seattle adventures

At the bakery this morning with the New York girls, while looking up at the breakfast sandwich offerings, I hear my name called from somewhere by a guy. He calls it a few times while I look around stupidly until I realize it's coming from the baking table behind the counter - it's the first friend I made in college, an English major I met at orientation. It doesn't make sense to me to see him here, since he's from LA.
In college he sort of tried to date me the first weekend of school and I freaked out. Then he and my roommate both joined the men's and women's rowing teams, respectively, and as a result of their co-ed parties had a very brief fling at one point out of boredom that neither of them was that into, around the time at which we drifted apart.
He tells me he's there training for the olympics for rowing, and asks how long I've been in Seattle. I tell him I'm just here for work and for the corporate office holiday party, and sort of feel like a jackass with my black turtleneck and white coat and laptop talking about coming up to headquarters for a party while he's baking by a hot oven and training for the olympics. It reminded me of when I used to think I'd spend my twenties pursuing my dream, until I realized that my dream wasn't really working in publishing or journalism or living in New York anymore than it was working in online advertising in San Francisco, and because of whatever emotional defect I'm still working through I'm not capable of or ready to write things of my own creating for publication, so I figured I might as well choose the latter since it's more fun.

For our Q4 team event we went to an indoor go-cart racing place in Redmond. I didn't expect to be very good at it, and was really just hoping to avoid injury and potentially have fun. Not surprising that I came in last place for lap times in each qualifying round. This placed me in 7th place out of 8 in the bottom tier of the final rounds, where winner was the first to finish. Somehow though, everyone kept crashing and I just kept going around them. I figured I was a lap behind everyone, but somehow I came in first (first of the worst) and received the same shiny trophy with a car on top as the winners of the two higher-tier rounds.
This was followed by a (sinfully) decadent feast at Blue Ginger in Bellevue, where we ate not only Korean barbecue but sashimi too, with both sake and beer. Ten kinds of fish eaten five different ways later, I am back at the hotel, resting up for the holiday party tomorrow.