Valuable Things My Ex-Boyfriends Taught Me: Lesson #1

Photo by Sweet One.

 

Yesterday, Carson and I decided to carry on a tradition started by my ex-boyfriend, the illustrious J. the Second. (So-called because he succeeded not-so-illustrious ex-boyfriend J. the First, obviously.) J. the Second has recently has made something of himself and spent a two-year stint in the Peace Corps, followed by med school . . . but while we were dating, he was a delinquent whose major claim to fame was that he introduced me to a little game that I like to call Let’s Get Drunk at the Movies!

This is how Let’s Get Drunk at the Movies! works: Buy a bottle of whiskey. Pick a movie, the more terrible the better. Buy one of those gigantic movie theater sodas. Find your seats, preferably somewhere in the back where no people are near you. (This shouldn’t be hard because you picked the worst movie at the theater.) Slurp out about two inches of your soda. Replace with whiskey. Enjoy!

Let’s Get Drunk at the Movies! is not only fun because you’re, you know, getting drunk at the movies. It’s fun because of what comes after you leave the movie theater, still drunk. Being drunk in situations where you’re not used to being drunk is a consciousness-expander and leads to all sorts of decisions you wouldn’t normally make, leading to many mini-adventures. Thus why, after finishing off half a bottle of whiskey between the two of us and watching Saw 3D-which-was-actually-only-2D-because-it’s-really-hard-to-watch-3D-movies-while drunk, Carson and I found ourselves at the pawn shop down the road . . . buying a copy of Top Gun, which is, as I was soon to find out, the boy version of Dirty Dancing.

We also went to the mall and spent about twenty minutes looking at calendars with pictures of kittens in them.

Today, this conversation happened:

H: If we were fighter pilots, I’d never let you die.
C: If Jigsaw caught you and put you in a trap to test my loyalty, I’d save you.
H: Also, if Tom Cruise were serenading you in a bar, I’d never let you go home with him. No matter how drunk you were.
C: You’re the best friend anyone could ever have.
H: You never, never leave your wingman.

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adventures, buddies, carson, ex-boyfriend lessons, j the second, liquor, movies

November 17, 2010

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The Great American Novel Project

Photo by ginnerobot.

My newest project: to read all the novels on Wikipedia’s Great American Novel list. For the sake of simplicity, because the list is constantly changing–apparently the criteria for what makes a Great American Novel is an issue at least as contentious as Roe v. Wade or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict–I’ll work from the version that was up when I started the project:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
• Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
• Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
• William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
• John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
• John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
• J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
• Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
• Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
• Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections

Since I’ve already read them, I’m crossing Huck Finn, Gatsby, Catcher, and To Kill a Mockingbird off the list immediately. That leaves me with nine books before I lose interest in this project. Feel free to place bets on how far I’ll actually get.

Yes, I am ashamed of the fact that I was an English major and a lifelong book nerd who’s closing in on 30 and still hasn’t made it to Steinbeck and Nabokov. And yes, I am updating my blog about books on a Friday night. But wait–that’s not the nerdiest part! The nerdiest part is that I skipped out on a party tonight so I could but update my blog about books, read Kazuo Ishiguro and drink whiskey-spiked cider by myself. A+!

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books, experiments, the great american novel project

November 6, 2010

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Couch Days

Photo by visual.dichotomy.

Couch Day: One of those days where nothing is going right, you’re feeling bluesy, and just putting on jeans instead of yoga pants seems like the hardest thing in the world. So instead of forcing yourself to put on real clothes, you just succumb to sloth and stay in your pajamas, spend eight hours on the internet, read one of your favorite childhood books (the literary equivalent of comfort food), and follow it up with a delicious fall beer and some scary movies. And all of this won’t actually make you feel any better, it’ll just restore your energy levels to the point where you can actually afford to face life again the next day.

Carson and I have declared this Couch Week.

That should tell you how well things are going these days.

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lazy

October 27, 2010

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Great Books

 

yes.

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books

October 19, 2010

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Cecily’s Carrot Cake Shot

Cecily’s birthday happened. She made me do shots. Too many shots. I don’t do shots anymore; I’m an old person. Somehow, four beers and four shots later, I woke up completely hangover-free. I’m trying to figure out how this happened so I can replicate it.

Our favorite concoction:

Carrot Cake Shot
Equal parts:

• Bailey’s
• Butterscotch schnapps
• Goldschlager

Chill, mix, serve.

To me this taste less like carrot cake and more like cream cheese frosting, but hey, I’m down with anything that consists of liquor but tastes like frosting.

[Photo source]

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buddies, cecily, liquor

September 30, 2010

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The Great Pumpkin (Ale)

Photo by Evil Erin.

Last night it was slow at the bar, so I got done around eleven. Our Wednesday drink special was two-dollar pumpkin ales. Have I mentioned that the best thing about fall–even better than college football, the return of boots, and apple cider–is all things pumpkin? Since I quit coffee, I can’t satisfy my cravings with pumpkin spice lattes, so instead I’ve been all about the pumpkin beer.

As I sat down with my first beer, I reached for my phone to text Carson. I’d say, “How do you feel about pumpkin beer?” and he’d say, “I like pumpkin beer,” and I’d say, “Get down here,” and–since he lives three blocks from the bar–he’d be down there before I’d even finished a third of my drink. But then I second-guessed myself: Maybe you should cultivate one of your other friendships. Carson and I have been hanging out lots lately, maybe too much. You know how usually you have the friend you get drunk with and the friend you work out with and the friend who gives you good advice when you’re down and the friend who chills on your couch watching movies when you don’t want to go out? Carson is all those friends to me, and even when we hang out every day, we don’t ever get sick of each other. So I’ve been ignoring all my other friends because it’s so much easier to just call C. No matter what I want to do–get wood-fired pizza between shifts, hike eight miles on our Monday off, drive down to Illinois for my sister’s birthday, go to a random show at the club next door to our bar–he always says yes. But I have this sinking feeling that he’s going to get tired of Wisconsin and move back out to California one of these days, and while that would be tragic in and of itself, it would be doubly tragic if he left and I had no other friends left. So maybe–just every once in a while–I should hang out with somebody else instead.

So I texted Pete. This is how I convinced him to come drink with me:

me: how do you feel about pumpkin beer?
P: never had it. but i had a pumpkin milkshake today. that was tasty.
me: how can you have never had pumpkin beer? nectar of the gods. come down to the bar, we have two dollar pints of it.
P: hmmm. i wasn’t going to drink tonight.
me: i’m noticing a definite lack of persuasive argument in that statement.
P: . . . ok, be there in five.

And we drank pumpkin beer happily ever after.

Photo by harryalverson.

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beer, pete b., the bar

September 24, 2010

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How I De-Stress These Days

I haven’t had a lot of things to be happy about lately, or maybe it just seems that way. First I sprained my ankle, which–while a comparatively mild sprain, took almost three weeks to fully heal. This derailed both my summer half-marathon as well as Operation: Ride My Bike to Work, in addition to making me insanely grumpy and high-strung. Shortly after I’d recovered from that, work turned into a seething, sucking cesspit of hell (note: maybe a slight exaggeration) that left A. and all my favorite coworkers and I perpetually crabby and spatting with each other. It’s only now that things are beginning to calm down and I’ve gotten back on the trails, back on the bike, back to the gym. It only took those five weeks off to make me forget how good it feels to work out–how it’s pretty much the only thing that makes me feel that great. I remember having to memorize Sidney’s “Come Sleep! O Sleep” for a lit class in high school, and all those things it says about sleep are how I feel about a good workout. The certain knot of peace, the balm of woe.

A couple weeks ago, I asked Carson how long it would take to bike to California.

“We could do it in a couple months, easy,” he said. “I have some friends who did it.”(Note: Of course he does. C. worked in a bike shop for a while and has all these bike-crazy friends who ride their bikes to Timbuktu and Siberia and things like that.)

“Let’s ride our bikes to California,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“What do you think, two years of training and I’ll be ready? Let’s do it in 2012.”
“Okay,” he says, and then: “I’m not kidding.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’m not either.”

So for the past two weeks it’s sort of lingered there, one of those half-plans, half-jokes that neither of you really thinks will ever happen even though you both want it to. The thing is, in my head, I have committed to it. When I go to the gym, instead of hopping on the elliptical or the treadmill like I usually do, I get on the bike and ride ten or twenty miles. I figure that by the time I can do two 25-mile sessions a day, I’ll be ready to go. I haven’t told Carson this yet.

When I have a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day at work, I console myself by saying, “Hey, I only have to make it through a few more shifts, and then I can quit and ride my bike to California.” And then I go home, drink half a bottle of wine, and, around 11 P.M., I text Carson, “Let’s get pancakes!” and he comes to pick me up and makes fun of my grape-stained tongue.

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September 23, 2010

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A Trip to the Bike Polo Championships

Drawing by doubledareya.

My coworkers and I have started this new thing we call Sunday Field Trips. The bar we work at is closed on Sundays during the day, so we all get together, look through our local weekly paper, and find something really random (and preferably free) to do. Log-rolling competitions. Alpaca festivals. And this week, the North American Bike Polo Championships.

Bike polo is exactly what it sounds like–polo played on bikes instead of horses–but appealing to hipster bike geeks instead of rich dudes. Hipster bike dudes, by the way, are largely cocky assholes. I hate to say that because my boyfriend and a large subsection of my close guy friends are bike nerds and could not be sweeter, but on the whole . . . bike nerds are assholes. And I’ve never been one of those girls that was drawn to jerks–didn’t go for the football players in high school, didn’t go for the frat boys in college–but now that I’m post-college, I’m all over the bikers. Give me a hipster with a fixie and a beard and, uh, my knees go a little weak. So to be surrounded by an entire crowd of shaggy-haired assholes with their pant legs rolled up? Heaven. Josie and I spent the first ten minutes just marveling at how hot all the men surrounding us were.

And bike polo itself? We’d expected to be mildly entertained, but I was nowhere near prepared for how awesome it actually was–to the point where I have no idea why they don’t show this on ESPN2 at three in the morning in place of poker or bowling or whatever else passes for sports these days. (C. swears he once saw ESPN show a Magic: the Gathering tournament in the middle of the night, but I don’t believe him.) Despite the 90 degree heat and sunshine pounding down on us, the crowd was so into it, all shouting and pounding on walls. C. and I were almost late to work because we didn’t want to leave before it was over. We’ve already got a team together and we’re figuring out how hard we have to practice if we want to make it to nationals next year. Just kidding. Maybe.

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adventures, bikes, buddies, the cooks

July 21, 2010

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Self-Esteem

My boyfriend, despite growing up a tall, skinny, goofy kid in a small town that worshiped football players, managed to escape with his self-esteem in tact. Maybe a little bit too in tact. Behold a conversation we had recently:

me: “There’s this one Spanish soccer player who’s my favorite. He looks like the adorable European guy you’d hook up with while studying abroad, and of course he’d never call you again because he just tried to have sex with as many American girls as possible, but you wouldn’t even care because he was just too good in bed.”
him: “Which player is this?”
me: “Xabi Alonso.”
him: “Oh. He looks like me.”

Of course, this is nothing compared to the time that I caught him combing his hair in the bathroom mirror, whistling happily, and declaring, “I look just like Hugh Jackman today.”

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a.

July 9, 2010

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Constructive Summer

Photo: mattmangum.

I spent the last three days camping up in the Apostle Islands with Carson. Out of all the vacations and mini road-trips I’ve taken so far this year, this is the only one that’s actually sent me home one hundred percent relaxed. Carson is human Xanax for me. On all my other trips, I’ve spent most of my energy trying to make other people happy, then collapsing on the sidelines with a book. But with C., we spend a little time trying to figure out how to make each other happy, and then realize that we’ll both be happy with the exact same thing: sleeping in late, getting out somewhere green, doing something we’ve never done before, drinking some good beer, eating some good food (preferably ending with chocolate). So we did–hiked around the point, dove head-first into ice-cold Lake Superior, watched the Bayfield/Madeline Island/Ashland fireworks simultaneously, drank Goose Island and Central Waters around a campfire, ate cookies for breakfast when we felt like it, read books by the light of a camping lantern while the mosquitoes buzzed around our tent.

On the drive home, I was marveling over how calm I felt, when I realized the reason why: Carson had done all the work. He drove us the entire eleven-hour round trip. He set up and took down the tent every time. (I folded the tent poles.) He grilled up my bean burgers while I read David Sedaris and roasted potatoes while I took a nap. My entire contribution to the trip chores involved fetching our beer from the cooler. He was probably never going to go camping with me again . . . unless I bribed him. The bribe came in the form of a brewery in Minocqua and the Netherlands/Uruguay soccer game. Not that this was any great sacrifice for me–I can’t say no to pale ales and sweet potato fries, and now that all my teams have been eliminated, I’ve joined C. in pulling for the Dutch. Problem solved: while we bonded over the win, he told me he’d had a great time on the trip. We finished it off by swinging by his hometown to say hi to his parents, who bought us ice cream.

And what did I come home to? A boyfriend who had cleaned the entire house from top to bottom while I was gone.

You have every right to be jealous.

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adventures, camping, carson, travel

July 7, 2010

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