"Brick by brick, we can build it from the floor / If we hold on to each other, we’ll be better than before" - Train
Last week was quite exhausting at work, as we had our quarterly earnings announcement in addition to a lot of things going on in the solar energy side of the business. I didn’t work longer hours, but the time I was at work was especially intense.
So possibly I wasn’t in the best frame of mind on Saturday when I went to visit Puck and a group of past and present SBU people for their annual LGBTA field trip to NYC. I had woken up early that morning to go to Nordstrom Rack’s large-size shoe event, which turned out to be disappointing and didn’t buy anything.
I met up with the group after they were done at the Museum of Sex (since I just visited on Labor Day, I didn’t care to see it again) and we went down to the East Village for ice cream at The Big Gay Ice Cream Shop. I got a Monday Sundae, which is a chocolate/vanilla soft-serve swirl in a waffle cone lined with nutella, topped with chocolate and dulce du leche, sea salt and whipped cream.
From there we had dinner at a ramen shop near St. Marks, where I had a bowl of spicy seafood ramen. We headed toward the sex/fetish shop Purple Passion on 20th Street to shop a bit before it closed. On the way to Penn Station to catch the Long Island Rail Road back to SBU, I told Puck I wasn’t feeling really up to continued hanging out this weekend – partly because of just being tired, but also partly because I’ve been feeling disconnected from them lately as a result of our last relationship check-in (in hindsight we were long-overdue for another one, because the last real check-in was way back in mid-June (“Folsom Street East” – June 19, 2011).
We hung back from the group on the walk to Penn and talked things through a little. It reminds me now of when we were walking with Laura and Patrick back on their 18th birthday in 2008. Our issues are different now and we’ve both grown a lot since then, but thankfully, we haven’t lost our ability and willingness to communicate in the moment about our feelings, even in the midst of other things going on. So we got on the train for the two-hour ride back to SBU and I met some of Puck’s new room/suite mates before going to bed.
The next morning we were supposed to have breakfast with some of the people from the day before, but one of them bailed so we just saw the other one off and came back to make breakfast on our own. We were also supposed to have lunch with Emily and her friend Lauren (with whom I marched at SlutWalk before I even knew who she was), but Emily was delayed in the city, so that plan also fell apart.
So once we were alone in their room, Puck and I had a good check-in and didn’t really make any new agreements or changes (other than we're going to be more regular about our check-ins rather than wait until things are going badly), but just reaffirmed our existing ones and said what needed to be heard. Then we ordered pizza and watched Captain America with some of their suitemates until it was time for me to catch my train back to the city.
I was pretty exhausted by the time I got back home, so I debated on whether to go to Papacookie on a Sunday night. In the end, I’m glad I did because Kacey was there and we had a good catching up after her return from Amsterdam. We’re going to try and get together again soon for movies or plays or just to get out and take a walk. I only stayed for the first two performances, a solo bassist and a duet of bassists, before I had to go home and get ready for another busy week at work.
