i just got back from junior formal. if you don’t believe me, come to griffin 302 and take a look: i’m sitting here in my dress slacks, black square-toe docs, and wifebeater undershirt, dress shirt and tie strewn on the floor to my left (incidentally, according to hanes, i am not wearing a “wifebeater” but an “a-shirt”. according to my dad this selfsame article of clothing is a “guinea tee”. perhaps hanes is too uncomfortable with and my dad too old for the unpleasant connotation of the name. i prefer to think of the name not as being built up from components with a determined semantic value [“wife” and “beater”], but being an english primitive, the fact that it sounds phonologically similar to said semantic components a complete accident. more interesting to you all is perhaps why i wear this particular style of clothing at times. this is a great topic for discussion, as it involves themes of pride, insecurity, frivolity, and toned muscles. tonight let’s just say that i was out of regular undershirts. and this was in fact the truth).
junior formal was held in the carnelian room atop the 52 stories of the bank of america building in san francisco. needless to say, the views from the event’s two admittedly-crowded rooms were nothing short of spectacular. before arriving at the dance, we sat to a late dinner at 8:30pm at the cosmopolitan cafe, an upscale live-jazz type restaurant. the food did not disappoint, and everyone ate to his or her utter satisfaction.
of course, food, dancing, and skyscrapers are all purely secondary considerations. what makes or breaks an event such as this is, obviously, the date! and, while i can remember plenty of dances in the past years, i feel that i must have particularly lucked out on this one because of my date. i had the privilege of taking the beautiful miss mackenzie wallace, a student at santa clara university. she looked stunning in her red dress (of course), proved to be an interesting conversationalist (for me, this means taking in stride my off-the-wall and irrelevant comments, my propensity to focus the attention on myself, and the random gibberish noises i make occasionally), and didn’t even like dancing! three very admirable qualities. she also smelled good, which is something i’ve noticed about girls in general but they must do something special for dances. or something.
but now is the sucky time when everyone’s gone home and i’m sitting awake at 3:45am trying to resurrect the experiences of a few hours ago and put them into blog form. honestly i would have liked nothing better than for the night to have continued indefinitely. i don’t know exactly what that means, but i think it was because of a combination of (1) enjoying my date’s company and (2) dreading the thought of having to get up tomorrow and work all day, and all the next day, and all the next days until next weekend. either (1) or (2) would have sufficed as a reason for the wish on its own, and so their concurrence lent fuel to the frustration that time moves forward without much in the way of stasis.
still, i think this is a key area of my personality in which i can grow; namely, that i always want a good experience to last forever, mostly out of a fear of returning to the baseline of the normal. i can’t seem to internalize what i think is the correct view: good experiences are good partly just in virtue of the fact that they are not forever…if they were, wouldn’t they lose the very distinctions which make them good? due to the failure of truly grasping this, i have a horrible problem in coming down off of any kind of ‘high’ in experience, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. i tend, in fact, to get immediately frustrated for a short time after one of these events because i haven’t let go, or really believed it to be over. kind of like a kid on one of those little rides outside of k-mart–the helicopter, or the horse, or the racecar–the quarter’s long spent, and the pistons long still, and yet the tyke keeps gyrating and balancing, pretending the wind into his hair and denying reality the chance to catch up with his fleeing it.
of course, the last thing i wanted was to turn this blog into a pity party or another tedious recital of things i want to change about myself. who cares? not me! (maybe this is a problem). at any rate the fact that i’m writing right now and trying to hold in my lungs the spirit of the fun time i had tonight shows that it was, really, a fun time! so i can stand back, package it up, smile one more time, and give it to god for safekeeping. hopefully that will solve all my problems and clear my mind enough for the sleep which i desperately need, having been awake for about 21 hours. that being said, adios y que el les bendiga.
virtual disc on spin: it’s hard to find a friend | pedro the lion
