It was 9pm, and I got a phone call from a friend of mine, not a particularly close friend but somebody I hang out with every once in a while (most recently the night before last when we went mini-golfing and I sold her my old bike for the ridiculously high price of $20). She asked me to go biking with her. Now, it was after dark and she lives 40 minutes away if I take the freeway, which I am uncomfortable doing at night, so I told her flat out that I would not do any such thing until morning. She then spent the next several minutes arguing with me trying to convince me to agree to her plans, despite my insistence that it was extremely unsafe (my bike doesn't have reflectors, too many people get hit by cars while biking at night, I'm not familiar enough with her part of town, etc.). So she decided that I needed to drive to her house so we can go on a walk. I tried arguing with her about this one too, because it was so late at night. After a while it seemed to me that such insistence must mean that something was wrong that she didn't want to talk about over the phone, because we had been discussing this for so long and I obviously was not agreeing with her, so I decided to go after all. I drove through 45 minutes of construction to get to her house (which I had to look up on google maps to find), only to discover that all that was wrong was that she was bored. We went on a walk in neighborhoods I was not comfortable in. I helped her adjust the bike I sold her before, because she had forgotten my instructions for reattaching the front wheel (it took me less than 30 seconds to do exactly what I had described and shown to her at least three times before). I drove home through more construction, with nothing good on the radio. I didn't get home until midnight. I could have been reading my new Patricia McKillip book and eating raspberry-pineapple jello.
