Yin Trumps Yang

Every yin must have its yang, and this weekend was no exception.

M. and I left for Northampton at 3pm yesterday, brimming with the excitement of meeting our Potential Goth Partially-Shaved-Headed DJ.

Or rather, we tried to leave, only to be impeded by the fact that a certain unnamed car rental company with whom we will never do business again



had closed at 12 noon, a full three hours before our agreed-upon 3pm scheduled pick-up time. Much moaning and gnashing of teeth ensued, but forty minutes, 120 bucks, five Avenue Blocks and one right-sided shin splint later, we were happily ensconced in our Pontiac G6 - - the very same car with which Oprah saddled her unsuspecting audience, according to M. - - courtesy of our new car rental company of choice.



We got to Northampton right on schedule, dropped our bags off at the Best Western - - cue ominous organ music, more on this later - - and ran over to meet our Potential DJ at the prearranged crunchy granola coffee house. Where we soon discovered that Potential Goth Partially-Shaved-Headed DJ is actually Potential Goth Nine Foot Tall Multiple-Ear -Lip-and-Perhaps-Elsewhere-Piercings Spiky Bleached Blond Hair DJ. If John Malkovich and the Albino twins from the Matrix movies had a baby and then let it grow up in the liberal enclave of Northampton, that baby might look like Potential Goth DJ, and if that baby grew up to be a DJ and I drove three hours to meet him, I might, upon first seeing him, feel a strange mixture of squareness as well as gastric unease.

So we sat down at a table with Potential DJ and his Quiet Goth Girlfriend - - M. agreed, later in the evening, that it was indeed prudent on my part to not, in an attempt at finding some common ground, volunteer that I had worn those identical false eyelashes last Halloween - - and began the beguine. I, as is typical of myself in new situations, was intensely intense and fidgety and high-pitched. Thankfully, M. held down the emotional fort and managed to keep the conversation on track. It was not long before we discovered that we are, indeed, in love with Potential Goth DJ, whom I will now refer to simply as Goth DJ. Seriously, he’s the best. And the nicest. And 100% on the same page as we are when it comes to music. And he and M. even had a conversation about urban planning. Really, he is an artist. You can give him a song and he thinks of three others that he could blend seamlessly together with that one song. He is to DJing what an interior designer is to home decorating, as opposed to Suzy Smith in Window Dressings at Home Depot. I am a little giddy about him, as is M.. He even hugged us goodbye, which made me even more giddy and prompted me to, perhaps ill-advisedly, hug Quiet Goth Girlfriend, although she did kind of hug back.

Then M. and I, because we are absolutely incapable of not spending the money we don’t have - - treated ourselves to a ginormous and, apart from the meatball lasagna, delicious meal.

Then we headed back to (recue organ music) the Best Western, where we did what came naturally - - namely, lounged around in our underwear on our enormous King size bed and drank Diet Coke and ate Whatchamacallits and made changes to our gift registries and talked about the nuances of the ceremony and reconfigured our guest sleeping accommodation schema and then went to sleep.

Then I woke up and discovered that, at some point during the evening, we’d been joined by a friend, who gamely posed for a photo.



Which I can’t help but notice, looks amazingly like this photo.



Which, oddly enough, Google files under the word bedbug.

I originally misfiled it under tick and rushed into the bathroom screaming that we had ticks in the room and we’d better check our scalps, but M. knew better, so then we panicked and went through all our stuff, and I turned up another (dead) friend inside my nightstand, and we made plans for where we might possibly live now that we would surely be quarantined from returning to our village, and then we looked in the plastic bedbug cup and were dismayed to find that the original bedbug was now copulating with or eating his dead friend. Before he could eat all the evidence, we rushed out to the lobby and I presented the cup to the poor little gay boy behind the counter, who I think almost fainted or vomited but was able to hold it together long enough to direct us to the manager at the other end of the desk, who promptly and discretely refunded our room. Which just about exactly made up for the cost of the ill-advisedly expensive dinner from the night before and/or our rental car, and I swear I felt my seventh chakra *ding* at the cosmic karmic sensibility of it all.

Then, because we are financially sound in unpredictable ways, we sat down and ate our free Continental Breakfast waffles.

All of which leaves me sitting here on a couch which a trip to IKEA on the drive home this afternoon reminded us once again that we can’t afford to replace, every minor itch and tickle driving me to the certain realization that I am slowly being devoured by necrophiliac bloodsucking aphids, my stomach still recovering from its downward plunge through my toes yesterday at 3pm courtesy of Enterprise Car Rentals, my bank account diminished by a couple hundred dollars…but all of this occurring in a general state of contentment, because the motel room was free, the mozzarella en carozza was good, the wedding plans are gelling, the DJ is hired, the invitation paper is purchased, and I got to spend some time with the boy I love away from the city that never lets me sleep, and other than a general state of exhaustion and an excessive amount of sugar coursing through my veins from the Sesame Honey Cashews my boyfriend brought me from his maiden voyage to the Union Square Trader Joe’s, I am feeling a little bit on top of the world, and for right now anyway, the yin has beat the yang.