Don’t get me wrong, living with my parents definitely has it’s perks: home-cooked meals, premium cable channels, free rent, my dog…but when you live with my parents it’s pretty much like being back in high school but with a relaxed curfew, casual drinking in the house, and much more talk about the future, my career, and my love life (or lack-there-of).
When I first came home after graduating I was in heaven. Fast forward to four months later and not a day goes by where the thought of being on my own doesn’t cross my mind at least once. What triggers these thoughts? Most of the time it’s my dad yelling at me for no real reason…like the other day he yelled at me for incorrectly putting my dish in the dishwasher…yes, there is a wrong way. He’s also obsessed with health and fitness. If I had a dollar for every time he mentioned the word protein or Crossfit in the last month I’d have a stack about the size of a grande late from ‘bux.
One thing that I really miss about college is the freedom to bring home a new boy* every weekend. Unfortunately, this type of behavior is frowned upon at my house. If there were a “Ten Commandments of Living at Home” the first would be “Thou shall not bring home strange men.” I learned this the hard way one mid-summer night when I brought home a new friend after a night out at the bars. This story will follow me for the rest of my adult life, so why not share it with everyone? Like most embarrassing acts committed in my early adulthood years, this one involved alcohol, and a lot of it. I think I’m going to need a drink just to get through retelling this story.
*pizza
The night started out innocent and fun. My friend’s friend’s friend has connections at Sub51 (please excuse the name dropping) and was able to get us a table and bottle which was an awesomely pretentious, but fun way to lead the night. After a couple drinks we decided to leave behind the loud music and Euro-esque nightclub atmosphere of Sub51 and make our way to local hotspot, John Barleycorn. This is where the night takes a sharp turn and my drinking goes from moderate to excessive. I’m standing at the bar with some friends and in walks an old fling. He’s with a blonde chick, who I immediately peg as the type who probably douses herself in “baby girl” perfume like Britney Spears’ Curious or Escada, calls her Dad “Daddy”, her instagram consists of average pictures of her cat, selfies, and selfies with her cat and other repugnant things of that nature. So when this happened I did what every smart girl would do: drink more. This lead to boring, and from what I can remember, soul-crushingly dumb conversation with some random guy who was friends with some of my guy friends. I know for a fact that the conversation was dumb because when he said he was from Minnetonka I immediately brought up Minnetonka moccasins and that’s about as deep as the conversation got…so as far as intellectually stimulating conversations go, we’re at about a 3, which was probably only slightly higher than my BAC level at the time.
Nothing about this picture reflects the night, except the fact that it was taken at a bar.
When we stumbled out of the bar, hand in hand, clearly in love, I had a choice to make: leave with my dignity still partially intact OR do I fight my inner voice of reason and do something in completely wreckless and out of character…obviously I chose to do the later; after all, I am the girl who has a blog about making mistakes. I decided to invite him back to “my place” aka my childhood home owned by my parents. We took a cab all the way back to my house 20 miles north of the city…a long enough ride for me to sober up and realize how bad of an idea this was. The whole cab ride I was trying to remember his name – he’d told me several times and each time I forgot it immediately after. When we arrived at my house I directed him to the basement (this is starting to sound creepy) and told him to stay there while I went upstairs to check in with my parents. My dad asked me who else was home and I slurred “no one, go to sleep dad.” He knew I was lying by the high-pitched inflection in my voice. I was screwed. Everything that happened after is a bit of a blur (I’d rather not remember/I don’t remember), but my mom said that she went downstairs and found my friend hiding in a closet. I tried to reason with them, making some ludicrous arguments like “it’s not a big deal, he just needs a place to sleep,” and I definitely tried to appeal to the fact that he went to my parent’s alma mater (University of Colorado) AND that he also hailed from the great state of Minnesota, which is also where my Dad is from. This guy could have been a the Prince of Monaco – it didn’t matter who he was because to my dad he was the enemy.
Would I ever see him again? Probably, and maybe we’d share a laugh over this…or maybe he wouldn’t find this at all funny (Update: we’ve both decided to pretend it never happened). My mom told me the next morning that the last thing I said before storming angrily up the stairs was “HE COULD HAVE BEEN THE ONE AND YOU SCARED HIM AWAY.” And that about sums it up.
XTINA MISTAKES 