Out with the old

Just as I was packing up at work to start the holiday weekend, I got a call from AMEX. It seems that yet again some mouth-breathing cousin-fucker has gotten ahold of my credit card information and tried to make a DMP (Dumbass Major Purchase) guaranteed to trip the fraud alarms. Thankfully, those fraud alarms work, but until I get my new card (and contact every company who auto-bills to my AMEX), I am credit cardless—and I’m not earning cash back on everything I buy. I hate you, mouth-breathing cousin-fucker!

But on to cheerier things: The boyfriend and I were invited to three parties on Friday night, but we committed to only the first two invitations we got. The first was a goodbye party for one of his former coworkers, who is embarking on an exciting new career. The party was at the Grotto, whose lounge décor is almost as cool as its bathroom décor—which will totally influence the bathroom renovation of the Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo the boyfriend and I are buying. Once we scrape up enough money to renovate the bathrooms. But that’s not the point of this paragraph. The point is this: I’ve finally found a big-boy drink I actually like, and I’m ordering it more and more when I hang out with the big kids. So on Friday night I ordered a vodka tonic as though I’d been drinking them all my life. And when it came, it was even more drinkable than the last one I had—meaning it was the first vodka tonic I finished all the way to the bottom. Just like a big boy! Curious as to why this vodka tonic tasted more like grapefruit Kool-Aid than the last two I’d tried to choke down, I asked the waitress what the house vodka was. She told me it was Gordon’s. Having never heard of Gordon’s, I told her that I really liked it—in the tone one might use to describe an exciting new wine or an innovative lamb dish. She smiled at me as though I had just shown her the contents of my nose, and when I relayed this story to the boyfriend, he told me that Gordon’s is so cheap I could probably fill a bathtub with it for under $20. I made a point to avoid the waitress when we left. From there we headed to a party thrown by one of my former coworkers, where I rediscovered the endless deliciousness of Doritos and brownies. Urp.

We had the official inspection of the Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo on Saturday morning, followed by a ton of errands—including poking through the going-out-of-business-sale remains at Bad Boys, where generations of gay Chicago boys have bought trashy underwear, sexual-innuendo-laden T-shirts and up-to-the-second fashions of dubious taste. I stumbled out of the store half an hour later with two new swim suits, three foo-foo trendy shirts and 10 pair of Calvin Klein (which makes them not trashy) underwear. All at 50 to 70% off!

New Year’s Eve Day was one of those magical days best described by the poets. But I’m going to try anyway, without ever resorting to haiku: The boyfriend and I stayed in bed all day—literally until the sun went down—getting up only to forage for food and to pee. But we didn't sleep there all day; we watched TV. For seven solid hours we took in a marathon of Law & Order reruns on his TiVo and a couple random things we stumbled on as we flipped through the channels. There was a point, though, where he went to check his email and he left me alone with a Lifetime TV Movie that promptly sucked me into its gaping maw. I will never get that half hour back. Or those tears. Since none of our friends invited us to any NYE parties (harrumph), we sauntered over to the nearby Cheesecake Factory for an early dinner and then walked a mile round-trip to the closest Jewel to burn off what we just ate … and to stock up on ice cream. Then we spent the rest of the evening back in bed watching a Sex and the City DVD marathon and fattening ourselves on creamy frozen goodness. We ushered in 2007 on his rooftop deck, watching the Navy Pier and Grant Park fireworks from our wind-whipped perch 64 stories in the sky. And discreetly aiming our ice cream burps away from one another.

And yesterday, the boyfriend had to work, so I did laundry (somehow losing one of my new swim suits in the process), paid bills, cleaned out emails and went to Sidetrack for show tunes, where I developed a migraine that kept me up most of the night praying for death. But I survived long enough to blog about it, so it looks like 2007 is off to a good start. Yay!