From: Kenneth G. Cavness Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan Subject: [TAN] Chicago DFS: On Tapas It Should Be Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 14:28:48 -0600 A wind, blah blah, beginning, yadda yadda. Insert obligatory Windy City and wind allegory here. The Social was actually to sort of start on Friday afternoon, with me getting a day off of work to play with my friends Maggie and Steve. But Steve got his car broken into at the first DFS Felony, so Maggie and Steve got into Chicago around 5:00. This does not mean that they arrived at my office at 5:00, because Chicago traffic is *in-fucking-sane* at 5:00. Stand-still traffic. Even if they'd have gotten downtown, their map was off somehow and they ended up a couple miles north of where they should be. Due to some random errors of circumstance, we kept missing each other by phone until around 7:30. Maggie and Steve were in front of my apartment, so I JUMPED into a cab to rush out -- or try, anyway, since the traffic was still horrendously bad at the time. Finally, we managed to all get together at the same time, and we walked back to Steve's car about a mile away (parking in Chicago can be a real bitch) to grab beer, cake, and sleeping supplies. We watched Blair Witch at about midnight, which Maggie had already seen and did not like. I personally enjoyed the movie and was pretty frightened during the parts where you're supposed to be, but I _really_ thought the ending was stupid. And I do mean the ending. The last 10 seconds or so. On Saturday, we woke up relatively early (around 9:00 or so), and proceeded to get ready for Koz to arrive, which he did around 11:30 or so. We remarked together about the various stages of compleness (or rather, the lack thereof) of my apartment: the painting, the furnishings, that sort of thing. I had _no_ idea how much effort (and money) can be involved in becoming independently accommodated. I've probably sunk altogether about $8000 in the first two months of living here, and that doesn't include the sheer amount of money I've put into rent, security deposit, etc. And I'm _still_ not done. Anyway, we arrived at Emilio's on Chicago's Longest Mile (Clark and Belmont to Clark and Fullerton is _always_ extremely crowded, traffic- wise), missed the valet parking since what it really is is a parking garage, and circled back to find it again. We stood outside of Emilio's looking for anyone, and I quickly sighted Hawk, Drew, Novak, Pam, and Bill, and waved at them. They ignored me. Only by shouting were we able to bring them to our little group. We entered, we ordered, we chatted. I convinced people to at least try the dates wrapped in bacon in a red pepper sauce, since it sounds so appetizing but is some of the best stuff I ever tasted. I think Pam found them to be a near-orgasmic experience. Novak thought they tasted "interesting". I had mentioned that Emilio's was the only "official" portion of this trip, but really I should have planned it out further, since afterwards (after the Hugheses and Millers had retreated), everyone else wanted to hang out. Mind you, there are no shortages of bars or coffee houses in Lincoln Park in Chicago, but we had one hellofa time trying to find a place that everyone liked. Finally, we decided that the best thing would be to go to my apartment and hang out there with alcohol and stuff. As has been mentioned earlier, my apartment isn't quite ready to entertain gentlemen callers, much less 9 extremely diverse Darkfriends. Still, we managed after a bit of effort to get everyone relatively comfortable, and proceeded to variously make trips to stores in the area to get various things (including cards, so that we could play a game. I'm just that much closer now to having a place where I can invite friends... See, cards are really all you need. Fuck the furniture.) At some point, as Koz has mentioned, peoples' stomachs started rumbling, so we decided to walk down Clark again (this closer to my apartment) in search of food. We found a nice little sports dive bar and ordered various meats of questionable composition, and had a bizarre-yet-cheap "anti-free-association" game, where we had to pick words out of random that were NOT related. That lasted for about 20 seconds. The rest of the conversation dealt mainly with every possible topic one can imagine, so I suppose it wasn't that different from the 20-minute game we played. We visited a used book store, in which I tried in about 30 seconds to explain to Novak why I felt that Starship Troopers was fatally flawed on its face, after which I think we both decided that the book was stupid on so many levels that even _had_ its political system not been fatally flawed, it would _still_ be too tedious to talk about. Or perhaps Novak just got bored. In any event, we ended back up at my place, where we had various conversations, had birthday cake (Thanks, Maggie!) and eventually everyone got too tired to continue (And Koz really did have to drive back to Milwaukee). So, today, I get Steve to take me to Linens and Things, only to find after I'd bought $500 worth of things that my credit card had disappeared somewhere between my paying Hawk $50 after the Tapas on Saturday and this morning. After a frantic search for the card, Steve placed it on his card, I wrote him a check, and we discovered that my toilet had stopped up. Luckily, there are 24-7 plumbers in the area. I had one out within the hour and they managed to fix the problem. I've called Visa and Crestar to report the card lost and get a new one reissued, so all's well on that front, but it was alternatively a wonderful and frightening weekend for me. I would do it again at *any* time and welcome the chance to host it again (hopefully, I've learned something from this one). Just let me know when you want the next one to be. -- Kenneth G. Cavness http://conan.proxicom.com/~kcavness/