900 miles to be ditched, straight up!

So did I tell yous that my friend B. got engaged? She got engaged two days before my marathon, and of course she's all excited... Anyway, she called to tell me, and then asked me to be her maid of honor.

Anyway, I knew I'd be going home for vacation for a long time, and so a month ahead of time I call her up. I had one day (Friday) that I would be in Chicago and then my fam and I were going to drive to Minocqua, WI, for the rest of the week. So, two weeks before she gets engaged, I tell her that I'll be in town and she "pens me in" to spend all morning and afternoon Friday together. The original plan was that we'd go to the beach downtown, as I'd land at 9 in the AM and then at 5 in the PM, I'd ride the train home with my friend W and hang out with him for dinner.

So then she gets engaged, and one week before I'm supposed to fly in she calls and says, how about we go looking at banquet halls for the reception instead, which sounded like fun because I'm always getting asked to be in wedding parties but then the b2b never wants me to help with anything... which is a mixed blessing of course, but I was still pretty excited to go look at halls with her and be on the inside track a little...

Now it's Thursday at 7PM Chicago time, and I just finished with that lab accreditation BS, and we were out having a drink. B calls and I say I'll call you in 15 minutes. We're about to leave. I call her back and she says her fiance's cousin invited her to a "cross-town" ball game (Cubs v. Sox) and she was going to go to that instead. She's saying, you know how hard those tickets are to get and how expensive they are and blah de blah de blah. And I'm sitting in the bf's car heading into Denver and all I can think is, " This is an OUTRAGE!" She says, let's hang out at night instead. I say I have plans with W. She says, can I hang out with yous? I say, call me tomorrow. And hang up.

Of course I'm LIVID! B is NOT A DIE HARD BASEBALL fan!! She doesn't know any of the players. She doesn't watch the games on TV. And I'm flying in from across the country, her fucking maid of honor, and available for one day only! To really tick me off, I start thinking, I could have called my uncles and made plans to have lunch with them. I could have called my cousins and said I'd drop by for an hour in the afternoon. But I cleared an entire afternoon for her, and now it's 10 pm Chicago time, and I can't call anyone!!

So I curse and curse in the car with my bf, inventing all sorts of great fun expletives. I eventually get disappointed as I'm realizing that my bf is not joining in on my curse-a-thon and that I have no way to get home from the airport tomorrow morning. I call my dad and say, "Dad, you'll never fucking guess what B did!"

He says, All right, let's have it!

I say, We've had plans to hang out tomorrow for longer than a month, and she just called me NOW to say she's going to a cross-town game instead.

Dad says, What?!

I say, yeah, what a bitch!

He says, Yeah what a fucking bitch!

I say, she doesn't even pay attention to baseball and I'm flying across the country for one day only and she's going to a fucking ball game!

Dad says, Fuck her. Fuck her.

I say, This is an OUTRAGE! A Mother Fucking OUTRAGE! And you know what else? She just asked me to be her maid of honor and we were on the phone 2 times earlier this week talking about hanging out and she was telling me all about how she broke it to her other close friends that she's not having anyone else in the wedding party!

Dad says, And then she pulls this shit?

I say, Yeah, what a bitch!

Dad says, Fuck her. Fuck her! We'll pick you up from the airport and eat omelets and we'll go to the Japs for dinner.

(God bless him!)

The good thing about all of this is that I was planning to check on a bag so that I could bring her birthday/house warming (she and the fee-fee-poo are moving in together) present--it's a liquor carosel that holds 6 bottles of booze and dispenses a shot every time. Now that she was a confirmed huge fucking bitch, I didn't need to bother with checked baggage. Which was nice.

Anyway, I fly in and I end up having a very nice little day with my mom and dad (which was a moot point as we were destined to spend the next 7 days together anyway), and then I have a fabulous time with W, bitching about her... and at 1030 at night she calls and says she wants to meet us up.

Then I'm torn, right? If I were living in town, I would perpetuate this squabble for months and months until I'm satisfied, and then we could just meet up one evening and everything would be fine. Now I'm half way across the country, and if I'm going to hold this grudge, the route toward resolution is much less certain. I was trying to weigh these things with W earlier, because I knew she was going to call. W enjoys conflict and agreed that I should keep up the grudge. But when she calls, he says, Just have her come out. Now that she's making effort you've lost all the awesome upper hand. So she comes out to A BOOKSTORE reeking of booze, and wants to show off her ring and talk about the game, which "her side" lost, and I was feeling pretty righteous and smug having chosen to wear the other team's hat.

Anyway, she was acting all happy to see me and I was like, ho hum, and not intentionally either... but maybe just because I was ho hum...

It really makes you realize who your friends are, you know? I mean, I have guy friends who are religious about baseball, but I'm 100% certain that if they were presented with cross-town tickets when we had plans and I was flying across the country for these plans, they wouldn't go. W, for example, hates bars, and only goes to them when the Sox are playing, and I KNOW he wouldn't go to a cross town game if it meant canceling plans.

Fast forward to coming home from family vacation. I totally carried two frozen Chicago-style pizzas on the plane and invited my roommate to my boyfriend's house to eat them that night. At the bf's house my roommate notices the same liquor carousel I bought for B's birthday and says how cool it is! The next day I go home and give my roommate the boxed-up liquor carousel saying,"I was going to give it to B for her birthday/ house warming, but now she can just suck my ass!"

Then we got drunk and took out a sharpie and crossed out all of the kind words on the birthday card I had bought for B, so that all that was left was "Birthday". (Obviously leaving "Happy" on it would have been highly disingenuous...) I still haven't sent that card to her, but I'm thinking more and more that I will. Afterall, she's a bitch.

Birthday, B, Birthday.