01.98 - Untitled
I really want to write you all a spaceship story. Really, I've had this mental image in my head for ten years of an interplanetary fighter marine guy, fighting aliens (they are human-like), looking up at his support ship and realizing in a panic that the ship has lost its engines and is slowly, so slowly, dropping out of the sky onto the battlefield. And I can hear the warm whoosh of the air pressure increasing as the huge ship falls, ever faster as it drops. And our marine begins to run.
But, I'm too tired and strangely cranky to do anything that wild. Instead, I shall tell you of happenings.
You may or may not be a subscriber to T's blog on myspace (I am), and if you are (or perhaps you're a random browser of it), you now know that T and I are vegetarians. For a month. And yes, it was my idea.
Nevermind the fact that we're officially ending Day 2 of said diet, and the second day in a row that I have had meat...
T has vegetarian friends, and Carl's new fiancee is also a vegetarian, and I decided I wanted to know what that was like.
I have thought of it as a tradeoff between guilt and inconvenience. And some people would much rather be inconvenienced than guilty. And I'm definitely one of those people.
We all have levels of awareness when we do normal, everyday things like eating or driving a car. I usually don't dwell on animal cruelty when I eat a steak. I don't think about melting glaciers when I drive to the movie store...mostly because I haven't done that in about four months. But some people do, and most of those people are perfectly happy with changing their own lifestyle and not being overly proud of their mission. Especially because it may be guilt-driven, and the world is too meat-crazy to change in a day.
In Tampa, Carl's fiancee worked around us to get vegetarian meals. I winced when she picked up a teeny fish egg from off the table (was a garnish on Carl's entree) and squeezed it after Carl dared her. She didn't think it was a fish egg. Other than that, her struggle to get meals that made her comfortable also made her uncomfortable. Try getting a meal anywhere without meat and you'll know what I'm talking about. If you can get enough food to fill you up, you still are going to get dishes that are prepared as a second thought to the meat-filled meals...just because they are in much less demand by the general public.
And so, perhaps out of a moment of craziness, I decided I wanted to try it. And I haven't done well so far.
Stegs and I are going to play in a basketball league every Tuesday. Which worries me, because I haven't played basketball at any competitive level in years. And I'm not exactly basketball material - but there aren't many touch football leagues advertising. I'm picking up a pair of high-tops this weekend, and I'm hoping we start practicing often. I have a feeling the first two weeks are really, really going to suck.
We played at the park last month, and a kid walked by and made fun of my low-tops. Which is why I'm making the investment for high-tops.
We went to our job site today on the Mississippi River. I walked around on a barge in the cool late summer-almost fall breeze, listening to work getting done around me. Sometimes you feel like its dumb luck when you coordinate all these things to happen and they actually get done as you planned it. You start to get a bit too confident in your own talents sometimes.
And when I walk into the station, my client's project engineer's boss looks at me and says, "Well, do you think we can get this done like you say we can?" And I'm seriously thinking, wow, if this guy only realized I completed my degree less than a year ago, he probably wouldn't have handed the project schedule over to me.
I think that, but I say, "Yep."
He replies back to me, "Would you bet your job on it?"
And I say without a hesitation, "I pretty much am, aren't I?"
He looks down at his stack of paper and says, with a little smile, "We all are, I think."
