The Difference Between Falling Asleep and Dancing a Jig

Saturday morning, Stephanie and I were about to leave the house to have breakfast in DC by ourselves when our friend John called. He was at the Best Buy down the street shopping for (you guessed it) all three extended Fellowship of the Ring movies and thought he could pick us up. So we piled in his car and headed straight into disaster.

We went to Cafe Saint Ex, which has nice outdoor seating and a weird tendency to kick up a lot of wind whenever I eat there. We sat outside and were having a good time and I thought it was a good sign when the wind rather mightily appeared on what was probably the calmest, mildest days in weeks. Perhaps in retrospect I was wrong. Anyway, we had two pitchers of mimosas. I think John was flirting with the waitress.

From there, we thought it would be fun, in this order, to: go wine shopping; buy five bottles, including a $35 bottle of Tokay, which has become one of my favorite vices; go back to John's place to drink it; decide we needed fancy cheeses to go with all this wine; go to the street market and buy three different large cheese hunks and some grapes; go back to John's and lay everything out; and then watch The Fellowship of the Ring (looong version) while we drank wine and ate cheese and felt very proud of ourselves.

I'm not sure at what scene I lost consciousness -- I think Orlando Bloom had just shot some orc through the eyes from an impossible distance -- but I passed out. I can't say I fell asleep; I passed the eff out. My body could not take any more wine and cheese. I woke up half an hour later, with the ending credits rolling, with a terrific headache, wondering why all the wine was gone. (In our defense, two bottles had been stored away for safekeeping; naturally we will never see them again.) What did I learn? Apparently I have a lower tolerance for the good life than I thought. We spent most of the afternoon agreeing that this is exactly how French peasants spend their lunch hours, and kind of half-believing ourselves (I've never met any, and not for lack of trying), but at the end of the day it didn't really matter because I simply cannot do that again for a while. It was a lot of cheese. And we ate it on slices of a large baguette. We should have at least had some tomato or something to cut the sheer cheese of it all.

And speaking of fun, last night Stephanie and I went to see the Young Dubliners at the Birchmere. It's kind of hard to briefly explain them without referencing other bands you also probably don't listen to: maybe a cross between Flogging Molly and Ashley MacIsaac. I only own their most recent album, which is really good, so I didn't know what else to expect, but I recognized about two-thirds of the set, and the rest (minus one or two mediocre songs) was just as fun, including an unexpected sort of free-form jazz odyssey they launched into near the end replete with a Braveheart riff from a guy sitting in his chair holding the Irish bagpipe. If you like really upbeat Irish rock and a large sasquatch playing the fiddle as though his life depended on it, you should catch their show.