I Miss My City, too

Strange night tonight.

Bought a pack of Camels at the Wawa, my first since arriving home. Smoked one whilst tearing down the windy back county Hanover roads. Smoked two more pacing under the lights in the deserted parking lot of my alma mater Rural Point Elementary, worried that each passing pair of headlights was the police come to tell me I was trespassing.

Wrote in my journal for the first time since Amsterdam after getting home.

The Mad Men season two premiere was great, by the way.

Will be back amongst my people soon enough.

R-Braves

My family went to a Richmond Braves game at the Diamond tonight. Seeing the Braves was always a favorite part of my childhood, especially when players would move on from Richmond to play in the big leagues in Atlanta. My childhood was a golden era for this; when I was young I was able to see Chipper Jones, Ryan Klesko and Javy Lopez in RVA before they moved on to become major league stars. Only Chipper is still with the Atlanta Braves, I don’t even know if the other two are even playing baseball any more, but all three were integral parts of the team when Atlanta won the World Series in 1995.

I say all this because this is the final season that the Braves will play in Richmond. The Braves organization had been telling Richmond that they needed to build a new stadium to replace the Diamond (which was considered to be the nicest minor league stadium around when it was built in the 1960s) or risk the Braves moving to another city. Well, after our brilliant mayor Doug Wilder vetoed stadium proposal after stadium proposal, the Braves informed Richmond last winter that this would be their final season in Richmond before moving to a nice new stadium in Georgia next year.

Richmond is scrambling to find another team to play at the Diamond next season, but there are no other Triple-A teams willing to move, and they almost certainly won’t be able to find a Double-A either, leaving Richmond with nothing but perhaps a single A or perhaps even lower-level team. The quality of play will be lower, and the excitement in knowing that you’re watching players who may soon be in the big leagues will be gone. And it was with knowledge of all of this that I took in my final Richmond Braves game last night.

The Braves aren’t very good this season, but at least the game was close and there was a fair amount of scoring. Crowd favorite, or perhaps just a favorite of Daniel and I, Brent Lillibridge, was playing with the team after a brief stint in Atlanta. He looks like he’s about fifteen years old. He made a couple nice plays at shortstop, turned a few tough doubles plays, and hit a single in the ninth inning. I hope he makes it back up to Atlanta and gets to play regularly, just so I can say, for one last time, “I saw him when he was young.”

Summer Employment

I’ve been helping out at the William Smith Morton Library at Union Theological Seminary where my mom works. I had worked there over the past two winter breaks when I couldn’t physically bring myself to work at Ukrop’s ever again (two winters ago) and when I need to supplement my Starbucks income in order to earn as much money as possible before leaving for Amsterdam (this past winter). I decided to go back there this summer since I wouldn’t be home for long enough to get a real job. Plus, I know my mom’s boss and so all I had to do was email her and ask if I could work for three weeks in July and she was like “bitch, please” (note: my mom’s boss is 60something years old, is retiring in a couple of weeks, and has almost certainly never said “bitch, please” in her entire life. I mean, she’s a librarian for chrissakes).

My job is in the preparations department of the library, which means I prepare new books so they’re ready to be put out on the shelves. I was working specifically with plastics this summer, which is just a fancy way to say paperbacks. See, the thing with paperbacks is that they would have a pretty short shelf life if they were just released into the library as is, so there are steps that have to be taken in order to improve their resiliency. That’s where I come in.

The first thing I do with a paperback book is drill a series of holes about an inch apart through the spine of the book. For this I use just a regular Craftsman drill with a tiny drill bit along with a vice that’s used as a template for drilling the holes. Drilling is the most fun part of the job, but it doesn’t take very long so I had to find other ways to occupy the twenty-five hours a week that I worked. The next step in the process is sewing. Basically, I take some high-strength thread and, using a needle, string it through the holes that I drilled. This process serves to makes the spine much stronger, preventing it from breaking as easily as it otherwise might. The final step in my job was the actual plasticizing process, where I layered clear adhesive contact paper over the exterior of the book. This offers obvious protection for the book. Once I finish all three steps on a book, it gets handed over to the processing station. Processing labels the book and stamps it in various places, embosses it, adds a security strip and finally places the call number sticker on the spine. Then the book is ready to be placed on the shelf.

The other employees in preparations are all work study students at the seminary. There’s Ernest, the very efficient Ghanian guy who also did plastics with me (I would do most of the drilling and sewing and let him handle the plasticizing, the dullest part of the process), Rachel, a girl probably from Kentucky judging by her accent who watches movies on her iPod touch while processing books, and Todd, a guy who does repairs on the older books. The students are allowed to set their own hours as long as they work a certain amount of time per week, so I really didn’t see that much of the other people. Often it was just me alone in the room, listening to my iPod and working on books.

Working at the library is something of a Lehman family establishment. My mom has been working in the cataloguing department for 15+ years now, I help out from time to time, and Daniel, who started volunteering there for IB CAS hours, has been working there in an official capacity since last fall (it works out well for him since he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet and can just get a ride in with my mom). Really, I guess the library is just a family business in general. Ted’s daughter has worked there. So has Elaine’s. Dottie’s son has. Ann’s son has too, as has at least one of her daughters. I’m sure there are others. But yeah, they’re happy to help out when kids need a short term job.

Blargh. Well, now that you’ve been bored out of your minds reading about how I’ve been spending my summer, I’m going to wish you a very fond goodnight.

Briefly

There’s a church I drive by everyday on the way to work. As many churches do, this one has a sign out front that announces the topic of the coming Sunday’s sermon. Last week, the sign announced that “LIFE IS NO LAUGHING MATTER” which I think is a pretty misguided and just generally awful way to look at life. This week, however, the sign announces “GOD CONTROLS EVERYTHING!” (exclamation theirs) This one I just find mostly funny. I’m kind of curious of how the congregation will react to learning they have no free will.

Because You Asked For It

I kind of forgot about this after having some upload difficulties. But here it is, for your pain and your pleasure, the series finale of Beard Watch. These photos were taken immediately after arriving home from Dulles International Airport on July 2nd, which I believe would be Day 24.

That would be me in front of the very autumnal shower curtain in my bathroom.

Look at that nice neck beard!

MySpace© Photography Winner for “Best Mirror-Aided Shirtless Self-Portrait.”

I should also add that the brand-new razor blade I placed on my trusty Gillette Mach3 Turbo specifically for the purpose of shaving my well-documented beard was utterly dulled in the process. However, not having the necessary funds to buy replacement blades, I have continued shaving with my worn blade over the past weeks. It is like shaving with sandpaper.

And with that, I bid adieu to Beard Watch. I feel like a whole new man with my newly smoothed features.

The Folks Back Home

I’m never really sure exactly what to tell people about my time in Amsterdam. The worst is when I’m asked what my favorite thing about Amsterdam was. My dentist asked me that last week. So have various coworkers at the library. So did my aunt and uncle. And I’m certainly not blaming people for being curious about my time their, I’m glad they’re interested and I’m happy to talk about Amsterdam, but I always have this feeling, and perhaps it’s just me being utterly unable to read people, but I have this feeling that what they’re expecting to hear when they ask me what I liked most about Amsterdam is THE DRUGS! FUCK YEAH! and that any other answer I give will come across as being disingenuous. I have my spiel down though. I start by talking about how beautiful the city was with the canals and such, then go into how much I loved biking there and appreciated how much it was integrated into daily life. Then I usually have to explain that, no, I didn’t really meet any Dutch people because I was in classes with other international students, and yes, it’s a shame, but I did make some really great friends from the U.S. I don’t even bring up the weed.

One time a woman I work with at the library asked how the ladies were over in Amsterdam. I sputtered around for a while about how they were “fine” until she clarified that she meant “the women in the windows.” The Red-Light District is another thing I find myself having to often explain to people, that it’s a very contained area and is very easily avoidable in everyday life. I suppose there will always be misconceptions about the city.

The Previous Post

The previous post is something I wrote up earlier today that I felt, as it’s vaguely Amsterdam related, would be worth sharing. There’s a story behind it.

The Hold Steady is playing a show at Minneapolis’ famous First Ave. club this coming Tuesday. Months and months ago when the show was first announced I told Will he had to go so I could live vicariously through him. He had every intention of buying tickets, but one thing lead to another and he found himself without tickets with the sold-out show fast approaching. So he checked Craigslist. And among the hucksters selling tickets for outrageous prices, he found somebody looking for a bit or excitement in his life. The poster said that anybody interested in the pair of tickets could either: 1) offer him an exorbitant amount of money for them; or, 2) write a story detailing why you deserve the tickets. Will quickly found himself saying “Fuck yes! I’ll get Tim to write the story for me!” and, being the kind-hearted, generous friend that I am, I agree to whip something up when he asks.

Will had called me on Saturday evening. The guy with the tickets had indicated that the stories were due by 5pm on Sunday. I spend Saturday evening trying to come up with a story worth telling, and by the time I fall asleep, I’ve settled on The Hold Steady and my time in Amsterdam. I sit down to start writing early Sunday afternoon, and after a few hours of work, pound of the piece that you have either just read or are about to read. I don’t know how coherent an argument it makes in the end, or even if there is even an argument there at all, but I was pretty pleased with it nonetheless.

I get a call from Will later Sunday evening, ecstatic with the news that my essay had won him the tickets. Apparently my piece was about eight times as long as any of the other entries. Sometimes it pays to be verbose. Anyway, I was pretty excited for Will and very pleased that I would be able to vicariously experience the show through him. Have fun Will!