lifetimes are catching up with me

Last night, MM and I went to Market Bar in the Ferry Building. I had hoped to take her to the Ferry Building to indulge in a little window shopping- the place is teeming with ridiculously expensive pastries, cheeses, wines, mushrooms, and JI had told me that on Thursday evenings, they usually hold a farmer's market with all sorts of overpriced and exotic produce. By the time we got there, near 7, the place was empty, most of the stores were closed, and there was no farmer's market to be found anywhere. There was also an event of some sort going on, so Market Bar was deserted.

The food was just what I wanted- everything tasted so good; even my responsible side dish of wilted spinach was delicious. MM even ordered a Kumquat Soda (wtf?!? I didn't even know what a kumquat should taste like) that turned out to be so tasty that I am considering hunting around for it in the local markets. And because I rarely see MM, and she had dropped the news that she was 7 months pregnant, we both turned a completely blind eye to the exorbitant cost of dining there, absorbed instead in catching up with each other's lives.

MM and I diverged somewhere along the way and wound up on completely different trajectories. And it is nice to know that, even when that happens, it is possible for two people to respect each other's choices and to be genuinely happy for each other. That sounds so obvious and so simple, but it is interesting how rarely friendships unfold in that manner.

It turns out we had not seen each other since February. That did not seem that long ago, not even a full year. Yet when we got down to the business of recounting what had transpired for each of us since then, it was rather overwhelming. We kept pausing and then saying, "Oh, and I don't think I told you this either."

I am not sure if it is evident from these daily ramblings, but I was on lockdown for quite some time, years. I had my nose to the grindstone, head to the stars. But as I started thinking of what has happened to me in the past year, I realized that this has really been a period of coming out of my cage, and I've been doing just fine. I am a little surprised at it, because I am still largely preoccupied by The Goal. So much remains uncertain and unclear. But I think at some now-unidentifiable point, I simply snapped and thought f*** it. Or perhaps it was not active. Perhaps it just happened to me. Certainly, a series of unpredictable events have occurred since the last time I saw MM. But I am not sure how much of it was just a bizarre alignment of the fates, and how much of it was what I allowed into my life. I have been just busy enough not to have the time to scrutinize and tease out such nuances- or maybe I have kept myself busy enough.

Just to make life even more unstable and uncertain, that job that got dangled in front of me? The fools are throwing a full-court press at me now. This is a really difficult call, and I am trying to be as level about it as I can. I have told the hiring manager that it is a tough call for me now. This current job is mind numbing and the suck but it's not killing me at the moment, and I plan to hand them my resignation as soon as they hand me my bonus. On the other hand, if I take the new job, it would be interesting work, but intense, would involve a lot of travel, and would mean that I would have to stay in Corporate America all the way to the summer, cutting into plans for a period of rest before embarking on the culmination of The Goal. Now I know why I struggled so much in multivariate calculus.

And let me leave you with more tales of 12-year old behavior:

Co-worker GBF: (looking out the window) Hey look, it's your favorite guy.
me: I have a favorite guy? Where?
CWGBF: There. (pointing at speck in distance in window)
me: Who is that?
CWGBF: SC.
me: Shut up!

Don't get me wrong- I can't think of a better way to end the week than sliding into pre-adolescent conversation.