mandalay

before sunset

the sunlight in your hair... 

so much has happened in the last few days, so let me try to catch up... wednesday i began to seriously consider moving to santa fe, and resurrected my plans to leave austin. i started thinking about staying in my aunt and uncle's vacation home until i found another job and trying to convince my parents' friend who is about to retire and commit all his time to his new photography business to take on another photographer. then on thursday i actually found an awesome-sounding job for a commercial photographer in santa fe.

that night, my dear friend elizabeth, a current houstonian, came to visit sophia and i. sophia and elizabeth have the same birthday (the 21st) and elizabeth had gone to nyc to celebrate with her boyfriend d.j. so we hung out and had ice cream cake and chatted and learned that d.j. had proposed to elizabeth on the poetry garden terrace at the library hotel. as three women poets, we were all particularly moved by his choice of setting and impressed with the dewey decimal room numbers. it made me very happy to learn of the engagement because it is so wonderful when i feel like my friends have ended up with the right people. friday morning, i received a wonderful friendster testimonial from friend and soon to be ex-co-worker dorothy. it made a long string of insomniac days and nights almost totally bearable. (an aside: it seems that austin is in transition - everyone is leaving or arriving, some doing both nearly at the same time, and so even my new friends are on their way to new places...)

yesterday i began learning guitar from my voice teacher so i now actually have some tabs written out for me and a new guitar stand and tuner to start on the path of knowledge with this lovely instrument gifted to me by my bro years ago, which until now has known only the joy of other's hands. hahaha. anyway, i'm excited about that. i spent the early afternoon hours after that scanning negatives and working on my website, which should be up very shortly. stay tuned.

finally, we come to the main event of the day, the before sunset premiere at the paramount theater. since before sunrise is one of my absolute favorite movies, i've been following the progress of the sequel for about the last year. so yesterday, sophia, my dear cousin, jordan, and i all trekked through the rain to go to the 4:30 screening of before sunrise which was to be followed by the 8:00 premiere of before sunset with ethan hawke, julie delpy, and richard linklater all in attendance.

an interesting thing happened as sophia and i were waiting for jordan in front of the theater. i saw a guy who looked like my old friend dave, who the last i had heard was going to japan to teach english. only a few weeks ago i had seen his name on a poster at emo's and wondered if he was back in town, with a new band. we shared the awkward glance, both trying to decide if we really knew each other, since it had been five years since we had hung out. he walked inside and i was left to ponder.

small digression:
there are a handful of people in my life who i've never become very good friends with, people who i've felt i could really connect with if only provided the right circumstances, but alas, these circumstances never came around. in high school, i began writing back and forth in pencil on my desktop with some mystery guy who sat at the same desk in my pre-cal classroom during another period. we wrote out music quotes and lines of poetry and responses and i finally learned that it was micah, a friend of a friend in the drumline. last i heard he was engaged and living in austin but no matter what i will always feel that we shared a kind of escape, gave each other something to think about even though we rarely spoke. someone else is friend tycen, who i met in the touring ministry choir i was involved with in high school and as a counselor afterward. tycen is an absolutely wonderful person, a true southern gentleman and talented graduate of SCAD. we had an instant rapport and we still talk via IM even though i haven't seen him in 4 years. another person is nikki, a girl who i met freshman year in new braunfels when i was with ex-boyfriend travis. she was one of his ex-girlfriend's best friends and we got on famously when we hung out but she went on to A&M and i never saw her after that.

so that brings me back to dave, friend of a friend, or in the here and now, friend of an old friend's ex-boyfriend. it turns out it was him. i saw him outside after the first movie and went up to talk to him and invited him to dinner with us and we all hurried through the rain to hickory street bar & grill to have cheeseburgers and giant margaritas. when the sequel was over (which was very well-done and i highly recommend to you linklater fans and people fond of honest, no need for melodrama movies) and the Q&A was finished, dave and i headed over to the cactus cafe to listen to mary lou lord and then hung out and talked music, movies, and life till 3:30 in the morning. this is all to say that you never know who is truly only a memory or passerby in your life and who will reappear. as they said in the movie last night, no memory is truly complete until you are dead.

posted by amanda @ 3:29 PM