magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

stayed late at work to finish some sketches for antiques roadshow. another of alison's projects. then met up with people for drinks at wakamba. i'm not sure exactly how many i had. three or four. people started filtering out, and i waited to see if anyone was going to be ordering another round. chloe and mike were staying, and sally from australia, who had come out with us last week, who, it turns out, studied architecture at risd a few years before i did. so i got one more, and we talked risd.

finishing up, sally asks, 'who's hungry?' the four of us got in a cab, and headed downtown to a sushi place she knows about that's in the basement of a hotel. it was fairly upscale, huge, but we still had to wait an hour for a table on tuesday night. so we got mixed drinks at the bar.

then at the table, food, and another martini. at some point during the evening chloe made some hand gestures that seemed to be implying that i should ask sally out. [ in retrospect, this hasn't come back up, but chloe also had no recollection that we had discussed relative ages during dinner, and the fact that i am a month older than she is. (sally is four years older.) ]

the food was good, and not particularly pricey. the martinis were both. but mike and chloe argued that they should pick up the tab. it's the first they've been out with sally since she's been back in the states (she had been in italy for a while, as well as home in australia) and i'm not getting paid enough to buy expensive meals. i didn't fight too strongly against this logic.

after dinner, we sort of crashed the private party that was going on in the back bar. we had heard rumors that there was a democratic fundraiser going on, hosted by hillary clinton. it turned out to be al franken, and actually, most of the famous people had already left. but we had another round of drinks, and got a first hand look at the young, rich democrats of new york.