i woke up saturday morning at 6:30 with a ringing …
3598 days agoi woke up saturday morning at 6:30 with a ringing hangover and the sun shining in my eyes, which reminded me that i was sleeping on a friend’s couch and ought to learn more about the difference between gin and tonic and a long island iced tea. i got my car from where i’d left it friday night and had enough time to stop home for a quick shower. i washed, rinsed, repeated, and reflected: how much fun is it to go out with my co-workers after waiting tables all night? i wasn’t really disposed to think kindly of it at that moment, but it is good social and bonding time. in any case it set me thinking.
that was all the thinking i did for some time, because i spent the better part of the morning and early afternoon fishing with chloe. we picked up a couple of fishing rods at gart sports, and i dug out the hip waders my brother dan got me for my birthday a few years ago, and we headed up to the big old lake near estes park. it was a beautiful day, the kind that makes you wish you had a chainsaw to take the roof off your car and drive around with the wind whipping your hair, and take naps on the grass in the sunshine. and i would like to say that we did just that but it wouldn’t be true. we did roll down the windows, and we did spend a couple of hours in waist-deep water casting lures with no hooks on them, talking about nothing in particular, and gradually succumbing to the early stages of hypothermia (yeah, of course i gave her the waders). we didn’t catch anything, of course, and we’d had to cut the hooks off the fishing lures to make sure of that – there’s really nothing that kills pleasant conversation so much as a big, angry fish flopping around needing a hook extracted from its mouth. so thanks to our preparations, fishing was a pleasantly unproductive activity, but we were eventually too cold to keep going.
we could have just sat in the car to warm back up, and that probably would have been the fastest way, but i was soaking wet and had no change of clothes, so i had to dry out first. chloe scouted out a patch of grass in the lee of a big rock but right in the sunshine where we could warm up. it was great. the sun warmed us up in nothing flat, and my clothes, even my jeans, were dry inside of forty minutes. faster than the dryer in my apartment. so naturally i was sad when we had to go, but until i can start managing to keep regular hours i wait tables on saturday nights. and you know how it is of course. having spent such a nice day with chloe, nothing could get me down all night at work, not even the Spitting Man (“Yesssss, I’ll have a sssssteak.”).
but all of that combined with what i’d done on my brief trip home got me thinking, all the way back to why i moved out here in the first place. it was not to try to land an office job and not to convince the citizens of longmont that they would like a margarita with their dinner. i wanted to carve out a niche here, make myself a part of the community. i wanted to be a professional triathlete. i do feel like i’ve done pretty well at making a niche, to a certain extent, but i feel like its not quite the right one. i think i’ve done well at trying new things (cf. my forays into tap dancing, boxing, and building a computer from parts), but i haven’t left room for my old training patterns. i have my inhaler and a nice pair of shoes, and the weather is mostly great. i just feel like for a while there, i’d forgotten the dream, something i’ve been clinging to for nearly seven years now. it was a dream i was close to realizing last may, but graduating college and moving into a garden shed proved to be a great deal more challenging than i’d imagined.
anyhow, the fire is lit again. happy easter.
