Something’s changed over the last couple of weeks. Do you feel it too? I’ve become much more comfortable going out again, and gathering indoors with friends – at least boosted ones who aren’t also immunocompromised. Yesterday I had the first one of those random city days here in a long while.
You know the type. Met up at noon with friends at Ochre, a local bakery, where we picked up breads and beet sandwiches and tahini chocolate cake. Took them over to S and C’s place to eat and stayed till mid-afternoon, talking about hacked Sodastreams and cities where we used to live, about being unemployed or self-employed in our late twenties, about eavesdropping on tourists from upper-floor balconies. Then J and S (a different S) and I went thrifting in the burbs. I got a CD for my new old CD player. For dinner we scooped up fatoosh and koftas from Mr. Kabob, a restaurant attached to a gas station, on our way back to my place, where Julia had just finished a shift of remote work. J and S went home to feed their cat, then a couple of Julia’s old undergrad and nursing school friends (who we just discovered had moved into the neighborhood during pandemic) came over for drinks.
They tell you in story workshops that you’re supposed to avoid “and then”s, supposed to link one event to the next in a chain of causality – that way the story has momentum. Seems less random. But oh boy, sometimes I love random.
