It’s Sunday night. I have worked, churched, eaten, dishwashed. I now sit, with a crystal glass of whiskey chilled by frozen rocks beside me, and will pontificate to you all on the recent happenings in my life: physical, mental, emotional, and otherwise.

The previous sentence was primarily composed to fulfill my deep-felt need to use the word “pontificate”. Now I’ve used it twice.

It’s been an interesting week of contrasts; I could lamely refer to it as a tale of two concerts. But I won’t. Wednesday night I joined some girls from my small group at a Phil Wickham concert in Chelsea. But who is Phil Wickham, you may ask? I certainly was asking, never having heard of him. Turns out he’s a Christian solo musician/guitarist/vocalist type. The concert was at this old German Lutheran church a couple blocks from my job. It was packed out with youth groups and young professionals around my age. My favorite part of the evening was the contrast between the cathedral-style architecture of the building (lots of carved wood, columns, arches, etc) and the hipster-style concert complete with projection screens, colored lights, microphones, and young people. It was a funny juxtaposition. Musically, however, it was just average. OK music, but I didn’t really know any of the songs. Lots of talk about the sun and the moon and nature, apparently Wickham is very inspired by the creation. I actually felt out of place. There was lots of “Let’s give Jesus a hand” applause and such. Maybe I’m old and cynical now, but it was a little too youth-groupey and forced emotion-al for me. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed going, but I don’t know if I would again.

Thursday I brought 2 pans of blondies to work for my coworkers. I bring desserts every couple weeks to help boost morale at the end of the week and to give me an excuse to bake. To date, everything I’ve brought has always disappeared by the end of the day, usually before. So this week I decided to test my coworkers’ eating abilities and brought around 70 blondies. I laid down a challenge that they couldn’t eat them all; they pshawed and said they would have no problem. We set a time limit, and they failed. We extended the deadline and still they failed. Despite a couple of them almost eating themselves sick, at the end of the day there were still 6 blondies left. Theoretically, I’m supposed to never bake them anything again as a punishment, but that will never last. It would be more a punishment to me than it would be to them. But the bet was a good way to keep a fun atmosphere in the shop for the whole day.

Thursday night my ex-coworker Justin was performing with his band in Brooklyn. David from the shop, his girlfriend Hannah, and I were all planning on going. We got off work at 6 and the show didn’t start until 10, so I decided to hang with them before we headed down. David and I headed to a bar for beers after work, expecting to meet up with Hannah and her dad, who was visiting, there, but after we’d gotten our drinks we found out that Hannah and her dad were eating dinner at this fancy Spanish restaurant down the block. So we headed over there. And I ended up eating escargot, vegetable paella, and red wine with my friend, his girlfriend, and her dad. Paid for by her dad. It was a little weird and awkward, but I decided not to focus on that and enjoyed it.

After dinner we said goodbye to Hannah’s dad and the three of us headed down to Brooklyn for the show. We got there as the band was setting up, ordered beers, and said hey to Justin. He had this huge mountain man-beard the whole time he worked at the shop but had recently shaved it; I hardly recognized him. The set list was only like 7 or 8 songs; we stood up front the whole time, right next to Justin. He was bass guitarist and was very good. I really enjoyed the music, it was very strongly emotional and flowed well; I have no idea what the songs were about, but I liked them.

I got to talk with Hannah a good bit during the show, which was fun. At one point David yelled to me that he had just poured his beer accidentally down someone’s back. He walked Hannah back to the subway during the changeover to the next band; while they were gone a guy came over to me and said “I really loved that last band; they had great octaves.” I smilingly agreed and then cracked up after he left.

The contrast with the Phil Wickham concert couldn’t have been stronger. Instead of a cathedral, we were in a tiny hole-in-the-wall Brooklyn bar. Instead of a couple hundred youth group Christians, the audience was about a hundred 20-somethings Brooklynites in their trademark long hair and thrift-store clothes. But I felt much more at home with the Brooklyn kids. Maybe it was just that I enjoyed the music more. But the atmosphere was less forced and fake. I dunno.

I stayed through most of the set of the next band. Got to talk to Justin for a couple minutes, but he was pretty busy chatting and networking. Just after midnight I said goodbye to him and David and headed back on my long trek home. Made it back to the apartment around 1:15am. Fell straight asleep only to unaccountably wake up at 5am, wide awake and feeling tons of adrenaline pulsing through me. I read until I felt tired again, but woke up on the hour every hour until it was time to go to work. So ended up with only about 4 hours sleep for the night. Definitely felt it the next day, but whatever. It was worth it.

Friday was a good work day. Came home and fell asleep at 930; then worked all day on Saturday. After work I headed over to the Metropolitan to look at Alex’s set and talk about the sort of work he wants me to do. Ended up staying there for almost 2 hours talking and helping with some cleanup stuff. I think I’ll be working my weekends the next few weeks, but I’m really excited about the project. We’re turning the entire theatre into a deserted tenement building circa 1930. Lots of peeling wallpaper and plaster. I’m gonna do some samples on Tuesday to figure out methods; it should be fun.