Caturday

Caturday 2018 (someone told me that's what day it was), a rainy day in NYC. I planned to spend the morning and afternoon with 2 of my favorite people. Jing and Krista. You see, Jing is getting married in August and wanted some advice from Krista, her maid of honor, about a dress she likes. They also go nuts for dim sum, and planned to eat that afterward. I got invited to tag along at the last minute, perhaps a pity invite? Or an invite no one expected me to accept. The joke’s on you guys. I accepted that “invitation” immediately. I showed up at David's Bridal just in time to find them both in the dressing room giggling without me. But it’s cool. I acted natural and soon enough we were all giggling together, while I gave pointers on how to look fabulous while walking in a wedding dress. Qualified as I am given the fact that I have no experience wearing wedding dresses and someone recently told me that I walk weird.

Mariano (Most Handsome Man Alive/Argentinian Model/Friend): Yeah you do walk weird. You put one foot in front of the other.
Me: ...?
(It may be a language barrier thing. Either way he gets hired to walk and look good, and I do not.)

Pretty soon I was finding out Krista had plans in between dress shopping and dim sum. She jetted off to get tattoo eyebrows or something. I’m told it’s a fancier, less terrifying, non-permanent procedure. Apparently the color will fade to 50% to look more natural, but on the first day it will look much darker. Jing commented that Krista would show up looking angry.

To kill 3 hours until Krista’s transformation was complete, Jing agreed to let me hang out at her place. We popped into Starbucks for a quick snack to tide us over which turned slightly dramatic when the “baristas” couldn’t get our orders right. Before I was even finished chewing a bite of a tomatillo, egg and steak wrap, Jing informed me that she needed to go to the gym before dim sum. Ugh. That was short lived. What to do now?!

We spent 30 minutes looking at Pinterest for ideas about bridesmaids dresses before she had to leave. During that time I decided that instead of going all the way home I would accompany Jing to the gym because she gets a free guest pass once a day. Next thing you know I was wearing a pair of her sneakers one size too big for me and heading out the door to get my treadmill walk on.

Once we arrived at Blink, I got signed up to be a visitor. They even took my picture and gave me my own permanent guest pass ID. When I got dressed in the morning I thought I had put on a cute outfit. But the fact that I seemed to blend in easily with all the other gym folk, and no one gave me any what-the-heck-are-you-doing-at-the-gym-in-those-clothes looks tells me I was not as smartly dressed as I originally thought.

I found myself a treadmill, pressed play on the 1999 Moby album, and began a casual “walk” while I went back and forth between scrolling through Instagram and playing candy crush. At first I chose an easy pace of 1.7 mph but that proved to make me dizzy. 1 mph was much more comfortable. But I still found myself wishing I wasn’t walking at all and attempted to “take breaks” by quickly walking up to the top of the treadmill and then riding it for about 2 seconds to the edge until I almost fell off. 3 seconds of break time was a bit too nerve wracking.

When I realized that it was about that time for Jing to finish her actual workout, I pressed the Cool Down button which slowed me to a nice pace of 0.5 mph. Within a minute she showed up at my treadmill completely covered in sweat while my pits stayed dry. I was not ashamed of my relaxed activities.

After Jing cleaned up we collected her husband, Alex and met Krista (whose eyebrows didn’t look as angry as we expected) and Mike (whose wrist was recently broken!) at Tim Ho Wan for dim sum. But it was a 2 hour wait! So we whiled away the time at City of Saints Coffee Roasters around the corner where Krista endured our many questions about her eyebrow procedure. Alex spent the time watching the proverbial pot boil (checking his phone every second to see how many more minutes we had to wait for a table), and Mike sat in a corner and worked on PhD stuff. When it was finally our turn we ran over to snag our table lest they give it away to someone else and we promptly ordered 21 main dishes and 4 desserts. As the food came out, stacks on stacks on stacks of dim sum fare, we devoured many things I’ve never tried before. In my opinion it was good but not great. I particularly liked the Baked BBQ Pork Buns and surprisingly the Sweet Osmanthus Jelly with Goji Berries.

After our bellies were full, and in some cases too full, we all made our way to Long Island City to hang out with the kitties and play games at Krista and Mike’s place. On the train ride, I shared with Krista my frustration about my purse and any other bags sliding off my shoulders too easily, especially while wearing a coat. And how I wish I had knobs on my shoulders to make life easier. We spent the rest of the train ride and the walk home discussing design ideas for a product I really think should exist. We call it Shoulder Knobs. We laughed and laughed at this crazy idea so much that I almost peed my pants and was afflicted with the hiccups.

Then we had a lengthy discussion about the origin of specific citrus fruits. I am blown away by the fact that an orange is a hybrid! It’s a cross between a mandarin and a pomelo.

Krista (indignantly): Who did that?? Florida?

Alex was the Google master and answered our myriad questions. It wasn’t Florida. It was China.

Then Amanda joined us and we played games (Fibbage) and drank wine and marveled at how ridiculously cute Fitz and Meru are.

A full Caturday if I ever had one.