Big night out

On Friday afternoon, I asked B if he wanted to try and get a babysitter for sometime over the weekend. Lucky us, she was free Saturday night so we got on the phone and made plans for a big night out, meeting up with all the friends we haven't seen in so long, and... Thats what we SHOULD have done. Instead, neither thought of it again until B got home from work at 7:30 on Saturday night.

I said that I hadn't made any plans and asked if he had done anything. He said that he thought about checking which movies were playing, but hadn't actually done it. So, since we had a half hour before the babysitter arrived, we got dressed and started throwing out ideas for dinner. We decided that since we had never actually eaten at Pershing Hall, we would try there. They gave us a reservation for 10 pm which was kind of late, but I really wanted to show B all the brochures for kitchens that I had picked up during the afternoon, so we said no problem.

As we drove over to the Champs, I rang up a friend to see if there was anything going on that night or if she wanted to meet us for a drink at some point. She ended up deciding to come and eat dinner with us. Lucky for us, when we arrived at 9:15 to go and have a drink in the bar, they offered us one of the super nice center tables if we wanted to eat immediately, since the table was reserved at 11. In the end, the other table didn't show and we ended up spending the whole night there, while my friend Mimi spilled out all her romantic adventures since the last time we were on the phone.

I didn't realize that Mimi's 35th birthday is coming up next week. When I met her, she was dating this fantastic American guy who was a few years younger than her. They seemed like they had a fantastic relationship, one of those couples that really seem like they are best friends. It looked like the kind of relationship tha you could be a bit jealous about. But in a good way. Anyways, Mimi is Tunisian and her American boyfriend was not Muslim but I didn't realize this was such a problem until she told me that her family had no idea that they lived together, in fact, no one in her family even knew that she had a boyfriend when they had been dating for nearly two years. So clearly things weren't as idyllic as they seemed from the outside. Then one day she was celebrating her 31st birthday and started talking to him about the fact that she would like to know that one day he would be interested in marrying her, even if it wasn't soon, just so that she knew that she wasn't investing all this time in a relationship that was going no where, especially since she was getting older, etc. He was a bit irritated at this and brought up the fact that she wasn't committed enough to even mention him to her family. Long story short, they broke up. Since then, I have seen her go from one disasterous relationship to another and its horrible to watch. Of all my girlfriends, she is probably the one that most wants to be have children. And she cannot meet the right guy.

Saturday she told me all the latest news and it wasn't good. She had met a few guys that seemed nice but in the end, one was too old, one was too ugly, and one called her "Cherie" on the second date. I can't really consider myself that much of an expert on dating, considering that I met my husband when I was 19, but I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her hard. The bottom line, each time, was that it wasn't exactly right. Its funny that when you are younger you accept all kind of faults in your partner because you figure it doesn't matter and as you get older you get so much more picky. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't you, as you get older and wiser, realize that everyone has faults and nothing is perfect and the best you can hope for is 7 out of 10?

I didn't say anything like this, because I don't like giving people advice on their love life. You can never understand the whole situation and, so at best, any advice you give out is harmlessly misguided. And so many of my girlfriends are in the same situation, getting older and really wanting to meet someone, but dating the same guy over and over again, the type that hasn't worked out for the past decade and yet they keep banging their head against the same wall.

After dinner, Mimi was headed out to meet some friends for dancing. And sort of tossed around the idea of staying up til dawn but then I remembered that I had walked about 6 miles Saturday afternoon in my eternal quest to entertain Ella (and also attack the issue of my ever growing ass) so my feet were too tired to take another 4 hours of hard work. Of course, instead of going home to bed, we sat up with a nightcap and looked through kitchen brochures until 2:30 in the morning. We are worse than 5 year olds. If there is no one there to tell us to go to bed, we just don't. Finally, I looked at the clock and literally threw myself into bed to try and get atleast 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep before dear Ella woke up.

Needless to say, 4 hours of sleep and a hangover does not bode well for an agenda full of exciting activities on Sunday. We did manage to run into BHV for some new sheets for our guest bed and the new Lost DVDs. Sunday was the last day of their 6 day sale, which, incidentally, started sometime in September. Is just my hangover, or does that seem odd?