and i'm having a bit of hard time with it. i guess i should've expected it...i've been tempted to look for jobs around here instead of in boston, and to contact school and see how hard it would be to transfer for my final year. it's a weird feeling, i've always considered myself to be a pretty independent person, and the last year of long-distance relationshipping (ldr-ing) was hard but not nearly as hard as i had been afraid it would turn out to be. so why am i worried now?
because i'm also excited to leave. part of that is the things i have hanging over my head. looking for a job and an apartment at the same time is hell no matter how you slice it, but to be in the wrong city while cheap studios get taken and interviews get postponed is downright torturous. and despite my mom's conviction that i'm a member of the wait-and-see tribe (thanks, jd!), i actually prefer to go out and get shit done rather than let it get all sword of damocles on me (ok, that was gratuitous, i'm sorry). unless it's a paper for school. those are best left until the last minute, because that's when all the good ideas come out and play.
right, so i was going to use this post-work week to get out there and do a whole bunch of touristy things (climb the monument, go to the zoo, stand in the middle of the city and ask the cool looking people how to get to the jefferson memorial, take pictures of every building i see, eat signature dc foods (coffee and steak? every day? i feel like a lobbyist!), etc.) but now i'm gonna be guilty if i don't actually look for jobs/apartments. there's probably some way to equitably divide these things among the hours of the girlfriend-deprived portion of my day--there are far better ways to spend the hours when she's around, snap!--but all i really want to do is work on my latest story. since i'm basically trapped here with lots of free time, i should take advantage and really try to work through a chapter or three. with nanowrimo coming up fast, it's best to get into practice for 2000 words a day.
on top of all that, there's a very real sense that we've already started saying goodbye. shared glances heavy with significance, more hand-holding, lots of um...intimacy. none of which is bad, mind you. but it's hard to start saying goodbye with a week to go. i almost prefer to ignore it until the day i'm leaving, and then be sad for a day or two (or week, or until the phone sex starts) than to feel it dragging out through every minute we have together. she tries very hard not to be sad when we're apart though, more than i do, so i feel like she deserves a little indulgence. i'm perfectly ok with her sadness schedule. when i get sad and we're apart, i'll almost welcome it. i like a little melancholy now and then to spice things up--have a glass of bourbon, put on some mournful, beautiful music, light a few candles and stare at the cieling. i try to revel in the maudlin fun of it all. she's a stiff upper lip kind though. lacking in the "artistic temperament" (that's ok with me, i've got some to spare, after all). she bottles it up when we're apart, so it's almost good for her to be a little sad all week. a small price to pay for me anyway. my job is to cheer her up, and i think i'm damn good at it.
this is a little more personal than i usually get, so let me know if it's too much. not that i would stop. i do what i want, alright? quit trying to change me, jeez.
Showing posts with label cecilia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cecilia. Show all posts
8.08.2006
7.27.2006
come to dc, you'll be in bed by midnight!
i guess it’s true what they say, as long as what they say is “miller high life tastes like old paint.” on saturday, cecilia’s brother was in town to visit and we did all the usual touristy things: walk around, go to urban outfitters, grab a cheap haircut at the hair cuttery in dupont, and last but not least, head to asylum for quarter beer night!
every week, at 5pm sharp, asylum, the vegan biker bar, fills up with the poor and the very poor and the alcoholic for a night of bargain basement debauchery. 12-oz plastic cups of high life start at just $.25 and go up $.50 every hour afterwards until they reach their market price or everybody drinks themselves blind, whichever comes first.
in my case, absolute disgust with the corn-syrupy-sweet, utterly bland taste of high life led me to instigate a revolt (ok, cecilia’s comic inability to down the stuff didn’t hurt either) and order a round of delirium tremens for the table. and it was a damn good thing too, because after finding a chip of glass in one of them, we got all four for free! huzzah for potential injury!
needless to say, the good beer revived our spirits immensely and when waitress andrea (wasn’t she on a reality show? we wondered. although not me, because the only reality tv i watch is project runway, 30 days (it’s back!), and the food network. i don’t think andrea was heidi klum in disguise…) asked out of the blue if we wanted to do some carbombs. yes, andrea. we do.
i barely remember stumbling down 18th st. to dupont, though i do recall landing heavily in a booth in the big hunt. this is all around 9-ish, so the place is pretty dead. we order a greased-out pizza and proceed to watch cecilia’s brother get more and more out-of-it. and he’s the only one still in college! why, back in my day, collegians could hold their liquor, damn it. he rebounds enough to sing along with the cabby on the ride back to the hill, but when we get there we find that every fucking bar has gone and closed up by ten on a saturday! what the fuck, dc? isn’t getting bombed at cap lounge worth a little rain? honestly, i’m a little ashamed for you guys.
and that’s not all we have to be ashamed about, because a few minutes later we forced the closing crew at some mexican place down on pennsylvania to let us in for one last drink. i don’t know about you, but to me, 5 sodden, boozy twenty-somethings miserably cutching coronas in an empty, over-air-conditioned taqueria spells p-a-r-t-y! hells yeah. let’s just say we were happy to get home and forget it ever happened.
every week, at 5pm sharp, asylum, the vegan biker bar, fills up with the poor and the very poor and the alcoholic for a night of bargain basement debauchery. 12-oz plastic cups of high life start at just $.25 and go up $.50 every hour afterwards until they reach their market price or everybody drinks themselves blind, whichever comes first.
in my case, absolute disgust with the corn-syrupy-sweet, utterly bland taste of high life led me to instigate a revolt (ok, cecilia’s comic inability to down the stuff didn’t hurt either) and order a round of delirium tremens for the table. and it was a damn good thing too, because after finding a chip of glass in one of them, we got all four for free! huzzah for potential injury!
needless to say, the good beer revived our spirits immensely and when waitress andrea (wasn’t she on a reality show? we wondered. although not me, because the only reality tv i watch is project runway, 30 days (it’s back!), and the food network. i don’t think andrea was heidi klum in disguise…) asked out of the blue if we wanted to do some carbombs. yes, andrea. we do.
i barely remember stumbling down 18th st. to dupont, though i do recall landing heavily in a booth in the big hunt. this is all around 9-ish, so the place is pretty dead. we order a greased-out pizza and proceed to watch cecilia’s brother get more and more out-of-it. and he’s the only one still in college! why, back in my day, collegians could hold their liquor, damn it. he rebounds enough to sing along with the cabby on the ride back to the hill, but when we get there we find that every fucking bar has gone and closed up by ten on a saturday! what the fuck, dc? isn’t getting bombed at cap lounge worth a little rain? honestly, i’m a little ashamed for you guys.
and that’s not all we have to be ashamed about, because a few minutes later we forced the closing crew at some mexican place down on pennsylvania to let us in for one last drink. i don’t know about you, but to me, 5 sodden, boozy twenty-somethings miserably cutching coronas in an empty, over-air-conditioned taqueria spells p-a-r-t-y! hells yeah. let’s just say we were happy to get home and forget it ever happened.
7.14.2006
more convenient than ever
last night, cecilia and i went to see an inconvenient truth, the culmination of 40 years of work by mr. al gore, the man who “used to be the next president of the united states.”
no lie, it’s an extraordinary and powerful movie. if you know anything at all about climate change, then you probably are familiar with the kind of information that he talks about, but the magnitude of it, and the simple, clear, and effective way that he gets it across will still leave you impressed. no doubt about it, mr. gore looks and feels far more presidential as the narrator than he ever did on the campaign trail. he’s a virgillian figure, leading us down an ever steepening spiral to an inescapable conclusion: climate change is real, and it has already begun. all that we can hope to do is mute its effects. and i’m gonna start right now.
first and foremost, as always, is getting the word out. so, if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it this weekend, and bring a friend along. if you have already seen it, then by all means tell everybody you know to go see it. tell them that it doesn’t matter if you love gore or hate him, or whether you’re progressive or conservative, we all live on the same planet (unfortunately, if they’ve read that insipid crichton book, they’re probably beyond reaching). And most importantly, tell them it’s free!
to help spread the word, two organizations have stepped up, offering—through partnerships with fandango—free tickets to anyone who signs up.
first, inconvenientchristians.org, a website run by an environmental stewardship church called recovering eden. there’s a bunch of biblical quotes on their homepage, and when you sign up for the free tickets, they make you click one box that affirms your faith, and another that says you will come back and submit a review to them. fair enough, but i don’t really like to encourage hypocrisy or lying even on the internets, so…
we have targetglobalwarming.org, which is the same basic thing, except it’s run by the national wildlife fund (partnered with cabela’s, a hunting/fishing/outdoors equipment store) and they don’t make you pledge a damn thing. this is who i went through, and the process is virtually painless. in both cases, you get a coupon code that you enter into fandango’s site after you select a showtime. the codes are good for $20, but with the surcharges, the cost for 2 tickets in georgetown was $21. a small price to pay, i’m sure you’ll agree.
lastly, if you’re an internet 2.0 kind of person, eric pan, a regular-joe type from santa cruz, saw the movie and set up share the truth, a sort of community clearinghouse for people to either buy tickets for strangers, find tickets offered by strangers, or put together a group of like-mminded strangers to go see it together.
there, now you have absolutely no reason at all not to see this movie. it’s even pretty short, about an hour and forty-five minutes! if you can’t spare that, then there’s really nothing i can do for you. As for everybody else, pass those links on to whoever you can. tell them to see the movie and make up their own minds.
no lie, it’s an extraordinary and powerful movie. if you know anything at all about climate change, then you probably are familiar with the kind of information that he talks about, but the magnitude of it, and the simple, clear, and effective way that he gets it across will still leave you impressed. no doubt about it, mr. gore looks and feels far more presidential as the narrator than he ever did on the campaign trail. he’s a virgillian figure, leading us down an ever steepening spiral to an inescapable conclusion: climate change is real, and it has already begun. all that we can hope to do is mute its effects. and i’m gonna start right now.
first and foremost, as always, is getting the word out. so, if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it this weekend, and bring a friend along. if you have already seen it, then by all means tell everybody you know to go see it. tell them that it doesn’t matter if you love gore or hate him, or whether you’re progressive or conservative, we all live on the same planet (unfortunately, if they’ve read that insipid crichton book, they’re probably beyond reaching). And most importantly, tell them it’s free!
to help spread the word, two organizations have stepped up, offering—through partnerships with fandango—free tickets to anyone who signs up.
first, inconvenientchristians.org, a website run by an environmental stewardship church called recovering eden. there’s a bunch of biblical quotes on their homepage, and when you sign up for the free tickets, they make you click one box that affirms your faith, and another that says you will come back and submit a review to them. fair enough, but i don’t really like to encourage hypocrisy or lying even on the internets, so…
we have targetglobalwarming.org, which is the same basic thing, except it’s run by the national wildlife fund (partnered with cabela’s, a hunting/fishing/outdoors equipment store) and they don’t make you pledge a damn thing. this is who i went through, and the process is virtually painless. in both cases, you get a coupon code that you enter into fandango’s site after you select a showtime. the codes are good for $20, but with the surcharges, the cost for 2 tickets in georgetown was $21. a small price to pay, i’m sure you’ll agree.
lastly, if you’re an internet 2.0 kind of person, eric pan, a regular-joe type from santa cruz, saw the movie and set up share the truth, a sort of community clearinghouse for people to either buy tickets for strangers, find tickets offered by strangers, or put together a group of like-mminded strangers to go see it together.
there, now you have absolutely no reason at all not to see this movie. it’s even pretty short, about an hour and forty-five minutes! if you can’t spare that, then there’s really nothing i can do for you. As for everybody else, pass those links on to whoever you can. tell them to see the movie and make up their own minds.
6.29.2006
a day of reckoning
tomorrow morning, whether you like it or not, the quarterfinals of the world cup begin! now, in my last copa post, I endorsed a few teams, based on my own deep-seated prejudices. and, they all lost except for argentina.
sweden – lost to germany
ecuador – lost to england
mexico - lost to argentina
australia – lost to italy (which was bullshit!)
ghana – lost to brazil
i prefer to think of this less as my own failure to pick good teams, then as divine provenance for cecilia’s countrymen to, yes, go all the way! viva argentina! boo, deutschland! i don’t care if you got past the whole fascist thing way before the argentines did, you’re gonna eat it come 11am.
sweden – lost to germany
ecuador – lost to england
mexico - lost to argentina
australia – lost to italy (which was bullshit!)
ghana – lost to brazil
i prefer to think of this less as my own failure to pick good teams, then as divine provenance for cecilia’s countrymen to, yes, go all the way! viva argentina! boo, deutschland! i don’t care if you got past the whole fascist thing way before the argentines did, you’re gonna eat it come 11am.
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