There's something all right with the world when you're drunk by five o'clock in the afternoon and you've a date with four boys for a mean game of trivia. Your ass is smaller than the blonde goddess waitress' ass is, no pimples are playing "hi my name is," and you understand whole sentences of Italian on the bus. If you've had a day like that, then welcome to my last Wednesday. It's the first day off I had in ages. Instead of collapsing into a pile of grumpy, your girl Jewel (that's me!) was trotting around downtown, catching some sun, and knowing all the right tricks for meeting the right folks at the right time. Happy hour cocktails and appetisers were had, greetings were crowed, and I got to put my brain to good use.

Wednesday trivia is one of my favourite nights. We go to National Mechanics to face other think tank graduates for the hardest, yet most rewarding game of bar trivia I've ever played. Instead of guessing at answers on a little electronic device, each team has to write down answers. This is not any lame, pansy-ass trivia. Misspelled answers are thrown out. The host is an Irishman calling himself Irish John. He doesn't take any guff from any ruffians. Each time he reads the rules, he says, "And don't cheat by getting the answers on your cellphones or fuckin' Blackberries. It's bullshit and it's pathetic." The trivia he selects ranges from pop culture (Question: Name the famous couple who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house for them, but never moved into it because they got divorced in 1969. Answer: Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller) to obscure (Question: Where does the element name Niobium come from? Answer: The Greek myth of Niobe, who bragged of her children to Leda. Leda sent her children, Apollo and Artemis to murder Niobe's seven sons and seven daughters in retaliation.) to the scientific (Question: What's the most common chemical symbol used? Answer: I forgot.). I am a repository of endless, pointless information, so I am all over this stuff.

If you win the three-round game, you get forty dollars off your bar tab. If you come in second place, you get twenty off. My team is usually a point (rarely much less) than a group of Harvard kids (heretofore known as "The Winners") who probably know how to do long division in their heads and shit. I have to sing Schoolhouse Rock songs (in my head, not aloud) to remember my numbers sometimes, so I feel pretty good about this. Granted, I am mildly dyslexic with numbers. I've a crazy genius when it comes to fractions, but I think that's due to playing music my entire life. Figuring out fractions is all a part of keeping time. So when it comes to winning Quizzo, my team (heretofore known as "The Second Place Kids") is always a bridesmaid, never the bride, which is fine by me because I am not sure I believe in marriage.

We get twenty dollars off our tab, have a great time, and get to exercise our minds while subsequently killing brain cells. Last Wednesday was no different. We ordered a whole catastrophe of food, saw our regular waitress, and proceeded to kick tail and ask for names later. Once the trivia ended, we went for a walk, ostensibly to find one of the best cheesesteaks in Philly. We ended up passing by a club with the door half-cracked and a long stretch of wooden dancefloor. The doorman threw out free drink coupons to me, so we had to go inside. The boys cuddled me up, saying they never got free drinks unless they were with me. For some reason, that made me feel good, every bit as much as having a tribe of boys to surround me while I danced and keep anyone else from encroaching upon my space. A few interlopers tried, but my little tribe circled me and all was well.

I don't define myself by the words or opinions of others, but it's still nice to be told that I am smart, fun, beautiful, and the best damn dancer in the city, especially by those I am coming to like and love. It's not true, but it's still nice to hear. One of the reasons I most like Wednesday trivia is that it reminds me to think and learn hard and that knowing so many strange things has its strange rewards. Sometimes, I'm so exhausted that I forget the simplest of things, like whether I locked the door before I curled up or a word I knew a few weeks ago, so it makes me feel that my brain isn't rotting.

I worry so much that it might.

Jewella

Today, on lazy Bloody Mary Sunday, I'm howling like La Llorona, and you won't be rescued from me. My thoughts have grown hummingbird wings, ruby-throated for love and war. I was not born innocent or guiltless. In grade school, I discovered that the other children were born much worse. I might have stolen chapstick from the grocery store and kicked boys in the shins with my hard church shoes. However, I didn't play the headgames of other little girls. Little girls play these jacked up games, like I'm gonna mess with you harder than you can mess with me, just because I can do it. Seed pearl teeth, tanned skin, and laughter like a pack of dogs. You're sitting there with your knees against your chest, pretending not to cry at naptime, thinking, "This can't be happening."

O, but bitch, it is.

Maybe that's why I surround myself with men and boys. I know how to run with these wolves; I like their honest and clean scent. Even when a man is lying to you, he smells like he's not. There is no lingering smell of fresh blood with men and boys. If they wound you, they're up-front about it. They have no corners of their minds crammed with baggage and bones. They've learned to subsist on the remnants and to scavenge. It's pretty efficient, and I like little complications. I prefer my complexities to come from within, not outside of me.

Lately, I've been going to a pub that used to be a bank. I go on Wednesday evenings, and it's me and my silver Frida earrings dangling like milagros from my earlobes, a table full of man-boys, and pitchers of golden liquid that I never drink. The waitress has a Monroe piercing and sometimes buys us shots that taste sweet enough to numb thought processes and turn drunkenness into brilliance. We play a trivia game for money and almost always near-win. The host is an Irishman who uses us as the standard by which he can determine whether the questions he's asking are too hard or not. Our team name last week was The Fighting Amish. I wanted it to be The Amish Street Gang, Motherfuckers, but no one was buying that trash. Turning thirty means I am rowdy beyond what's good. I expect that being seventy will mean more of the same, only worse.

What is strange, my friends, is that I get hit on by twenty-year-old guys and am still carded everywhere I go, unless the bartender is like eighty and those broads know things. When those ladies pour my drink, I just know that they realise I've slept with a number that's less than one hundred but rhymes with shifty, and it gives me the heebie jeebies. Don't get me wrong, though. I don't mind being carded. How this all plays out is baffling to me is all. I'm in looking underage's thing all the time lately. My mom says it's because I never smoked and I don't do drugs anymore; Shaun claims it's the organic and mostly raw foods I eat; my dad says it's not drinking much. I think it's drinking my ass off on the times that I do it and cooling it the rest of the time, getting enough sleep, excercising when I can, and knowing when to gnaw on a candy bar and when to walk away from the artery clogging potential projectile.

Speaking of hot messes, on Friday, I went bowling with another large group of boys. They played hip-hop at the bowling alley. The shoes were cute enough that I wanted to swipe them, but like for real. I didn't, though. I guess part of being thirty is I don't want to get arrested for ganking shoes from a trendy bowling alley. If I'm going to get apprehended these days, I want it to be a goodie, and not after I've paid twenty dollars to be there. Our team was fierce at bowling, and we had the requisite immature bowling names you choose at the bowling alley. Mine was Assgrabbin. Seeing that light up on the screen whenever I did something amused the hell out of me. I am easily amused, I guess.

At one point, we'd had a few gin and tonics, and decided it'd be love-rock to see who could roll the fastest ball. See, that's the kind of high-tech joint we were at: the bowling alley measured the MPH of our rolls. Soon, I was thinking it would be a good idea to see how far down the alley I could get before they threw me out or something beeped loudly at me. What I didn't expect was the alley was really slick with wax. I mean, I knew it'd be waxed, but this was crazy and kind of cool. I slid into an almost-splits. Then, I thought that since I was on the floor in an uncomfortable position, I might as well lie down. A lot of folks clapped. There were a few "She so crazy" looks, but I guess you just had to be there.

Afterwards, we went to a dive bar with a live band that featured a mean organ player. The place promised drunken spelling bees for porn or cans of meat, so I was all over that. We ended up having our own little spelling bee at the table, me and the boys, and I found that spelling words is a lot harder when you're grown-up and drunk than it is when you're a ferocious little spelling bandit of a kid. Let me put it this way; I forgot how to spell Stolichnaya. I used to win spelling bees all the time.

Yes, I can be real and admit that I was messy enough not to remember a vodka. The end of the night found us in a gay club and somehow, I'd gained an admirer from Barcelona who thought I was Russian. At one point, a cocoa-skinned dancer tried to twirl me on the dancefloor, but I wasn't having it. By the time we got home, I wrapped myself up cozy-cozy in Shaun's bathrobe and fell promptly to sleep. The next morning brought the first hangover in ages, and one of the boys from the night before saying, "She is a she-devil."

I've been called worse and been in worse company. That's how it goes, I guess.

Jewel Home-slice Fatherfucker

P.S. I start Aveda tomorrow, Anthropologie on Sunday, and I am so excited! I got to buy new work-clothes yesterday and it made it more real to me. Also, I had a lovely Saturday evening out with Shaun, involving finding him a suit for his arguments section in law school, getting macaroni and cheese homestyle, and curling up for nuzzling and lazy dreaming.