BUT FIRST, THE SLEEP REPORT:

Friday night: 12 glorious (albeit strongly medicated) hours of sleep.

Saturday night:  Yeah, not so much. But how much sleep can you really expect after finding yourself in line for chili cheese fries at 3:30 am?  (Yeah, just keep reading.) Although I did have this one really vivid dream about being Mariah Carey’s personal assistant. Mariah was exactly the sort of damaged train wreck one secretly hopes she is, except even more so, like Anna Nicole Smith. Like I picked out a dress for her to wear and she put it on backwards and I had to do her hair for her because she kept putting pink bows in it. And I was all, Bad Mariah, no! No bows! I also defended her to everybody by saying she was just “fragile.”  She also had a huge ass.

Sunday night: Was on my way to a good eight hours of sleep when Jason woke up at 4 am due to some kind of allergic reaction to our sheets. Or to the detergent we washed the sheets in, which was not my beloved Allergen-Free All but some vile Bounty-of-Allergen Tide. As a result, have been up since. And if you ask me if I did anything productive like get to work on time, I will totally lie and say yes.

AND NOW…

So. Saturday morning.  Or really, Saturday noonish. I was still sitting on the couch in an unshowered puddle when Jason spotted an ad in the paper for Carbon Leaf’s latest album. The latest album I have listened to a bazillion times already and am totally peer-pressuring all my friends into buying.

Oh, but wait! The ad was also for an in-store concert by Carbon Leaf at a Borders’ in Maryland.  That started in…holy shit…two hours so FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET SHOWERED WE HAVE TO GO NOW.

So we went. But oh! My! God! As we walked in the mall entrance, I noticed this guy in front of us was carrying an instrument case stenciled with CARBON LEAF.

Lead singer, babies. His name is Barry Privett and just prepare yourselves, because one day you are all going to want to sleep with him, for he is HOT. (And to Fresh Baked who pointed out an unfortunate resemblance to that bug-eyed freak that played Fourney in that Natalie Portman movie where she gives birth in a Wal-Mart or whatever: No more Fourney. The hair is cut and so are the biceps. Yowl.)

Jason and I were all, “Holy shit! It’s Barry!” But then we did all that second-guessing and whispering and whatnot until we stepped on an escalator right behind him. (I was eye-level with his ass, people. Who wants to touch me?) I finally made Jason say something to him, which he did, and Barry was all nice and shook our hands and talked to us the whole way up to Borders’. I was only sort of a blithering stalkerish idiot.

Oh, and we forgot the camera. Please to enjoy some grainy camera-phone pictures that are all we have to remember the coolest concert I have ever attended in a retail environment.

We bought a second copy of the CD, because we fight over the one we already have. Plus we wanted more autographs. AND they let me steal a poster off a bookcase and they autographed it. WITH MY NAME. And I gave Barry a wee hug, which was better than the last time I hugged him, which was after their last concert at the 9:30 Club in D.C. and I was very drunk and sweaty and I distinctly remember squealing.

Anyway. Ta-da!

THIS WEEK’S EXPENSIVE MATERIAL POSSESSION CURRENTLY FILLING THE BABY-SHAPED HOLE IN OUR LIVES:

We bought a new camera. A Canon PowerShot SD110 Digital ELPH.

The concert was the last straw.  Now, we have a digital camera. A very nice one, actually. It’s just HUGE. And complicated. It intimidates the crap out of me and I always end up taking it to Jason and asking him to set it up for me so my pictures won’t look like crap.

So we bought a new one that’s small and all point-and-shootable. It’s actually so wee I can keep it in my purse or even a wristlet. And you hit a button and it takes the picture. I think it does more than that, but those were the major selling points for me.

(We’ve taken a frillion pictures with it already. I’ve put them in a separate album so this entry won’t take three years to load. Warning: These are not good pictures. Many of them? Are downright horrible. But they are NEW. NEW NEW NEW. There are also lots of self-indulgent arms-length shots and also a lot of the cat. Who is ADORABLE and I KNOW you want to look at him in various stages of sitting and staring.)

I wish I could buy a camera that would make me look less stupid.

AND THE MAIN EVENT…

We went to see Carbon Leaf AGAIN on Saturday night at the 9:30 Club, which is a very cool and small venue. But it’s also very cutthroat. It’s all general standing-room admission and people are total assholes. I hate people.

We staked out a spot nice and close to the stage but spent half the show defending our territory against stage-crashing drunks. I seriously had WORDS with these two Drunk Girls before Carbon Leaf came onstage who thought that they deserved to be in front of us because it was the one girl’s birthday. Or “biirfffday”, as she put it. They also thought making out would change people’s minds. I tried to reason with them that there was no way in hell I was letting them push me aside and then realized I was arguing with a completely smashed 21-year-old who looked like the chubby Dixie Chick. Anyway, there was no point in getting worked up over it because they left to go throw up a few minutes later.

Other thoughts from the concert:

You have not truly lived until you’ve heard a celtic-folk-rock band do a Zeppelin cover on acoustic guitar. You simply have not lived.

Wearing flip-flops to a standing-room only show is Stupid. Stupid dumb idiot moron.

Barry wore the same t-shirt he wore at the Borders’ show. I would say “ew” but he looked really good in it. He should probably never change.

Our camera didn’t really do us much good at the show, as we got yelled at when we used the flash. Without the flash, we took a lot of nice pictures of darkness. Which is why I posted all those crappy pictures, because I must justify the existence of the new camera in one way or another.  Anyway, I don't need photos from the concert, for they are printed on my heart. I will also check out the fan sites for other people's and then steal them.

AND, THE AFTERMATH…

After the show we wandered around, decided we were hungry, and ended up at Ben’s Chili Bowl, the D.C. institution of late-night-drunk food in a slightly sketchy area that you don’t notice because you’re drunk. This is where we found ourselves, at 3:30 am, waiting in LINE for chili cheese fries. Which were the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. I very nearly wept over them…it was that good.

On the way out? As I pushed my way through the line? This woman sitting in a booth shrieked. “DON’T TOUCH ME!” and pulled away in horror, like I had open sores and was lurching towards her clamoring for brains. I stopped and stared at her, because she didn’t look like The Crazy. She actually looked pretty normal. She shrieked again, “WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T TOUCH ME.”

And with a bravery unseen by most white girls, this white girl in particular, I looked her right in the eye and told her to calm the fuck down, because I wasn’t going to fucking touch you, you crazy bitch.

And then I went home and had the crazy Mariah dream. La la la.

ONE LAST PARTING SHOT:

You know you had a good night when there's an empty wine bottle in the trash IN YOUR BATHROOM.

That is all, thank you, good night. Will be here all week.