Bringing the Drama

so thursday night i went out with some friends to take our friend len out since he got married yesterday. he has all this stuff planned to do on the honeymoon up in tennessee, seemingly too much planned. but his future sister in law gave him a box of 196 condoms, so yeah. i think it just has awkward week written all over it.

last weekend i went up to north carolina for several things….first was to see kelly clarkson, second was to celebrate my friend kari’s birthday, and third to see friends i don’t see very often. it was so much fun, the concert notwithstanding. first off, mike picked me up from the airport and we drove to durham to hang with dawn and go to a durham bulls game. we stopped off at duke (after having to search through a forest to find the campus) and checked out the cathedral and cameron. we both made comments about how walking on such a serene campus made us feel like we had to whisper. you’ll find out if you ever go. the game was pretty fun and i got an interesting picture of a kid eating a pizza box. the cookout on sunday was fun, and involved different things like drinking pina coladas, sparklers, and hairdressing.

so then monday rolls around, and its the big day. KELLY CLARKSON! my friend mike and i wore american flag bandanas to the show. i wore my elvis glasses (i had to buy a new pair in the memphis airport because i left my gold ones at home) and everyone was excited, i think mostly to see if we could actually have fun at a show like this or that we’d all feel like fish out of water. we made a food stop at target before the show, and i found myself alone on the candy aisle. a kid no older than 21 came up to me and said “hey, nice bandana”. i said “yeah, i’m just celebrating freedom a day early”. he says “yeah, that’s good. too many people these days are too afraid to do that.” i found a way to exit the conversation and moved on. then i was also complimented by someone in the pharmacy aisle. NC is full of patriotic americans. maybe i should move there. the show was unbelievably fun. there aren’t many shows where you just don’t feel self conscious about dancing like at a kelly clarkson show. we even saw some guys down in front of us spreading their wings to learn how to fly during ‘breakaway’. there are now videos of me jumping up and down at a kelly clarkson show up on the internet. i’m not going to direct you to that though. it was cool though to see people around our age and you could tell, they were there for the same reasons, KC’s music is a guilty pleasure, but they were going to the show, and they’re going to have fun. we were all there under the same guise, and it worked.

the bandanas also made an appearance at the grasshoppers game, which was also very fun. we even won free waffles. the evening of the fourth ended with mike, kari, and i standing on the sidewalk in greensboro, watching the city fireworks, and the fireworks from the stadium that had been delayed, mike’s ipod blaring neil diamond’s ‘america’ and john ‘cougar’ mellencamp’s ‘ain’t that america’. it was spectacular and probably one of the most unforgettable july 4th’s i’ve ever had. in fact, i can’t even remember a specific memory it could replace.

more tomorrow about the wedding and poker night…