Sunday, November 04, 2007
Alma Mater
Instigated by e-mails from my old advisor at Hopkins, I decided to make a trek down to Washington this weekend. It’s been years since I’d been there and it was due time.
I haven’t mentioned it before, but in Provincetown I had a week-long romance with someone living there. It was a true East Coast experience – entirely sexual, uncommitted, casual (though spending every night together). In most ways he was perfect for me: he loved the opera, worked for the Cato Institute, and sexually we were an extremely good match. But it always had a certain tacit that this was something of the moment, and nothing else -- the geographic differences, my determination to live in NY and his to devote himself to his causes in DC, made it such. We haven’t talked much since Provincetown and, though I was tempted to call, never did. Instead I decided not to complicate the weekend and focused my attention on friends.
I saw Ken and Dan, new friends I’d made though Eric, Olivia, and Professor Weiss. I had a weekend of great lunches, dinners (some work-related with Saks folk), drinks, and coffee with the people that had been part of my academic and social life in the DC and Baltimore area.
Prior to leaving today, I’d invited Weiss to brunch and he made the trip in from Baltimore, the catalyst for the trip. We dined at the Tabard Inn where chatted about economics, family, politics, his assent to associate program chair, my current work and former grad school melodramas at Georgetown. On a level, I’d always regarded my dropping out of a PhD program as a failure, but, in his own way, he made me feel good about it.
I haven’t mentioned it before, but in Provincetown I had a week-long romance with someone living there. It was a true East Coast experience – entirely sexual, uncommitted, casual (though spending every night together). In most ways he was perfect for me: he loved the opera, worked for the Cato Institute, and sexually we were an extremely good match. But it always had a certain tacit that this was something of the moment, and nothing else -- the geographic differences, my determination to live in NY and his to devote himself to his causes in DC, made it such. We haven’t talked much since Provincetown and, though I was tempted to call, never did. Instead I decided not to complicate the weekend and focused my attention on friends.
I saw Ken and Dan, new friends I’d made though Eric, Olivia, and Professor Weiss. I had a weekend of great lunches, dinners (some work-related with Saks folk), drinks, and coffee with the people that had been part of my academic and social life in the DC and Baltimore area.
Prior to leaving today, I’d invited Weiss to brunch and he made the trip in from Baltimore, the catalyst for the trip. We dined at the Tabard Inn where chatted about economics, family, politics, his assent to associate program chair, my current work and former grad school melodramas at Georgetown. On a level, I’d always regarded my dropping out of a PhD program as a failure, but, in his own way, he made me feel good about it.
# posted by otas : 8:18 PM
