Your Daily Awesome

“I’m Beginning to Think No One’s Coming to My Cinco de Mayo Party”

I mean, it’s September, so you’d figure at least the guests with kids would’ve shown up by now, because they have to get home early to set the babysitter free. What’s funny is that the fashionably late stragglers are probably going to be the first people here. And they thought they were being so cool!

Let me turn down the music. I checked out some mariachi stuff from the library to add some mexicano flavór. Now I’ve begun to suspect that four months of continuous mariachi music may have something to do with my insomnia and the mustachios I’ve been hallucinating.

One guy who has no excuse for not showing up is my neighbor Jim. He lives across the hall, has no family obligations, and just sits in his apartment getting stoned and holding staring contests with the light on his smoke detector. When I hear him walking down to the garbage room, I’ll grab a trash bag of my own and pretend to bump into him. He’ll say something like “Hey, man,” and I’ll casually respond in kind, waiting for him to acknowledge my serape. But nothing clicks. It’s true he never said yes on my Evite, but he never said no, either. He never even said maybe. In fact, no one replied at all. I feel like I wasted my time coming up with funny response headings (Yes=Sí, Maybe=Tal Vez, No=No).

Wait, did someone just knock? No, it’s just a guy outside working on his roof. Ever notice how you become hyperattuned to sound when you’re waiting for company? You think someone’s at the door, but it’s actually just a thunderstorm three states away or a stray cat’s heartbeat. The false alarms are annoying, but if I prop the door open anyone can just saunter in and crash mi loco fiesta—I mean, should mi loco fiesta come into existence…

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Tom Skerritt’s Speech to the Cadets in Top Gun Is Probably Long Enough as It Is
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