Saturday, I painted the town red with leighhyphenanne, or at least our version of it.

Things got off to a strange start when a parade of men started hitting on me at the bus stop. Not one. Not two. Not three. FOUR different men approached me and were shameless, asking for my phone number, dropping ridiculous compliments, asking if they could go wherever I was going–at one point, I looked up to see if there was a full moon, and around me to see if maybe Ashton Kutcher was hiding in the bushes nearby, because I figure the only two potential explanations were either crazy astral influence or I was being punk’d.

When I got to the Comet, I recognized entropic_system just from the pictures he’s posted to the intertubes, and we waited together for Lanny.

Our first stop on the tour was Po Dogs, a place to coat our guts in the requisite grease to kickstart an epic evening. The week’s special was a Mac&Cheese Dog, and while that sounded disgustingly delicious, it didn’t sound disgustingly delicious enough. I steeled myself for mockery, approached the counter and asked “Do I live in a world where I can order a Deep Fried Danger Dog (a hot dog wrapped in pepper bacon which is then deep fried and smothered in onions and chili) with mac & cheese instead of chili?”

Yes. Yes I do live in that world.

It is a delicious world, ladies and gentlemen, though I have a feeling that dog is STILL sitting on my heart, hence the danger.

After dinner, we walked to Lanny’s place to pick up her wallet before we found a place to go drinking, because some places are weird about accepting passports as IDs for whatever reason. I can’t exactly remember when the idea of going to a strip club was first broached, but it definitely solidified when I spotted a Guy Fawkes mask on Lanzo’s table and insisted that it was important that he get a lap dance.

We played ding-dong-ditch on her new pothead neighbors, ran screeching down the fire exit stairs, silly-walked our way back up the hill…and then we saw it. Some utter douche had decided that since he couldn’t find an actual parking spot close to the grocery store, he would just park around the corner, in the intersection, sitting across the crosswalk. My thoughts came out in a rush, “Should I go over the hood? I want to go over the hood. Ok guys, I’m going over the hood,” and then I rolled over it, action-hero style. Next, Lanny used the tire as a step and crossed the hood on foot. As I looked back to watch her, I saw a guy angrily emerge from the QFC and shout “HEY!” Ever an avoider of confrontation, I hurried across the street, my logic being that if he was too lazy to park farther away, he certainly wouldn’t follow us all the way across the street. After we hit the next sidewalk, I glanced back and realized I was wrong. “HEY!” he yelled again, as he grabbed Lanny’s arm. “That was my car you just walked across!” “Uh…sorry?” “OH, you’re SORRY?” I interjected with “Sorry you don’t know how to park!” “YOU BITCH.” “OH NO, NOT THE ‘B’ WORD! MY FRAGILE EARS! NOW I’M *REALLY* SORRY!”

…At some point, I graduated from Internet Douchebag to Real Life Douchebag.

Thrilled at this non-confrontation, we ended up at Moe Bar, drinking PBR tallboys with straws. Lanny brought her own cozy, because frankly that is how we roll. Mike just watched, because that is how HE rolls.

After our beer, Mike was being summoned to Noc Noc for vurumai‘s welcome wagon party (ONE NIGHT ONLY: ONE LJer ENTERS SEATTLE! ONE LEAVES!), so he offered to drive us downtown since we were going to the strip club anyway. We mingled outside Noc Noc with the great big Seattle LJ crew, met the super-awesome-wonderful Tobie, and then Lanny and I walked to Deja Vu.

Once inside, we both agreed that we preferrred ladies stacked on the top and the bottom, which meant, of course, that we were doomed to be approached only by the skinniest girls in the joint. One of them was so thin, her butt was pointed. I hadn’t known that was possible. No matter how much she professed to love dancing for girls, I did her a favor by declining her lap dance offer out of concern that if she rubbed her twiglike legs together too much, she might explode into flames like dry tinder in the wilderness. Another rail-thin girl approached us, but instead of trying to sell us on a dance, plopped into the chair in front of us, almost tipping it over, and started chatting with us while we watched the super-acrobatic girl onstage. Eventually she got up to leave and tripped over her own stripper shoes. My first instinct was to reach out to keep her from falling, and after I grabbed her, I realized what I’d done. “Oh no, I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to touch you but I didn’t want you to fall over”–fully expecting to be booted out of the club at this point. She laughed and said it was fine to touch her to keep her from falling, and then I think she made an attempt to caress my face but ended up stabbing me in the cheek with one of her nails. I have a feeling this girl might not be cut out for the stripper lifestyle.

After that, we were pretty well left alone by everyone, free to mock at will. We saw the most coked-out girl in the universe. We saw a rotten weave. We saw another girl who maybe wasn’t cut out to be a stripper, dressed in a leopard print apron, carrying an oven mitt, get rejected by nearly everyone in the club, which we really couldn’t figure out and then she reached out and tweaked some girl’s boob in the front row and we smelled it. Homegirl REEKED of cat pee, which is not the traditional stripper smell. At one point, we crumpled dollar bills into little balls and flung them onstage. We made fun of other patrons. A walker-using midget came and went. Clandestine pictures were taken. Some guy shouted “HEY HONEY, I GOT DOLLARS OVER HERE FOR YOU” and the stripper went over, bent over in front of him, stuck her head through her legs, and took the bills with her mouth. Encouraged by his successes, he continued to shout “I WANT A HOT GIRL WITH NO MORALS ONSTAGE” and the next stripper shushed him. After closing, he shouted that he wanted someone to hook up with him. Yes. I DID die laughing. After the club closed, we hit the lone women’s bathroom. I went in first, and was in there for maybe a minute when someone angrily rattled the door handle. “Whoa! Whoa! I’m coming out!” Apparently one of the strippers had sat in gum and wanted to check herself out in the mirror, so she forced her way in with Lanny, who got to pee in front of a stripper. So. That happened.

Of course, after any successful (not THAT successful, Guy Fawkes never got his lapdance) strip club outing, it’s important to visit the adjacent porn store, which was swarming with tanked guys. “Hey girls! What do you use THIS thing for? If you use this THERE, then where’s the room for me? Do girls really want something THIS big?” and so on and so forth. It was all fun and games until some guy stood reallllly close to us, and whisper-quiet asked our names, asked our ages, then said “You don’t need any of this stuff…I’ve uh, got a PHD, and uh…” When we looked at him quizzically, he said really quietly and quickly “Oh, I hate myself.” I told him he didn’t need to hate himself but that hitting on girls in a porn store maybe wasn’t the best way to meet someone (and maybe don’t come off as a skeezebag, but that’s a lesson for another day). He didn’t really learn his lesson, and when I picked a great big red-glitter dong off of the wall, he asked if he could buy it for me. No, dude. No. Go away.

Then Lanny and I spied the great big fisting arms on the wall, grabbed two, and had a fistfight in the middle of the store. Eventually, she picked out something, I picked out something, and we went home. Let me tell you–as much as it felt normal to pick out a vibrator at three in the morning, it did not feel as normal going home on the bus at 8am with one shoved in my coat pocket.

How was YOUR weekend?

On Saturday, Aisling picked me up to do some last-minute christmas shopping for her family and do a bit of selfish shopping as well. I keep maybe one awesome pair of walking shoes around at a time, and over the course of the last month, I’ve put enough miles on them that I’ve worn the soles completely through. When shoes begin to leak water, it is time to replace them or face the gross consequences, so replacing them was high on my list of priorities.

We started our afternoon at Starbucks, where we used a grand total of four cards to pay for two coffees because we are awesome. I had been carrying around two gift cards worth about three bucks total for the last year or so, Aisling had her gold card, and then we put the rest of the balance on a card because neither of us carry cash. We are the douchebag twins.

I wasn’t able to find any light-up shoes with dinosaurs on them…this time, but I am fully confident by the time I need another pair of shoes, at least one shoe company will have a product out taking my special needs into consideration.

All of the mall employees we encountered were ultra-mega surly, and I don’t blame them one bit–working retail around the holidays is no treat, even when you take special steps to entertain yourself. Aisling and I took it in stride, and decided one of our day’s activities should be to find our sleep number. The sleep number store was full of beds and no employees. We looked at each other, looked around, shrugged, and picked out a bed. Just as we started taking photographic evidence, an employee came out and growled, “What do you want?”

“Um, uh, we wanted to find our sleep number.”

“Go nuts.”

After we settled in and started fiddling with the remotes, the employee came back with a special remote that adjusted both the head and the foot of the bed and also turned on a vibrate mode. I couldn’t help exclaiming, “Oh my god, it’s like being in a cheap motel only at home!” and I believe this is when the employee decided we were not assholes and began to make surly jokes WITH us.

Aisling and I have decided that we both need vibrating sleep number beds in our lives, and both of our sleep numbers are the same: 35. We must have spent an hour in the sleep number store, and while neither of us actually slept, we both left feeling rested, and not just in the ‘hey, I’ve been on my ass for an hour’ sense.

We then proceeded to try on fuzzy hats, annoy more clerks, have a dressing room fashion show, and find magic jeans. Bonus: all of this walking coupled with my reluctance to trudge up the hill to buy groceries has caused me to go down a full pants size and then some. Negative: I now must wear belts, wash and dry on hot, or face inevitable humiliation. No one needs to know I wear spongebob underpants.

…aww, crap.

After our shopping shenanigans, we decided to go eat dinner in an exotic locale that can be accessed without a passport–the Rainforest Cafe. Neither one of us had been there since we were little kids (or annoying tweens, whatever), and we’re both big enough people to admit that we’d like to enjoy some animatronic animals with dinner.

We thrilled and clapped like children at the robot animals, the giant tanks of fish, the copious amounts of neon signage, and the contrived thunderstorm.

The servers at the Rainforest Cafe were no exception to the ‘surly employees’ rule, shuffling off to grab our shared appetizer and almost grumbling at the idea that we were going to split the appetizer, skip dinner, and split dessert. However, if you were in our position, you would’ve done the same thing. There’s no way we would have had room for both dinner AND a brownie with a sparkler crammed in it, and whenever I have the rare opportunity to order something with a sparkler crammed in it, I am going to take it, come hell or high water or grumbling servers.

Plus it DARES me to eat it, right on the goddamn advertisement, by implying I am a weenie if I don’t brave the volcano. I don’t like being called a weenie. Not one bit.

As with all things, it was good until it wasn’t. Toward the end of the appetizer, one of us (I won’t say name names, but it’s the person who ALWAYS has this sort of thing happen and then blogs about it as if she’s befuddled) scooped up some dip with a chip and then pulled a terrible, terrible face as she picked a kinky hair that belonged to neither party at the table out of her mouth. The server came back and when we pointed out the hair, she huffed and said she’d get the manager, but not before she asked if we wanted our dessert. Sorry, the hair sort of killed it for us. Not even the presence of a sparkler could bring back the carefree attitude of five minutes prior.

A not insignificant amount of time passes. All the while, the unnamed party can still feel the offending hair in her mouth, even without its physical presence.

The manager eventually wandered over to our table. “Hello ladies, I hear we’ve had some difficulty with a foreign object in our food this evening.” The hair on the plate is again pointed out. He then asks if we’d like a fresh appetizer. “No. No, thank you.” “Oh, ok.” He grabs the plate and leaves. Aisling and I shared a confused look. Is the situation resolved? Maaaaybe?

After another long period, the server stalked back to our table and slapped down our bill. OH. The situation HAD been resolved. Look, lady, even though the meal has been removed from the bill, I still intended to tip you as if it were there…but when you treat me like shit, it makes it more difficult for me to do the right thing.

I think this should be the Rainforest Cafe’s new motto: Fun Until It Isn’t.