Margueritas make me sleepy

“So blissfully unaware.”

“What?” asked Andy as she studied the umbrella in her girly green-ish drink.

“They all look so happy. Look at them. All ‘look at me, look at me shaking my groove thing,’ all happy and stuff and junk,” I said obviously un-entertained by my flaming cocktail. Seriously. I had to blow it out.

“I see you’re going to be your usually uplifting self.”

It was Friday night, I had dragged Andy out of her sweat pants because I decided we should be “people” and interact with other said “people.” … Ok I also wanted an opportunity to wear the new pretty tragically unaffordable shoes I had just purchased.

So we were in a dim lit club, with fancy white leather couches, elaborate wood architecture, as well as suspiciously attractive barmaids as far as the eye could see.

The crowd was largely made up of well dressed university students. And there lay my melancholy.

“So happy now. They have no idea middle age is gonna hit them like a punch in the face. It’s a tragedy really.”

I get worried about a lot of things. I worry about whether the guy in Polka Dot Door ever get to see Polkaroo, I worry about Pauly Shore and his complete lack of a career, and damn it, yah, I still worry about Jennifer Aniston’s happiness.

But right now, I’m thinking: who will that pretty boy go home with, that’s who I’m worry about. Not the man with the man boobs.

“Hey are you worried about the man with the man boobs?”

“Scuse me?”

“I read this short story once, about a guy who said he was worried about some relatively clean cut guy with man boobs.”

“Um gotta say no. Not worried.”

“Yah me neither. I’m worried about him”

I was looking at an unnaturally attractive guy leaning on an awkward modern structure, possibly holding the whole place together.

“Worried? You mean you’re lusting.”

“No I’m worried. Nobody ever worries about the pretty people.”

Andy wasn’t particularly impressed with my musing. Instead she was intrigued by a nice looking, well dressed guy who seemed like he was having a controlled seizure on the dance floor. Well the poor guy had caught her staring and was coming right towards her.”

“Hey how you doin’?” he said illustrating his speech by fake shooting his index fingers at Andy.

She was visibly annoyed. Well, she was visibly annoyed to me. I’ve known the girl since she thought that The Backstreet Boys were “like, omigod, so totally awesome.” When she’s annoyed, she actually looks earnestly concerned: less eye rolling, more eyebrow furrowing.

Andy took her marguerita and held it high, “You’re up here. You should be down here,” she said as she lowered her drink to her navel.”

“See, now that’s the kind of guy you should be worrying about.”

“Bah. Enough people do.”

“Let’s go home. Margueritas make me sleepy.”

Ode to Andy

My dearest bestest friend in the whole wide world is leaving me. She’s recklessly abandoning me and my yet to be discussed future neurosis. She’s going to another province where she found a better job where she’ll get an office and a window. I’ve been traded in for a window.

So I guess she’s decided to grow up and be successful. Pffff. I threatened to hold my breath until she said she would stay. My diabolical plan was bound to work - except I got all dizzy.

I told her everything. Now who am I going to call when I’m looking for some advice on an embarrassing rash? I would have gone to Jeeves from the Ask Jeeves website, but the Ask people have terminated the charming butler, and frankly I don’t care to trust anyone else. Only my best friend and a cartoon butler.

Besides worrying all weekend about who would talk me off the ledge after I realise I just ate a quarter pound of expired cheese I thought was supposed to be blue, I got to help Andy pack. This meant sifting through a wardrobe big enough to clothe a small country. Clearly she could not bring it all so I helped her part with about two thirds of her dearest birthday suit wrappers.

“No! Not thooooose,” Andy whined.

“It’s an old t-shirt with arm pit stains. It’s so old I can see directly through it.”

I waddled past her in a pair of her old clogs and threw the monstrosity in a large heap in between a purple sock and a pair of bright blue leather pants, across from an unattractive blond wig.

Her wardrobe was a museum of her life. The sun dress she wore for her first day of high school, the oversized basketball shorts she wore at fifteen because she thought “they were da bomb, yo.” Then there was the sweater she met her current boyfriend in: I was there for both the purchase and the first encounter. Finally, I discovered a collection of local t-shirts of the “I heart NY” variety which act as a live travel log.

Yes, I could finish this story with a predictable ending. I could use her cleaning the closet as a metaphor for the transition of her growing up and starting a new life. That after boxing up her old clothes and bringing them to the Salvation Army, Andy told me how she felt about that new chapter of her life story had begun, and we all had a good cry. On that note, this is how it ends:

Clothes strewn about the room, half folded, mostly just piled up in various corners of the bedroom.

“I brought two spoons,” Andy said as she settled next to me leaning on one of three piles of miscellaneous garments.

“Awesome,” I said as I dug into the tub of Rocky Road ice-cream.

We got lazy, lied in old clothes, and watched some predictable tv comedy. And that is why I’m sad Andy is leaving.

Columbo’s Glass Eye

“I have a problem.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do. This time go chronologically, alphabetically gives me indigestion,” replied Andy in one even unimpressed breath over her Cantonese Chow Mein.

“I’m serious – well more than usual, this could be medical, or worst: psychological!” I wheezed my last words. More because I thought that it could be plausible rather than the fact that I was distracted by the last dumpling I had bit into and was presently choking on. It seems it did not want to take the path of previous soldiers before him: ultimately turn into poo. Rather, it wanted to join his presently uneaten family, or maybe it hoped to escape and live its remaining days in the place where he was born (in the back of this tiny, sketchy restaurant in the lost alleys of Chinatown where the waiters are rude and don’t speak English.

It’s snowing now, on this graying February afternoon, and I’m sitting across my longest friend Andy, as I clutch the table attempting to gracefully get through a slight coughing fit. She knows all and too much about me. If I wasn’t sure she’d keep my paranoid babbling to herself, I’d have to shoot her.

“I think we’ve already established that most of your problems are psychological. Statistically, this should be one too,” Andy said as she sympathetically handed me a full glass of water to wash the dumpling down to its death.

“I can’t sleep.”

“Count sheep.”

“Seriously, I haven’t slept in two days! Not one wink, not one hour, nothing, I go to bed tired, I close my eyes and nothing. I’ve just spent two nights on my back counting how many seconds I’ve been awake,” I cried as I eyed my second dumpling victim, assuring it internally that its fate would be quick and painless.

“Well that’s your problem right there. You probably spent the night thinking about how you couldn’t sleep, creating some kind of twisted neurotic escalating snowball of rapidly increasing thoughts, ergo keeping you awake. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy really.”

“Really?” I said wryly, assuming Andy would use any excuse to be able to call me a neurotic nut (whether or not there is any truth to that)…. (and there isn’t)…. (really).

“Really. So all you have to do is stop thinking. Be at one. Be zen. Find your inner self and ‘ohm it up.’”

“Ohm it up?”

“Ohm it up. You know, like the monks: oooooooohhhhmmmmmm. You know, meditate. Did you know that Buddhists and Ascetic Hindus’ ultimate goal is to separate themselves from their constant inner chatter? They want to dissociate themselves from both their mind and their body, to transcend this chaotic, meaningless, unpleasant world. When they manage to do that they attain Nirvana, a higher plane of energy where mind and body don’t exist, you simply meld in with the universe. And that’s what you have to do to sleep. You have to find inner peace.”

“But I don’t want to dissociate myself from mind and body, I like being neurotic - not in a nutty way, in a cute, charming way. I like over-thinking every situation: I like to try to figure out which of Columbo’s eyes is the glass one. I like to analyze whether the guy behind the counter at Starbucks thinks I’m cute by dissecting the way he asks which size coffee I want.”

“But you’ll never gain inner peace that way,” menaced Andy knowingly, as she sipped her green tea. I saw her then as a nagging mother who you know knows what’s best, but wish she didn’t.

I wouldn’t sleep that night, nor the next. Instead I lay awake calmly, and happily thinking about incoherent, unimportant daily meanderings. Whether Joey really did the right thing by choosing Pacey. I tried to figure out why Titanic’s Jack Dawson wouldn’t climb on the raft with Rose, and why Anna Nicole Smith has lost all her motor skills. It’s ok that I didn’t sleep for another two nights. I was happy, lost in thought, lost in what makes meaningless life events bearable: the running cynical commentary in my head. I like my mind and body as one; I don’t want to not exist. If that means I’ll never attain a higher level of spiritual being, so be it. At least I “be.” Three nights after that, I finally fell asleep, I was watching some late night A&E when I dozed off as I hopelessly tried to figure out which of Columbo’s eyes were glass.