I’m not a very outgoing person. And by outgoing I mean, I don’t like to go…out. I don’t have agoraphobia or anything that serious, but I have been feeling lately that my non-outgoingness has been getting a bit worse since I started working from home. It doesn’t help that my boyfriend works 68 hours a week and has our car with him most of the time, so even if I wanted to go out, I really couldn’t.

For the most part I don’t mind, though. It’s not like I never go out. We usually go see a movie every few weeks and we go out to eat once or twice a week (used to be more, but we’re trying to cut back). Plus I have to go grocery shopping and get my Target fix regularly. And there’s the other random errands: bank, post office, bookstore, etc. I used to go walking on some nearby trails, but haven’t been able to go since daylight savings ended. I’ll probably pick that back up in the spring. But other than the movies I don’t usually go out to do anything “fun”. Sometime I wish I did, but then I try to think what would be fun and I can never think of anything. I don’t like parties or clubs, I don’t even really like alcohol that much (which seems to be whole point of going to parties or clubs). That kind of stuff has never been my thing and it’s not my boyfriend’s thing either. I guess we are just natural stay-at-home-ers. And like I mentioned above, he works 68 hours a week and being a freelancer, I’m pretty much “on-call” 24/7, so neither of us has a lot of “free time”.

But things have definitely been a little stale lately and I’ve been looking for new things we can go do. We finally live in a city that has events and concerts and plays, so why not take advantage of that? So last month I found out that Rent was coming to town. I got the soundtrack a few years ago and still listen to it pretty obsessively so I jumped at the chance to go see it. My boyfriend was not as happy with the prospect, but this month is Valentine’s Day and my birthday, so he really didn’t have a choice in the matter.

I was so excited to go see the play last night, but by the end of the night I remembered why I don’t like going out that much. It’s always such a freaking ordeal! We got there an hour early, only to get stuck in a traffic jam one street away from the theater. It took us 45 minutes to go about a mile. The problem? The three lane road merged into one lane for absolutely no reason. They just had a bunch of cones blocking off the other lanes, but there was NOTHING WRONG WITH THE ROAD. It was insane. There also happened to be a Jimmy Buffett concert the same night at the “big theater”. The play was in the “small theater” but they were right next to each other and shared the same parking lots. Of course there was no parking at all. You’d think a place that has two large theaters would have enough parking for events at both, but no, you can’t have that. That would be logical. And who cares about that, right?

The play was supposed to start at 8pm and we found a parking spot a mile away at 7:55. We parked illegally because one of the (very drunk) Buffett fans opened up the gate to a lot that was closed (even though there was still tons of parking in there…again, logical). We practically ran to the theater (both of us have really bad blisters on our feet now), but were slowed down by the tons of drunk people stumbling around wearing hula shirts and balloon animal hats. I have seriously never seen so many wasted people in one place in my life and the concert hadn’t even started yet. They were offering us Mardi Gras beads to wear and I’m thinking “Umm, no thanks, I am about to go see a play about people with AIDS…I don’t think that’s the appropriate attire.” We made it just in time (they wound up starting about 20 minutes late anyway).

Even though the play was awesome and I’m glad I finally got to see it, I’ve definitely had enough “fun” for awhile. I’d much rather stay at home and watch Grey’s Anatomy (which I Tivoed and wasn’t that a pretty freaking awesome episode, I can’t wait for next week!) than deal with all the traffic jams and annoying people*. Plus my boyfriend and I tend to get in arguments when we are around that kind of stuff (case in point: last night when we had a screaming match about where to park) so by the end of the night I never wind up having as much “fun” as I thought I would.

I’m thinking of buying Snow Patrol tickets for later next month, though. Maybe we’ll have better luck there than we did last night.

*The people sitting next to us kept talking throughout the play (“What just happened?” “Where did he go?” “Why did she do that?”) and I was almost ready to punch them by the time intermission came around. So of course they gab all though intermission about what just happened (because the plot is just. so. complicated.) and one of them starts talking about Jonathan Larson and how “he died of AIDS before the play even opened”. Gah!!! I wished I was on a forum, because when people say stupid things you can call them on their stupidity and link to the Wikipedia article where it says he actually had an aortic dissection (or an aortic aneurysm, which is what the Rent article said…but still it was not in any way AIDS related.) Unfortunately, in real life you can’t tell the people you are sitting by that they are stupid and gullible.