this weekend eric was out of town so i seized the opportunity to hang out with some friends from back in the day that live in chicago.
friday i organized my past bills and filed them. unfortunately the new filing cabinet i bought is sucking more every day, and standard-sized hanging files don’t reach across its bars. by about a quarter inch. i had fun anyway (yes, fun) throwing away old envelopes and putting things into chronological order. whee! i’m such a rebel!
saturday i got up early to get ready for the cable guy. he came really early (i was his first call of the day) and was very nice (and good-looking but i digress). i spent several hours trying, to no avail, to improve the reception of about half of my cable channels. i did get that great deal on cable and cable internet, but when the phone guy didn’t mention is how my basic cable would give me maybe 20 channels (that come in clearly) and most of them are the ‘ethnic’ channels that i never watch. where is my cartoon network and comedy central and discovery channel? what about spike for cryin’ out loud?? i felt sort of ripped off until i remembered that i was paying for 12 months about half of what it would’ve cost to just get the cable internet, plus i got very clear local channels and at least vh1.
my wireless set up is pretty sweet…at least it is NOW. my router was totally not working at first and i spent a few hours banging my head against that one. i really enjoy being able to carry my tibook around without wrangling a cable.
i watched lots of csi on saturday and enjoyed the novelty of a whole day to myself, completely ignoring the things i should be doing (unpack, research furniture, work on websites, figure out My Future, etc). it was just like being in college again!
i completed my college-retro day by going out with conrad and some of his crazy friends. at 9pm i took a couple of buses (what an interesting collection of people!) down to his apartment. turns out he lives just down the street from arturo’s, the place where i first tasted the glory that is horchata and all å la carte dining. i hung out at his new apartment and had some gin & tonics with him and his friend janine, who is awesome and totaly insane. conrad is growing a beard and really looks a lot like his dad with it.
we took the train downtown to the columbia dorm/hostel and picked up janine’s boyfriend, brett who, like me, is 22. but he seemed like…19, so that wasn’t very comforting. also we grabbed cody and a couple of other crazy conrad friends. we got back on the train and hit the music box for their midnight 3D porn, a gem from 1975 entitled, ‘the lollipop girls in hard candy.’ here is the plot synopsis (courtesy of the music box website). from what i saw this ‘plot’ had very little to do with the weirdness on screen, which included a guy dressed in a big bird-esque costume and some stuff involving the trojan war and time travel in bunny suits. i’m completely serious.
The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy
Okay, here is the “plot”: the Dandy Candy Company is doomed to shut down and in desperation the boss turns to the factory’s chemists for help. They produce a batch of aphrodisiac lollipops and soon Vera Tight and Percy Duckbutter and everybody else in town is sucking on the candy and anything else they can get their hands on, for example, John “Johnny Wadd” Holmes. Rated X and in 3D! (1975)
once i sat down i felt really really drunk, so i couldn’t keep my 3D glasses on the whole time. thus i didn’t get the full effect of the 3D cum shot. however, i did get to see some ’70s-style porn sex scenes which were sort of bland compared to the dirty internet porn that is being passed around these days. but i guess i should’ve known what to expect after seeing the porn adaptation of ‘alice in wonderland’ at the dillo day porn a couple of years ago. man, pornos in the ’70s were so long and had so much plot, even if it was totally ridiculous.
after the movie we all felt sort of perplexed and confused by life in general so we went back to armitage and damen for a house party. if i didn’t feel sort of weird and old by then, i certainly did once i walked into that house. which is not to say that i didn’t have a good time, because the whole night was awesome. i just suddenly realized why jon was always saying how old he felt back when i was still in school.
anyway, we all went and sat in this back room where conrad first met all of these crazy folks and sat around and talked and smoked (i just inhaled a lot of second hand smoke) and drank. everyone there seemed to know conrad so there was a steady stream of people saying hi and new hands to shake. conrad and i closed the party, reminiscing about some high school stuff, catching up on gossip and weighing life in sherrard compared to life in chicago. needless to say, it’s pretty different and neither of us are going to go back to live in the qca any time soon.
conrad walked me to the bus stop near his apartment and he went to arturo’s to sample the horchata and super å la carte menu. i waited awhile for the bus but i was really tired at that point so i just got a cab. i collapsed into bed at about 5am.
sunday i slept in till the afternoon, tired and sort of hung over. i watched a little bit of the john deere classic (the quad cities’ pga tournament) and saw my dad on tv! he volunteers every year as an electronic scorekeeper. he gets to follow around a new player every day and keep the official score and call for special rulings and stuff. i called my mom and we watched some of the tournament together.
at about 4:30 i got on another couple of buses and went to fran’s new place to hang out. she has a really nice apartment in uptown/buena park and some great furniture and a giant tv. as sort of a thank you for all of the stolen purse business, fran made me spaghetti, salad and garlic bread. everything was AWESOME. this girl can cook.
after dinner we played travel scrabble and watched ‘the lizzie mcguire movie’ which i hadn’t seen yet. it was pretty much totally awesome. oh lizzie! oh gordo! and hilary duff looks really good as a brunette too. in regards to travel scrabble, a word to the wise: travel scrabble letters snap into the little board. they also may explosively snap out when you try to put a letter beside another. watch your eyes. after scrabble and lizzie (fran is the best person to play scrabble with. we are pretty evenly matched so neither of us feels like a goof when we spell words like ‘vat’ or ‘ax’) we had some ice cream and watched an old favorite, ‘the three musketeers.’ i must purchase this movie. we watched the video for ‘all for love’ at least 3 times and laughed our asses off at the funny gestures rod stewart was making and the shots during the bridge (see title of this entry). there is nothing quite like watching a movie you love with someone who also loves it and has seen it a million times with you! you share all of the same jokes about the movie and never tire of repeating them and noting how hot the actors are (charlie sheen! forbidden hotness!).
fran was sweet enough to drive me home (‘so THIS is what the inside of your car looks like!’) and once i got there, in spite of myself, i watched another episode of csi. it was really good though, so i don’t regret the lost hour of sleep at all.
the whole weekend was awesome – it was refreshing to spend time with new people and be in environments other than work or eric & jon’s apartment. i must keep up this trend of expanding my social horizons. next weekend is fran’s birthday so there will be drinks and food and bar hopping…plus cake. you can’t forget the cake. 🙂
note to self: enjoy my 20s while they last.