Um, wat.

I stayed up way too late, and now I'm miserable. Like everything I do late at night, I look back at it in the morning and ask "How did I get here?" Mornings provide an interesting counterpoint to the evening. No matter what you were doing or who you were with, you usually end up waking up in the same bed, with the same sunlight on your face, at the same time. Daily renewal is orderly, patient, predictable, and usually comforting - unless you'd like to stay in bed for a few more hours.

And I usually do.

I got a call from a friend who was working in downtown St Louis at around 7 PM, basically telling me that I needed to drive out to her bar because business was slow and she was bored. This is not a regular call. I wasn't feeling really sound and had every intention of staying in last night, but she came on pretty strong. I was unprepaired, and found myself saying, "Yeah, ok, I'll be heading out after this episode of Futurerama." After the call, one side of the brain smacked the other side, which had made the decision without checking with the rest of me; there is little about going to a sushi bar in St Louis on a Tuesday night that seems like a terrific idea.

Half an hour later, Frank and I are in my car driving to Washington Ave. while he tries to discern what it is that I'm intending to do. It's hard to say, really. I don't even know. I just felt like it'd been quite a while since we'd hung out, so I ought to go. Around 9, when the place was closing up, though, she asked if we'd want to go out to another bar and have some more drinks. I declined - work in the morning. Frank looked at me and said, "What are you thinking telling this girl no?"

And off we go.

There is a moment of cognitive dissonance when I try to explain my position re: work, drinking, and I'm told that this really is the socially appropriate and acceptable action. I feel out gunned. I cave.

I guess I should be specific when I say that nothing terrible happened to me, but dissonance continued throughout. I hadn't realized she was serious about me asking her out, or that she'd be so surprised when I did. When someone else hit on her later in the evening, I hadn't expected Frank to become so cross about it; forcing the awkward compromise between us where I confronted him in a suitably antagonistic manner to prevent him from confronting him in a significantly more antagonistic manner. My antagonism being deemed suitable, he allowed us to leave.

But I've still got a date on Saturday.