No one was home. My parents were at church, my little sister was at a wedding in a suburb, my older sister is serving alcohol at the Taste of Chicago, and my grandmother was grocery shopping. And because I was alone after having two terrible days, I was preparing myself to sulk for the rest of this particular day.

So I lied there for what must've been 15 minutes, until I heard the phone ring. I crawled over and picked it up, and heard an immediately recognizable voice, "Hey David? Do you want to go to the Gay Pride Parade?"

I immediately stood up, "Sure!"

"We'll be over in a little bit."

I hung up the phone, and another head rush sent me crashing back to the floor.

The parade was pretty cool. Lot's of colorful folks running about. Take that in whatever context you'd like, and you'd still be right. It's only unfortunate that we arrived near the end of it. I was there with Jen, Lyn, Joey, and Jenny Cook.

We walked about for an hour and a half after the parade, until we finally decided that we've had enough fun. I of course didn't want to go home, so we piled into Lyn's car and headed off to Patrice's house way off to the west.

At first, the plan was to rent some bad horror movies, but with us being adolescents with very little iniative, that plan fell through. Patrice instead pulls out a board game, Cranium.

We killed several hours by acting out mannerisms of famous people, trying to guess trivia that should be obscure (but us being Northsiders, we have a natural affinity for useless standardized test-type knowledge), drawing pictures of keywords and having our partners guess and using clay in the same manner, and spelling words that were five or more syllables long.

The six of us formed three teams, and we all were very close. But in the end, Jen and I were victorious.

Just like in real life.

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