Who wants to hear a totally pointless rant about a comparatively minor topic in which I make myself sound like  crotchety old person?  No one?  TOUGH COOKIES.

Here is what I would like:  I would like to buy a reasonably cute, not terribly expensive summer dress or two with a hemline long enough that I do not risk exposing the entire population of the city of Chicago to Ladytown in the event of a strong gust of wind.

Apparently, that is fucking impossible.

Seriously, clothing designers, does everyone demand micro-minis these days? Is no one interested in a dress that stretches even half way to the knees?

Let’s take a gander at some of the styles I’ve recently seen, liked, and ultimately had to reject because I’d like to be able to sit down in my dresses without fear of underpants exposure:

Adorbs, right?  Except when you click on measurement, you learn that the length of the ENTIRE DRESS is 32.5 inches.  Because I am a giver, and wanted to demonstrate the true magnitude of this problem, I shall now post for you a picture of me in a dress that I ordered off the internet that was described as being 34 inches long.  A dress I eventually gave away to Sam because I decided it was sort of obscene and I was never going to feel comfortable wearing it out of the house:

That’s a lot of leg, my friend!  Too much, in fact! (Forgive the lousy lighting – I actually tried to set up a demonstration of this problem last night by folding up my pj pants to the correct length last night, but now cannot find the camera cord.  That’s probably for the best.)  Anyway, the adorable navy and white sundress above?  Is even shorter than the black dress I’m wearing in the photo. Perhaps in a climate with no wind, where one was never expected to sit down, one could wear this?  Here in real life, though? TOO SHORT.

Or how about this one?  Stylistically, I’ll admit, it’s not for everyone, but it’s yellow! And adorable! And cheap! And the name of the style is “You’ve Got Quail!”  How can one resist a dress whose name is a movie pun?

Oh.  One can resist when one realizes that the adorable quail dress is EVEN SHORTER than the one listed above.  Good god.
How about this adorable floral dress?  So pretty and fun in the picture!  Perfect for summer parties!  And all for less than $40!

Except then when I tried it on in the store IT DID NOT EVEN COVER MY WHOLE BUTT I AM NOT EVEN LYING.

This problem is not limited to sundresses, either.  This number is billed as being work-appropriate:

I’m sorry, but is it okay in your workplace to wear a dress that’s six inches above the knee?  Because in my workplace, that’s frowned upon.  (See how the model, doubtless a tall girl herself, is bending her leg all funny?  She’s trying to hide how short the dress is!  I see this all the time now!  Ladies, look for this scam the next time you are window shopping online- if the model is slouched over and her legs look bent at an odd angle, ask yourself: is this all an elaborate plot to pretend that this dress is long enough to wear in public?  Don’t be fooled!)

Or how about a party dress?  This one would be perfect for a summer wedding- different and fun, and only $62!

Except- you guessed it! 32 inches long!  Congratulations, bride and groom!  My pasty white upper thighs say congratulations, too!

Don’t even get me started on shoes, and how everyone seems to think now that anything under a four inch heel is a one-way ticket to DowdyTown.  I pretty much went around the bend the other day when I saw these featured, with admiration, on outblush:

REALLY?  SERIOUSLY?  I mean, come ON.

Saturday night presented me with my first-ever private room karaoke experience.  I didn’t know that was even a thing here.  Sure, I remember that scene from Lost in Translation, but it seemed the kind of wacky and crazy thing one does in Tokyo, not necessarily in the midwestern United States.  But I was wrong- Korea Town in Chicago has its very own private-room karaoke establishment (surprising), and one of John’s school friends is a regular (even more surprising), and a huge group of people decided that would be the perfect way to spend a Saturday night (most surprising) so off we went.

It was, of course, hilarious.  We crammed into a tiny room with couches built into the wall and three big flat panel tvs.  Every time a song came on, above they lyrics, animated asian avatars wearing skimpy hip hop outfits would do hip hop dances.  (Which, incidentally, leads to one of my questions: why, exactly, is hip hop dancing the default here?  It is tremendously strange to see hip hop dancing asian avatars rockin it out while your friend sings a heartfelt rendition of “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers.)

Probably 2/3 of the song choices were in Korean, which was obviously sort of limiting for our crowd of non-Koreans.  But there was one book of “pop” selections from which we could make our choices.  The selection, though, was puzzling.  For example: did you know that the band Hoobastank has more than one song?  And that six of them are available as karaoke choices?  But Son of a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield (a classic if there ever was one) is not?  What is up with that?

Or take The Eagles.  Witchy Woman? Available. Hotel California? Not.  Really?  Not a John Mellancamp song to be found, Cougar years or otherwise, but a half dozen choices from System of a Down.  Large selection of Christian rock ballads, but no Britney Spears.  It was….limiting.

Fortunately for me, they had Alone, which (in case any of you were wondering) is a real crowd pleaser that will definitely get people singing along.  Also I learned that I know all the words to Crazy In Love and am available to jump in and bail out any friends who choose that song only to learn after starting that they, in fact, do not.  Plus, I discovered that my husband secretly likes Weezer, and he and I busted out with a truly classic off-key rendition of Buddy Holly.  (The “ooh oohs” were particularly imprecise, but whatever, we were aweseome.)

On the whole, a surprisingly fun way to pass an evening.  I just wish I could un-see that girl avatar in a school girl outfit so short you could see her little animated underpants, working it out to Eleanor Rigby.

So, I’ve been summoned for jury duty in Illinois for the first time.  (I still get summoned for jury duty at least once a year in California, where I have not lived for five years. They seem to be a little short of jurors in California.)

I realize that many people loathe the very idea of jury duty, that it makes them grumble and groan and think awful thoughts about bureaucracies.  But in my job I get to interact with juries fairly regularly, and I think it’s an incredibly important and cool aspect of our legal system (particularly civil juries, which virtually no other country in the world uses).

I’ve been called as a “standby” juror, so I have to call in the night before to see if they’ll need me, and the language of the summons leads me to believe that the answer to that is probably “no.”  Even if it’s yes, my background and particularly my current job make it kind of unlikely, I think, that I’ll actually be selected for a jury.  And (here’s where you all shake your heads in disbelief and wonder what the eff is wrong with me): that kind of bums me out.   I’m kind of hoping that I’ll be empaneled.  I’d like to see the system from that side for a change.

That’s pretty much a guarantee that I’ll be dismissed immediately, isn’t it?  Murphy’s Law of juries: the more you don’t want to be on one, the more likely you are to be selected.  Perhaps I should go in there all sullen and slouchy and acting like I’ve got better places to be.  Maybe then they’ll choose me.

Hat tip to the lovely Metalia for this topic idea….she requested these stories, people, and there were simply too many to put in her comments section.

I was at a wedding a few weeks ago, and several bourbons into the evening, I walked outside to get some air and found one of our friends smoking a cigarette with two of the groom’s nerdy-hip cousins.

“Do you want one?” he asked me, a knowing smile on his face that said “I know you, old and boring person, and there is no way on God’s green earth you’re going to want a cigarette.”

So of course I took one, because I get a little contrary when I’m a few bourbons into the evening.  He gaped at me, disbelieving.

“It’s been a long time,” I said, “but there was a phase.”

“WHEN?” he asked.

“Before I knew you,” I said.  He looked at me, uncomprehending.  (I have known him for 10 years, after all.  But I AM OLD and there was a time before that when I was young and did stupid things, okay?)

So I proceeded to half-smoke the cigarette before I realized I was over it, stubbed it out, went back inside, and felt mortified at my embarrassing show of drunkenness.  This is what drunken antics have become for me, apparently- one ill-considered half-smoked cigarette.  Sigh.

In the old days, though?  HOO BOY.  My friends and I would bust out the TBPs (tight black pants) and head out to parties, returning home with UPIs (unidentified party injuries- I went to a college that liked to abbreviate things, okay?)  and stories of absurd behavior.

• Like the time I recreated my entire high school musical theater tap dance routine…on top of a pool table.  (Low-hanging lamp + double time step = mild concussion!)
• Or the time I knocked on the door of the guy I had a crush on at 2 in the morning, waking him from a dead sleep, to ask if I could borrow some Skittles.  (I was playing it cool, okay?  I would just casually stop by ask if I could borrow some candy-coated chewy fruit candy, a totally normal request, and he would see how lovely and graceful and charming I was and  ask me out on the spot! Or look at me like I had two heads! Either/or!)
• Or (god, I’d almost forgotten this) the time when, egged on by my castmates, I performed my monologue from The Vagina Monologues on a busy thoroughfare with lots of foot traffic for any random soul who happened to be walking by.  This one.  Yeah, the one with all the moaning. Subtle!

I can only be relieved that I was young and in college in a time before cell phones, or the drunk dialing/texting would no doubt have been legendary.  Oh god, and twitter?  Thank my stars.  The last thing the Library of Congress needs is a permanent record of my youthful idiocy.

On Thursday, John called me at work.

I answered. “Hi, what’s wrong? Is everyone okay?”  John does not call me at work often.

“Yes,” he said.  Then, “do we have plans for Saturday?”

“Well, I’m supposed to be going to Dark Lord Day,” I said.  “And we’re running that 5k.”

“Do you have to go to Indiana?” he said.

“No, I guess not, what’s up?” I asked.

“Well, what if I told you that I had tickets to the Blackhawks playoff game?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I just got invited by [company we work with] to go as their guests because we’re good clients.  Actually, they invited [coworker], but he can’t go.  The tickets are in the first row, on the glass.  Do you want to go?”

“Why is that even a question? Absolutely.”

So that’s how I ended up here:

That, my friends, is a non-zoomed photo of Patrick Sharp, standing against the glass about 6 inches from me.  It was nuts.

That Sharp is a class act, too, let me tell you.  A little kid a few seats down from us was wearing a Sharp jersey, and was following Sharp’s every move during warmups with the wide-eyed adoration that only a six-year-old can have.  Sharp saw him and skated over, grinned, and gave the kid a fist bump through the glass.  That kid will remember that for the rest of his life.  Good people, that Sharpie.

The game, for those who may not have caught it, was absolutely ridiculous.  The Hawks dominated for 2 periods, but somehow the Predators tied it and then went ahead in the 3rd period.  Hossa got called for a ridiculous boarding penalty with one minute left so the Hawks were down one goal AND playing short handed.  With FOURTEEN SECONDS LEFT, Patrick Kane scored a goal to tie it and send it into overtime.  Hossa had to sit out the first four minutes of overtime, which caused me to have excruciating nervous tummy.  The Hawks managed to kill the penalty and Hossa skated out of the penalty box and scored the winning goal about fifteen seconds later.  Seriously, it was like something out of a movie.

I have very little interest in or grasp of things like finance and banking, but I must say: I am glad that I am married to someone who works for a company that is a client of such places, because I can tell you with 100% certainty that there is no way my ass would have ever sat on the glass at a Hawks game, let alone a playoff game, otherwise.

Some other observations:

• John has a total mancrush on Patrick Kane.  He insists that he and Kane locked eyes at one point during the game.  I’m trying not to worry that my husband might leave me for an underage be-mulleted hockey player.
• At one point, the Hawks goalie stopped a goal with his gut.  The puck disappeared somewhere into his gear.  It took them over FIVE MINUTES to find it.  That’s a lot of gear, my friends.
• A startling number of women appear to believe that appropriate gear for hockey fans includes sky-high heels and full makeup.  I felt woefully underdressed in my jeans and sneakers.  I’ll know for next time: stripper heels are in!
• Speaking of strippers: the female “ice crew” is an insult to women everywhere.  The end.
• At the first intermission, I told John I think it would be great if our kids play hockey instead of, say, football, because it’s still rough-and-tumble but in a less brutal way.  Then I looked at my program and noticed that the Blackhawks official roster includes four team dentists.  Is competitive youth croquet a thing?  Or perhaps badminton?

Last year, John and I went with our friends Bird and Bama to a concert at a small local venue.  There’s a restaurant attached to the concert hall, so we had dinner first.  The concert was scheduled to start at 7:30, so we went to dinner at 7, thinking that would give us time to eat and roll in at about 8:15, when the concert figured to actually start.  Because, you know, concerts NEVER start on time.

You can see where this is going, yes? We ate dinner, walked into the venue and…the set was 2/3 over.  Turns out, there was a late-night show by a different band starting after the show we were seeing, so they’d started precisely on time.  What we did see was really great, but after about five songs, the show was over.

So I was really excited when I learned that that the artist, Jeffrey Foucault, was coming back into town this spring.  This is a great time of year for live music- bands and musicians are coming out of winter hibernation, gearing up for summer festivals and tours, playing small venues.  I’ve been to half a dozen shows in the past month and a half, and haven’t paid more than $15 for a ticket.  That’s about the same as a movie, folks.

This was one of the shows I was most excited about- I bought tickets for us well in advance, and like the enthusiastic old people that we are we arrived at the concert five minutes before the opening act started, plenty of time to get seats.

And oh, it was so worth it.

I wish there was a way I could write about music without sounding like a trite nitwit, but I haven’t found it.  I love music, but I don’t play well, and I certainly can’t write about it effectively.  Suffice it to say that I can think of few better ways to spend an evening than watching someone who is truly prodigiously talented as a musician doing what they do best.  For example, at the show last night, pretty much every song required a reset of a capo and a retuning of the instrument.  I found myself transfixed by the process, amazed at the years of accumulated practice and skill at playing and songwriting that it must take to be able to write beautiful songs in different keys and to shift back and forth between them effortlessly while making idle chat with the audience.

There’s nothing in the world that I can even come close to doing that well.  I like to consider myself a generalist- I do many things pretty well.  I can cook, for example, and sew.  I’m good at writing, and I’m pretty clever in conversation.  I’m good at pub trivia.  I make a solid cocktail.  But I don’t have deep, amazing skill at any one thing, the way our friend Newton does at low temperature physics, or my friend MEM has at theoretical math, or our friend Dyer has with computers.

I do not have the brain it takes to become a world-class expert in any particular academic field, nor the discipline it takes to become a world-class expert in any hobby or skill.  I am, for the most part, perfectly okay with this.  But sometimes, like Saturday, I watch someone playing absolutely lights-out on the guitar in this effortless, spare, heartbreakingly beautiful way and I wish, just for a moment, that I could do something that well.

The last song of Saturday’s show is one of my favorite songs of all time.  I’m glad we saw the whole set this time, and I’m doubly glad that I finally got to hear him play this song live.  I’ve heard this song dozens of times and it still catches my breath.  It makes me wish I could write poetry, or songs.  I’d highly suggest you check it out.

Things I have seen on the ground in our building’s parking garage which distress me:

• Milk, spilled, with accompanying shards of glass
• Rodent, dead
• Condom (SERIOUSLY?)
• Piles of vomit, now desicated and frozen and generally disgusting (2)

Look, management company.  I do not ask for much.  I do not care about Christmas décor in the lobby, or the frequency with which you shampoo the hallway carpets, or the speed with which you deliver package notices.  But for the love of all that is holy, could someone PLEASE clean up the vomit in the parking garage? Please? It’s foul.

Day Train: Readers

Night Train: Chatters

Day Train: iPods to block out the other throngs of commuters

Night Train: iPods for singing along to

Day Train: Coffee in a commuter mug or a Dunkin cup

Night Train: Old Granddad or a tall can of Miller Lite in a paper bag

Day Train: “Tickets please”

Night Train: “Where you going, sweetheart?”

Day Train: Universal agreement to all just look straight ahead, engaging with no one

Night Train: Apparently everyone else considers this to be some sort of weird people SOCIAL HOUR oh my god.

In conclusion: Do not forget your iPod on a late night train.  Also: wear a hood, a hat, and practice your fake sleeping.  You’re going to need it.

John and I have this problem: it’s called Rachel Getting Married, and according to Netflix, it’s been sitting on top of our dvd player since shortly after it was mailed to us on August 21, 2009.  As in: nearly five months ago.  For five months, I have been paying a monthly fee to Netflix for the privilege of having Rachel Getting Married sitting on our shelf, making us look like smart people who watch well-reviewed indie movies.

But we have not been watching indie movies.  No, my friends, we have not.  What we have been watching is a shit ton of Pawn Stars.  If you are not watching this show, you need to start, immediately.  It’s set at a pawn shop in Vegas, run by a family and presided over by “The Old Man,” who wears suspenders without irony and talks like he’s got a mouth full of marbles.  It is the perfect blend of reality show elements: it’s a little bit of Antiques Roadshow, except instead of the Keno twins the goods are appraised by a bunch of foul-mouthed, heavily-tatted dudes.  Antiques Roadshow meets Miami Ink!  Brilliant!

This show is fascinating.  First of all, people want to pawn the WEIRDEST SHIT.  Just today, in the (oh, half-dozen or so) episodes we watched, we saw people bring in a playing card vending machine, an assemblage of hand-cast gold devil heads, and a knights of the round table cheese board.

And weapons- oh my god, who knew so many people had old weapons lying around the house?  Shotguns and military knives and throwing stars, oh my! You know you have watched a lot of Pawn Stars when you see a gun-toting guy walking into the store and you call out “musket! That’s a musket! That’ll be valuable!”  And then your husband looks at you like you are crazytown.  The end.

It’s always interesting to hear why people are pawning or selling their stuff, too.  You see a lot of slimy-looking frat boy types looking to sell something they found in grandma’s attic, just hoping they can get enough money to go out big on Saturday night, and I find myself hoping that their stuff is fake, that it’s not worth anything, if only so I can see the smug smiles wiped off their faces.  But then you see someone who is selling some treasured childhood item to try to get enough money to take his kids on vacation, or the guy who wanted to pawn his big rig truck for a few weeks so he had enough money to pay rent, and it’s hard not to feel kind of sad about the whole business.

One of my personal favorites was the kid who came in with a gun from his grandmother’s garage, which he wanted to sell so he could buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend.  The pawn shop dude is all, “well, we got engagement rings here,” and he said “really?” and then proceeded to TRADE the gun for an engagement ring. I can imagine the proposal now:  “Here, honey, I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and I’d like to symbolize it with this pre-worn and possibly fake bauble which I selected because according to the pawn shop it is worth about the same as some old gun!  Love you!”