looking for love in all the wrong places

i don't know what i find more surprising- that the brad and jennifer breakup has become unqualified headline news, or that so many people seem to be sad about it. i for one am delighted.
in my celebratory state (it is, on some level, now slightly more likely that brad pitt will marry me) i agreed, not only to watch the packers/vikings game with my blogmate, but to watch it in a bar over bloody marys. i had planned a busy afternoon at home trying to get my act together, but let's be honest, all i really do is shuffle clothes and papers around and don't actually manage to make the list any shorter. so off we went to my pseudo-neighborhood bar to drink knock your socks off bloody marys made with absolut pepper vodka with a splash of guinness- a steal at $4. while i love all things wisconsin and desperately want to care about the packers, i was mostly interested in the bloody mary.
so of course it was all a bust. the packers got clobbered, and boy did the bloody marys disappoint. we sat on the wrong side of the bar where we were attended to by someone who was obviously a barback and clearly terrified. he hadn't at all mastered the eyebrow raise and lean forward heyi'maknowledgingthatyouwantadrink maneuver and stood there awkwardly, too far away from us, so that we couldn't tell if we should order or not. we should have known better but we ordered our bloody marys anyway. no guinness, less of side salad in them as usual, and just plain mediocre, especially when we found out that the $4 drink special was off.
we decided to move back to our usual side of the bar but, of course, that meant we had to close out one tab and open another. turned out that was way too complicated for scared barback boy (who would seem way less out of place in a bookstore) and we spent the rest of our time trying to straighten out that mess. then came the mean waitress and the packers' humiliating defeat and our uncertainty about how to acknowledge the guy at the table next to us who we vaguely know from work. the blow was softened by the yummy fries... and vodka is vodka, even if it's entourage includes hohum bloody mary mix.
so rather than viewing the evening as a total loss, i've decided to extract the following learning points:
1) good, cheap bloody mary is better than bad, expensive bloody mary
2) attractive, slick bartender is better than stupid bar back
3) nice, funny waitress is better than mean, bitchy waitress
4) i will never get to root for a winning team and i might as well stop trying
5) there's still a chance for brad and me