Update 5/27/07

An update to my life as of late:

1. Job – No go so far. About 2 weeks ago I put out applications to a good 7 or 8 places, and am still waiting to hear back from most of them. One place in the mall, called Museum Earth, looked promising, but the manager there told me to wait 2 weeks before getting back in contact with her. Monday will make 2 weeks, so I’m planning on dressing up all nice and professional like, and venturing forth to check back up on places. Keeping my fingers crossed tight. This entire summer without a job wouldn’t be fun.

2. Austin – I’ve been spending more and more time in Austin with the friends and the boyfriend. Austin is a city I truly feel I can breathe in. It’s a city where weird is the norm, and the white collar Republicans that usually populate the state of Texas are considered the freaks. It’s nice to be openly accepted as pierced and shaved as I am. It’s nice that people here aren’t afraid to make eye contact with me. The air is clean, and the green belt is a magnet for the beautiful long and soaking rain storms. It’s a city that is so anti-city it’s astounding.

My week here has been a slow and relaxing one, but there are certainly some events that are noteworthy. Saturday was my friend Erica’s graduation from UT with her Bachelor’s of English. It was a nice ceremony, because they are kind enough to have separate ceremonies for each of the different schools, so the ceremony we saw was only the English majors walking. They had an Irish trio playing, they even played an Irish rendition of Pomp and Circumstance which was verily awesome. What was nicer about the ceremony was that the speaker was one of the English professors who spoke of the joys of writing and reading, and quoted famous authors and poets. The ceremony was catered to the majors who were graduating, as I assumed it was for the rest of the ceremonies going on across campus. I can only hope to be so lucky with my own graduation ceremony.

Erica got a new camera as a graduation present. Some $600 digital camera which actually physically clicks when you take pictures with it. 6 megapixel or somesuch. Very big and fancy and shiny. She let me play with it some. Lets you take really professional looking photos. We took an afternoon to wander about the Botanical gradens, and being the botanist at heart that she is, Erica was in hog heaven taking pictures of various flowers and plants with it.

Monday was the aptly named “Den of Sin” night at Erica’s house. Everybody had work off the next day, so it’s an excuse for everyone to laze about drinking and shooting the breeze and listening to good music and watching good movies, and generally staying up far too late and being irresponsible. About 3AM we looked outside to notice that the heavens had opened and there was pouring rain. We were standing on the porch with our drinks, watching the rain and smiling. I stuck a hand out from under the covering of the porch. Then an arm. Then a shoulder and a leg. Before I knew it, the four of us had stripped down to our skivvies and were running out in the front yard in the grass, under the pouring rain. There was laughing and hugging and kissing and dancing. This lasted about 10 minutes before we all decided we had appropriately embraced our inner flower-children and were bloody cold, and we made our way back inside to a warm cup of coffee and a stand-up comedy DVD.

Tuesday was, of course, spent recovering by the lot of us. Lots of headaches, lots of the morning waking up and peeling your face off the pillow and facing the throbbing headache and promising, dear god, that you’ll never do it again. Still worth it, though.

Wednesday I got to go up to Georgetown where Drew works and he took me flying. For those who haven’t been paying attention, he is a licensed pilot and flight instructor, and is working as a flight instructor for the next few months as preparation for an interview with Express Jet, a company which he hopes to fly for. Anyways, I drove the 45 minutes up to Georgetown and he took me for my first unofficial official flying lesson. We did a thorough walk around and inspection of the plane before we took it up. It was a little single prop glider which seated 4 people (I think, two flying at the controls and two behind.) Having never been in anything much smaller than something that was meant to carry 300 people across the Atlantic, this was a new thing for me. He took me up and out over Austin proper, and gave me an aerial tour of downtown. He even let me take the controls for a minute, though the short-lived stint of my flying was due completely to my nervousness, and not his mistrust of me. It was a few moments of holding on, turning the wheel slightly to one direction, going “FUCK, the plane is moving!” and centering the controls again, then doing it in the other direction to the same reaction, before going “Ok, that’s enough, take the controls back!” Nonetheless, it’s a start. Perhaps next time I’ll be brave enough. Drew had been talking about a friend getting his private plane fixed and Drew using it to pick me up in Denton, and then fly us both down to Sugar Land for the day to see the parents. He said it’s about an hour and a half flight from Denton to Houston, so I’m gonna need something to do during it, so I might as well get used to flying. I’m not going to argue with him, just still apprehensive about controlling an aircraft that is worth significantly more than me with absolutely no experience. I trust Drew’s judgment, though, and if he says I’m ok doing it than I guess I am.

Yesterday was Drew’s day off. First thing we woke up, got changed into exercise clothes, and headed out to Zilker park, which has a 7 mile dirt jogging/walking/hiking/biking trail around it. We took the 3 mile route on a walk/jog until we were good and decently sweaty, then walked down the street from the complimentary water/stretching station to the Magnolia Cafe down the road. I was dressed only in shorts, tennis shoes, and a sports bra. Drew was in an exercise shirt and jogging shorts and shoes. I expected people to be staring at me, the half-dressed sweaty mohawked girl. I was met with no stares, only friendly smiles and a comfortable silent acceptance.

Austin is just a city of such variety. You’ll find every kind of freak here, from the mohawked and pierced, to the British punk rockers, to the goths swathed in black lace, to the granola-eating, flowey skirt-wearing flower children, to those who are just off-beat enough to make the cut. We tucked into delicious eggs, home fries, and pancakes the size of your head and watched a rare cluster of Austonian Republicans walk in, in their plain-colored polo shirts and khaki shorts and white tennis shoes. The room fell silent for a moment as eyes glanced up to watch them come in, agents of espionage in the impenetrable fortress of the weird. This lasted but a moment, and the Austinites went on happily ignoring them and eating their meals.

The oldest of the three men (it looked to be a UT student, his father, and his grandfather) in a red polo shirt was sitting about at my 11 o’clock. Several times I glanced up to catch him staring openly at me, as I was still dripping in sweat, my ‘hawk a bit tussled, still only in a sports bra. Over my coffee cup I flashed my eyes at Drew sitting across the table, his back to the men, and grinned.

“What?” Drew asked me through a mouthful ofscrambled eggs.

“Normalites at my 11 giving me a good stare-down.”

“Oh?” Drew asked. He turned his head and glanced over his shoulder at the cluster of men. He grinned. “You know what to do.”

Over my coffee cup I watched the oldest man. When I caught his eyes I winked, waggled my eyebrows, and made a few small air-kisses at him. He turned a bright red and quickly averted his gaze. I chuckled and went back to my meal, Drew and I coming up with various fascinating points of conversation. As the waiter came to re-fill our coffee, I glanced up to find the man staring again. I looked at Drew.

“Your turn.” I told him.

Drew stuck out his tongue, grinned, and lounged sideways on the booth so that he could rest an arm on the back and gaze over at the man. When the old man’s gaze came around again, Drew caught it and treated him to the same wink, eyebrow waggle, and kissie face combination. The old man blushed an even deeper red, and the three men hurriedly finished their meal and departed the restaurant.

It’s things like this that I absolutely adore about Austin. Like I said, the weird is the norm and the normal people are the freaks. It’s honestly such an comforting feeling. Austin is an easy city to fall in love with, especially for a person like me. It has all of the same left-sided, organic granola eating, flower child hippy beliefs as me.

Unfortunately tomorrow I have to up and leave back to boring old Denton to attend a friend’s birthday and get my ass in gear on the job search. Really not looking forward to it, as mostly everyone has left Denton and the campus and town are both virtually empty with little to nothing to do. Here’s hoping that I can manage to get myself a good job with some good heavy hours to work, so that my time may be occupied and I may make mass amounts of money.

3. School – The spring semester has just ended for me. I’ve discovered, with the help of my adviser, that my graduation date is set for Fall of ‘08. It’ll be a semester later than originally planned, but for a degree that usually takes a normal student upwards of 5.5 to 6 years, 4.5 ain’t half bad. It’s actually kind of terrifying to have all of my classes set up and ready to go for the next 3 semesters. Even scarier to think that three semesters is all I have left (and only one more semester of trombone, yay!) I managed to squeak out of the end of this past semester with all A’s, 2 B’s and 1 C. Took a hit to my GPA down to a 3.59 from a 3.61, but it’s still considered Dean’s list/honor roll, so I’m not concerned.

4. Music – I unfortunately did not have the friends with free time, nor the funds to make it down to New Orleans to see Flogging Molly play at the House of Blues. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for any other interesting concert coming up. Incubus is playing at the Backyard here in Austin on Sept 3, so that might be a viable option. I’ve been introduced to many a new group since coming down here. One that I particularly like is called The Polyphonic Spree. It is a 20 person group consisting of everything from guitar bass and drums to French horn, tambourine, chorus members, trombone. Everything. They are truly flower-child happy hippy music. One of my favorite songs consists of a chorus singing “Hey, it’s the sun, and it makes me shine.” Great, great music. You should give them a listen.

Really not a whole lot else I can think of right now. Just busy existing and trying to get by, I suppose.

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-M