Another One.....

I love live in general. It's freaking awesome we all get to live. We get to wake up, eat good meals, enjoy relationships with friends and significant others. We get to listen to music that doesn't suck and sometimes we even get to score! Seriously, even when life sucks, it's really not that bad. Sorry, I didn't mean to get off on that tangent, but perhaps my favorite part of life is the random moments that help you realize there are reasons for everything. The coincidences that keep you thinking for hours, "This is really weird, and really cool."

Last weekend Jennifer and I went to Wilmington for Kelli's birthday. Her age is not significant, but is indeed a milestone. It's great to go to Wilmington. Most of Jennifer's friends are there and they are all super people. Plus, I usually get a chance to slide in and see cousin Lee and family, so I was really happy we made the trip. Kelli wanted to celebrate at Indochine, a pretty good restaurant featuring Thai/Indochinese/Indian/Japanese and probably three or four other kinds of food. It whipped a ton of ass. Good food, cold beer and good people. We had to wait a while in the bar and I thought the manager walking around the restaurant looked real familiar.
I didn't think much about it, but I was pretty sure I knew this guy from somewhere, but I couldn't quite figure it out. We sat down, ordered and he walked by our table. I decided to stop him and ask him where he was from and he had lived in Charlotte for a short time, but as soon as he said that, I realized Charlotte isn't where I first met him. Some of you know I was in real college for a few months at UNC-Greensboro as a vocal performance major. I sang pretty good in a previous life. Anyway, my good friend Brad got an apartment off campus our second semester and had a seriously flaming gay neighbor who was always throwing big gay parties on Spring Garden Street. They were always inviting us over but I was a bit skeered to take them up on the invitation. Mom had always taught me gay people were nice and not scary so I finally convinced Brad's then girlfriend to go over there with me one night. I was 18 and had zero experience around gay people. I was nervous and not sure what to expect but I vaguely remember walking up the stairs and some dude yelling, "Watch out!! Here comes some straight people!!" I felt a lot better after that knowing they all knew I wasn't gay. It was an experience I'm glad I had at that age. I found gay people to be way more entertaining than myself and my friends, and I got to see people doing hard drugs for the first time. This 18 year old was soaking up life, a completely different life than I'd ever been around, and it didn't scare me. The gay neighbor's boyfriend named talked to us for a while and even after that night always spoke to us and was real nice to us. Sure enough, that was Rob managing Indochine in Wilmington! Freaking random!! I'm glad I don't forget many faces and he actually remembered us, too. Talking to Rob brought back some good memories for me, memories I'd forgotten to tell Jennifer about so I was able to do that. Rob moved to Wilmington a few years ago, retired and now has what he described as a short, vietnamese boyfriend and is about to have a child with a woman. I don't know about all that, but it was good to see Rob.
We left there and headed to the Sofa Lounge for a few more drinks. Jennifer, Kate and Kelli talked about something whilst the boys talked about traveling to Wales for the next Ryder Cup and other manly stuff.

We need to make more trips to Wilmington.