DIARY
– Entries have been short due to the impending end of the semester.
– WEEKEND – On Friday, Jess and I stayed in, making cheeseburgers and watching our O.C. DVD Special Features. We needed this downtime because the rest of the weekend was running on a different agenda. Cody (my brother) graduates from the Eastman School of Music this year, and so the 10th was his recital. Jess and I were able to attend.
– On Saturday morning, we got up and took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to get our Enterprise Rent-A-Car for our trip to Rochester and Eastman. Alas! When we arrived, our car had been given away. The website did not mention that reservations must be claimed at the appointed time or be given away. We discovered this at 10:30 AM, which gave us time to work with, albeit limited time. The desk worker “arranged” a vehicle for us at an office deep inside Brooklyn, and so we took a cab (to the tune of $25). Alas! When we arrived at the Brooklyn office, we discovered first that the car would have to be rented in Jess’ name because I don’t have a credit card. Since Jess is 24, that meant an additional $25 per day Aw, nuts. Second, they had to charge us for two days instead of one because Enterprise evidently operates on a completely different system in Manhattan than Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn the car cannot be dropped off on a Sunday.
The cost of the trip had essentially doubled. Jess got upset, I got angry, and we eventually managed to wrangle a deal that would closer approximate out budget. And so we finally got on the road at about 12:30. I still wasn’t fully comfortable with my Brooklyn geography to take the BQE, so instead we drove along the Avenues from 64th street to the Manhattan Bridge, and from there wormed our way through Manhattan to the Holland Tunnel. The tribulations hadn’t stopped. While driving east in New Jersey one is almost certain to end up in Lower Manhattan (wherever she’s coming from), driving west has the opposite effect. You could emerge near Newark or Siberia with equal ease.
After about three wrong turns we escaped from New Jersey and made good time through Pennsylvania and New York to finally arrived in Rochester at about 7:30.
We met my parents, brother and sister, Peg, and Caitlin’s boyfriend, Craig at the Microtel (as it was called), Jess and I each changed and had a slice of pizza, and we rode down to Eastman for the recital.
I’ll discuss the recital itself in a later post (I want to devote more space to it than I can here) but we met my Aunt and Grandma at the auditorium, the performance went very well, and afterwards we quickly setup a reception for Cody and his friends. Interestingly, we’d intended to serve Irish coffee, but somehow the whiskey had never been picked up. My dad drove off to get it, and just after he left, Cody’s friends informed us that one cannot buy liquor after 9 PM. After about twenty minutes, the kids started clearing out, and ten minutes after that, the custodian turned the lights out on us. We stumbled about, mostly in the dark, cleaning up, and finally made it down to the car.
We stayed up that night for awhile, joking and telling stories, and then went to bed.
– Sunday had a couple complications, but went much more smoothly than Saturday. Jess and I packed up our things, and drove with the family into Rochester to hear Cody sing choir at the Universalist church. It was a nice service, and I’m struck that Unitarian churches, interestingly, are similar to Catholic churches, in that commonalities are set off by variations in detail that establish completely different moods. My father described this church as feeling more “spiritual” and Flint’s as more “intellectual.” I would personally have described Chicago’s First Unitarian as “intellectual,” maybe even “gothintellectual” and Flint UU as “solticeful.” But I digress.
After the service, we went to have brunch at Jay’s diner outside Rochester, got gas, and started home by two. A snowstorm hit in the Appalachians over Pennsylvania, but the mountains were beautiful, and we’d made it back to New York City by 7:30, and had dropped off the car and rode the subway home by 10:30.
– I was exhausted and went to bed without finishing my homework. That was probably a mistake.
NEWS OF THE WEEK
The Flint Journal: Angry workers map out moves.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
What kind of music did you listen to at the tender age of twelve?
END OF POST.