The World According to Gio

I spent the morning cleaning my house, briefly interrupted by a phone call to my grandmother, and not so briefly interrupted by a phone call from my mother during which I explained the details of my advance health cxare directive to her and incidentally found out that she expects to immediately be taken to Belgium for the ingestion of a suicide pill should she ever become terminally ill, and was all ready and roaring to go around 1pm when bofaboy called to invite me to a BBQ at his house starting at two. I said, "Sure, I just have to run by the bank, Macy's, the record store and then I'll be there by three at the latest." Famous. Last. Words.

All I needed from Macy's was a pair of plain black linen pants, as my much-beloved DKNY pair from last summer is at least one size too large at this point. You'd think this would be easy, wouldn't you? Ha! At 4pm, I had a small melt-down in the middle of the downtown Macy's. Mostly, I stood in the middle of the ladies wear section shouting into my cell phone, "The problem with having religious nuts running the country is that all the fashion designers have been replaced with straight, colorblind pod designers." The sales assistant who had been sidling up to me scurried off rapidly as a result, and bofaboy made sympathetic noises on his end of the conversation while I launched into a rant concerning what I'd like to see done to whoever thought bright fucking green and pink were good spring colors. Half the racks of clothes hurt my retinas!

A few minutes later I walked into The Limited--still searching in vain for black linen pants--and discovered that the cool new purse my mother sent me as an Easter present retails here for $200 a pop. Dude. I'm almost afraid to use it now. Have I mentioned that one of the cool things about being nominally from a Catholic part of the world is that I clean up for prezzies three times a year? December (X'mas), April-ish (Easter) and August (B'day) Perfectly timed and all. Go me!

Anyway, I kinda gave up on the pants before I got completely hysterical (might head to the Mall tomorrow) and headed over to the independent record store to spend the Easter loot from my grandmother on some new CDs. At this point I was running about two hours late and had to call _thedentist to rearrange evening plans some. You can't rush a good record buying binge though, because it's very zen.

[Tangent: people think my album buying habits are strange; apparently most people don't mix punk, folk, jazz and blues as their preferred genres. It totally makes sense to be though. The three things I appreciate most about music are bouncability (punk and jazz), smart and fun social/political commentary lyrics (punk and folk), and really strong voices (jazz and blues). I think I really freaked out lenajill last weekend when I asked her Dad to turn up the radio in the car because Sarah Vaughan's version of "Black Coffee" came on jazz radio and I adore that song and Vaughan equally.]

Headed over to bofaboy's for microwaved BBQ and then I had to rush off to meet _thedentist at the Turnverein because he's on a German learning kick that apparently now includes a fascination with Bavarian culture and they had a Bockbierfest. For the non-Germans on the flist, Bockbier is an unsually strong beer that was taditionally brewed between Ash Wednesday and Easter as a nutritional supplement for people who were fasting for lent. There was traditional Bavarian food, which I skipped except for a piece of Bienenstich and a pretzel I bought for my breakfast tomorrow, traditional Bavarian music (the less said about that the better), traditional Bavarian dancing, and many, many people in traditional Bavarian dress, including _thedentist who was wearing actual honest-to-God Lederhosen. I showed remarkable self-restraint by not howling like a banshee with laughter. How do I get talked into these things?

The polkas finally got to be too much and I excused myself. I'm now at home and self-medicating with bitch beer and the soundtrack to De-Lovely, which is much more my speed.

( And because Swabian requested it, a meme: )