An Evening That Took All Afternoon
I woke up at half past seven with two and a half hours to sort everything out. Nothing was organized. As usual, it all landed on me. I switched on my phone, opened ICQ, and immediately had Irina and Ana asking for updates I didn’t have. I put a mushroom pizza in the oven and started calling André. He didn’t pick up. I called him ten times.
Somewhere in the middle of this I needed to shower. Lisa wasn’t picking up either. Irina was calling me now. The pizza was approaching critical. André finally called back—he had no idea whether Lisa was coming or not. Then Lisa called. I told her to take Irina and Irina’s friend Daja if she was driving. She said she might also be taking Tina, which meant one seat too few, but she wasn’t sure yet. I texted Ana. Ana said to wait. Then someone named Andrea called to confirm Tina was definitely coming. André called again to ask when we were picking him up. I had no answer. The pizza almost burned. I ran around the apartment in my boxers the entire time.
By the time I had a half-charred slice in one hand and Lisa on the phone in the other, she’d settled on picking me up at half ten. I texted Irina the update, relayed everything to André, somehow became Irina’s unofficial chaperone for the evening, and then remembered I’d left conditioner sitting in my hair for the past twenty minutes.
At André’s I noticed my face cream had quietly dissolved—I could scrape the residue off with a fingernail. Washed it off in his bathroom, found the good old Nivea tin, and finally felt like a person with somewhere to actually be.
Lisa’s car had no CD player. The seatbelt on my side didn’t latch. She spent half an hour after we arrived circling for a parking spot that never fully satisfied anyone. When we finally found the others outside, I had a beer in hand and was mostly just relieved the getting-there part was finished.
Worth it? Marginally. I’ve had better nights at the same club, but the evening had its moments: running into my old classmate Hobi, messing around with Bianca, getting a proper read on Daja for the first time—genuinely chaotic, genuinely funny, probably the reason the whole thing didn’t tip into a waste. Without her it would have.
A decent-enough night assembled from terrible logistics. And if Blizzard had bothered to send me that beta key, I probably wouldn’t have gone at all.