for april 8

until today, april 10, i have been locked out of my blog because a robot marked me as a spam blog. so i apologize if you tried to read this and couldn't get to it... anyway this is the entry for april 8.

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yesterday was hilarious. it all started with waking up at 5am to the smell of cigarette smoke in my room, which ultimately ended up with me writing an email to my upstairs roommate who decided it was ok to smoke in his room. after becoming wide awake with the anger of being poisoned in my own home, i eventually fell back asleep before getting up at 8am for my first official faust interaction. i'd decided to go by bicycle, which left me with a pretty good 40 minute bike commute to downtown. riding the streets of chicago is SO FAST because everything is flat... not like birmingham where even the flat parts are just secret little hills. it's also really fun and really exciting, with traffic zooming everywhere and having to dodge two-foot-wide-ten-inch-deep crevasses that the people around here call potholes. you really gotta pay attention around here.

faust had invited me out to join them for a 10 o'clock meeting with one of their favorite clients, The Buzz Company. this place is basically a placement agency that freelancers can use to find work. the catch is that the whole staff is equally as quirky and creative as the people they hire. just hilarious people who have put themselves in the position to have shitloads of fun with what they do and allow it to make them successful in that way. faust has been working with them to make these catalogs that show off particular freelancers as products in some sort of fashion magazine. there's good copywriting, great photography, and overall i think it's a perfect example of faust throwing out ideas and then taking one and running with it. the whole meeting was really warm and easy, and i bonded quickly with kelly, the buzz co's vice president. i caught her subtle reference jokes really well, and i hope that basically it both established a good situation for me working with buzz co in the future while at the same time showing faust that i can handle this human interaction stuff like a pro when i need to.

after i got out of that meeting, i called brian, who had just flown in that morning. met him over near wrigley field at a starbucks, and then we headed up the red line a few stops to get to his new store. i camped out at a borders bookstore cafe while he interviewed/hung out with his new store manager for something like three hours. by the time he got done with all of that, we were both starving and so we got back on the red line and got off at depaul university to try and find this pizza place that brett had recommended. we were at that weird time in between lunch hours and dinner hours, though, so the place, and every restaurant nearby, was closed. so we started walking towards wicker park in the hopes that we would find something. we ended up at some pita place (brian called it the pita version of a subway) where i had a gyro and brian had something i can't remember how to pronounce. we enjoyed it and eventually made our way back across town to the apartment.

we got back and took naps before going out with dan and matt (the roommates) and their needlessly forward chick friend, jess. i asked dan if he'd gotten my email about the smoking stuff and he was really cool about it, so that worked out well. i was prepared to ship out to a new place if i had to. anyway, we went out to a place called Waterhouse over at paulina and roscoe. i enjoyed some sort of chicken and pear panini and a giant Magner's irish cider, which came in some sort of cross between a champagne bottle and a beer bottle. massive. you can get cider everywhere here, i love it. we had a really good time going out with these guys, who i mentioned before don't exactly fall in line with what you would expect me to enjoy in people. brian especially did a good job of trying to bring up sports a lot when scores would pop up on tv, as this is a skill set he has that i truly don't. all the same, i think everyone involved had a lot of laughs, ragged on each other a little bit, and just had a straight up good time going out to a bar. as we were leaving, we ran into a gaggle of girls who were waiting for the rain to stop (it was pouring) and suddenly brian was significantly less eager to leave.

so we stalled in the doorway for awhile as dan went to get the car. eventually that whole situation dissolved when one of the three just ran out in the rain, and matt picked up another one of them to carry her to her house. random shit! the last girl kind of ran after her friend, and brian was left to think about what he should have done differently after i opened the door to opportunity with "do you guys like playing scrabble?" the whole thing is hilarious to watch because brian turned off his dating radar in the months preceding the move because he didn't want to get tied up before we left. and now it's on full blast because there are loads and loads of cute girls around here. i told they guys in the car on the way over there that my radar is totally off as of late, and with the best of reasons, but that i would gladly do whatever i can to help brian find the curly headed jewish girl of his dreams. does that mean wingman duty? do i even know how to run wingman duty? shit, who knows. would Goose ask the girls at the bar about scrabble to help Maverick out? i think so. i will quickly prove to be one of the worst wingmen of all time, but my heart is in the right place.

we all went home after an hour and a half i think, and brian and i regrouped to head into the drizzly night in search of new things. we took the bus for awhile, and tried to go to this new bar i read about in TimeOut, but the soft open mentioned in the article clear hadn't taken place. so we started walking. the general idea is usually that i start walking towards a given destination in the hopes that brian will see a place that interests him along the way. in this instance, i started towards Baladoche, this incredible belgian waffle place, while brian looked for a good bar to check out. we ended up walking all the way to the waffle place after a lot of indecision about bars, and the waffle place was closed. so i thought, let's just head back towards Schuba's, a cool indie venue we passed that was closer to out house, and see what's up there. we headed in that direction, where we ended up finding a place called Jake's Bar. the neon sign in the window was a skull and crossbones with the bones being pool cues, but the interior was nice and had little candles on the table. i'm a sucker for candlelight.

the atmosphere was great, the bartenders were conversational, and Crocodile Dundee was playing on the bar tv the whole time. i had rums-and-cokes while brian sipped on whiskey and the night went along really smoothly. this place had a jukebox loaded with stuff like radiohead and the flaming lips in addition to your usual jukebox classics, so i unloaded some of the myriad quarters from my manpurse and started a little live dj jukebox session. this definitely included 'fake plastic trees' as well as 'yoshimi battles the pink robots pt. 1', among others. in the middle of all of this, the bartender walks up to us with a white paper bag and says "hey the waffle place down the street dropped off samples, if you guys want one!" and sure enough, after our long search, a hot delicious baladoche waffle fell at our feet. unbelievable. this led to a lot of pronounced laughter and back-slapping between the two of us, as well as some "dude can you believe that shit", you know the usual. i told the bartender about our long, roundabout quest for a waffle and she was also intrigued by this happenstance. we stayed out until 1 or so and had a hilarious time before heading back home and crashing out.

no doubt, a great indication of things to come...