in which an Earnest attempt is made to behave Appropriately in public.

before attending dinner with a dinner date and after spending 30 minutes preventing several off-leash mongrels from consuming an entire loaf of bread and the contents of a large bag of potato chips, i stopped back by my house to pick up some Things that would be beneficial to have post-dinner date for use with the dinner date. i reminded myself, 'it's cool. you are good at being stealthy and discreet. no one will know the contents of your opaque shopping bag which holds the Things which will be beneficial to have post-dinner date for use with the dinner date.'

often i am delusional. i am neither stealthy nor discreet, as evidenced by how loudly i laugh, by how forgetful i am of things that require stealth and discreetness, and by my gargantuan limbs, which enable me to type this entry while my body is in another room. i know this already. once i accidentally outed my friend to the entire population of people that knew said friend's parents and therefore could have potentially outed said friend to said friend's parents, because i forgot said friend's gay gayness was a secret. this resulted in my complete ignorance of any secrets ever again about said friend or any friends that attained knowledge of the incident involving said friend, which of course was completely justified.

however, my stealth and discreetness seem to have been taking vitamins, because recently they have been much more noticeable, in a stealthy and discreet way. okay, that was a complete lie. but i felt i could pull this off. really, i did. i'd taken all the common sense precautions, like picking the opaque shopping bag instead of the ridiculously transparent blue shopping bag. i'd made an informed choice. or rather, i made the uninformed choice but then caught myself halfway down the stairs when i glanced at the bag and the Things which would be beneficial to have post-dinner date for use with the dinner date smiled and waved at me in all their silicone glory. i retreated, switched to the opaque shopping bag, and that was precisely when i made an informed choice.

the flagrantly stupid choice was when i took my shoes off to join the dinner date at the table in a sushi restaurant where you have to take off your shoes to sit at the table, and i plopped the opaque shopping bag on the floor right next to my shoes and an empty table leaving it Wide Open so that Later, When Two People Entered The Restaurant And Sat Down At The Empty Table They Both Had An Excellent View Of The Contents Of The Opaque Shopping Bag. as did the waiters, most of the kitchen staff, and the father who had just picked up his two kids from their mother's house and was taking them out for a treat, because of my near-perfect choice to place the opaque shopping bag next not only to the empty table, but also next to the mini-staircase that leads to the no-shoes area.

at least the waiter didn't charge us for the tea, probably thinking the entertainment we inadvertently provided was worth about that much.