Musing on Beginnings and Endings

Yesterday I puttered around at home for a while, and finally got in my car to go to a party thrown by Eric, one of my cow-orkers. Eric is another Quake player, and is French, and the occasion for the party was that he and his family are moving back to France in a few weeks.

The party was scheduled to start at 1:30, and I showed up "fashionably late" at 2:00 (understand, I am amazingly punctual about most appointments, so this is rare for me).

Well, I was the first one there. Moreover, it was half an hour before anyone else showed up! Go figure.

Eric and I chatted for a while, and he showed me his collection of European graphic novels and science fiction (most of it written in French; it's very odd to see sixteen Anne McCaffrey novels in French sitting side-by-side). Finally some other folks showed up and the party got under way.

It was pretty laid-back; there was a self-use barbecue, so I made some hamburgers. A number of people from WebObjects who have left the team or the company over the last year showed up. Many, many people brought kids (Eric had rented one of those big inflatable tents for the kids to play in and bounce around in, which kept them all amused), and several of the women there were pregnant. Guess I'm at that age where most of my peers are doing the family thing.

So it was a good time.

I left around 6:30 to meet Lucy and Ceej in Palo Alto for dinner. It turned out that Lucy had trouble finding parking, while CJ apparently got tied up at work and had to bail. So I waited for about half an hour, but that was okay since I had a book with me.

Lucy arrived and I phoned CJ and learned the result there, so Lucy and I went to get Indian food the next street over. It was pretty yummy, but I got completely - even uncomfortably - stuffed as I neared the end of my meal, apparently having not digested the burgers. So we went out and walked around a while and I felt better. We went to Kepler's afterwards where I indulged in the book I list over there on the left. It was nice to see Lucy again. I'm glad it seems we won't be cut off from each other by the fact that we now live 50 (as opposed to 20) miles apart.

Today was another puttering-around day. I spent a bunch of time cleaning up my study and organizing a lot of loose papers which had been lying around for weeks if not months. This led to the usual bunch of time spent reading old comics and leafing through books or newspapers before I shelved them or tossed them or whatever.

Oh, and I also called my Mom in there, wished her a happy Mother's Day. It sounds like she's just been taking it easy today. Usually a pleasant thing to do with a weekend day.

I went to the fitness center and worked out, and then went by the pet store (gosh, the always have adorable kitties there; it's hard to resist getting one), a sporting goods store (looking for workout shorts, I instead bought a Red Sox cap), and a comic book store (where I bought a comic which turned out not to be what I thought it was, and got on their mailing list).

Came home, did laundry, caught up on some TV viewing, petted the cats, etc. etc.

Actually, two of the taped TV episodes I watched most of were the final two episodes of Babylon 5. "Objects at Rest" and "Sleeping in Light" are real tear-jerker episodes, because they're both about the end of an era. The former is about the end of a long struggle, and the beginning of a new adventure yet to be revealed. The latter is about the end of the principal character in the aforementioned struggle, and the other characters reflecting on what it all meant.

It occurred to me that one can always find new beginnings in one's life, but that they always seem to be difficult to wade through, or that one doesn't notice them as a beginning at the time. Beginnings and early days always seem so remarkable in retrospect, but rarely so at the time.

I guess this isn't always true; if you're leaving a really rotten situation and are just glad to be out, then the beginning which follows it can be memorable and pleasant just by contrast. But if you're leaving a decent situation just for a change or scenery or pace, or for a possibly better situation, then you could end up where I am: Missing a lot of things about the last situation, and having a hard time coming to terms with what passed as a result of the ending.

You know, I really should try to avoid watching TV shows like this.

For something completely different, two separate comic strips, one from Zits and the other from Liberty Meadows, which poke fun at the same thing, which I'm sure every heterosexual guy can relate to:

I know this all seems very familiar to me...