What's going on with me?
He listens to Depeche Mode so I sort of love him already
Wasn’t I just talking to Joanna about Murphy and his annoying Law? He must have heard me, because he has returned! With a vengeance and a taste for blood! In the form of my new awesome boy/friend/boyfriend!
I met a really good guy Saturday night at a club, and yes I am fully aware of how stupid that sounds. Meeting someone at a club is a whole rung up (down?) the ladder of shame and degradation from meeting at a bar. But I now know that it can happen, believe you me.
The Pre-Story
So, Friday night I went to the engagement party of my good friend A. She is getting married next month in Italy (bitch! Ha ha, just kidding. Kind of.) so she had a nice dinner here for all her friends who are not flying to Italy for the actual wedding, ie. all of them. I had been invited with a plus one, which was cool, as until now I’ve never been awarded such an honor. However when I sat down and considered who to invite, I realized I don’t have all that many guy friends. I have that guy I was seeing a few months ago…you know, the one who used the word “fanny”? And HIS friend, who I actually always did have a crush on but of course never pursued for reasons of international boy codes of honor and such, but he lives in the suburbs and would never make it downtown in time. And then I have boyfriends of friends, who I obviously could not invite on a one-on-one thing.
I ended up inviting the boy at work, the one I am training. He turned out to be a teriffic date. He looked very nice and was a good mingler and always answered “yes” when I would ask him if he was doing okay. Also, I know I have not really written anything about him since I mentioned that I thought he might be unhappy at work already, but it turns out that he is freaking HILARIOUS. We crack each other up constantly at work and it has made the days so much more fun. He just constantly busts out with the cleverest things. For example, one day we were unpacking and assembling a shredder we had ordered, and I was reading from the long list of instructions and warnings, and he said the funniest Saturday Night Live quote.
Me: “Do not place shredder on top of a heater or heated fixture. Do not walk on shredder’s power cord. Do not allow shredder to rest at an angle of more than ten degrees. Do not–”
Him: Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball!
I laughed so hard I almost died, for real. And all day is pretty much like that. Laugh laugh laugh.
Here is another example. Some guy from our sister company emailed me and immediately we got distracted by the fact that the guy’s name was Robert E. Lee. Seriously! So he started riffing on what this Robert E. Lee character might have written in his email, and he goes, “Dear So-and-so, I now know what it means to be enveloped in the ‘horrors of war.’ It is so cold here in the trenches at night, you would not believe. My men have not gotten any meat to eat in weeks, and most of them have no shoes anymore…”
I had to make him stop talking, because I was getting all gaspy and hyena-y and on the verge of tears. It was quite sexy, let me tell you that. Also extremely professional.
I haven’t laughed this hard in years. Sometimes I have to walk away and hang out in the kitchen for a while, running the water at full volume so that nobody can hear me bursting into a cackle remembering something he said, like, four hours earlier. It is really crazy.
So, we are having fun at work. So much fun that I am ALMOST sad that Friday is my last day, but not quite, because hello, I’m not a moron.
My main story
Anyway. So Friday night he and I went to that engagement party and had a great time. Then Saturday it was my very last Saturday night of living in downtown DC (since as of this Saturday I’ll be at my mom’s in the suburbs), so Poppy and I decided to go out and do it up right.
After kind of a sucky start (note to self: DO NOT GO TO GEORGETOWN AT NIGHT. YOU ALWAYS REGRET IT), we ended up at Five, which is this club I really really like because they play good trance music and you don’t need to be dressed up to get in, and the people there are very diverse and laid-back and not-snooty. Also in my experience the guys who hang out there are not the type that get all up on you and attach themselves to your ass while you are trying to dance with your girlfriends, for crying out loud.
Poppy and I had one tequila shot, which was my idea and she was very nice to humor me. She actually danced too, which was great. She is such a nice and giving friend. Eventually a boy started dancing near the two of us, but we weren’t really talking to each other. He was pretty cute though, I could tell that much in the dark. So we were all dancing, and I was sort of zoning out and looking off to one side, and then I felt someone touch my side and say into my ear, “What’s your name?” When I turned my head back though, I saw the first guy, and another guy, both forming a circle with Poppy and me, and neither of them seemed to really be looking at me, and neither seemed to have been the one who had spoken to me. I looked at Poppy and started to ask her who had spoken to me, but I could tell that she hadn’t seen anything. So I kept looking back and forth between the two guys, but it was a total mystery. After a few seconds of that, I decided that I had just gone crazy, from either
A) the tequila, or
B) the genes of all those crazy relatives who have come before me,
and so I forgot about it.
A while later, I was noticing that the first guy kept sort of looking at me, so I asked him HIS name (J.), and then he said to me, “Are you from Kazakhstan?” And obviously I was like, “Excuse me?” And then he said, “Well, I tried to ask you your name a little while ago, but you just sort of ignored me, so I thought you were, like, foreign.” Bwa! I think I asked him what he expected, asking a question and then moving six feet away like 4.3 milliseconds later. I mean really.
After some back-and-forth yelling into each others’ ears, we started dancing, and we ended up spending the entire rest of the night dancing. Except for the times when we were making out. Just kidding! Except, not really. (It was a really, really good night.)
(Poppy had a good time too; at one point we lost her in the crowd, only to eventually spot her dancing on the PLATFORM at the front of the club, with a MAN no less, holy sweet Jesus. She has already emailed me asking about going dancing again this weekend.)
And. AND. The big news is that the guy, J., called me the next day and asked me to meet him for brunch, and we ended having one of those dates that goes on for hours and hours, outlasting geolithic eras and the rise and fall of various empires, in that it spanned both brunch and dinner. It was so great. We just walked and talked and ate and joked around for hours. He is really funny and clever and romantic. At one point he bought me two roses from one of those street vendor guys, and if I didn’t really like him I would be all barf, but since I do, it was super.
Then he called Monday, and he came over last night and we got Chinese food and listened to music and pretty much just laughed continuously for, like, four hours. This is friggin unbelievable. Where has he been the past two years? At least he lives in the same suburb as my mom, so once I move home on Saturday I’ll see him a lot before I actually move to Georgia. I am trying hard not to get all bogged down in the fact that I’m leaving in three weeks; I just want to enjoy the fact that I can have a really good time with him now.
Tonight two friends are coming over to take apart my futon and cart it home with them, and tomorrow night my office is going out for a big debaucherous evening. How have you guys all been?? Sorry I’ve been so awol. I will do better soon.
4.20.2005
I was a mad baseball-card-collecting fool!
Hey hey hey. I have been having an actual life lately, which is a nice change. On Monday a coworker had given me two tickets to a baseball game. My friend Azalea and I saw the new DC team, the Nationals, get their asses BEATEN DOWN by the Marlins. Fun night. The tickets were down pretty close to the field, on the third baseline. I hadn’t seen a live baseball game in years, since going to the Orioles as a kid with my mom and stepdad.
I used to be a yooge baseball fan when I was a kid. I collected cards and everything. My favorite teams were the Red Sox and the Yankees. They were my chosen teams mainly because I had an inexplicable young-girl-crush on Wade Boggs and Don Mattingly, respectively. So you seee, I’ve always been this odd.
Anyway, the game was tons of fun. We got beers and fries and we cheered and booed in all the appropriate places. I will really miss Azalea when I move.
The life story of one of my friendships
We met in college, my junior year and her senior, and came as close to falling in love as two straight girls can get. The more we got to know each other, the eerier it got, as we discovered that we were practically the same person. I mean, she had a Pulp poster up in her bedroom, for God’s sakes. And she showed me the Way of the Light and the Lord, and by that I mean that she introduced me to Belle and Sebastian, so for that I will always love her.
Then for my senior year and her, uh, super-senior year, we lived together in a group house in the old town part of our little college town. We shared a huge apartment with three other girls she was friends with. It was a disaster. We had completely different living styles and we ended up fighting all the time and it was horrible. I have not cried as much in my entire life as I did that year living with her, even if I count the period when my parents got divorced and my mom and I moved six states away and my puppy died. (But obviously that was a bad period too. Heh.)
After one particularly bad fight towards the end of the year, we stopped speaking. Finals were over and she moved out early. I was going to London for a year of art school that fall, so I was looking forward to that, but “breaking up” with my best friend kind of put a damper on life right then. however, the things she’d said to me in that last fight were, I felt, just so over the line that I wasn’t interested in making up with her ever again.
So, I went to London for the year, and I will definitely write about that some other time, like when I have six hours to kill or something.
Then I moved back to my mom’s house in the suburbs, and after a few months I moved into my current apartment downtown. A year went by. The next May rolled around and I remembered it was her birthday that month. Suddenly I started thinking about how close we had been, and how I hadn’t found someone to be such good friends with in the three years since graduation. On a whim, I found her mom’s address online (she’s got a unique last name) and sent her a birthday card, just saying I missed her and I hoped she was doing well and I gave her my email address.
When she wrote back I was so so elated, i cannot even tell you. I think I even squealed a little. We arranged to meet. It was amazing, so much fun still, like no time had passed. I see her a lot now. All the old stuff is there still, and we can just ignore the fights and bad parts completely; since we’re not living together they don’t come into play at all. It’s pretty wild.
We actually do sometimes refer to the year we lived together in an oblique way. We’ll talk about “that year we were both psychotic bitches” or “that year I wanted to punch your lights out” or something. Lighthearted jokey references, you know?
I am almost 100% excited to be moving away from DC, but she is one of the few things I will miss.
Internet people are people too!
ANOTHER unusual and fun thing that happened this week was that I met up with a group of Internet Blog Stranger-People on Tuesday night. We spoke and drank and ate and had a really fun evening. And it was all done IN PERSON, not over the internet, which was surreal. Almost like when you’re a little kid and you see your teacher at the grocery store or the mall or something, and you’re like, “MRS. JOHNSON????!! What are you doing outside of the school??!”
Everyone was charming and intelligent, and I was fascinated to hear everyone’s stories about how they viewed their sites, and the process of writing, and the whole balancing act of blogging as a private, creative writing-type exercise vs. a public, community-creating thing. (Personally I am still working that issue out for myself, as I probably will be forever, so I have no particularly enlightening things to share on that. As of now, at least.)
Also I thought it was cool to be interacting with people whose writing I had sort of come to know, in the sense of being able to compare their way of writing to their way of speaking. One of the things we talked about was whether everything we write is true or not.
Personally, all the stories I tell here are true, but I definitely try to make things funnier when I type them out. However, I do this in real life too, so I’m really not misrepresenting myself at all here. I very much like to entertain people and to be the “class clown” type person in my group of friends, so I think it’s only natural that I would do that in my writing too.
Give me the gas!
This morning I had to get one of my molars drilled and filled in with plaster or whatever it is dentists use for this sort of thing. It was my first cavity ever (aw, baby’s first cavity!) so I had no idea what to expect and I was sort of scared. Of course it turned out to be nothing. I am such a wussy.
(Oh my god, it is SO HOT in my apartment right now. I am all sweaty behind my knees. I hate sweating. Wow, Georgia is going to be really really hot for six months out of the year, isn’t it? Shit.)
4.17.2005
I have not fallen into the great Salt Lake!
Okay, so, hey. What is up? I am back in the D of C now. I have lived here for two years and have gone on a first and sometimes second date with every guy here between the ages of 22 and 30 but OF COURSE now that I am moving away in a month, I met my like dream boy last night. And why not? Damn you, Murphy’s Law! I spit on you. Ptah!
Do you want to hear about Salt Lake City? It was salty and just as wholesome and clean and crisp as I remembered it being. Flying in is amazing. Coming from the east coast, the mountains are just so shocking. You’re flying over these snow-capped peaks and actual plateaus, which I had previously only read about in geography textbooks, and then suddenly there’s a town just below, encircled by a ring of mountains. Wild.
Our show went well. It was a rah-rah meeting for a pharmaceutical company, to rev up their sales reps, who were all beautiful and smartly-dressed in their little heels and khakis (women and men respectively). I was racing around and around all the ballrooms of the hotel for four days straight so I was wearing sturdy shoes, much like a nurse or a librarian, and was jealous of all their adorableness.
(And their leisure time, but it’s sort of my job to be, you know, working, so that’s not really a valid complaint.)
On the big final night, the entertainment was the B52s, which was awesome. I had time off during their performance so my pal from our Chicago office and I got to shake it on the dance floor. They were really cool. I had never seen them before and they sounded great, just like they do on their albums. They played all the delightful radio hits. Before you ask, they do not wear their hair in beehives anymore. As a rule. Do not even ask! The beehive is no longer on the menu!
And now it is time for the pictoral illustrations of the trip!
Behold, the mountainy goodness of Utah.
See how pretty?
Check out how clean the streets are. No garbage blowing around. No homeless people even. It’s like Mayberry.
I love that they have a trolley system. So Euro and environmental.
Arty blurry shot.
Arty nighttime shot, in which you can see nothing but I like the color of the sky here.
My ginormous hotel room. I regret to inform you that I never got around to taking photos of the lobby and corridors of our hotel, but trust me, it was like living in Versailles. In.Cred.I.Ble. Everything was ornate and gilded. There was a mirror in one of the ballrooms that was rumored to have cost a million dollars. (In the words of Dr. Evil, “One meellion dollars!“)
Topic Change
Also, the art auction last Saturday went very well. I was expecting it to be a standard auction, with the auctioneer and the little paddles and everything, but it was a silent auction. All the art was spread out in various rooms of this convention center, and each had a sheet with a list of prices, so people would go around and put their names next to whatever price they were bidding. My orange painting was in the room that closed for bidding first out of all the rooms, and nobody had bid on it at closing time, which made me sad and embarassed. Although to be fair, it was so early in the night (ie. people were not very liquored up) that not very many pieces in that room had any bids.
But the yellow painting was in the room that stayed open the latest, and it had an actual little bidding war going on for it! I kept checking back on it and each time there would be a new signature. Which was awesome.
So my yellow painting is gone forever but I still have the orange one, since it was all pathetic and rejected by society and stuff. There is a happy ending though, because one of my coworkers is obsessed with orange and she wants to just buy it herself, for her house! Rock. It is nice to be unloading some stuff before I move. Also the money and the validation is not too bad. I think with this sudden extra cash I am going to buy an ipod, so that once school starts I can listen while I paint in my little cubicle. (And, to be honest, possibly forget that I am in public and sing along and annoy everyone around me.)
Again with the phototage!
Here is my apartment, in the midst of being packed up. This is what it looks like when you walk in the door.
And this is what it looks like when you are standing in the kitchen, at the far end of the bedroom/living room/only room.
See that rug under the coffee table? It’s gone now. My mom packed it up and hauled it away yesterday. Now, The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite movies ever, and I always laugh at that line about how his rug “really tied the room together,” but I never really GOT it. I never really understood what that meant in practical terms. Well, now I know. I mourn the loss of my shagadelic 70s Scandinavian rug. My apartment looks crazy now. It’s just so un-tied together, you know? Bah.
In finality
I went out with a friend last night, and also her friend, her friend’s boyfriend, and one of HIS friends. (Ack, sorry; I need a flow chart for this story.) The boyfriend’s friend was awesome and I love him. However, I am moving out of my apartment two weeks from yesterday. Sad sad, cry cry, crappy timing etc. I hope he calls.
Have a pleasant Sunday, friends.
4.8.2005
A Sunday that begins before the cock croweth, and boy am I pissed about it.
So, thus beginneth the weekend of Supa-Xtra Insanity!! Right now it is Friday night, and I am home “packing” for my work trip to Salt Lake City.
However this is all I have done so far tonight:
1. Watched two episodes of The Golden Girls on Lifetime.
2. Ate some sushi and salad (since I quit my gym membership, I am making up for it by eating lots of fruits and vegetables and crunchy eel rolls).
3. Opened up my two new DVDs from Netfix.
4. Marveled at the fact that Magnolia is 3 hours and 8 minutes. It’s a great movie, but DAMN. It’s called editing, director dude.
5. Spoke to my mom about the coordination of events for The Madness That Is To Befall Us For The Rest Of The Weekend.
6. Put suitcase in the middle of the room.
7. Poured glass of red wine.
8. Stared at the suitcase.
9. Checked the weather in Salt Lake City on weather.com.
10. Got seduced by internet. Eventually started writing this post.
Have I mentioned how much I hate packing? I am infamous for leaving it until the verrrry last possible minute, as evidenced by the fact that when I was 21, I did not start packing for a YEAR-LONG STAY IN LONDON until the morning of my 2pm flight. My mom had been screeching at me to “get on it already” for days, but such was the power of my convictions (laziness) that I held strong (was lazy) the entire time (was reduced to a mad racing fool trying for three hours to cram clothes for four seasons into the required two suitcases).
Sigh. I don’t have that “luxury” this time though. I am really gonna have to get this done tonight, because the rest of my weekend is very insane. This is what it involves:
Saturday morning: My mom arrives to continue with the moving-out of my stuff from my apartment. (Have I packed any boxes that need to be moved out? Three guesses.)
Saturday noon: We drop my paintings off at the site of that art auction. Yup, it’s tomorrow night. Two paintings of mine are going to be auctioned off for charity, and I am so excited! I got them framed and everything:
It’s weird to think that after tomorrow, I’ll never see either one of them again (sniff). That is, of course, unless they don’t sell, and that will just make me sad for a whole different reason.
Moving on with the Schedule of Doom!
Saturday afternoon: Go back to my mom’s house in the suburbs. Help her unpack the car. Take advantage of washing machine that does not require quarters.
Saturday evening: The auction! Get all gussied up and watch my babies get sold to the highest bidder.
Saturday late night: Go home. Try to get a few hours sleep.
Sunday, 6AM IN THE FRIGGIN MORNING: Car comes to pick me up.
Sunday, 7:40AM, SWEET JESUS OH THE PAIN: My flight to Salt Lake City leaves from Dulles airport, which is not in downtown DC, nooooo, but out in the suburbs. The plane LEAVES the ground, theoretically, at 7:40am. I did not know that airports were even open at 7:40am on Sundays, but apparently they are.
Sunday, 10:20am: I arrive in the Land of The Mormons. I’ll be there until Thursday, and I will think of you all lots and take many photos of mountain ranges and wholesomeness to share with you when I return.
Have a nice week, y’all (I am trying this out in advance, for Savannah). If I’m lucky, I’ll have enough spare time to visit the Salt Lake of Salt Lake City. Maybe I will catch a delicious bass.