Temporary Insanity

It was a strange weekend to be sure.

I made my way to the fine state of Pennsylvania with a two primary purposes. Get my semi-annual cleaning at the dentist and go to several bars with my friend that had flown in from New Mexico. The two of you reading this might wonder why on gods earth would I drive roughly 280 miles just to get a cleaning? Surely there must be dentists somewhere in or around my current location that I could visit. All of these things are certainly true but my dentist is awesome. I’ve been going to that office for so long that I simply have never been to another dentist’s office until Somewhere around ago. That’s when I tried going to a dentist down closer to me. They are all booked up and I needed to schedule 3 months in advance. The place I went to was horrid in just about every respect. I left the office with a mouth full of so much blood you would think I had got into a fight with a wall in which I lost. (Though I put up a rousing good fight, the judges were split.)

To top it all off the dentist only barely took my insurance. I had decided after paying that much money for all of that abuse I decided that if I was going to continue my trips to the dentist the 280 miles were indeed worth it. Plus my dentist back in my home town was awesome. I can rearrange an appointment only a week or so prior without much hassle. Plus my dentist is awesome. When I go there the woman cleaning my teeth doesn’t leave my mouth feeling like I need to call the police and report a hate crime. Plus my dentist is awesome. Are you sending a trend? Seriously. If you don’t believe me just drop me an e-mail I’ll tell you where his office is.

Prior to the cleaning it had started to snow and by all accounts it was going to continue to snow for a significant remainder of the day and the better part of the evening. Roughly 12 inches of snow later I resigned myself to the fact I was not likely to leave the house that Friday. I had received the cold hard shaft of mother nature once again. As it turns out snow becomes somewhat less fun when you don’t have snow days anymore. But the snow must go on, so let’s fast forward to Saturday.

At the behest of my friend we made our way to a bar across from the campus of the college he had graduated from. The evening had multiple bars in store for me, none of which I had wanted to go to, one of which I hated since first time I ever entered into it, but he had flown in across several time zones and thousands of miles so I let him call the shots. At bar number 1 I knew not a single soul aside from the one I came with. Just lovely. I wanted to leave instantly. Luckily we weren’t there for too long before making our way to bar 2. Unluckily bar 2 was the bar I’ve hated for some time and with good cause.

You see there was so many people from my high school it might as well have been a reunion. This bothered me more than I’d like to admit. For one thing if I graduated and you have not heard from me in the 5 years hence it is not likely that it was accidental. The number of people I have lost contact with that I actually would like to see again can be counted on one hand. (Make mental note of this statement, it will come into play later.) With that fact in mind, how am I supposed to react to people I haven’t seen in so long as to make them all but void in my psyche. Don’t misunderstand me, with the exception of perhaps one individual there is no one I hate, just none of them have entered my head in well over a year. They are none events, much like any movie Sandra Bullock has made in the last 10 years.

The good news is that when I was in high school I had long hair. Like really long. Like past my shoulder blades long. At the very end of my junior year I cut it all off to the beautiful coiffed head of head you all know and love today. This is a sort of good news bad news situation because in the eyes of most of the people from high school the mental image they have of me has long ass hair. To them my long hair is like the red and blue Spider-Man suit. They’ve had no exposure to the black symbiote suit and in this alternate realty the black suit wasn’t evil, so Peter Parker kept it. That might have been the longest but also the awesomest extended metaphor I’ve ever used. Let’s continue on our merry way. For some reason the people that recognize me are the people I don’t want to recognize me, and the few I actually want to recognize me don’t. The plan back-fired.

So now I’m surrounded by people I used to know almost entirely because of geography and all of them want to know how I’m doing. This frustrates me a bit. The big problem is how do I summary the last 5 years of my life? It’s like making a resume for job when I don’t care at all whether I actually get the job but I just want them to want me for the position anyway. How do I explain that for roughly 6 months in my sophomore year in college I had what can rather euphemistically be called an existential crisis resulting in my first hand account of psycho pharmacology. How do I explain my job to some people that barely understand how to operate a television? How do I tell them that I own a motorcycle and a nice car without making it seem like I’m bragging? If there is an answer to any of these questions I’ve certainly not found it.

So I make small talk. I discuss cars with someone who obviously doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. (The finest automotive is clearly the BMW M3, and anyone that says otherwise is delusional.) I ignore them as best as I can and pray that we get to leave this bar and never come back again. (Had I known that any bar on the roster was going to be similar I’d probably have spent the night driving back to Maryland.)

At some point I was having a discussion with my friend over this girl I was talking to earlier in the evening. She had been a friend of a friend or some such and sitting next to me a bit earlier. After quickly making note that she was quite attractive I decided I needed to flirt with her because what’s the worst that can happen? When her friend told us it was time for them to leave I obtained her phone number after a short verbal exchange that had been executed so flawlessly I wish I had instant replay so John Madden himself could draw over it with a white marker making note of exactly how awesome it was for future generations to study. So my friend and I were discussing her when he dropped the bomb on me that she was the younger sister to an old friend of mine. Remember when I said there was only several people I wouldn’t mind looking up could be counted on one hand? Well it turns out I had flirted with and got the phone number of Mr Index Finger’s younger sister. It seems mother nature was not the only one interested in dropping the shaft on me this weekend. I’ll just have to wait and see how this goes.