Party Planning!

We're throwing a Halloween party tonight and I am very excited to see how it is that Shawn and I will be able to stay awake to attend it.

Last night, Shawn went to a work happy hour and arrived home promptly at 4 a.m.---a full eight hour work day of drinking and socializing. I was fine with him being gone until about 12:30 when I still couldn't fall asleep and hadn't heard from him since 8:30 p.m. when I called him and he said he'd be home in about an hour. At 2:30, I called his cell phone. No answer. At 3:30, I called him again--no answer again. At 4, he stumbled in, soaking wet because he had decided to walk home from downtown (in the rain) which took about an hour and a half. I was relieved that he wasn't dead (kept thinking, if he had been hurt, who would call me? Would anyone know to call me?), but livid that he was so late and that he didn't call at all and that it kept me up until 4 in the morning, especially since we're having a party tonight that doesn't start until 9 p.m. Then he woke up at 8:30 a.m. because he has some walk to do for this new committee that he's on. That means I've had a little less than four hours of sleep and we haven't yet bought any of the food or beer or decorated, though I did clean last night and put up some window decorations last Sunday.

I told him that he should consider being single--that he would be much better off if he didn't have to worry about niggling things like calling me or returning home at a normal hour or having to think about someone other than himself. But why would he want to be single? He has someone who helps pay the mortgage, whose car he can borrow, who buys groceries, who cleans the bathroom and washes the sheets, who is obviously more of a home body and so there's little danger that she'll be out carousing and flirting. It's the best of both worlds except when he has to deal with me actually being upset that he's not thinking about me or contributing to the house hold at all. But I'm not mad. I understand. I want that too.

While I was laying there playing out the possible scenarios for where he might be, I thought of a good short story idea about a woman whose boyfriend is killed and how she is not sure how to feel about it--how on one hand, it's really sad and horrible and how on the other hand, this might mean she can keep all of his furniture. A good title for the story could be something like, "My Boyfriend Went to Heaven and All I Got Was This Lousy Sectional Sofa."

I'm in Rocket Cat again with Padhraig who has come up from State College to see Carrie and to attend this certain-to-be-anticlimactic party. He doesn't quite have a costume yet, but he'd like to come as a French aristocrat, which should be easy to pull together in a couple of hours. He's sitting next to me right now, grading badly written history papers about Nazism where the students write sentences like, "Fascism at this time allowed for many changes and made certain parties gain some kind of rights that were guaranteed to alter the course of history somehow." I told him to write in the margins, "Mysterious!" or "Intriguing...I wish I knew more." Padhraig would like me to mention that he has had a haircut and that it makes him look years younger.

(Aside: there is this utterly obnoxious dad/uncle/kidnapper in here with a two year old boy . The guy has a scratchy loud voice and a Camel cigarette tucked behind his ear. He said, "I'll have a cup of coffee and a child-shutter-upper." HA HA HA! He looks a little bit like Julia Roberts semi-ugly brother, Eric. He also said, "Hey, I'd be crabby too if I woke up at 5 a.m. every morning with my pants wet! I'd be arrested!" It doesn't seem right that I should be able to hear every word he says even though he's forty feet away. He's one of those guys who sincerely believes that everything he says is funny. Please don't let this be the kid's dad).