Love and Hate

I love going out with friends. I hate when it's on a Thursday night and I have to work the next day. Al might consider this feeling an indication of accomplishment from the previous night, but I don't want anything to do with it. Ugh.

Danielle and I were just going for dinner and a few beers last night. We got there a little after 6PM, so we figured we'd have plenty of time to relax before getting out of there at 10. With any luck, I'd be home and in bed by 10:30 to catch some ZZZZs for the long weekend ahead. Nope, my luck at the bar was as bad as it's been with cards. I remember looking at the time around 8:30 and telling Danielle it was still early yet. More talking, more drinking - the karaoke guy is putting his stuff away. That means it's midnight. Oops. We'll finish this beer and go. Wait a minute, are they really calling last call? They can't be... oh wait, the ugly lights are coming on. I guess we'd better go.

I wasn't sure how the night was going to go since Danielle's ex-boyfriend's car was right in front of the bar when we pulled in. At first she didn't want to go in, but I convinced her that everything would work out - either he wanted to be friendly and talk or we'd just ignore him the rest of the night. It seems that he wanted to be friendly, and he immediately started talking to us when we walked in. We ended up sitting with him at the bar and I let the two of them do most of the talking. I began talking to other people I knew (or decided to talk to anyways) instead.

Last week, this guy Joe was having a birthday, so we all celebrated his birthday and made sure he had fun. Joe was in again this week, and he was one of the people I was talking to while being a social butterfly. As the night got later, we got drunker. (Amazing how that is.) As we got drunker, we started talking about our particular preferences in people still at the bar. It seems that Joe and I have very similar tastes, if you know what I mean. :-) By that point, we were just silly, laughing and giggling. Towards the end of the night, Joe bet me a beer that I couldn't become part of the group of young guys playing on the golf machine. (He was interested in one guy in particular.) I still have the chip for the free drink in my purse.

I'm sure there's lots I'm forgetting. Random things I do remember:

- I forgot my tomato at the bar. Yes, I was carrying around a tomato at the bar. One of the guys has tomato plants that are producing fruit like crazy. He brought them in to distribute.

- I had to order a polar bear because a few of the guys really wanted to do shots and really wanted me to do one with them. The bartender told the guys it was Absolut. I made the "Damn that liquor's strong!" face and shuddered once, and they didn't know the difference. Not too hard to fool drunk guys either.

- I helped one guy Len get a really good High Score on the Megatouch machine in one of the word games. He's been trying to beat this other guy in the game for months now. Len had the high score, so the other guy actually wrote a computer program to generate all words possible with the set of letters. Other guy then brought a laptop and used it to get the high score - 122K or something like that. We fixed that last night. Between the two of us, we ended up with a score of 131K. The really funny part is that I know the guy thought I was a complete dunce when he first walked over to the game and I asked him how to play.

- Karaoke. Japanese for "sounds like cats being tortured". I know it takes nerve to get up there and sing, but I wish some of those people were a little more shy. I don't think my ears could've taken much more of it. I declined to sing this week, even though I was encouraged to. That was my gift to the bar last night.

- Bar Basket-shooting. One of the girls had finished her drink and had a cup of ice left. She grabbed a piece and tried to shoot it into the collar of one of the other guys. He thought it was funny because she missed so badly and held his collar open for her. Still a bad shot. By the end, there were 4 or 5 of us lined up along one side of the bar with our shirts hanging open while she tried to shoot "baskets". She missed every single time, and we quit when she ran out of ice.

- The "mean, nasty bitch" conversation. I don't even know how the subject came up, but it came down to the guys' opinion that Danielle is the one who could be a really mean bitch when she wanted to, but I could never be like that. Who says? You had to see their faces when Danielle said, "Oh yeah, she's a mean bitch. 10x worse than I could ever be." I backed it up later by offering to knee one of the guys in the groin if he really wanted to see mean. Maybe they believe me a little more now.

Yeah, I know that it doesn't really sound that fun or exciting, but its my comfy little (dive-ish) bar where I can sit around and be myself without having to worry what people think of me. Most of them know I'm crazy anyways. I'm just lucky they find that amusing.

The aspirin is finally starting to kick in. Add to that the wonderful breakfast sandwich Al got me, and I'm starting to come back around again. Now, all I have to do is get one more load of laundry done when I go home so I can finish packing up my stuff to head back to Berwick for more cleaning and drinking. On 3.5 hours of sleep from last night. God help me!