My friend Lisa is home on winter break, so we did the lunch/hang out thing yesterday. She’s one of the few people from high school worth staying in touch with: she’s not a twat, she’s not fake, and I don’t have to worry about her leaking any behind-closed-doors aspects of my life: a rare trait to find in a person these days. (Am I right, Keri? Dumb cunt.)

Lisa moved to Colorado last year for school, and since I haven’t seen her since she last visited in July, I let her decide which restaurant would be the lucky establishment to have us as diners.  She chose Aladdin’s, where she requested a second basket of pita and proceeded to waste it, but nothing was spilled this time, not even a tiny dribble of olive oil. I was proud of her; she must be drinking less.

After sitting through a meal and hearing things like, “You’re still so weird,” and “There’s always something crazy going on in your life” (and by crazy, I think she met dramatic), we crossed the street for some biscotti, which was sold to us by a very brusque and impersonal shop owner. Lisa bought a giant chocolate cookie and was pleased when he slid a warm and fresh one off a tray straight from the oven, but when we got back to my house, she theorized that he was really only choosing the most deformed cookie in the shop — it was pretty malformed and pathetic-looking.

But tasty, I’ll give it that. The shop was supposedly voted one of the top ten bakeries in America, but I found the biscotti to be so-so. (Of course, I didn’t check to see the source of this high accolade, so for all I know, it could have been some fat kid updating a 5-visitors-a-week blog from a dank basement in Idaho, on which completely reverent articles about Twinkie recipes and World of Warcraft are meticulously scribed.)

I gave Chooch a piece of a chocolate biscotti, and he only needed to see my dunking mine in coffee once before he elbowed his way to my lap and ravagingly tried to dunk his own. A caffeinated Chooch is all we need, so Henry took the lid of Chooch’s sippy cup and let him dunk it in chocolate milk.

Chooch made it down to the last bite before turning his face and making a disgusted “no more” sound in his throat, so Henry popped the chocolate milk-saturated piece into his own mouth and I promptly dry-heaved.

“Chooch dipped that in his milk!” I cried.

“Yeah, so?” Henry answered defiantly.

“You just ate his floaters!!”

Lisa laughed and Henry explained to her that I’m essentially a horrible mother and we all laughed and then took pictures and Nicotina bit Lisa and then Lisa peed while I put my make up on for work and we hugged goodbye in my bathroom — an appropriate place to end a day with Lisa.

She goes back to Colorado on Monday and I won’t see her for at least six months. That’s three friends I had to say goodbye to in one week, the kind of trauma that might make a weaker-willed person hang themselves. Just sayin’.

Then I went to work and my boss told me my hair looked like crap.