Before I launch into my awesome weekend, I have to say that I started organizing my desk last night. The untainted promise of new office supplies (yes, I love new office supplies almost as much as I love new purses) lured me to begin mucking out the detritus that has grown on my desk in my "office". (For those of you who haven't seen my office, it's really a corner of my bedroom.) It is as if my computer is the base of a tall tree and everything else is the leaves that have fallen and fallen and fallen and fallen until you have to get a shovel and the bottom layers are beginning to blacken and turn to fertilizer. Yeah. Needless to say, my desk has been neglected in the unpacking frenzy that Lisa has courageously helped me undertake before this coming weekend. But I started taking it back last night. I sorted. I threw away. I actually read some of my mail! I have a lot of my bills set up on automatic bill pay, so I'm not always good about mail, unless I'm expecting something fun, like lingerie.
Saturday morning, I got up early and armed with (hopefully!) Aunt Clara proof directions, I made my way into Philadelphia to a contra dance. Yeah, I didn't know what one was either. You do a lot of the same moves as a square dance, but you move up and down a line of dancers. The best description, in my mind, is the country dance in the early part of the original A&E version of Pride and Prejudice. [Don't even bother with the recent version. It sucked.] I ended up at this dance because an old and dear friend, Seth, was up from Hotlanta calling for the dance. I was very amused when I arrived and asked if Seth was there yet to be told that he hadn't arrived and everyone was asking about him. Really? Wow. Turns out this goofy guy who used to have lumber in his bedroom and had to throw out a pot of spagghetti sauce because he didn't want to wash it is one of the top ten callers in the country. And he was! Awesome that is. I was very impressed at how he lifted the energy of the room with his...patter. There's no other word for it. It's patter. And it was fun. It was fun people watching. It was fun dancing. And everyone was in disbelief that I had known him so long that I knew him when he still had hair.
The first...boy...that I danced with had bare feet and was so sweet about it being my first time. I think he's been stoned A LOT in his lifetime, but he was very kind as he helped me through the moves. The next guy I danced with came all the way up from DC for this dance. He showed me how to properly be swung. I like to be swung. It's spinny and fun. In fact a lot of the dancing was spinny and fun. Allemande is spinny and fun too. I spent a lot of time looking into the eyes of people I had never met before. There's a curious intimacy about it. It's not like when you meet someone for the first time and you look at all of them and talk to them and your eyes move about the room. No, when you're dancing and your partner swings you, you look into their eyes. Everyone there had a different energy. There were the college guys like Keith and Joe who were having laid back fun. There were the guys who, you could tell, were serious dancers and took every misstep with the tolerance of a siamese cat. "No, your feets go there, stupid human." There were the little old men who were just glad they could still get it up and onto a dance floor. There were some gay couples, one of which had very prickly energy. There were the couples that kissed every time they swung together, kissed while the waltzed. There was one couple especially that was all about the kissing. I kept looking at them and trying to decide if they were kinky or not. Because that's how my mind works. He appeared to be much older than she looked and he had this big-ass, goofy grin on his face for most of the dance. This man was having some serious bootilicious fun. It was a joy to watch.
At this point, let me say, never ask a guy who wears fluorescent yellow and orange pants what to wear to a contra dance. The vagueness of his response goes into Guy Communication Hall of Fame. Really it does. Though, to be fair, people wore a wide variety of outfits from short tennis-type skirts, to peasant skirts, to pants, to pants under skirts, to short flirty skirts that showed their panties when they whirled. No one had a skirt stuffed inside their pants, but that's just because everyone was all about the swirling. The men wore skirts too. I guess men who contra dance like to swirl too. One of the guys wore this cool-ass skirt that was black with fall leaves on it. It was awesome. There were a couple of guys there in kilts. One of them was quite offended when I asked him if he was regimental. I don't know why. It's not like I was groping his ass while I asked!
It was a lot of fun and I plan on dragging our Girls' Night Out group to a more local contra dance.
It was also a lot of fun to catch up with Seth. What can I say about him? It's lovely to have shared your life, your time, your body with someone and years later still be friends. He put up with a lot from me in the rocky months after we finally broke up. I told everyone about the cat playing ping pong with his balls. I gave all his new girlfriends' bug names. But we survived. And our history together is something to be treasured. He's the one who upped my nickname in college from Wench to Fiendish Wench (Somehow "pantsing" someone while they're doing laundry and not wearing underwear could be considered evil. Go figure.). He challenged me in how I have relationships with people. He accused me of splurching on myself all the time to draw attention to my tits. Please. As if. We talked about old and familiar topics. We talked about new stuff in our lives. He's expecting another child and I'm thrilled for him. I always knew that he would make a great dad and was a little sad when I thought he was going to marry someone who didn't want kids. I rediscovered his fabulously silly sense of humor. Puns and silly jokes abounded.
I was so tired Saturday night that not even the Magic Pajamas could give me energy. They practically had to scrape my ass off the sofa to get me into bed. Of course, that didn't stop me from being distracted the next morning and running late in the process of discovering my legs are too short.
Sunday morning, I met Seth, along with Baldric and my kids at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We grabbed a quick breakfast at their suck-egg cafeteria and then hit the museum. We had so much fun! The Japanese Tea house was lovely. The temples were so peaceful. I got to see "Sunflowers" up close and personal. Wow. But the best fun we had was in the modern art rooms trying to decide what everything was. (A long time favorite pass time of the boys' and mine.) My favorite was the Washer and Dryer. Nicholas thought it was a cave. I don't remember what everyone else thought of it. The highlight of those rooms though was Nicholas trying to touch some (probably priceless) piece of artwork because he didn't realize the stick stuck in front of it was part of the piece. Once we scraped the security guards off of him, he was fine. I plan on teasing him about this for years to come. We also liked the ceiling which I thought would make a good nerf gun target. Conner agreed because it was already shaped and painted like a nerf bullet. We had a great discussion about what art was. Is a painting that is grades of orange on canvas art? Or the blue square with a different shade of blue down the center? Or the grid of 25 blocks in five different colors?
We then trekked nearby to a restaurant for a leisurely lunch. It was a bit more leisurely than we had anticipated, because our waitress was so slow, I think she was going into the kitchen and giving blowjobs to the kitchen staff in between trips to our table. She always had this vague, silly expression on her face. Everything took forever. My toast came after the bus boy cleared my plate. But we had a great time. Seth showed the boys his iPhone and let them play with it. He and the boys told silly jokes and talked. it was a lot of fun. I only got lost a couple of times on the way out of Philadelphia. Breathing much easier once I hit 422.
The evening wasn't so fun. Nicholas was very...expressive...of his anger. But it needed to come out. I also found out that someone I absolutely cannot stand because of something she did to Conner wants to date Baldric. What? Why? Sometimes the world is just too bizarre, even for me.
But, I had a lovely weekend and fulfilled a couple of my goals (yeah me!) of keeping in better touch with friends and of taking the boys to more fun, enriching activities.
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