#guthrie's

[kmixon]

Source: AL.com

https://search.app/c47uN

https://search.app/c47uN

[tubagod05-blog]

Drunk Undergrad Discovers Meaning of Hamlet

Last Thursday night at the North by Northwest apartment complex, undergrad Andrew Defoe finally understood the meaning Hamlet.

“I don’t remember a single thing,” Defoe commented at press time Friday morning, with very clear signs of a hangover. “Hamlet? Was he the guy that left his phone in my Lit class?”

Outside sources say that Defoe had arrived at the party wearing jeans and a button down shirt with tacos covering it, ready to party. After greeting his host, he beelined it to the drink table and put back whatever he could fill in his cup.

“I’ve never seen someone so determined to get wasted before in my life,” Defoe’s best friend, Taylor Ross, commented. “The man was really doing it up.”

After forgetting where he was entirely and stumbling into a bedroom, Defoe accidentally placed his hand over a copy of Hamlet and began perusing the pages. Eye witnesses said that he had a moment of sober clarity when landing on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and his pupils dilated as he uttered the words, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” and immediately started sobbing.

People came into the room to check on Defoe and found him crying heavily, shaken by Shakespeare’s words saying, “To be or not to be! I don’t want to be! I want to am!”

Immediately following this outburst, Defoe threw up on the floor and passed out, reportedly waking up later in the night and walking to Gutherie’s to eat fried chicken, not remembering a single thing that happened.

“They have really awesome chicken there,” Defoe recommended. “If you ever go, you have to get the box, but don’t get the coleslaw. I’ve heard it’s not that good. But their sauce is killer! That’s a must-do every single time.”

[klappersacks]

Guthrie's Alley Cat by agilitynut on Flickr.

[wakenbakersfield]

So that song "Closing Time" was inspired by last call here?

[paintedimagining]

365-295 Guthries by cassaendra on Flickr.

[fifteenfirstdates]

Date 3: Pass me a tamale

"So, we're eating these on the train, right?" he asked, shaking the bag of tamales on our walk back to the Red Line.

Oh, this one's a keeper.

That might not be true. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I had higher hopes for Date 3 than usual. Though I'm becoming more and more disenchanted with the actual possibility of forming a relationship with something I met on the internet, he had a few perks: recent Loyola graduate living only two miles away, cute in the scrawniest of ways, a lover of Thursday night television and the intern life.

He suggested we go to a bar in Lakeview that has an impressive selection of board games. Most of my other dates have been pretty talk-heavy, reliant on conversational inertia to keep the night afloat. But since we had an activity to distract us -- even if that activity was Connect Four -- we didn't spend so much time trying to think of get-to-know-you questions. That might not have been a good thing -- we seemed to just avoid them altogether.

That's not entirely true. We met up at the Howard stop to ride to Addison together, and our train ride was definitely first-date uncomfortable. The train was quiet, and there are few things I dislike more than when other people can overhear my awkward-first-date conversation. He wasn't fantastic at keeping the dialogue going, which left me scrambling for conversation starters. When I'm nervous on a date I ask all the questions anyway, pulling from anything I've ever said in an interview and anything I've said to any other date. It can be an exercise in listening, trying to tease out follow-ups from their responses. I'm not always good at it, and occasionally my mind meanders into thinking about their facial hair and then I lose track of the conversation. I wonder if they get distracted while I talk?

Despite the stilted discussion, I found myself flirting, smiling in a specific way and leaning forward, playing with my neck as if I had lost a necklace around it and was just trying to find it. It's weird. It's probably not particularly attracting. Nor am I particularly confident that my flirtation indicates any sort of interest within myself. I'm great at flirting with people I don't find attractive. Much better than flirting with people I like, really.

But the bar itself was fun -- a huge beer list, full of friends playing games. We started out with a game neither of us had heard of. The box didn't come with instructions, and so we had to piece together how to play from the game's description on the back of the box. Later we moved on to childhood favorites -- Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Scrabble. He was a good loser, and a graceful winner. Perhaps all potential relationships should be evaluated right off the bat for their competitive spirit. Or maybe he was just being polite. We'd already established that neither of us was competitive enough for sports, but he kept offering to lend me vowels when I was stuck in Scrabble, my board game arch nemesis.

When a guy off the street came in hawking tamales, I was both caught off-guard and completely hungry. Normally on dates I'm pretty conservative -- one coffee or one beer, no food. Mostly because I don't know how to deal with who might pay for anything. I don't know how I ended up suggesting that we buy tamales out of some stranger's cooler, but he was immediately down. We asked for two and ended up with about a dozen mini-tamales. He paid for them, as he had paid for our beers. I may not know how to properly accept chivalry, but it's nice.

I called the night early on account of impending finals. We rode back to Howard together and parted ways at the turnstiles upstairs, him to walk home and me to cross to the other platform to catch the Purple Line. It was uber awkward, even compared to my other awkward date goodbyes. For once, perhaps the first time, I was the one that suggested we do it again. No numbers were exchanged, no hugs initiated.

As I was texting a friend an update (someone had to keep track of whether I was returning alive from drinking with a strange man late at night) he ran back to me. I hadn't taken my half of the tamales. He held the bag out to me, and I happily took one of the Ziplocks. I was left bewildered, but pleased.