Mini-Break

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Taking the weekend to go back to my quaint Southern town to play with old friends. These friends are very different, but much loved and treasured. It's almost like I lived a different life when I knew them, and even though we're running off at 100 mph in every direction, I love & cherish the times when we get to play together.

Til I post the photos...

Black and White Nights...in D.C.

I don’t like D.C. so I’m happy that I actually didn’t “go” there, but mainly stayed in Clarendon and Fairfax with Jane, my corporate “pitbull with lipstick”. We took the Vamoose bus down to Arlington and enjoyed tapas, shopping at Tysons, Jane’s housewarming party and a delicious brunch at the Silver Diner.

In Arlington Old Town with Natalia and Jane

There’s a LEGO store in Tysons???

Boy plays with mannequin. See what happens?

With Boy at J’s Black + White party

Breaking it down

(wearing an Alice and Olivia dress)

Discussing the meaning of life over brunch

Silver Diner with Jane and roommate Lori

At Crate & Barrel in Clarendon.

(wearing a Gryphon jacket, H&M tank, Botkier purse)

Thanks for being a wonderful host & friend, Janey!

Road Trippin': San Antonio & Greune, Texas

About a million years ago, some crazy cowboys took a stand at the Alamo. A lot of them died, and San Antonio was founded. As a side trip over the weekend, Alex, Cristiana, Aunt Afina and I went to San Antonio to check out the awesome history, the famed RiverWalk and some tasty tasty guac!

Alex and I in front of the Alamo - Remember the Alamo, y'all.
(wearing a Charlotte Russe top, BCBG linen shorts, payless gladiators)

On the RiverWalk

Here we are in Gruene, another "old" town in Texas, with a quaintly uncomfortable dancehall (open during the summer, no air-conditioning!).

said dancehall, and a little infoz

with happy graduating cousin, about to nom some BBQ in Gruene

Leaving tomorrow :(

Mojai: Funk Is Not Dead in D.C.

I never expect to find good things when I head back to my hometown. It is a perfunctory experience. At best, I spend most of the time in my bedroom or playing with my dog or the random friends I still keep in touch with since high school graduation. At worse, I run into particularly shady ex-friends.

But the pleasant surprise still comes my way. I met up with my friend Rachel in Adams Morgan to check out a funk band, Mojai , and I’m sure glad I did.

While the video is, I’ll admit, a bit poor, the music is transcendental, transparent and rhythmic in its sometimes lullaby-quality, sometimes jazz-jam quality, even with little notes of hard-rock. The keyboards, guitar, bass guitar and seemingly millions of saxophones mesh into brilliant notes. Great for dancing, great for the general vibe of the bar (The Space).

And, I love music sometimes that is just purely instrumental. Lyrics sometimes get in the way of, however cheesy this sounds, the “melody”. You can’t ignore dueling saxophones, but you can ignore (or try to) bad lyrics.

During a funky long keyboard sesh

Home?

I’m laying in my bed. “my” bed. the one i slept in for six years. And not even a bed, but an overpriced silver-frame futon.

I arrived in Baltimore’s Penn Station this morning at 9:50 am after a 2hr train ride from - you guessed it - New York’s Penn Station. original.

Another leg of the journey takes me to oft-traveled highway 695 W to Frederick. It’s a lazy drive with hardly any cars on the road for distraction. A brownish grey Maserati GranTurismo 4.2 passes us - and it seems my two lives have just crossed over.

No rest for the weary - by 11:40 I’m sitting outside my restaurant with some fresh mozzarella sticks and - my favorite - cherry italian soda. Downtown Frederick is sleepy and cheerful and I’m just doing my part to help customers feel at home. Strike up a conversation about coffee mugs. Get more pages read of “The Geography of Love”. Enjoy the sunshine. Today’s the busiest day of the weekend - the day I think I feel like I never left New York. Hustling to a meeting with a financial advisor (please, tell me how i can retire by 40), doctor’s meeting (bad news), eventually, a much - needed facial at The Strand. The sun (84 degrees) is making everything too hot; like summer surprised me when I was looking for more hot cocoa and warm soup.

The clocktower in Baker Park, Frederick, MD

Even though I’ve made the switch from Southern Belle to Uptown Girl, it still feels like a part of me is irrefutably linked to this place. History was made here, even if it was so inconsequential that it didn’t affect anyone outside a 5 mile radius. Life was much smaller when 21701 and (301) were my only history - before I moved to 13210 and (315) or 10031 and (212). My first boyfriend, proms, endless school trips and “please stand for the pledge” and Field Day.

I really miss Field Day.

How often do people end up in their hometown for the rest of their lives. Close by, maybe, but not “in it”. Have your kids go to your schools, become the Mayor? A line gets crossed from “I gotta get the hell outta this town” and finding that you never left. I never wanted to stay in Maryland and I trade jokes with a colleague (originally from Upper Marlboro) about the “Fredneck” pride I have even now. I love County Fairs, In The Streets, Velvet Lounge, Pit Crew, La Paz chips and salsa, Mudd Puddle, Denny’s, Frederick Coffee Company, C. Burr Artz PL, The Bridge, Wonder Book and Video, Wa Wa’s, Sheetz MTO sammies, The Mall, Barber’s Darkroom, My Darkroom, Bob Evan’s (Rt. 40), Belles’, Teal Lane, and all the rest of my haunts (21+ - Firestone’s & Old Towne…never fails).

But I’m wondering, as I’m walking around the room I spent the past ten years living in, how do you know when your “room” isn’t yours anymore. When you can’t recognize anything. When it’s so stripped bare to create your new life that it’s rotten and empty…and you don’t even want to set foot inside it? I was 15 and had a vision. I was so over the pastel pink walls and tidy preppie furniture. I wasted no time signing up then-boyfriend (now married) to help me paint the room navy blue. It took a gallon of paint before I realized 1 gallon does not = one wall.

I let my friends write witty quotes in Sharpie all over my closet doors and I put up “Evil Dead” and “Trainspotting” posters on my walls to show off how cool I thought I was. I burned mixes of Dashboard Confessional, The Get Up Kids and Reel Big Fish for the boyfriend and chain-smoked cigarettes on the roof outside my window when my parents fell asleep in the room next door. I stayed up late chatting on the phone until said parents, weary from my contradictory combativeness and ambivalence, half-heartedly told me to shut up. And, let’s not forget my 15th birthday, where as my mom was singing me happy birthday with a homemade ladyfinger cake, a combustible mix of cliques were present - goth kids, druggies, photo nerds, skaters, Cool Juniors. I made home movies about interviewing famous, albeit, invisible, diplomats and Rwandan warlords (fancying myself a Eastern European Christiane Amanpour, I think). I set up a volleyball court in my backyard for my graduation party but ended up playing spades and drinking non-alcoholic beer. Spades was a theme that summer, but we quickly realized non-alcoholic beer was not.

Leaving my old room for a dorm wasn’t a change in scenery. There, I could always sneak out, sneak food, sneak boys and phone calls, and still keep a part of myself hidden and mysterious. My sophomore year in college, I came home to find the reliable silver futon had found new roommates: whitewashed desk/bureau set from the early 90s and a great big plasma TV. It all fit wonderfully, but now it’s empty. The shelves hold books I don’t want to bring to my apartment, scratched CDs I feel too nostalgic about to throw out, old yearbooks and high school photos, endless cables I have no use for, piles and piles of journals, VHS tapes (both commercial and homemade), discarded negatives and Mini-DV cassettes. The scrapyard of my life is in this room. Projects started but never completed-unopened acrylic paints from my “painter” phase. Gaelic and Russian language books and cassettes - though I did succeed in learning conversational Gaelic at one point…but the possibility of actually going to Ireland was depressing, and that was abandoned as well.

I’m in no hurry to clear it out. Where will it all go - all the things I simultaneous want to hoard and toss? My life, being packed into boxes, but also boxes I don’t want?

Until I went away to Syracuse, I hadn’t slept on a proper bed for four years. Bringing the Biologist (the going Boyfriend pseudonym) to F is met with groans and forgetting to pack ibuprofen (for backs made sore by aforementioned futon).

But we’re a lot more alike than he cares to think. Visiting Syracuse, we sleep, once more, on a futon.

All I Want is Beer for Breakfast

On Saturday, I did two things I try hard to avoid. 1) Drinking in the Daytime. 2) Hopping into a car, going on the BQE on a Saturday morning, and getting out of Manhattan.

I’m not a borough snob, I’m the opposite. Some of my closest friends live in Astoria and Brooklyn Heights, so I’m actually there a bit. Haven’t ever spent a great deal of time in Williamsburg and Greenpoint (hipster enclaves in immigrant/ethnic communities - I’m sure it’s to feel “connected”) so , partnering my love of breweries and all their byproducts, and my softness for advertisements in foreign languages ended up bringing me to the Brooklyn Brewery.

The Brewery is housed on N. 11st Street in Brooklyn, across the street from the delicious vintage clothing store Beacon’s Closet and overall awesome skate shop KCDC. Coming from a major alternative-sport-heavy town, I truly respect such a “see” then “do” shopping experience - like a board? Try it out on the ramp. So rad.

But, the true delight is the Brewery in this gritty little section of Wburg. Graffiti is everywhere, with my favorite example being a bubbly “Les Crabs” stamp on the back end of the Brewery wall. Les Crabs? A French gang in Brooklyn? I wonder if they even have sub-sects…some are soft shell, some blue, some King? Do the Blue crabs wear blue - and subsequently get expelled from their high school? Les Crabs popped up even during the ride back home, leading to these very suppositions.

So I’m not a big fan of drinking during the daytime, mainly because I’ve just been during the nighttime and I often don’t want to see another 12oz. But I sucked it up and enjoyed a delicious BB India Pale Ale (my favorite of the Ales). Arriving around 12:30pm, my boy/friends, the Boyfriend & I took a, well, abbreviated tour of the premises, which basically embodied a trip from one room, to another. But it’s ok, like many small(ish) micro brews, they contract out their recipes to larger, more established manufacturers, so they

only produce 1/3 of their total output in Brooklyn. Just like you readers, I was asleep as this was being told to me. Far more interesting was a huge plastic tub of tubes and a dark colored liquid, which, unfortunately, did not contain beer. Quite a Tease.

With a great dollar - beer ratio ($20 for 6), the ability to get delivery pizza and garlic knots and play endless rounds of Kings all afternoon without a hovering snarly waitress makes this a great bet for a Saturday afternoon…if you’re willing to get out of Manhattan.