Last Day

 

It seems to be a truism that whenever I travel, I will feel accustomed to the place I'm visiting just shortly before it is time to go.

 Suffice to say, I have had a wonderful time here in Minnesota, both in Minneapolis proper with Grady and further out into the suburbs with Tess. By no means did I see enough to whet my appetite, in either locale--Minneapolis is a big, complex and many-faceted city, and I suspect the only way to truly get acquainted with it in depth would be to live here for a time. And while suburban sprawl is...rather the same, in many ways, wherever you go, the people and places are not. I suspect there is much to bring me back here in the future.


Shortly after my last post, I spent an evening with Tess. There was some Battlestar Galactica watched, much conversation had, and a fair bit of writing shared. Perhaps because she is also somewhat withdrawn, her home appears to equal "Safe space" to my perceptions, providing me with the closest thing I've had to (badly-needed) time alone since I arrived here. It was wonderful getting a chance to meet her.

 The next morning, Grady and I had brunch with some more friends of hers (I have met so many people since I arrived!), at a charming little hippy cafe. They take a rather communist approach to everything--you write down your own order at your table, including the price, get your own table furnishings and water as you need them, deliver your order to the kitchen staff and wait until they call your name. Charming. Also like many communist economies, you can expect some serious inefficiency in the production process. However, the resulting food was excellent--it contained a veritable swarm of adjectives such as "organic", "free range" and so on. The menu intrigued and delighted, and it is definitely someplace I will dine again, someday.

 Afterwards, we took a bit of a drive to visit the Como zoo in St Paul. It's housed in a small park, and is not the sort of sprawling, big-production affair I tend to associate with the word "zoo." They did have a surprising collection of primates, though my heart went out to the poor gorillas, who seemed especially unhappy with all the attention they were recieving. I find it impossible not to empathize, even deeply, with both gorillas and orangutans, who seem largely indistinguishable from humans in terms of their percieved emotional capacity.* I took some photos with Grady's excellent camera--any worth sharing will be uploaded later.

 Tess then invited me back for a Rifftrax party with some friends that evening, and since Grady had a social function that seemed likely to involve loud noises, large groups of strangers, and drinking, I took Tess up on the invite. After meeting these charming people, we headed to dinner at Red Robin (aiya, halfway across the country to eat dinner at a place I've been more times than I could count) before retreating back to the domicile of the resident webmistress and host of this site. Suffice to say, I laughed until my facial muscles were aching and sore. It made me a bit sad to be leaving so soon--this is a repeated event, and I'd love to have a weekly viewing party of this sort myself. 

 There was...a single moment of unpleasantness that occured after I technically had gone to bed. I won't recount it in detail here, except to say it involved a message from Andrea and left me rather fragile. I did not sleep well at all afterward.

Today: saying goodbye to Tess, a brief lunch and thank-you with Grady, and then...to Seattle. I am not sure it will be the same as when I left.

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*I am speaking subjectively, here, but it seems rather evident to me that our nearest relatives, while they may not possess the same cognitive traits to the same degrees as we do, are nevertheless cut from very similar cloth and display far more ability to feel and think than I need to empathize with a living thing in the first place.