This is Day 14 of The Illness that Would Not Go Away.
Of course, I suppose I didn’t help it much by going out to the Bad Bar last night. I fared pretty well, all things considered, managing to dance and generally cavort until 1 a.m. Penelope finally wore her lace-up white shirt from the Hootchie Mama store with the lace-up pleather skirt (total cost of outfit: $14 I believe) and was the picture of hotness. Carissa, however, orchestrated a Hotness Coup with a purple shirt which had buttons that started dangerously low and a cigarette black skirt with a slit up the back.
I, on the other hand, had all sorts of wardrobe quandaries. I didn’t want to be Punk Grrl again, and last time I had the whole streamlined head-to-toe black with the rhinestone kitty collar thing going on. This time, I wore regular faded blue jeans (not low rise, not bootcut) and a black long sleeve t-shirt that did incredible things to my figure, paired with diamond stud earrings and two vintage deep purply-blue hair clips I picked up in New Orleans. When Esteban saw me in the outfit that morning (because I knew that I would be working late and wouldn’t have much time to get ready), he commented ‘Wow, you’re going to get a lot of compliments today’ which is almost even nicer than hearing him say ‘You look nice.’ Because that’s almost a given that HE thinks I look good. But to say that he knows other people would think so too? Best compliment ever. And he was right too’ I got no fewer than four compliments at work from random folks asking how much weight I had lost (the outfit was quite ‘slimming’, which was a word that two different people used) and at the Bad Bar, Carissa noted that my breasts were in tiptop fabulousness that evening.
There was a guy from my high school class there. I never really liked him, thought him a self-centered ass then and he did nothing to change my opinion last night. He kept impinging on our bar space, crowding our group further and further down the bar. I kept stressing to the folks on the end that they must be the book ends and maintain our boundaries. Finally, watching him so rudely push my friends to gain bar inches, I went down and sat quite firmly in the end bar stool, defying him to try that with someone who couldn’t be pushed so easily. I would not acknowledge his presence nor the fact that I knew him, which I think he was expecting me to do. I noticed that he kept watching me closely, however, noting how the owner of the bar (the bald bartender) kept giving me free drinks and how I knew the girl bartender and how I was with a huge group of friends. We were mainlining Pixy Stix and finally, the bartender just handed me the entire gigantic brandy snifter of Stix, Smarties, DumDums, and Sweet Tarts. Seeing that the prized candy cache was now out on the bar, he leaned over, sticking his hand in my face, and greedily snatched a fist full of Stix. He lunged again so I pointedly picked it up and offered it to him, saying ‘Would you LIKE some?’ He said ‘Thanks Weetabix’ in this way that was obviously to show that he knew me. I ignored it. I just wasn’t in the mood when they had been such asses all evening. He did it again later, walking through our crowd and saying only to me ‘Excuse me WEETABIX’, as though perhaps I hadn’t heard him say my name the first time. Then he waited for me to respond with ‘Do I know you? How do you know me?’ or ‘Oh hi! How’ve you been?’ I did neither. I simply stepped out of his way and continued to talk to one of my friends. When he returned, he lunged across the bar for the candy again, so I held it to him so he wouldn’t break it or tip it over and he said ‘Thanks WEETABIX!’ and I said very nonchalantly ‘No problem, Chris.’ Because I wanted to make it clear to him that yes, I recognized him and no, I wasn’t planning to pursue it any further.
It sounds really cold, when I reread that scenario, and I think that by now most of you realize that I’m, for the most part, a friendly person. Coincidentally, the last time I was at the Bad Bar, I saw someone else from high school and I went right up to him and said ‘Hi, your name is Guy I Never Hung Around With, right? And you went to Our High School?’ And that guy hadn’t recognized me until I told him my name and we had a very pleasant talk above the din of retro music and drunken giggles. But with Chris last night, it was like he recognized me from high school and wanted to make a point of showing that he remembered me, but he was too cool to come up to me and say ‘Hi Weetabix! Remember me from high school? What are you up to these days?’
Gah. Maybe I’ve been watching too much High School Reunion. By the way, do you not want to just slap that smug look off ‘The Gossip’ Trish’s face? And what the hell does everyone see in ‘The Player’ Dan? He looks like a Clinton.
In other Bad Bar news, toward the end of the night, I totally got hit on. By a girl. A very cute girl with a very nice body, but still a girl. She started talking to me at first, complimenting my hair and saying how cute it was. I thanked her and told her that I actually thought her hair was really cute too. There was much use of the word cute and I think it may have somehow been caused by my Tinkerbell underwear from Torrid that had “Mighty Cute” on the waistband. Then she explained that she had to keep it short because she was in the Army. And then we talked about the song ‘It’s Raining Men’ which was playing right then and I commented on how many men there were in the bar (seriously, it was like a man factory blew up and the Bad Bar was holding the fire sale) and then how it was in that movie ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ and she mentioned how she loved that movie and she thought Bridget Jones was so pretty and sexy and then I said ‘In the party scene, where she’s all dressed up like a bunny? Yeah, she’s quite sexy!’ and then I imitated the Breast Tug that she does with my own rather impressive Dayam!Bra and then the girl said ‘Yeah, I’d totally do her.’ Which took me aback, but then I remembered that Cari, Pen and I had jokingly been making kissy faces at each other all night and declaring that we wanted to make out with each other because we were all so very hot. And also, the fact that I am catnip for lesbians.
Then the song changed to something very danceable, so I started sort of dancing at the bar, because sometimes my hips wiggle independently of my brain, and then she began to grind and do that thing where you go all the way down to the floor and then all the way back up and she was very groiny and very looking at me in this way that made me feel as though I had suddenly become edible. So I leaned over to Penny and said in her ear ‘I think she’s hitting on me.’ And Penny wholeheartedly agreed. Then she went over to her group of guy friends and pointed me out to them, and they all looked at me in an appraising way, and then she came back and kept telling me about how she told her friends how she had just met the sweetest girl (which was me, apparently) and how I was just the sweetest girl in the bar and I was so very cute. Which, I mean, I can’t argue. I am exceptionally cute at times. And that I had the prettiest eyes. And for some reason, with that comment, I felt it was time to go to the bathroom, so I did. And her friends dragged her out of the bar to another bar shortly afterward, so we were spared from a Very Special Episode of That’s My Bix! Too bad, I suppose, as this is Sweeps Week. I could have perhaps kicked Friends collective asses. Or at least Everybody Loves Raymond.
