Trashed and Scattered

I had the best texts all lined up for you guys.. Only, yeah. I’m an idiot.  I wasn’t planning to explain how this happened, but in the interest of not repeating to every commenter (like there are any of those these days!) how I managed to be such a flaming moron: first I got the phone all kinds of wet in the river while rafting (not this phone’s first encounter with moisture, I should add)…second, while trying to air out my wet phone, I gleefully flung it out the window of a fast-moving vehicle.

Trying to see the silver lining: I have always hated this phone.

 So….a full weekend by all accounts. Brace yerselves, here comes the recap!

Friday night, I was turning down social activities, knowing full well that I’d be waking up at 7am to spend a day on the Yakima river. Okay, so I agreed to a post-work glass of tinto at a posh-ish wine bar near work. Which turned into two glasses, and the decision to soldier on with the social activities. Dinner and more drinks (holy cheap, that Palomino!) were had with a bunch of strange-to-me-folk who, despite my friend’s apologies at their juvenile antics, were so unSeattlelike as to be a (sort of) breath of fresh air.

Saturday was spent recovering from all that tequila and wine, exposing my paler than pale skin to sunlight, drinking, paddling, drinking, falling into ice-cold water, breaking phones, and trying to stay awake enough for the drive home. As my friend pointed out, I had to watch a movie with him, as all my other options for the night depended on the ability to call/text people, which…yeah. I slept on a couch through half of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, which is no big loss since I can pretty much quote that movie word for word, then stumbled home for more sleeping.

Sunday was spent looking for a replacement phone (Verizon, incidentally, makes you pay full retail if you break your phone before your contract is up. A comparable replacement to my Evil Razr would cost me between $300 and $400. Thank you, no, I will not bend over.) I did a little grocery shopping while waiting for Cingular AT&T to open, since taking the hit for breaking my Verizon contract + free AT&T phone = cheaper than new Verizon phone, but no go there either, since you can’t keep your out of state phone number that way. Ridiculous.

I returned home, ate a whole bunch of green tea mochi ice cream, shopped online for new phones and was thwarted (”I’m sorry, we can’t port your number at this time. Please call XXX…” but that’s not very helpful when you DON’T HAVE A PHONE). So I calmed myself, had some more ice cream, spiffed up and headed downtown to complete my tour of all the Tom Douglas restaurants in Seattle by dining at Serious Pie. YUM.

After which our crowd moseyed on over to the Moore theater, to watch a fantastic Grizzly Bear and a sublime Feist rock the house. The show would have been perfection, if not for the woman sitting directly behind my friend, punctuating every song with at least fifteen “YYYYEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!”s and then filling in the rest of the space with loud, drunken commentary on just how much she was enjoying the show. I swapped seats with my poor friend to give her ears some rest, and when my fury boiled over, I turned around, intent on asking the woman to politely turn it down a smidge, but instead I opened my mouth and said something that would need to be bleeped out every other word. Taken aback, she began to apologize, stopped, changed strategies, and decided she’d be even more obnoxious, yelling back in my face until people calmed us both down. Granted, she reduced her yelling to more appropriate moments in the show, and I felt better just having expressed my displeasure, but she then decided that I needed to be kicked in the shoulder and arm as much as possible.

I’m fairly easy-going and passive-aggressive by nature, content to give someone stink-eye and leave it at that. Still, at that moment, I could really truly imagine just how nice it would feel to actually punch someone in the face. I swung around in my seat, ready to go for it, but her friend gave me a gentle push back, hushed and restrained her friend, and I settled for some more cursing at the bunch of them.

Someone later tapped my friend on her shoulder and showed her a text message (salt, wound) that read “Don’t worry, we think they’re assholes too,” sent from another audience member. Others also expressed their extreme displeasure. Still, excellent show, and I didn’t even come close to physical violence. Which I don’t think I could have handled anyway.

New phone is ordered, and now I just have to suck it up and deal with a week of no texting. My boss did let me borrow the company Sidekick, though, so there’s that.

Nick: Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” just shuffled onto my iPod.
Nick: I somehow blame you.
PWT: HAHAHA!
PWT: Did I ever tell you that I really, really liked Bryan Adams as a pre-teen?
Nick: I just assumed.
Nick: The next song was “Backdrifting” by Radiohead, thank Christ.

Yesterday after work, with no plans in the works – Nick is in London on business, I dropped by a friend’s place to watch a scary movie. I warned him that I don’t handle them well, which he brushed off. The movie, a straight to video deal (I don’t remember the name, how pathetic am I?), made me scream and curl up into a ball on the couch every 5-10 minutes, and made him roll his eyes approximately the same amount of times.

After the movie I was amped up, and just about to walk home and try not to pee myself on the way back, when my phone rang. My friend and his friend were having a drink and a bite to eat at the restaurant on my block, and did I want to join? Sounded better than a dark apartment to me, and I never say no to this place…it’s a charming, upscale Italian joint, but laid back enough to show up at whenever the mood strikes. I dragged along my very tired movie compatriot, and we had a few drinks and munchables. To my disappointment, it was Fedora Bartender’s night. He tends to ignore me, and act a little haughty whenever I even look the least bit cheery. Still, we took a table after one drink, so I dealt with him less than usual. I think I got home around 11:30?

I had trouble sleeping, and around 1AM, had to get up, annoyed, and pull my shades all the way down because police lights kept flashing in my windows. This isn’t terribly uncommon in my neighborhood, although it’s never a dangerous situation…see, we have this weird project housing for chronic alcoholics a few blocks away…it’s basically a place to get people off the streets into a place where they can die quietly. Awful, but I’ve very rarely seen any of the tenants, and the ones I have seen are usually very nice and very sad. It breaks my heart. So the ambulances, they’re not so uncommon.

Turns out the flashing police lights? Were because Fedora Bartender was shot resisting a robbery attempt on my favorite little neighborhood restaurant, about an hour and a half after two of the boys walked me home.

I’m glad I gave Fedora Bartender a bigger tip than I usually do, for actually paying attention to me for once. I feel slightly less guilty for making fun of him just hours before he got shot.