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Carnival, part 2
So, Sunday. I woke up around 10:30am, the plan was to meet at least Derek and Nathan at the Oakland Mad Mex at 11:30. Of course I was running a bit late, and as it turns out they had decided to get a group together anyway and everyone was running late! I got there at 11:45 and they had just gotten the big table in the back. The place was empty, so it wasn't a big deal, though. It was me, Derek, Nathan, Brian, Jay, Alkas, and Chris joined us a bit later as well. I made people order too many chips, but it worked out okay, and I got to have my mad mex burrito for old times' sake, yay. The funny part is that Chris made us play credit card roulette for the check AGAIN, and even I entered it this time. Alkas hadn't eaten food since he went to brunch earlier so he was in charge of it, and... bizarrely I was first out, and then Derek, and then Nathan, and... it seriously went around the table and came down to Jay and Chris, and of course Chris lost yet AGAIN although this time there was no cash for a "next level". He was calculating the odds of having lost 4 out of 5 CC roulettes as like 1 to 840, which is about how much money it cost him over the weekend.
Everyone else was doing various stuff around Pittsburgh and/or going to the airport after that, so I went to Squirrel Hill for the pie party... although I made my way there over the course of like 2 hours. First I stopped in Dave&Andy's again for more ice cream (there was no line and they had the Kahlua cookies'n'cream, so I think I win) and then I went to the Forbes Field wall just to see it, and I walked across the Schenley bridge to campus and went around campus a bit. I was originally going to just walk to Barbara's house, but it was REALLY HOT OUTSIDE so by the time I'd gotten to campus and wandered around a little I decided to just take a bus up, and got a drink from Entropy so I'd have change to take the bus. (Though I still had to walk half a mile up the hill even from the bus stop.)
Pie party was good, there were a lot of people and I did get to talk to some of them a little bit more, and meet some people's new SOs (well, one specifically, but he seems to not want to talk about it online), and there was something weird in that there were two people there who have changed genders MTF since the last time I saw them a few years ago, and I felt awkward when talking to them. I was thinking about why I'm not very good with dealing with friends' transitions, and it's not that I disapprove of transgenderism, because I don't -- I think it's linked to my memory? For people who've known me a long time, you know I have a bizarrely good memory for faces/names/numbers/etc, but also that if you give me wrong information, it's very hard for me to ever overwrite that, so I still know some birthdays as a string of things, like "it's not the 16th, it's the 23rd", and I also have a very tough time changing names for people in my head, so I still call people by their college nicknames a lot of the time even if pretty much absolutely nobody else uses that name (or in one case, a guy who was one of my PGSS students and went by his middle name up through high school but switched to his first name in college, I *still* call him by his middle name because that's just how he was introduced to me 17 years ago). So I think this is just another case where I just don't know how to overwrite the data in my head. There's a person in there, they have a name, they have associated numbers and memories, and since I don't see them on any regular basis to really build a new identity or anything, it's just tough for me to correct what is in my memory.
(I dunno, I was thinking about this a lot afterwards, because I mean, I have a lot of gay friends and I never have any problem at all with that, so why is it that trans is hard for me? Yes, I realize I'm saying this in a public entry, but whatever.)
Anyway, aside from that, I juggled for a while during the party, and also did play some games during the party too, like Race for the Galaxy (where I am still convinced that it's a game that really suffers from "missed the boat" syndrome in many ways) and Factory Fun (where we would have played the full game out, except we were outdoors and sunset happened). I actually did not eat any pie at all, so ended up going back to Roman and Kelli's place and we had Zaw's for dinner, which was also nostalgic in a good way, and we sat outside on the porch and I got to find out exactly how cheap houses are in Pittsburgh these days, which is a little depressing.
My flight back to SF was at 6am, so I called for a taxi to show up at 3:45. I TRIED to take a nap but just utterly failed, and instead stayed up the entire night chatting with people online. Took a shower around 3am and caught the taxi and got to the airport. Brian was at the airport all night apparently, so I met him at the gate, and it turned out Jim K was also on our flight, and I slept through the entire flight (yay window seat, yay reverse redeye) and I got a ride to work with Brian since his girlfriend Dian was picking him up from the airport. Yay!
Everyone else was doing various stuff around Pittsburgh and/or going to the airport after that, so I went to Squirrel Hill for the pie party... although I made my way there over the course of like 2 hours. First I stopped in Dave&Andy's again for more ice cream (there was no line and they had the Kahlua cookies'n'cream, so I think I win) and then I went to the Forbes Field wall just to see it, and I walked across the Schenley bridge to campus and went around campus a bit. I was originally going to just walk to Barbara's house, but it was REALLY HOT OUTSIDE so by the time I'd gotten to campus and wandered around a little I decided to just take a bus up, and got a drink from Entropy so I'd have change to take the bus. (Though I still had to walk half a mile up the hill even from the bus stop.)
Pie party was good, there were a lot of people and I did get to talk to some of them a little bit more, and meet some people's new SOs (well, one specifically, but he seems to not want to talk about it online), and there was something weird in that there were two people there who have changed genders MTF since the last time I saw them a few years ago, and I felt awkward when talking to them. I was thinking about why I'm not very good with dealing with friends' transitions, and it's not that I disapprove of transgenderism, because I don't -- I think it's linked to my memory? For people who've known me a long time, you know I have a bizarrely good memory for faces/names/numbers/etc, but also that if you give me wrong information, it's very hard for me to ever overwrite that, so I still know some birthdays as a string of things, like "it's not the 16th, it's the 23rd", and I also have a very tough time changing names for people in my head, so I still call people by their college nicknames a lot of the time even if pretty much absolutely nobody else uses that name (or in one case, a guy who was one of my PGSS students and went by his middle name up through high school but switched to his first name in college, I *still* call him by his middle name because that's just how he was introduced to me 17 years ago). So I think this is just another case where I just don't know how to overwrite the data in my head. There's a person in there, they have a name, they have associated numbers and memories, and since I don't see them on any regular basis to really build a new identity or anything, it's just tough for me to correct what is in my memory.
(I dunno, I was thinking about this a lot afterwards, because I mean, I have a lot of gay friends and I never have any problem at all with that, so why is it that trans is hard for me? Yes, I realize I'm saying this in a public entry, but whatever.)
Anyway, aside from that, I juggled for a while during the party, and also did play some games during the party too, like Race for the Galaxy (where I am still convinced that it's a game that really suffers from "missed the boat" syndrome in many ways) and Factory Fun (where we would have played the full game out, except we were outdoors and sunset happened). I actually did not eat any pie at all, so ended up going back to Roman and Kelli's place and we had Zaw's for dinner, which was also nostalgic in a good way, and we sat outside on the porch and I got to find out exactly how cheap houses are in Pittsburgh these days, which is a little depressing.
My flight back to SF was at 6am, so I called for a taxi to show up at 3:45. I TRIED to take a nap but just utterly failed, and instead stayed up the entire night chatting with people online. Took a shower around 3am and caught the taxi and got to the airport. Brian was at the airport all night apparently, so I met him at the gate, and it turned out Jim K was also on our flight, and I slept through the entire flight (yay window seat, yay reverse redeye) and I got a ride to work with Brian since his girlfriend Dian was picking him up from the airport. Yay!