends told me about last seeing them as children, or when I couldn’t get anyone else interested, I was worried I’d be bored by the show.

And I was bored, for the first quarter or so, but something changed. On the bus, I thought about personal questions like, “what prompted me to relax and start enjoying the show?” And scholarly questions like, “how does Blue Man Group as an institution enact thematic continuity?” And I failed to ask more germane questions, like “what am I having for dinner?” My ostensible reason for watching Blue Man Group was because I was tired of verbal processing, but I was sure using lots of words to think.

With Toast happening in less than thirty minutes, I didn’t have time to get dinner with anyone. I jogged to the Bellagio, went to my room, wiped the sweat off, and dressed up. I scarfed down the trail mix I’d bought from the airport, the quickest dinnerlike thing I could do.

By some miracle, I had some time left over between eating and when I had to leave. Five minutes, even. I set a timer, closed my eyes, and felt my body. Five minutes passed, and I opened my eyes.

Eleven. Friday late night, at one of the tables outside the Bellagio Patisserie. Alone. After Hakkasan and TAO, I decided not to go to the Kickoff afterparty at XS Nightclub. Instead, I posted on the Pi Reunion Discord saying I’d be at the Patisserie with some card games I’d brought.

I brought out my laptop while I waited: checked emails, caught up on reading, got some writing done, DMed a bunch of friends asking where they were. It was midnight, or three AM Eastern, so some of them might’ve been asleep. Others told me they were at the afterparty, or walking around town. Over the next hour, several people I knew walked past, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to get their attention, offer a seat, and play some games.

I couldn’t pinpoint what I felt in that hour. Regret, shame, embarrassment? Despite my lack of gambling, my time in Vegas had so far felt vague in its variance. Was I swinging between feeling full and feeling hollow? I felt uncertain if I’d made the right call to sit here and wait, uncertain if I’d made the right call to go to Pi Reunion.

Alan asked me if anyone else was there with me. I lied and said one other person came. The next morning, more people would ask me about it, and I kept up my lie. They say if you tell the truth you never have to remember anything, but I happen to have a good memory, rejection anxiety, and an inability to be alone.

Was it because I wasn’t bold enough to greet the passersby? Maybe I secretly wanted to be alone in a public space. Maybe I’m insufferable and no one wants to hang out with me, and it’s silly to keep inviting people, and I should stop initiating things, and instead glom onto anyone who’d take me, no matter how awkward. Or maybe there’s less to it than it seems: plenty of people would’ve been interested, but my timing was simply off.

Fourteen. Saturday early afternoon, at Liquid Dayclub, in Aria. I’d grown bored pondering conglomerates. Unless there were scheduling mishaps like yesterday’s at Encore Beach Club, Liquid must’ve been open for half an hour now. I wasn’t entering because I’d be alone, and the only thing worse than being alone is being alone around people who aren’t:

But I had nothing else to do. I went in, alone, around people who weren’t alone. For a while. And something must’ve prompted me to relax, because I started glomming myself onto groups of half-acquaintances, whose names I no longer recall. I pulled out some skills I’d forgotten I’d practiced and knew how to do: say hi, introduce myself, ask others about their lives.

Basin

Three. Thursday late afternoon, at Game Nest Arcade, in Chinatown. Victor glommed me onto his group of MIT osu! friends: I knew Sameer, I’d talked to Kevin once, and I’d never met James. I had fun kibitzing James’s Chunithm play and teasing Kevin for playing Maimai.

Four. Thursday evening, at Omega Mart, in Area15. Seeing it on Google Maps reminded me of when, years ago, I binge-watched all their employee training videos. I convinced Alan and Krit to come along, in that way you share your nerdy interests with your friends, and you felt a little vulnerable because what if they don’t like it? But they did.

Six. Friday morning, at one of the tables outside the Bellagio Patisserie. I woke up at seven AM: back-to-back sensory overloads had fractured my sense of linear time and need for sleep, and my Eastern-Time circadian rhythm didn’t help. At the Patisserie, I got an early breakfast with Alan, Freddie, and Jayden. I asked about people’s plans for the day, and Alan brought up Encore Beach Club.

Nine. Friday evening, at Grand Bazaar Shops in Horseshoe Las Vegas. While shopping at a Target near the Atomic Testing Museum, I made dinner plans with Alan and Arun. Rideshares to the Cosmo were five times more expensive than usual, so I considered waiting it out—but I didn’t want to miss dinner with friends I saw so rarely.

We signed up for Ramen-Ya’s waitlist. We were damp from the low-hanging misting fans, so we talked about how the area’s topography influenced the dry heat. Las Vegas, named after las vegas, Spanish “the meadows”. The city lies in one of Mojave Desert’s basins, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Isolated, walled off from the rest of the world, the terrain itself enforcing the old Vegas rule.

Twelve. Saturday morning, at Overlook Grill in the Cosmopolitan. I asked Freddie about museums he’d enjoyed, as I deliberated recommending the Atomic Testing Museum to him. Why was I so scared of giving my friends bad recs? I cared about modeling my friends’ tastes, but isn’t negative evidence useful for that too?

Fifteen. Saturday afternoon, at Lotus of Siam. Freddie had just come from the Atomic Testing Museum with Chirag. I was glad to hear Freddie liked it, even if for different reasons than I expected, reasons I planned to remember. I hadn’t talked to Chirag much, but Freddie picked good topics: geography, math problems, whether the existence of Slovakia is common knowledge.

Eighteen. Saturday late night, along E Flamingo Road. After Toast, a group of us started walking toward the Toast Afterparty at Omnia Nightclub. I was drunk. Alan, Arun, Jerry, and Krit, all sober, stood in a square around me as we walked.

Someone teased me for being too talkative, which I took as permission to talk about more personal topics. I started asking about other people’s romantic relationships. How they started, how they evolved, how they differed from friendships. A topic I’d always been interested in, as someone who’s never been in a relationship.

At Caesars Palace, Jerry and I got in line for Omnia, while the others walked to Bellagio. I said hi to some friends, but the music was too loud, so I left. I headed to the tables outside the Bellagio Patisserie, where Alan, Arun, and Krit were. I sat with them, taking the same spot I did yesterday.

And again, people wanted a deep conversation. I pulled out a skill I’d forgotten I’d practiced: asking people what was missing from their lives. We talked for two hours about security and appreciation, purpose and meaning, love and certainty. Jobs and places and people, and the drives behind choosing them. Motivations, values, and satisfaction. A topic I’d always been interested in, as someone who’s never been satisfied.

Nineteen. Sunday noon, in New York-New York Hotel and Casino. I’d glommed Alan onto Kevin, Sameer, and Victor. We checked bags at the NY-NY bell desk, then asked Kevin, our Las Vegas local, to recommend a good lunch place. Somewhere that wasn’t too busy, where we could sit and chill for a while. Kevin led us to Shake Shack, which I enjoyed.

Twenty-one. Sunday evening, at the food court in Excalibur Hotel and Casino. Victor and I got some rice and chicken from Pick Up Stix, and appetizers and drinks from Popeyes.

I’m reminded of SPARC. At the end-of-program survey, many participants say they wish they’d talked to more people. Every year I’d gone to SPARC, we’d mention this at the start, and sometimes we’d repeat it in the middle. Every year, without fail, people write the same thing in the survey: they wish they’d talked to more people.

And I wonder, I wonder if it doesn’t matter how many good conversations we have. That there’s something intrinsic to these gatherings, and the grand walled containers we have them in, that leaves us wanting. That the solution isn’t to maximize the time we spend with others, but to realize we can go out into the world and have good conversations whenever we want, and the only things stopping us are a failure to say yes to things outside our comfort zone, a fear of forcing a depth that’s fake and artificial, an anxiety about disappointing people and experiencing rejection.

Or maybe there’s less to it than it seems: the need to belong requires regular maintenance, a constancy no single event can provide.

Twenty-two. Sunday night, in LAS. Toomas sends a message in the Pi Reunion Discord: he rescheduled his flight, so he’s at the D Gates with nothing to do. I ask him to come. We sit at an empty gate. He asks me what my favorite event from Pi Reunion was, and I say it was Toast. The space is brightly-lit, quiet enough to have good conversation, and I get to talk to people I hadn’t seen in a while.