Re: Social Life (It Does Exist...Kind Of)

Here I sit, blogging, on another consecutive Saturday night. But this time it's almost justified, since I had my wild and crazy Boston adventure/sleepover with Real Life Dan Humphrey and his roommate, Tennis Guy, Thursday night, from which I'm still recovering. That's probably more interesting than why I'm home on a Saturday night (which, incidentally, has a lot to do with having gotten up at 8a.m. today to babysit a two year old, which is all cute and bubbly except if you happen, as I do, to not be so fond of the childrens), so let's talk about that.

After spending my last week and a half sitting home at night, drinking glasses of wine and watching terrible Lifetime movies with my mum about women stealing other women's babies, I decided it was due time that I got myself gussied up (read: out of my gym clothes) and went out and did something befitting of a 21 year old young, hot thing. Real Life Dan Humphrey's birthday was last Sunday, and since I was otherwise engaged then I decided to do a scandalous mid-week night of debauchery. I'm allowed to be completely irresponsible since I'm on break from college, although it's another story for RLDH, who did have work at 9am Friday morning. And I did have some freelance editing stuff that my boss had sent me on Wednesday to be completed by Friday. But work be damned, we were going to celebrate his 23rd like it was a birthday that actually mattered. (Let's face it RLDH...it all goes downhill after 21!)

So Thursday afternoon I packed my overnight bag and, after my dad questioned whether I "really felt safe with this guy" (as if A. RLDH wasn't my best friend's ex, B. RLDH wasn't one of my boyfriend's best friends, and C. wasn't one of MY best friends) and equipped me with a knife (to be fair to him, it's mostly for my car, so that I can cut my seatbelt and break the window if I ever get submerged in a body of water...yup, this is the man who also has me carry pepperspray in WILLIAMSTOWN, Massachusetts), my trusty British GPS friend and I hopped into the car and reverse commuted to Boston at 6pm on a Thursday. Since we were heading INTO the city and not OUT of it you'd think there'd be no traffic, and I told RLDH I'd be there around 6:30 (I live about a half hour outside the city.) Everything went swimmingly until I got off the highway...and then I proceeded to sit in traffic for TWICE as long as it had taken me to get there. That's right, driving the 5 or so miles to RLDH's apartment in the city took me longer than driving the 30 miles from my house to Boston. And then my GPS, who clearly enjoys seeing me sweat, commanded me to take a left in a right-turn-only area, adding another good 20 minutes of re-routing onto my route. So when I finally pulled up to DH's apartment around 7:30, we were both starving.

DH changed out of his work clothes into his "non work clothes" (I can't tell the difference; they're all varying degrees of button-down sweater-pullover belt-and-loafers-combos) and my heels and I battled the Boston cobblestones down to Dartmouth Street, where DH took me to Brownstone, a super cute classy pub type place.


DH and I decided to go all out, so I forewent my anti-carb-and-sugar diet for the night and, well, basically consumed entirely carbs and sugar. We got these cheese waffle-fries which came with actual SLICES of pepperjack cheese melted right on top. We would come to regret this decision many, many times that night. Then I got the Brownstone Burger, which was delicious. DH wouldn't let me pay, like a true gentleman (plus, his income is about 500% more than mine annually), and we went next door to Clery's, which is basically like Brownstone's Irish alcoholic cousin. (Not to say that all Irish are alcoholics, of course, but Clery's IS an Irish bar, and it in fact had TWO full "bars," as in places the bartenders stand, inside ONE actual "bar," as in place where people go to get schwastey. For any How I Met Your Mother fans out there, it basically felt like a really, really big MacLaren's. (Which, incidentally, I always thought was a real place until recently. Sadness.)


We were super excited about watching Celtics-Lakers game one. At the beginning of the night I predicted that LA would take the finals in 6. By the end of the 2nd quarter, I decided they'd do it in five. Sadly for poor Boston, there seemed to even be more Lakers fans in this Boston bar than Celtics fans! Much to his credit, DH kept his eyes mainly averted from the tv and on his lovely friend who would have been very upset if she had driven to see him only to be forsaken for a tv.

Since the Celtics weren't doing much for us, DH and I naturally turned to drinking. We each owed one another a birthday drink, so we decided he'd buy a round and then I'd buy a round. He started us off slow, with a UFO for him and a whiskey sour for me. When it came time for my round, DH said to "surprise him," so I procured two of my favorite drink for us: SoCo and Coke. Guys. This girl loves her some whiskey. Especially SoCo. I once remarked that SoCo "tasted like Christmas" (referencing, of course, its sweet, spicy taste.) A friend promptly responded that I was going to have some really sad Christmases ahead of me. Unfortunately, DH can't handle his SoCo as well as this girl, and so while I virtually sucked mine down like water, DH had half his beer and a SoCo and Coke left by the time I was two drinks in. Our "you buy one round, I buy the other" idea quickly became laughable as we planned out our next "x amount" of drinks. After discovering that DH doesn't like manly drinks (he's going to be so mad at me by the end of this blog), we decided to do a virtual 180 and order mojitos. Even though it was DH's turn to buy, he naturally couldn't order a mojito in a Boston bar and emerge without a black eye, so I went up to do it, only to find that the bartender didn't have mint. WHAT?! You're KILLING me! So I ordered a citron-and-Sprite for me, and a rum-and-diet for DH. Yeah, I hope you're laughing. I'm laughing too. My drink slowed me up a little since vodka and I aren't really good friends at this point, but somehow I made it through so I could get back to my main man: SoCo and Coke. Another of those and another rum-and-diet for DH (which I got by conveniently going to the OTHER bar-in-the-bar so the mint-less bartender wouldn't think I was a total lush...which, if we're being honest....), and we were feeling pretty good, read: drunk, at this point. Especially since all I had had earlier in the day was a soy protein shake before the gym.

We probably should have called it a night at that point, but DH's roommate, Tennis Guy, got out of work around 11:30 and decided to join us and buy the next round. If there's one thing I've learned since I turned 21, it's that you do NOT turn down a free round, so I kept my mouth shut. But when Tennis Guy asked us what we were having, and I said SoCo and Coke, he just laughed and said "I'm not ordering you that." What?! Don't deny a girl her SoCo! So TG went off to concoct a special surprise for me, and came back with, I kid you not....Hypnotiq on the rocks. I could drink SoCo until the Celtics win a finals tournament (see, it's funny 'cause they never will...get it? get it?), but throw some Hypnotiq on me at the end of a very long night of drinking and it's a recipe for disaster. I like sweet drinks, but Hypnotiq tastes like something that a drunken Willy Wonka would have created in the factory. Thank god after that we decided it was probably time to head home.

The point of all this salivating discussion of SoCo is to demonstrate that we were very, very drunkers. Well, at least I was. DH had two beers, which obviously don't count toward getting you drunkers. (I think I learned that in college.) So we stumbled back along the cobblestones and talked about procuring eggs to make brownies. When we finally got back to the apartment, TG turned in (he works from like 9am-11pm every day...poor guy), and DH and I drunkenly settled down on the couch to watch the season finale of Gossip Girl. Warning: major detour here, but GUYS?!! Did anyone else WATCH it? No spoilers, but OMG CHUCK? I FREAKED out. FREAKED out. It was really intense, maybe too much so for drunk Michelle to handle.

After GG blew my mind, it was time to call L. for our nightly good-night. He wanted to conference call with DH since they haven't seen each other for awhile, so I found DH in his room and lay down on his bed next to him and put L. on speaker in between us. I didn't remember any of this conversation the next morning, but apparently, according to him, I told L. he wasn't entertaining enough and was boring us to sleep. Poor L.! To be fair, DH and I were drunk and exhausted and falling asleep at that point. So much so, in fact, that when L. and I got off the phone, we both fell asleep right there. I woke up a few minutes later and asked DH for a blanket so I could move to the couch, but he just said "Why don't you just stay there? Let's just both stay on our sides, and it will be okay." And being as half-asleep/half-sober as I was, I said "great!" and immediately dozed off. For about five seconds. DH's apartment is HOT. I felt like my poor mother, who gets hot flashes about every .6 seconds. And suddenly all the caffeine from my SoCo and Cokes caught up to me. And....wait a mintue. Why was I sleeping in the same bed as DH? It was all very, not awkward, but definitely out of the ordinary enough for me to be unable to fall asleep, so I basically dozed on and off until about 7:30am, at which point DH got up to GO FOR A RUN. I am so impressed by that boy. When he got back I decided there was no point in my trying to get any sleep anymore, and then I remembered that Tennis Guy was up and walking around, and realized that we were in kind of a pickle. When DH got back from his run I heard TG say, "Hey, DH, where's Michelle?" And DH said, "In there." And then came into the room laughing and said that TG had given him "the look." The funniest part of all this is that when I told C. about the falling-asleep-in-DH's-bed story, rather than freak out, bless her heart, she laughed hysterically and revealed that DH had gotten "the look" quite a few times before from TG when C. had stayed over the apartment when she and DH were, let's just say, not quite together.

Exhausted but surprisingly not that hungover, I packed up my stuff and fantasized about heading home to crank up my AC and sleep the day away. I said goodbye to DH, aka my new bedmate, (we talked about how the true test of a platonic male-female friendship is to sleep in the same bed for the night and have it not be super weird), and headed home, crawled into bed, and found that sleep just wasn't in the cards for me. So I went to the gym to do some 1000-calorie damage control (I made sure I burned 500 calories Thursday afternoon as a preventative measure, but realized that was nowhere NEAR the food and drink debauchery of the evening.) Somehow I made it through the day without dying, only to wake up bright and early at 8am today to babysit a two year old boy. We can discuss that later, since this post is super long and, as I read it over, very self-indulgent. It's okay though, because let's admit it to ourselves: is there anything MORE self-indulgent than blogging? I mean, besides cheese fries and SoCo?

DH is having another party tonight to celebrate his bday (I jokingly asked him how long he was going to celebrate this thing), and I had thought about going down but driving back the same night (sharing a bed twice in a week could be a little awk), but I'm not feeling up to it tonight due to the exhaustion that comes from hating babysitting children and some bad news I got earlier today. But I wouldn't want anything to dampen the lighthearted, lushy, self-indulgent tone of this post, so perhaps the reasons the childrens and I don't see eye to eye and the bad news will come tomorrow. For now, I hope these shenanigans justify to ya'll why I'm sitting this Saturday night out.