Things aren’t as joyous around here as I’m used to. I’m blaming the winter. I’m hoping it’s the winter.
On Saturday night, I went out for what was supposed to be a wild girls’ night involving all six of my closest NYC ladyfriends. One by one, though, they had to work or had delayed flights back from business trips or had to “pick something up in Brooklyn” (what?), so it ended up being just Emily, Sonya, and Jessica. We went to dinner at BonChon for chicken that is both “tasteful” and “nutritiously enriched”. I don’t know what either of those words mean, but it was a damned fine chicken wing they were serving. It was so weird, though–the place was on the second floor of an unmarked office building, yet it was crowded with greasy-fingered eaters. It’s funny how Asian people somehow convince white folk to sneak into secret rooms for designer knockoff purses and into elevators of seemingly empty offices for sesame-glazed drumsticks.
After not even finishing one plate of wings and rosemary French fries, we went to Karaoke Duet to sing our hearts out in a private room. Karaoke usually means Emily doing the humpty dance, Beth–the whitest person you know–somehow knowing all the words to every Kanye song, and me . . . okay, I always sing sad 90s songs. But this time, EVERYONE was singing sad 90s songs. We actually kept apologizing to each other for choosing them, but we couldn’t stop.
I stood up at one point to take a picture of the three of them leaning back against the mustard-colored vinyl couch, completely sullen, but as soon as they saw the camera, they all became totally fake-animated:
Look at this! Jessica went as far as pretending to sing into her closed fist.
The really depressing part of the night was that karaoke had been half price before 8 p.m., so we’d gone to dinner at 4 to give ourselves plenty of time to sing for cheap. Which meant that we were finished hanging out at 8:30. Sonya went off to see crappy Asian movies with her boyfriend, Jessica went to meet up with her similarly-German friends to eat some weiner schnitzel or something (wait, is that Austrian?), and Emily came back to Kamran’s with me to gel her hair before a hot date. I had really wanted to go dancing, but when we got to Kamran’s and found him already in bed with his pajamas on, I lost all energy.
On Saturday, we watched Brick, which I didn’t know was a neo-noir when I added it to my Netflix queue. Despite hearing good things, we were both set to hate it and had pretty well succeeded after ten minutes, but once the story started making sense, we found ourselves warming up. Halfway through, I said, “I don’t hate watching this movie,” and he agreed. And then we ended up liking it. I don’t quite think that Joseph Gordon-Levitt actually needed to impersonate Humphrey Bogart during the last ten minutes for us to get that it was supposed to be a noir, but the interesting–sometimes annoying, but always interesting–wordplay throughout the film made us forgive that. Still, total bummer.
On Sunday, we watched the John Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence, and I pretty much cried the entire way through it. I thought it weird when we paused it so Kamran could go to the bathroom and I found myself lying down on his couch and leaking a couple of tears into his red satin pillows, but by the time an hour had passed, I was in full-on sob mode and had to ask Kam to stop staring at me so I could concentrate on not killing myself. It was seriously the bleakest movie I’ve ever seen. It’s what Revolutionary Road was trying to be and totally failed at. You don’t know who to blame for everything that happens in it, and you want to give all of the characters a Valium. We debated abandoning it with thirty minutes lef but decided we had to know what happened. When we finished, I said, “Let’s watch it again with commentary!”, and Kamran said, “I’m not watching that again. EVER.”
On Monday afternoon, my Internet randomly went down at work–only mine, mind you–and that’s when I found out that my laptop had 13 viruses and had been banned from the network by my IT guy. I spent two entire days without access to my photos, my music, and my smut. I don’t check my blog visitor count every ten seconds like I used to, I don’t have the motivation to write for Examiner.com, and I find myself unable to listen to anything but super-poppy songs like this:
On the bright side, what had better be the last snow of the season just passed, and soon it’ll be warm enough for me to wear the PINK SATIN COAT my sister bought me for Christmas:
This is the only thing keeping me going.
