Shopping! I wandered the Mall of America with my mom for about six hours yesterday — my Gramma was invited, but simply spat, "I don't do the Mall."

I know quite a few other Twin Cities residents who would react similarly. Myself, I didn't find much I was tempted to buy. (Except maybe at Le Gourmet Chef, a better and more realistic version of Williams-Sonoma.)

I haven't been to the Mall for at least three years, so I was disappointed to see that Bare Bones, once my favorite store, is now gone. Unless you count a proliferation of charm bracelet stores (what's the count noun for charm bracelet stores? A gaggle? A murder? A retail? I can never remember) and a few booths selling "Grandma Pants," there were no new interesting niche stores.

Grandma Pants also deserve their own digression, which includes the following sub-digression:

I kept comparing Grandma Pants to culottes, which I still mentally spell "coolats," — the borrowing "culottes" goes back at least to the sixties, when culottes were sometimes called "hostess pajamas" (scroll down), and is probably much older, but amazingly, it's not in my big dictionary — because of their unusual length, but apparently I don't know what culottes are. Later, Jenna offered her own definition, which as usual I believed because she sounded like she knew what she was talking about — I have to start watching out for this, because much like a former roommate of mine, Jenna rarely makes tentative assertions — but while the word conjures up a certain length (below the knee) for Our Bold Hero, and a different length (above the knee) for people like Jenna, the only stable factor after so many years of assuredly yo-yo-like semantic generalization and narrowing is the hybrid skirt/pants design.

The proper comparison, at least for the Grandma Pants I saw at the Mall, would be knee-length breeches. Made out of some sort of polar fleece? Elsewhere, they look less ridiculous, but when I saw them at the Mall, I wondered who, and why.

Remember those weird commercials with celebrities shopping at the mall? With the old lady from Just Shoot Me? I can't believe they're still taking up mental warehouse space at this point.

A lot of walking and some crappy Panda Express later (I am seriously craving good Chinese), we left the mall and met up with my brother Matt and some of his cohorts at the Bonfire Grill, which is just south of my apartment, actually.

Those kids were coming from the other side of St. Paul, so here, sitting at the bar with my mom and waiting for a table, is where my six or seven hours of drinking begin. Always a good decision indeed. Ugh: memories of a certain weekend at the Politician's cabin.

But the food was pretty good, and there were many Michigan Tech stories. Those kids and their crazy pranks; all of them are probably at least 1/4 Jubb.

Barry's b-day party was a success, if I can say that. It was actually supposed to be a surprise party, but he invited everyone we were going to invite to his place, so everything worked out. We, by which I mean mainly his g/f Jenna, got him a keggerator. There's a logistical nightmare lurking behind the scenes here, but by the time I showed up, everything had finally been mostly figured out.

We couldn't use the keggerator (see "mostly," above), but there was ample if slightly foamy keg beer and a good crowd. I talked to many people who did not suck — in fact I had a conversation about the Church of the Sub-Genius that was only vaguely connected to Illuminati — and continued my Josie and the Pussycats drinking game campaign.

Some vague plans were made, the kind you can only make when a little drunk. I left at 1, relatively early (Graham says he was there until 3:30), because after putting it off yesterday I had to work this morning.

I'm not hungover whatsoever, in fact I feel something of the pleasant after-drinking lightness that Alan of Lawrence claimed to experience after every party, but this particular Big Elaborate Edit is so thoroughly messed up, with both the English language and our company protocols violated on every page, that all I can bring myself to do is blog about Dan's Big Saturday and listen to every Beck song I have. You have to take some time to relax.