Tuesday,
January 15, 2002
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wine animates the Ballet celebration
"Everything happens to everybody
sooner or later if there is time enough."
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emerging from the fog Things continue to get clearer. I have energy. I imagine myself attacking my work duties, getting my house in order, catching up with this journal and documenting the whole wonderful new me: thinner, in control, in better shape, living in a neat and clean house. Emerging after being sick is an interesting thing. Euphoric delusion. At work, I attend a 'brown bag' meeting. The idea of such meetings is that you eat some lunch while listening to a presentation. Therefore, everyone's time is 'free' to the company and further the meeting doesn't usually interfere with others. I don't do that, though. I instead listen carefully to the meeting (which starts fitfully due to the failure of technology that is supposed to show the presentation to remote listeners). I then go to lunch. I am hungry by this time but I have a big salad at Whole Foods with water to drink. I have lost a little weight due to illness (well, and the loss of appetite that came with it) and I figure I might as well try to be more healthy and keep it going. Then I go over to Linens 'N Things. I'm after a 'thing'...some tongs to replace some the bookkeeper might have lost at our house. I can't find the right thing. There are tongs, but not acceptable ones. I wander through REI. They are having a sale. Every store is, of course. I don't see anything I need. That's a good feeling somehow. I do look at the hiking boots, but I don't really need new ones just yet. I look at socks, but I have plenty of socks, too. I work on my presentation most of the afternoon and answer an e-mail that poses an interesting intellectual problem. I get called to an impromptu meeting. I feel capable and in control. That won't last.
I leave work early. Just a few minutes, but I'm trying to beat the traffic and get home and help Forrest get things together for a wine dinner he has planned at Zoot to fete the management committee of Ballet Austin. He's planned this meal and the wines very well. In spite of the traffic, we arrive dead early and have time to correct a few things on the printed menu, chat up the staff, admire the flowers that our friend Kisha has done. People start arriving. We toast with a Veuve Cliquout Orange Label. Soon everyone is there. Spouses were invited but several people have come alone because the spouses weren't available. Ben Barnes' wife says he is off at a Pritiken Center exercising four times a day and eating wheat grass. Shame. Because we enjoyed:
Good conversation, good food, stunning wine, great service. It was a tremendous evening. Could only have been better if it were Saturday night so tomorrow wasn't a workday and if one could have participated in all the lively conversation up and down the table somehow. And I could have had a better appetite but in a way the way I felt was perfect. I enjoyed what I could eat, didn't overindulge in any one wine. I felt bad seeing some champagne and Graves in my glass go undrunk, but such is the life of restraint in the land of plenty.
I'm still occasionally coughing and producing some stuff from my lungs and so maybe I'm 'not completely over it' but I'm at that stage where I know this is past me and it's on to the future, new infection or good health, something different.
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175
JUST
TYPING