Go Roberto Go!

Hi everybody. Just like last week, sorry for not posting anything yesterday. I think it would be safe to assume I'm never going to post anything on Monday. More often than not, I'm exhausted from the weekend, miserable at work and simply not in the mood to think. So any posting would just be mush. I'd be better off slapping the keyboard like an excited baby. Maybe I'll just start doing that. So I could act like an excited baby.

As I mentioned on Friday, this past weekend was my grandparents 25th wedding anniversary. I drove up to Dallas for the festivities on Saturday, which allowed me to miss a "mandatory" brunch. The party itself was nice - we rented a room at a quasi-fancy Dallas restaurant. Unfortunately, the theme of the party, as decided by my grandmother, was "party animals." So we blew up a lot of zebra and leopard-print balloons. The place looked like an African Chuck E. Cheese.

I was able to chat with a lot of relatives I'd only really met within the last five years or so. Turns out my dad has all these cousins I've only sort of heard of, and these cousins have kids that are anywhere between 25 and 35. Why have I never met these people before, you might ask? Who the hell knows. Something to do with my dad completely isolating himself from the rest of the family. It's complicated and a bit infuriating. But anyway, some of them were genuinely hilarious, which was surprising, considering my dad's sense of humor really only emerges when he finds a news article about some poor bastard getting his penis cut off. Let me put it this way, if you're sending my dad a birthday card, you can't go wrong with a farting monkey.

I spent most of the night talking to my brother, and we took advantage of the open bar. I've never mastered the open bar, and I probably never will. It's not like I was ordering shots or anything, but everytime the waitress came by and asked if I wanted another beer, I thought, "well, why the hell not?" and ordered another one. The waitress was cute. I don't know what it is about waitresses, but I find them irresistible. Maybe it's the uniform? Maybe there's something about the customer-waitress dynamic that appeals to me? Anyway. After my fifth beer, I started casually chatting with her. I still wasn't feeling confident enough to launch into a full-blown conversation. By my tenth beer or so, I'd mustered up enough courage to try something. So I snatched a stuffed tiger off one of the tables and walked over to her. "I got you something." (God, I'm gay) "Oh yeah?" Then I handed her the tiger. "Awwww!!" Smiles. "He looks just like the tiger from Go Diego Go!" Ummm, okay, what is "Go Diego Go?" Then I remembered that it's a kid's show (an offshoot of Dora the Explorer, I think). Well, the first thing that came to mind was "this girl has a son. Terrific." But more importantly, I realized I had absolutely nothing else to say. I probably should have prepared something before approaching her?! I couldn't even think of something as simple as "so how do you like working here?" She completely froze me! I was immediately reminded of the time I once asked for a stripper's phone number (no telling how many beers I'd had that night). Her response? "I don't have a phone." Yeah. That one still stings a little.

So anyway, I left the restaurant with no phone number from the waitress. Not that I asked. Not that I would have after my extremely awkward exit from our post-tiger conversation. Yeesh.

Anyway, tomorrow is the debut of the Memoirs Mailbag. Last I checked, there was one question in the mailbag. One. Thanks everybody. Again, it's memoirsmailbag@gmail.com. Until then...