When I came home just now my housemate C was standing on the front porch, wearing plaid pajama pants, a Boston College sweatshirt, a headlamp and rubber gloves. “Chiara?” she yelled when I got out of the car. “Are you squeamish?”
How does one answer that question, you know? I mean, it can so easily go wrong. If you say no then very likely the person who asked you in the first place will make you taste some milk to see if it’s sour or will ask you to stick your hand in a sink full of vomit to unplug the plug. If you say yes then potentially you will miss seeing a cool frog or something. I chanced it. “Uh, no. Usually.”
“I have a dead mouse,” she said, sadly shaking her head. Zeke, the resident cat, has recently reverted to being an indoor/outdoor cat (as cats should be, in my completely worthless opinion) and apparently has been exercising his right to dismember small rodents.
“It used to be alive,” said C forlornly. “I tried to save it but it’s dead now.”
“That can happen,” I told her, coming in and taking off my jacket, which I totally didn’t need to wear tonight because it was surprisingly warm. “Put in the bushes now and take off your gloves.”
“Just chuck him in the bushes?”
“No…place him in the bushes. Respectfully.”
I guess that’s what she’s doing right now. Poor mouse. Poor C.
In a stunning move, I went out tonight, briefly. To a bar, even. That’s how come I was coming home just in time to see the mouse’s sad demise, because I had been away from home. For someone who doesn’t drink, I sure have been going to the bars a lot lately…of course, “a lot,” in my world, means “at all,” so don’t go clutching your pearls just yet. One of my work friends asked me to come out to this bar sort of at the last minute, so, okay, I’ve already watched the latest installment of my nature show on Netflix this week, sure. It was okay.
I don’t see what the point of playing old Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and stuff like that if you can’t dance, really. No point in having a (really sort of awful) DJ in a place with no dance floor because you just have to scream louder and get a sore throat, you poor delicate flower. I talked with some nice people my work friend knows and watched the other bar patrons, some of whom were, inexplicably, wearing cowboy hats and some of whom were wearing suits. The server girl was super cute and she put an umbrella in my (free!) cranberry juice and asked if I wanted her to keep them coming or if I thought I should slow down a little. “Yeah, I’m driving tonight, and I have work in the morning, “ I said. “Maybe you’re right.”
Since I live in mommy-jogger latte-liberal neighborhood, I am a little nervous when I go to Belltown or Capitol Hill or other places around town where the inhabitants stay up past ten, especially if I have to walk anywhere by myself in the dark. I did okay, I think, after having conferred with the very courtly and polite parking lot guy about where this bar actually was, at looking as though I knew where I was going. It wasn’t too bad. It was nice to meet a couple of new people and scream at each other about where we’d gone to college and what we do for work for a couple of hours, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never be super into the bar thing.
I’ve been writing this while eating cookies in bed and thinking about what it would be like to go out every night to a different bar and not be able to dance when they played “Got To Be Startin’ Somethin’” and to scream/chat with basically friendly strangers, every night. I’m in this weird time of feeling very unmoored socially so I’m doing some new things in terms of going out, but I don’t think I’ve quite successfully figured out what exactly I want to be doing for fun yet. I’m glad I went out a little tonight but I’m even more glad to be all tucked in and to have a book to read before I go to sleep.