last thursday i flew home. shortly after arriving at my house, i left again to see the matrix reloaded with my friends. it was a fantastic movie, and i’m still shuffling bits of it around in my head to construct a coherent plot structure.
the few days after that were filled with parties. graduation parties, mostly, but i also attended one wedding (an outside wedding, on the grass, sunny, 95 degrees, and humid as a glass of water). the parties were also fun. at the first one i went to (my sister’s), i was able to run around with my brother outside in a terrific thunderstorm, tossing a frisbee. later on in that same thunderstorm duty found me on the roof, unclogging one of our gutters, and praying that if lightning decided to strike, it would go for something besides me. the rest of the party was spent gradually losing a game of chess to my good friend josh, and eating little croissant hot dogs or something.
i realized all of a sudden at these parties that my sister and her friends have grown up. it seems that until last weekend i had still been thinking of them all as if they were high school freshman, trapped in shy and insecure bodies and minds. and then, magically, they now appear 5 or 6 years older. the girls are all beautiful and no longer the annoying, giggle-prone crazies everyone knows high school girls are, and the guys are for the most part taller than me, laid back, studly, and surprisingly wise. for the first time, maybe, i was able to hang out with many of these people, not because they were my “sister’s friends”, but because they were fun in and of themselves. (this again shows my snobbiness in who i find enjoyable, and for what reasons. however, i think maturity is a somewhat allowable criterion for enjoyable hanging out)
obviously, most of these kids were just as mature and just as fun a year ago, and so you might wonder what the big deal is. the deal is, i think, that there is a line crossed when someone graduates from high school, and this line, in the friendship calculus, adds a few years. so, if i am allowed to be friends with people at most 3 years younger than me, i will be able to hang out with high school freshman when i am a high school senior, but when i am a freshman in college, i can only hang out with high school seniors and up (or perhaps juniors). this puts those who were high school freshmen when i was a senior out of my “friend” range until they graduate.
obviously, that’s a bunch of crap. but it’s fun to make up. the point is, my little sister’s all grown up and i’m so excited to see who she will choose to be in life! and the other point is, if you are an older brother with a younger sister, don’t be too mean to her and her friends when they are in the awkward high school phase, because if you’re not careful they will grow up to be amazingly hot and you’ll be kicking yourself. then again, you could always date older women, like me.
what else did i do in orlando? i went running a few times with david, once at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, in a sunny 95-degree swelter. i went to a pool hall for the first time in my life and lost miserably at cutthroat and nine-ball. and, get this, i randomly went to the pete yorn show at the house of blues in orlando on monday, thanks to the paste-musicking of jason killingsworth. it was a pretty good show.
soon enough, of course, the fun and not-working had to end, and i flew back to stanford on tuesday. luckily, i had a lot to look forward to, as the following night was the pedro the lion, ester drang, and starflyer 59 concert. it was in san francisco, and i went with show-loving friends mackenzie, chuck, and alex. i haven’t thought about it enough to say for sure, but it may have been my favorite SF show ever. ester drang was beautiful, starflyer was actually entertaining, and pedro rocked harder than he ever has before. in particular, the live version of ‘second best’ (played with 6 people on stage) alone was worth the price of admission. on top of that, not being satisfied to provide us with musical delicacies which can only be likened to the sad addictiveness of life itself, dave bazan was on his best verbal game, making clever comment after insightful observation time and time again.
and that brings us to now. 2 am. back from seeing the matrix reloaded a second time. as i said, good stuff. and as i now say, good night!
