Day -2
A Dominican baseball player currently lives in my room; a fact my family was rather vague about until I came home a week ago. Not that sleeping in my unfinished basement isn’t glamorous (the shabby-chic kitty litter box is catty-corner from my couch/bed), but I can’t say I was expecting my last two weeks of life in the midwest to be spent watching Ninja Warrior on a fold-out couch that’s older than I am. Regardless, the jugador rummaging through my dresser drawers doesn’t bother me as long as I’m not expected to translate Spanish conversation to my monoglot mother during breakfast, which is why I decided not to leave my subteranean bomb shelter of a basement until after 11 each morning. In fact, this is a completely normal turn of events. Hosting the gypsy family for Thanksgiving dinner was fairly standard. The “my mom went into a coma on the beach, again” stories have become fun anecdotes at this point. My friends barely batted an eye when I told them about the time I woke up at the Pentagon. In math randomness is a pattern.
However, all of the family induced predicta-crazy is about to end. Before graduating from my univer$ity I was fortunate to nail down a two month gig with a major television network, so in a few days I’ll be shipping out of the midwest and into Manhattan. I choose to believe once immersed in the city, I will stop getting into this kind of trouble…
I spent tonight soaking up my hometown the only way possible, coffee and hot fudge sundaes at 2 in the morning at the only all night diner in town. Before coming home to discover I’d been replaced by the Dominican (who is relentlessly nice), I spent the last four years at a small university in an Ohio village. Being a black gay buddhist vegetarian liberal in red state territory wasn’t the best geographic decision I’ve ever made, so I essentially spent the last four years fitting into my parochial university much the way Dolly the sheep would fit in at Trader Joe’s. Still, I have some great memories and some damn good blacked-out psuedo recollections of college life that I will sorely miss.
Still, four years in a village has driven me to take up residence in the West Village. After a chat with my Korea Going Blonde friend who is taking off to teach English in South Korea for the next year, it was decided that our coffee-and-sundae fueled banter must continue despite the hemispheres and low-income salaries that will seperate us. This blog will not just provide e-chat fodder for KGB, but will stand as a somewhat trustworthy narrator’s recollection of how a reluctant wunderkind tries to live up to his potential for once.
[if I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere]
