Rudy

My mom called me yesterday afternoon to tell me that they had to put our 18 year-old dog, Rudy, to sleep. There aren't words to describe how shocked and saddened I was, even though I should have been preparing myself for this day for years. In the past 6 years, there have been several back surgeries and more than a few bouts of sickness bad enough to make me think this might be the end. But he always bounced back better and healthier than before.

I guess part of me assumed he'd just keep doing that.

But this time, it seems, there was no bouncing back.

Being so far away in DC, I feel somewhat buffered from the full impact of this news. But what will happen--and how will it feel--when I go home to Colorado, and Rudy isn't there?

He's been a fixture--a family member--since I begged my parents to buy him from the pet store when I was 10. At the time, we already had two other high-maintenance dogs; the last thing we needed was a new puppy to train. But he was so cute, and it was so heart-breakingly sad that no one else had wanted to buy him: he'd been in the pet store for 8 months--so long that the employees had gone ahead and given him a name.

From the moment we set eyes on Rudy it was love at first sight, and he has been nothing but a wonderful, fun and funny addition to our family. From tipping over trashcans and pulling toilet paper off the roll to being the best looking dog ever to sport an Elmo party hat, Rudy will be missed. By me and my parents, certainly. By our other dogs certainly. But also by just about anyone who ever encountered him: Rudy was the kind of special dog that made even the most wary dog-hater fall in love, and I don't know how exactly we will get along without him.

Rudy with birthday cake on his face

Easter fun, a few weeks late

I'm back-dating this blog post, because I couldn't bear the thought that I'd actually gone more than a month without posting on my blog. Shameful.

Easter is one of my favorite holidays of the year: I love spring time, I like pastel colors, I like dyeing eggs and I LOVE Peeps. But this year, I was sick to the point of not being able to get out of bed and had to cancel my plans for an Easter dinner with my grad school friends. But Mike--who must have the world's best immune system--could sense my disappointment about scrapping all my Easter plans, and he said he was willing to risk getting sick in order for us to celebrate. And so we did, in a smaller fashion. A little dinner, a little egg dyeing, and some Peep jousting. All in all, a pretty good Easter, despite the illness.

Our dyed Easter eggs

Mike and Claire self-portraits. Medium: eggs, dye, and wax crayon.

Our Peeps, prior to the joust

Our Peeps, after the joust. I think Mike's won.

If you're going to San Francisco. . . .

I know, I know. I've been a slacker of a blog poster this month. Since grad school started, that seems to be the theme of my life. But to do a little catch up, two weeks ago, Mike and I went to San Francisco for Valentine's Day/President's Day weekend.

I think I told every single person I saw in the month leading up to us going how excited I was.

You know how sometimes you're really excited about something, and then when it actually happens, it's not as good as you thought it would be? Yeah, that definitely DID NOT happen this time. San Francisco/Oakland were so much better than I thought they would be, and I was already expecting them to be awesome.

For starters, we had kick-ass weather. Apparently, it's been very rainy and cold this winter, and this was about the first time since November that the sun had come out. I know this because when we went kayaking on Lake Merritt, the boat rental lady told us we were the first people to rent boats in 2008! Good work Mike and Claire!


Then, we got to go to Drake's, my fabulously sketchy brewery in a parking lot. And even better, I got to go there with Miranda. And even better than that, we ran into George. Seeing as how Miranda and George were both integral parts of the awkward craziness that always was Friday nights at Drakes, I was happy to share it with both of them.



We also got to see more of my dearly missed SF friends: Helen, Jess, and Dina. We hit up some of my favorite dive bars in SF and the East Bay.

Doc's Clock

The Alley

We went to Angel Island. I learned how to play Rummy 500 and now own a set of "how to survive in the wilderness" playing cards.



And we ate oh so much yummy food. This trip was pretty much built around a very rigid plan of all the foods I've missed and can't get in D.C., that we then washed down with cheap dive bar beers. Or bloody marys.

Banana Pudding from Chef Edward's

The only things that could have made it better would have been more time, and getting to see more old friends. But for a short weekend it was awesome, and I think just simply made both of us more sure we want to come back again--very soon!

I'm a Bloody Mess

And I do mean that literally.
This is what happens when an accident prone person (inevitably) falls off her bike. It's going to be even more gorgeous when it bruises, I think. Oh, and for those who are interested, if you follow the trail of blood down my shin in the picture, you can also see the eye-shaped scar left over from the MRSA/abscess-removal.

I suppose it's never too late to start wrapping myself in bubble wrap?

YAY!!!!

My friend Miranda sent me a message a few days ago, asking what I was doing for President's Day. Seeing as how I didn't even know when President's Day was, I definitely didn't have plans. And then she suggested meeting in San Francisco, with boyfriends in tow. It took me approximately 4 seconds to decide that come hell or high water, boyfriend or no, I WAS going to be in San Francisco that weekend. So I launched a full-force persuasion campaign to get Mike to agree that it was worth the cost to come.

And 12 hours later, our plane tickets were bought. I AM SO EXCITED! I'm excited to see friends, I'm excited to get to go all the places I miss, and I'm really excited to get to share it with Mike.

Times Square Ain't the Place for a Vegan

Mike and I were in NYC last weekend to celebrate the birthday of his friend Yuriy. Last Friday evening, after many hours of meat-eating and booze-drinking and general birthday-celebrating, we left Yuriy and the rest of his friends to make our way back to our very swanky Times Square hotel.

En route, we got into a fairly intense discussion. It was intense enough--and we were both so focused on it--that upon arriving in Times Square we continued to stand in the middle of the sidewalk, talking intently to each other and not really paying any mind to what was happening around us.

So here we are, in the middle of Times Square, having the kind of single-minded and emotionally intense conversation you can only have when you're really drunk, when a couple--youngish and fairly well dressed--approach us.

Couple: "Um, excuse us. We're sorry to interrupt you, because you look like you're having a pretty important conversation, but we don't have any money and we're pretty hungry."

Mike and Claire: "Um. . . ." as both of us start fumbling through our pockets for change.

Couple: "No, no. We don't want to take your money, but if you wouldn't mind buying us something to eat, we'd appreciate it."

Mike seemed game for this proposal, so he gestures around Times Square--where there are easily 20 open restaurants within spitting distance of where we are standing--and asks them: "Where did you want to go? How about McDonald's?"--as it was the closest to where we were standing.

Couple: "Um, well, that won't work actually. You see, we're vegans and we don't really eat any of that kind of food. But we know a really good vegan Chinese restaurant about 15 blocks south of here. How about that?"

Even now, a week later, I don't know quite what to make of this. Have people really just gotten that bold? Were they actually trying to pick us up for a foursome? Were we being Punk'd? And did they really not appreciate the truth behind the phrase "beggars can't be choosers?"

Needless to say, Mike and I said that was a bit far for us to go to get them food, wished them luck and bid them adieu as we quickly made our way back into our hotel.

Seen in the NYC Macy's

A Hassidic Jew toddler--complete with baby yarmulke and long curly sideburns--attached by a leash to his mother.

Good News

I have lots to blog about from the last few weeks, but I'll share my exciting school/work-related news first:

About a month ago, my friend Alison, who works in the very cool Center for Social Media at school, was asked to recommend any people she knew who might be a good fit for the Center's Fellowship program. She recommended me (as did a couple of my professors), and I was brought in soon after to interview for the program. Destpite interviewing in the middle of my final hell week--when I hadn't slept in two days and I was running around with a painfully throbbing MRSA-filled abscess on my leg--I had felt like the interview went well. It went well enough, anyway, that they offered me some short-term employment over the break, while they were short-staffed.

Cut to today, when in the middle of a conversation with the woman I'd initially interviewed with (about my continuing to do some work this semester for the Center), I asked her when they would be deciding about the Fellowships. Shocked, she replied, "But I thought you knew! No one told you? We're offering the Fellowship to you!"

Needless to say, this is really fantastic news, and I'm very excited. The Fellowship will partly pay for school for the next two years, and I'll get two years of working with the other folks in the Center for Social Media, which is right up my alley!

Celebrate good times, come on!

It hasn't all been spider bites and MRSA infections here in Washington, D.C. I've actually had a lot of fun this semester.

Case in point: we celebrated my friends Alison and Anthony's 24th birthdays--as well as the end of the semester--with a party at my house last Friday. There was booze. There was cake. There were fun people. And--best of all--there were drunken declarations of (platonic) love, which is always a sign of a good party, in my opinion.

Alison the birthday girl with Claire and Genna

Anthony the birthday boy with Gary

Two Mikes, a Dan and the other Anthony

Mike and Claire

Merry Christmas to Me

So if I haven't mentioned it, this semester has been kind of . . . eventful. And by eventful, I mostly mean crisis-filled. What with the flooding of my apartment, my development of allergies to something in my apartment, the near-lethal spider bite, and the day when my external hard-drive over-heated and took all of my semester's work with it, this has not been the easiest few months.

But recently, everything had been going much smoother. Classes were fun and I was doing pretty well, I'd made some good friends, and have even ventured into a stable, not-f'ed up relationship. The only slight trouble was that I seemed to have become more clumsy than normal, and often found myself bumping into things or tripping. Hardly a big deal, I thought.

SO NOT TRUE. The weekend after Thanksgiving, I "tripped and fell and scraped my shin." Annoying, but I didn't think it was a big deal. Until it became clear that the scrape wasn't healing. I went to a doctor. She said it was infected. She gave me antibiotics and told me to come back if it didn't get better. It didn't get better. I went back, she informed me that an ABSCESS had formed and I was going to need to have it drained. Yikes. So I go to the surgeon she referred me to who informed me that they didn't drain abscesses--they just cut them out. So she numbed up my leg and cut a quarter-sized chunk out of my shin. When I went back the next day to have it checked out, I fainted and then spent 10 minutes throwing up from how much it hurt and how absolutely disgusting it looks. And now, just as it is starting to heal and hurt less, she has informed me that they got the tissue culture back on the abscess and it seems that I have MRSA. Yes, MRSA.

Merry Christmas to me.

Yuck

While I was home this past week for Thanksgiving, my mom made tacos one night. Now, I was pretty excited about this because I love tacos. I was even more excited when I was the container of what I assumed was guacamole out on the kitchen counter, along with all the other tacos fixin's. I LOVE guacamole, and I've been in avocado withdrawal since I moved to DC.

So I spoon some of the "guacamole" onto one of my tacos, but there's something kind of off about the texture. It feels really. . . .thick, and almost. . . .gelatinous? This makes me suspicious, so I taste some of the "guacamole" off the spoon. Hmm. Doesn't exactly taste like avocados. So I finally look at the container and discover I'm not eating guacamole at all, but "Guacamole-flavored dip"! And as I look at the list of ingredients, my stomach churns a bit. Because of the 23 ingredients listed on the label, avocados are number 12: well behind water, salt, dried onion powder and several chemicals I cannot pronounce.

I guess I'll be waiting for my next trip to CA before I attempt to feed that craving again.

When your pet surpasses you in popularity

Many of you know that I come from a family of dog lovers. As long as I can remember, we've always had at least one dog (always a dachshund--or weiner dog), and more often than not, we've had two or three at a time. Right now, we have three dogs, one of whom has made it to the ripe old age of 17 1/2 years old.

I'd never really stopped to think about how amazing it is to have a nearly 18 year old dog, until a friend of my parents called the local paper and suggested that they write a story about it. The paper jumped at the opportunity, and early last week, an article profiling my parents and Rudy--our dog--and talking about the challenges more people are facing in having older pets appeared in the paper. And mind you, this was no small, single column newspaper story. There was a small picture of Rudy on the front page of the paper. There was a HUGE picture of Rudy on the front page of the Lifestyle section. And then there was the actual article--complete with more pictures of Rudy and our other two dogs on an inner page of the Lifestyle section.

A good month

I realize it's been a long time since I blogged. This last month or so has been really fun, but sadly, I have virtually no pictures to prove it. So what have I been up to?

In the last month, I:

Went apple picking twice. Once we went in the pouring down rain, but we got lots of yummy apples. And a pumpkin. And some cider. The second time we went when it was sunny and beautiful, but didn't actually come home with any apples. (This is partly because I already had plenty and partly because there really weren't many left on the trees.)

Carved pumpkins for Halloween. My pumpkin was a landscape of Colorado. My friend carved his to represent the way that capitalism--like a boiling cauldron--consumes us.

Got lost in a corn maze (or maize maze, as I like to call it) and watched people shoot pumpkins out of a cannon.

Mike and Claire try valiantly to find their way out of the maze

Dressed up as a "Smarty Pants" for Halloween, while my friend Brianne dressed as a "Fancy Pants."

Brianne has the bling and ruffles to make her pants fancy, and I've got the Smarties

Finished my first short film--an autobiography.

Went to my dear friend Abby's beautiful wedding.

Becky, Abby and Claire at Abby's wedding

In addition, I have not been bitten by any small animals (or large ones), and there has been no more flooding, so that's been good. All in all, not a bad month.

Datey-dates

So I'm going on a very "datey-date" on Saturday night. It occurs to me that I can't remember the last time I went on a "datey-date." It has definitely been a couple of years.

Now don't get me wrong--I've been on plenty of dates. But they've tended to be lower-key dates. "I'll meet you there" dates (or even more common--given how many people I've dated who didn't have a car--"I guess I'll pick you up" dates). "Play it by ear" dates. Or sometimes, "I have a general idea of the plan" dates. And as a general rule, the content of the dates I've been on has been pretty low key and non-datey also. We'd go hiking, or have a picnic, or go for a motorcycle ride, or just kind of wonder around and see what happened. Hanging out as dating.

And really, non-datey's been good with me. The formality and planned-ness of datey-dates makes me nervous. I feel like staring at each other from across the table of a fancy restaurant isn't a very natural or organic way to really get to know someone. And it's certainly not representative of how I really like to spend my time.

And yet, this datey-date's got me intrigued. There is something to be said for a guy with a very clear plan. Who's going to pick me up in a car. And take me out on a Saturday night (not a Thursday night or Sunday afternoon). I don't even know what to make of it. But given my penchant for new experiences (particularly if they're awkward), I'm looking forward to it.

Here's to hoping we don't decide we hate each other mid-way through the appetizer, because it would be a really long night after that!

The Upside

So I've spent a lot of time on this blog lately complaining about things that are bad, but very little time talking about school or the stuff that's going well.

And I promise, there ARE things that are going well. School--for the most part--has been great. It's really challenging, and I spend at least half of my time feeling like I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm still really enjoying what I'm learning. I'm taking a writing class where we're writing scripts for fiction and non-fiction films. I'm taking a production class where we're making short films. And I'm taking a design class (for reasons I still don't quite understand) where I'm learning all about Photoshop. I will soon be sticking my head on all sorts of other people's bodies.

On top of that, I've made friends. I've learned my way around DC well enough that I can give directions to people who have lived here longer than I have. I've reconnected to Abby and Becky's DC-based parents. I've got an in for what I think will be a great internship, AND the weather here has not been as bad as I expected.

See? All good things.

There is hope for me and DC yet.

Washington, D.C.: 4, Claire: 0

A month and half ago, when I was (fairly calmly) dealing with the flood that put good chunks of my apartment underwater, I rationalized that everyone needed something bad to happen to them upon moving to a new place, and it was better to get it out of the way. After all, the damage from the flood was minimal, and if that was the worst thing that befell me while living in D.C., that wouldn't be so bad at all!

Foolish, foolish Claire. What on earth made me think that would be THE ONLY bad thing? What on earth made me think that would be the worst thing? Now, I know better. I will now wait in calm dread for the next ridiculous, bad thing that is going to happen. I'm very sure the bad luck is not over.

Why so sure, you ask? Why so pessimistic? Here's why:

I have had what I presumed was a cold pretty much since I moved to D.C. This past week it occurred to me that 6 weeks was kind of a long time to not be getting better from a cold, and that my symptoms (stuffy nose, sneezing, sore throat) improved drastically when I was away from the apartment for long stretches of time, only to return with a vengeance when I walked back in the door. My friend Brianne--who would know a thing or two about this--has pointed out that it probably means I am allergic to something. Yes, that's right. I'm ALLERGIC to my apartment.

And, all the nose blowing I've been doing has triggered yet another problem: nosebleeds. Yup. All throughout the week, my nose has spontaneously erupted blood at the most inopportune moments, forcing me to walk around (although thankfully not in public yet) with a twisted up Kleenex shoved up my nose, as I try to staunch the blood. This makes me feel like the geeky loser I was when I was eight and had to stop taking swimming lessons because the chlorine made my nose bleed. There is nothing sadder than being the 8 year old who has to sit with the teachers while all your friends splash away in the pool.

But I digress. As if the allergies and the nosebleeds weren't enough, there's been another problem. It seems that earlier this week, a brown recluse spider bit me. For those of you not up on your spider hierarchies, the brown recluse bite is extremely dangerous, second only to a black widow. In worst case scenarios, the bite gets infected and all of the surrounding skin rots off. I'm not even joking. It's really disgusting.

Now, I've been bit by a spider before, and it was annoying and it kind of hurt for a few days, but then it faded away and left me with this stupid lumpy scar. Not a huge deal. So I didn't worry too much when I noticed the bite. I didn't worry too much when it still hurt several days after I first noticed it. I started to worry yesterday, when I realized that the redness and swelling looked worse than when I first noticed it and that my entire leg was throbbing with pain.

The advice nurse at Suburban Hospital was pretty worried, too, when I described it, and she ordered me to haul my ass ASAP to the emergency room, which I did with the help of said friend Brianne. There we proceeded to wait for 4 hours until I finally got seen. They loaded me up with antibiotics and painkillers, took blood, gave me a tetanus shot and told me that if the swelling and redness hadn't gone down substantially in the next few days, I'd have to come back in and they would need to carve out the chunk of infected skin to keep it from spreading. I'm hoping they just said that to scare me into taking all the antibiotics.

So yeah, that's been my week. Allergies, nosebleeds and spider bites, oh my. And I don't even get to enjoy the tiny silver lining of having a spider bite that hurts like a motherf---er: They offered to prescribe me percocet for the pain, and I had to turn them down. Even extra strength Tylenol makes me feel like I'm on a tilt-a-whirl and about to throw up, so I definitely can't handle big-time painkillers.

I feel like these experiences have made me wiser, more prepared for whatever other bad things will come my way. I am completely expecting to find out that mutant killer crickets live in the laundry room of my apartment, and it would not surprise me at all to find that a school of pirhanas has taken up residence in my toilet bowl. Bring it--nothing would surprise me now!

D.C. is Finally Looking Up

Since I last wrote, things in Washington, D.C. are going much better. We never did discover the cause of the crazy flood waters that overtook my apartment (and my mom, the neighbor, the plumber, the contractor working on the house where I live, the landlords and I all made a valiant effort to figure out where the water could have come from, to no avail), but we did tear out the old, wet carpet and go crazy with a couple of fans and a dehumidifier. (Note: I have never seen a device that sucks water OUT of the air before. Being a nose-bleed prone child from an arid state, I had no need to be taking any more water out of the air. Ordinarily, we were looking for ways to put moisture back INTO the air.)

But anyway, right around the time the apartment dried out, the movers showed up with the rest of my stuff, the carpet guys came to lay down new (and much prettier) carpet, and I finally got to unpack, put together my bed and stop sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen. And somehow--luckily--the only things that suffered any damage from the flooding were my cable box (ironically, I'd been really hesitant to get cable, fearing it would suck up too much of my valuable time) and the biography of Richard Nixon, which promptly started to mold. HA. Karma's a bitch. (And no, I don't really want to explain why I have a copy of Nixon's biography. It's a long story.)

So now, relatively settled, I'm getting into the process of making new friends, reconnecting with old ones, and poaching other people's D.C. friends. Orientation for my graduate school program was Friday, and so far I've managed to stay more excited than scared. I'm not a) the only person who doesn't have film experience or b) the oldest person in the program, although I'm not that far from it.

I realized how old I am, and just how long I've been out of college, when this librarian came to orientation and started talking about appropriate research methods. She said: "I know when you all were undergrads, it was OK to just do all your research for a paper on Google, but now you should be using different methods to research." She says this, and it suddenly occurs to me that I'm not completely sure Google even existed when I was an undergrad. And so my slow descent into old age begins, at the ripe old age of 27!

I guess that's about it for now. I start both class and work tomorrow. I hope it goes well. I hope I don't discover that I'm in over my head. Or really, I guess I'm OK with being in over my head. Everything I've ever really learned from, grew from or been challenged by involved me feeling like I was in WAY over my head. I hope I learn, grow and am challenged by this!

I'm Living in a Swamp

And at the moment, I mean that quite literally.

So my mom and I got to DC on Monday night, and we've been staying at a hotel, and running around trying to get some of that move-in stuff done (e.g., visits to the DMV, buying groceries, multiple trips to the hardware store and the Bed Bath and Beyond, etc.) Last night--despite the fact that none of my furniture is arriving for about a week and they hadn't delivered my new bed yet, we decided to stay in the apartment on an inflatable mattress I'd brought along.

One small problem: while I can inflate the bed no problem, the cap that keeps the air IN the mattress is missing. So we slept on the very hard floor on top of a deflated air mattress with no pillows. Awesome. (Mental note to me: DO NOT travel without your thermarest camping sleep pad and sleeping bag.)

After a very sleepless night, I got up early, spent about 4 hours at the DMV and car inspection place and ran some more errands. With those out of the way, my mom and I headed out to actually do something fun, like be tourists.

So here comes the swamp part. On returning to my apartment 5 hours later, we found that something, somewhere had flooded, leaving the carpet soaked, everything that had been on the floor drenched (and I do mean DRENCHED--I was wringing water out of clothes I'd left in a suitcase on the floor), and a good half inch of water on the floor in the bathroom (which we had to clean up using a dustpan, because we don't have a mop, buckets, or towels to use yet). That's bad enough, but the amount of heat in the air coupled with all the water in this apartment has given this place the feeling of being a swamp--thick, muggy and utterly disgusting. Add to that a bunch of slugs bigger than my index and middle finger combined and the 30 or so mosquitos who have bitten me in the 3 days that we've been here (leaving behind huge red welts, because I'm incapable of not scratching), and I feel like I've landed in the Everglades. And it's just made me miss California all the more.

I'm hoping that, with the really bad thing out of the way, Washington D.C. can only get better. Seriously, I'm looking for something--anything really--to like about this city.

The Free Lunch? It Really Doesn't Exist.

I've been home in Colorado for about a month. That's been nice, but kind of. . . well, boring. As a way to alleviate some of said boredom, I went with my parents a couple weeks ago to volunteer with their service group--The Lions Club--at a sporting event for blind athletes. At the event, I got to talking to another member of the club--Jim--about my future plans and why I was interested in pursuing documentary filmmaking.

A few days later, my mom asked if I wanted to come to the bi-monthly Lions Club meeting that day. I wasn't really interested, but she said there'd be free lunch, and who passes that up?

So I went, ate my free lunch and politely listened to the club members discuss the orders of business, one of which was a proposal to start inviting non-club members to come and talk about whatever it was they did. At this very moment, Jim-the-guy-from-the-other-night pipes up and says he'd really like it if I could talk more about what I was doing and why.

Suddenly, every head in the room swiveled to stare at me. The president of the club announced that HE thought it was a great idea (with my dad very thoughtfully seconding him) and asked if I'd be willing to come back and present at the next meeting. Before I could try to back out, my dad had assured them I'd be happy to do it.

So much for free lunch.

So yesterday, I came back to the meeting, got up in front of this club of mostly old, slightly cranky Republican men and talked about how JVC and the union had turned me into a crazy lefty commie who believes in obscene things like empowerment and equal rights for all and how I was going to take all of those beliefs and use them as the basis for propaganda. Ahem, I mean documentaries. (Or at least this is how I am sure what I said--which I really tried to make as neutral and non-partisan as possible--was perceived. Seriously, when I mentioned--JUST MENTIONED--Michael Moore in passing, eyes narrowed, lips curled, and I thought at least one guy might attempt to jump me and shake those liberal values right out of me.) Needless to say, it felt like a tough crowd. I definitely earned that damn lunch.

Who Needs Kevin Bacon?

So I was in D.C. last weekend, searching frantically for an apartment that I can move into when I get to D.C. in the middle of August. After looking at what felt like a million apartments and trying to navigate the many flaming hoops that apartment management companies feel are necessary to determine whether or not you're worthy of living in their apartment (you want the application fee as a money order and the deposit as a cashier's check? You need to see my 3 most recent pay stubs and my W-2s? You need to know the balance of all of my bank accounts and you need to see my actual social security card as well as my passport and my driver's license? Um. . . Ok), I found a place that I'm excited about. (And didn't require any flaming hoops at all!)

I also managed to find time to take in a Nationals game. I went with my friend Brianne, who brought her friend Rachel, who brought her friend Fred, who brought his friend Alex. Alex, like me, happens to be a former HERE union organizer, so we bonded over that. After the game the group of us headed out to a dive bar on U Street that soon got overrun by a bunch of drunk rugby players who'd just won the Mid-Atlantic Rugby championship in their division, or so they drunkenly told us. Repeatedly.

Anyway, Alex and I continued to chat, and in the process of talking, discovered that his dad grew up next door to the mom of my very dear friend, Miss Abby Levine. Wow. Kind of random. And yet, somehow, I am not surprised at all. And neither was Abby, when I told her about it.

You see, Abby, was the link that led me to meet nearly everyone I know in San Francisco. So of course she would somehow be connected to the friend of a friend of a friend that I meet at a baseball game. Also, Abby was my introduction to San Francisco's progressive Jewish circle, so it seems fitting that she would manage, inadvertantly and without even needing to be there, to be my introduction to that exact same circle in D.C.!

With friends like that, who needs Kevin Bacon to play the "6 degrees" game?