Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily...

I think it’s important to tip cab drivers a little extra if I happen to leave puddles of water on the backseat. The cab driver is almost certainly going to get an earful from the eventual wetbottom who gets in the cab next. I just want to make that moment a little more palatable for the driver, so I left a 30 percent tip and dragged my soaked 60-pound bluejeans (and the legs inside them) out of the taxi.

Had I known getting in to the taxi what I came to understand upon getting out, I'm sure I would have done a few things differently.

If nothing else, when my girlfriend Emily asked me if I wanted to kayak up the Chicago River toward Lake Michigan to watch Saturday night's fireworks, I would have isolated two very important words: kayak and river. Looking back, I really should have weighed more closely the probable effects of any activity involving these two words. This is automatic for many people, but not me.

I told Emily yes and absentmindedly finished my taco or whatever.

Most people would show up to a kayaking expedition with swim shorts and flip-flops... y'know, as if they were prepared to get wet. For some reason I let myself act as if the cover of night and the promise of fireworks would shield me from a billion gallons of lake water.

Emily and I arrived at the kayak launch site, signed in with our tour guide and chose a life jacket. My tour guide looked at my blue jeans, sneakers and plaid shirt and asked if I had any other clothes I wanted to change in to. In my head I'm imagining all the clothes I wanted to change in to, but all those clothes were tucked away in my house. So instead, I laughed and told my tour guide that I didn't have more appropriate clothes to change into and jokingly acknowledged that I was screwed.

In a situation like this, after I've just acknowledged what a bonehead I am, all I'm looking for is a little reassurance; a "there, there;" an "I've seen worse" or a "you'll be fine, pal." Instead, my tour guide smiled, nodded and agreed that, yeah, I'm pretty screwed.

Somewhere in this story I should mention that Emily and I were not alone. There were about 14 people in our group including some friends of Emily's, so it wasn't like we were by ourselves, but for the bulk of the trip we might as well have been. Our tour guide urged us to use dual kayaks. Along with the assumption that I would somehow not get wet, I also assumed I'd be in my own boat.

I mean, what's the difference between a two-person kayak and a canoe?

I've found in my life as a not single person that my definition of "togetherness" is quite different from that of my female counterparts.

tew-GETH-er-niss n.
male definition: being in the same general area while sharing similar, but not exact experiences.
female definition: being in close proximity as much as possible therefore sharing the exact same memories and experiences.

You'll notice that my definition would most likely lend itself to being fine with my own kayak. You'll also notice that Emily (and her female friend) were more than excited to share a boat with their respective male mates. I'm sure they referred to the partnership as cute or fabulous or some damn thing. Turns out that sharing a kayak is neither cute nor fabulous because sharing a kayak is hard. Along with the syncopation, unless the woman you are with happens to be an Olympian, she ain't making up for her weight with the energy she's expending. So if the two of us are going to get to the fireworks on time, that energy has to come from someone.

Guess who?

In all honesty, I don't mind putting in grunt work. There's something noble about doing so. How bad can a little paddling be? A little paddling probably wouldn't have been bad, but the voyage Emily and I tandemly set out upon was quite a bit more than a little paddling.

Two-and-a-half miles there. Two-and-a-half miles back.

Fun on a Saturday night is seeing a movie, watching the game in a bar, perhaps playing checkers in my jammies, something along those lines. Grunting up the Chicago River, drenched and exhausted is somewhere further down that list.

I should confess that I have a pre-existing bias against kayaks and really, all row boats. A little over two years ago, I attended Maine's annual Lobster Fest and entered its blindfolded boat race with my friend Priti. I rowed while wearing a blindfold and Priti directed me with verbal cues. I'll not go into detail of that horrendous race, but I will say it went poorly and I didn't say much to Priti for a good hour after we climbed from the boat. I guess I just don't do well with tandem things.

The row up the Chicago River was both painful and frustrating. It took us about an hour to get to where we stopped and viewed the fireworks. Emily, God bless her, could sense my frustration and thought that telling me how this experience would make a good blog would be the silver lining I needed. Good blog material doesn't make everything better, okay? Blog material isn't like mommy kisses or unicorn laughter.

Sometimes the stories I get to tell aren't worth the hell of going through them.

Besides, I had already planned on writing a blog about this before she said anything. Up until I sat in the taxi, I was planning on starting with that unicorn laughter line.

Admittedly, the fireworks were kinda kickass and they provided twofold services. The first being a calm in between two storms of rowing and the second being our tour guide's insights as to what will happen to Chicago if the city wins the bid to host the Olympics in 2016. I won't go into detail, but I'm pretty sure it will create a disruption ten times larger than the Cubs beating the White Sox in the World Series.

It'll be enough of a disturbance that I will realistically move to another part of the country.

After the fireworks, the sky returned to darkness and we returned to our paddles. Sitting inertly for 40 minutes almost made me forget how wet I was and how much I hated rowing. My hands were pruned and soft, which made it all the easier for layer after layer of skin to peel away, leaving one slightly more tender layers as my only protectant between the paddle and open nerve endings. Our trip down the river went better than our trip up the river. Part of this was because we had learned from previous mistakes, but most of it was because we were now swimming with the river's current.

It felt so good to glide in a straight line. In the fleeting moments where she and I miraculously found a rhythm, I could almost understand the appeal of it all. We were moving, slicing, still grunting, but with more purpose now. We were going to make it, we were going to get there faster, faster than we could have imagined.

We flew on the wings of Icarus.

I heard wind and water, followed by voices of our friends in the distance. I could not make out the words, but the tone sounded urgent. I disconnected myself from the freedom of movement long enough to decipher what they were saying to us.

"Get over!"

It didn't take me long to understand what they meant by this. My focus shifted from my friends behind me to an approaching force 200 yards in front of me. I wasn't sure if this impending phantom was the night sky or my imagination, but it was hulking and silent.

It was a miniature barge that blew its gutteral horn as if to signal that it was not a figment of my imagination. Emily let out a shriek. How could something so massive slink through the water so quietly? How could something so opressive remain unnoticed by two people rowing directly at it? Both Emily and I shared a moment of surreal panic. Was this boat bigger than it appeared and farther away or smaller and a mere matter of feet away?

I refocused and joined in the chorus of our friends by yelling at Emily to get over. I then added "Left!"

For the uninitiated, if you want your kayak to go left, you must paddle on the right side of your boat. If you want to go left, paddle on the right side. On our ride upstream to the fireworks Emily and I had experimented with these physics to a large degree. When I said left, she'd paddle on the left side of the kayak.

It's funny what escapes your mind when you're in a state of panic.

My yelling "Left! Left!" had no effect on Emily, who lifted her paddle over her head for reasons I may never understand.

With the barge making no effort to avoid us, I drag my paddle deep into the river and started moving us. Soon after we gained momentum, Emily came to her senses and paddled with me. We got out of the way and met our friends who were laughing (much harder than I was) and just as clueless how we all missed the barge until it was almost too late.

We exited our kayaks and returned to the small area in which our group had left their belongings.

Soaked and dripping, I felt dumpy; heavy like I had grown a tail. Like all my leg hair grew out an extra foot. It was about 11 p.m. and the set of doors through which we entered were locked and there was no clear alternative exit. We were next to an ultrahip, lively restaurant and lounge called Japonais in the complex in which we were trapped. We approached the bouncer of the club who told us to cut through the smokers patio and exit on the opposite side of the club's exterior.

This club: think a mid-western "Laguna Beach." Think of tiny cocktail dresses and perfect hair, bored eyes and hair gel. This club: think 95 percent yuppies listening to 95 percent hip-hop. Think: social smoking, not addiction smoking. Pitt and Jolie were there last year (pictured right). Got it? It's upscale.

The highlight of my entire night was walking through this maximum capacity club dripping like a newly washed car, brushing past people who spent longer in front of the mirror that evening than I had in the entire month. I'm still tickled by the idea that some girl with a cosmo in one hand got dowsed with a shirt full of lake water on the other when I brushed past.

That must've been confusing.

It must also have been confusing for whomever entered that taxi right after me. You gotta figure, that next person felt some moisture and ran through all the possible liquids the backseat of a city cab could host. I'm not sure what the driver told this person, but I bet everyone assumed it was worse than lake water.

As far as I'm concerned, nothing could be worse than lake water.