Last night I dined in a swank Italian restaurant. The last time I'd been there was several years ago, when a girl I'd dated briefly invited me to her birthday celebration. I repaid Heather's generosity by focusing my attentions on her friend Kristin all night. It's not as vile as it sounds. Kristin was fantastic. About meeting Kristin, Katrina once declared, "Oh. My. God. John, I have met your ideal woman." You don't seat me next to a pretty tomboy without knowing exactly what's going to happen next, right?
I chickened out with Kristin. Bummer, but at least I had the satisfaction of watching Heather implode. She shot me daggers all night. When I gave her her customary bottle of Godiva liqueur, Heather took this opportunity to recount, for all her friends, all the things I'd done for her in birthdays past. It was quite an impressive list. The description of her birthday scavenger hunt alone lasted a couple minutes. In establishing her long history of enduring specialness to me, she was wearing my bloody name out. It was slightly embarrassing.
"Hey Heather," I called from the other end of the table. "I have one question."
"What's that?" she chirped.
"What month is my birthday in?"
And right there, in front of all the friends assembled to celebrate her own birth, she had no earthly idea. Divine.
I used to think that the worst food presentation possible is a creamy pasta that contains shrimp with their tails still intact. I stand corrected. Garlic roasted in its head, then decapitated so that you have to use a tiny fork to meticulously dig out minuscule boogers of garlic, meanwhile getting oily skins everywhere—that's much worse. I had that shit in my hair, afterward. And I'm shaved bald.
I got to tell the old last time I saw my dad story, which is always great fun. This led to a larger discussion of our childhoods and our lives' respective crises, which further led to a discussion of how much we want to smack people who conjure earth-stopping dramas out of comparatively benign setbacks. The world's filled with so much actual awfulness, we said. Famine, disease, war, evil everywhere. It's really hard to respect the awfulness that exists only between someone's ears. I felt shame about my own such indulgent lapses, and as my penance I resolved that the next time some goateed Seatard whines that his life's failures stem from his mother not breast-feeding him until he was twelve...smackity-smack.