Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting, Saturday Night's Alright, Alright, Alriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
Freaking. Insane. Ballgame. A lot of Yankees-Red Sox games are like that, but this one yesterday? I swear, these two teams are like professional wrestlers, where the writers have to find new angles to make the same two opponents going at it again interesting, and somehow pull the trick off.

It's the kind of game where, even though I'd been working all afternoon and got off at six, I wound up hanging around the bar for another couple hours because I knew I'd miss something astounding during the walk home. It's also the perfect game to watch in a bar because generally a bar TV has the sound on mute, so that way you're not subjected listening to Joe Back and Tim McCarver talk. There is, after all, only so much Yankee/Jeter hagiography one can take.

If you didn't see it, it had everything - a benches-clearing donnybrook, a delayed start because of rain, beanballs, Kevin Millar mysteriously not sucking for another day, an apparently endless sixth inning, and a game-winning home run off Mariano Rivera by Bill Mueller in the bottom of the ninth. That left a lot of the out-of-towners who are filling the town because of the Democratic National Convention stunned, but once the first hit came, I felt like that ending was inevitable. Don't get me wrong, Rivera is a great relief pitcher, but I think half of what makes him effective is the legend that has been built up around him. Once a team gets that first hit off the supposedly-invincible Rivera, it seems like he can be vinced and vulnered like anybody else. Granted, that first hit is tricky to get, and this impression comes from watching the Red Sox, who have had a quite-frankly monstrous 1-9 attack the past two years.

So, that sent me home in a good mood, which was not quite dispelled by walking into a Maureen-Carter argument. Apparently, one of Marti's friends who was at the party had a nineteen-year-old brother, thought "Sam" might be his type, and mentioned that to Maureen. Maureen, having met this guy, thought it might be a good match, and had tried to set them up for a date sometime next week. This, as you might imagine, pleased Carter not one bit. I arrived sometime around "if he's so great, why don't you go out with him?", to which Maureen replied that it would be weird going on a date with her friend's little brother. I scooted throught the living room quickly and closed the door to change out of my work clothes.

A few minutes later, Carter comes in, grumbling. "The nerve. Why can't she just leave me alone?"

I mentioned that a month ago she was the one telling me that Maureen was actually a nice person and I shouldn't be worked about over living with her. "You know, if you told her the truth, she might lay off."

He didn't want to be treated like a freak, I asked if anyone treated me like a freak, and he mentioned Kate and Jen hadn't exactly called since the party. I said it was a lot to digest, and they'd come around. Sounded like I believed it, too.

Carter and Maureen both were in bed by ten, since they both got up early - Carter for work, Maureen for church - but I wasn't close to tired, and decided to head out for the midnight movie at the Coolidge.

Going to the Coolidge often involves waiting outside; they don't have that much lobby space, and for the last few weeks they've been scheduling Farenheit 9/11 for 10pm - and since it runs a little over two-plus hours, that means one of the two midnight movies on Saturday starts late; this week it was the Kung Fu one, Inspectors Wear Skirts. So I sat out in Damnation Alley - so named by the Sci-Fi marathoners who hang around that freezing wind tunnel early for the Sci-Fi marathon - and read a magazine, until I noticed someone sitting beside me.

"So," Wei said, "do I know you?"

Can't describe how happy seeing her made me. I had a stupid grin on my face even as I said something wishy-washy: "Well, I know you, but you've got to make that distinction where I'm concerned."

"And here I was hoping you'd give me the answer." She held out a hand, trying to guage whether it was raining or not, and sort of thought out loud. "At the party, you talked about Martin in the third person, but you always paused before doing it. Now that I'm looking for it, I do see little Marty things in the way you talk and act, but I didn't see it at all last year."

"Well, it's not an obvious place to look."

"Yeah. I mean, you and Kurt were doing each other. How can you be Marty and just jump into bed with a guy two months after...this."

I told her there was other stuff going on, that I was afraid of losing him to Denise, and that I had thought this whole thing was a test and Kurt was some sort of hoop I had to jump through to get back into that body again. It wasn't a healthy relationship at all.

"I can't imagine. I literally can't. I try to wrap my mind around it, but..."

"It's okay. I can't, most days."

"That makes me feel a little better. Anyway, here's the thing. I miss my friend. I've been worried about him ever since my Christmas card got returned-to-sender, and now I guess even though he's gone, there's still a big chunk of him in you..." At this point she reached into her purse, pulled something out, and handed it to me.

It was a wedding invitation, with and "ina" added to "Martin" and the "le" crossed out of "Hartle". I was speechless.

"It's Labor Day weekend, so I'll understand if you can't come--"

"I'll be there."

"--and I feel like maybe you should be in the wedding party, but you can't exactly be a groomsman and I'm not sure you're enough of my old friend to make you a bridesmaid--"

"That's fine. This..." I swallowed nothing; I haven't had enough reason for tears of joy in the last year to be really comfortable with them. "This is more than I hoped for."

She put her arm around me, kind of tentatively. "I'm... glad, I think. Just... don't tell Kurt, okay? He's not there yet at all, and I think I'm going to need the whole month to convince him."

I said that was okay, then they called us in for the movie.

Inspector Wears Skirts quite frankly stunk, but on the whole, I think it was a hugely successful night.

-Martina
- posted 4:39 PM - - (archive use only)