A weekend crowded with incident

Fun from top to bottom, no doubt about it.

Friday evening was okay. monshu had lost track of his Netflix queue and ended up with three gay movies all at once, so I told him to watch them alone and sat down to a couple hours of better-than-average stand-up on BBCAmerica. Dara O'Brien, with his extended riffs on Catholicism vs. Protestantism, probably held my attention the longest, but there was also a NYC comic whose comparison of the safe, padded, rubberised playgrounds of today to the steel-and-concrete deathtraps we grew up with had me guffawing myself into helplessness.

I stayed up too late, but we weren't expected on Nuphy's rooftop until three p.m. Saturday afternoon so I could sleep it off. Five of us (Rubeus and ottr4bear along as well) went through something like six bottles of wine; I wasn't able to use my field-tested Austrian-wine survival technique of alternating alcohol with fizzy water because there WASN'T ANY. (He's the only guy I know who throws a barbecue and then asks the guests to bring the charcoal.)

Strange as it sounds, watching crazy French Baroque opera did sober me up a bit. (ZOMG René Schirrer = NEW SEKRIT BFREIND!!!!1!) You've never heard of Rameau's Les Paladins but you know the plot already: Creepy old guy desires beautiful young ward, young ward has hots for hunky young beau, hunky beau enlists cunning helper--in this case, a seductive faery--to foil old guy. What you don't know is that the faery in this case is also a hunky young guy. And this isn't some crazy avant-garde casting choice either, girls; Rameau wrote it for a tenor, not a castrato, and that's how he sings it.

Words can't begin to describe the production. Any Rameau opera is at heart just a dance extravaganza with some songs in it, so you'd better have a good corps de ballet in your corner. They did, and it's here where they let themselves get all supercrazy postmodern. 50 performers dancing everything from pas de deux to the robot in various states of dress and undress among a riot of video projection doppelgänger? LOVED IT!

We left right about the time for a quick poke-of-the-head into Touché to remind local-area Bears that I still exist. I'm proud of the way I handled Creepy Nipple Troll without being unnecessarily rude, but I'm afraid I was a little too wasted to adequately judge to what extant I was charming and to what extant I was nothing but a obstruction of sight lines. (Getting into with two New Yorkers about pizza styles was almost certainly a bad call.) Oh, well; at least I fulfilled the goal of reminding strategic members of community who I am (there's a really sweet doctor who confuses me every time with a long-haired friend of his in the same way that bookbear always artlessly asks me if I'm the photographer he met at Southern Decadence ten years ago) and got out before The Pumpkining.

This was important because Sunday morning I had a secret coffee date with snowy_owlet before the chaos of a mass dim sum. God on a biscuit, we could talk until the cows came home, lived out lives of quiet desperation, and faded away to piles of bleached bones on a barren mesa. Dim sum went swimmingly; `Aṯā'ullāh was almost bizarrely affectionate, from little caresses to my arm during the meal to a roundelay of hugging at the end. So good to see her parents again. Afterwards, e. and bunj were kidnapping snowy_owlet for textile fun at their place, but the rest of us didn't want to go home just yet, so I conned lhn, prilicla, and mollpeartree into a tour of Argyle culminating in a several-mile stroll through the lakefront park in the best weather imaginable.

Before that, I brought them back for cocktails and conversation. It was exactly the kind of entertaining I like to do--low-key and spontaneous--and that I never do do because, frankly, I'm deeply lame. Dinner was at Hải Yền and I convinced myself that the occasion finally called for me to try the "Seven Courses of Beef" dinner that I've always been eyeing. It was, fortunately, not quite as massive as it sounds and definitely worth doing again.

Monday was the first day that the weather wasn't unbefuckinglievably gorgeous, so I devoted it to inner pursuits like laundry and languages. Expect a couple more babbly entries about American Indian languages pretty soon.

So how was your holiday?

"Oh, you're a computer programmer? How many languages do you code?"

The dreaded question! Every profession has one and Saturday night at Bear Night I got it twice. profundojoe, bless his heart, allowed me a very convenient amendment. If the question is "How many languages can you speak the way an opera singer can be said to speak a language?" it suddenly becomes a lot easier to answer.

My silly co-worker, not knowing the treadmill I walk on, set me up by telling seemingly EVERYONE about what a master polyglot I am. I really didn't know what to say because a noisy bar already plays havoc with my audio processing of English. All I need for total humiliation is to have my claims put to the test by having someone try to get me to say or respond to something in a foreign language under such adverse conditions. Can't remember how I weaseled out of that situation...