Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Huntington Redux
Monday
August 13, 2012
Today I shed my normal vampire role (working all night, sleeping all day) for a little while and walked down to Tropical Moon, a frozen yogurt shop that my former co-worker Edwin opened after a long career at WSAZ (the other is in Barboursville). He owns two in the area; the one in Huntington is about a ten minute jaunt from my apartment. I had hoped he might be in, though that turned out to not be the case. A cute girl working there flirted with me as I used the self-serve machine to try the cookies and cream flavor, which was pretty good. I've noticed attractive women popping up more and more as the start of the fall semester for Marshall approaches. The ghost town of summer is slowly transforming into what will be a college-dominated oncoming fall, and even though I'm in the shadow of my 35th birthday, I'm in a pretty good spot... and I'm not just talking about living two blocks from Marshall's campus. As Jim Ross would say, business is picking up.
If this was my life five months ago, Jack at the end of season three of Lost, back in his hometown but languishing (and in many ways the parallels were stronger than you might realize), then being back in Huntington is the final season of Lost for me. There are plenty of people here who I remember from my first run from 1999-2001, but many are in new roles and, in some cases, have different personalities than they did before. So, keeping with that motif, it's fitting that Edwin is now running a pair of frozen yogurt shops in town -- it's like seeing Sawyer as a cop. You process it and then do a double-take: wait, what?
At the same time, as much as coming back to Huntington has had elements of the surreal, it's gone about as well as I reasonably could have hoped it would. Tomorrow will mark three months since I left Nashville. And if you would have laid out this scenario to me as I was about to leave Nashville, broken and not quite sure where I would end up, I would have taken it ten times out of ten. On the whole, things are going remarkably well.
To point, I found out today that I will have free internet through at least next May, something I had expected to lose by the end of the month. They extended it for residents who were grandfathered in, which I wasn't, but they let me have it and now keep it because the box for it happens to be in my unit. So not only do I have the best apartment of the twelve (for the same price that the people up on the third floor are paying), I get free internet with it as well. That's some sweet action.
With that in mind, I might end the Summer Without Cable sooner than planned and go ahead and get Comcast/Xfinity over here to get me set up with an HD DVR. It will be very nice to have the NFL Red Zone Channel, which I've never had before, and I can beat the likely rush of Marshall students signing up for cable hookups that will be happening soon.
My overnight job continues to be something that is working out better for me than I suspect it would for 95%+ of the people out there. I used to hate mornings, but I don't anymore, though that's because my mornings are now my evenings. I know that doesn't make any sense, and the whole concept of yesterday/today/tomorrow becomes a blurred mess on this shift. But when you get past that and the realization that very few people will understand the logistical problems involved with days off when you work 11p-7a, it's something you just adjust to, like a long commute or any other job-related issues that people face.
I probably should get to sleep now...
|
