Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never by Lancaster, Jen (e books free to read .txt) 📕

to shout, “Show us your tits!” after a particularly stirring solo.] As much as I love to people watch, the opera is the perfect place for it because every walk of humanity is represented, at least sartorially. There were folks from kids in jeans to men in tuxedos, capes, and big top hats, and all fashions in between.

Because we really want to make tonight’s showing of Carmen special, we’re treating ourselves to a hotel room. I want to do it up right because in the fifteen years I lived in town, I never once stayed anywhere except my own apartments. So I figure if I’m going whole hog, I’ll book us at the Peninsula.

Joanna and I debated whether or not we wanted to share a room, but we realized we spent our entire freshman year in an eight-by-ten cinder-block dorm room, and that’s without the benefit of room service or seven hundred fifty thread-count sheets, so we’d probably manage being together for sixteen hours.

Before the show, we have dinner at the Purple Pig, a restaurant known for charcuterie. We sit at a community table and make friends with the conventioning Minneapolis-area anesthesiologists sitting around us—sharing a couple of bottles of wine and bites of a sugar-seared rib eye. [Sounds so wrong but tastes so right.] The doctors are leery about our order of roasted marrow, so they leave us to sample it ourselves.

Truly? My stomach turns a little when the plate is served. There’s a big round bone with a gelatinous blob of grayish brown in the middle, paired with slices of bread and a bowl of chunks of Himalayan salt. Tentatively we spread and salt the goo, and with our napkins at the ready, we taste it at the same time.

And then we lose our minds.

The marrow is why meat cooked on the bone is always so much more delicious than its filleted counterparts. Marrow is what gives braised short ribs their flavor. Marrow is the essence of beef and eating it is like biting into a thousand pot roasts all concentrated into one little smear of perfection. [No lie, as I write this description my mouth is watering.]

We spend the next twenty minutes saying over and over again, “Oh, that marrow!” It’s all we discuss on the way to the theater and it’s our main topic of conversation over opera cake and cappuccinos during second intermission. And even though everything about Carmen is spectacular, when I look back on this night, marrow is what I’ll recall most fondly.

After a drink at the bar, we call it a night. We’ve got our bathroom kung fu timed perfectly and after a little Real Housewives, we’re ready for bed.

In the dark, I can tell by her breathing the exact moment Joanna falls asleep, having heard it so many times before. I can’t think of a single instance when we lived together that she wasn’t out first. I’ve never been a great sleeper, particularly when I’m not in my own bed, and until I discovered the tiny white miracle called Ambien, it would take me hours from the time I hit the sheets until I dropped off.

I had cocktails earlier in the evening, so I don’t take my Ambien because that’s a recipe for accidentally ordering an entire new suite of bedroom furniture. [Trust me on this one.]

Joanna went down around twelve thirty a.m., but it’s one thirty now and I still feel wide awake. I suspect any fatigue may have been counteracted by the coffee I had during dessert. I toss and shift, but I can’t seem to get comfortable. At two thirty, I have to employ desperate measures—pillow flipping—in the vain hope that the cool side will help me nod off. It doesn’t.

Around three, I feel myself drifting off to sleep FINALLY, only to be awakened five minutes later by Joanna’s snoring.

This is new.

If she snored as a freshman, we’d have never been together long enough to form a twenty-five-year-long friendship.

I have no problem falling asleep to music and when I was a kid staying at my grandparents’ house, my grandfather would blast talk radio all night long. To this day, I adore talk radio because of him and it always makes me feel comforted. Put golf or baseball on the television and I’m out in seconds flat. And whenever I’m on the road, I like to sleep to old sitcoms on Nick at Nite.

But the snoring?

I have a problem with snoring.

Joanna snores lightly, but insistently. Really, it’s more of a loud breathing deal and there’s no vibrato or anything, but I can definitely hear her.

Maisy started snoring in the past few years, too. Between her and Fletch [Who also came to snoring far too late into the relationship to break it off.] I find myself sneaking into the guest room more often than not.

I put in my earbuds to see if that blocks her out.

Zzzz.

Nope.

I decide to take a bath, hoping that will put me out.

Zzzz.

Nope.

I push her a couple of times, but feel bad doing so. She probably doesn’t normally snore except we talked so much we’re both kind of hoarse, plus she’s had a night full of cocktails, marrow, and cake. That’d make anyone snore.

So I’m not mad about the snoring. But sleep is impossible.

And then she begins to thrash.

That’s new, too.

At four a.m., I can’t take it anymore. Because I don’t want to wreck her beauty rest, I decide to just go home. As quietly as I can, I collect my things and in the dark I write her a note.

I find out later that my night penmanship is wanting and pretty much the only part of the note she could decipher said YOU SNORE in big, shouty letters. I’ve come to find in every relationship, one person is inevitably more of a jerk than the other. In the case of Joanna and me, I’m clearly the bigger jerk, but I’m fortunate that we established this long ago, so really, nothing inconsiderate I do now comes