Friday night. 11pm. Sometime between the hours of “tragic” and “lackluster” I left a beatle-themed church dance wondering what my life has come to. Shoes off and another 3 calls to my still unreachable boyfriend who feels it is ok to fall of the face of the earth to go gallivanting about in Sequoia National Park, leaving me to conjur up terrifying scenarios where he is tied to a tree by manic Greenpeace activists and left to imperialist chainsaws, rabid wolves etc.
Really I should be thankful. Downtime has become a mirage in a desert of scornful politics professors who leave trails of academic devastation behind in their passing. With the only other significant monopoly of my time and energy on an impromptu Sabbatical in the backwoods of California that gives me an entire hour and a half daily to play with.
Let’s see…I suppose I could start by catching everyone up with what’s been going on in my little corner of the world. After a rather shaky start, my dance partner and I finally made it to our first ballroom competition and believe it or not medaled in waltz…twice. Not to worry though, we swam right back to the shallow end of the gene pool with our quickstep and at least two of our latin performances, thus righting this particular cosmic imbalance.
Leeds in general is still a mostly sketchy place to be out and about in between 4 pm (the start of the average Otley run pub crawl) and 11 am (the end of the morning after migration, also know as the “Walk of Shame”). Thankfully seasonal prime time favorites like “X-Factor” and “I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here” make for safe indoor entertainment and most of my free nights are spent on a couch enjoying them with either a likeminded roommate and/or a nice cup of decaf chai (courtesy of my lovely friend Johanna). That’s not to say that I don’t occasionally enjoy a night out on the town in some come hither heels. Just the other week I had two bottles of lager consecutively spilled on my brand new dress at Fruity Friday because apparently being the only sober white girl in a club merits some sort of embarrassing punishment that not even the sexiest heels can distract from. My sister who actually came to visit me in Leeds has convinced me though that in the end, in the interest of saving myself from the dreadful abyss of spinsterdom and multiple cat ownership, some sacrifices must be made, clubs attended and dresses inadvertently trashed.
