Weekend Recap

Is my life inane? You be the judge:

• If you don't want to spend Friday night doing laundry, watching TV, and swizzling wine coolers from the fridge, learn how a phone works.
• I swear to god I bought those wine coolers for my friend's wife! I was out of beer! They were just going to go bad anyway! Have mercy!
• Wine coolers are the alcoholic equivalent of candy cigarettes. They're desperately trying to be the real thing. ...But everyone knows they're for posers.
• Transforming the mound of dirty laundry on your bedroom floor into a mound of clean laundry may seem rewarding, but the truth is: to the casual observer, any clothes on the floor are assumed dirty until proven otherwise.
• Is there such a thing as a formal observer? And if so, why do you have one in your bedroom?
• You know you are a clothes horse when you do five loads of wash and find out you need to go buy more hangers just to put them all away.
• I'm just kidding! I haven't put those clothes away. That's a lot of work.
• There are few things that make you feel more like a domestic hipster than doing the dishes while listening to This American Life.
• When choosing a line at any checkout counter (be it Home Depot, Target, or Trader Joe's) remember the Tom Barrett Rule of Checkout: Always pick the line with the cutest register girl. Invariably, it moves the fastest. Or seems to.
• Ignore this rule at your own peril.
• If, through some ill-advised packing by the non-cute register dude, you find yourself with a carton of broken eggs... well, guess what's for breakfast?
• You know you have a misplaced sense of priorities when you look around the bare walls of your cluttered, dusty apartment and think: I should really go out and buy a good martini shaker.
• The Saturday Night Dilemma: go to an improv show or stat up some NPCs for your D&D game?
• The Saturday Night Dilemma is a test to see if you've figured out how to use that phone thingy yet.
• Just because you push some shiny buttons and the tinny distant voice of your friend comes out of the magic box does not mean that they are suddenly available to hang out on two hours' notice.
• Just because your friends are not available to hang out on two hours' notice does not mean you can't go to the show. It just means you will be the creepy guy who's there all alone.
• When the surprise guests at the improv show are two of the models from suicidegirls.com, you suddenly go from possibly-creepy-guy-who's-there-all-alone to possible-stalker-with-an-unhealthy-tattoo-fetish.
• Despite the fact that their job is to regularly appear nude on the internet, the models from suicidegirls.com are remarkably reticent when it comes to answering any kind of personal questions from the host of the show.
• Maybe they think that guy in the third row who's there all alone is a possible stalker with an unhealthy tattoo fetish.
• Determined to put your appearances behind you, you call it a night and head home. The next morning you drive to Korea Town and audition for the role of a child abuser who molests his 17-year-old stepdaughter.
• At the end of your audition the director says, "That was FANTASTIC!"
• You'll take that as a testament to your acting skills. Because otherwise you'd have to start drinking.
• After a long, lonely weekend of domestic chores and going to shows by yourself, nothing beats the social redemption gained by DMing your weekly game of Dungeons & Dragons.
• That last part, that's 100% true.

-Tom, who has clean clothes, clean dishes, and a clean conscience.