📅 May 2006

Wow. This weekend is really one of missed connections and unfortunate circumstance.

On Thursday, I missed Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, who were playing at a concert series that I didn't know existed. I would've liked to have seen them; however good or bad they are, they cater to my nostalgia for the days of my youth when I'd go to Chapel HIll to see Squirrel Nut Zippers shows at the Cat's Cradle for $5 (before they became big and started charging $20 at big arenas).


On Friday, I found out that someone has been putting on free concerts in Buffalo and that I've totally been missing them. Having recently moved, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's still a lot of learning that I have to do in the department of where to find good cheap entertainment (I'm still looking for a $1.50 movie theater with second-run movies, like the Blue Ridge had back home). For most of the time I've been here, the majority of my live music experience has been catching the Lance Diamond show at the Elmwood Lounge. It's a great act and the man is truly an entertainer, but my Motown/70's music circuits are starting to get a little overloaded.

Saturday afternoon, I find out that (e:strip) is having some sort of get-together, which I can't attend because my father is visiting from Durham to help me do some final setup of my apartment. In the grand scheme of things, family is more important than finding out whether someone's voice really sounds like how I imagine it to sound. But now I'm going to have this lingering curiosity that's not going to go away until the next (e:strip) function (whenever that is).

On the bright side, I get memorial day off from work, so it's an extra day that I can spend entirely with my dad.

I've decided today to make my first-ever posting to (e:strip).org. I've been reading members' posts during the past several months, and I've decided that joining this on-line community and posting to it myself would be a good first step in participating in some Buffalo community activity (that doesn't involve rooting for the Sabres). I chose the name "Carolinian" because I recently moved to Buffalo from North Carolina, and also because any self-respecting Duke fan would never call himself "Tarheel."

So why am I here in Buffalo now? I moved here from North Carolina because I couldn't find jobs down there and got a job here. Three months ago, out of the blue, a manager from a small factory located in the Orchard Park area called me and said their company needed me for a job programming Macs (which seems to be one of the few things that I don't suck too terribly at). With an increasing number of people back home breathing down my back about my lack of gainful employment, and as the University I did Mac programming for would never give me the full 40 hours that my predecessors had (due to state budget cuts), it was fairly easy to say "Yes" to the job. Actually, there were a lot of people I cared a lot about back home whom I was leaving, so saying "Yes" wasn't quite a completely pain-free proposition.

Having moved to Buffalo, I've now acquired a nickname. Yesterday, at a bar where I was watching a hockey game, someone with who I struck up a conversation christened me "the salmon", because I'm swimming upstream and doing everything the opposite of everyone else. That's actually a very apt title.

Apparently, I'm supposed to:


1. Live in the city of Buffalo.
2. Get tired of the living conditions there.
3. Move to the Orchard Park sprawl and commute everyday to the city.
4. Not be able to find any jobs up here.
5. Get a job in North Carolina and move down there.

Instead, I :

1. Couldn't find any jobs in North Carolina.
2. Got a job in New York State.
3. Moved to Orchard Park (where I lived for a few weeks).
4. Got tired of the living conditions there.
5. Moved to the city of Buffalo and now commute every day to Orchard Park.

I guess I'm doing it all wrong.

So far, Buffalo seems to be a pretty cool place; there's lots of stuff happening, and there's a good alternative paper (much like the Independent Weekly back home) that details it all. In some ways, Buffalo is a lot like downtown Durham, where the town saw better days in the age when its chief industry (tobacco) was a booming profit center. Unlike downtown Durham, however, Buffalo didn't die and leave a completely soulless shell behind.

As for where I live now, I eventually settled on living in the upper part of an old house on Richmond Avenue. Originally, I made this decision because I needed an apartment soon, and because the apartment complexes wanted to lock me into a year lease that couldn't be broken even if my temp-to-hire status didn't work out. But looking back on it, I'm totally glad that I made the decision to live here. Richmond Ave. is a really beautiful place to live, and looking at photographs from a hundred years ago, little has changed since then. Trees still line the sidewalks, and people race their cars up and down the wide street way too fast, just like they raced their horses too fast a century ago. For a person like myself who has a terrible sense of time, a place that's timeless is the ideal place to live.

While I enjoy my life up here so far, it does have its challenges. It's never easy to move into a new place, and some things are still not unpacked and probably won't be for another month. I'm living in a place that's at least three times bigger than my previous 500 sq ft. apartment, and while the space is nice, that means that there's now three times the space to clean. And since I just moved here and know very few people, my weekends are kind of boring and the social isolation is getting to me. I'm passing a lot of my time either at the Jewish Community center working out or sitting in my home office designing my own community-oriented software that will allow me to more effectively make use of all the activities the city has to offer.

So I hope I've written enough to make the (e:strip) automated "You've not written a damn thing yet" mail daemon happy. Any verbosity present in this posting can be blamed on an overzealous attempt to avoid my account to be deleted.

Oh, and one other thing: LET'S GO CANES!!!