A little ditty, about....

my former roommate and a girl from Japan. As I told you here, they are very, very happy when they're together. I can't blame them. They're good for each other.

Well, after she went back to Japan a few weeks ago, he asked his boss if he could work remotely from the Tokyo office for the month of July. Apparently, at his job, this is not that outlandish of a request. I'm sure if I did the same thing, I'd get looked at funny. Even if I just wanted to work in Toronto for a month.

His boss was receptive, but offered something else. Seems there was a job opening in the Tokyo office, and it required someone who spoke English (the posting, as he is pointing out, mentions nothing about whether or not applicants need to speak Japanese) and a two year committment.

After receiving this news, he e-mailed me and asked my advice. It didn't take me long to see this for the golden and incredible opportunity it is. I gave him what I saw as the best- and the worst-case scenarios. I reminded him of the similar quagmire I went through when I was deciding whether or not to move to NYC, of how the woman I was seeing at the time told me, to my face, that if I didn't do it, she would think me a coward. I told him he should go and be with her and to be happy and damn the torpedos and all that.

Last night I got a text that all he needed was a visa, and he was all set. I called him to congratulate him and find out what he needed me to do to make this possible. He was understandably excited and receptive to my help. A few hours later, I got another text message from him, freaking out about moving to Japan and telling me that we should do a Schlitz tour of Chicago before he leaves, just in case.

Allow me to explain the Schlitz tour- way, way, way back in the day, in the crazy days of 1999-2000, both of us started to cohabitate with our girlfriends at about the same time. There is an unwritten rule out there somewheres that when you start the cohabitation dance, you're pretty much starting a countdown to the big question and the big m-word. At the time, neither of us were particularly interested in marriage. Maybe not so much uninterested, but definitely unready. We made a bet- and I forget who came up with the conditions- that the first one of us to get engaged would have to take the other out on a Schlitz Tour of Chicago, and go to every bar we could find in the city that serves Schlitz, and have one in each.

There are thousands upon thousands of bars in Chicago. Even within a few blocks of my house, I have at least 2 dozen or so options, some of which are on this map. Not all of them have Schlitz, but I'd say at least a third of them do.

Chicago, friends and neighbors, is big. These are the bars and I consider to be stumbling distance from my house- say about a 6 or 7 block radius. We'll probably have to make a weekend of it.

Image the amount of liver damamge we would do, too.

Is there a statute of limitations on bets made in your 20's?