Beer

I've had an interesting, though largely unproductive day today. I started by leaving at just after 6:00am for a required meeting at the bookstore where I work to prepare for the holidays.  One of the managers, Jason, even baked us homemade gingerbread cookies.  We were then split into two teams and had a contest in which we answered questions related to our work at the holidays.  My team won, so I got a canvas shopping bag.  Now when I go shopping, I don't have to get those awful plastic bags anymore. 

After that, I met my friend Bill again to film the next section of the instructional video series we're working on.  This section was on prostrations.  It should be fairly short.  I basically explain how to do both short and long prostrations properly.  I've got some other ideas in mind, so I'll let y'all know when we start posting short versions of these on youtube. 

After that, I tagged along with another friend, Jennifer, to pick up a suitcase her friend was bringing back from Catalina Island.  Her friend works there about nine months out of the year, so this Winter, she and her friends a are driving up to San Francisco, then riding their bikes down to San Diego.  So Jennifer is suitcase sitting.  She's also an interesting driver.  I suggested she have her own cable access show, "Creative Driving with Jennifer."  Let's just say we did multiple u-turns on the way to and from the Catalina Island Ferry dock. 

We had a great talk about life and our plans, too.  For one thing, the older I get the more I worry about where my life is going.  Is this master's degree I'm working on ultimately going to lead me to some kind of financial stability and the ability to do retreat?  She said she makes her decisions by whether or not she can learn something from the opportunity at hand and she's done some amazing things, like teach English in a slum in India and in the Czech Republic).  I said, "You're 24 and I'm 35.  It's different when you're older."  Not that I was criticizing her.  Not at all.  It's just that you start to reach an age when you realize that you don't have another decade to just explore and life's adventure needs to be tempered with health insurance and the ability to take care of yourself.  So if you're in your mid-twenties and trying different things and just kicking around the globe, good on ya.  You should explore all the possibilities and probably not jump right into a career in tax law after graduation.  But you can't avoid thinking about your retirement forever.

Well, after that, I joined Jennifer, Bill and our friend Julia for a late lunch at a place I was assured wasn't a bar.  It really wasn't a bar.  It was the temple of beer.  In fact, on top of the main coolers was a shrine to Ronald Reagan.  The beer list was printed on legal size paper, 10 point font, front and back.  The owner said he has about 37 (?) new beers to add to the list. As soon as I walked in, heard the honky tonk country music playing and saw the guys in white t-shirts, jeans and baseball caps looking me up and down, I turned to Bill and said, "Oh, I'm going to fit right in here," with a big grin.  I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, fries, avocado slices, and a cranberry juice.  I left the beer to the rest of them. 

We laughed a lot.  I really enjoyed teasing Julia about being German (she was born in Boston and is  U. S. citizen, but was raised in Germany).  I said something like, "Oooohhhh, Ya!  Oktoberfest, Lieterhosen, Beer!  Yaaaa!"  She later made a comment about "maximizing our fun."  Very German.  I turned it into, "Vee must maximize our fun quotient."

So now I'm back here blogging instead of working on a paper or reading for class.  It is Saturday, after all, and I needed a break. 

But now it's back to work. 

Comments

[Josh Rosenberg]

Fun to read blog, I came across this from my professor and friend Hun Lye's website (warren-wilson.edu/~hlye) who is vice president at the meditation center in maryland that had a link to here. I help to run the buddhist group on campus with Hun as the faculty supervisor -- the group's site is bewarrenwilson.blogspot.com and mine is jmrosenberg.blogspot.com

-Josh