Last nite, I met up with Ann and Michelle at Monterey Hill restaurant for dinner after work. (“You’re going WHERE? That’s a DATE RESTAURANT!” Michelle’s fiance Eddie had apparently complained to Michelle when she’d told him about our dinner plans. “Are you SURE you’re not meeting guys there?” Haha. Eddie’s in Taiwan right now with his family so he had to be jealous from afar.) It was the most geographically widespread dinner I’d been to in awhile; I was coming from Norwalk, Ann from Fountain Valley, and Michelle from Alhambra. All three of us had been to the nice view steakhouse before, but it’d been many years for each of us (we counted it by way of “3 boyfriends ago,” “5 boyfriends ago,” etc.). Ann and I arrived while it was still happy hour, so we each sipped on a glass of champagne while indulging in the bar’s free meatball and veggie appetizers as we waited for Michelle.

Michelle soon arrived and we were walked to our window table by the host. As soon as we sat down, Michelle pointed repeatedly somewhere to her left as she mouthed something that Ann apparently understood. I had Michelle repeat her miming so many times I’m surprised she didn’t just slap me. Turns out, I can’t read lips. Something about green monster? Was she pointing at two Asian men seated alone to her left in a booth? Or at the table with two women with the one man closer to us? Did people give us dirty looks as we walked in? “Green monster” meant jealousy, right? I asked Ann, who was seated to my right, what Michelle had said. Turned out she was trying to tell me The Incredible Hulk was seated to our right, a bit behind Ann. I turned and looked, and there sat Lou Ferrigno.

Michelle dug through her purse and soon a pink camera emerged. “We should go ask him if we could take a picture with him,” she suggested.
“Yeah, with all of us!” Ann said.
“But he’s trying to eat, he probably gets this all the time,” I hesitated.
“Yeah, I feel bad bothering a celebrity when he’s at a restaurant,” said Michelle, wavering.
There was a pause as we all reconsidered. And then Ann said, “Oh, he should be flattered! He’s a HAS-BEEN!” We laughed, but decided let him finish eating. Just in case we miss him, though, I leaned over Ann as she tried to lean back out of my way and snapped the above photo with my omnipresent cameraphone. “Geez, you’re not discreet at all!” Ann noticed. See her right shoulder at the corner of that photo. It turned out that Ferrigno’s party finished and walked out while we were doing our girl gabbing, so if I hadn’t snapped that photo, you all would’ve just had to take my word for it that we ate dinner with The Hulk. (With, next to, near, it’s just semantics, right?)

The three of us had a great time bonding and laughing over dinner. Here’s my dinner in particular:

I’d been craving lobsters for awhile. Thoughts of an old Rosarito, Mexico trip and the bargain lobster tail dinner I had there have been causing me to salivate for the past week. When the dinner bill came, the three of us Asian girls realized we had something else in common.
“Just tell me what I owe, I can’t do math,” Michelle said.
“I can’t do math, either,” I admitted, looking to Ann.
“I hate math, it was my worst subject,” confessed Ann.
“Mine too!” Michelle and I chimed in.
Michelle continued, “And people think just cuz I’m Asian, that I’m naturally good at math. And I’m really not.”
“I get that, too,” I shared. “People tend to push the tab at me.”
Ann and Michelle referred to their calculators as necessities.
“I took the most random courses in college just to avoid having to take math to fulfill my math and science GE requirement. I even took Oceanography,” I shared.
Michelle and Ann both looked up at me in surprise. “I took Oceanography, too!” they each said, and I had the feeling they took it for the same reason I did.
Michelle and I struggled through the bill some more and griped more about our pathetic math unskills, and I was vaguely aware of Ann next to me digging through her purse like a dog trying to bury a bone in its yard. Soon, Ann produced a small white thing in her fist and announced, “I have the PERFECT THING for this occasion.” We looked. It was a button that read:
I’m Too Pretty
to do Math!
We all shrieked in delight. We left making plans for a future slumber party with chick flicks, popcorn, wine, and jacuzzi at Ann’s place. (We were responsible drinkers that night; Ann and I stopped at our singular glasses of champagne, and Michelle nursed one glass of red wine the entire night.)

This weekend: bike ride and campout with the Jujitsu Peeps!