Last Call

So, happy belated Memorial Day, although it ended nearly three hours ago. I figured an exceptional day deserved at least a quick post.

Curtains rise on me getting up rather early, at least for me. I slept until about ten-thirty and was showered and out the door by noon-ish. My first quest of the day was to head to Wegman's and pick up some supplies to make meals. You see, as of my birthday (this past Friday), I've been telling myself that I need to set aside time for cooking and controlling my intake. I don't particularly need a diet, but avoiding things like cholesterol and fat can't hurt, and I want to try something a bit more vegetarian. It might be a bit more pricey, but it's worth it for my health.

I managed to find a nice collection of low fat and organic foods, including what became my lunch, a lovely primavera pasta with tofu cubes flavored a bit like steak. I'm honestly not all that familiar with tofu, and the texture was strange at first, but it was easy to make and wonderful.

While I was enjoying said lunch, I was invited to a Memorial Day barbecue by Nicole. Apparently a friend of hers that normally resides in Brooklyn, NY moved down to Philadelphia for the summer, and was throwing a little party for some of his friends and acquaintances. Nicole and I got there first, and after I met Matt and Becky, some others started arriving and they prepared the food. I showed off my Midwestern corn-huskin' skills and it was an overall enjoyable evening. Many of the attendees worked on something akin to "Computer Science freelancers," where they would hop from project to project doing work. Day faded to night, and we ended up staying until a little after ten. Tremendous thanks to Nicole for inviting me and Matt and Becky for having us!

The rest of the evening was both a nice cooldown from the party mindset and an incredibly engaging few hours of conversation, and a nice glimpse of what I don't know. I love knowing what it is I don't know, considering it's like opening a door into a room you've never seen before. Next comes the scrutinizing every inch of said room and gathering all the information it can provide. The best part? The room talks.

Blogvalanche

So, I have some confessions to make. I've been seriously skimping on my blogging commitment. There are several reasons for this, but I'm going to do my best to nip them all in the bud by posting more. Gasp.

Anyway, it was an eventful weekend. I'll break it up into more posts because I can, so I'll start with the Friday night. Most of my testing for the week was axed, I found out on Thursday, so I ended up saying 'screw it' and taking the rest of the weekend off. I took ten hours of PTO, including a holiday float day and two hours of comp time I had just sitting around.

I worked fairly late into Friday morning and ended up leaving around four, heading to bed, and waking up at about two in the afternoon. I woke up and drove into Philadelphia, parked, and headed to a random coffee joint to meet Claire. Soon enough, and after learning an important lesson about purses not needing chairs of their own, we were off to get something to eat.

Claire had a coupon for a restaurant, but before we could get there we spotted a place called Tapas y Vinos which we decided to try out. After walking in the wrong door (and plodding over some rocks), we sat down and started looking at the menu. I was overwhelmed, but pleasantly so, and let Claire make the calls as to what we got. The shrimp and shirred egg topping was delicious, and after splitting up the check we high-tailed it to the concert.

Eventually we found a place to park on the street, and I had the sneaking suspicion that the spot wasn't all that perfect - there was a hydrant a couple yards behind me, but I figured it'd be okay. We got there just in time to see the (mediocre) opening band, Crooked Fingers. They were pretty run-of-the-mill as far as opening acts go, something akin to the TOMAHAWK band that opened for Tool, but not that bad.

Then the main event! Neko Case and her band came onstage. The performance wasn't as epic as some of the other events I've been at, but it made up for that and more by being far more intimate a venue. The tickets weren't outstanding, but the small size of the theater (the Keswick in Glenside, PA by the way) made it easy to see the stage from wherever. I was surprised at the set list she sang, since it contained a lot of Fox Confessor Brings the Flood stuff that I have listened to (and liked) a lot more than her newer stuff. Among my favorite renditions were "Maybe Sparrow" and "Teenage Feeling," the latter being a song I wasn't all that fond of until I saw it performed live.

Accompanying Neko and her band was a movie screen behind them playing videos for each of the songs they played. Of particular note was a few very bucolic video scenes, including one that had me transfixed featuring a plane skirting some clouds over the pure blue sky. Also of note was the little quips that the titular singer and her backup exchanged over the course of the concert, including a mention of a "suit made of sleeping back parts" and some kind of potato-chip-delivery-system somehow involving a vacuum. Of course, the encore is always obligatory, and they ended up playing a half a dozen additional songs. Once the concert closed, Claire was half asleep and ready to head home, so I dropped her off and walked into my apartment at a little before midnight.

I talked a bit to some folks after getting home and made the spur-of-the-moment decision that I'd be going on an adventure the next day. More on that later!

Letting Go

If there's something that I've learned about in the past year, it's letting go of things. Letting go of feelings, people, ideas, futures. It's certainly and important skill to develop, though to master it makes you almost inhuman. People must grope in the dark to find the courage to continue on without something that seemed almost essential, or at least quite important.

Loss is something people feel very differently. Some obsess for years over what they could have done to prevent its occurence. The real truth is that such notions don't matter in the least. Certainly, there is value in retrospection, in peering back at the mistakes you make so as to not make them again, but obsession is unhealthy. Be assured that those around you, despite how graceful they might seem in their handling of grief, all wounds scar in some shape or form.

When someone loses something or someone they care about, it's tempting to simply fall apart, to mourn the loss so extensively that you lose your own self-conception. You become your grief. It's tempting to blame yourself for things, but in actuality it's never that simple. You are what you are, and you can't be anything else in a puff of smoke.

The lingering pain is what gets people, what ruins people. The initial loss will always be a shock to the system, whether a good friend or a lover, but if one makes the conscious decision to begin to heal, the process begins almost immediately. Acceptance is the final stage of grief for a very good reason; you have to trudge through everything else before you can truly accept the events of your life. Without that initial agony and pain, accepting the events in your life is meaningless.

Reflection

Well, it's a new year, and I haven't gushed about what I'm looking forward to, yet. There may be some repeats, but eh, it'll be nice to type something out again. I so rarely am motivated to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) that I may as well appreciate it while it lasts.

I'm looking forward to flourishing friendships, from those people back home who I've known for years, the people here who I am just beginning to know, and people who are at present complete strangers to me. Everything seems so new; even when I go home, it seems like so much has changed between visits that everything is novel and interesting again. The new people I've encountered, shared meals and drinks with, and sat in front of a glowing movie or television screen with have been incredible, every single one of them unique and irreplaceable. Oh and the people I pass on the street whose names I don't know, I look forward to shaking your hands, too.

I look forward to more people from back home seeing how I live now. I look forward to seeing more of them head off into the world and make new lives for themselves, or stay content in the lives they have now. I'm especially curious about the juxtaposition of the old and new, for those who would be open to such things; the environments of home mixed with the faces of Philadelphia, the voices of Minnesota speaking in my apartment.

I'm excited to see where my career continues to move. It was recently shared that I may be taking the leadership position that Brian may vacate come the summer, along with responsibilities and visibilities I've never had working anywhere. It will be a challenge, but I'm determined to continue learning and growing to fill the role when it's ready for me.

I look backward in awe of all the things I saw and learned throughout 2008. New experiences, new locales, new feelings. Obviously I've never been a college graduate before, but along with that I've never experienced a September that I was not attending school that I remember, much less the rest of the year. It was a curious feeling and almost uneasy at times, but now that I'm comfortable with it, it's fairly liberating, but a little regretful at the same time. A stage exited, a new entered.

I look on with excitement to all the things that I will see and experience in 2009. I hope last year was merely a crescendo, leading up to an even more adventurous and enlightening one.

Perhaps most importantly, though, I look forward to the people in my life and being there for them through fun and bad times. It's cheesy, yes, as is most of this post, but there are times when the magnitude of sunlight in someone's day depends solely on someone whose hand they can grasp, someone who will listen. I want all the people I love to have to use SPF-60.

End of a Road

Ah, so the holiday buzz has finally worn down for me; I say finally because I just dropped Whitney off at the airport this morning after she spent the week with me. Hopefully she got home okay. Sadly I didn't get to spend as much time with her as I would have liked due to working all week, but hopefully she had an okay time (and more importantly, a relaxing time).

So I've got a bit on my plate in the next few days. Today I worked from just before noon until about six just to fill in hours, and tomorrow I'll be pulling the "normal people shift" from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. After that, I anticipate hanging out with Nicole and spending Sunday driving somewhere random and interesting - preferably photograph-worthy. I won't be coming into work until about four in the afternoon on Monday, so I could be in for a late night.

At some point I've also got to coax Claire to meet me at a restaurant so that I can give her the (especially teensy) Minnesota-themed gift I got for her. Nicole seemed to like hers, so that's a plus!

Tonight I just get to hang out and be alone for a bit, which is pretty cool. It seems like I have a grass is always greener mentality; too long alone and I get lonely and seek out other people to be with, and too long without having the apartment to myself makes me long for a day of privacy. So, I suppose today is that day. My plan for the evening is to grab a sandwich and eat some ice cream before heading to bed fairly early tonight. I got about four hours sleep last night, so I could use a good night's sleep and a half before I pull my eight hour tomorrow. I'll live. And I've got something to look forward to!