Late Nights With The Big Tuna

what i'm listening to right now: "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives" by Voxtrot

After work last night, Amanda and I went to The Raleigh Times for a few drinks and some salads. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this on the blog yet, but the two of us have gone on a diet. So far I've lost somewhere around 15 pounds. That explains the salads. We've been going to The Times since it opened and the lights were much too bright for a bar. It's since gotten much busier. So we had to hover like falcons over the couple of tables they have there. We got a table because we were waiting for Amanda's cousin, Steven and his friend, Becca.

Steven has been a very good friend to me over the past two years. He was the first of Amanda's relatives that I met, and also the first among them to accept me. Initial relations with her family were chilly at best. After stealing Amanda away from her longtime boyfriend, Shaun, I was referred to as "that Jeff" by her parents. Since things have warmed significantly, I've been able to get into arguments with her aunts and survive, her parents like me now, deleting the article "that" and just referring to me as "Jeff".

Back at The Raleigh Times, we continued to drink down the PBR pitchers and got to retelling Amanda and mine's epic story of "falling in L-O-V-E."

To break away from the narrative for a moment, my cat, Coltrane, has crawled behind the books on my bookshelf and gotten himself stuck. He can't really meow or purr right, it's a mix of the two, kinda like a Spanish meow. Throwing some rolled R's in there. back to the narrative...

I don't have the room here to relate our story, thought it's something that I plan in doing in the future in a post with less miscellany. In the course of our tag teamed story telling, Steven told me that he thinks of me as one of his cousins. That made me feel great. It sounds kinda cheesy, but that feeling of acceptance is amazing. After everything we went through, I've always been kinda nervous that I'd do something to be shunned by her family. Just being someone from the outside. It means a lot.

I probably didn't fully communicate what I wanted to say in this post. I'm not sure. Like, there was this whole thread that I wanted to run through this about Radiohead's Kid A, which Stephen is absolutely in love with and is really emotionally attatched to, it was playing while I was coaching the rest of them on to kill off the two pitchers they bought at last call (I was driving, so had stopped by then). The point is, I really look up to Stephen and it matters a lot that he thinks of me as a cousin. He's going to Ikea in D.C. today to buy $500-600 in furniture. Hope I can do that one day. Actually, I can do that one day. I just need to learn how to save money, well, I know how to do that, I think it's the cat's fault. That's why I let Coltrane figure his own way out of the bookshelf. Getting even for that 300 dollar flea treatment.