Sunday, March 12, 2006

Weekend adventures

FRIDAY
8:15 Go on one of the shortest dates of my life.
(He showed up high. Like ADHD high. I told him he was a loser.) Go home and watch TV instead.

SATURDAY
7:00 Wake up at the crack of dawn.
For no useful reason. On my one day to sleep in. Stupid sunshine! Why do you have to peek in my windows and make my bedroom all warm and cheery and wake-uppable? Curse you!

9:00 Get my hair cut. It’s funny how you can go from shaggy fluffball to droopy power fro overnight. I’d reached critical droop earlier in the week, and I had to go to two client meetings looking like I had a nest on my head. So put a visit to the nice hair lady on the top of my weekend agenda. I go to one of those walk-in, no-appointment-necessary, take-your-chances salons haircut stores because 1) I don’t see any reason to spend $40+ on a basic ’do I can get just as easily for $12 and 2) I can walk there from my house. And when you get there the moment the door opens in the morning, there’s (almost) no waiting!

9:45 Pick up dry cleaning. I own nine dress shirts (10 if you count the one that’s gettin’ kinda ghetto), and I’ve been traveling for work (the only time I play dress-up) so much lately I’d completely depleted my stockpile. Now everything’s clean again. Which means it’s gonna be that much harder to make decisions when I get dressed in the morning.

11:00 Begin Journey of Pain. I didn’t realize the St. Patrick’s Day parade was yesterday. I got on the train at 11:00, and by 11:01 I was regretting ever being born. The train was PACKED with drunken college kids in unnatural shades of green. And they all had their volumes set on Shriek. And they sprayed beer on each other. Oh—and there was some kind of problem four trains ahead of us, so we sat on the tracks for achingly long periods of time. Stupid loud, drunken kids. Always after me Lucky Charms.

11:46 Arrive a minute late for my back and upper-arm waxing, thanks to the abovementioned train delays. I don’t mind body hair on men, but I’m not a big fan of it when it’s on their backs and upper arms. And I’m REALLY not a fan of it when it’s on my back and upper arms. And the older I get, the more I seem to devolve into a hairy-back-and-upper-arms monkey-like state. Intelligent Design doesn’t seem to be making it go away, so I have a nice Polish lady who rips the hair right out of my skin for me. She has pictures of her Asian daughter (“she’s adopted”) all over her salon, and she chats away the whole time she’s tearing the flesh from your body. She usually does an awesome job, but this time she missed a few little islands of hair and I broke out in little pimples all over my arms by Saturday morning. Sexy!

1:00 Arrive for my first-ever visit to the Field Museum. I did a one-hour tour of the permanent exhibit (including an emergency meal at McDonald’s) and then met three friends at 2:00 for the last days of Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption. Giggly title notwithstanding, the exhibit is pretty interesting, but I’d hoped for a lot more frozen-in-time bodies and a lot fewer amulets and melted coins. It is well-researched, though—and it does a nice job of helping you understand the staggering enormity of the destruction.

5:00 Do some shopping for birthday cards, Chapstick (except I accidentally bought the Walgreens brand, so for the next couple months people will think I’m too poor to spend an extra 80¢ for name-brand lip balm), and other various and sundry items. Oh, I also bought a gift, because the next adventure on my schedule was:

7:30 Birthday party. My friend Paul had a nice little get-together last night for his 40something-th birthday, with homemade roast beef sandwiches, some shockingly delicious cake, and a nice gathering of men who laughed and snorted together over Stewie Griffin – The Untold Story and drooled together over the shirtless Timothy Olyphant (and the coupling of Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) in Go. Then we watched a TiVo’d episode of Ghost Whisperer, which is so staggeringly retarded it could almost be elected POTUS. Except with worse dialogue.

8:30 Ruin the ending of Wicked for a friend AS HE’S WATCHING IT. My friend Mike called me from NYC to tell me how amazing the show was, and I—not doing the time-zone math right—thought he'd seen it to the end. So I asked him how soon he figured out that [element X in the show] would turn out to be [surprise element Y in the show]. Then I heard the announcement in the background telling patrons to return to their seats for Act II. And I felt very low. As low as a Munchkin under a farmhouse.

11:30 Aborted trip to the Eagle. I’d been in a skanky-bar mood for a while, so I brought my leather vest and wore my boots and low-slung jeans to the party so I could go trolling afterward. But by midnight I was too tired put myself through all the trouble. And the guys at the party were frankly a little horrified I would even consider it. One of them even used to work there—which was all the decision-making influence I needed.

SUNDAY
12:00 Meet Stan for coffee.
We met at a Starbucks in Lincoln Park. Which makes us Trixies. Except we talked about politics and religion and other deeply, profoundly intellectual stuff. And while we did talk about boys for a bit, we never once compared purses or shared the names of our pedicurists. So we’re SO not Trixies.

5:00 Leave for rehearsal. The show is gonna be pretty awesome. Got your tickets yet?

8:45 Dinner at IHOP with Matt. Just like every Sunday.

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