Activated joy

For the first weekend of the NFL season, Jen and I headed to Boston to see some friends, specifically commenter Chris D. on this site. He was my college roommate and was also in my wedding party when Jen and I got married. It was really great to get back to Boston for a weekend to see everything and everybody.

While I was in Boston, we had a chance to meet up with some college friends, one of my high school friends, Joe, who is turning into an academic monster with a doctorate at MIT and a post-doc at Harvard. (Yes, he is smart.) We also had occasion to have dinner with good friend of the website Mister Crunchy, who was a friend of mine in meatspace before he was an internet friend.

Anyway, the real highlight occurred on Friday night. We were going to do a big old-fashioned casual hangout at Chris D's place, complete with beer and pizza. So, a bunch of people showed up, Chris ordered the pies and then Chris, Joe and I left to go pick up the pizza at Coolidge Corner.

Chris double parked, and Joe and I went in to pick up the food. The pies weren't ready. In fact, they hadn't even received the purported order. After a little detective work, we figured out that Chris had accidentally ordered the food in Beacon Hill, which is a good 10-15 minutes away given Boston traffic. Thankfully, the Red Sox were out of town because we had to traverse the areas closely surrounding Fenway to get from Coolidge Corner to Beacon Hill.

We arrived at the restaurant in Beacon Hill and Joe and I went in to pick up the formerly hot pizza. We paid for it and headed back to the car. Due to the traffic considerations and the fact that Joe used to live in Beacon Hill, I gave him the navigator's seat up in shotgun, and I took the back seat. So, I carried the pizza out to the car and because Chris had double-parked so close to the other cars that I walked to the driver's side to put the pizzas in the back seat.

There was stuff in the back seat, so I pushed the stuff onto the floor of the car, put the pizzas on the seat and closed the door. That's when Chris took off like a shot and pulled away. I saw the tail lights quickly fade away as they took a right hand turn off of the street we were on, and I was just standing there speechless with my hands in the air like Jason Lee in Almost Famous when he proclaims, "I'm only the lead singer!"

Cut to the scene in the car after about three blocks of furiously typical Chris D driving. Chris' phone rings, and he sees my name pop up on his caller ID. He says, "Are you really calling me right now?" as he looks to the back seat of the car to realize that I am not there. He answers the phone.

Chris D: (laughing) Hello?

Craig: "I AM NOT IN THE CAR!"

Chris and Joe never realized that I hadn't gotten in the car with the pizza. They didn't realize it three blocks into their journey back to the apartment. Who knows how long it would have taken them to realize that I wasn't in there without the aid of cell phone technology. If I had been really committed to the joke, I never would have called and taken a cab back to Chris' place.

But it doesn't end there. Chris and his "navigator" Joe couldn't figure out, with all the one-way streets, how to get back to the pizza place, so they parked a couple blocks away and started honking the horn so that I could find them in the car. It was like a big, dumb, stupid of Marco Polo, except without any water and with the two most educated people I know in the entire universe being unable to figure out how to get back to where they had just been mere minutes before.

Anyway, I found the car and we all headed back to Chris' place for one hell of an ice-breaking story to start off the casual hang at Chris' on Friday night.