It’s weird that I had to travel 600 miles to have a totally low key weekend, but such it was. I spent about 36 hours down at the ABL and it was just lovely. Right now I am a little bit sad that I can’t live there with all my friends and have fun low key weekends every weekend.
The last couple of flights I’ve taken have been to the East Coast and back and so I was sort of surprised when a mere two hours after the plane took off, it landed again! I only finished half my book! Rob and Anna were there to pick me up and take me to dinner at this Mexican place that looks, oddly enough, just like Anna’s hometown of Port Lavaca, Texas, down to the crazy hand painted store signs and the boats in the front yards and the bay just out back. Dave and Chrysa, two of my beautiful fiances from Stupid Burning Man, came with us and made sure I didn’t eat soap at any time during the evening. I think we just spent about six hours talking and peeing in our assorted pants from laughing, and that was Friday. I told them about going salsa dancing again last Thursday, wearing one of my new dresses. I don’t exactly know how this happened, but I ended up looking a little like a Gorey character, with a high-waisted, knee-length dress and black stockings and square-toed shoes. Mostly I danced with very short, older gentlemen, but one sort of hipster dude, newsboy cap and all, asked me to dance as well. His line? “ I really like your necklace. It’s half the reason I came over here.” Much of the pants-peeing resulted from speculation about what I should have said in response to that as opposed to what I did say: “You could see my necklace from all the way across the room?” I am soooooooooo smooth.
Now, the last time I went down there for non-party purposes, about a year ago, it was a pretty busy weekend. We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and then we went to a Gaskell Ball and we were constantly getting in and out of the van and being late and rushing around and by the time I got on the plane to go home I was exhausted and felt like taking another couple of days off. I was not in the mood for that this weekend. Anna agreed and so we decided that we would not do anything we didn’t want to. I love making decisions like that. Anna decided that I needed to go to Torrid as I had never been, and Rob and Dawn and John all came along too. Anna and I wore our new boots and we looked, I have to say, pretty cute. These are the boots that I got a couple of weeks ago and was not quite sure how I felt about them…I got them in two sizes and decided to keep the smaller pair and brought the larger to Anna. I’ve decided that they are very good boots with skirts and with jeans but not with regular pants. Anyway, to the mall! We went to the mall!
I liked some of the stuff at Torrid…I mean, hey, Care Bear shirt…even though I didn’t end up buying anything except a pink and black scarf to wear to this wedding I have in a couple of weeks. Anna got some pants and a skirt but no one else could find anything else so they all went to the regular Hot Topic and that was very funny too. I rarely go to the mall so I don’t get to see Goths in their natural environment very often so I was having a great time. I did get a pair of earrings at Claire’s though. They are very nice.
Okay, so that was at the regular mall, like a mall with a Gap. That’s fine. The next mall we went to was the one that they all refer to as the Geek Mall. This is a half-empty mall whose remaining stores consists of about three wig shops, eighteen cut-rate evening gown and bridesmaid dress stores, another Hot Topic, and five or six weird, like, fantasty armor/gaming-with-multiple-sided-dice/comic book stores. I had a hard time distinguishing them from one another. The Hot Topic was actually going out of business that very day, which you would think would have garnered us some excellent deals on skull belt buckles and fairy wings and leather pants and Manic Panic, but didn’t. Oh well. Then it was time for lunch at a crepe/bubble tea place (huh?) and then it was time to go to all eight hundred of the gaming stores, which I totally didn’t understand and which made me very tired. It was such a weird mall, all deserted yet trying to keep a brave face on its dwindling prospects. It was pretty much empty on a Saturday afternoon.
I think we were all pretty tired (I mean, two malls in one day!) so when we got back to the house we all pretty much fell on the floor and immediately took naps (Anna and I removed our boots first). People would wander in and out of the room and either laugh at us for sleeping all piled up like a litter of puppies or they too would succumb to the siren song of our collective snoring and shoving for more blankets and would just drop right down there with us. Another friend woke us up by calling to say he was coming over, and when he got there he just settled in too. How great is that?
We were all finally awakened by Dawn, sweetheart that she is, coming in with 982398 bags of groceries, so we dragged ourselves up enough to make dinner (grilled cheese sandwiches, Brussels sprouts, and ice cream, for those of you paying attention). Then, of course, it was time to play What Movie Should We Watch?
I have to explain that all weekend Anna and Rob had been keeping a running list of movies they thought I should see. They think I am very uncultured when it comes to movies. Probably they are right. I mean, I just got Netflix, so I’m trying to catch up, but still. I forgot to bring the list home with me but I think it involved SuperTroopers, or something. I don’t exactly know why. Anyway, we talked about that for the requisite three hours, then we waited another eight or nine hours while Ian and Rob and possibly John as well futzed around with the computer so that we could watch some esoteric anime that can’t be played on a regular DVD player, or something, and Anna and Dawn and I just screamed the whole time. We gave up and watched the hilariously awful The Big Hit. I mean, this is a movie that not only involves Christina Applegate going “Honey, is my butt still perky?” but also involves a scene in which erotically stuffing a chicken features prominently. Let me repeat that for you: stuffing a raw chicken. All sexy like. Ew. And then we watched The Guru which was kind of cute even though I would never admit it and which also fueled my antipathy for all things Billy Joel.
I had an early afternoon flight so there wasn’t a lot of time to do very much, although Anna did some pictures of me that involved a French maid outfit, an orange wig, a sombrero, and a red vinyl tank top. (Not all at the same time though). Usually I get weepy when I have to say goodbye to my friends but this time it was no big deal because it turns out all those people I saw this weekend in their natural environment? Are coming up to Seattle in two weekends to attend the abovementioned wedding (the one for which I got the pink and black scarf). It’s like we all live near each other again, sort of. It’s also good because, uh, confidential to Anna, I totally packed that cute pink bunny shirt in my bag by mistake. Sorry about that. Also, when they come up I’m hoping to take Rob on some sort of ferry ride, which he was disappointed to hear was not an actual Fairy Ride when I mentioned going to Bainbridge Island or something as a non-wedding-related activity we could do. If anyone has been on any fairy ride anywhere at any time, please let me know immediately. You will make one tall bearded man extraordinarily happy.
When I got off my short little eetsey weetsey plane flight (hour and a half!) Carl was there to pick me up, both literally and figuratively. I was very glad to see him; it was the perfect end to the perfect weekend. I love all my friends so much.