Junet and Caro, ‘shrooms, and small worlds

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on November 19, 2001). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Been a good weekend. Not very eventful overall, much of it I just spent at the Shoebox relaxing and revelling in being connected to the net, but there were a few nice perks.

I had been invited to go out with Heather and some friends of hers on Friday night, but during the day complications came up and she had to renig on the offer. Apparently one of the other people that she found out was going along is something of a rabid man-hater, and Heather figured it would be safer for me to meet some of her circle at a later date. So, once I got home, I gave a call to Stacey (another Anchorage friend who’s recently moved down here). She and Nate have an apartment just a few blocks uphill from me, so I wandered up that way and hung out with her for the evening. Nate had headed out to a reading of some sort that a friend of his was giving, but Stacey wanted to stay home with the dog they’d just gotten, so we just hung out there and talked for the evening.

Saturday I didn’t feel much like doing anything, so I spent the majority of the day just hanging out in Yahoo! Chat. While I’ve been a regular in the Alaska room for years, and am fairly well-known there, I’m still trying to get to know people and become known in the Seattle room — much tougher crowd there. Rick came by midway through the day and hung out for a bit, then went back home after confirming that we had plans to see this week’s midnight movie at the Egyptian. I bounced between being online and putzing around the apartment until Rick showed up again later that night, when we made a swing by Bimbo’s Bitchin’ Burrito Kitchen for some food, and then hit the movie.

This week’s midnight show was Delicatessen, a wonderfully bizarre little french film. It comes from the directing team of Jeunet & Caro, who are also responsible for another great little oddball flick (which happens to be next weekend’s midnight show) — The City of Lost Children. It’s a surreal black comedy set in post-apocalypse France, where a landlord/butcher hires odd-job workers to fix up his tenant building — until the tenants have no food, the worker is slaughtered and sold to the tenants, and a new help wanted ad is placed. That basic concept frames the story, but there are also many hilarious moments where the directors play with their characters, the camera, and the sound, to create some of the most memorable sequences I’ve seen. Good, wierd, stuff — right up my alley.

After the movie Rick and I each went our seperate ways home. I was planning on just heading to bed, but just a minute or two after I got in, there was a knock on the door. My neighbor Damon and his girlfriend had taken some ‘shrooms and were working their way through a bad trip. They’d been thinking about heading to the hospital, but when they saw me come home they figured they’d check in with me first. So, I invited them in, and spent the next few hours sitting up with them, chatting, doing my best to keep their minds in a comfortable state, and reassuring them that yes, this will end, you will go back to normal, and no, you won’t be crazy for the rest of your life. Having gone through similar things and had other people work me through them, I was very willing to do the same for someone else when they needed it. By about 4am they’d come down enough to be able to handle things on their own, and they wandered back over to their apartment to see if they could get to sleep. By that point, I was well into my second wind, so I hopped online and chatted with my friend belindaff for a couple hours until I passed out.

Sunday was, again, primarily a day doing a whole whopping load of absolutely nothing. I’d bounce off and online from time to time during the day, and ended up getting in a conversation with Candice, a girl from the Seattle chatroom. Turns out she’s also an ex-Alaskan, so we started babbling about things we knew about from Anchorage. As it turns out, we had a lot of common interests (both went to Germany with our respective school’s German club after graduation, both managed to stay involved to varying degrees in our churches because we were allowed to think, and quite a bit more), so after bouncing back and forth for a while, we agreed to meet up at Charlie’s.

That ended up being a very entertaining evening — and it proved again just how small this world (and especially Anchorage) are. At one point I was talking about the apartment I lived in and mentioned “a huge 3-bedroom basement apartment in Turnagain”. Candice got a funny look on her face, and asked who I’d lived with. It turns out that she is very close friends with a girl named Christie, who dated my ex-roommate Ron for a while after Ron and Adri broke up! Just bizarre…Candice had even been over to the Pit a couple times with Christie, just (apparently) not any time that I was ever there. Wierd, wierd stuff. Anyway, we met up about 9:30pm, and by the time I thought to check the time it was just after 1am. Realizing that my alarm was going to go off in about five hours, I made my apologies and we got ready to go. She gave me a quick lift back to the apartment, and I quickly collapsed into bed and passed out.

So, that’s it for another rousing weekend of my Seattle life. Overslept a little bit this morning, but was only about 20 minutes late to work, so that wasn’t too horrid.

Oh, one last cool thing about the weekend. Dad called me on Saturday to let me know that he and mom had been able to pay me the majority of the money I’d been waiting for from them. Very cool! I spent some time Saturday researching stuff, and ordered some bits and pieces on Sunday — now I’ve got a new motherboard, processor, and ram for my PC on the way, and an order placed with Speakeasy for DSL access to be installed in roughly 15 days or so. It won’t be long until I’m back up and online full speed instead of the piddly little 56k dialup I’ve been whining about for the past few days — woohoo!

So that’s it for now…time to quit babbling again. Until next time….

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