Friday. Bar-hopping in B-town with the usual suspects plus a few people (Ben, Nick, Joey) who I haven't seen since high school... felt somewhat sketchy.

The bars had linoleum floors and ugly carpet and generally had that feel you usually only get from bowling alleys and strange barbershops, but the funny thing is that we didn't have to go to a bunch of crappy bars. Even I know of much better bars in Brainerd.

Which begs the question (prescriptivists: stifle yourselves): did we go to these particular bars out of foolishness, laziness, geographical convenience? Or was it to be ironic, because we are all so urbane that slumming like this is just hilarious? Did I just unwittingly devote a night to irony?

Saturday: Shopping! Cue music. Mostly at Kohl's, a step up for someone used to buying everything at Target. O, the sale prices! I spent a ridiculous amount of money, for me, but don't worry, it wasn't real money, just credit. And all that spending that seems to do is make this scary number a bit bigger.

I delayed my return for a while to have dinner with the family, but still got back to the Cities with enough time for one more go at Gears of War, hurrah. The most exciting activity of the past few days is probably that videogame.

One thing in particular that has grown on me is all the backstory just sitting there. The game might allude to it, and there are strange posters and symbols everywhere, but of course, your character knows all of this, so why would anyone explain it to you?

(Maybe Act Five is more forthcoming; we were three or four hours short of beating the game when I had to leave and sleep and all that.)

Also, the game is pretty hard, which is very nice. In particular, whenever it split Ben and I up for two or three minutes, we seemed to end up spending half an hour trying to meet up again. We found ourselves accidentally specialized in different weapons after one particularly rough patch: I must have killed that guard with my shotgun at least twenty times.