My faith in the Inferno is restored. They have Goth-Industrial night every other week now, it seems. Apollo may well yet turn things back around to what I perceive as normality. These are the nights where I'm so buzzed with energy I can't fall asleep until 5am.

It was all the same as before. The Coterie was in back as usual, the well-established in the hierarchy mixing with commoners and the rising stars. It's a transitional space where two back bars are, a space for gin and water at different intervals--perhaps the occasional show by the tattooed man or a burlesque.

That is obviously not the reason I go. I dance. I get drunk and lose all sense of reason and proportion. I danced for two hours straight. Now I see the benefit of doing cardiovascular work four times a week.

It was the most delightful experience I've had in months. There was perky Jewish girl wildly ecstatic that I was getting all into "Panzermensch", and mustachioed Huguenot guy that dances and then watches the History or Discovery channel in captions at the main bar that's never open nowadays, or the Hillary look-alike who has oddly gotten slightly better at dancing and does not try as hard to fit in, or Nathan, Mike, and all the others.

They club-know me, I club-know them. it's always been enough to dance there. But given that I may stay here for another 1-3 years, perhaps it makes sense to strike up friendships of some kind. All of my grad student friends are married and were never exactly go-gettingly social to begin with.

Regardless, a moderate piece of my old life before Emily is back. All I need now is to starting doing photography again. As soon as I have a solid idea of when I start making post-doc money, I can use part of my savings to buy the camera I've always wanted with some lenses and a new tripod.

* * *

Tomorrow is a lab get-together over the Terrace that I organized. I went there today in the hopes of getting out of my apartment cave and being around people. It was windy and cold outside. It was chock full of people wanting to use the toilet and kids eating iced cream inside. Oddly this helped me focus on the tasks at hand. I wrote an email to Barb about the Metabolic Syndrome study with some ideas. I also went through the whole literature on a chemokine called IL-8 and its relationship to brain atrophy for a manuscript I'm writing.

Given that I'm going to be sore tomorrow, I think I can just concentrate on work, socializing, dinner, and more work.

I like that proportion. I like where things are going.

previous - next