06.16.06 9:00am Central Time (is it CDT at this time of year?).
I’ve been awake for six and a half hours, and it’s only 9:00am, yet somehow I can’t remember feeling this good for quite some time. Maybe it’s sitting across the table from my true love, maybe it’s the world cup match on the tv behind me, maybe it’s knowing on a regular Friday I would be sitting under the fluorescent lights of corporate America for another eight hours. Instead, I find myself gazing out the window of Chicago’s O’Hare airport sipping my second Bloody Mary of the morning waiting to board a plane to St. Louis, Missouri.
It could easily be 9:00pm by the atmosphere in this bar. There isn’t an empty cup in the bar. I even see a gin and tonic to my left. World cup fever has reached a pitch somewhere near March Madness – men shouting like they have been following Argentinean football for years The bartender is the kind of girl you’d like to be your neighborhood bartender, and only when you really pause to think do you wonder from where she summons that attitude this early in the day. One man just wandered in wearing a mesh Notre Dame basketball jersey and jean shorts. A business man is drunk at the bar demanding the tvs be tuned to the US Open so he can see how Tiger’s doing. The bartender is politely turning him down, but she knows, like I do, that he was just complaining that his receipt was itemized so it would be harder to expense to his “firm.”
“Do you really think this is the type of thing you should be turning in anyway?”
“Oh believe me, I’m going to.”
This day is so great though I barely gave a passing thought to how wrong that was. Justin has already put me on warning that I must stop talking about fonts, there is no way talking about the finances of the golf loving drunkard’s company would be okay.
In less than two hours I will be meeting my boyfriend’s best friends from college. I will be seeing a part of the country I have never seen. I will be attending the wedding of people I don’t know but for which I am still excited. I will be braving humidity my hair hasn’t faced in years but with any luck my new cut and my bag full of products will get me through it.
I’m in love. I’m on vacation. I’m watching soccer. I have a ridiculously early am buzz.
I couldn’t be any happier.
