saturday night and gatsby.

friday marked my last shift at the restaurant.

just before going in i stopped in the local bakery for a bottle of pellegrino to save me from the unsavory new york heat.

i pointed, asked, and was met with questioning looks.

silence.

backtrack. replay. click-in. oh. i had asked for a bottle of prosecco. freudian slip? (after all, the end of my tenure as glorified restaurant decor is cause for celebration, no?)

so when alisha came over on saturday night i asked her to bring sparkling things. she kindly obliged with a bottle of pellegrino and prosecco. you see why i like her, right?

point of fact: my friendship with alisha is the best thing to have come out of my time working at the restaurant.

friendship is a funny thing. it can take a lot of work. and friends come and go. but every so often you (or, well i do) meet someone and think, i'll keep them for life, please.

when i first met alisha i had been working as the new girl for three months. and i was ready to not be the new girl. but i was not ready for alisha. she was just so damn...sparky. and very short. and from a height of 5'10" both things seemed cause for concern.

i think it was that so much pep could be packaged in such a little body that i found off-putting.

i soon came to learn that this pep was a brilliant ploy to appease management and cover a deeply intelligent and sarcastic sense of humor.

i love how smart alisha is. and i love that every time i suggest a book, she declares that she's read it (chances are years ago...probably dreamt it up before it was even written). and then she goes and does something like flapping her arms all about because she's so darn hot and once she settles into the heat she starts waxing nostalgic about great gatsby and don't you know, she can actually quote the thing.

it was beastly hot on saturday night. and while we laughed the whole way through it, by night's end we had "lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry."

all in all, perfection.