Pinot Philosophies

A few nights ago I went back to my old college town of Lawrence to visit a friend who is starting school there (Hi Mara!). I am so jealous of her I almost want to kidnap her and place her in a small fishing village in Korea, never to be seen again, while I take all of her classes and re-live life as a college freshman. Only 11 a.m.? I’m going back to sleep BITCHES!

Anyway, I went to go spread my jealous vibes and also to see yet another friend who’s moved to Lawrence this summer. It is a very sad trend when your best friends wait for you to move away from a town before even considering moving there. Maybe I should be nicer to my friends and not make fun of them on the Internet?

We go out to eat at Mad Greek, one of my favorite restaurants in the world, amen. They sell Peroni, the Italian beer that I used to buy in the form of 40s in Florence. I was a hard-ass thug roaming the cobblestone streets with my 40 and armed with a cell phone with international service. LOOK OUT WORLD! Mad Greek makes me think, if just for a moment, that some things don’t just exist in Italy, but everywhere. And at least here, I don’t have to order in broken, insanely horrid Italian, constantly breaking up sentences with “no lo so” and “non posso parlare Italiano bene.”

We eat a lovely dinner of beer and pasta and then head out to another one of my favorite college dives (Insert Unpaid Advert Here) Henry’s. Now, being out with these two girls is different than most times we go out. Usually, our bitchiness is easily overshadowed by the more chipper members of the group. But when it’s just the three of us, we don’t, suprisingly, get many people asking for phone numbers. Maybe it’s Amber’s evil glare or Mara’s eye rolling or the fact that I am constantly spilling drinks all over anyone in a 10 foot radius even when I’m not drunk, but we’re not exactly a welcoming group.

This is why we all had a stunned look when a short, latin man with a nice rico suave/mullet haircut and a bandana came up behind Mara and TAPPED HER SHOULDER. WITH ONE FINGER! Now, this man had been on the deck with us for quite a time, and was a very obvious and open homosexual. There was another nice man with some short shorts and there was a bit of rubbing going on. So I was very surpised when he came over, asked to buy a cigarette from Mara (which she gracefully gave to him for free, I think she was too stunned to do otherwise) sat down right next to Amber and stared strait at me.

Imagine the next speech in thick accent, not unlike Fez from That 70’s Show:

“I have a question for you. Love? I was just telling my friend over there [with the short shorts] how love is just a memory. A memory of the feeling you get the first time you touch someone for the first time. The feeling you get inside when you talk to them. It is just a chemical in your brain that makes you feel good, so you spend your whole life trying to recreate that feeling when you first touch. This is all love is? Is it not?”

Silence.

“Well, that won’t sustain it. You have to truly care for another person, because you can’t stay together just based on a feeling. It may begin like that, but it can’t sustain for a long period of time.”

Mara and I stared at Amber, dumbfounded.

“What? It’s true.”

And they say the Grinch’s heart grew three times it’s size that day.