dreday

Things I miss, in no particular order: a comparative advantage over my not-stupid-but-definitely-apathetic-and/or-just-plain-lazy-at-least-compared-to-overachieving-GWU-students undergrad VCU peers; those dreamy summer days of drunk volleyball and river lounging and accompanying lack of responsibility for pretty much anything/anyone, including, and perhaps especially, myself; the warm embrace of bbear; not being in a truly absurd amount of debt; sitting idly and sipping coffee from my kitchen counter vista while watching made-from-scratch in-ways-never-before-thought-reasonable meals prepared by Brett Adams, daily; simultaneously enjoying and resenting the company of Charles, our compulsorily adoptive furry friend who definitely overstayed his welcome but also grew on you the less you associated him with his absent owner; china-town to china-town and back spontaneous, insouciant adventures with lil’ cousin; going to any one of the multiple coffee shops in Richmond for no reason other than a perfunctory exercise in “getting out of the house,” despite the surfeit of coffee and reading material and comfortable loungy spots and pretty much anything else one would look for in a coffee shop, right there in the house; the way the light used to cascade and beam, literally, into my old Richmond bedroom every morning and force the blanket over my head so I could get back into the dark, despite it being way too warm to justify covering my head with a blanket; getting the “hook up” at almost every bar in town, a natural consequence of spending nearly 8 years in one small and reflexively social community; painless daily transport owing to a too-good-to-be-true proximity to almost any location of interest; jubilant consumption of tequila at every goal scored by Messi, Ibra, Alves, Iniesta, Bojan, Henry, Pedro, Keita, Touré, Puyol, and even Piqué - needless to say, those were very drunk days; getting absurdly lost at 3 am Halloween night in Chongqing and stumbling into some vertiginous building that might or might not have been, but then definitely was not, the hotel where my travel buddies were “chillin’,” unconcerned that I was wondering the streets of central China, drunk, sort of scared, lost, and very, very alone (ok, maybe I don’t actually miss this one very much, assholes); pre-schism family holiday trips to wherever the rest of the very extended family happened to be amassed; pretending to not be embarrassingly excited when she actually seemed interested in conversing, at least, but then was actually also interested in (gulp) way less innocent things, and then again pretending to not be embarrassingly excited; protracted and contradictory this-is-the-Truth arguments, again with lil’ cousin, that I often lost but that eventually led into a somewhat coherent “life philosophy”; discovering a new band that you felt righteous about being knowledgeable of, and the subsequent oh-them?-yeah-I-used-to-listen-to-them-all-time righteousness when someone else discovers them way later, and the moment when all that just goes away and you realize that there is no real righteousness to be found in these sorts of things; those moments when someone in the group asks an obscure question like “what is a knot, actually?,” and you just happen to know the answer and in fact you happen to know the history of it and how it relates to a nautical mile and everything, and you feel something like arrogance but what it actually is is just you being really, really happy with yourself; that weird serendipitous feeling you get when two friends that you didn’t even know knew each other and are from entirely different social circles actually happen to have known each other from way back and have been friends for way longer than you have with either of them, and then wondering if that tells you anything about how much you know about your friends and that maybe you’ve been a little too self-absorbed lately, but then thinking that you’re not too self-absorbed, this is probably just one of those funny things that happens every once in a while; realizing that Ellwood Thompson’s was named that because it’s on the corner of Ellwood and Thompson streets, and wondering why it took you several years to figure that out, but to be fair it probably took you so long because you never actually thought about why it was named what it was named; taking the biggest knife in the kitchen and slicing off the top of a champagne bottle in one big parabolic celebratory swoop and then indulging in the ensuing bacchanal; pouring water all over Tom’s bed that one year when he blacked out and making him think the following morning that he pissed the bed and that we couldn’t leave New York until he did the laundry; coming up with a new Facebook status update that is supposed to list three little things you miss, but then getting a message that your update has too many characters and so thinking “what the hell, I’ll just keep going in a Microsoft Word document and just not post it on Facebook” and then ending up with a …821 word sentence, and getting kind of excited because it contains absolutely no little green grammatical-error squiggly lines, even though it is definitely without a doubt the longest damn sentence you’ve ever written (okay, technically this isn’t something I miss because it just happened).