Thursday, July 8, 2004

"But it was a necessary accessory..."
--TreasureGoddessChic


WOW, checking out the receipts, thinking, now how much can I sell on eBay?????? That's the worst part of the post-shopping-extravaganza-hangover. Our themes for the weekend in Chicago were "Moms gone wild" (my fave), white-girl-monkey-luck (long story) and "but it's a necessary accessory". Man, I can rationalize ANYTHING when it comes to shopping. People should hire me out for my services. I'll make you feel so good about spending money, but I'll be gone by the time the credit card bill comes in the mail!

Short version of the white-girl-monkey-luck: I think I forgot to write that I went to Chicago with 3 Asian friends. One is from China and the other two were from Viet Nam. I'm kind of tall for a white girl anyway, and then I wear heels, so I basically tower above them and they mall-walked like they were leaving me in the dust. It was quite humbling, actually. I met them through my friend Alison I went to Friends Univ. with and they very sweetly adopted me into their circle of friendship. OK, back to the monkey thing. Apparently, THIS is the year of the monkey also. I did not realize that. I did know that the monkey is very lucky (probably why I'm still alive after the stupid things I've done). We were eating dim sum (basically people walk around with carts full of chinese food and you grab things off the cart and everyone shares and it's quite a social bonding/eating fest. The food is NOT like our little American chinese food, but REAL stuff. I did pretty well. You also have to realize it's 10am and breakfast time. My system was not quite ready for the real stuff that early. My friends must have rubbed off on me because I was actually chowing down on egg rolls & sticky rice and pickled cucumbers when I'm normally throwing down donuts. The restaurant gave little cheap-o necklaces to the children that all had a monkey pendant with a red string. I SO wanted to have one, but didn't know if they got the necklaces from the restaurant or a store in Chinatown. I finally got the message across by pointing, making faces and almost grunting. My chinese language skills only include "hello" and "thank you". I found the manager, conveyed that I had 3 small children (so I lied, I wanted a necklace too) and he gave me some! I went back to the table all proud of my international communication abilities to find that Lili had already got necklaces for us all. oh well. An old lady told me I was very lucky and then we had all kinds of good luck that weekend. We would just barely miss the worst thunderstorms, hit the good deals in the stores, lots of little things that we decided were all due to the "white-girl-monkey-luck."

I've really got to learn to tell shorter stories.