kenjisan

A wedding to remember

All things considered, I'd say my weekend ranked in at about an "okay." Friday night, I don't even remember what I did. Saturday was full: running, driving, attending a wedding. Sunday wasn't, but was good anyway: hanging with the T-streeters and Gabe, eating at Luna, playing (and losing) hockey.

Mainly, it's been a weekend to really stop and think. Attending that wedding sure helped put an interesting spin on those thoughts. Two observations:

1. After three years, conversations tend to revolve around our jobs. "What do you do?" is that inevitable question, and the inevitable answer is, "I work in DC, I live in Alexandria." Our lives become defined by our jobs, summed up by our careers and the neighborhoods in which we live. As Cyndi pointed out, we don't get to think about the things that make us more interesting: I play poker on Wednesdays, Hockey on Sundays, I'm training for a half-marathon. The little minutae of our lives get lost in the summary.
   
2. I'm amazed at how bad I am with names and people. It had only been three years, why can't I remember the name of someone I hung out with? It gave me a really scary thought: in three years, or five years, or ten years, what am I going to remember about this life I'm living now?
   

Point number two has really resonated with me. At first, I had these visions of running into you guys down the road and playing the, "Hey... [shit, can't remember your name] what's up?" A few months ago, I passed a guy I lived next to for a year, and couldn't remember him. How shitty is that? But I came to the conclusion that I won't forget many of these friends I have now. You guys are so much closer than most of the people I knew then, and those that were as close (or comparable), I remember. And that's comforting.

It's just kind of crazy that this circle that I keep right now can be so large—possibly larger than my college experience—yet so tight. It gives me a lot to be thankful for.

The next two years

Thanks to Verizon's new policies of totally fucking over anyone who doesn't sign anything less than a two-year contract, I have now signed a two-year contract. That means I'll be in the States for at least the next two years (for those of you who haven't heard yet, NZ is off, caput, dead).

A couple nights ago, I had this weird dream where I was training for a half-marathon at Washington & Lee. There were two other runners on the track, training for the same thing, and we were all running around the quarter-mile lap at an amazingly high speed. My trainer (yes, I had a trainer in my dream) was none other than Cyndi's dad, and he was yelling at the other two runners and praising me. Oh, and I was chewing on one of those candy cigarettes you used to be able to buy when we were kids.

I'm not sure what the meaning of this dram is, or why I shared it, but it struck me as relevant here. There was this weird sense of redundancy to the whole dream, even though it appeared (from the verbal feedback I was getting) to be the right thing to do.

Anyway, my number hasn't changed, and suprisingly, Verizon transferred the number within 5 minutes of walking out the doors. My new phone is the ultra-trendy Kyocera SE47 "slider" phone and I've already received a phone call in the metro, which made me stupidly giddy.

Things are looking up, even if they're looking familiar.

Origins

Today is NCARB's annual company picnic. It starts at 11:30. We aren't required to come back afterwards, but we are requred to come in until it begins. Because of this, there are about a half dozen kids running around here, killing time before the running around moves to a park.

Curiously, it's sparked a memory of when I was a young kid at my dad's office. To entertain me as he worked, I played on my first Apple, the Macintosh SE. More specifically, I played with the Paint and Draw programs. I think it's interesting that the programs that entertained me as a kid pay for my rent, sustenance, and entertainment now.

I wonder if any of these kids will make a career out of whatever it is they seem to be doing. Maybe this one kid'll be a short-distance track star.

What's worse than moving?

Being sick and moving. My beautiful singing voice has been hijacked by some kind of terrible chest cold and both rent and the new home will wait for no man. So here I am at last, moved in*.

It's not really that I hate moving, but more the Act of moving. In theory, moving is something that I could love: change of location, change of pace, wiping the slate clean, throwing out all the refuse that had filled in the cracks at the old place. There's a kind of rebirth that emerges from a move, like getting a new job or new computer, and that is something I like. It's really the Act that I hate: so many boxes, so much complete crap that I can't either part with or live without. There's the loading and unloading of the truck/car. There are those stairs upon stairs to climb. Really, pretty much every aspect of the Act is, well, the worst.

Throw a sickness on top of "the worst" and you get the worster. And let me tell you, the worster isn't a happy place to be. Still, here I sit on a (really tall) bed, typing away in a room cluttered with opened and unopened boxes, and I am happy. Maybe that's because the Act is almost over. Why does looking at the Ikea catalog make me wish I was going to stay here longer? Am I becoming domesticated at last? Have we witnessed an evolution of Kenji before our very eyes?

I don't really think so, but let's just say that I'm beginning to see the merits of staying put, and leave it at that. Who knows what will come next? Maybe I'll finally understand all those crazy people who want to raise children...

*And by moved in, I mean I have a bed with sheets on it surrounded by boxes.