Monthly Archives: August 2013

Midtown Cat Studio

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Image courtesy of the DLC. Licensed under CC BY SA.

It has occurred to me recently that I might benefit from therapy. However, released as I have been from the comforting bosom of student health care, I have no idea about how to seek out a therapist.

I figured I’d start with Yelp.

It turns out that, unfortunately, the same site that I use to find every taco joint in midtown Atlanta is not a particularly appropriate resource for mental health care. All of the results it turned up were for massage therapy and marital counseling.

I did learn that I live next to a massage place, though, so that’s very exciting.

After giving up on that particular failed Yelpisode, I busied myself with my new favorite hobby: listening to this song, on loop, forever. (Occasionally I get bored with it, at which point I break out the best “Seven Nation Army” cover.) Last week, to expand my horizons beyond those two songs, I made a Spotify playlist called “Pretending I Live in an Anthropologie,” intending to fill it mostly with wispy, acoustic pop in foreign languages.

For authenticity, I Googled “Anthropologie music,” which of course turned up a comprehensive list of the music they play in the stores, typed out by a former employee, because Internet.

I am officially at a point in my life where I am okay having my personal soundscape curated by Very Cool 25-year-olds managing retail. Sixteen-year-old me is side eyeing hard through time.

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Traipsing through the cemetery moors

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Image my own. See the rest of the set here.

I was never a spooky wee goth in high school. Instead, I concentrated all of my time on becoming queen of the nerds. The goth streak I saved for college, where I wandered in to a class on mourning practices and basically never left (exhibit 1: the paper on Facebook and dead people that I spent a chunk of last year writing).

So, when a friend asked if I wanted to go visit a cemetery other than Oakland (so mainstream*) I was totally pumped.

Apparently, so was the weather, as our August heat was replaced for the weekend by a dreary sort of grey autumn weather. I felt like the appropriate weather for a Rookie photoshoot, staring dreamily off into teenaged ennui. That weather happens to coincide nicely with the weather needed for checking out mausoleums and traipsing through moors, which is exactly what we proceeded to do.

We visited Westview Cemetery. Wikipedia says that it’s the largest cemetery in the southeast, which makes me feel marginally less bad about the fact that my co-traipser and I spent the second half of the trip driving around, slightly alarmed that we would run out of gas before we saw the other wall of the place.

We started our visit in the Westview Abby, on the (mistaken) assumption that the giant castle building might have information about the cemetery. Instead, we managed to wander into a completely beautiful building full of vaulted ceilings (think Boston Library on a smaller scale), stained glass, and dead people.

It turns out that Westview Abby is a gigantic mausoleum. There were three floors of tombs that we saw, each with a plaque labeling its occupant. The bodies seemed to range in time–in the back corner we saw several plaques from the early 1900s, and several cremation markers that were older than that. We also saw tombs that were clearly earmarked but not yet occupied, and several plaques from the 2000s. It was very quiet. Continue reading →

Making Myself Useful

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Image courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This is the fourth time I’ve tried to write this blog post. I had a couple of ideas for topics, mostly centering on this John Green video about becoming an adult, but they all wound up mopey and self-absorbed and awful. They did not begin to approach the level of fun of, say, my piece on bears on leashes.

Basically, I am aware that being 22 sucks for a lot of people, but that does not make it less terrible for me, right at this moment. I feel like I’ve screwed something up by being in Atlanta rather than New York or LA or Tanzania, and even though I know that nothing about this is permanent, and that my life is likely to change more than I can possible imagine in the next 10 (or even five) years, there is a giant gulf between what I know objectively to be true and what keeps me up at night feeling somewhat adrift.

However, it is also totally possible to autopilot my weird bout of self-loathing and sadness–that’s part of what makes it so boring to read about. I am able to realize that I’ll probably feel that way no matter what I do, so it is easy for me to rationalize getting back out in the world to make myself useful. To that end, I went out to volunteer over the weekend.

I’m glad I did, because you know who’s super-nice, particularly after you’ve spent most of your weekend talking to no one but your cat and immediate family? Volunteers.

They are the actual nicest. Rather than being frustrated with me for not knowing what I was doing, every single person who was working with me over the evening thanked me for coming out, helped guide me through what I was supposed to be doing, and then made perfectly nice smalltalk about how I wound up volunteering there. It was really pleasant to be surrounded by kind people who were also not talking about tech support.

Plus there was free beer and cupcakes, which is not a bad volunteer perk.

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So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

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Saturday night, I attended the closing party for the 280 Elizabeth Street location of Dad’s Garage, the theater where I’ve been taking improv classes. On the one hand, it was bittersweet–I have been going to this theater since I was 12, and it is weird to see your hometown change. On the other hand, the party was insane.

Before we even wandered into the party, my friend and I had our first encounter of the evening: as faithful readers may recall, a few weeks ago I hit on a will call volunteer via Twitter at this very theater. Because my life is fun, he was in fact working will call for this event. Awkward banter was exchanged, we were set up with wrist bands, and my friend and I wandered inside. (The boring conclusion to the Twitter bro story is that he seemed to have a lady friend at the party, so, uh, whoops.)

A kindly volunteer, seeing my friend and I wandering around after we had come in, oriented us to what was happening: the main stage had turned into a four-table flip cup tournament moderated by Lucky Yates (who had a bullhorn because reasons), the part of the theater that had previously been offices had been transformed into a sweet black lit dance floor, and the back corner of things had been turned into something with a sign proclaiming it “The Bone Zone.”

“It was Lucky’s idea,” she said. “Don’t go in there. You’ll get pregnant.”

With that somewhat ominous warning (which we did heed), we headed off to wander. For the first hour, that was most of what we did–we’d wander into the dance floor, see that it was still empty, and wander back to watch flip cup or read some of the wall graffiti that was being added to the building. (Since the place is being destroyed soon, vandalism was encouraged so long as it didn’t involve punching through walls, because no one likes an electrical fire.)

Between the dance floor of people looking slightly uncomfortable, the flip cup tournament up front, and the dedicated portion of the theater for semi-public theater sex havers (or people doing cocaine, I have no idea), the whole event basically served as a reminder that frat parties pretty much never totally leave you. Unlike a frat party, however, the beer was good and the floor wasn’t even really that sticky. Continue reading →