Best Night Out (Best of 2009 Blog Challenge)

I had some really great nights out this year, a lot of them when I was completely broke, and everyone around me was broke, but we were all still willing to spend the money we didn’t have to hang out with each other over some fancy drinks. I could name several nights like that at the 515, but I’m going to go more recent and talk about an evening I had when I was in Austin over Thanksgiving.

My friend Ximena, whom I totally fell in friend love with when she started working at 360training with me in 2005, is an amazing, hilarious, fun, and driven lady. The first day I ever hung out with her, we were with co-workers at a pizza place for lunch, and she said that she wanted to dress up for Halloween as a donut. From that moment, I knew we would be great friends. She has been having a really difficult time with her job recently and our first night out got delayed because of it. But we rescheduled and met up at Trudy’s for some Mexican martinis and girl talk. When you only get to see friends once or twice a year, there’s such pressure to catch each other up on everything possible. But for some reason, with Ximena it’s always a painless process. We had such a great time, talking about writing, and planning out what to do next in our lives, analyzing jobs and relationships. We had the sweetest waitress, who brought us each enormous bowls of olives to accompany our drinks.

From there, we couldn’t narrow down bar choices, so we decided to drive around until someplace spoke to us. We ended up at Side Bar, where I had a pumpkin-infused vodka White Russian. The previous night, David (my ex from a few years ago who I'm happy to say I’ve reconnected with) and I had a marathon hangout at Jorge’s. The next night, he met up with Ximena and me after a little bit, and we all hung out and pumped several dollars worth of music into the juke box. I’d love to be able to point to some moment in the night that distinguished what was so great about it, but it’s really as simple as being with two awesome people I don’t get to see very often and realizing that I have good taste in friends.