"I was sleeping, diving, eyes closed, blinded / Now for the first time, I can see"

[dorchadas]

Every weekend should be a three-day weekend.

On Thursday, britshlez asked me what I was doing on Friday, and I told her that I was going to an EDM concert. She said she had wanted to invite me over to watch a movie, so I suggested we do it that night instead since I didn't know when the concert would be over, and that's what we did. I walked over to her place after I missed the bus (it would have taken longer to wait for the next bus), ran into her on her way to the store, and we got a couple bottles of wine and walked back to her apartment.

She asked me what my three favorite movies are as a way of narrowing down the options, so I said Dark City, which she hadn't seen and wasn't on Netflix; The Princess Bride, which she had seen but wasn't on Netflix; and then before I could make a third suggestion (probably 千と千尋の神隠し / Spirited Away) she asked me if I had ever seen Better Off Dead, which I hadn't, so we watched that. I'm...not sure what I expected, but a surreal, almost magical-realist black romantic comedy certainly wasn't it. britshlez said it was one of her favorite movies. I didn't like it as much as she did, but I thought it was great, and it does make me wonder what else I've never seen that's actually really good since I spent most of my childhood playing video games and not watching movies.

And then we stayed up until 3 a.m., drinking wine and talking religion, relationships, and philosophy. And if I hadn't been falling sleep, we might have stayed up later! I called into work--there was no way I was going in on 2.5 hours of sleep when I had a concert that night--and after I woke up the next morning, she texted me:

britshlez: "First of all, what we were thinking last night?!"
Me: "I think it's a mistake to assume that we were thinking."

She made cup noodles and eggs, I made waffles and an omelet. Good drunk recovery food.

I didn't do much of anything other than recover and read on Friday, but after dinner I left and took the L down to the UIC Pavilion to go to a night of EDM. I knew Illenium was the headliner but I knew exactly nothing else about the event, so the other three artists that performed--William Black, Dabin, and Ekali--were all totally new to me. The music was good, though, and when Dabin played a remix of Simple and Clean, that got my attention:

"Dabin - Simple & Clean" (Watch on YouTube)

There were some other memorable moments, like three gym bros in sleeveless shirts, caps worn backward, with arms around each other's shoulders singing along to the music; or when a woman just burst into the men's bathroom and stole a stall because she didn't want to deal with the women's bathroom line and no one stopped her, though I did overhear someone say "Can you imagine if one of us did that to the women's bathroom?"; or when someone said "I love the long hair" as I was walking by and grabbed my hair. But the main event was Illenium and Said the Sky and they were everything I was hoping for. Beautiful Creatures straight into Broken Ones, the remix he did of Halsey's Without Me, the Good Things Fall Apart sing-along, Fractures from Awaken, building up to Gorgeous near the end...it was magical.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me why I wasn't having fun, and I said I was, I'm just more sedate. What I should have said is, "Because I'm probably ten years older than you." I almost never feel old, but hanging out with EDM kids for four hours? I left just before midnight, after having gotten there at eight, and went home and almost immediately went to bed.

Saturday I decided that rather than stay at home all day I'd be active, so I invited lisekatevans (who was doing Acro Yoga with a friend) and britshlez (who was eating lunch and then going shopping with her sister) to the Art Institute, and when neither could come, I went myself. I wanted to see One Hundred Views of Tokyo: Message to the 21st Century.

I forget the title, but this is about the roadways ringing Tōkyō.

...and I was done in ten minutes, because it was thirty of the hundred pictures, right immediately in the East Asian art section. So I saw the the Bauhaus textile exhibit:

"Weaving was the only thing that women were taught at the Bauhaus, because it was the twenties and gender was a thing, still."
-Overheard

I wandered over to the Modern wing and looked at architecture and photography exhibits, deliberately avoiding the Andy Warhol exhibition because I don't care. I had wondered why there was a such a huge line to get into the institute--good thing I'm a member and could just walk right in.

After a couple hours I left and went north to Millennium Park to look at the leaves before the sunlight faded. While there, I saw a post by shawn.labrassuer that he, his business partner, and fiendishfanfares would be in the West Loop on a bar crawl for research purposes--shawn.labrassuer is getting into real estate and wanted to look at some popular West Loop destinations--and he was looking for people to meet up with them. I haven't seen them since ACEN this year, so I confirmed where they would be and after finishing up the leaves, I walked over to The Bandit and found them sitting at a table.

lisekatevans invited me out to dinner right after I confirmed my meeting up with shawn.labrassuer and fiendishfanfares.

We went to The Bandit for food and drinks; then The Allis, which had beautiful dark wood interiors and which I just realized is one of the places that lisekatevans wanted to take me since it's on the ground floor of Soho House; and then the CH Distillery and Cocktail Bar, which was the complete opposite, a translucent white bar (seemingly all of a solid piece) and windows onto the gleaming metal of the old stills. We had a drink or two at each place, and pretty quickly the conversations split to shawn.labrassuer and his business partner discussing the decor and how to remodel their building, and fiendishfanfares told me about the RPG game she's in based on the Black Dagger Brotherhood books, a description of which you can find here. And we reminisced about the Exalted game I ran for years. It was great.

I appreciated all the jokes about the business partner's "California accent" (he's a German living in LA).

CH Distillery and Cocktail Bar was several blocks east of everything else, and since their next stop was The Girl and the Goat (where I'd already been), I said goodbye and walked back toward the Red Line. On the way, britshlez texted me to let her know if I got done with my bar crawl at a reasonable time, so I said I was already done, responding to her surprise by pointing out we started during happy hour. She was at an Argentinian restaurant called Artango in Lincoln Square, listening to a live bossa nova performance, so I took the Red Line to Fullerton, swapped to the Brown Line, and met her there. I missed the most popular song (she said), but we stayed for a couple drinks chatting about vegetarianism--she said that a cheeseburger was the most perfect food ever devised by the mind of humanity, but she can't in good conscience eat meat anymore--kabbalah, and music until the staff started being extremely obvious about closing up, so we walked back to her apartment, took her dog out for a walk, and then we went up and she made us drunk recovery food--cup noodles and eggs, and then toast and eggs. And poured us more of the wine that we hadn't drunk on Thursday. The wine was...not good, but the food she made was, and this time we only stayed up until 2 a.m.! Progress.

Sunday I was originally planning on doing chores and shopping before my evening plans, but around 11 a.m. I got a text from graybear721 asking if I wanted to come to brunch at a sports bar, and I figured you know, why not? So I met her bowling team--they invited me to join them since someone was missing, but I declined due to said evening plans--and we ate bar food and talked mostly about non-sports things, which meant I could contribute to the conversation! Especially when we were talking about how terrible cheating in relationships is!

graybear721 also told me about her new job working for a company where all the executives are Jewish, so now it shuts down early every Friday so they can get home in time for Shabbat.

I left after a couple hours and squeezed in shopping before I went down to Argyle to meet thosesocks, except I happened to pick the exact train, exact car, and exact door that she was riding and caught her by surprise! We went to the supermarket south of Argyle on Broadway, which I won't name because the name keeps changing, and picked up ingredients for thosesocks's curry rice recipe, as well as a bunch of extra stuff for me--thick matcha Kit-Kats, shin-ramyun, konnyaku, etc. Then we went back to her apartment and made the curry!

And by we, I mean "mostly thosesocks." I chopped the vegetables and sautéed the onions, she did everything else. It was really good! We couldn't find tonkatsu sauce, but we did find Japanese Worcestershire sauce so we used that instead, and I found gari while we were searching so we could include that as well. I was really happy with including the Worcestershire sauce and might do that myself in the future.

We originally had been planning to watch Ratatouille--thosesocks was kind of astonished that I hadn't seen it, which is a running theme with nearly everyone I meet about any given movie--but she had a rough week and a rough morning, so instead we chatted about RPGs for a while and she asked me if I knew anything about how Jewish physicians had contributed to the development of medicine after I told her about how the principle of פיקוח נפש pikuach nefesh, "saving a life," allows Jews to ignore almost all of the commandments if life is at stake (like performing medical treatments on Shabbat). I said I wasn't sure, but now I'm curious. I'm going to see if I can find any more in-depth sources about it.

At 7:45 p.m. she kicked me out to do chores and wind down before Monday, and I left so I could do chores and wind down before Monday.


So, uh, am I an extrovert now? Even beyond everything I've done, I was all set up to do something tonight, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I wrote about this and some of my friends said they got tired just reading it. I've living that city boy life, as I told fiendishfanfares.

What a lovely weekend.

Comments

[corvi]

Ooooh, another Dark City fan! Sometimes I feel like I must have seen it in an alternate universe; so few people have seen or heard of it. *high five*

[dorchadas]

High five!



I feel like Dark City exists in the shadow of The Matrix even though it came out earlier. I've made it my mission to show it to all kinds of people because it needs to be better known.

[earthspirits]

Sounds like you had a very interesting weekend. That food photo looks absolutely scrumptious!

[aguart]

Marinated cucumber and other pickles are good drunk recovery food :) in Russia)
I read you for a long time already. Interesting posts. I never write comments, but I think I will do it sometimes since now.
And perhaps I will start to write my posts in English soon.

[dorchadas]

Oh, I remember that icon! Thank you for the comment--if you write any posts in English, I'd love to read them. I don't speak any Russian at all.

I usually eat pickles for breakfast--I have Japanese breakfast, with rice, pickles, fish, miso soup, and tea--and I'm glad to hear I'm fortifying myself against all the wine I'm drinking lately!