Here is something from around July 7, to placate Dyanne while I work on more:

Fifteen minutes with you
Oh I wouldn't say no

Seth and I saw Napoleon Dynamite circa its release date, which brought back surprisingly fond memories of middle school dweebdom. I know, I'm still a dweeb, but less spectacularly. Back then, there was such unself-conscious ungainliness among my group of friends (the pariah femme clique). It was charming, idyllic, and nowadays alien, since we're all so relentlessly self-aware. One illustrative anecdote: The Humanities and Communications Magnet held a graduation pool party/formal dinner/dance, which provoked various degrees of consternation as I wondered first whether to wear a two-piece swimsuit (I decided against and was very much in the minority), and later whether to wear a dress or a skirt, pantyhose, makeup, etc. The dance itself was a mess, after all my preoccupation. A nerdy boy - worse off than me, I perceived, in the social hierarchy - cornered me and confessed a three-year crush and asked me to dance. After a brief, awkward attempt, I ran and hid in an upstairs dressing room for the remainder of the evening. Aww (grin).


Before the movie, Seth and I walked through Bethesda's night scene: whole blocks of outdoor tables sporting tapas, Thai food, & more. Seth expressed an old desire to swipe food from a table as we passed, which, I pointed out, he's been saying for almost as long as I've known him. His courage/manhood thus challenged, he left me at a bench by the former Giant-turned-store-for-seasonal-or-transient-proprieters, returning several minutes later, at a jog, with a handful of nachos for both of us. [He acquired them with permission from two young men at Jaleo, who reportedly looked Weirded Out.] On June 25, Seth arranged another food-related outing with Nick S. and Tara, for beef and pork ribs, buffalo wings, collard greens, etc. I'd never eaten such things before, and, in spite of my relative finesse with chopsticks/Maryland crab dissembling (or not so much), I found dinner very taxing and overly awkward. Afterwards, we meandered over to Bethesda Metro, where we discovered innovative phallic graffiti, and Nick chased Seth around brandishing an umbrella.


An old friendly acquaintance of mine, Griff, appeared from the shadows and engaged us (mostly Nick and Seth) in esoteric conversation for more than an hour. Then, Nick left us for a concert, and Tara and I fell asleep to the sounds of Wayne's World in Seth's basement. She and I were roused unhappily at approx. 12:50 AM, and we made it home - to meet again, nine hours later, for a day-trip to Rehobeth Beach, DE. Liliya accompanied/transported us, Tara navigated, and I sat uselessly in the backseat eating other people's food. We got lost only two or three times. In various states of scandalous undress (poorly concealed bikinis), we appealed for help from 1.) antique show docents at a community center, 2.) staffpeople at a small airport in a cornfield, and 3.) clerks in a tiny convenience store located (for serious) on a median strip splitting a fairly well-trafficked road. We did make it to the beach by early afternoon, and, after further adventures in parking and eating lunch, we completed a condensed version of all my favorite childhood beach things.


Highlights included: playing in the water, playing at Funland, consuming a half-pound of Candy Kitchen sweets & fudge, and later eating delicious Chinese carryout in our laps as we crossed the Bay Bridge (it appears, from this entry, that meals are very important to me). Funland, the boardwalk amusement park, has acquired a souped-up Real Ride, "The Claw," which Tara and I tried. It has a retractable cylindrical base, from which extend arms (or "talons," I guess), which are attached to cages (?? God knows?). Tara and I were bolted into a purple cage, which had no internal seatbelts, only handgrips - the idea being that, if you lose your grip, you fall into the grill part of the cage, but I'm fairly confident I could fit through the slats. So, the ride begins, the cylinder protracts, the cages spin, and then the arms begin to pivot and the cages turn upside-down. At that point, Tara and I were looking up at the underside of the ride - the mechanics of the cylinder and arms - and I was contemplating the size of the slats, etc. I told her afterwards that it was the amusement park equivalent of a tequila shot: more doable if you don't know what to expect. [To be continued....]

What I've been doing with my free time (including the countless hours at work when I'm not working) instead of blogging:

15% Reading Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, which is fun but taking a long time because...
40% Sleeping. I am far too young or old or lazy for a 40-hour workweek. Also:
25% Updating the DP Style Guide, incl. cross-referencing and converting the whole thing to HTML
20% Socializing

But a post is coming soon.

You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands

Seth was away at Beach Week on June 3, so we celebrated our two-year anniversary on Monday, June 7. Last year, we went to Pho; this year it was A&J's, for a $10 meal of dumplings, tripe, bean curd, and wontons. He asked me what we should do after lunch, and I suggested going back to my house. "To do what?" he said.

"Hang out, have conversations,” I said. “We've been managing fine so far."

"Do you mean today, or for the past two years?"

Both are generally true, as I replied - I can't conceive of the sheer volume of conversation hours the two of us have logged. Our dates have been mostly walking around/sitting in various Bethesda locales, punctuated with media appreciation and restaurant meals. It's remarkable how much we've found to say about ourselves, our friends, books, and music (with incidental other things like world affairs and religion). For example, on our anniversary celebration day, we: played a record of T.S. Eliot reading "Prufrock" and made fun of his British accent/Midwestern drawl fusion; became disproportionately excited over "Bizarre Love Triangle" while playing New Order in the car; and were self-consciously sentimental.


Other things that we've done on dates more recently (because the chronology is superfluous): walked to The Other Side of Town, where there are actual homeless people and a fenced-in dirt lot next to a dingy CVS, and lay on the couch in his basement after his parents were asleep, watching "Who's Line is it Anyway?" For once, in the countless times we've done that, we didn't have to worry about a legally enforced midnight curfew - because I am no longer 17, and neither is he! We also played Scrabble, visited Bethesda ES playground, and read poetry out loud. I was pleased to report those things to my boss, when he asked how I spent my day off (last Thursday). He looked a little appalled and said, "Ah, freewheeling youth."


On Thursday, June 10, I saw Seth, as well as Hank and Tara, for Harry Potter. Neither of the boys has read the books, and Seth hadn't even seen the first two movies; Tara and I provided whispered plot summaries. Afterwards, we sat for a while in the picnic chairs chained outside Potbelly's, while Hank rooted through Tara's purse. (He also abandoned it in a wheelchair-access elevator across the street, but Seth made him retrieve it.) On Wednesday, June 16, Nick S., Tara, Natalie G., and I met for dinner, and afterwards Seth came and Natalie left – and we went to my place to watch Duck Soup. It was our first exposure to a Marx Brothers movie (for everyone but Seth), and it was really surprisingly funny. We chased it with soft porn that we found on channel 350, playing with my TV's new sybaritic features.