promised weekend craziness...

october 9, 2006

so weekend craziness doesn't even begin to explain it....

friday, october 6
left work on friday and went to will and shan's to hang out with zac. shan had already left for the rehearsal dinner. the plan was to go there, wait for will to get home, and go meet jp at his law school shindig. i arrive, talk to zac for awhile, put on some makeup, straighten my hair, blah blah blah. will arrives home, brett comes downstairs. we smoke a little and then are out the door and to oakland (amazingly enough, mostly on time!). so we find parking not too far from the law school and it's one of those new spots where you pay a machine and then put the receipt on your dash. one would imagine that being intelligent, college educated folk we could figure it out. but no. the first thing i do is push the '2 hour' button. put in 2 quarters. machine says 'paid' so i print the receipt. it only gave me a 1/2 hour. now i should've realized that parking was not going to cost 25 cents an hour, but i wasn't really thinking too hard about it. ok, so i'm screwed now because i have to print out a receipt that says i can park until 8, and this one says 7. there's 2 quarters lost to technology. so we round up the rest of the change we have between the 3 of us, and stick it in the machine. we get until 7:50 and i can live with that. no meter maid checks meters 10 min before it becomes free!
so we head on down to 'oktoberfest', the first annual international food fair hosted by the international law society. for $7, you get to wander around and eat all the dishes that the students have made and there's beer, wine and sangria too. pretty sweet deal, plus i got to see jp manning a table. we eat, brett and andrea show up, jp's booth shift is over, and he wanders over. introduces us to some friends, who turn out to be pretty cool. the one guy, ken, has a wife who is doing her first year of residency right now. yuck. he sees her less than i see jp nowadays, which seems crazy. they actually got married on the same day as us. this past year too. ken was really funny, he told me that they got married on may 30th. and i was like, oh, you got married on a tuesday? and he was confused because he knew that wasn't right. so we determined they also got married on the 28th. we also met jamie, a really nice guy who i would've sworn up and down was gay. he made a comment about his spouse and didn't say wife and jp then started talking about his wife. i thought he had made a big faux pas until we met her later on in the evening. they were both really sweet and moved to pittsburgh only about 7 weeks ago. they live in morningside, right near our stanton place.
so fast forward to when shannon, brian, and leeann arrive in oakland. at this point, jp has consumed 8 free beers. he's got the cute belligerent jp slur going on. i always appreciate when jp is drunker than i am. =)
so we all go to joe mama's and drink a bunch of cocktails. it's a good ol' time. i end up leaving around midnight because i'm exhausted, leaving jp in the care of brian. go home, clean the litterbox, go to sleep.

saturday, october 7
pre-wedding....
we wake up the next day at 9 (yay for sleeping in!) and jp is totally hungover. this works in our favor because this means he doesn't want to get trashed at the wedding and we don't have to take a cab home and go pick up will's car the next day. i have to almost immediately leave to go to BB&B for the wedding present. i take a route to the waterfront that i don't normally and end up making several wrong turns and eventually have to turn around, but not before having to cross the hi-level bridge. grrrrrr. of course, it's full of construction even on a saturday morning. so fine. go buy some knives, want to buy their magnetic knife bar but they're out. get the chick to put together a gift bag for me and i'm off to giant eagle to grab some coffee and run home. make it home without incident.
get home, iron dress (which is definitely more of a task than i expected. jersey is NOT easy to iron). jump in the shower, get dressed, makeup, straighten hair, etc. the plan is to all meet at will and shan's at 1:15. ceremony starts at 2:30 and we want plenty of time to get blitzed and drive the 20 min out there.
so we are out the door at 1 (perfect!) with everything we need. the card, the knives, the quesadilla maker i have still yet to wrap, the camera, extra memory cards, extra cigarettes, etc. etc. i've never been so on time in my whole life. get to will and shan's and i proceed to wrap the quesadilla maker and zac's present. except there isn't enough wrapping paper. so there are big stripes on the bottom of the presents that aren't wrapped. whoops.
brian and leeann arrive with bagels and coffee (sweet!) and we all look fantastic. smoke as much as we have time to, and we're off.

ceremony and pre-reception
manage to get to the wedding mostly on time (they actually started the wedding about 5 min early. i was amazed.) and we get halfway decent seats for the HOUR LONG catholic ceremony with mass. i lost it when kathy walked down the aisle. standing there, dabbing the corners of my eyes to avoid smearing my eyeliner (my only not waterproof makeup of the day). so they get married in about the first 15 min., but we keep praying and standing and sitting and singing and kneeling and praying, etc. etc. whenever i'm at catholic mass, all i want to do is yell "stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!". jp and leeann know all the catholic callbacks and the rest of us are confused. but we make it through and get to leave. no receiving line (for the only wedding where i know most of the wedding party!) and we all pile out to smoke and say hello to everyone. hang out there for a good while, since it's 3:30 and we can't go to the reception until 5. finally leave around 4 (minus one will, who has joined the wedding party in the limo bus) and we need to stop for batteries for the camera and drinks and cigarettes and whatnot. stop at an eckerd in this mini strip mall plaza and jp and brian decide to wander into "record rama" (doesn't that need an "O"?). we go to eckerd, then join them. record rama was amazing! so much vinyl, and halfway decent stuff at that. i pick up tull's 'aqualung' and the knack for erik for his bday (that day). there's an article posted in the store from the post-gazette about how the owner has the world's largest collection of popular music. the library of congress wanted to buy it from him because their collection is only 1/2 of his. pretty sweet for random store in the middle of grotesque northern suburbia.
so we leave and continue to the reception. have to wait a little while to get in, so we take pictures of us looking snazzy outside.

reception
finally get in to cocktail hour and there are drinks to be had. vodka is skyy, so i'm totally pleased. guy behind the bar looks younger than me, and cards me. thank god i thought to bring my id!
the ballroom we're in is really cozy (i think the number of us was the max the room could fit). this means that the walk to the bar is not long. there are chair covers with big red bows and red roses as centerpieces. it all looked very...swank. very wedding-like. very unlike my wedding in every way, which was sort of strange to see.
so we drink and eat and go outside to smoke and drink and eat more appetizers, etc. the wedding party arrives and kathy and ryan dance to 'lovesong' (very cute, they totally learned to dance for that). there are best man and maid of honor toasts. rachel says something about " their love, which is never futile, will always be wasted" and we were all confused. who knows, maybe she was drunk already. so we move on to dinner (pretty yummy) and drinking and more drinking and dancing. i call erik at one point, but it's noisy at the wedding and also noisy where he is. all i know is that i wished him a happy birthday and told him i'd see him tomorrow. i spend a lot of my night dancing, but also mingling. kaiser is there for the weekend and it's good to see him. plus yulch and erin are there too, and i haven't seen either of them in forever. everyone looks great, all dressed up. kaiser looks so much like a mobster, it's scary. manage to talk to all the parents except kathy's mom and thank them. they all seemed to be having fun and it was quite obvious that we all were. the bartender knows my drink well at this point and is no longer skimping on the vodka. we dance to all sorts of (mostly) fun songs, but i miss the 2 that i really really wanted to dance to! 'yeah', which i requested, and shakira's 'hips don't lie'. i was really sad, but life goes on. we start to realize the night is winding down, so i try and drink as much as possible before we leave.

the embarrassing parts...
yeah, leaving. here is where much of the night has been not necessarily remembered, but told to me. up until this point, i've been having a good time, but have been very much in control of myself. this is when things changed. we walk out the front door of the hall and i totally fall. jp and shan tell me that i say "it's possible that i'm not ok" and tell them that i really hurt my wrist. then i realize the shuttle school bus is right there, full of my also drunk friends who have just seen me fall and are yelling at me to make sure i'm ok. so i think that i need to apologize and board the bus. since i haven't talked to anyone on the bus and jp did not follow me there, i have no idea what i said. i do know that the bus driver was definitely freaked out by me. well, these things happen.....
so jp drives us home. on the way home, i start the drunk dialing. leave a message for anferni and i call elizabeth and end up talking to her for awhile, the whole car ride and then again at will and shan's until my phone dies. on the way into will and shan's, i end up almost falling off the stairs but manage to catch myself. i spend the rest of the night asking everyone if they think elizabeth will be mad at me for my phone dying. they are reassuring. at one point shannon claims she wants to be me at that moment for halloween. i get mock angry and shake my fist, tossing my lighter somewhere across the room. i also end up spilling some hot ash on the carpet and burning it. end up feeling really guilty. jp takes me home and i manage to undress myself and get into bed. have one of those drunken breakdowns and cry for awhile since i've made a fool of myself. finally fall asleep....

sunday, october 8
wake up at 9. can't go back to sleep. realize that i've slept in my contacts the whole night and take them out. wander into the living room and watch sex and the city for about 1 1/2 hours until jp wakes up. plan is to breakfast at ritters. call shannon and she is the only one awake. we agree to wander over there in a little bit. so we change and get over to their place. no one is moving very quickly. smoke a little and then get ourselves to ritters. in order to seat all 5 of us soonish, we all squish into a booth with shan and zac on one side and me, will, jp on the other. i insist on playing 'mandi' on the jukebox and someone else does the same about 2 songs later. even i think there should be a limit on barry manilow.
my mom calls while we're there, looking for erik (see also: crimey mcgoestojail, above). never showed up at his friend chuck's house last night and he talked to colleen (his gf) at 2:45am and told her he was wandering around carnegie by himself.
we leave ritters and go back to will and shan's. sit around and watch the history channel, essentially dozing because we are all beat. zac decides to go play disc golf for a little bit.
erik is eventually found, and there's another crazy story there.
quite a weekend. next one is my birthday...i'm hoping for no disasters and me not having to apologize for drunken behavior.