Living by the maxims of life

There are three maxims in life
1. Play hard
2. Party hardy
3. Die young

I engaged in all three this weekend. It was a weekend with the highest of highs and lowest of lows. It all started normally enough with me working till 11:30pm on Friday night. Those e-mails don’t reply themselves. I am coming very close to automatically sending all my e-mails to the recycle bin.

As I have mentioned before, I am training for a triathlon. Saturday I ran, I went the gym and I swam. I wanted to go for a ride, but I NEEDED a snooze before I went out in the evening…
Saturday night brought The Oracle - my wisest of friends – her [insert number here]th birthday. It was a get-together, as opposed to any sort of shin dig or box social: seven of us were there and the stage was set for an awesome night: red meat, roast vegetable salad, champagne and cake. It’s just not a birthday without cake. What made it so awesome was the humour: seven people with a sense of humour as dry as a Texas summer. I got home at 1am, very tired and very happy. Excellent.

If Saturday was the high, Sunday was definitely the low. An acquaintance – not a friend, an acquaintance, you understand – had set me up on a blind date. Yes, I broke the first rule of dating: I went out for coffee with someone I did not know. I’d seen a picture. But, ya know how people gain something like 5 lbs a year…well…on meeting this blind date I can only surmise her picture had been taken somewhere around 1875. Anyway, not being one to judge a book by its cover (or a ship by its hull), I pressed on. I’d been told she was a bit of a fashion guru, but I think her fashion magic had run out that day because what she was wearing made her look like a beach ball. I don’t like empire-wasted dresses on slim women, let alone ones the size of a small planet, but my date was wearing one with vertical stripes. Note: vertical stripes only make you look taller when you’re not as wide as you are tall.

I did have a cunning plan to get out of this – which, given my job, shouldn’t surprise you (at work, we call it an "exit strategy"). The date was set for 3pm. I "had" to leave at 5pm to go catch up with my folks for dinner. Get out time couldn’t come quickly enough (ooo-err). I tried to drop some subtle hints about my predisposition towards her – limited eye contact in the main – without wanting to appear like a psychopath.

The limited eye contact was a useful ploy because I tired very quickly of her tendency to throw her head back when she laughed, revealing the long black hair up her nostrils. Oh, yes, this lady (and I use the term loosely), puts the ass in class.

It appears, unfortunately, that my lack of eye contact and my “gotta go – dinner time” has been less than successful. She thinks I’m adorably shy and she’s enamoured by how close I am to my family. And she's got my cell phone number. Fuck. I should have gone with the borderline psycho plan. She's off to the east coast next week for 10 days. I have 10 days to figure out how to draw her a scenic map to Dumpsville.

To top it off, I worked till 11:45pm last night and I have picked up a cold. Probably from being in her gravitational field. God knows what else she’s home to. On the plus side, I spent my three hours of work on Sunday night listening to Beth Orton…bliss.

So, this weekend I have played hard. I have partied hardy. How did I meet the third maxim? - I showed up to work at 8:30am this morning. The little Egyptian man was unimpressed.