where the blog turns into catherine's diary!
despite the drizzles, this weekend was full o fun. i hadn't really felt like doing anything all weekend (that's what the rain does to me) but i ended up doing quite a bit. friday at work was somewhat disappointing because my coworker and i (who are running the marine corps together and fundraising together [donate money to paypal account, if you're so inclined! not a single person has donated yet, and if you donate i will write a blog entry all about you and your wonderful traits and i will exaggerate said wonderful traits enormously]) went to talk to the vp about the possibility of matching funds, or at least a donation from the company. he was nice, but nothing was achieved. i wasn't surprised, seeing how ridiculously stingy our company is (i found out recently that annual raises aren't even guaranteed, which is speeding up my job search considerably). but he said we shouldn't even create a sign-up donation sheet, or even send out a fricking mass email about the race fundraising, which seems ridiculous to me, because i'm sure no one would mind one email about giving money to cancer research. but whatever. he suggested we go around together to all of the vps/higher ups individually and ask money from them, but that was probably the extent of what we should do. it was frustrating. i was kind of counting on my company to be able to donate a somewhat, if not huge, significant amount of money. i am pretty sure i can get at least a couple of hundred bucks out of them, because i do work with some kind and generous people, so i'll be grateful for that.
i left work promptly at five with aforementioned coworker s. and another coworker l., and we headed to whitlows on wilson for some happy hour action. i generally am not a fan of whitlows, as i consider it to be the purveyor of all northern virginia post-collegiate frat boys/sorority girls action, but they have a good friday happy hour - $2.50 for anything on draft. a couple of beers later, naomi and julie and tommy showed up, and we chatted for a bit before deciding we were starving and that chili needed to be ingested at hard times cafe. yum. chili.
tommy and i decided to go back to my place after chili, because we had to wake up at 6:30 am the next morning to attend the susan g. komen national race for the cure. bless tommy's heart, he didn't have to come, but no one else was running with me or coming with me. normally i wouldn't mind going to a race alone, but i thought maybe seeing all the breast cancer survivors/people who were running in memory of loved ones would tick off my hyper-sensitive emotional crying abilities, and i didn't want to like, be running like a hysterical freak by myself through the rain.
the race was great, except for the rain. it was life-affirming and a happy experience - i didn't feel any sense of sadness or desperation, just lots of hope and wanting to remember people who had died from breast cancer in positive ways. all the survivors who ran the race had been given special pink t-shirts, and as they crossed the finish line, the announcer pointed them out and everybody in the crowd would cheer for them. but even though doing the race wasn't really about running for me, i couldn't help having my over-developed sense of competitiveness kick in during the 5k. and since the crowd was super slow (several several thousand people were running the narrow course, and it's not exactly like cancer surivors are out to beat everyone into the ground with their running skills) i kept getting frustrated and dodging slow people and once i might have pushed a kid to the ground to get by. just kidding. but i thought about it.
saturday day involved a lot of grad school research. i don't know what to think about that. i suppose if i go to grad school, it would be for journalism, though i do realize that spending $30,000 and not working for two years is maybe not really the best way to advance your career in a field that values work and hands-on experience more than theory and training. but oh well. i still have a yearning to get back in a structured academic environment. another stumbling block is the fact that the only programs i would be really interested in are those that have an emphasis on magazine journalism/production, and the only schools that offer a master's in that are like the three fricking top j-schools in the nation (northwestern, berkeley, missouri) and they are all incredibly long shots for me. anyway, i still have to accomplish the freak-out task of taking the GREs and re-learning everything i forgot in mathematics, which will take quite a while, seeing as i haven't taken a math class since senior year of high school, and i haven't paid attention in a math class since 7th grade.
i forgot: that afternoon, we went to a matinee of harry potter, which was quite good, and the best in the movie series by leaps and bounds. just two problems: during the MOST CRITICAL scene in the movie, where basically all the plot twists are revealed, the sound went out for 15 minutes; and we were sitting next to The Most Annoying Women in the World, who, while i was waiting for tommy to get some popcorn, called a friend and shouted into the phone: "guess where i AM? drinking a bottle of sake and watching HARRY FREAKING POTTER!" she very kindly offered us some of her sake, and when the sound went out at that one scene, proceeded to narrate what was happening to the, oh, 12 rows around us. she said it didn't matter that the sound went out, because she was going to see it at least five more times anyway.
saturday night, tommy and i attended a housewarming party thrown by his friend erik brolis, who recently moved into a house near catholic university. the house was so nice and cute, and even though the neighborhood was slightly ghetto, the sense of an urban lifestyle really got me thinking about moving into the city at some point. i really have never lived in a city - i grew up in d.c. for my first nine or ten years, then was a young suburbanite until college, which i attended in charlottesville - not exactly a thriving metropolis, though i did love the town to death. i then moved to milan, but not the city center - rather a suburb of milan that was basically a bunch of boxy apartment buildings and a vegetable stand. now i'm in arlington, which i adore, because it really is vibrant and young and busy for a northern virginia suburb. i don't know exactly what i would gain by moving into d.c., except higher rent, smaller space and an increased possibility of getting mugged, but it still seems oddly attractive.
and here we are today. i just realized that i have wasted half an hour rambling about nothing important or exciting, and so will go running as punishment. six miles today. the marathon training has begun!
anyone else do anything exciting this weekend?
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The best part of the new Harry Potter movie is to see David Thewlis - who played Lupin - back in action. He is of course best known for his portrayal of Knox Harrington, Video Artist.
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