The Brew House

To the regular readers: Many apologies for lackadaisical posting here. I’m working on a writing project outside of work that is killing my time and I know Rustin is always busy working what amounts to two jobs at the Star. That said, let’s take this as a step toward much more regular posts.

I sounded like Christine O’Donnell, and those preceding words are the hardest I’ve typed in a long time, maybe ever. But it’s true. Click here and look back at the introductory blog for the Brew House, written almost a year ago today.

Or just read. This was my attempt to define a blog, a meaning I considered philosophical back then and can now regard only as stupidity or perhaps something that ranks higher on the not-so-smart list, like ignorance.

“Some were people’s opinions about politics or sports. Some were just pictures. Some were random thoughts. Some seemed to be nothing more than a person’s daily schedule.

“Then it became clear. There really is no definition for a blog. Blogs are anything. Blogs are you.”*

A year later, I only want to say that whatever blogs are, they aren’t Christine O’Donnell. And I want to ramble on about the last year of my life, the first year of the Brew House, in this first State of the ‘Brew’nion. In much the same way my thoughts about the definition of blogs have changed, so has much else in my life. Of course, unlike my opinion of the meaning of a blog, this change was more natural, more a gradual step of a never-ending evolution, something Christine O’Donnell would claim doesn’t exist.

*If you don’t get the O’Donnell reference. Watch this commercial and then you will.

I’m sure all of us feel like this. It would be strange for us not to evolve. Years blend and blur into the next, the only concrete difference being the four digits we type next to the day and month at the top of Word documents, but then you realize the smaller changes that take place each day when you slow down and look in the past, past what’s in front of you. I think these changes particularly relate to people my age.

Last fall was the first time since I was six years old that I didn’t begin a new school year in late August. College had ended. I had stopped living with two of my best friends at 12th and Louisiana, just five minutes from the Union and five more past Fraser toward the heart of campus. I would no longer drink at Dollar Night on Wednesdays or write my Morning Brew for the Kansan on Sundays. I wouldn’t study. I wouldn’t sit in lectures. I wouldn’t purposely stomp really loud on our hardwood floors at the apartment just to be freaking hilarious and annoy the people who lived below us.

I would put on a polo and slacks – thank God not a tie – and go to work. I would be thrust into a city I hadn’t seen or visited since third grade, a city where I knew only one person and he would be moving to Korea in two months. I wouldn’t be around young people all the time. That was the biggest thing. Life wouldn’t continually intersect with the lives of others that are the same age, and I think all of us probably took that comfort for granted. People with similar goals, opinions and lifestyles surrounded us from grade school through college. We could always talk with someone and likely find common ground.

And now I would have to work with adults, spend a significant chunk of my day with them. Not one person under the age of 35 was employed at my office when I took my job. They would be people who are married. People who have kids. I wouldn’t even have a dog. Or a cat. What had life become? What would it become?

A year has passed. I’m still living in Dallas – and enjoying every day. The two strangers I rented an apartment with off Craigslist weren’t serial rapists, per the usual Craigslist zeitgeist, and have become two of my good friends. Younger people have been hired at work, and the adults aren’t so bad either. Uptown bars aren’t a whole lot different than those on Mass. Street. I bought a new car, performed standup comedy twice, saw some sick bands at Austin City Limits, played ball at the Rucker, choked in several matches of a tennis league, ran a half-marathon. I’m comfortable, probably every bit as comfortable as college. Life has become life.

And nothing feels different from a year ago, although plenty is. Every day or perhaps every week marked a small yet significant alteration in life’s delicate fabric, and every day probably will bring the same from here on forward. Sometimes this evolution might not be easy. Sometimes the nicks and cuts might linger. But it always feels right to take time and look back on all those changes and realize that they make you better.

That’s the point of this State of the ‘Brew’nion, to take inventory of an always-evolving life. Who knows where I’ll be or what I’ll be next year? Who knows what it will be like for any of us?

I only know one thing won’t change. I can say with certainty that I’ll never be a witch.