A Girl...

Something Out of Nothing

You know you've found a kindred spirit when you can say to someone, "You know how to waste time better than anyone I know," and they understand it as a compliment. This weekend Simon and I had nothing to do but kill time, and yet there was never a dull moment.

Friday afternoon, I got an email from him that said he was sorry I'd had a rough week (work stuff), and he welcomed me to the weekend with the promise that we'd do "something fun, something responsible, something productive, something silly, and something lazy." He didn't include "something yummy," but at the end of the day, he called me to say that he was coming directly from the pool to pick me up (have I mentioned he's training for a triathalon?) and from thence I would be whisked away for a sushi dinner date, because sushi makes everything better.

After dinner we took our fish faces home and watched Titus while I held a bottle of cold gin to my back because I'd tweaked it the night before and could barely breathe all day the pain was so bad. Although Simon swore that his internet research of "how to soothe back pain" revealed that the unanimous remedy was "eat lots of sushi," I was still only partially cured, so a cold bottle of gin it was.

On Saturday we lazed in bed until noon and then decided we'd go blow the $100 my grandma gave me for Christmas. And on what did we spend this Grandma Christmas Cash? Underwear from Victoria's Secret. Woo to the hoo! Lacies and frillies! Simon was a kid in a toy store.

Actually, he was a kid in a toy store earlier, when we stopped by a Toys R Us that lured him in with a huge "store closing" sign on the building. We came away with some itty-bitty baby shoes, a bag of Easter candy, a couple DVDs, and this:

It talks and has a voice-changer microphone. Simon was so pleased with the product and the low low price of only $20, he convinced the store manager to let him make a special satisfied-customer announcement over the store intercom, as long as he "kept it clean." ("I just bought a Darth Vader voice-changer helmet and so should you! Heck, for the low low price of only $20, you should buy two! What kid doesn't want a Darth Vader helmet? What adult doesn't want a Darth Vader helmet?! Get yours today!!!")

Yes, the helmet matches some of my new panties. What?

Between dinner and a movie, we had another hour and a half to kill at the mall, and I didn't know how we were going to fill it since I was too full of hamburger to try on clothes and too OCD to browse the bookstore. In my previous life, I'd probably have just gone home rather than try to pass that much time, but not now. Not with Simon.

His solution was to pop into one of his favorite audio-video stores and see if they had a test copy of Dark Side of the Moon--the remastered SACD 5.1 surround version, a popular tool for scrutinizing the quality of a stereo system. They had it indeed, and after the salesman had set us up in a listening room full of bitchin' components and comfy leather chairs, he turned off the lights and left us there not for a song or two, but for the duration of the album--43 minutes--and 15 past, during which Simon impressed me with trivia like how the recording engineers programmed the speaker channels so the last line of the last song--"There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark..."--sounds not like it's in full surround, coming from every direction, but coming from inside your head. Freaky. Maybe that's something all rock fans know, and maybe it's standard procedure for stereo salesguys to leave lovers alone in a darkened room for an hour, but the whole thing felt pretty special to me, little miss easy-to-please.

Then we took Starbuck's coffee and hot chocolate into the theater (a first) and saw Brokeback Mountain and cried and cried and ached and sighed and felt it all really closely and deeply and didn't stop talking about it until 3 a.m., except for the ten minutes we spent giggling over the silly romance novels in the grocery store at midnight. ("Can I help you?" an employee asked. "Nah, we're just reading dirty books," Simon said. "Hey, the liquor aisle is right over there if you need anything." Ha!)

The next morning Simon made scrambled eggs and we were wasted tired and left the house around 1 p.m. without showering and without makeup and without clean underwear because we were heading straight from my house to Simon's house (where we would shower) with only one teeny-tiny detour in between to pick up the bra they forgot to put in my bag at VS the day before. BUT--we didn't go straight from my house to VS to Simon's house, oh no. We went to the swap meet and looked at all the stolen merch and bought an incense holder and a Guyabara shirt and DVD and some records and tried to get a deal on two pieces of luggage and a medium-sized disco ball, but the prices just weren't right. And then we went to Victoria's Secret. And then we went to a high-end furniture store to gawk at the $8,000 kitchen tables. And then we got home with just enough time to do half a load of dishes before our guest arrived--Simon's friend Erik from his study-abroad in England a dozen years ago.

Wearing hats on our unshowered heads, we prepared a fine feast on the grill--tri tip steak and yellow squash and onions--and ate a might hearty and good meal. Erik was one of those MIT PhD genius types and terribly easy to talk to. Plus, he knew all about the Mormons. There was a bottle of wine, a bottle of beer, and a white russian, and there was talk and laughter and Digable Planets during dessert--artichokes and then ice cream sandwiches. We put our guest to bed on the futon with half a dozen blankets and a cat the size of Ohio, and golly, we were exhausted.

"Thanks for the fun weekend," I told Simon as our eyes were closing. "I had a great time."

"But we didn't really do anything."

"Sure we did...I mean, not really anything major...but..."

"What was that list? Something silly, something productive...?"

"I think we covered it all."

"I think you're right."

Posted by Leah at February 6, 2006 01:24 PM