Overheard: in the End, Girls Marry Kyle

Scenario: A well-dressed girl in the parking garage waits for the valet as she talks on her cell phone. She is in distress.

So he’s like, “It’s my opinion. Do you want me to change my opinion?” And I’m like, “No. That’s your opinion. Keep it. Fine.” So he’s all, “It’s nothing personal.” And I’m like, “It’s law school, of course it’s personal.” You know. Like, are you not getting the logic here?…

Exactly. I mean, when he was looking for a job, I was so supportive, you know?…

Exactly….

Kyle, you don’t even know. I’m like, are you fucking kidding me right now?…

Dude! It’s just, it’s just… I don’t even know.

Plan B

Our friend Josh is in for the weekend. We’re having a quiet, excessively hung over breakfast at the Pork Store.

Me: Where are we going today?

Bryan: Well, Lori wants to meet up, and she’s babysitting her godchildren.

Me: Right. We were talking about going to the Exploratorium.

Josh: What’s that?

Me: It’s a kids’ science museum with all these exhibits you can touch. The kids can kind of run around.

Josh: We’re going to the museum of screaming?

Me: That’s one way to put it.

Bryan: They also have drums!

Me: And flashing lights!

Unwinding

I decide to watch a little TV, and realize there’s an “Oprah” on Tivo that I haven’t seen. I read the show description:

“Children sold into prostitution, children trained to kill, babies raped by men.”

Yeah. So, if I flip over to VH1 to watch “Behind the Music” with George Michael, I’m definitely going to hell.

By Example

A parenting lesson from Fussy:

“The more stringently you forbid something, the more attractive it becomes to the forbidee, correct? And shameful, because you still want to do it, but you also know you have to hide it, and the situation gets everso charged. And we want to drain all the charge out of things like . . . this! My neighbor’s five-year-old daughter, the other day, she walks in, cocks her hip, puts an imaginary Pall Mall to her lips, and whispers, We must smoke. And my neighbor was like, Wha-huh? Where the Bette Davis did she get that? We only ever watch Animal Planet. But, in alignment with the non-freaking-out philosophy, she replied in her best Marlene Dietrich, Yes, we must smoke, but we must also cough. So they started swanning around the room taking elegant drags off their imaginary cigarettes and then immediately pretending to hack up a lung. This, I thought, was educational roleplaying at its finest.”

Splashin’ and-a Splashin’

We’re in D.C. staying at the gorgeous, velvety, sunlit Hotel Monaco. The rooms come equipped with animal-print bathrobes, they’ll loan you a goldfish for the duration of your stay, and our suite has a cavernous bathtub. It’s the kind of bathtub that makes you hesitate if you don’t know how to swim, the kind of bathtub that makes you think, “We could fit, like, eleven people in here!”

And so, last night, we hosted a Champagne Bubble Bath Roaming Robe Party. Everyone donned their swimsuits and robes in their rooms, then came back to the suite for a bubble bath.

You never know how ludicrously long your friends’ toenails are until you’re in a bath with them. People, cut your toenails.

Insecure

The bathrooms have little “security seal” stickers all over everything. I think they’re supposed to indicate that no one has placed a bomb in the paper-towel rack. By day three, all of the seals are broken. While the absence of security seals wouldn’t concern me, for some reason, the broken security seals are making me think twice about using the soap.

I Need to Sleep

I’ve always known that I tear up when I hear large groups of people singing patriotic songs. So it was no surprise when I had to bust out my hanky for the “Star Spangled Banner.” “This Land is My Land”? Check. “America the Beautiful”? Check. And then “Johnny Be Good” came on.