Monday, September 29, 2003

From playing Pirates to playing Packers in just three days

Chris, Bill and I met for drinks tonight at a dive bar around the corner from our office. It was a total guys' night out, complete with beer and salty bar snacks and talk about chicks—except I was always available to help keep things nice and gay.

After Chris took off to catch his train to the suburbs, Bill invited me over to his place to watch the first Bears game in the newly refurbished Soldier Field—which, contrary to popular opinion, I kind of like. Yes, it looks like a giant toilet bowl/space ship parked inside the shell of the old Soldier Field, but the two elements provide a spirited dialogue between the stately, controlled march of the original columns and the swirling, asymmetrical vortex of the new stadium. And the ongoing uproar over the renovation has not only underscored the obvious importance of architecture to us Chicagoans, but it's also reinstated colonnade into the vocabulary of civil discourse. Everybody wins!

So Bill, his wife and I sat in their living room all night multitasking our collective asses off: While we used the magic of Picture In Picture technology to watch both the game and the final, gripping episode of Temptation Island 3, Bill heated a pizza in the oven, Laura studied for an actuary exam, I tried to develop a meaningful friendship with their new dog, and Bill beat me in a high-scoring game of Scrabble. (While I racked up an impressive 45-point quote, he managed to squeeze a whopping 77 points out of sizzles. The bastard.)

Bill and I capped off our evening with a rousing medley of show tunes at his piano. But the biggest news of the night came when we discovered—after working with each other for five months and working out together five days a week for almost as long—that we have the same birthday. Who knew?

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