weekend in review
Went to see Star Trek on Friday. Liked it. A lot, actually.
Would not have seen it, possibly ever, except GOG sent out an Evite. Then ROG asked if I were planning to attend. I can generally resist one source of peer pressure, but two? I crumbled like a rock.
Before the movie, while waiting for the previews to start, I learned that GOG and OG are perhaps no longer dating. This threw me for a loop, and not just because I might now (if she continues to be part of my orbit) have to come up with a new nickname for GOG. It wasn't that feeling of 'well there's another stake in the struggling heart of someone who'd like to believe in love.' It felt more like losing my youth. I suddenly felt very aged.
I miss my 20s. I would like them back. I don't know what I would do differently but I'd like the chance for a better outcome.
I got home late, slept for about an hour, then headed out to the station for my show. The DJ in front of me was playing mostly rap. While driving, I tried to figure out what to follow that with. Then he put on a song with some major FCC violations. He noticed this about one verse and a chorus later than I did. Quickly turned off the track and put on something a bit more electronic, and that set the tone for my show.
Ambient, electronic, dance, dancehall, brief turn to reggae, and then accidentally ended on the down note of a somber rock song.
Bird's been distracting me lately. He likes to talk. And sometimes the time I should be using to cue up another song gets taken up by head nods and 'oh yeah's.' This leads to me having to play whatever backup song I've left in the player. Which leads to weird tangents sometimes. Like a reggae set being broken up by a Brian Eno track.
Bird's also needed my help lately with the station Macs (now that the engineers have declared the PCs off-limits to us plebs). Good thing he's keeping those bananas coming.
After leaving the station, I headed to the gym for an hour of turbo kick-box followed by an hour of zumba (latest gym dance craze). The zumba teacher is an actual dancer, rather than a good mover who just took the training class. She makes the choreography easy for us, but when she decides to bust out and go crazy with it (add in the personality), it's hard to keep up. Fun to watch, though.
I should then have stayed for pilates, but I draw the line somewhere before spending three hours at the gym. So I meandered on home, chilled for a bit, and then went out for lunch. Arriving home several hours later, I lay down on the couch and slept like the dead.
This brings us to Mother's Day. It went well. Surprisingly well.
I took mom to Coconuts, a Jamaican restaurant. And even though she'd never been to this place and was not familiar with the cuisine, she didn't complain and she actually enjoyed her meal. Or at least she said she did, which is all I really require.
She also liked the orchid I got her. I'm glad for that, because I'd been worried she'd be disappointed that I didn't get her roses instead. (Why didn't I get her roses? Because I forgot to bring a vase from the house to put the roses in. And roses in vase were way more expensive than roses in bundle. And it seemed silly to spend so much on dead things. Ironically, this reminds me of mom mentioning what she and Auntie Pauline had been talking about before I arrived, that the church in her hometown won't bury you unless you pay an annual registration fee. They refused to bury Cousin Frances because the family wouldn't cough up 85,000 naira for the mass. Cousin Frances had never registered, so I guess there were asked to pay for every single year of back-log. They went with a different church instead.)
After lunch, we went to Cousin C's house. He'd bought a waffle maker and was hosting a late (very late) brunch. All of the local siblings were there--Ify, Agby, Aurora--along with their mom. This makes sense, but I was still surprised.
Cousin Agby is expecting. Cousin Aurora already has her littl'un. She plopped the child in my lap, to hold while she fed her. After a while she burst out laughing and implored someone to take a photo. This is Cousin Aurora's general reaction whenever she sees me holding a baby. She knows I'm not very comfortable interacting with kids and is amused by my facial expressions when I do. She said I looked very worried about getting baby food on my dress, and she was right. Despite my best efforts, I did get slimed a bit.
The coolest thing so far about Cousin Agby's extended visit from Nigeria is getting to hear gossip I would not otherwise be privy to. When mom and I went to visit her last week, she told some stories of the Nigerian cousins. Specifically, her tale of when cousin Nwole (sp?) visited her was just...Whoa Drama.
Yesterday, I got to hear a bit about some issue between Cousin Aurora and her husband. Hopefully they'll work it out because, right now, Aurora has the best marital track record. All three boys have been married, and are now divorced or working on being divorced. And Cousin Agby has never been in a serious relationship as far as I know. (Her pregnancy is the result of in vitro fertilization and an anonymous sperm donation.)
One thing that kind of got me down was when Cousin C mentioned that he no longer has tech support because of me. Because he chose me over c*, because of course he had to choose me over c*. To that I responded that I never asked him to make a choice so if he doesn't have tech support that's entirely on him.
c*'s a sore topic lately. David tried to ask if we were still talking and I kind of cut him off at the knees. I guess I don't feel I can talk about that situation in a rational manner. Or maybe I worry that talking about the issue will make it permanent. So there's that evidence of irrationality.
Anyway, since Cousin C has recently acquired a Mac, I am his unofficial Mac tech support person. This is ironic for the obvious reason: I'm not the one who majored in computer science.
After leaving Cousin C's, I drove mom home, then headed to my office to finish up work I'd skipped out on on Friday (prioritizing the whole 'getting to the movie on time' thing. Actually, I was prioritizing the 'stop by mom's house, find out how she's doing in the wake of learning that one of her acquaintances has died of a stroke, pick up my weekly allotment of whatever food she feels like giving me' thing. I went to the movie after that. Dad had mentioned she was pretty upset. He'd talked her down a bit. I did what I could in my own low-key fashion. Mom feels like her stroke was a curse. But I feel she was pretty lucky. She could be in much worse shape, and I like to remind her sometimes to focus on the things that went right, rather than what went wrong.). Got home around 12:30am and slept like the dead until the alarm went off.
Voila. It was Monday.
Would not have seen it, possibly ever, except GOG sent out an Evite. Then ROG asked if I were planning to attend. I can generally resist one source of peer pressure, but two? I crumbled like a rock.
Before the movie, while waiting for the previews to start, I learned that GOG and OG are perhaps no longer dating. This threw me for a loop, and not just because I might now (if she continues to be part of my orbit) have to come up with a new nickname for GOG. It wasn't that feeling of 'well there's another stake in the struggling heart of someone who'd like to believe in love.' It felt more like losing my youth. I suddenly felt very aged.
I miss my 20s. I would like them back. I don't know what I would do differently but I'd like the chance for a better outcome.
I got home late, slept for about an hour, then headed out to the station for my show. The DJ in front of me was playing mostly rap. While driving, I tried to figure out what to follow that with. Then he put on a song with some major FCC violations. He noticed this about one verse and a chorus later than I did. Quickly turned off the track and put on something a bit more electronic, and that set the tone for my show.
Ambient, electronic, dance, dancehall, brief turn to reggae, and then accidentally ended on the down note of a somber rock song.
Bird's been distracting me lately. He likes to talk. And sometimes the time I should be using to cue up another song gets taken up by head nods and 'oh yeah's.' This leads to me having to play whatever backup song I've left in the player. Which leads to weird tangents sometimes. Like a reggae set being broken up by a Brian Eno track.
Bird's also needed my help lately with the station Macs (now that the engineers have declared the PCs off-limits to us plebs). Good thing he's keeping those bananas coming.
After leaving the station, I headed to the gym for an hour of turbo kick-box followed by an hour of zumba (latest gym dance craze). The zumba teacher is an actual dancer, rather than a good mover who just took the training class. She makes the choreography easy for us, but when she decides to bust out and go crazy with it (add in the personality), it's hard to keep up. Fun to watch, though.
I should then have stayed for pilates, but I draw the line somewhere before spending three hours at the gym. So I meandered on home, chilled for a bit, and then went out for lunch. Arriving home several hours later, I lay down on the couch and slept like the dead.
This brings us to Mother's Day. It went well. Surprisingly well.
I took mom to Coconuts, a Jamaican restaurant. And even though she'd never been to this place and was not familiar with the cuisine, she didn't complain and she actually enjoyed her meal. Or at least she said she did, which is all I really require.
She also liked the orchid I got her. I'm glad for that, because I'd been worried she'd be disappointed that I didn't get her roses instead. (Why didn't I get her roses? Because I forgot to bring a vase from the house to put the roses in. And roses in vase were way more expensive than roses in bundle. And it seemed silly to spend so much on dead things. Ironically, this reminds me of mom mentioning what she and Auntie Pauline had been talking about before I arrived, that the church in her hometown won't bury you unless you pay an annual registration fee. They refused to bury Cousin Frances because the family wouldn't cough up 85,000 naira for the mass. Cousin Frances had never registered, so I guess there were asked to pay for every single year of back-log. They went with a different church instead.)
After lunch, we went to Cousin C's house. He'd bought a waffle maker and was hosting a late (very late) brunch. All of the local siblings were there--Ify, Agby, Aurora--along with their mom. This makes sense, but I was still surprised.
Cousin Agby is expecting. Cousin Aurora already has her littl'un. She plopped the child in my lap, to hold while she fed her. After a while she burst out laughing and implored someone to take a photo. This is Cousin Aurora's general reaction whenever she sees me holding a baby. She knows I'm not very comfortable interacting with kids and is amused by my facial expressions when I do. She said I looked very worried about getting baby food on my dress, and she was right. Despite my best efforts, I did get slimed a bit.
The coolest thing so far about Cousin Agby's extended visit from Nigeria is getting to hear gossip I would not otherwise be privy to. When mom and I went to visit her last week, she told some stories of the Nigerian cousins. Specifically, her tale of when cousin Nwole (sp?) visited her was just...Whoa Drama.
Yesterday, I got to hear a bit about some issue between Cousin Aurora and her husband. Hopefully they'll work it out because, right now, Aurora has the best marital track record. All three boys have been married, and are now divorced or working on being divorced. And Cousin Agby has never been in a serious relationship as far as I know. (Her pregnancy is the result of in vitro fertilization and an anonymous sperm donation.)
One thing that kind of got me down was when Cousin C mentioned that he no longer has tech support because of me. Because he chose me over c*, because of course he had to choose me over c*. To that I responded that I never asked him to make a choice so if he doesn't have tech support that's entirely on him.
c*'s a sore topic lately. David tried to ask if we were still talking and I kind of cut him off at the knees. I guess I don't feel I can talk about that situation in a rational manner. Or maybe I worry that talking about the issue will make it permanent. So there's that evidence of irrationality.
Anyway, since Cousin C has recently acquired a Mac, I am his unofficial Mac tech support person. This is ironic for the obvious reason: I'm not the one who majored in computer science.
After leaving Cousin C's, I drove mom home, then headed to my office to finish up work I'd skipped out on on Friday (prioritizing the whole 'getting to the movie on time' thing. Actually, I was prioritizing the 'stop by mom's house, find out how she's doing in the wake of learning that one of her acquaintances has died of a stroke, pick up my weekly allotment of whatever food she feels like giving me' thing. I went to the movie after that. Dad had mentioned she was pretty upset. He'd talked her down a bit. I did what I could in my own low-key fashion. Mom feels like her stroke was a curse. But I feel she was pretty lucky. She could be in much worse shape, and I like to remind her sometimes to focus on the things that went right, rather than what went wrong.). Got home around 12:30am and slept like the dead until the alarm went off.
Voila. It was Monday.