Ate stingray. Spent time with my two best friends. Spent time with my family. Worked as a casting director. Accidentally didn't show up for work. Saw a musical. Invented license plate Yahtzee. Drank lots of really expensive alcohol. Completed two Escapades. Got two private winery tours. Invented a confused Chinese poet named Kitty Diphthong. Got free wine. Laughed my ass off over the Sims. Laughed my ass off over lots of other things. Said goodbye to my childhood home. Spent time being a VIP. Drank real, honest to goodness moonshine. And got some amazing, landmark news.

Even though this "weekend" includes Thursday, that's an awful lot of freaking stuff that has happened to me. And the list above doesn't even include the Mickey/Huck kissage and my venture to see Bridget Jones. (Between Mickey, Huck, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, I'm surprised I didn't spend the entire weekend standing in a cold shower.)

At any rate, I don't think I can possibly do the weekend justice without a scanner, some pictures and a whole lot of time.

But here now is the wonderful news, because I just can't wait to share: my teaching proposal was accepted.

Did you hear that? Let me say that again a little louder. My teaching proposal was accepted. If all goes well (that is to say, if at least five people sign up) I will be teaching an intro poetry workshop next semester. I will be teaching undergraduates as a teaching fellow.

This is big, huge, gargantuan news. I'm not sure that the people I've shared it with really understand. This is my dream. My lifelong dream has been to teach college level poetry and now, in just a few months, I will be fulfilling that dream.

I am wetting my pants with excitement at the prospect of planning my lectures and making a syllabus. I can't wait to have my own students and my own class. Regardless of anything else that happens with my degree and my program and my career... this is the opportunity I have been waiting for.

I got to hold our freshly minted literary magazine in my hands last week, and that was a proud moment for me. But when I stand up in front of my own classroom for the first time, my pride will completely eclipse it. I am ecstatic.

In case you didn't pick up on that.

I'm trying to pick out the thing that stands out the most for me this weekend, but it's all just a big jumble. So chronologically it is.

On Thursday, I went to the airport to pick up my friend Bruce. I don't write about Bruce here very much, but he is definitely one of my best friends. Bruce and I were high school sweethearts, but about a year into our relationship, we discovered that he speaks fluent fag. So that was the end of that, but we have remained best friends ever since.

The Oakland Airport was a nightmare from hell. All the parking lots were full, even the valet. I was driving around in a complete panic. I didn't have my cell phone, and Bruce's plane was to arrive in five minutes. Thank god, when I circled the airport for the second time, they had opened the gate to the Economy parking lot. I was able to manifest a parking space, and then had to walk only about three zillion miles to the terminal.

The passengers were in the process of deplaning when I got there, but luckily, Bruce wasn't off the plane yet. So I saw him, gave him a kiss and said, "You have no idea how lucky you are to see me here. The Oakland Airport is not my friend."

I took Bruce into the city with me to sit in on my Urban Scrawl class. The topic was sex, so I figured that would be interesting. Plus, he could meet some of my friends.

We got to the city about an hour before class and decided to get some sushi. We ran into Probst in the bookstore, who loves sushi, and invited him to come along. I have only had sushi once in my life before, but I have to say I really enjoyed it. We had some salmony thingies, and some tuna thingies. Yum. I also had some Japanese beer: the first of many, many alcoholic beverages I was to imbibe over the course of the weekend.

Class was entertaining and fun. Our papers were supposed to compare Victorian attitudes about sex to modern attitudes. My paper (which I had written at three in the morning the night before) was in the form of a rap. It was silly, but creative and sort of funny. It went over well. Some of the other papers were quite interesting, and the prof let us out early, so it wasn't too taxing on Bruce's rusty attention span.

After class, we went down to the local bar. Bruce got to meet Laurie, and that's where Kitty Diphthong the Confused Chinese Poet was born. Get a few drinks in us, and we turn into utter goofballs. See, the thing is, there's a poster on the side of my school with all these photos of people's faces on it. One of the faces is a large picture of an old Chinese-looking woman, and we decided that she was Kitty Diphthong, a poet who is confused about being in America. We wrote a poem on Kitty's behalf, entitled, "Am I Not In Peking?" I'm sure you had to be there, but it was entertaining for us.

At one point, Probst got up to go to the bar or something, and Bruce turned to me and said, "Oh my god, you two are so attracted to each other." I told him he was smoking crack, but he insisted it was just like the old days, when I used to look at Tim with big worshipful eyes every time he said something smart. "You're so turned on by his mind," said Bruce. "It's way obvious." Well, shit.

After getting appropriately liquored up, Bruce and I went back across the bay and got some dinner from an excellent little place in my neighborhood. They have great turkey burgers there. And then I think we played the Sims for a while. Well, Bruce played the Sims, mostly. He created a house with a hideously ugly tiki theme that we both made fun of mercilessly. When the Sims moved in, they all booed the tiki furniture. Even they made fun of it.

Please, oh Buddha, make this hideous tiki nightmare end!

And that was Thursday. And I am tired, so I think we'll have to continue this later.

Oh, speaking of tiredness: I haven't gotten much sleep recently. Part of that has to do with the houseguests currently living in the room next to me. It's this woman and her two year old kid. This kid woke me and Bruce up the other morning by screaming bloody murder for an hour solid.

This mom doesn't seem to have any idea how to control her kid. From what I could gather, she was trying to change him, and he didn't want to be changed. She talked to him softly while he screamed. Does this really necessitate an hour of screaming? At the very least, couldn't she have gone upstairs so the screaming wasn't right outside my door? All I know is I was exhausted and I had very little sympathy.

Bruce and I lay in bed, trying to sleep off our hangovers, listening to this kid screaming his bratty little lungs out. We were muttering really awful things. "For the love of god, shut that kid up." "Spray him with water." "Stick duct tape over his mouth." "Pour concrete down his throat."

So, as I'm writing this, it's midnight. The mother of this kid just came in to my room to ask me if I could possibly turn down my TV. "Sure," I said. "Could you possibly buy a ball gag for your kid?"

Okay, so I didn't actually say it. But I should have.

"Then [Tim] said, 'Well, I’ll be sad.' I giggled and waited for the inevitable punch line.

But there wasn’t one. "