After Work

Justin and I decided to go see Kill Bill, Vol. 1. We got to the theater early, and ended up hitting a nearby Barnes and Nobles to kill an hour. I didn’t really read much, and spent most of my time checking up on old, favorite authors, trying to see if they had anything new on the shelves. I refrained from buying stuff, and hopefully will be able to find what I’m after at Quimb’ys maybe tomorrow. :)

Justin spent the whole time studying VisualBasic.

After the show, we heard a voice behind us say "What are you kids doing here?" Turns out, Fook was in our theater, and caught the show as well. What was doubly surprising is that we ran into him at work earlier in the day. He invited us out for a drink, but Justin’s taking a week off of boozing and I drove to the movie theater.

I know. Lame. But let me explain.

I’ve got this thing about driving and alcohol of any kind. If I know I’m going to drink, I make it a point not to drive. After living in Columbus (where you call a cab and, maybe an hour and a half later one shows up), Chicago is cab heaven. I walk out into an intersection, raise my hand, and someone sidles up to take me where I need to go.

Let me tell you a story.

Once, when I was an idiotic high-schooler, I was driving around Indianapolis. We were all passing around a pint of Souther Comfort, and I was sipping on it as much as anyone else. Only thing was… I was the driver. At one point, we’re tooling through a neighborhood on the Northwest side, and it’s one of those neighborhoods where the roads are tight and winding, woods all around. The road curved sharply to the left, and I didn’t. Somehow, I was lucky enough to slam on the brakes before I hit anything. When the car finally came to a stop, I saw that my headlights were about 10 feet away from someone’s house.

Not a tree. Not another car. Someone’s fucking house.

Fast forward a bit later. I’m at my friend Alex’s house, and I called home to try to see if I could stay the night. Unwilling to tell my parents I was too drunk to drive, they tell me to come home and I get behind the wheel. Again, thanks to some unbelievable miracle… I made it home without killing myself or anyone else.

Only much later did I realize how UNBELIEVABLY lucky I was, how lucky I am, to be alive. I vowed that I would never get behind the wheel of a car unless I was sober.

To my shame, I broke this vow a few more times than I’d care to admit while I was a grad student in Columbus, OH. I was never as bad as that one time in high school. But there were moments when I distinctly felt that, probably, I should not have been driving.

In my mind, my dance card is full. I feel I’ve been given a great deal of leeway, and some bigger force out there graciously decided to overlook my adolescent idiocy. And, to a lesser extent, my post-undergraduate indiscretions. For me to take any risk today is to snub that miraculous early fortune, and that’s something I want desperately to avoid.

To make a long story short – this evening, I felt really bad about saying "No" to Fook. He’s a really cool guy, and someone I hope to get to know better. And I felt like a total lame-ass for saying "Sorry, I can’t drink… I drove tonight" to him. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I stuck to my guns, but I don’t want him to get the impression that I don’t care for his company. Quite the opposite.

I’m hoping to talk to him next week, and tell him all of this. And, to invite him out for drinks after his shift.

All in all, today was a really great fucking day. I got to learn a ton, hung out with Justin (who did get his phone back, by the way), and saw a great movie. The one thing that was a negative was not hanging out with Fook – and that’s something I plan to remedy next week.