Sunday, Oct. 03, 2004
.good is October in weekend first The, posted at 9:40 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I had a good weekend.I've requested from the restaurant that I have one weekend night free every week, and it appears that's going to be Friday nights. So far, so good. I have discovered that one of the most simple pleasures of my life in Baltimore is rushing to Cross Street Market soon after school lets out on Fridays - before the place gets too crowded - and pulling up a stool at the sushi station down there. Coupled with good company, usually my friend Ryan, we scarf down good sushi and guzzle beer from huge plastic cups that are $5. After Cross Street gets too crowded, we head over to Thirsty Dog, where we enjoy the company of the red-headed bartender who is too tall for me but is ever so nice. And we enjoy some of the 2-for-$3 ales. I usually get the blueberry ale, because I am confident in my masculinity. And it's damn good. Yup, that's a great Friday afternoon in Baltimore.
Alright, so I've only done it twice, but I'm going to try to make it a regular thing. When the going gets rough this week, I'll just think about that sushi and beer.
But it shouldn't get too rough this week. I don't officially work at the restaurant, although tomorrow night we have a meeting that will introduce us officially to the new manager. I'm feeling pretty good about him. Meetings there are usually fairly dull, but afterwards we head over to Gecko's, and the bar tab's on them. Then, I don't work again until Saturday, and the week will be highlighted by a wiffleball game on Wednesday, and some house showings with my real estate agent. I'm thinking more and more about just buying the house I'm in (after all, all it needs is a new stove, a washer/drier, a painjob, all new windows, and a few holes in the wall fixed), but I need to see what else is out there. And there's the whole deciding if I for sure want to stay in Baltimore or not thing, too. Because I'm excited about coaching baseball again (just signed up for the mid-Atlantic coaching conference), I'm currently in the "stay in B-more" mindset.
The weekend wasn't so busy where I couldn't get some reading done (Lord of the Flies, rereading while teaching it), as well as a couple of great workouts and a long trip to Barnes & Noble. At Barnes & Noble, I lounged for a bit while waiting for my stomach to settle, and picked up the new biography of Alice Walker, A Life and thumbed through it. As you may remember from this entry, one of my favorite of the last year, the year when I rarely wrote well, I really like her work, finding it, while erratic, to be very moving at times. I thumbed through it, and found in the index a reference to Tracy Chapman. I go to the page, and apparently the two of them had/have a relationship for years, but Chapman's so private that it's never really gotten any attention. It seems pretty clear that it's there, primarily because of this poem that Walker wrote to Chapman's sister, and that's fine. Power to them. Both Chapman and Walker have, in different ways and different times, changed the way I viewed the world, so I think it's pretty cool if the two of them are/were together. So, tonight I google their names together. Well, what comes up as the 7th or 8th hit is my own personal college website, where I listed them together when I built the website six years ago or so. I can't even believe it's still online, to be honest. Anyhow, I sort of feel like I called that one.
I just went to the page, and, wow, I was really fat. It's nice to remind myself sometimes, as I'm about 20 pounds over where I'd like to be, but still 100 pounds less than what I was. And, another thing, I sounded like quite a dork when I was 22. I'm glad I've grown up since then. I don't know how anyone who has experienced urban public schools could give much of a thought to animal rights, to be honest. I did, though. I wish I could disconnect my name from that old page. What was I thinking, I wonder now. I really didn't have much of a clue. There is definitely much relief in seeing that I'm not at all the same person I was five or six years ago. Five or six years from now, I hope I've made some other transitions as well.
