there’s an owen on my porch!

so owen came back to town last weekend! it was like, the best of times and the worst of times. we were both reasonably exhausted, i’ve been working 50 hour weeks lately and he had school, summer school, audio workshop, and literally hasn’t been home in eight months at this point. but before going back to philly, we had some more quality time.

thursday: i got home from work, owen showed up an hour later after driving six hours from ohio. we found an AMAZING italian joint for dinner that’s ONE BLOCK from my apartment! very cool. then came home and went right to sleep.

friday: i got home from work and we hung out on the balcony until it was time for my kid sister’s birthday dinner at scoozi’s, a family favorite. then we tried to see Clerks II, but hey, when you show up at 9:50 to a 9:20 movie, they barely let you in and then you realize you’re 30 min late when you thought you were only 10 min late and then you know what you do? you go home and watch The Count of Monte Christo and talk about politics instead.

oh, the balcony. we were outside for a little over an hour, just chatting and playing Can Lisa Name That Song, No She Can’t. i am without rival when it’s CD or radio, but when it’s just one guitar i can barely catch Eye of the Tiger for the love of pete.

so saturday: tragedy struck. we fed the meter at owen’s car, went to get milk for cereal, went to feed the meter again at 11am, and in that time someone had broken into Owen’s car and STOLE HIS GUITAR. it was that bad. they took nothing but the guitar, left behind his J Crew shirts, iPod, etc and took the one most valuable thing in there. i burst into tears. owen handled it better. we called the cops, his parents, a few glass companies, i blew my nose and we headed out to the south side to get the window repaired. it was way south, like past Comiskey Park south, like i’d been down that far twice before and did NOT want to hang out.

anyway, aside from the guitar being gone it was all fixed and taken care of soon after.

i felt terrible, so bad that i think it effected me the rest of the weekend. i had expected owen to get mad or regret coming so i was paranoid and super nice to the point that i was probably being annoying and then being paranoid about whether i was being annoying. so the natural solution, of course, is to bring in more people and heighten the possibility of annoying the snot out of my friend. i took owen to my sisters’ new place and he somehow managed to hang out with my affectionately overwhelming family and survive intact and enjoying himself! saturday night: just hung out. it had been a rough day, to say the least. while hanging out i made owen a present, a CD cover:

if you know anything about photoshop, you’d know this is a really easy trick, but it looks cool and i did the whole thing in about twenty minutes :) AND if you know photoshop, you’ll know the pretty fantastic feeling you get when you reveal your computer monitor to the person in the frame and they see themselves in a previously unimagined setting. owen was shocked, in a good way, in the best way. i almost redeemed myself…

finally, sunday: slept in. saw Thank You For Smoking. walked around. got Owen a haircut (badly needed. you can’t see those muttonchop sideburns like i could see them) (glorious). we kept walking. went back to the italian place for late lunch / early dinner. hung out on the balcony. sent him off around 7pm. by the time we had hugged goodbye three times, everything had evened out and we were back where we started, makeshift siblings who somehow will just always be absolutely fine. i still feel very mixed about the tone of the weekend – we were both tired and overwhelmed – but i saw some strength in our friendship that i knew was there.