the beautiful people

Music: Judge Joe Brown

Oi! I'm feeling a little hurty today. My boi Christopher has been in town the last few days taking in Austin as a virgin encounter. Christopher and I were stationed in the Tundra for a couple of years together (he got his master's at the U of MN) and, after seven years of separation, we have been reunited in the same geographic region! I'm thrilled that he landed a job at Texas A&M, less than two hours away from Austin. I anticipate many weekends of evening rewards for good writing days. I suspect such weekends will occur mostly in Austin, but I'm not averse to trying the work-and-reward program in College Station.

The truth is, having Christopher so close is both a delight and a threat to my liver.

Anyhoo, we toured various Austin places. Yesterday we went to "Hippie Hollow," apparently a nudie beach without sand on lake Travis (we didn't go in 'cause it was $12, too much to see normal people naked), and ended up at the Oasis, a restaurant on the cliffs overlooking Lake Travis. The view was awesome. We looked for naked people, since Hippie Hollow was in view, but didn't see anything. Too bad, 'cause da google hits on this blog would have shot through the virtual ceiling.

Last night we did a mini pub-crawl, beginning with dinner at Mother's (the best vegetarian place in town), then to Lovejoy's, the Gingerman, and finally, the Whiskey Bar, where Amber was tending like a crazy fiend (my girl must make some bucks, but man, she was really working hard and the place was packed). At the Whiskey, as I was snapping shots of our posse, after a well-said comment Christopher made (he's good at that), I realized that my "new" friends here in Austin are quite beautiful. Marilyn Manson's song "the beautiful people" was playing in my head (not so mucht the stuff about steeples), and then I got to thinking: what's up with the matching hypothesis? According to researchers in my own discipline, attractive people tend to run around with other attractive people, while us less attractive people tend to hang with the, well, not as attractive people. However, this research ignores the power of token. As last night's token, I had a blast!

Here's a gallery of Christopher's visit and an extensive documentation of last night's shenanigans. Last night the truth of my having endured a year here finally set in. As a neurotic obsessive prone to abject loneliness in new places, last night I realized I was happy: I finally have some people to hang with and not be self-conscious around, and one of my best friends is moving a quick car ride away! Yay!

Now it's time to plan for dinner tonight for colleagues. I think I will prepare my signature gumbo over rice, cornbread, and green beans. The starter will be shrimp Creole over lettuce, I think. I would go all fancy French, but, I have a feeling very few of my new peeps here have had decent gumbo. I'd like to be known for something other than my magical token fetish-power.