Social Time and News from Texas

[abka]

This was one of the busier (and better weekends) that I've had in a while. Lots to write about so I'm going to break it up by day.

Friday:
Friday I went on the WCMA summer fieldtrip. First we went to DIA Beaconwhich was absolutely amazing! Truly incredible. Then to see Bard College's new performing arts building designed by Frank Gehry. We got a tour and even to see part of a rehearsal for their upcoming opera Osud. Then we went to a field full of bugs and sort of mediocre sculpture, but we didn't stay too long.
Afterwards Denis picked me up and we went to Eleven (the trendiest restaurant in the area) with everyone from our other job at Agora Media. We got to meet everyone from the Brooklyn office as well as some other North Adams people and spouses/significant others/children. It was great to meet a whole new group of intelligent young (20s through early 40s I'm guessing) people. Not to mention that dinner and drinks were great (and free), Denis is still talking about how good the hanger steak was. I hope there are more company events in the future (our boss mentioned something about Las Vegas, depending on how things go?).

Saturday:
Saturday Denis worked 7:30am-10:30am at Best Buy, then we worked 10:15-4:15pm at Agora, then he had Best Buy again from 6-10:30pm. I went to a co-worker's (from WCMA) birthday party which was right down the street. I wasn't feeling great and didn't expect to stay long, but I ended up chatting with a lot of people and having a good time. There were a lot of people from work there, plus some older graduates of my grad. program (one who is at NYU and offered me a place to stay if I want to go look at the school this fall) which were great to talk too.
Then I went home and watched movies (must take advantage of expensive HBO). I saw Kissing Jessica Stein, which was cute and funny, and I identified with the neuroticism of the lead character, and then got kind of depressed because started thinking that this would be the only way that I would become best girlfriends with someone (I never had a "best" female friend, even as a kid, something I've often wanted), of course Denis didn't take kindly to this idea. Oh there I go again talking about things you're not supposed to talk about publically when you're married, except to your best girlfriends, which I don't really have, sigh. The next movie on, High Art, which I've seen before, didn't help cheer me up at all, just made me nostalgic for college and the Breakfast Club. Went to bed kind of sad.

Sunday:
Sunday we did a bunch of errands (I even did some sewing, who knew I would actually get around to mending). We went and saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was a fun 2-hours although not an earth-shakingly good movie. Had fun identifying the literary references to the idiot high-school kids in the lobby. I also talked to my sister for over an hour and found out that my parents (and maybe now Denis and I too) will be going to an island in Texas for a week next January. Not sure how exciting that will be, but Melissa is now 21 so the three (or four if her boyfriend comes) of us can head either to Austin or Mexico and go out at night. Now back to work, it's Monday, ho hum. Didn't do any grad. school/Fulbright stuff this weekend which I feel kind of guilty about, but not horribly.

Comments

[mrsjadephoenix.livejournal.com]

I never had a "best" female friend, even as a kid, something I've often wanted

Not being traditionally girly, I can empathize a lot with this, even though I did have more female friends when I was younger. In high school actually, my best friend was a girl, but we didn't really do girl stuff together. We both didn't like dresses or makeup or girly magazines (except sometimes we looked at them to get a laugh). We didn't gossip about boys, because we were both not the kind of person to get flightly crushes like that. We just went to movies together and played video games together and stuff like that, so it wasn't a typical girlfriend relationship.

Since high school, I haven't had all that many girlfriends. I'm the kind of person who, if I'm in a relationship, my significant other needs to be my best friend so yeah, having a "best female friend" is sort of difficult, considering I've never swung that way. ;-)

(And come to think of it, some silly high school people tried to label me and my best female friend from high school as a "lesbian" couple - weird.)

[abka.livejournal.com]

Most of my friends in highschool were girls, but the relationships were somewhat superficial. They were fun to hang out with and I'm still friends with several of them, but there was a level of intimacy, of talking about things that are really important to you, that never happened. Topics that routinely came up in Amarna discussions in college were never broached in highschool (despite some of my efforts). A lot of it was that within our group there were pairs of best friends or other people outside the group that people we're best friends with. I was mostly paired with Tim (when we were dating) and never had the plutonic thing.

[abka.livejournal.com]

ah, can't correct comments, I do know the difference between "were" and "we're."

[toran.livejournal.com]

But do you know the difference between plutonic and platonic? :P

[abka.livejournal.com]

yes, darn it, I'm writing at work and my computer is in the common room and faces outward to I have to type fast and don't have much time to edit. That's my present excuse.

[mrsjadephoenix.livejournal.com]

The Amarna folks are the closest group of folks I've ever met. The kinds of discussion that went on within our group of friends were definitely on a deeper level than I was used to experiencing from high school, and which I frankly haven't really experienced much since.

I think that's why I cling to my Amarna friends so much - the close connections felt really natural there, whereas right now with my work friends for example, we're all friendly to each other but it feels more superficial like you were saying. It's not that we don't care about each other - it's more like it somehow doesn't seem as appropriate to talk about more serious and meaningful things. It's like there's some invisible barrier or something.

It really struck me one time at college when I went to a discussion about depression that was happening in my dorm cluster. We got a random smattering of students from the dorm, and the person leading the discussion was talking about the various signs of depression and how to approach someone that you think might be depressed. A couple people (they were boys, but I don't think it's limited to boys) remarked, "But...I don't really talk about feelings to my friends. It would be weird to just go up to someone and say 'Hey, are you feeling okay?'" This just baffled me - in my opinion, if you can't talk about your feelings to your friends... what's the point? I mean, I you can have activity partners and stuff, but what really makes people your friend if you're not somehow emotionally connected?

Anyway, sorry to ramble. I don't really know where I'm going with this, other than to say I agree about Amarna friends being uber cool. *sigh* =)

[abka.livejournal.com]

I agree that Amarna friends are some of the closest (and coolest) people I've met. How fortunate that Justin decided to start (affectionately?) calling me "wench" while I was waitressing at Lone Pine Tavern freshman year.

[toran.livejournal.com]

Hey yeah, good point. Arrrrr!

For the record, it was totally affectionate.

[coffman.livejournal.com]

Had fun identifying the literary references to the idiot high-school kids in the lobby.

Yeah, Alan Moore, who wrote the comic on which the movie is based (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1563898586/qid=1058218460/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-5917621-4783108) as well as the excellent comic Watchmen (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0930289234/qid=1058218460/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/104-5917621-4783108), is a well-read guy.

I haven't read the comic or seen the movie, but I really like what I have read of Moore's, and I'm curious to at least read the comic. Most of the literary references are pretty straightforward (at least for you or me or most of our friends who aren't idiot high-school kids in the lobby), but had I not read it elsewhere, I wouldn't have known where the character of Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery in the movie) came from. He's from King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard. Incidentally, that literary character is rumored to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

As I mentioned, I haven't seen the movie or read the comic, but I understand that there are some interesting differences. First off, Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer were added for the movie; they had no role in the comic. Secondly, Moore's version was, as usual, a good bit darker than the movie version - for instance, at the comic's opening Quatermain is an opium-addicted mess and The Invisible Man is having his perverted way at an all-girls school.

[toran.livejournal.com]

I'm absolutely getting the comic now that I've seen the film. I think I would have been too seeing the movie if I'd done things the other way round.

Strangely, in spite of the fact that I've read King Solomon's Mines, I totally forgot who Allan Quatermain was. I like that he's essentially the first pulp action hero though.

In the film, they're extremely good about giving big long explanations as to who everyone is. This is moderately useful and not annoying in the case of Quatermain who is a fairly obscure literary figure and whose expositional bit is worked pretty well into the story. The other characters... well, less acceptable. They keep stopping the action to allow the characters a soliloquoy on who and what they are. The only ones they don't do this for are Jekyll/Hyde and Captain Nemo. Presumably they decided that even idiot Americans know who they are.
I can understand explaining a little about the Invisible Man and being like; "Check it out. It's Tom Sawyer. He's a special agent. Cool, huh?" and I recognize the need to say; "This is Mina Harker. She's from Dracula. Dig it."
But I made the mistake of saying to a friend of mine from work yesterday (a person who took comparative literature and feminist deconstruction as a double major or something) that I thought it was dumb that they had a big long exposition about Dorian Grey because he's widely known. This, of course, was the point when I realized she didn't know who Dorian Grey was. Sigh.
The moral of the story? Um... curse you, Vashar?

[mrsjadephoenix.livejournal.com]

The moral of the story? Um... curse you, Vashar?

There's always that, but I think the moral of the story is that our group of friends is overeducated! And now poor because we shelled out so much money for college. Um. Go us!