Addendum
I don't mind coming in on my roommate having sex so much as the fact that it's never with the same person.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Sunday, April 18, 2004
On Friday, went to Bal'more with Jeremy. I thought he was going to take me out to cheer me up from the random depression I'd been in for the last week. But no, he apparently had needed to go fetch the Exalted Players Guide from the Inner Harbor Barnes and Noble. Silly pie. He should learn how to BS.
The sun had come out after basically two weeks of unremitting rain, and made things shiny again. (Malex, I hate you for being in Southern California and not dealing with East Coast weather. :P) We went to Fort McHenry, which we found out later was called Federal Hill, very steep and imposing from up close, with grassy slopes that rise steeper than 30 degress. The top of the hill, with the oversized Star Spangled Banner drooping in windlessness like a disappointed bird, is flat and surmounted by a toothy ring of cannons. It's very freaky, especially to someone like Jeremy with no depth perception, because the slope of the hill disappears behind the ridge formed where the flat and the incline meet, so it looks as if past a certain point the ground just gives way to thin air. But from the top you can see everything, downtown across the harbor with sailboats like little triangular paper cutouts, those crew teams in their slim maritime needles slipping through the blue, and fireboats uncharacteristically jaunty in red and white and thick smoke mushrooming charmingly from the pier. The skyline casts a clean silhouette of sunlight on metal and sky mirrored in glass, and in other directions away from the city, so far in the distance as to be painted against the horizon, roll the hazy blues of hilly piedmont.
For a while you might even say that the city is fair, until you are, in the course of a day, begged at for money by ten (we kept count) people. One man asked us for money for coffee... across the street from a tavern. God, I don't know why I make eye contact with anyone anymore, because as soon as you take your eyes off the sidewalk and look someone in the eye they ask you for spare change. Jeremy told me he does make eye contact, but has mastered a look of such contempt and vitriol that most people just find it better not to approach him for anything. Only one person was with an organized charity. I suppose you could count eleven people total if you count the little girl who tried to sell us chocolates, and twelve if you count the drunk who yelled at Jeremy belligerently and incoherently, but didn't ask for money. The drunk was bellowing "Lifeguard!" at Jeremy (who was wearing his lifeguard t-shirt) and I thought he maybe needed medical attention, but he kind of fell back once Jeremy marched me past, towed very firmly by the arm. He probably was just drunk and didn't need a lifeguard at all (we saw him again on the way back). After all, if I really had some sort of emergency and honest intentions, I wouldn't have been cowed by having someone glare at me. But I also wonder, if I were homeless and had a medical emergency, if I would have any kind of conviction regarding my right to be helped. Most of us would consider a medical emergency a life or death situation, but I think homeless people are so used to being in life or death situations and being ignored (not having money for food every day is a continuous life or death situation in its own way) that maybe they've stopped expecting passerbys to even care about the most terrible of tragedies.
In any case, we didn't give them money.
We walked to historic Fells Point, with brick streets and small shops that sold genuinely interesting gifts items. We had tea at a small, if expensive, Egyptian cafe called The Nile, with frescoes from the Book of the Dead (said Jeremy) where Anubis weighs the souls of the dead, and hieroglyphs painted along the walls. On the other wall was an Egyptian hunting scene with archers and trappers and a woman on a papyrus boat amongst the cool reeds of the Nile, inhabited by comical fish and a graceful flock of herons in flight. This segued, next to stairs to the upper (private) floor, into a mural of veiled women and men in headdress captioned in Arabic. I thought they got their genres mixed. In any case, there is nothing quite like the texture of late afternoon sunlight on a hardwood floor, so the atmosphere was fine by me, and it was a rather relaxed affair revolving around mint tea, jallab (date juice with the subtle hint of rosewater as an aftertaste), a bizarre, honey-coated dessert that looked like a giant wheaties (kunafa), and a cinnamon buttered, almond cake with oranges (basbousa). Later, we went back to B&N, and wandered around because I swore I'd seen a theater around there somewhere, except I must not've (there's a theater along North Charles Street but none downtown). In the coming of the evening, we found a cozy, winding walkway through a series of waterfall-fountains, where the niche behind a curtain of water provided a little bit of privacy.
The sun had come out after basically two weeks of unremitting rain, and made things shiny again. (Malex, I hate you for being in Southern California and not dealing with East Coast weather. :P) We went to Fort McHenry, which we found out later was called Federal Hill, very steep and imposing from up close, with grassy slopes that rise steeper than 30 degress. The top of the hill, with the oversized Star Spangled Banner drooping in windlessness like a disappointed bird, is flat and surmounted by a toothy ring of cannons. It's very freaky, especially to someone like Jeremy with no depth perception, because the slope of the hill disappears behind the ridge formed where the flat and the incline meet, so it looks as if past a certain point the ground just gives way to thin air. But from the top you can see everything, downtown across the harbor with sailboats like little triangular paper cutouts, those crew teams in their slim maritime needles slipping through the blue, and fireboats uncharacteristically jaunty in red and white and thick smoke mushrooming charmingly from the pier. The skyline casts a clean silhouette of sunlight on metal and sky mirrored in glass, and in other directions away from the city, so far in the distance as to be painted against the horizon, roll the hazy blues of hilly piedmont.
For a while you might even say that the city is fair, until you are, in the course of a day, begged at for money by ten (we kept count) people. One man asked us for money for coffee... across the street from a tavern. God, I don't know why I make eye contact with anyone anymore, because as soon as you take your eyes off the sidewalk and look someone in the eye they ask you for spare change. Jeremy told me he does make eye contact, but has mastered a look of such contempt and vitriol that most people just find it better not to approach him for anything. Only one person was with an organized charity. I suppose you could count eleven people total if you count the little girl who tried to sell us chocolates, and twelve if you count the drunk who yelled at Jeremy belligerently and incoherently, but didn't ask for money. The drunk was bellowing "Lifeguard!" at Jeremy (who was wearing his lifeguard t-shirt) and I thought he maybe needed medical attention, but he kind of fell back once Jeremy marched me past, towed very firmly by the arm. He probably was just drunk and didn't need a lifeguard at all (we saw him again on the way back). After all, if I really had some sort of emergency and honest intentions, I wouldn't have been cowed by having someone glare at me. But I also wonder, if I were homeless and had a medical emergency, if I would have any kind of conviction regarding my right to be helped. Most of us would consider a medical emergency a life or death situation, but I think homeless people are so used to being in life or death situations and being ignored (not having money for food every day is a continuous life or death situation in its own way) that maybe they've stopped expecting passerbys to even care about the most terrible of tragedies.
In any case, we didn't give them money.
We walked to historic Fells Point, with brick streets and small shops that sold genuinely interesting gifts items. We had tea at a small, if expensive, Egyptian cafe called The Nile, with frescoes from the Book of the Dead (said Jeremy) where Anubis weighs the souls of the dead, and hieroglyphs painted along the walls. On the other wall was an Egyptian hunting scene with archers and trappers and a woman on a papyrus boat amongst the cool reeds of the Nile, inhabited by comical fish and a graceful flock of herons in flight. This segued, next to stairs to the upper (private) floor, into a mural of veiled women and men in headdress captioned in Arabic. I thought they got their genres mixed. In any case, there is nothing quite like the texture of late afternoon sunlight on a hardwood floor, so the atmosphere was fine by me, and it was a rather relaxed affair revolving around mint tea, jallab (date juice with the subtle hint of rosewater as an aftertaste), a bizarre, honey-coated dessert that looked like a giant wheaties (kunafa), and a cinnamon buttered, almond cake with oranges (basbousa). Later, we went back to B&N, and wandered around because I swore I'd seen a theater around there somewhere, except I must not've (there's a theater along North Charles Street but none downtown). In the coming of the evening, we found a cozy, winding walkway through a series of waterfall-fountains, where the niche behind a curtain of water provided a little bit of privacy.
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