guilt by association

over $10 burgers at the "neighborhood bar" the other night, my blogmate called to my attention the list of $10 martinis on the wall. i'll spare you another rant about my lack of understanding of chicagoans and their ritzy martinis, but the final three on this list were pretty funny, especially when read sequentially:

french

dirty

wet

i mean really. are we talking about drinks or porn?

meanwhile, back at the ranch...

i'm a little embarrassed.

i lead such a comparatively uninteresting life. my weekend consisted of working, eating and running. and truth be told, that's how i spend most of my time. when my blogmate (who i can't acronymize properly because it makes her "mb," which would really throw me off) got home from her rowdy wedding festivities and said "so how was your weekend?" i only had "it was fine! i learned how to make cornish game hens and pilot my new meat thermometer!" and whereas my good blogmate (ooooohh... mgb?) returned from our sex-and-the-city-like dinner to clever although rather unnecessarily deflating comments about her scandalous behavior, i returned home to my boyfriend (mb; you can see where this gets confusing) serenely sitting on the couch with a book, looking up only to ask "can you give me an example of a paradox?" far from scandalous.

to be fair, the paradox conversation was a little funny. you try to come up with good examples after helping down a bottle of pinot noir. but mostly, i'm very excited that if i can't be the girl who spends her time kissing her gay friends and punk rock acquaintances and staying out until three, at least i get to be friends with that girl, and feel a little cooler by association.

do you want fries with that?

you all know our good connecticut friend who constantly amuses us with her good breeding (and willingness to talk about thongs and cuss like a sailor in public). i mean really- who else leaves messages like, "i was wondering if i could impose on you to borrow your greenday CD" on answering machines? after a sexandthecity-like dinner our little circle of sexandthecity-like girlfriends (to the extent that there are four of us) gave her a good razzing about her choice of restaurant. we'd decided that none of us could stand to shower, much less cook, and after weeks of her raving about her new favorite burger joint we finally gave in. she'd promised us some sort of neighborhood dive where we'd fit right in in our cargo pants and running shoes... not a self-proclaimed bistro that served free-range chicken and escargot (to which she wore a twin set with pearl buttons). as usual, my blogmate and i quickly buckled under the pressure of our impending yuppiness, ordered a bottle of pinot noir, and proceeded to have a perfectly lovely evening with our friends (deliberately mispronouncing things on the menu and mocking the personal habits of our coworkers).

i strolled into my apartment in high-spirits, not at all expecting to find a very funny and gentle rejection on my very own blog. until then i had no idea you could have an awkward silence all by yourself. don't get me wrong- i'm actually quite excited to have enticed a near-stranger to participate in our blogging adventure so actively- in fact i hope rcfog will keep it up...

nonetheless, i think it's about time i gave myself my own acronym. i've never felt like i needed one, as "me" seemed to suffice. but now i think vefob (very embarrassed friend of bride) is perhaps more fitting.

bourbon is a double-edged sword

now that i've returned to my baseline, non-bridesmaid state (i.e. eagerly awaiting the next episode of gilmore girls and watching basketball over PBR) i've got time to extensively ponder my bridesmaid behavior and have come to some unsettling conclusions.

i started to ask myself why the rather cute friend of the groom (rcfog) with whom i spent the better part of an evening engaged in flirty banter wasn't willing to aknowledge said flirty banter. but now that i'm back to my usual state of relative clarity, it's all too clear- or rather, the possibilities are endless:

could it be that i spent the better part of the previous evening engaged in flirty banter with the punk rock groomsman (prgm) IN FRONT of rcfog (and yes, i know he noticed on account of he called me out on it later)? or maybe it was the fact that there were scheduled make-out sessions with not one, but two gay friends of the groom (gfog#1 and gfog#2)- for the record they both said i was a good kisser but who knows what that means? it could also have something to do with my kicking off the conversation with rcfog with a pretty self-incriminating story about the groom busting me doing something that would (to an outsider) make me appear considerably more sketchy than i actually am (i had to tell rcfog something- he wanted dirt on the bachelorette party and i didn't want to cough it up).

whatever the reason that rcfog didn't immediately (or in the face of my amazing persistence) succomb to my adorable charm, i'm sure that i might be in more favorable standing had i not hit the bottle quite so hard. it's hard to know when alcohol switches from social lubricant to enough rope to hang yourself.

blogger hits the road

i never thought i'd hear myself say this, but i don't think i can take another open bar.

staring blankly at the chipper bar tender this morning at the um-teenth garden party in the last two weeks, i declined the bloody mary and oyster shooter, opting instead for orange juice and coffee.

i pondered the events of the last 72 hours, unable to draw any meaningful conclusions.

now that i've recovered from the slack-jawed paralyzed state i entered after, "hey, this is sort of funny since my ex-girlfriend is marrying your ex-boyfriend," and have laid to rest my transient crush on the punk rock groomsman, i have to ask myself: how is that we're still such drunken idiots?

don't get me wrong. i'm all in favor of drunkenness, and, quite frankly, am idiotic enough when i'm sober... but i don't think my body can take the two in combination anymore- i just can't keep up.

i guess i'll have to take comfort in not being the biggest drunken idiot. as i greeted the aforementioned punk rock groomsman who couldn't understand why i didn't want to drink vodka at 11AM on easter sunday i wondered why in the world he was so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. then i noticed that he was very much wearing his tux from last night having clearly spent the night in a hotel room other than his own.

i'm one to talk, i guess, since i woke up with a walloping headache and someone's phone number written on my hand. fortunately for me, the decorum of staying with your parents requires that you come home alone to your own bed.

i feel like there's a lesson in here somewhere, but i think i'm just too hungover to see it. talk about running on empty.

maybe i'm a quack, but in my defense...

first of all, a few words on the previously mentioned yuppie afternoon: as much as i love my jeans-and-sweatshirt lifestyle, i thought it was time for a self-esteem afternoon. you know - feeling out of shape? run a little. feeling poor? return an expensive purchase you don't need. feeling unhealthy? have healthy dinner. granted, by "return expensive purchase" i wasn't expecting the subsequent "make replacement expensive purchase," and by "healthy" i didn't have to mean sushi, which helped the feeling unhealthy but exacerbated the feeling poor. but it was fun.

except now my blogmate is off on yet another bridemaid-related trip back home, while i am stuck at work this weekend hoping she has fun and has a drink or two for me. sad, though, because apparently her foot hurts too much to walk on it. parting words to me were that she feels vindicated for my not believing her yesterday when we were running. so, in my defense, she was complaining of knee pain, hip pain and ankle pain. no foot pain. i am not a rocket scientist, and i realize it sounds lame to say i didn't believe her knee, hip and ankle pain but that her foot is an entirely different story. but i swear she couldn't have been running with me if her foot hurt that badly before.

i know everyone has their opinions on health, especially around nutrition and exercise. but maybe i really am in left field. mb has decided that he doesn't know what i stand for anymore, based on my recent disclosure that i have been withholding feedings on my plants, because i believe based on their yellow- and falling-down-ness that their time in my kitchen window is coming to a natural end. mb is trying to force me to reinstate feedings because he believes i have no respect for my parsley's life. i would personally like to do the humane thing (plant-ane thing? plantain?) and put them more quickly out of their misery by sticking them on my porch to freeze, but can't for fear mb might put out a citizen's arrest on me.

the accidental yuppie.

my blogmate and i are self declared low brow types. we like our clothes from tj maxx and our beer in a can, thank you very much.
so after a somewhat successful jog (by which i mean that my perceived imminent heart attack didn't actually take place) we decided to return some of our more extravagant purchases at ann taylor and find a cheap sushi place for dinner...
by which we apparently meant going to buy more clothes at ann taylor and finding ourselves seated at a new, $10 martini, stylish bathroom (what is it with these new restaurants and their designer sinks?), sophisticated lighting scheme place up in lincoln square that was metromix's pick of the week.
not that we didn't love it. the clothes look good. the sushi was delicious. now i have some good conversation material for all my hypothetical dates.
but it seems that we yet again stumbled into yuppieness... and now we have to go find some PBR to drink in our flip flops to redeem ourselves.

the jock inside

we've all head of people with drinking problems, gambling problems, drug problems... people who are addicted to shopping, addicted to sex, addicted to chocolate.
i think i'm addicted to basketball.
let me clarify. i'm addicted to march madness.
i can't stop.
for 4 days i've walked around with my bracket in my purse- it's getting rattier by the minute, now all market up with the corrections i've made- who would have known that blindly guessing was a bad way to predict the tourny?
granted i made a few exceptions to the chaos by going for schools that have funny sounding names or that are vaguely close to my heart for historical reasons, but really i just guessed.
the guy at work who's running the pool told me that my bracket was "adorable."
maybe college basketball just enables my sitting around bars drinking beer and getting rowdy (and perhaps i also have a drinking problem), and maybe it engratiates me to my brother (blog to come about how i and all my highschool freinds were plagued by younger, more attractive, better-adjusted siblings)... but there's something about the thrill of it all, especially in those final minutes of the game that leaves me hungry for more...

as a sad postscript, i'll tell you about my discovery at the bucks game that feminists have a long way to go. during half-time they brought out a bunch of middle school basketball teams (boy teams and girl teams) for some kind of race to make baskets from the free-throw line. we were sitting in front of a row of obnoxious 10-year old boys and one of them kindly alerted his friends to his astonishing discovery- "LOOK! they're letting the cheerleaders play!"

family ties

i called home this morning for the weekly chat with my parents, forgetting the promise i had made to myself to lead off with a profuse apology to my father for leaving him a plastic penis water pistol to discover in his trunk on the way to work. he, of course, refused to let it go, and made sure to remind me that he'd found a plastic penis water pistol in the trunk of his car on the way to work, and also admitted that he felt quite compelled to torture me about it. i begged him to throw it away, but he remained steadfast in his refusal- he apparently prefers to leave it on the mantle in the living room, awaiting my arrival next week (intended recipient of plastic penis water pistol is getting married). in a last-ditch effort i pointed out to my dad that the plastic penis water pistol doesn't even work... although he sounded mildy disappointed, he didn't cave.

i can't quite bring myself to share this story with my younger brother who is in town for the weekend. we're pretty open with each other (i think) to the extent that every now and then the details of his romantic exploits get to be a bit much for me (you have to draw the line somewhere, and i say that line should be drawn way before "she didn't even want to mess around")...
and it's not like we've run out of things to do or talk about. after coaching me through the pounding of 4 beers in a half hour at a microbrewery in milwaukee we bought cheap tickets to a bucks game, during which he raised very complex questions like, "do you think the mascot has a day job?"

maybe i haven't given my family enough credit...

mycological madman?

more mushroom mysteries. is anyone else as fascinated by this?

yesterday i got home and found a second message on my answering machine, this time from tina, demanding that leon call her back immediately, but at a different number than the one that mike left a few days ago telling leon it was imperative to call immediately. i waited until after 5 and called the numbers both back to see what kind of voice mail they had, looking for clues. unfortunately, both numbers led to a very generic "welcome to academy services." so at least it's just one person who thinks i'm leon. next, i called the number back and hit zero for the operator, figuring at the very least they should tell me who the heck they are and take me off their list, and maybe if they're nice tell me if i should worry for my personal safety.

apparently nickelodeon and food network tv show hosting isn't very lucrative, because i had a lovely conversation with marc summers, who is the academy services telephone operator. marc told me the place was called academy collection services, and that should tell me what they did. he couldn't find my name or number anywhere on leon's account, but said that sometimes they do call neighbors trying to locate people, although he wasn't sure if that was why i was getting calls.

so i don't know if leon took my name off of my mailbox and looked up my phone number to try and avoid the collection people, or if it was just a random neighbor dial that happened twice in a row. marc implied that leon has multiple accounts with them by multiple clients looking to collect, and that maybe one of those clients had my number for some reason... i don't know. if i don't stop getting calls, should i call my landlord? or just cancel my land line altogether? is it sad that this is the biggest drama in my life?

the journey of a thousand miles begins with one plastic penis

act I:

it's like i always say- you haven't lived until you've traveled 1,000 miles witha suitcase full of plastic penises (peni?). after the orgy of yuppiness at ann taylor, i packed up little garden party dresses, strappy sandals, and collection of trashy bachelorette party materials and flew home for a weekend of polite bridal showers... and plastic penises (peni?).
i stood in line at the airport sweating bullets, wondering if i'd have the misfortune of getting pulled out of the security line to have the good people from the TSA discover my carry-on filled to the brim with scandaolous lingerie and adult party games (pin the macho on the man, anyone?).
i thought i'd made a clean getaway until the email came from my father. "it was good seeing you this weekend. your mother and i are constantly reminded of how proud we are of your accomplishments... even if i did find a penis water pistol in my trunk."
doh!

act 2:
now i've put the penises (peni?) behind me and moved on to more sophisticated endeavors...
march madness. as i obsessed over my bracket (after all, i've got a whole $3 invested) all day yesterday, i was reminded of a few fundamental truths:
#1) anything can become a crack-like addiction if you let it. i really couldn't care less about college basketball until i entered the pool... but i spent yesterday glued to various bar stools, starring in zombie-like fashion at the big screen TV's, pondering deep, meaningful questions like "where is old dominion anyway?" i'm totally hooked.
#2) it's all about the simple pleasures. sure i may work ungodly numbers of hours and have a dismally poor romantic prognosis, but damn it, i found the free pizza in wicker park and watched my brother eat half of a fried chicken surrounded my martini sipping yuppies.

at the end of the day, i think i'm managing to get a little wiser...
always check to make sure your plastic penises (peni?) are properly stowed for take-off and landing.
if the bride's medical career doesn't ever take off she can always be a porn star (she's got the wardrobe).
bars are more fun if you go there for a specific reason: pizza, basketball, chicken. oh yeah, and beer.

he said what?

unrelated, but true.

1. in a display of true family-centered-ness, mb told me yesterday that in the future he would like to have two children... because any more than that would get in the way of his plans to own a suit-wearing monkey.

2. this might only make sense to our midwestern blog readers, but during a talk this afternoon i heard the speaker describe one of his clients from fond du lac, wisconsin, as being from "a rough neighborhood north of milwaukee." i'm sorry, fond du lac?!? rough? while speaking on the south side of chicago??? fond du lac has 20,000 people, a main street complete with faux-wrought-iron street lamps, two perfectly good high schools from which people graduate and go to college, proximity to reasonably cultural attractions, and is as middle-america as it gets.

3. one of our favorite late-entry blog readers sent me a link to a ny times article essentially on religious nuts with blogs, suggesting that my entries speculating on my blogmate's leanings toward unitarianism might join the likes of gaycanadianfeministmormons.blogspot.com, or something along those lines. i'm so proud.

mycological mystery

our faithful readers will remember leon, my downstairs neighbor who subscribes to all of the mushroom magazines. so this afternoon on checking my answering machine, there was a message from some guy with a new-york-ish accent asking for leon. seems it is imperative that leon call him back immediately regarding a situation in chicago, illinois (that's illi-noise, not illi-noy). out of curiosity, i looked up leon's phone number, thinking maybe we had similar numbers and that this confusion would continue to happen, allowing me to continue spying on this fascinating fungus lover. but alas, it was not meant to be. so that means i only have this phone call to use... i'm trying to figure out how i can call this number back and tell the investigating party that i am not leon, but for some reason desperately need to know what's going on. i'm taking suggestions.

in other notes, i'm having angst about the previously mentioned pink party dress. the rest of the story, briefly, is that my blogmate and i were on a marathon shopping afternoon, one of the only shopping expeditions we've ever had that does not involve hunting clearance racks at t.j. maxx, and we had a blow-out at ann taylor loft on halsted. so many things fit me perfectly. one of them was a size 6 bubble gum pink party dress, complete with tulle in the skirt so it flares out a little. now, as one might gather from my stated interests of power drills and spying on leon, i am not a pink party dress kind of girl. but we were having such a fun yuppie (how do you spell a single yuppie? yuppy?) afternoon, and it was so nice to wander into starbucks with our arms full of purchases, thinking that just for this one day we could hang out with the trixies before going back to the organized-by-color racks at unique thrift... so i bought the dress. but now i'm realizing that the dress costs the same amount as a pair of shoes for work that don't hurt my feet or make my feet smell yucky (yucky? yuckie?), and so i'm torn. it's all well and good to feel girly and pretty in a pink party dress, but it's also hard to feel girly or pretty wearing smelly beat-up sneakers that need to be febrezed every night before i put them back in the closet. what's a girl to do?

how the other half lives

i've spent the last few days catsitting.

it's an arrangement that works well for all parties, particularly the cats. my rich married couple friends leave their fancy downtown apartment and their two rather high-maintenance cats under my care. i feed the cats (twice a day), refuel high-tech fountain-like water bowl and deal with the nasty litter box. in return i get to eat their food, use their washing machine, and watch their tivo. i also get to sleep in a bed that's WAY more comfortable than mine, use an internet connection that's WAY faster than mine, and, in general, life a life that is WAY nicer than mine.

except for the feline alarm clock factor.

come 6AM these cats are ready to go. what with the pouncing on me, purring, knocking things over, and overall obnoxious behavior encircling me, there's really no opportunity for the much anticipated snooze (they also live a good 10 minutes closer to my job than i do). this problem is aggravated by the fact that they have a VERY complicated coffee maker.

it's all a nice reminder that i like my low-brow life.

the sweet smell of relief

in accepting the sad reality that nothing exciting is ever going to happen to me, i've decided that it's time to start appreciating the little things...

for example, the apparent fact that drunk dialing takes on a whole new meaning once you're married. the other day i got a late night phone call (by which i mean 10PM, but for us that's late) from one of my more established, married friends (who had obviously thrown back a few) to the tune of, "will you pleeeeeeease come to costa rica with me someday? i really want to go and you know that blankety-blank [husband] won't ever come to costa rica with me. pleeeeeease???" so while i probably shouldn't hold my breath for marriage to a clown or an indian neurologist (side rant: is that really my idea of exciting?), i can at least be comforted by the fact that when my richer and more successful friend gets tanked she fantasizes about backpacking in central america... with me.

then there's the following saga: on the way to work the other day i heard this mysterious squeaking that sounded like it was coming from under the passenger seat of my car. the squeaking didn't line up with the other sounds my car was making and my extremely rodent-phobic self had the fleeting (but panic-stricken) thought of, "dear god please don't let there be a mouse in my car." i managed to get this thought out of my head ("how could a mouse have jumped up into my car") and forgot about it. until... a few days (weeks?) later i was driving to work (again) and was suddenly overwhelmed by an absolutely foul stench. "dear god," i thought, "please don't let there be a dead mouse in my car." i couldn't even bring myself to look, and decided that i'd rather live in denial. "maybe i can just never lose anything ever again and therefore never have to go looking under the seats in my car." come to find out a couple of days later that said foul stench plagued the ENTIRE city of chicago that day and that numerous people had called in with "it smells like something died" complaints. the source of the smell remains a mystery, but i'm fairly confidant that it wasn't emanating from my car.

so while i may not have won the lottery or been chosen to compete on the amazing race (another fantasy of my above-mentioned drunk dialing friend), and while i still can't pull off the pointy- toed-faux-crocodile- shoes-with-designer-jeans-and- slutty-camisole look, i can take pleasure in having convinced my blogmate that she NEEDED the strapless pink party dress... and that i can go back to losing stuff.