Thursday, February 26, 2009

A Day Out of Town

This has been what Big Liver Girl calls "a treadmill week": I've been running like mad to keep up with everything, and I'm essentially in the same place where I started. Which is okay when you consider that the alternative is to have ended up in a tangled heap on the floor.

The Mister and I went to Toronto for a hair show last Monday. Hair shows are always fun; the shows themselves are always interesting and I come away feeling pumped and inspired about my job all over again, PLUS they have the added bonus of providing some of the most spectacular and entertaining people watching ever created. Seriously, I'd pay good money just to sit and watch the audience instead of whatever's going on up on stage. There was one young woman sitting close by who's cleavage was so impressively displayed in a clearly architecturally unsound bra that we were sure her breasts were going to jump out and say "howdy" at any minute. We saw a man who appeared to either part of some unseen Mardi Gras parade, or be auditioning for a role in "Liberace On Ice", because he was wearing some really weird shit for a Monday afternoon. And one of the guys up on stage actually doing the hair had the Mister and I in fits of giggles, because he was a dead ringer for Bilbo Baggins, and we kept making "Hobbit the Hairdresser" jokes.

We took the train to Toronto for the day, which meant that we had to be out the door at around 10 to 6 in the morning. That meant that breakfast was at around 5:30 or so, so you can imagine how enthusiastic we were about lunchtime when that rolled around. Honestly, we were so crazed with hunger by then we'd, as one of my cousins so eloquently put it, have eaten the legs off a low-flying duck. As we ate, the Mister remarked that we seemed to have Salman Rushdie as our waiter. (The Mister and I "see" celebrities everywhere. It's not unusual for one of us to tell the other that we saw Mikhail Gorbachav pumping gas that afternoon, or that Elizabeth Taylor was at the drycleaners. It amuses us no end.) That led to a whole lot of "he's been in a bit of a bad mood since the fatwa", and "maybe he's researching his next novel about being a Anglo-Indian waiter at post-colonial convention center banquet hall". We were highly entertained.

After the afternoon session, the Mister and I had a while before our train home, so we went and had some natchos and a beer (because we didn't have to drive!!) and I read my book and the Mister was able to snag some free wi-fi time and messed around on the internet and we managed to pass our free time in an incredibly civilized manner. Then we got the train home. There were two university guys in the seats behind us who spent the whole time on their cell phones negotiating with some other guy about editing their essays for them and getting them better marks. They wanted the editor to guarantee a particular grade increase, while he was clearly having none of it. He wanted a flat rate and they wanted a smaller rate, with a "per point" bonus, should he perform well. I couldn't help but want to suggest to them that perhaps they put this much effort into the essay itself, and maybe they wouldn't have to engage in such shenanigans at all. But I figured that was going to have to be a lesson that bitter experience, not I, was going to have to teach them.

Sometimes it's good to get up on that treadmill and shake things up a bit, even if I do risk ending up as heap on the floor.

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