It has been a wild and crazy weekend my friends, and I confess that I have been riding the procrastination train with a vengeance. Tonight will be an all-nighter, complete with frozen Junior Mints and a pile of Kiera Knightley movies (there’s something about watching Pride and Prejudice as the sun comes up that is oddly satisfying), trying to catch up on my many projects and trying to redeem myself a bit.

But the weekend was well worth it. Friday night was an excursion to The Baton Lounge with Adam and a group of friends and family to see the city’s hottest transvestite review. Now I’m a damn open-minded girl, and I’ve had friends from all walks of life, but I’m still trying to decide what was most disconcerting about the evening: trying to remind myself that the really hot chick onstage shaking her ass in ways I’ve never been able to is actually a guy, or trying not to be grossed out when the largest performer (and I mean large, like to the point where it’s part of her act) came out wearing a skin-tight rhinestone catsuit and a Cher wig circa 1987. Kinda like this, but much, much bigger:

So the next night, you’d think I’d have been good and stayed home, gotten my work done, etc. Which was part of the plan…until it was brought up that a new friend of mine had never been to a strip club. Which, in my opinion, is just unthinkable for someone with the adventurous personality she displays. So Adam, our roommate Dave, and a few other friends loaded her into the car and headed for our favorite south side strip club. I’ll leave the details out to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent-anymore, but let’s just say that when I fell asleep finally around 5am, it was with many colorful images in my head and the satisfaction of knowing that my friends had a lovely time.

As for the headline of this entry, I feel that there may be those of you out there who see us “rockstars” as some sort of higher beings, blessed with good looks and big brains and unable to make mistakes or say inappropriate things. In case any of you are out there, still believing in the power of celebrity infallibility in spite of Britney’s desperate attempts to prove you wrong, I think it’s my duty to dispel that myth and remind you that we’re just human. A moment from my week:

Adam and his friends have been going to a bar and playing trivia once a week for years. They compete against other teams, answering questions in 5 different categories, and the team that has the most correct answers each week wins the pot, sometimes a few hundred bucks (which, when his team wins, is given to the waitress as a generous tip). There’s one person who runs the show each week, asking the questions over a PA system, giving multiple choice answers, and then announcing the correct answers and the winners at the end of the night.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, the girl who used to run the trivia was nice enough but was, unfortunately, poorly equipped for the main duty of the job, i.e. reading out loud. I cannot even begin to recall the number of times that I personally witnessed her flubbing words that most of us mastered in grade school, and not just once – she consistently mispronounced or got confused by the same word or phrase each time she’d read and re-read a question. Apparently the boys used to mock her pretty openly for this, and, since she had a good sense of humor, it was never a big deal.

A few months ago, though, she got a different job and had to abandon her trivia duties, and her replacement – another south side girl I don’t know personally – was, believe it or not, even worse. If girl #1 misread 4 out of 50 questions a night, girl #2 was thoroughly confused by at least 10. And it’s not as if they were handed a script and asked to read cold – these girls were responsible for finding the questions and answers beforehand. Plenty of time to check for tough words, make sure everything made sense – and still. On top of it all, we didn’t know the new girl and couldn’t joke with her about it, so the room became an awkward hush of giggles and stifled snorts as over a hundred people tried not to rip on her for choosing a job that openly displayed her inability to read in her native language.

Yes, I am a grammar nazi and a vocabulary snob. I make mistakes too, of course, but I try to catch myself and think before speaking, and I’m always incredibly frustrated by the obvious errors in newspapers, magazines, and books. So when I showed up to trivia last week after a couple of months away, I was thrilled to see a new person behind the microphone – a guy in his late 20s who started on time, read the questions succinctly, and even sent out his assistant to ask for help pronouncing a tough word in the Biology category. It was awesome.

After the session was over and we were paying our bill (we took 2nd, and I still maintain that if the boys had listened when I swore that hedgehogs are born with soft quills that harden as they dry out and that’s why they don’t injure their mothers on the way out, we’d have had it), the guy running trivia stopped over to say hi to one of our teammates. Everyone was complimenting him on the categories and the well-run night, and I joined in, saying how well he’d done and that he could come back and run trivia anytime.

And then I managed to singlehandedly define the word “blurt” as I leaned forward and practically yelled, “Yeah, you were awesome, because at least you’re not retarded!”

Keep in mind that I hadn’t been drinking, nor was I tired or on any kind of drug. I cannot explain what incited me to make that particular statement at that particular volume, but somehow it seemed like a compliment to me – after all, he was obviously much better than the previous two people I’d listened to, and everyone was saying things along those lines, so it felt like I was being supportive. Until the words were out of my mouth, when everyone within hearing distance suddenly stopped speaking and looked down at their feet or at the table, and an incredibly uncomfortable silence filled the air.

And that’s when I realized that the girl he was filling in for, the one I had just called retarded, is his girlfriend.

I don’t think I stopped blushing furiously for at least an hour. And I’ll definitely not be going to trivia again for a few more months. Ugh.