It was Rachel's birthday last weekend. Rocket bar on friday and I went out wine tasting on saturday. Both were pretty fun. I had a hard time finding Rachel's group in the bar, and nobody was responding to my text messages, so I watched some arena football on the bar's tv. Okay, so that part was kinda boring, but after a while I did a third tour of the bar and happened to spot Julie and Jordan. They're engaged now, which I had to find out through randomly going to her facebook page and seeing a bunch of strange congratulatory messages. Oh, Rachel got engaged too! I didn't believe Rachel when she told me because she said it so casually. But I guess she just has a good poker face because it happened right before rocket bar.

Like 5 years ago when I went to the first parties with Rachel's friends I didn't like any of them. It seemed like people were only interested in hooking up or otherwise finding out how you could further their hookup-agenda. I guess a lot of it may have been because the parties were at bars with a $10 cover charge (for guys at least). If I pay a $10 cover fee, I want at least 2 phone numbers at the end of the night to make it worthwhile. That's not really how I roll, but I could see most guys thinking that. You want to get your money's worth. (Maybe 2 phone numbers isn't being very ambitious because I've heard that the new thing these days is for girls to give out their phone numbers to everybody and then weeding people out by not responding to your voicemail. So maybe you should try to get like 10 phone numbers, just to play the odds. But I've also seen girls get super pissed when they give a guy their phone number and he doesn't call. Dating culture is a strange fig.) But my point is that the fun level has definitely increased since Rachel has settled on rocket bar. Or she's just weeded out the undesirable people. The two are probably related .

There wasn't anyone annoying there on Friday. Even Diana was courteous enough to not show up! I should hope for a DMB concert overlap every year! Leslie is still cool. Julie is still funny. Jordan was more talkative than I'd ever seen him. Mehrnaz was watching her blackberry most of the time until her friend showed up and they kinda wandered off. Puja was too tired to go and Kate Reid couldn't make it because she lost her wallet on the metro and she couldn't get into the bar. And for the first time I met Charlotte, who I'd heard about before (due to her having multiple kids, I think), and Sarah who used to be part of Rachel's friends who threw February parties. But I never met her at any of them and she seems cooler than I remember those parties being. (I just did an email search for any old evites for those feburary parties to see if they were called the fab five, or if that was my imagination. No luck, maybe I deleted them. Though I did find an email to Rachel where I tried to assert a matter-of-fact justification for my comments on the evite about girls being ugly. Wow, I was a jerk 5 years ago, I'm surprised Rachel talked to me. I wonder if, 5 years from now, I'll look back on my current emails and be embarassed.)

I'm going to cut this entry off now because I know that nobody likes a long posting. Tomorrow I'll write about Saturday's wine tasting and my newfound wine expertise. (Will I use it for good or evil...) And I still want to write about my recent viewings of The Room, Benjamin Button, and Inception.

I think Dave is in town for the next few weeks before his 2-year island vacation in the south pacific. If you can call Clarendon being "in town." I should give him a call. Maybe he'll be up for trivia if we're short handed again.

(This quote is from a few years ago but it's appropriate. Right after my coworker Jeremy got engaged we were talking about the engagement ring)
Jeremy: They say it's supposed to cost a couple months salary.
me: Yikes.
Spittle: Man, I sure hope I never love a girl that much!