a small, balding cultural phenomenon?

every girl attracts their own brand of weirdo. for example, dwtacc draws every dark-haired medium-skinned guy with an accent in the chicagoland area, because they all think she's their particular brand of ethnic. i am much less exotic - i am a magnet for vaguely nerdy short men with receding hairlines. not that they're trying to ask me out - they all want to tell me about their dreams for a fancy car.

this started back in college when i drew the short stick at work and had to go to the copy room with the weird guy to make new brochures or something. he kicked things off with a very disturbing beavis-and-butthead cornholio impression (i'd like to see you keep your composure when you've never seen beavis and butthead before and suddenly a small man yanks his shirt above his head and starts screeching about his bunghole), and then, seeing my discomfort, proceeded to convince me of his classiness by telling me all about the money he planned to make, the fancy car he would drive, and the fine home he would own, once he became a rich lawyer. since i was in the middle of a bunch of rural sociology classes run by hippies that taught things like sustainable agriculture and cooperative business practices, this didn't get him very far. later, when i moved to chicago, i was at dinner with a friend when he started, again, telling me about the car he would buy after his promotion. when i didn't look impressed enough, he asked me "wouldn't you rather date someone with a nice car?" i tried to explain that i was uncomfortable with the idea of spending so much money on a luxury item and was much happier taking the bus out for burgers, he just looked confused. more recently, at work one of my co-workers parked himself next to my desk and started telling me how much he hated minivans, and hoped to buy either an suv or little sports car. unprompted, he told me "i feel like someone's car should be sexy and support their lifestyle."

this is becoming a disturbing trend. i'm not surprised that short balding men want compensatory cars, or that any men hope electronics ownership can bring them sex... i just want to know why they all want to tell me about it. it can't be because of my deep appreciation for cars; my own colorful auto history has consisted of a 1979 chevy impala wagon with am radio and no heat, and my current 96 plymouth whose check-engine light warns me regularly that i am about to have unscheduled stops in random places throughout the midwest. it can't be because they want to date me, or i would hope they wouldn't share their whole m.o. can someone help me think of a way to remove the "please, share your thinly veiled desperation" sticker from my forehead?

the symco society pages (aka i never met a latte i didn't like)

has anyone ever read those reeeeally small-town newspapers? or columns about some neighboring village with no real news to report except blurbs like "mr. and mrs. fred jones were at the home of violet and jack fisher last evening for a game of bridge"? it occurs to me that our blog reads a little like that... with that guiding principle in mind, a tale of two girls trying to run errands on a thursday afternoon:

my good friend twinset and i had both finished work early on thursday, and since i'd been on long work shifts recently and had some amount of errands to do for my brother's upcoming wedding, she kindly agreed to be my chauffeur around the city doing what girls love best (buying things). it seemed like a fun idea...

in retrospect, twinset and i firmly believe that the whole thing went bad the minute she tried to drive down 53rd street toward martin luther king dr. to take locals to little italy instead of lake shore drive. lesson #1: don't EVER drive down 53rd st in hyde park. it's a commercial strip where, for some reason, NOBODY is in a hurry and EVERYONE double-parks or just stops in intersections to wave to their friends.

ten minutes later, we had made it ten blocks and were on our way. we arrived finally in little italy for the successful procurement of candied almonds for wedding favors, plus cannoli and chocolate treats for twinset and me. perfect, we thought. now just some lattes for the road and we'll be on our way. lesson #2: although you might think a local italian bakery is a better place to buy lattes than starbucks, you would be wrong. twinset and i are not coffee snobs, and have both been known to drink whatever swill comes our way. but this was foul. my dad taught me that no self-respecting italian drinks cappuccino after 10 am, so either this was passive-aggressive vengeance for us ordering the wrong drink at the wrong time, or the milk had been sitting out since 10am cappuccino hour.

latte-less but still determined to have a good afternoon, we promptly got stuck in traffic a few more times, punctuated by twinset telling me things like "i just know this leads to armitage" only to find ourselves in industrial parks, and eventually found our way to the last stop - trader joe's. lesson #3: don't tell the driver of the car anything like "see, [twinset], i'm so glad i'm with you! all of these things might have been frustrating, but as long as we don't let it get to us it's fine..." because that statement might precipitate, say, running said car alongside a cement pole and getting big scratches in the nice clean paint job. doh.

but a good time was still had by all. i got my errands done, twinset determined that her husband would never see the car scratches before she got to the body shop, and we laughed over her stories of finding herself at the gym on a treadmill next to one of chicago's national celebrities. anyone who can describe said unnamed celebrity as "my GOD, he smells DELICIOUS even after he's done running!" can't be too mad at me for the inconvenience of the afternoon. i hope.

the bottom of the barrel

i came home from work the other day feeling particularly defeated and decided to curl up on the couch in my favorite pink pajama bottoms to drown my sorrows in three-buck-chuck and spend some quality time with the gilmore girls. i eyed the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and weighed my options. sure i could do the civilized thing and use a glass, but i'd finally finished washing a giant pile of dishes. for a second it seemed reasonable- nobody would have to know that i'd sunk so low. i'm not sure how long i stood there in the kitchen having an internal debate about whether i was ready to give in and become a completely barbaric pig, but i somehow managed to come to my senses and decided that if i was going to drink alone on the couch at 6:30 on a weekday the least i could do was to use stemwear.

the magnets that hold everything together

my fridge used to be a testament to my young hip life. it chronicled all the fun i was having with my young hip friends and consisted mostly of pictures of us in varying states of intoxication, interspersed with racy commercial art and postcards from the exotic places we were all traveling. but times change, and now my fridge has become a shrine to those same friends' babies. not that they aren't the extraordinarily cute offspring of people who are very important to me... but it's getting a little ridiculous, given that i still function at the level of "ohmigod, billy asked me to the dance(!)" or, at best, "monsoon has $5 lychee martinis on wednesdays!"
i take a little solace in the apparent fact that my silly antics serve as a constant source of amusement to my blogmate, dwtacc, and twinset, who are willing to not only listen to me carry on about said topics, but often act as accomplices. for one thing, it makes me a feel a little better about my failure to evolve into adulthood... and "hey [n#4], a bunch of us are going out for beers tonight," requires me to fabricate entourage on short notice.

emerging from their cocoons

i learned something important wednesday night: goths come out to play on michigan ave at sundown. in the middle of an otherwise very yuppie evening night of meeting mb downtown for a picnic at the free grant park music festival, we found two sad little goths huddling in a little corner of the front garden of the art institute. on the way to dominick's on roosevelt after the concert, a whole goth-gaggle was straggling its way over the bridge. maybe they were on their way to meet the first two sad little goths - i don't know, i can only imagine they all know each other - but i was left with the impression that michigan avenue is a special place for people with spike collars and white face paint.

in other notes, what is it with these people who have never heard of pontoon boats?? i found another besides my chicago-native co-worker, this one a philosophy grad student that mb and i swim with. on trying to explain my fun-filled weekend of floating around on mb's parents' party barge, our philosophical friend asked "so, can you... live... on these... pon-toon boats? at least when i explained that they were basically floating boxes with gerbils for motors, he managed to conclude, "so, i guess you bring lots of beer, then?"

the rise and fall of neurologist number four (n#4)

it's not for lack of trying.

ok, maybe i didn't try so hard, but my blogmate put up a good fight.

it went like this:

i kinda thought i had a little bit of an in with n#4. not enough of an in to do anything about it myself, mind you, but enough that i felt the need to talk about it a whole heck of alot. with the clock ticking, my loyal blogmate absorbed the hint and took matters into her own hands. "game on," she said this afternoon, grinning ear to ear, having just invited him to join us for our collective sorrow-drowning at the local bowling-alley slash bar. then there was a scurry to find to some entourage which resulted only in the recruitment of mb, whose company i always enjoy, but whose presence only promised to create an inadvertent air of staged double date. i'll save for another day my experience with, and subsequent distaste for, double date traps.

my worry was all for naught, as it turned out, as n#4 didn't show.

game over.

not that the outing was a total loss.

we expanded my growing list of potential boyfriend deal-breakers to include non-tongue-in-cheek belief in supernatural phenomena, and crossed another guy off the list based on our (relatively unfounded) suspicion that he was a divorced hyperchristian, rather than an atheist computer programmer. it wasn't totally unfounded, actually. the wwjd bracelet and absence of wedding ring that i could have sworn was there the last time i saw him gave it away.

i also took advantage of my time at lucky strike to think about an unfortunately unstable girl at work who gets so stressed out that her hair actually falls out. maybe i'm a horrible person for repeating it, much less finding it funny, but she's such an antagonizing head case that it's nice to have confirmation that it's not my imagination... and that if my biggest problem is my inability to get n#4's attention maybe my life's not so bad.

figures

i could set my watch by the certain predictable phenomena in my life.
like the fact that every purchase i make of a super-cute, super-cheap, white article of clothing results in my spending twice as much time and money looking for the necessary undergarment to wear under it.
or that while i somehow manage to pass myself off as witty and charming to my girlfriends (i think) without trying very hard, the presence of any cute neurologist (take your pick) turns me into an inarticulate stick in the mud.
being a girl is hard.

like a broken record

all in all it was a good weekend, even if it started out with the discovery that my blogmate has been publically mocking me... ON THE BLOG!

getting back to the point, i really did get to do fun stuff. the high point was decidedly all the sleeping i got to do, but i also went to the chicago botanic gardens with twinset, caught up (albeit on the phone) with DWTACC, went to a pro-soccer game, discovered that many soccer players are hot, discovered that many soccer fans are hot, discovered the phenomenon of the soccer geek.
soccer geeks are, for the record, not hot. they travel in packs, sing annoying songs, and wear really ugly soccer paraphrenalia. having spent a decent chunk of my life on the farm in europe i have a certain respect for soccer obsession, but it's just not as becoming on mainstream, denim-shorts-wearing, middle-aged american men.

all this weekend activity was good distraction from the rather disturbing fact that i have a crush on yet another neurologist. i don't understand how this keeps happening. the current infatuation is, for a change, not indian, but he's equally well dressed and speaks with an adorable eastern european accent which becomes even more adorable when he gets punchy, swears, and then apologizes for swearing.
the sad thing is that it looks like if i want to do any stalking i'm going to have to get in line. apparently i'm not the only one with a thing for neurologists.

re-claiming my low-brow roots

there have been some dangerously yuppie exploits described here lately. high-brow ethics seminars, climbing professional ladders, wearing decent shoes out to dinner... we can't pretend it doesn't happen. i confess my ridiculous excitement about the upcoming opening of a whole foods in the south loop.

now, i don't apologize for the yuppie leanings: last weekend's co-worker birthday expedition to the all-you-can-eat chocolate feast at the peninsula hotel was sooooooooooo delicious and fun! plus i think my blogmate might have had enough of quick-shot's pre-chocolate bar drinks that she managed to spill just enough of the evening on her dress to keep us all from being too classy. :) but i am saying that every good yuppie needs to balance a little. so this weekend mb and i are heading back to wisconsin for some much-anticipated brunch at the come-back inn, and an afternoon of a clearly non-yuppie sport: booze-cruising on his parents' pontoon boat on a small lake near madison.

my excitement about this weekend's plans reminds me that you can take the girl out of the boondocks, but you can't take the boondocks out of the girl... while discussing my weekend plans with a chicago-native co-worker, she looked at me blankly and said "what's a pontoon?" riiiiiiight. because when lake michigan is your lake, you ride on sailboats and large watercraft, and have probably never heard of a party barge. the polite-but-disinterested look i got when describing an entire afternoon of floating around with cheap beer made me feel like maybe i'm not too much of a city girl yet, in spite of the pedicures and new non-ripped jeans and all. good thing.