Wandering

Yesterday was a pretty lazy day, at least for the first half of it.  My mom called to catch me up on a few things and also to get some status update from me on the whole San Francisco thing.  She’s always curious about what I’m up to, so I let her know my plans for the rest of the month.  It was pretty bizarre even for me to recount it all; I don’t think I’ve ever had such a packed two week period before.

At the time, I was still looking forward to the Saturday night festivities which included the Chinese New Year celebration that work put together, including the modern dance exhibition my friends were doing.  I also had to go to my friend’s engagement party afterward (which meant I missed the karaoke after party, but you can karaoke any time).  Tonight we’ll finally do our secret Santa gift exchange pot luck (which reminds me I need to find food to bring too).  Tomorrow will be my last day of D&D with the folks at work.  Tuesday will be dinner with my friends Alan and Sara their daughter (who they can’t really bring to the big going away party).  Wednesday and Thursday this week are open (for now), though I’ll still be working of course.  Friday will be my last day of work and the night when we do the original circle’s going away party.  It will be myself, Roy, Anais, Nam and a few folks who were with us when I first started hanging out with those guys two years back.  It should be a nice little bit of nostalgia.  Saturday I’m going to go see Jake Shimabukuro play his ukulele.  Sunday is a bit up in the air; I might go to Vancouver for dinner but I might stick around and do drinks with folks at my current job.  Monday I’m planning to be in Vancouver to check out the Capilano suspension bridge, but I’ll be coming back in the evening to share Chinese New Year dinner with a bunch of folks.  Tuesday will be my team going away lunch with my current coworkers; it would be earlier but my boss is out of town next week so we’re waiting for him.  Wednesday is open, but Thursday I’m debating to take a trip down to pick up the keys to my new place (I don’t think it’s mandatory but it might still be a good idea).  Friday Jenny and Lareina are coming down from Vancouver and I’ll be doing the Theo chocolate factory tour with them and Anais.  After that we have the big going away dinner and after party, and it will be the 27th!  The days after that aren’t planned out but I imagine I’ll be spending one or two days making the trip down with the kitties.

Anyway, the Chinese New Year festivities last night were pretty good.  There was a lot of cultural dances and a few more modern things.  Of course my favorite was to watch my friends; I think they changed their style up a bit after the last exhibition they did for last year’s LNY (Taiwanese edition), but I could just be imagining that.  It was funny to hear them introduced as PINC meaning “pretty innocent, but not completely” (it’s really “puked in Nam’s car” which may capture a similar tone).  It’s too bad the stage was carpet, or they might have done some cooler stuff, and it was already a bit cringe worthy thinking about how much rug burn they must be getting, but it was still good.

Aside from them, my favorite was probably the Geoffrey Castle and Lucy Wu performance; they had accompanying drums and keyboard, but they led the show with their respective electric violin and electric erhu (which I don’t think I’d ever seen played before).  It was decent music; I could take or leave their vocal performances (Lucy was singing Chinese anyway), but the solos on strings were really fun to watch.  There was also a number of dance troupes performing, and a lot of them were very cute.  The kids’ kung fu was really nice as well.

After the PINC performance, I stayed to watch one or two more and then headed out.  The engagement party was 7:30 to midnight and it was already about 10:00 at that point.  So I headed over to the Garage downtown.  I’d been to the place a few times before; it’s basically a bar with some bowling and a bunch of pool tables.  I grabbed a drink and wandered around for a while, pinging my friend via text to see where they were.  Eventually I found them at the very far end of the pool table hall, and I said hi to my friend and her fiancé.

Before I proceed with the rest of the story, I guess I should mention that my friend is actually an ex of mine.  We were dating when we moved to Seattle together, though that was about 6 years ago now.  We broke up about three and a half years back now, and while it was a bit of a bumpy ride we managed to come out of it as good friends.  She told me she wanted to invite me to the engagement party but only if I wasn’t going to pull any “take me back” shenanigans XD.  Anyway this part is mostly relevant because while we were dating I got to know a bunch of her friends as well as her entire immediate family, including her brother and sister who were there that night.

Now, her brother is a pretty cool guy but I realized pretty quickly I didn’t have a whole lot to talk about with him.  I asked him about his four year old daughter (who I’d seen the day after she was born) and he started showing me some photos.  We talked a little about work and where he’s living these days, as well as about how I’ll be moving and whatnot.  But it was a little awkward I think, and not in the best way (the fact that I was there to begin with was the better kind of awkward).  I later started talking with her sister, who is considerably older than her (actually her brother is as well).  She’d had kids much earlier, and actually her oldest is apparently started university last Fall.  So we talked about that, and she complimented me on getting into better shape since the last time I’d seen her (which was a long while back).  She asked if I was dating anyone, I told her I wasn’t, primarily since I’d decided not to invest myself in the Seattle area much lately.  She then told me there were plenty of eligible ladies right at the bar there XD.  She asked me if I often hung out at the Garage; and I told her no.  The real reason is probably that I tend to hang more in Belltown where some of my friends live, but I told her it’s because I haven’t been very social over the past year.

“The past year?  You’re just generally anti-social!”  It was in jest a little bit, but it made me think a bit on how much I’ve really changed in the past few years.  Lately I’ve been thinking about how different 2010 and 2011 were, but when I think about it, there’s an even bigger difference between those years and 2007 or 2008 (2009 a bit too, though that was kinda the transition year).  On further reflection it makes me think I really take social media for granted.

I started with Facebook back in February 2009.  I posted a decent amount of stuff, at least enough to look back and get a decent idea of what was going on that year (especially now with timeline).  I also have this tumblr which I started in October of that year.  Especially at the beginning, I think I wrote a lot that I can really enjoy going back and reading to get a good feel for how a lot of things were going in my life.

Before that, though, there’s not much record aside from what I remember.  I have emails, of course, and a few videos of my exploits with my raid team.  I do know that a lot of my time was wrapped up with WoW and work, especially once I became single (and until I quit playing).  I really wonder to what extent my having a social life has impacted my career path (it certainly lines up with when I stopped getting my promotions :P), but I wouldn’t say that I worry about it; I think it’s for the better anyway.  Before I was single there was a lot of hanging out with folks from the Fields lab (which I suppose has been replaced with the WCF get togethers).  Looking back I do wish I had recorded something somewhere about what was going on, for it was truly a different era that partly ended when I became single and almost completely went away once I started hanging out with the WCF folks (or perhaps they’re two eras).  And I suppose the same could be said about previous eras as well.

So I realized that my not-very-social 2011 was still miles above what previous years have been.  Of course I’m grateful for that.  On a side note, she also asked me how I met the WCF group.  I explained that I met one of the guys playing WoW and started hanging out with him after we both quit playing, and that turned into me hanging out with most of his friends too.  I guess the way I explained it sounded super homo, so there was this hilarious moment of “Are you gay?  I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s okay if you are, but I was pretty sure you were straight…”

After a few games of pool I headed home.  I eventually discovered that I missed out on the karaoke that folks went to after the exhibition.  I was a little sad at that, just like I was a little sad to miss out on the Jess/Ange birthday cooking lesson event.  But I guess more than the sadness, it makes me realize two things.  One, ironic as it might be, it’s difficult for me to really go out and enjoy those sorts of events unless I’m in a happy mode, and right now my happy mode is due to the fact that I’m leaving.  Second, I suppose I had better get used to missing these things; it’s only going to be much more frequent once I’m in San Francisco :P