So I think that I mentioned earlier that I joined a bookclub. Last night was my first meeting. I would say that it went pretty well. It’s always nice to meet book-minded people. It often seems that we are too rare of a breed.  There were about 10 people at the meeting so it was a nice, small group. We read “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.”

Most people didn’t really care for the book. I liked it okay. Some of it was hard to get through but it does have some really lovely lines in it. Really it’s about not living life linearly and allowing yourself to think and reflect on both your past and your future. For myself, I feel like it would do me some good to analyze the past a little less. Living in the moment is good, oh so good. Another point in the book is that we create our own circumstances, or our own sort of Science Fictional universe with its own context.

We had some pretty good conversation with only a few awkward pauses. I got the feeling that most of us are pretty introverted so that could be why.  I’m hoping that being at a book club with relative strangers will help me break out of my shell a little more and to communicate better with people I don’t know well. I’m interested to see how many people attend meetings with regularity. It would be nice to have some cohesion in the group. I might feel a little bit more comfortable that way. It’s so hard for me to speak up sometimes. I have stuff to say almost always but I get very self-conscious about speaking or even finding a good moment to speak out. On the other hand, if I know you well, I’ll talk your ear off.

Anyhow, I’m definitely looking forward to attending more meetings. The meeting was definitely a nice way to break up the week.

Here’s  some good quotes from the book, taken from my Goodreads:

- “Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backwards”
- “Can you live your whole life at zero?”
- “Time is a machine; it will convert your pain into experience”
- “Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down in the coming years.”
- “We break ourselves into parts”
- “Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life”
- “At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.”
- “Step out into the world of time and risk and loss again. Move forward, into the empty plane.”

Some of my long term readers may remember me talking about my college roommate before. This girl and I were really good friends through college and lived together during our Junior and Senior years. Something happened with her during our senior year where she just stopped going to school and got addicted to an online rp game (Second Life). She was lying about not going to school and wouldn’t talk to me about it when I finally confronted her.

We didn’t leave on necessarily bad terms, just weird terms. She was no longer the bright, funny person that I had moved in with and I couldn’t do anything to either move her to get help or even just to talk to me about what was going on. I moved out after graduation (2007) and she stayed in the apartment and signed a new lease with someone she found through Craigslist or something.

Anyhow, she pretty much cut off communication with me after I moved out.  She wouldn’t return phone calls and left me pretty confused. There was an issue with our security deposit where she was supposed to get the new roommate to give me a check for the security deposit, which she never did. I was upset at the time but it was water under the bridge awhile ago.

After that summer, she seemingly cut off communication with all of our friends from college as well as her good friends from home. Flash forward about another year, and her parents are calling me asking about her whereabouts after I hadn’t had contact with her for a year. They said that she had shut off her phone and they weren’t sure where she had gone. It was frightening to say the least. Cutting off all communication like that is never a good sign.

My sister, B, was out with one of her good friends last night and lo and behold, her waitress was the ex-roommate. B was in college when I lived with the roommate and was over at our apartment frequently so I definitely think that the roommate would have recognized her. B said that the roommate didn’t acknowledge that she knew who she was and was also putting out a vibe where B could tell that she didn’t really care to bring up that they knew each other. It was just weird. So dinner went on without either one acknowledging that they knew the other. It was kind of crazy.

All I can say is that one, it’s a really frickin’ small world and two, I’m glad that she’s still around. I was a little worried…

On Friday, I went to the doctor to get checked out for an ear issue that has come and gone over the past couple months. I’ve been having episodes where my ears feel just full, I lose a little bit of hearing and I’ll get dizzy like my center of balance is off.  It’s a little disconcerting, especially the dizziness (it’s always fun when you can’t walk straight, oh yeah). The odd thing is that my symptoms would come and go. The doctor diagnosed me with something called Meniere’s Disease and put me on what is essentially Dramamine, which is supposed to relax my ear tubes so they don’t close, I guess.  Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be happy if it just makes the dizziness go away! So far, so good.

Friday night, we went to see No Strings Attached. It was cute and pretty funny. I also got a new waterproof gymbag. I was using just a plain old backpack that didn’t keep my clothes and shoes very dry as I was trudging through the weather.

Saturday, we got up late and went for lunch at Buca di Beppo (Italian chain food that beats the pants off Olive Garden). Then we went to the Phillips Collection, a small museum with a really broad variety of art including some Impressionism (my favorite). I had never been there before but if you all ever make it to DC, we should definitely go. It’s amazing to me that one guy was able to collect so many masterful works. We ended our afternoon with tea and my favorite salty oat cookies at Teaism, a local tea house.

Sunday, we had breakfast with our landlords, two of the sweetest people in the world. They had us up to thank the Architect for shoveling this week. We were upstairs for about 3 hours. Afterward, we came back downstairs and I did a little housework while the Architect did a little garage work (gotta love the division of labor). I went to go change the laundry and noticed that the towels I had in the washer were absolutely soaking still to the point where I could just wring them out. I go to restart the washer on the spin cycle and it won’t work. So now we have to have a repairman come in to see if they can fix it. We think that the motor may have just died. Bummer!