5 Thoughts on a Thursday

1) If you're looking for something to do tonight and are in the Chicago area, I suggest that you got to see The Easy Tease play tonight at the Town Hall Pub in Lakeview on North Halsted. Why the superfluous plug, you ask? Well, because....

2) The band members are currently asleep on my living room floor.

R.A. and I know The Easy Tease from their early days as a Bard College Band, playing on the weekends on campus. Or, at least R.A. says that we do. Both she and the band members claim that I went to multiple shows at Bard, but for some reason I have no memory of ever seeing them live. Of course, this may be because whenever they were on stage at the Multi-Purpose Room, I was outside in the snow with my hooligan friends, "guarding" the kegs. But I have listened to their music on CD and MP3, and they're really good, especially if you're into a kind of folk-rock with cellos and banjos, which I am.

The band got in late last night after playing a "gig", as they say, in Lake Villa, Illinois. They're almost finished with a month long tour that has taken them to pretty much every part of the country that I have yet to see: Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota. After Chicago, they go on to Ohio and then back home to New York.

This is the third time this year that old Bard friends have come to visit me and R.A. here in Chicago, and it's always a great time. (For me, at least.) R.A. and I are definitely going to be staying in Chicago for at least another year, although we're planning on moving out of Hyde Park at the end of summer and finding a place somewhere on the North Side. So if you or your traveling gypsy band are going to find yourselves anywhere near the Windy City ever, be sure to look us up. We will have ample floor space and gin.

3) I hate bluetooths. Blueteeth? Bluetooth devices? Whatever. I can't stand them. I understand your need and desire to multi-task, to be able to drive and talk on the cell phone and eat a Big Mac all at the same time (the very definition of the modern working man). But those wireless headsets just make you look like the aliens have got their brainwave-controlling spawn lodged in your pineal gland, and that you are now a mindless zombie drone of the Great Overlord Zerlak. It's creepy.

4) I was in the University dining hall today, eavesdropping on people again. One conversation that I overheard included one sorority girl (and, I'm not stereotyping - she had her sorority bag with her) telling her friends, "I accidentally got drunk last night."

Accidentally? Did she trip and fall into a vat of blueberry vodka? Did she think that she was sipping all night on cranberry juice that I had just gone a little bad? (Now I am stereotyping.) [Note from the Future: "I had just gone a little bad?" Hmmm... nothing Freudian here....]

Actually, I'm being too hard on the girl. I know exactly what she meant: she went out with her friends last night, having told herself that she wasn't going to drink. But then she started feeling a little awkward being the only kid at the bar without a drink in her hand, and then one thing led to another and the next thing she knew she was neck deep in her third Cosmopolitan. (She wasn't a very big girl.)

But this is a situation where splitting grammatical hairs is useful. Because she didn't get drunk involuntarily (unless someone tied her to a chair and poured booze down her throat). And she didn't get drunk by mistake (unless someone tricked her into thinking that a Long Island Iced Tea was actually tea.). But she did get drunk accidentally - she intended to stay sober but then had that breakdown of will that comes with being offered sweet, sweet liquor.

5) I'm running out of time and thoughts (Damn you Great Overlord Zerlak!), so I'll sign off with the first of (hopefully many) Gratuitous Philosophy Quotes:

"Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our prehistory, the entire middle ages, was given to drinking thanks to the influence of Germanic tastes on Europe." - Nietzsche