My bestest friend in the whole world, HM lives in the county of Baltimore. She is soon going to be world famous because she will have cured cancer in mice or something. Her husband B works for a computer game company. It sounds like they have fun at work, but I think there must be something funny in their office water cooler because every single guy who works there has the same male pattern baldness thing going on. It’s weird. But anyway, a lot of the guys who work there are married or are engaged and they have this thing where all of the wives get together once a month and have ‘ladies night’. HM feels bad that she hasn’t introduced me to people since we’ve moved here, so she thinks she is doing her part by taking me to this ladies’ night. SHE IS WRONG. Now, not only does she have to introduce me to new people, she has to undo the damage she has done by bringing me, not to ladies’ night, but to what is, in fact, the game peoples wives’ club.
Now, I want to start by saying the whole concept of this wives’ club seems to be a pretty artificial arrangement for friendship – these women have nothing in common with each other except the fact that their husbands all work for the same company. That fact could keep me going in a conversation for oh, about three minutes. But then again, I have a very short attention span. Anyway.
As you may have guessed, HM has forced me to endure one of these evenings, promising me that ‘everyone is really cool and super fun!’. If by ‘really cool and super fun’ she means totally boring and lame, then she was right. There were six women at the table and no one had anything interesting to say. Well, maybe they did but by the time they got around to saying it, I was already drunk. More on that in a minute.
The food was terrible, and the conversation was less than sparkling. At one point the women were complaining about how late their husbands worked when they had a deadline. I just sat there, dumfounded. Was it 1957? What was I doing with these women? How did I get there? Oh right, HM. I was seriously going to kick her ass on the way back to the car. In my mind, while the ‘ladies’ were talking, I was going over the ninja moves I was going to pummel her with.
There was really no input from me during this conversation about “oh boohoo, Tommy works so hard and I never see him its so sad”. After all, I had so many late nights and deadlines and stress that I developed an eye twitch that lasted for over six months and my darling husband never once complained. What could I contribute to this very wives clubby conversation? I sat there in silence and then looked over at HM and wondered how long I could keep this up. I figured I would give up the ninja moves and straight up punch her in the stomach, or kick her in the shins or something. I was feeling violent.
Well, Alas! I discovered a perfect solution. Wine. And lots of it. I drank until I thought I had something relevant to say, which means I drank until it was time to leave.
Now, there is another ‘ladies night’ in March and I’ve begged off. I’ve met some decent people here in B-more that I really like and I enjoy spending time with. It would be one thing if I’d hung out with these chicks and decided they were cool and we’d called each other and gotten together since January, but we haven’t, so I can’t imagine they would be crushed if I didn’t show up. I mean, they probably will, but I’m still not going. They can go to dinner, sit around, and cry about how much work their husbands do and how lonely it is at home and then trade recipes for tuna noodle casserole. To each her own.
