Weekend adventures: the recap

See the post below for my pre-weekend schedule, with all its promise of fun and adventure and maybe even the opportunity to shoot Dick Cheney in the face. Then read this post to see how everything turned out.

Friday
4:30ish. Haircut. Enter Joyce DeWitt. Exit Jake, Man with Hair from the 21st Century.

7:30. Dinner with the most random bunch of guys ever. Not what I’d expected. Three of our eight didn’t show up. I got there first and secured us a table outside, which meant that every breeze showered us with little flowery bits of tree poop. But I had a cosmo with pineapple vodka that went down as easy as melted tropical-fruit Jell-O. It was probably the fifth martini I’ve ever ordered, and definitely the first one I finished. I think I even got a tiny little buzz off it. But dinner was so disappointing (I’ve seen human toes bigger than the steak my friend Matt got) that we went down the street to Melrose Diner for our dessert. Which was actually pretty delicious.

Saturday
7:00. AIDS Marathon training. 10 miles. In the heat. I didn’t do so well in the last two miles (I run in the heat as easily as I can say “Our country is in good hands with President Bush in charge” without giggling), but my team made it. And nobody died.

Here’s a pic of us being goofy (and frighteningly misshapen and unphotogenic) at the 5-mile turnaround:


And here’s a pic of us celebrating in the shade at the finish line. Nothing says happiness like not dying on a sweaty 10-mile run:


10:00ish. Breakfast. The AIDS Marathon organizers provided tons of finish-line fruit and bagels and other snacks after our run. But five of us went to Stella’s Diner in Boystown afterward and also gorged on one giant breakfast each PLUS a giant plate of berry pancakes we all shared. Because when you run insane amounts of miles in the heat, you can eat anything you want.

Noonish. Something fun I don’t want to blog about just yet. Now I’m ready. But let me start by saying “fun” is relative. Because getting a tattoo (I got a tattoo!) hurts more than Tom DeLay’s brain on Find Your Dignity Day. George and I had been thinking about getting tattoos since before we met, and we’d been talking about it incessantly since we became friends. So a couple weeks ago I announced we were getting them on June 17 (in keeping with my well-established tradition of getting tattoos on the day before or after a major or minor holiday). We marked our calendars, nailed down exactly what we wanted to get (see this post for my only-a-little-bit-clumsy Photoshop rendering) and marched into the tattoo place on Saturday armed with printed artwork, credit cards and the warm feeling that since I’d found free street parking we could keep getting tattoos all day and I’d never have to run out and plug a meter.

And despite the pain (and the fact that I had to hold my arms above my head for a whole hour to keep my 38-year-old canvas taut and my hands fell asleep so bad that they actually hurt worse than the needle) our tats turned out pretty freakin’ cool.

Here’s George's Gothic/Victorian/Kick-Ass design, whose significance I’ll let him explain on his own time in his own blog if he ever feels the need:


And here’s my awesome, a-bit-larger-than-I’d-anticipated-but-there's-nothing-I-can-do-about-it-now new tat, which so far has never missed the litterbox.

Fun fact: The tattoo parlor image library didn’t have the tiger I was looking for, but it had a black panther in the pose I wanted. So the tattoo artist traced the panther outline on me and free-handed the tiger stripes and coloring on his own. I can’t even draw crooked lines, so I’m more than a little impressed (and profoundly relieved) by his talent.

These pix were taken fewer than 24 hours after the tats were finished and bandaged up in what looked like sanitary napkins bought in bulk for heavy-flow days at the camel sorority. So they’re still pink and red and discolored and slightly bloody (and weepy in my case, which makes the tiger look like he just emerged from the sauna). So please withhold your critical analysis until they have a couple weeks to heal—and I have time to realize that HOLY SHIT! I JUST GOT A GIANT TRASHY TATTOO IN MY UNDERPANTS REGION!

8:00. Dinner with Matthew and Todd and George. It was lovely. We added George's friend Shaine to the guest list at the last minute, so I had to use one of my ghetto folding chairs, which totally don’t match the dining-room set. But I didn’t burn anything. And nobody died. So I chalk up the evening as a grand success.

Sunday
11:00. Photo shoot. My fledgling photographer friend Drew is doing a photo series on the theme of passion and he’s invited a bunch of his friends to model for him, so I packed up my knitting running gear and George packed up his giant kitten outfit yoga gear and we headed over to have our passions recorded on digital film. But we didn’t have the time we thought we’d have—and our oozing tats proved to be too interesting to pass up—so we spent two hours recording them on film instead (see above). Drew is also experimenting with color and light and composition, and he took some totally cool portraits of us together (like the one below, which turned out totally cool in a hug-your-friend-shirtless kind of way):


2:00. Seven-hour chorus rehearsal. We got through everything in six hours—including admiring my new tattoo, which I somehow managed to show to everyone in the room. (Did I mention I got a new tattoo? I GOT A NEW TATTOO! IN MY UNDERPANTS REGION!) The show is gonna be spectacular. Get your tickets here.