There's a kid named Adam staying at my mom's house. He's from France and will be catching a flight home on Monday. My mom has told me of several occasions where this Adam kid has been less than appreciative of the hospitality he's been given. For instance, after a night of miniature golfing and swinging at baseballs in batting cages, my mom wasn't given so much as a "thank you." This could be the case for several reasons. Maybe he thinks his thanks is implied or possibly he assumes it very commonplace to go out and go miniature golfing on a regular basis. Who cares, though. What interests me is a parallel I see to a trip I took to Mexico during the summer between 8th grade and freshman year. I went with a kid named Paul and traveled around the country for about a month. What's already similar is the fact that both my and Adam's respective trips have been unnecessarily long. Like Adam and our family, I barely knew Paul's family. What I knew of Paul beforehand did not flatter his character too much. Basically, I thought he was an asshole. So did everyone else, apparently, as I was a close enough friend for him to invite me on a trip to Mexico.
So this Adam kid lacks manners. One thing Paul's parents loved about me was how polite I was. I thanked them for any gesture that was even remotely courteous and I displayed the utmost patience for their youngest child, who was an outspoken brat. One memorable car ride lasted an hour and a half and Augustin (this kid's name) declared "Je chaud!" every two minutes. To this day I do not know what stopped me from punching him in the face. So my (arguably) extreme courtesy was complemented by a complete lack of communication after they dropped me off at the airport and I caught my flight home-- no postcard, no letter of thanks, nothing. I had bought a batarang (the batman symbol-shaped knife thing) that seemed about as close to the real thing as I have ever seen. I was tempted to contact Paul or his family to retrieve that as I had left it behind in fear that airport security would accuse me of being Batman or something.
So the connection is that Adam and I, when Adam goes home and this whole ordeal is over, will have conducted our manners in an inverse fashion in relation to the other.
The second parallel I've noticed reminded me of itself last night. When my parents lived on Wolfram between Sheffield and Halsted back in... the early '90's, they would go to a bar called Lawry's. I remember going there once for their chicken dinner, I think. Or chicken wings. Something like that. Anyways, I remember that the Kansas State football game was on, and that Martín Gramática was playing and that he was an amazing placekicker. This was in 1999 or '98. Somewhere around there. So this bar was on Diversey, about a block west of Sheffield on the north side of the street. Three years ago it was bought by a couple of dudes who invested in classier beer, replaced the facade and made it much less of a dive. This is where Girlfriendo and I went last night, as well as several other nights.
Although these two circumstances with vaguely related aspects are merely arbitrary coincidences that would be just as important to the world if they went completely unnoticed, it is the best subject matter I could come up with today.
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