Good Surprises, Not-So-Good Surprises:

I'm usually okay with surprises, good or bad. I know people who don't like them at all (my parents, for example). This week had a couple of surprises in store for me.

The first occurred when I got home from work on Wednesday and my dad seemed really anxious about me pulling into the garage. When I got into the house, he started out by saying, "Are you busy tonight?" To which I replied, "No...why?" A family friend had given us tickets to the Raptors game that was starting in a couple of hours. I took a quick look at the tickets. Section 112?? Row 17??? Uh....yeah, I'm going. The game was mediocre (we lost again) but the seats were awesome (behind and to the right of one of the nets). They had the usher guys coming around with their fancy computer pads, taking your orders right from your seat so that you don't have to get up and get in line. And I realized that you can't always hear the people in the Sprite zone from the floor, so that all the chanting and screaming doesn't really do anything. Which is potentially a good thing, because last week at the other game that I went to, the people around us in the Sprite zone started chanting "Bull-shit! Bull-shit!" when the refs made a bunch of lousy calls against the Raptors. All I could think about was how many kids were in the audience asking their parents what the people were saying.

Okay, so that was a good surprise. Another surprise happened yesterday. Kimmy (with whom we had recently reconnected during our Great Winter Getaway) was having a birthday get-together. We went downtown to a nice greek restaurant for dinner and reconnected with some people we hadn't seen since high school. Highlights included Maria and Silva imitating the now infamous William Hung and all of us having completely separate descriptions about our Grade 11 English teacher. Then we walked over to Indian Motorcycle, a club that doesn't look like a club but is actually a dance floor, a lounge, a restaurant, a clothing store, and a motorcycle showcase all in one. It took us a while to find a bunch of empty seats but we did eventually. Ada (whom some of those present thought was a figment of our imagination, since they had never seen her before but had heard us talk about her for years) joined us, and we just sat, listened to an interesting mix of music, avoided cougars and smarmy old guys, watched Jack drink a Hoegaarten (that looked deceptively huge), watched Howie imitate the guy in the washroom who would do a little dance while squirting the soap in your hands or handing you a towel, and caught up with each others lives (I'm convinced that Lauren will become the next Barbara Walters). That was the good part of the surprise.

Em, Jocelyn, Ada, Howie and I left together, while the others stayed (Jack had just bought himself another Hoegaarten). On our way to the subway station, we stopped at a street meat vendor (Howie had a craving), then I led us astray (I thought the entrance at Roy Thompson Hall would be open), and Jocelyn had reception problems while trying to call her brother for a ride from Kipling (he eventually called back). Then we discovered that we missed the last subway. I guess the TTC guy closing up the gate would have been our first clue. But he did say that it was possible that the last one was late, so we each paid our token and ran down to the platform, but alas, the guy came back and said that they told him there wouldn't be any more trains tonight. So we walked back out of the station, and narrowed our options down to the one - a cab. Ada took her own cab back to her place, and the four of us climbed into a cab and made our way back to the west end. On the way, we deliberated on our next course of action (Could we get out at Howie's and he could drive us home? Could we drop him off then go to my house and I could drive the girls home? Do we have enough cash for us to take the cab to each of our respective homes?). A terse phone call from my mother (who is never up at two in the morning, so that was already a bad sign) kind of sealed the deal, and we pooled the money and got the individual cab treatment.

A costly lesson, to be sure, but a new story to tell in the end. Happy Birthday Kimmy!

"You can get wit this, or you can get wit that..."