I am too old for this. Last week I arrived at a house party only to spend the first 20 minutes putting the finishing touches on my gender studies junior tutorial syllabus. Tonight is squishy, slushy, miserable, the kind of night that will leave the streets shiny, lethal disco floors by morning. It’s 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, I’m trudging alone down Mass Ave on the way to Eliot Street, and I have never more deeply regretted the existence of New England.

My assignment: check out O Sushi, a mid-range bar and sushi restaurant in the Square and the area’s newest, freshest party spot for the College’s newest, freshest members. I have heard the rumors about the freshman class’s goings-on at this place, and I can’t write them for fear of libel. Suffice it to say that on Saturday nights the scene is reputed to heat up with equal parts body heat and scandal.

But I can’t get anyone to go with me. Even the freshmen who initially agree to show me their den of sin sink into the woodwork at my renewed urging. This may have something to do with the fact that I try to arrange the tryst via email using a lot of exclamation marks and maybe even the phrase “super rad,” but I tell myself it’s because they lack my intrepid spirit. My friends, with whom I’ve just spent the past couple hours calmly drinking, claim they’d rather get scorpion bowls and call it an evening. Also, they don’t like sushi. When I beg them once again in a last-ditch attempt to avoid existential loneliness, I am told: “Have fun doing cocaine with freshmen.”

So here I am, trudging resignedly in the snow, unaccompanied. Some guy passing by in new Timberlands uses this as an excuse to give me a look that is a nauseating concoction of sexual harassment and pity. Let me look you up and down in your large amorphous puffy coat as you talk to yourself on an unmentionably slushy evening in February, this glance says. Let my leering appraisal comfort you for being such a loser. I would flip him off, but I am wearing mittens.

I am too old for this.

By the time I round the corner of Elliot Street, I have registered the dearth of weekend activity in the Square. The weather seems to have prevented even the hardiest of partiers from leaving their gin-soaked shag rugs, and the scene at O Sushi does not seem promising.

I enter the restaurant in a haze of warmth and anticipated sake, and encounter… approximately nothing. Well, that’s not true, strictly. The place has class and ambience. A bar of some onyx-colored substance, the texture of which I would like to file my nails on. The kind of low-vibe music satellite radio likes to label “adult contemporary.” Angular black tables, stiff red booths, and, on the wall, a picture of a koi fish. I claim a seat at the near-empty bar and take off my extra 35 pounds of coat. There are no apparent freshmen.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Well-dressed couples with nice hair-dos huddle together intimately, reminding me I have not been invited to their tables. A 30-something gentleman with a tattooed forearm (obscured by his shirt: I can’t quite see whether it’s Scooby-Doo or the grim reaper) gazes wistfully at a Saturday night basketball game on the bar’s television. I wonder: Where are the shirtless youths engaged in oral sex and devil worship? Where is my material? Maybe, I think, the hordes of wild freshmen will move in later, at 12, 12:30 for a final edamame nightcap. At that moment, I spot my target: one table of semi-boisterous undergrads.

I’m pulled back to the bar by an affable inquiry from the bartender, a nice-looking dude with a ponytail who kindly asks me if I want anything. I tell him I will order later—I am waiting for somebody. I am not actually waiting for anybody; I just don’t feel like swending the money. (Surprisingly, there is nothing on the drink menu compatible with my $4 budget.) I have used this waiting-for-somebody structure while travel writing in bars from Cambridge to the Cinque Terre. There are dozens of bartenders in the Greater Boston Area and all over northern Italy still waiting for me to meet my date. This is very Beckettian of them. I imagine them setting up an association, convening for conferences, comparing their mustaches: the Alliance of Bartenders Who Have Seen Reina Be Stood Up by Somebody.

I depart for the bathroom with low expectations, in the off-chance it will house a cabal of eighteen-year-olds gathered for total debauchery, a live video chat with Lady Gaga, or, even rarer, a compassionate and socially conscious conversation about their feelings.

I find merely an impressive degree of bathroom cleanliness, with a poster advertising a Valentine’s Day special ostensibly intended for the reading pleasure of full-bladdered ladies. I’ve just about given up hope when I hear voices outside the door. Someone is telling someone their dorm location. I’ve spotted them: freshmen.

I stumble out of the bathroom into two reasonably well-coiffed white men in ironic t-shirts (one has a border of Coronas).

They refuse to give me their names or confirm my suspicions about their class years. “I have a cousin in media,” one guy says, “So I know all about you.” I’m not entirely sure I know all about myself, so I am intrigued. I suspect he is warning me against being the kind of sarcastic asshole who ruins other people’s evenings and sushi establishments for the sake of journalism.

He continues to eye me warily. “If you print anything I’m telling you, it will probably be slander.” I correct him and say it will probably be libel, but thanks for worrying.

I’ve never been able to deal with guys like this, guys who are confident, six four, and probably wasted. They make me feel vulnerable and ridiculous. This is probably what happens when you grow up as a fat, nerdy lesbian in a socially conservative suburb. The best solution I have come up with is to be amusingly caustic.

The guys are smirking. I am too old for this. “So someone told me this was the day to come,” I tell them. “But where is everybody? Where’s the booze? The mayhem?”

“Thursday,” the guy says, making an expression clearly meant to impress upon me the sheer coolness of the day that falls after Wednesday but before the weekend. “Come back on Thursday. The social clubs have parties on Saturdays, so there are fewer people here tonight.”

I say, “Social clubs?” revealing my peripheral status in Harvard’s institutional hierarchy. “Like the Hasty Pudding?” “Like final clubs,” he says.

I went to a final club once, I want to tell him. It was sweaty. They’re edging to go, and I feel I’ve wrung all possible information out of them. I’m about to sneak more surreptitiously than strictly necessary through the back exit, which conveniently exists for the benefit of super heroes and reporters, when Hawaiian-shirt-guy gestures to me.

“We love this place,” he says. “Don’t kill it.”

I slip out into the miserable night, too old to feel bad about the encounter, too young to feel anything but.