Also, at the They Might Be Giants show last night, they played their cover of the Cub song "New York City" as a tribute to their hometown. I was on the edge of tears for "The streets are paved with diamonds and there's just so much to see..."

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The topic at hand today is an ex of mine (I'm trying to refrain from self-indulgence, but it's what I'm thinking about today). This girl, we'll call her Sadie, went to a school that was neither my school nor the school that Leslie and Cecily shared, but a yet third school whose classes co-ordinated with those of our respective schools. After crushing on Sadie for about four years, I began to date her, my first really serious girlfriend.

At the time she had just gotten back from "being sick," which I would soon find out meant spending time at a mental institution, undergoing ElectroConvulsive Therapy. I suppose that seemed romantic to me, but I was determined to have that be neither here nor there. She would say things other people only thought, was loud and individualistic and a truly talented artist. I was in L-O-V-E.

Apparently, her seemingly unshakable depression began to have an effect on an arguably already depressed me. People very close to me have since told me that I behaved like an asshole during this time in my life, but I have precious little memory of it. It's kinda blurry and all seemed like a lot of fun to me.

Well, except for when I was thrown into heated conflict with my family because of her, and when she fooled around with half my friends.

As one might infer, there was a lot of torment and passion here, and it nearly killed the both of us. I don't want to give away a lot of details, but we both went away to college that fall with raggedy holes in our hearts in the shape of one another.

College was of course where our paths diverged, like most late high school romances. She was in Pennsylvania, and i was in Connecticut, and neither of us was stinking rich enough to even afford huge long distance bills, let alone trips to either school. I went to Pennsylvania once that fall, and that was pretty much the end of us. I went back to school knowing that it was over; she was too unhappy for me to do anything for her or mean anything to her.

In the years that followed, we kept up an email relationship at first. She dropped out of her school after only one semester. She returned to Baltimore and began dating someone in a band who I met once or twice. She seemed troubled and couldn't stay at any one job for very long. Finally, after not having heard from her for over a year, she called at the end of the summer before my senior year of college and told me that she currently does nothing. She could only watch TV in her mother's house. I was heartbroken as I told her that I didn't think I could really meet up with her, and she seemed similarly crushed.

It was terrible to know that someone who I once really loved as one of the most vibrant beings on the planet had been reduced to a cathode sponge. So much talent and intelligence gone to waste.

The reason I'm telling this story though, is that it has a happy ending. Tonight I became utterly determined to find out what happened to her, and Google made it easy. She seems to have attained a significant post in a mid-Atlantic Burning Man affiliated event, and I couldn't be happier.

I still don't know if I'll write her, but...