This week has been ups and downs, it seems like. I saw Puffy AmiYumi on Monday night at the 930. Watching the show, I realized I have such a crush on them but in a completely abstract way. Just the fact that there exists in this world two cute Japanese girls who can rock out like that makes me feel great. And the show was tremendous fun; I've been listening to them for a while, ever since I heard the Teen Titans theme song, so I knew most of the songs, and they played a lot of my favorites. Walking back from the club to my apartment, I passed by a bar near 18th and U that I hadn't noticed before. Having just moved here, I am still trying to find good places to eat and drink, and I'm trying to do it quickly as I'm already feeling my exploratory spirit draining - it can be hard to motivate yourself to explore when you're on your own all the time. It was fun at first but it gets old. So I figure I should do as much as I can while I can still motivate myself.
My general evaluation strategy for bars runs something like this: walk in, order a Yuengling, and see how much it costs. Then, keeping the cost in mind, take the overall scene of the bar in (how crowded, what sort of people, decor, music, availability of food, etc). Under this system, the best bar I've found so far is the Brickskeller, which has sorta-cheap beer (and an amazing selection of it) and is open every night, rarely crowded, and serves pretty decent bar food until late. On the other end of the scale was a bar on 14th, I forget the name, which was $5.50 a cheap beer and was packed full of terribly fashionable people. This new place, called Common Share, has $2 Yuengling, which means I pretty much instantly had a good feeling about it. While it is on the outskirts of Adams Morgan, it's obviously a neighborhood bar, not an Adams Morgan bar. It did kind of surprise me at first to walk in and realize I was the only white person there. That is something I'm relatively used to but I did not expect it that time, being as we were so close to the vast collection of yuppie bars just up the street. I had a couple of deliciously cheap beers and then went off home.
Up until this week I had managed to keep myself nice and busy with things this month, which was pleasant. On Tuesday I realized I should start watching how much I spend (since I don't get my first paycheck until the middle of September and I have to stretch what I have until then). So I didn't go out, which in the end was probably a mistake. I later found something in a writeup by m_turner about avoidant personality disorder: "Its easy to keep going, occupying your mind until you can't actually feel anything. And yet, once you slow down, it all catches up and hits you like a freight train." I think that pretty much nails how I felt that night. I couldn't sleep and ended up smoking quite a lot of weed just in order to calm down enough to stop pacing around and at least get into bed. Wednesday was just as bad, and I couldn't concentrate at work at all, especially after an old co-worker sent me an email about a happy hour going on tonight. This particular happy hour is a goodbye one for a certain someone, as tomorrow is her last day. As she was the 'cause' (trigger would be a more appropriate term) of much of my recent problems with myself, and especially as she does not want me in her life any longer, I decided I had other plans. That night I went out and revisited the Common Share and drank cheap beer until 1 AM or so, which didn't do much to make me feel better then and certainly didn't make me feel very great in the morning.
Today was all right. We went to a baseball game in the afternoon. It was the first time I had been to a major league baseball game. It wasn't that entertaining, but it was much better than watching one on TV. I spent a fair amount of it reading and had a couple of decent conversations with some of the people I work with. Rather than deal with another commute to and back from Nova for only an hour or so of actual work time, I just took the Metro home. Having actually gotten home at a reasonable time for once (5:30), I naturally went to sleep until 8 or so.
So, I guess I'm hoping that Friday and this weekend will end up better than the middle of this week has. I might go up to Baltimore on Saturday to have some fun and relax, though I still do need to hit up the Hiroshige exhibit that is showing at some museum around here before it closes in a couple of weeks.