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Is this the new face of evil? by Scott Weaver, C-VILLE cover story, August 19, 2008
New Face of Evil! post by Kyle on cVillain.com, August 19, 2008
Unrelated thoughts by James on nailgunmedia.com, August 20, 2008
I gracefully ended my tenure as “lilith” in March 2008, 11 months after creating the alias to cover Charlottesville news and culture for the website cVillain.com. I’ve never taken a dance class in my life, but I’d like to think I was blessed with graces of the social variety.
Please click on this one and enjoy my newest html skill, ANCHORS! Rock.
Chicago
I arrived in Chicago on a Monday morning. It wasn’t particularly painful to leave Charlottesville this time. I had time to clean my apartment over the weekend, so I did not have the sinking feeling of knowing I would be greeted with a chore on my return. But it had been a tumultuous week leading up to the trip, and I needed the kind of distraction travel uniquely forces on someone. Between New Orleans and this trip, I’d snuck away to Los Angeles to spend the weekend with someone–for a second time in two months, actually. (Neither trip is documented here.) At the end of the trip, I initiated some kind of discussion of whether or not we were dating, and he said it wasn’t something he would consider, and despite all we’d gone out to see and do that weekend–from horse racing to gallery openings at the Brewery, the world’s largest colony of artists–it cheapened the experience for me a bit. I’d seen it coming. So going into this trip, I had a fresh start for, essentially, everything. Everything except, of course, my job.
The best way I can think to describe the feeling of being a single business traveler is this: you’re at a city coffee shop at 5 minutes to 8 on a Monday morning, there’s a long line of caffeine fiends behind you—and your order is wrong. What do you do? Maybe you reorder. Maybe you take it. It’s not a situation in which you can cast a hypothetical prediction of what-you-would-do-if. You think you’re on your time, but everyone else thinks you’re on their time. All you can say of this hypothetical scenario is that if you were the one making your latte at home, you would have gotten it right. But you’re not at home.
I flew in to Nashville and immediately set off for Louisville by car. My flight was a bit delayed, and I’d arranged a formal evening meeting. I was cutting it very close for my arrival. I’d done the drive before, though, and I knew it should take three hours. It’s mostly remote blue hills; only the occasional truck stop and Dinosaur World, a park with plaster dinosaurs.
I just wrote out this whole thing and WordPress deleted it. Curses! WordPress, please give me back an hour of my life, or at least let me be as witty as I think I was the first time I wrote those.
The route: Fly to Houston, drive to San Antonio for a night, come back, fly to Atlanta, drive to Birmingham for a night, come back.
I traveled with one of our top faculty members, a Dean and Professor of Psychology who specializes in olfaction, the sense of smell. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of being at a dinner table with me when conversation runs dry, for 0.000073 seconds, then you’ve certainly heard me tell about studies of attraction levels and familial recognition based on tee shirt smells. Fascinating! He did a fantastic job, and I’d like to think Texas showed him a good time.
I first went to New York with my mom as a 15 year-old. We took the train from Fredericksburg, and my mouth had its own set of railroad tracks. We checked out Princeton and Barnard, and we went to a Broadway show starring Matthew Broderick. We went to MoMA.
I went the following year with the newspaper and yearbook staffs of my high school for a conference at Columbia. We ran into Paul Schaffer and ate at the soup café that inspired the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” episode.
I applied to NYU and got a scholarship. I didn’t go.
Then it got interesting. My first year at U.Va., I dated a New Yorker. He worked at Abercrombie in the financial district and got picked up to do a modeling job for Teen People from it. I visited him in the city for New Year’s, and we stayed in a studio loft with some kids he knew who went to Wesleyan. I remember hearing about cuddle parties and thinking that they were more spoiled than the silver spoons in the south. He took me to a vintage tee shirt store called Search and Destroy on Bleecker where I found a shirt for a roller rink in Fredericksburg, where I used to go to birthday parties. We went to a couple of parties but opted to go home before the last, and McCauley Culkin was purportedly there. It was perfect.
After we broke up, a break-up about which I will only comment, “It sucked,” I looked into transferring to NYU for film school. My ex and I road-tripped to Vermont, where his mom had moved, and came back via New York for my transfer interview. To be 19 and foolish is a luxury I am relieved I will never again have! He set the alarm clock for “pm,” and I missed the interview. I believe he has moved to France.
I went to visit two college friends and attended a wedding at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. I remember being stressed the whole time: I had just finished casting Room Raiders in Austin, and when I got back, I was going to move to Dallas for two months to cast there, living with a woman I’d never met and driving to 200 homes on roads I’d never driven. And I had communal pneumonia.
And then this. I was asked to represent our office at an event. It happened to be my sister’s birthday weekend, and she happened to be staying with me at the time. She came with me. With my sister, anything can happen. And for the love of God, I needed another good trip to New York City.
Memphis
The Memphis trip will likely withstand the test of time on my memory. In my life, it was the closest I’ve come to getting kicked out of a hotel lounge, it has the deathiest tourist attraction, most tasteless advertisement for wine, and most poor choice of shape for a building not in Egypt.
I want to disclaimer this entry with the fact that I had just been traveling, working, and doing events and meetings for six straight days. (See previous entry.) I asked for permission to take Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon off in Chicago on condition that I would schedule appointments in that time. No problem. So I had fun.
