Monday, December 05, 2005

on the rollercoaster of all these years/ with your hands above your head

Well, it turns out that sometimes, in some ways, going out for ethiopian food can be a little bad. But I want to recap the whole weekend first.
Friday was my birthday, and ended up being a fairly nondescript day; other than seeing Anna for a while in the afternoon (she got me an Ani bootleg cd, from Chicago, taped on the night we count as our anniversary! Whooo! And Gary Snyder poetry!), I mostly worked at school and in Civic, so I didn't really do much. When I got home at 11, Anna was at a holiday party (with open bar) for work, so I was here alone. Eventually, she called and I went to pick her up across town in her truck. We didn't get home until 2:30, at which point there were no parking spaces anywhere, and of course nobody's really moving at that time so you can't expect something to just magically open up anymore. So eventually I decided that we weren't going to find a spot and we should park by a parking meter on Devon (the main street by my house) and I would get up before 8 (when the meter kicked in) and move the truck so we didn't get a ticket.
When I got up and went outside at 7:45 the next morning, I was kind of confused to see no truck anywhere in sight. There was, however, I sign that I had mis-read the night before that said "TOW ZONE: No parking between 3-7 am, Dec. 1st-April 1st, or when there are 2 inches of snow." I had thought that the sign only applied when there was snow, but that's not the case and lucky for us the night before had been Dec. 2nd, so they came in the middle of the night and towed our asses. Chicago is notorious for this, so I guess it had to happen sometime, but anyway we spent most of the morning trying to get the car back from the impound lot across town.
Saturday night, we went out for dinner. Yay ethiopian food! It was delicious, and a bunch of my friends were there and I felt really just happy and like I actually have friends here (which is not how I usually feel). I also got a dvd of Monsoon Wedding, which I'm looking forward to seeing again, and the cookbook from the Chicago Diner, a fabulous veggie restaurant in Boystown. Way excited about that one.
Anyway, unfortunately I got food poisoning from dinner, presumably anyway since I didn't have much to eat other than that, and I spent most of yesterday either laying in bed shaking uncontrollably or throwing up. I had to miss a Civic rehearsal last night because I was literally so weak I don't think I could have walked to the el stop. (The good part of that is we finally got to watch Hotel Rwanda, which was such an incredible but devastating movie. I cried every time anything happened, essentially, and felt awful for ignoring/missing all of that atrocity when it was happening. I know most people aren't terribly politically saavy in high school but still. I'm shocked by my own ignorance.) Luckily, I feel much better today already, so I think I"ll actually be able to eat something other than grapes and get back on my feet. Anna said this whole weekend was just bipolar; everything was either really good (her Holiday Party, the ethiopian food) or terrible (the car being towed, the food poisoning). Thank god for Monday, for once ;-)

1 comment:

a said...

I was just informed by Josh, my roommate from last year, that food poisoning actually takes 24-48 hours to show up, so it was something I ate on Friday most likely. So the Ethiopian food is off the hook!