Bridget Callahan is Your Best Friend

So the last couple nights have proved that I am a sucker for anyone new. I am like the puppy your parents got to replace you, who gleefully adores all people who walk into the door, and nothing will change that excitement until you a) go away, and he promptly forgets you or b) you kick the puppy in the face. A few times.

Luckily Milwaukee Sarah has not kicked me in the face yet. See the out-of-towners are back, and I was immediately wagging my tail “Sarah Sarah Sarah, lets go do this, lets do this!” I don’t know why I don’t get my regular friends to do stuff like this. Probably cause it’s easier to justify spending money on stuff when it’s really “only because she’s just in town for a week”. So, on Monday, we went to Lava Lounge with Mike for Martini happy hour, then to the lake for sunset (Mike REALLY loves Lake Erie. I guess they have no large bodies of water in Connecticut, other than, you know, the Atlantic). Thursday, I tried to get people to go to Hooples to see crazy awesome guitarist Glenn Schwartz, but they all had a test on Friday, so instead we stayed at the chain Sports Bar/Adult arcade and I got extremely drunk. Drunk enough that at some point I was yelling how much I love Lord of the Flies, and no, I was not suggesting that the social atmosphere of the Sports Bar was conducive to finding the requisite Piggy and beating him to death, but let’s just say I had a candidate in mind.

Since we didn’t make it thursday, Sarah and I went to his Beachland show last night. I was very very hungover. I had spent most of the morning being unable to smell coffee without getting a tight feeling in my throat. The rest of the group wanted to go Downtown, because I guess there are lots of people who still like the Warehouse District, even people who are from places with much less lame Warehouse Districts. I don’t get that. I mean, I totally get drinking and dancing and hitting on people. But that place doesn’t even have the decency to display some depth of debauchery. Nobody is really doing anything that bad. They’re all just pretending to be bad, and being unnaturally proud of themselves for it. I always thought the glamour of going downtown was supposed to be “look at me hanging out with extremely attractive people, spending tons of money on really cool things I can only buy here, and not giving a shit about any of it”. Not “look at me hanging out with my mediocre looking friends, spending tons of money on drinks that are half the price anywhere else in a five mile radius, and caring a lot about what you think of me right now.” Most of the time I like Cleveland, until I go there, then I'm reminded of how much Cleveland sucks. But I guess for visitors it's the opposite reaction? Which is why I will never work in HR.

Anyway
So Sarah and I were not down for that, obviously. We were both pretty tired from the other night still, so on our way to the Beachland, I started a quest for the coffee my body finally started to crave at 8pm, which turned into an hour long tour of the burnt out Millionaire’s row by University Circle, various streets where I used to buy weed, and lots of closed coffee shops. Finally we ended up at the Phoenix on Coventry, where Sarah was very confused about how someone could make a café mocha without espresso shots. In Milwaukee, the espresso flows like the beer and the blood. She doesn't understand our wussy coffee ways. And there was a great thunderstorm with lots of lightning over the lake, so we hung out at the coast for a little bit, talking about communists with prada bags and 200 dollar jeans. Then finally, two hours later, made it to the show.

It was a pretty small crowd, but free. And by the way, when I said crazy awesome, I meant crazy and awesome. Because the guy is psycho, which is lots of fun if you can take it with a grain of salt. But his craziness was a little toned down last night, there was only one tirade against how a black becoming president would be the end of the country, and then a lot of stuff about how women should stay at home, and the fires in the toxic skies, and New York bearing the mark of the beast, pretty standard. Only one person walked out, and he was one of those weird youngsters you’re pretty sure has good intentions, but very little perspective, and while he might have better morals than you, he doesn’t understand that you can selfishly take advantage of someone’s talent while not espousing their schizophrenia.. Then some hipster tried to fake agree with Glenn, and Glenn was all like “bullshit, listen to yourself” and THAT was hilarious. See, that shit is disrespectful. Just shut up. The point is he’s a really amazing guitarist. But Sarah wasn’t down for 20 minute instrumentals, not enough salt to break up the sugar, so we left after an hour.

I probably should have gone straight home then. But instead we decided to go tool around our work campus since it was midnight, it’s a 24 hour access building, and Sarah still hadn’t seen the art collection, which is like 2/3rds of the reason I work for this company. So we walked around, and it was all empty and echoey and very abandoned spaceship-like.

THEN I went home. Where I still couldn’t go to sleep, so I watched a bunch of crap on Youtube, desperately trying to find a particular Bollywood dance sequence I had seen once. Don't ever do that to yourself. Too much Bollywood will make you yearn for your cat to eat your eyeballs. I think I finally forced myself to sleep at 3am? And woke up, as mentioned before, at 6? And now I’m here, where I obviously have enough time to write all this crap, so I think I should have slept at least another hour.

Tonight’s dancing in Akron, if you wanna come…