Mayday, Mayday
plus
Prom'd At Last
(or
Who Will Chaperone The Chaperones?)


So May has been a busy month. Two weeks ago I went to the May Day celebration at Bryn Mawr with Naomi whilst up in New Jersey visiting her. It was quite the event--for a school that's been around roughly half as long as William & Mary, they certainly have enough tradition to go around. One of those traditions involves, happily enough, a day where all the girls don white dresses and get quite inebriated and conduct all sorts of scandalous behavior of various stripes all over the campus.

Or so I have been told. I was shielded from the most egregious behavior, and was treated only to an incredibly profane and drunken improv performance of Romeo and Juliet (and part of Twelfth Night). Apparently streaking and other such behavior transpires as the day wears on, but Naomi (accidentally by her account) prevented me from witnessing any such events. I have no regrets, though--between the two of us we drank a bottle of champagne on the lawn near where the earlier picture I posted was taken, and that was enough to ease the heartbreak off of not seeing any real debauchery.
















The "normal" version of the May Day 2008 picture featured earlier.


So that was May Day. Quite an enjoyable excursion, to be sure. However, the best was still yet to come later on in the month. Naomi--I may or may not have mentioned this--is a teacher, and the advisor of her junior class. As such she wound up in the unenviable--or maybe enviable, depending on how nostalgic you are--position of having to help plan her advisees' prom. Thus I was able to go along as her escort and co-chaperone.

Being the kind of lady she is, Naomi ended up taking a lot on her shoulders, and to her immense credit it was a huge success (at least to my untrained eye). Her headmaster showed up with his wife, and instead of sneaking out the back like they usually do they actually stayed and danced--an act that would have rendered any comedian (had they hired one for the night) largely redundant. The weather was lovely, so students moved freely between the patio of the country club where the prom was being held and the inside where the music and food was. It had been raining almost nonstop since I got there, and resumed again on Sunday, but the entire day of the prom up until the hour it was over was pleasant and dry.

All of this made for an experience I thought I'd never have. I mean, I went to plenty of formals at William & Mary. Hell, I went to as many formals as I could in order to make up for not going to prom. And here I was, five years after graduating from high school, going to another high school's prom in New Jersey, for God's sake. (These kids were talking and behaving as though they would later be graded on their performance as stereotypical Jersey teenagers.)

I'm glad I got to share it with Naomi. I'm glad that after all I went through in the college, all the first times and novelties and changes and so on, that I got to have another first time. What Naomi and I have is the first calm relationship I've ever had, one that isn't marked by frenziednss or anxiety or mania but solidity and stablity and true affection. I didn't even realize I had been missing it until I had it. (Which is the nicest vice versa to come into my life for a long time.)






























































(I'm still flying.)

The Adventurer Apparently Suffers from Hereditary Sartoriasis


I have often recieved comments regarding my choice of wardrobe. Both complimentary and derogatory comments often note the somewhat archaic character it has. Well, there is a good reason for that:

Behold my great-grandfather, F. Scott May, standing with his beloved some half a decade before the stock market took a swan dive. At least good--if eccentric--fashion tastes run in the family.


(More to come, I promise. Some interesting updates from the past weekend, with no small focus on inebriated tree nymphs.)



(I'm still flying.)

Will's Soapbox
(or Another Example of the Mouse That Roared)

I happened to be searching news briefs on Wikipedia under "2008 in the United States" when I happened across this article. There's something really sickening, to me, about the fact that Japan, who has to this day not apologized for the Rape of Nanking, taking America to task for this crime (which, if you notice, had not yet been incontrivertibly proven as of when this article was written).

"It is unforgivable," Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told a parliamentary panel in his first public comments on the latest incident on Okinawa, host to a huge U.S. military presence.
"It has happened over and over again in the past and I take it as a grave case."

Ask the Chinese what happened OVER AND OVER AGAIN throughout the 1930's and 1940's, Prime Minister. Ask THEM if they find the atrocities Japanese soldiers heaped upon Chinese women--girls, in many cases--are unforgivable. Your hypocrisy, Mr Prime Minister, is appalling. And that's all I have to say.

So I promised the state of things since the fall (of last year, for God's sake), and here it is.

Late November - Early December

This is the period of time I'd rather not remember. I'd just quit working at the winery, and my departure was, shall we say, not rung about with fondness and warm wishes. Rather, it was a leave-taking accompanied by a sense of relief and finality. It's been a policy of mine to studiously avoid bashing or bad-mouthing anyone at the winery--and I intend to keep that policy active. But I won't lie and say that I felt bad about leaving. Anyway, it took me a little while to find a job, and the next one was a very short stint at a local coffeehouse called the Mudhouse. I washed out of training before becoming a barista--it turns out the environment was just too high-stress for me to be any good at what was required of me. The manager I was working under sympathized, and told me while he didn't think I was cut out for it, he would give me a good recommendation for any place I applied to work. So at least *that* leave-taking was amicable.

The rest of December

I started working at the wine retail shop. Since I started right around the Christmas season, I got thrown into the middle of it all. If you will recall, I started work at the winery on July 4th, so starting work in the middle of a busy period isn't exactly foreign to me. I enjoy it, in a weird sort of way. It necessitates learning things a lot quicker. Anyway, it all went fairly smoothly, and my boss told me he was pleased with how I was coming along. By the end of the year, I felt pretty good about where I was.
Other than starting my job, nothing much else of note happened until...

January

Since early November, I'd been talking to a lady named Naomi whom I met through eHarmony. We decided the volume was right and that we'd like to meet, so we arranged to get together in DC right around New Year's. Friends of my family have a New Year's Day Brunch every year, and they were kind enough to let me stay overnight so I could meet Naomi at the National Gallery the next day. It was a lot of fun--I hadn't been to the National Gallery since a school trip in (I think) 2002. We ate at the Garden Cafe in the Gallery and then went out for drinks later at the Capitol Grille. Then, in mid-January, I went up to New Jersey to visit her (which marks when the relationship "officially" began).

It's been nice--nice? No, great, amazing, and refreshing--to be in a stable, peaceful relationship for once. My college relationships were marked by a sort of frenzied excitement. It's great as a temporary drug, but when the passion mellows it's easy to make the mistake of assuming that the relationship is dying. Part of the more adult approach, I think, is modulating that initial "fire" with cautiousness and prudence, rather than leaping into full-blown passion right away.

Which I suppose is good segue into..

February

The only real item of note here is that I finally got to have a Valentine's Day where I wasn't single. Naomi came down and stayed with Harry and Jane over that weekend. We went to Barboursville to taste wine, and watched "Ratatouille" and "Star Wars: A New Hope" (I needed to remedy her not having seen it) on Harry's home movie theater. Without going into too much sentimental, sappy, detail--it was a nice visit, and it was lovely to be able to spend Valentine's Day with her.


That's pretty much the state of things, to date. I know I need to update the Wineblog, and I have plenty of material what with work at the store. I just need to find a way to put it all together into a coherent narrative. Or barring that, at least some sort of P.J. O'Rourke-ian gonzo journey down Blotto Lane.

Winter Brings Out The Worst In Me

Hmm. Yeah. This hasn't really been a journal lately, I guess. So much has happened between when I last pasted and now that I feel like a catch-up post is both necessary and insufficient, at the same time.

The problem is that it's often not economical to blog at work (*innocent whistling sound here*) but when I get home, I'm tired enough that I don't want to have to put more than two coherent thought processes together.

However, I owe the Future Me that reads this--and whichever friends still log on, only to find (as usual) that I haven't posted anything--more than that. And I do want to write. I have a lot to write about, and a lot to meditate and muse on, and I feel like maybe whatever "block" I've been sort of passively living with is finally coming to an end.

So this, then, is my genuine and non-smartass resolution to write more often, starting this week. I mean it. Stay tuned.

This Avalanche, I'm Not Afraid


And it's been a while...again. I have some earlier posts and ideas written during the Christmas season (and before) that I probably need to put down on here. But honestly, being unemployed for so long generated fewer interesting stories than you'd think. I'm happier having a job and not so much free time than I am with the converse.

After much searching, I managed to land a job at a local wine retailer who shall go nameless for the moment. I've had bad experiences coming out and naming the places I work--even when everything I said was positive--so I think I'd rather this one remain anonymous for now. Perhaps I will give it a whimsical and amusing name later, but only if I'm feeling particularly creative. Right now I feel more particularly tired than anything else. However, that could be a function of the massive tasting we did today. Many, many representatives from wine distribution companies came in all through the afternoon and we sampled their various, and sometimes multitudinous, wares. Luckily--or, rather, unluckily--we have to spit while working, so there was no on-the-job drunkenness.

Rather unfortunate, in retrospect, but oh well.

Anyway, I'm planning on updating Half the Bottle Down sometime this week, as working at the Unnamed Retailer (I told you I wasn't feeling particularly creative) will no doubt provide me with a lot of good material. Until then.



(I'm still flying.)

The Lengths That I Will Go To, The Distance In Your Eyes



Well, I know this isn't being posted in October, but I have this crippling fear of there being an empty space on Blogger where a month should have been. Some people tell me this problem could be solved by posting more often. Madness! Madness, I say. Insane ideas get you nowhere in this world, except maybe Congress. No, wait, that's bad ideas.

Anyway. October was an interesting month. Since it was harvest we had a busy month--statewide festivals coupled with an increase in customer traffic, as well as the actual "crush" process itself. This left a lot of tired people with short tempers, but come the winter everyone will have time to breathe and relax a little, content with the fruits of their labors.

Which makes it kind of a shame that I'm leaving the winery. I won't go into the reasons here--I'm always a bit uncomfortable, even on a journal-style space this such as this, discussing the intimate reasons behind departures or breakups. I suppose you could consider this an employment-related breakup if you like. At any rate, I'm now job searching in Charlottesville. Tomorrow I have an interview at a coffeehouse, so we'll see how that pans out.

At any rate, I'm becoming a bit more realistic about life after college. It was--is--a bit of a culture shock, and I guess in some ways I'm still adjusting. So to my friends at William and Mary and elsewhere--enjoy it while you can. You've heard it before, I know. But take a few days off from stressing about your bio homework, your psych test, your biology paper, and take a break from taking college life for granted. Treasure the fact that this is the last time in your life you will have so much freedom with so few consequences. It may not feel like it now, but take a recent graduate's word for it: the real world is much less forgiving.



(Be that as it may, I'm still flying.)