all play some work

2009-11-21 9:16 p.m.

Earlier in the week, Christina and I went just two days without each other's company. It could have been for perilously low blood sugar, but when we reunited at Souplanation on Tuesday, it was a veritable combustion. Not to toot my own horn, but I provided what was arguably the best part of the night when I made an embarrassing confession about my dancing.

See the story behind my spectacularly slutty profile picture here. The problem with being a satirical whore is that people will just read "whore".

Christina and I have a lot of overlap when it comes to blogs. We usually expect the other to remember the details and spin it into hilarious oblivion. I'm usually the one that gets bogged down in details - I actively try to remember moments for blogging later, but this time I left it up to Christina.

After Tuesday, we could only make it another two days before 10.30 pm Thursday Christina begged me to meet her halfway between Huntington and Irvine for pizza. I was sleepy from an errant Tom Collins to celebrate being done with work for two weeks. I think it was Alison who suggested we have a mildly alcoholic party of two over the internet. She left me to shower and go to a real party after an hour, though. It ended up being me and Snorberg drinking and watching Must See TV 2k9 (NBC Thursdays) together over the internet. It would have been cute if it hadn't turned creepy in a way I won't write about because really, I'd rather not remember it.

I realized five minutes into Parks and Rec (top notch this week) that I had to sober up quickly to go on a conference call with Christina and Human Rights watch. She recruited me last minute to go to Senator Boxer's office the next morning on the anniversary of the Convention of the Rights of the Child. I had to read a bit during the meeting and help her prep in the office beforehand. We carpooled up to LA at 11 am on Friday; I joked that this would probably be her best drive to work ever. Set the bar high for delightfulness and jokes... and started conversation out with young death. We got the seriousness out of our system by the end of four blocks and christina dispelled the gloom and doom by turning up old school hip-hop on the radio.

I slaved away for two hours counting and sorting through thousands of letters for Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton at the office. The meeting itself was brief and easy - though nerve-racking when Christina's boss Pam yelled at everyone else while looking into my eyes. Squirm. We took three high schools kids with us to the meeting, as well. It was simultaneously refreshing and depressing to encounter kids that young. They were talking about yearbook ads, lunch-time club meetings and bullies at a million words a minute. I was curious about how they didn't seem to have cliques or a hierarchy of "popular kids" at their school.

"Am I just too machiavellian? I really think there should be an atmosphere of fear and a ruling order!"

To thank me, Christina treated me to "Fantastic Mr. Fox", which (at the risk of being painfully lame) was really fantastic. It succeeded where "Where the Wild Things Are" failed, and was a sincere children's movie with clever adult jokes subtle enough to slip by the innocents. Wes Anderson censored himself, for cuss sake! It was pure whimsy and all around entertaining. I could try to appear intellectual and watch oscar nominees, or I could watch cute stuff and feel good.

It probably also helped my mood heaps to have two bags of candy, pearl tea and diet coke throughout the night as "dinner". On frightening sugar highs, we paced up and down the aisles of Ross and Rite Aid, as close to "coked out" as we will ever get. I tried on an XL oatmeal men's sweater and bought two pairs of tights called "no-nonsense" on a whim. Last count now: 25 pairs. Christina almost bought three pairs of shoes from one dodgy store in the mall we were watching the movie in. It didn't stop there.

"Is it weird that I'm not sick of you yet and want to keep hanging out?"

I didn't go home once we were back from LA. I came over, we dilly dallied for an hour before I convinced Christina to watch Star Trek with me. This was quite the feat, since sci-fi/fantasy is not her "jam" to put it lightly. She reserved it online because I was convinced that it would sell out, and somehow also found out that Kohl's was open until midnight. She was so excited that she almost made a left turn at a very obvious red light in her haste to get in and do some unnecessary shopping.

After Kohl's we drove over to Stater Bros. to pick up the dvd. To our shock and horror, it was already closed! We probably spent more time trying to get them to open than we did in Kohl's. Christina knocked on the glass door for ten minutes solid, and was ignored by at least three different employees walking by. We wrote a desperate note and held it up to the glass, pounding for attention. Finally a sympathetic but rule-abiding employee came over to tell us that he couldn't let us in, even if we were just to run to the dvd vending machine and out in forty seconds.

We drove to two other Albertson's before settling on "The Brothers Bloom" as a consolation prize. Christina's heart wasn't in it and she was still too mad about the Stater Bros. ordeal to really watch the movie. I turned it off a third of the way through and crept out in the middle of the night to go home.

This morning I came back over to finish the movie and finally watch Star Trek. We also took a break in between movies to have lunch with her family. Her mom shook a box of potato wedges in my face, solemnly saying "MOJOS"). It was too much fun. All told, I've probably spent more time with Christina this week than I have any other person. Our friendship is like a part-time job.

Unfortunately I've been too lazy to take out my camera to have pictures to accompany this post. I took just two relevant ones this week, despite all we've done. One is of a horrific Ed Hardy t-shirt that her sister taped to her bathroom window and the other is of Christina yelling at Stater Bros. Too lazy to upload just two pictures.

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