If You're Reading This...

....then I haven't gotten home yet. It was my birthday this week, so naturally I'm spending my Friday night in the city at a bar or bars with a friend or friends. If you're not reading this, then my plans fell through, I came home in time to watch Smallville, and I got to my blog before this message automatically posted. And in that case, I don't even know why the preceding sentence would be necessary. So hopefully, you are reading this, and I'm enjoying some long-overdue revelry. Maybe I made some new lady friends, or put way too many quarters in a jukebox. Perhaps there was some dancing in the street, although I haven't touched vodka since the one time that happened. Maybe I don't know where I am, or where I've been, or where I'm going. Taxi! Hopefully I made my train connections safely, and hopefully I drank responsibly and didn't get behind the wheel of a car if I wasn't sober yet. I'm quite confident that I wouldn't. In any case, even the geekiest of geeks(::waves::) has to unwind and party some time, and it might be another year before I do this again. I'm not getting any younger.

Finally, I apologize in advance to any friends I might have drunk dialed, either directly or indirectly by handing my phone off to a drunk friend. Not that I've ever done that....

UPDATE, 10 AM: So I had a pretty good time last night. Went in to Manhattan after work and met a few friends at one of our favorite drinking establishments. It was a chilly walk from the train station through streets that still had a lot of drunk pinstripes. I could care less about baseball, but at least New York won. After meeting two of my friends at the bar, at one point, one of my buddies leaned in to the bar to grab some drinks and struck up a conversation with the young lady next to him. She turned around, looked at my other friend, and slurred, “Whish Brady ish he?” We made her repeat it a few times before we finally got what she was saying. I pointed out that my friend didn't have dark hair but she was stuck on the hairstyle. It didn't seem to matter that she looked like someone had hit Salma Hayek over the head with a mallet and squished her down to like a MODAM version of the actress. She did correctly guess that it was my birthday, but soon went back to ignoring us.

There was also a dead ringer for Sylar there at some point who showed up with a friend of a friend and some other girl that was chewing Sylar's ear off most of the night, until the guy who brought those two fake-left with them and then doubled back around the block to come back to the bar. There was also a joke told that I probably shouldn’t repeat, though I’m not sure I could. The gist of it was some classroom full of kids being asked to use “contagious” in a sentence, and after several do so successfully, little Timmy tells some rambling story about an old woman slowly painting a fence, and his father telling him, “It’s gonna take that C*NT AGES to finish!” The accent and the beer make that a lot funnier. It was one of those nights where I didn't think I was drinking that much until I got off the bar stool and found it challenging to walk to the restrooms at the back of the bar. After that I took it easy, but not before my friend handed me a cell phone. I couldn't hear anyone on the other side so hopefully I didn't leave someone an annoying voicemail. I vaguely remember doing a running commentary of what I was seeing around me, mumbling things like, “That guy's a total douchebag; how is that girl now making out with him??” So yeah, the shots were probably a mistake.

One friend left around midnight because he had something like a two-hour ride home, so it was cool that he hung out that long. When the rest of us finally left an hour or two later, I had this strange feeling after a block or two, and turned around to find I was completely alone. Apparently the other two guys just stumbled in to the bar next door. While eating some food and waiting for my train, I got a “Where the **** are you?” voicemail from one of them. It would be another hour before my train arrived, and an hour after that before I was home. My cat seemed happy to see me, and his constant inquiries probably translated to “Where the **** were you?”, which stopped once I put some food in his dish.

And for years now, my internal clock has made it almost impossible for me to sleep past 10 AM, no matter what time I went to bed. It's been a good year, and a good birthday week, and after an inevitable nap I hope the good trends continue.