Those Crazy Kids

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . September 25, 2010 . 2:44AM

It’s been a month since I’ve been back to school and the one thing I miss, more than most of the other fun summer things I’ve given up, is the biweekly ritual my friends and I have known as trivia night. Every other week we pick a night and we go to the local Mexican place where we have to get there 30 minutes early to even get a table for our group. This was not always the case, but some evil snitch told everyone else how cool trivia night was and now the whole town knows.

So, we make a deal that whoever can get there early shows up 30 minutes early to get us a table. I don’t know about the rest of the group, but I start to look forward to trivia day about two days early. It’s not the amazing Mexican cuisine, though the food is easily the best Mexican in town. It’s not the stellar service, because the waitstaff is highly overworked on those nights. It’s not the celebrity sightings, even though we’re certain we saw a country singer the last time we went because in Nashville we leave our celebrities alone.

The whole day of our trivia night feels special and around 4pm, the texts start flying. “Is it trivia night?” “You coming?” “We’re so in. See you there.” “Can you get the table?” “Yep, got it. I’ll be there early. How many?” “Are you bringing a guest?” “Cool beans. I’m so excited. We’re gonna WIN tonight!”

It’s everything that happens in a two hour time span that makes that time together special.

AJ is the runner. He immediately goes up and gets our tickets to put our team name on there. We always choose the same name and it’s one that sends me into giggles every time. Either April or Bryan has to be the team writer. I’m not sure how this happened beyond my utter lack of attention to the questions and their ability to write fast. We can count on certain people in certain categories and me for no categories.

And, up until the last time we went, we never got close to winning. Last time, we got third. It was a proud, proud day.

The one thing that we can guarantee is that there will be a lot of laughter. Many attempts will be made to screw up the other teams by saying the wrong answers loudly. AJ will say the right answer loudly several times until I threaten to take away whatever junk he’s gotten from the bubble machines by the door if he doesn’t knock it off. April, who is as mild-mannered as they come, will look around suspiciously at people who are using their cell-phones (against the rules!) and may even scare a couple of them into leaving with her glare.

But there will be lots and lots of laughter.

I miss it, terribly.

I can’t wait for winter break.

It’s time for Trivia Night.

Internet friends

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . March 25, 2010 . 10:30AM

At CPAC, every time you turned around you could find someone you knew.  By this I mean that if you didn’t know them personally, you would recognize them from television, their blog, twitter or from pictures with your friends.  For me, this meant that CPAC felt like one big family reunion.  I’ll admit it:  I felt like a cool kid. 
 
My friends and Leon’s friends were there and those that were not were keenly missed.  Though there were thousands of people there, you couldn’t wander around without seeing someone you knew.  Even online friends were instantaneous friends.  This is the nature of and the intricacy of internet friendships.  You spend so much time speaking with someone online that it builds an immediate sense of comraderie and bond. 
 
This is not always a positive thing.  I’m fully aware of stalking and the like.  In this case, it was a delightful experience.  Please be careful who you talk to online.
 
By the end of CPAC, we’d formed our own mini-group.  The group was consulted before meals and definitely before going out in the evening.  Like-minded people who enjoy spending time together and who are at the same event sharing food:  what could be better? 
 
One evening, we headed out to get a very late bite.  Some of the participants wished to get a drink and we headed on to the bars on the strip to find a place to eat and settle down to talk for the night.  After walking for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, but what was really only around a couple of blocks, we found the place that 3 different iphones had placed as THE place to be for the evening.  As we started to head in the door, with all of us pulling out our IDs, there was a problem.  Caleb’s license has expired.
 
Caleb is well beyond the legal age.
 
Caleb looks like a logger.  Caleb looks like his picture.  Caleb’s picture ID states that he is above the legal age.  The kid at the door, who couldn’t have been all that much above legal age himself, refused Caleb entry.  He stated that it was the “new thing” for kids to use outdated IDs to get into bars.  Clearly, the ID was Caleb’s.  The kid again refused and stated that “in the DC stings bars were being busted for things just like this.”  At this point, Caleb’s brother Ben came to his defense and we left after words were exchanged. 
 
Be aware.  You might not be who you really are.
 
The silver lining was that the experience bonded the group even further and we returned to the hotel where we started and the bar and restaurant there.  This was also the place I’d suggested in the first place.  Before the walking and the argument.  To say I was smug would be true.  But we had a great “war story” and the group had a great evening. 
 
Yes, internet relationships are interesting.  I’ve met some of the best people of my life on the internet.
 
Here is to meeting many, many more.

Vague memories of an Irish pub

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . February 26, 2010 . 8:19PM

When we last left our heroine, she was at an Irish pub in the awful land of Washington, D.C.: a land full of people with agendas and horribly arranged streets…

We’d moved to a larger room in the back of The Dubliner and our group was gaining people like crazy. By this time, many in the group were inebriated. I was drinking my Coca-Cola (yeah, yeah, I’m drinking caffeine again–I’ll pay for it later) and enjoying the show.

It’s not my job to tell you everything that they did or said. It’s really not fair to them. Truly. They desperately need to be tattled on, but they all have their own blogs and if they can remember, more power to them. What I remember most keenly was our waiter. In an Irish pub, anyone with any kind of European accent sounds Irish. This is particularly true when everyone in the room is inebriated. What happens is that everything is much funnier than it really is.

Because of this situation, when it came to conversing with the waiter, I thought that it was hysterical that he wasn’t really Irish (look, he SOUNDED IRISH–if it looks like a Lucky Charm and walks like a Lucky Charm–yep, I’m kidding and yep, someone is gonna take that personally and yep, someone is gonna call me names). If you’d like to call me sauerkraut, go ahead.

Anyway, I made it my mission to discover the heritage of our waiter. As such, I refused to give him my order until he would disclose. What? I was in Washington. Disclosure is the name of the game. You can’t live there and not carry around your birth certificate, right?

Eventually, he gave it up to me and my friend Sarah that he was English and French. Sarah is French so this was an incredibly delightful conversation that ended with us holding our waiter up for ten minutes while we compared family histories and had a new best friend who was now required to serve all of our food “with love” because it was inevitable that we were somehow related (me being 1/4 English and Sarah being French).

And yes, I required him to say that everything had love in it.

This was much better than the experience we had at a bar later in the week where they wouldn’t allow us in because Caleb’s license had expired and they refused to believe he was over 21 even though he was supporting a full logger beard and it was clearly him on the license. And then when the guy who refused to let us in mouthed off to Caleb and Ben and made the situation ten times worse… Oh, you want to hear about that, too?

It was a long weekend. And I met a girl named Beer.