Oh, man. Vegas. I do not even know where to begin. I had a completely fantastic weekend, but it was totally this bright loud glitzy dreamlike thing, and now I’m back to my normal non-glitzy life and it’s a little weird. I started trying to write a blow-by-blow description of everything I saw and did while I was there, but it was getting crazy-long and I was only up to Friday night. Plus, putting in URL links for the approximately fifty people I hung out with would probably have taken the rest of my life. So instead, I think I will just do the highlights version and perhaps fill in the rest at a later date.

Vegas: Exactly as tacky, glitzy, loud, bright, skanky, and gaudy as I expected. Oddly, all of that was not as bad as I expected. It was kind of fun, and while I can’t see ever going there again on my own initiative, I would absolutely go again if friends wanted to meet up there again. But I would not try to walk all the way up the Strip, however close the end might look, because distances are deceiving in Vegas and that casino that looks five minutes’ walk away is actually twenty.

Gambling: As I expected, not my thing. I plunked a few bucks into slot machines, and won most of it back, but it was pretty boring. I watched some of the real games, but they weren’t really my cup of tea either. The only worthwhile gambling thing I found was the camel races (without real camels), which were highly amusing, but I don’t think you can win the big bucks in fake camel races. So my career as a gambler is over before it began.

Zumanity: Hm. Turns out that what you get when you basically cross Cirque du Soleil with a strip club is interesting and pretty but sort of disjointed and weird too. And also, not somewhere you should be sitting in the front row unless you like audience participation a lot more than I do. Oops. I think next time I had better stick with the PG-rated Cirque shows.

The Luxor hotel: Much better than the other hotel/casinos I wandered through, and I’m really glad we were staying there. I got a room in the pyramid with the 45-degree elevators, which was not as cool as you’d think but still interesting. The Excalibur was way too Disney-ren-faire-esque, the Mandalay was basically a big mall, New York New York was too crowded, but the Luxor was a pretty good mix of Vegas-y-but-still-nice. Also, it had an arcade with a giant Mummy Voltron over the entrance, which won my heart. Who wouldn’t love Mummy Voltron?

Drinks in Vegas: Too expensive and not strong enough. Except for one bar where they were clearly too hip for the likes of us, but damn, did they make a fine lemon drop martini. This may be my new favorite drink and I must learn to make it right away.

The aquarium: Lame. Small and lame. Which I suppose makes some sense because really, who the hell goes to Vegas to go to the aquarium? But I did get to pet a manta ray, which was much softer than I thought and rather like a live wriggly pancake. So that was nifty. But the main thing was:

The company. Man, was that a great bunch of people. Admitttedly there were ten or so people I’d met before and already knew would be fantastic, but I had started out rather nervous about the other forty. But it turned out that just about everyone was terrific and funny and smart and interesting, or at least doing a damn fine job of pretending to be so. I couldn’t fit in time with everyone as I would have liked, given the time limitations, but I had a great time with everyone I did get to spend time with. Food in Vegas is lousy, but at every meal I had at least a handful of really wonderful people to talk with, which made even the overpriced buffets a good deal. And then I spent a bunch of time just hanging out in the group suite talking with whoever wandered by, and a lovely afternoon by the pool drinking fruity rum drinks with Jill and Jay and Amanda, and a random but entertaining evening of exploring the Strip and cheering on reruns of the National Spelling Bee with a big group of people, and all in all it was just a really good time. Which is utterly uncharacteristic of me because I pretty much hate everyone in the world, and I am happiest if I can go weeks at a time without socializing at all with anyone but Len and the cats, and yet I had this utterly brilliant weekend hanging out with 50 damn people in the middle of Vegas. Truly bizarre.

But I did come home completely exhausted, and it’s nice to be back where things are not always blinking or beeping at me, and not every single person I see is completely skanky, and there is good food and my own comfortable bed to sleep in. I guess I’m a pretty lucky girl, to have a situation where I get to have an absolutely fantastic time enjoying my vacation, and then to also have a great home full of cats and Len to come back to. Life’s treating me pretty well of late. Of course, I don’t expect this weekend’s jaunt back to New Jersey for my sister’s graduation to be nearly as interesting or exciting. I’m mostly just hoping to catch up on some sleep while I’m there. But I suppose every weekend can’t be exciting. And now I should be off, as Len is busy putting a new hard drive into my TiVo and I should go see if I can be helpful. Plus, Henry Rollins is narrating a nature documentary on TV at the moment and I’m finding it a little bizarre and distracting.

When you’re a little kid and they tell you you’re going to have a baby sibling, they tell you about how it might be hard not to be an only child anymore, and how you’ll have to be more responsible now helping to take care of her, and as you get older you find out how it’s sometimes annoying to have to set a good example. But then when you get older I think everyone, including you, figures that you’ve been doing the sister thing for a long time now and you’ve got it down and there aren’t going to be more hard surprises or lessons that you need to be warned about in advance. But I wish someone had told me about this part of having a little sister, about how proud I would be of her and how gratifying it would be to have some tiny part in shaping the amazing person she’s becoming, and how utterly painful and heartbreaking it would be not to be there to see it all happening.

It’s my baby sister’s eighteenth birthday. It’s my baby sister’s eighteenth birthday and she’s going to college in the fall and she’s got this very serious boyfriend and she can drive and it’s all just crazy to think about. For fuck’s sake, she used to be tiny, and she couldn’t stand to be left alone for even a second so she would follow me all through the house begging to hang out with me. And often I was meaner than I should have been because I thought I was too cool to play with a sister eight years younger, which I sometimes still have twinges of guilt about. But she was just there underfoot all the time and I guess because I was a dumb-ass kid I thought she’d always be hanging around and sooner or later I’d get around to paying some more attention to her and of course she’d still be there just waiting for my attention.

Only of course it didn’t really happen that way, because I grew up and went off to school and for a while I was afraid she was turning into a Stepford Adolescent and I was never going to know what to say to her. But then suddenly a couple of years ago she became this incredibly smart, funny, articulate, gorgeous, poised, sarcastic, smart-ass young woman and it’s just been the coolest thing to see. And the most painful thing to have to see from a distance, only seeing her for a couple of weekends a year, when now I wish I could just hang with her all the time and talk and laugh and make up for all the time I was a crappy older sister when we were kids. I suppose this is just how it works. You have a sister and you don’t really recognize how cool that is until you’ve gone off and done your own thing and by then you’re just weekend visitors in each other’s lives. And then the trick becomes to make the most of that time, and to make sure that even if you both kind of cringe away from overdoses of sentiment, sometimes you just have to get the hell over it to make absolutely sure that she knows, in so many words, how much you love her and how she’s the best thing since way back even before sliced bread. (And things since sliced bread include the TiVo and my cats, so if she’s cooler than even a TiVo and four cats, that’s pretty goddamn cool.)

Happy birthday, little sister. You’re the best. Go kick college’s ass, and then come back and tell me all about it.

Some days, like Wednesday, I sit down to write a journal entry and it flows out and I feel like I have something worth saying and maybe it’s not great art or anything, but I feel like got across what I wanted to say and I’m happy with it. And then sometimes, like today, I sit down to write and it’s all “My dinner was really good and Johnny Depp is hot even though he’s sketchy and gmail is fun to play with and Mo Pie’s journal archives make for good reading.” All of which is true, but man, just not worth the two-and-a-half brain cells it took to write it. (Except that her journal archives really are good reading, and if you’re that one other person in the world besides me who hasn’t read them already, I think you should be doing that.)

I think the problem is that I’m in a little bit of a holding pattern this week. (And now I recall my first and only visit to the free psychiatrist at health services on campus, where I got into a big fight with her about whether ‘holding pattern’ is just a normal expression that people use that shouldn’t be over-analyzed, or whether my use of it indicated some sort of deep-seated childhood trauma about parental neglect. I still think she was full of crap.) I’m off to Germany next week, and it sort of feels like all the things I could be doing aren’t really worth doing right now because of that. We just finished a big project at work, and I could start on the next big thing, but with only a few days left before I take off for a longish trip, wouldn’t it make sense just to wait? I could be trying to whip our scary overgrown yard into shape, but wouldn’t it just get crazy again while I’m away, since my house- and cat-sitter should not also have to take on the burden of being a landscaper? I just finished a book, so I could start a new one, or watch some of my rental DVDs, but shouldn’t I be saving up my unread books and unwatched movies for the very long plane ride? It just feels like it’s not worth getting started on anything substantive if I’ll have to put it aside in a few days anyway.

What I should really be doing is getting out my silly German language program and trying to brush up on what little German-speaking ability I possess, because right now I don’t remember how to say a damn thing except “the boy is under the airplane,” and I really hope that’s a sentence I don’t get to use too often, much as I love the word Flugzeug. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. I think I’d better just go back to reading Mo’s archives instead.

This was the first year in several years now that I was actually in town for Pridefest, so I was looking forward to going to the parade and perhaps its associated Pride activities this year. However, I woke up this morning and checked the website for the time of the parade, and realized that it had moved downtown. I’ve experienced two parades downtown this year because of my clinic duties, and that was two parades downtown too many. Much as I would have liked to go, I just could not possibly voluntarily deal with another downtown parade. So alas, no pride for me.

Instead, my main activity for the day was attacking the small jungle that has sprung up in our backyard since we moved in. I like that it’s a little wild and overgrown back there, because the deer come and eat leaves and they’re awfully cute. But it had gotten beyond “a little wild” and straight into “I am afraid that one day when I come home from work my house will just be gone, annexed into the jungle.” So I suited up in my long pants and gardening gloves and launched myself into the thick of the mess with a pair of pruning shears. For a while I thought I’d never make it out again. It was very Little Shop of Horrors. So I did that all afternoon and partway into the evening, and while it was dirty and tiring and I am now exhausted and achy, it was actually quite a bit of fun. However, while I filled six giant outdoor trash bags with weeds and vine clippings and whatnot, I still barely made a dent in the work to be done out there. The view out the kitchen window is definitely looking a bit less predatory, but still, I’m a bit dejected at how much there is left to do.

I like the idea of having a yard to take care of, and I think once we’ve dealt with all the neglect and overgrowth from years of no one living here, and can just do regular maintenance, I’ll really like that. But getting it to that point is proving more of an adventure than I was really prepared for. Also, the smell of all the freshly cut plant life was giving me sense memory flashbacks to the shampoo I used for a couple of years in high school, Gap’s “Grass” scent. I have no earthly clue why I thought it would be such a great idea to go around smelling like plant life all the time. But then I suppose if I were to make a list of all the choices from my teenage years that really need to be questioned, my beauty product choices would be pretty far down the list. (And really, the bright green eyeshadow would have to be dealt with first even when I did get to that part of the list.)

I suspect tomorrow will be more of the same. Gardening, that is, not bright green eye shadow. I don’t think I will be winning any awards for my beautiful landscaping anytime soon, but if I can just keep the backyard from actually being terrifying to behold, I think that will be a weekend’s work well done.