Social Caterpillars

This weekend was kind of a bust. Nothing bad happened, but nothing really exciting happened either. I wonder if maybe 28 is the age where you and your friends are all paired up, people start having babies, and people decide that staying home is less of a bother than going out to bars or out dancing or whatever. I get it. Bars are mostly just for trying to meet people to date (and possibly stay home with on a Saturday night later on). No one's saying, "Hey, longtime lover/partner/spouse, let's go sit in a noisy, crowded bar, pay like $7 for a splash of liquor and some soda or a normal 12-oz. bottle of beer." No one is saying that! Last weekend, we somehow ended up going to a friend's house, where there was keg beer and a baby. It was an odd juxtaposition of life stages. The things we do to avoid going to the bars these days...

My stay-at-home buddy and I were really struggling for something to do last night. Minneapolis is absolutely redolent with good stuff to do on a Saturday night--usually. We were having a hard time deciding what, exactly, would be the perfect thing with which to occupy our evening, despite the array of activities/plays/concerts at our feet.

We decided--OK, I decided--that it would be a great idea to write down 6 possibilities on little pieces of paper and pick one at random. The number 6 came up because that is how many pieces of paper I got out of one large sheet. We actually had a kind of rough time thinking of things to write on that many pieces of paper at one point. This lead to us going to vita.mn, which is a website that tells you what's happening in Minnesota on any given night. We devised an overly-complicated system of each choosing a number and then adding them together, and then that would be the number of the event we would have as a choice. For instance, for the musical events, he chose 32, I chose 8, so we looked at the 40th musical option happening on 3/19.

ANYWAY, here are the events we came up with:

1. Female comedian at ACME Comedy Club (we later YouTubed her and found out she did mostly abortion jokes).

2. Male comedian at some comedy club at the Mall of America.

3. A play called 'Sarah Palin's Minnesota'--this was actually our first choice, but the tickets were something like $35 each, it started at 10PM, and local theater can be sort of hit-or-miss.

4. Music Option #15--some jazz trio at the St. Paul hotel.

5. Stay home.

6. See 'Barney's Version', a Paul Giamatti movie, at the indie cinema in Edina.

The first one I picked out of the hat was 'Stay home'. We were dismayed! So, we threw it out and started again. This time, we picked 'Music Option #15. This would have required putting on new clothes, however, as we were both wearing jeans. (The St. Paul Hotel is a very swanky place.)

The more options we chose, the less we wanted to do any of them! We were at the point that every choice, even staying home, felt like a huge chore. We became very whiny at the thought of having to do any of these things, like it was really difficult to put on a dress, or to drive to Edina to watch a tepidly-reviewed independent film.

In the end, we stayed home, grazed the kitchen for dinner--I had Greek yogurt and berries, he had leftover pizza--and watched the Sopranos. I think we were in bed by 11:30 at the latest. I am very well-rested.

Hope you've all had a good weekend!

xo