fuddy duddy fest

i think we all experience a moment during our transitional latter twenties when we realize how big a pain-in-the-ass we all were(are?).

sometimes it comes to us in a flash of revelation that fades as quickly as it appeared.

other times, it stays with us a bit.

friday night, i went out to a nice dinner at lulu on central and then to the dessert bar crave for some hot tea and hookah with about eight of our friends.

at lulu, we were seated in the corner of the restaurant, pressed right up against a table made for and created by gnomes. my husband sat oddly contorted in the corner, smashed against the wall, the gnomendale, and the freakishly high booth behind him (odd, when the table is just so damn . . . small).

anyway, there was a crew of drunken revelers behind us whose individual deaths i plotted for the following 2.5 hours . . . yes, you read that right. 2.5 hours. in an american restaurant. since when did we take a european approach to breaking bread?

i digress. our jonesy neighbors drank an obnoxious amount of alcohol and carried on as if the protective bubble of their well-bred existence had become literal instead of merely figurative. some crazy hyena suffered the severe delusion that i cared to hear every syllable she deigned to share with her unwilling audience at the TOP OF HER LUNGS. and that laugh, god help me, that laugh. it burst my eyeballs and made the split ends in my hair vibrate like a tuning fork.

i'm getting too ornery for this shit.

in my world, i would have said something to all of them. "if you want to carry on like this with such complete disregard for others in the restaurant, don't come to a restaurant like lulu. it's small, and you're obnoxious. i'm not paying 100 bucks to hear about your developing beer pong plans. the end."

this scene would have played out laced with my own gleeful relish. it all would have been to my husband's horror.

i'm trying to be good.

after trying to battle the sound behind us with some laughter of our own (a feat of impossibility sun tzu would have mocked), we decided to move the party to a more low key destination -- a dessert bar that boasted hookah.

ever since our trip to egypt, i've really come to appreciate the mellow grace that a nice hookah has to offer. as always, it was a great opportunity for conversation, and a relaxing way to digest the exorbitant amount of pate we shared at lulu.

it was all well and good, until the doors to the bar opened and unleashed "the kraken".

"the kraken" was a wasted girl with busted clothes, crack ho makeup, and an earsplitting screech she found relevant to her surroundings. like a toddler that somehow managed to purloin and abuse a fake ID, she gate crashed everyone around her in an attempt to find a way "home". she was in no way possessing a mental faculty open to a metaphoric wisecrack.

i'm too ornery for this shit.

as i sat there in judgment on "the kraken", i paused for a moment in reflective consideration.

yes, i did do a lot of dumb things in my latter teens and early twenties. yes, i was probably a huge nuisance to those around me. i mean, have you heard my laugh?

as i sat there thinking i should stop kracking jokes at the kraken's expense, she screeched again with the vigor of a banshee.

all attempts to be magnanimous faded.

yeah, i was bad . . .

. . . but never this bad. ;-)