This weekend was a crazy intense weekend of both awesome and exhaustion. Saturday was an annual all-day music festival thrown by the local gay club where most of my friends work. This year they even added a 5K walk/run before the festival kicked off. The days before it were spent helping them prepare for the ridiculousness. The day after it was spent pretending to help them clean up, but really just relaxing a little in their free AC. But the day of? That was spent people watching. And the only thing better than people watching is drunk people watching.
I volunteered to help out all afternoon Friday after work. So I drove straight to the bar from work, where I then sat around doing absolutely nothing. Eventually we decided to go to the grocery store to get some last minute items. Have you ever gone to the store to get 110 limes, 100 lemons and 20 bottles each of soda water and tonic, along with a whole bunch of really random things, like soy milk? If you haven't, I'll save you the suspense - the cashiers look at you strangely. It was me, a bartender, and one of the drag queens (who was not in drag for this particular outing). The grocery store got a little out of hand. At one point, the bartender and I were arguing, which resulted in the drag queen apologizing to the woman in the aisle with us. When she said she understood, the bartender announced his belief that we should just have sex to solve all our problems. This of course achieved it's desired effect of me blushing like a 12 year old girl. Of course, shortly thereafter, as I was giving the drag queen tips on shaving her legs, I suddenly hear "Hi" quietly from behind me. I turn around to see the only thing that could make this shopping trip more surreal, yup, you guessed it - a coworker! Awkward conversation happened, and then off we went. Back at the bar, I agreed to sit at the packet booth until the end. Only then did I notice another coworker was one of only a few customers at the time. And boy, did he want to talk.
I went to dinner with a college friend in town for one night, one of her high school friends and her co-worker. A seemingly slapdash group, but fun none-the-less. Armed with a name from the original e-mail she sent about this trip, I decided to do a little stalking of her high school friend. Facebook told me we had a number of mutual friends - mostly gay men I know from the bar. I made assumptions that turned out to be spot on. It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that my friend was unaware, which would have been awkward enough. However, he took the opportunity to come out, which was great...but extremely awkward given that he told her in front of two strangers. Somehow we ended up at this dive gay bar (I guess that's what you do after somebody comes out?) and I saw a friend. I regaled him with the tale of how I went to dinner with a stranger who then came out at the dinner table, only to be met with a reply of "uhhh, yeah...I actually know that guy. And it'll be awkward. I'm going to go". I still haven't heard the full story. This now-openly-gay guy then joined me at the club later in the evening, where I spent my night alternately dancing and texting a cute boy I've been talking to. I explained to this boy about the events of the evening. Somehow this turned into us discussing how badly our lives needed to be sorted out. I pointed out that at least he doesn't have to worry about coming out of the closet. A text which was met with the loudest silence I've ever heard. Eventually I received confirmation that, in fact, he does need to worry about coming out of the closet. There's a first for everything I guess, but never before had I had a bit of a crush on a man who turned out to be gay (that I know of). So that was...interesting. After that, I just went home to sleep. Oddly, I'm now sort of helping him with the situation and setting up meetings with some of my friends to discuss their coming out.
How did I write this much so far about the festival weekend BEFORE the festival even started?!
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