today i met a lot of people
i cut out a little early from narrascope to go get pizza at an all-vegan pizzeria
i told the person working very truthfully that this was the best vegan pizza i’ve had in 18 years of being vegan. they offered to open the store early for me on monday so i could get more pizza before i caught my train. (i will probably just go again tomorrow for dinner, cheesesteak be damned)
then, i went to a live recording of a podcast i like, and the cafe was very awkwardly laid out for this task, but it was a lovely thing and i was able to give out some zines.
then, i walked to a house party, foolishly deciding to walk the 30 minutes before realizing that philly has hills
i got to talk shop with some professors while a child played a drumset, and also i got to meet a cat who plopped down and purred while getting scritches. shouts out to cats.
then, my lyft driver back to the hotel was this iranian guy who was a coned programmer for like forty years. we talked a lot about programming and teaching it and what kinds of programming we do in games. (he started on fortran but ended up doing c++ and c#, but he didn’t like c# as much.)
he was telling me he used to work in NYC a lot and would commute two hours each way. i asked what he listened to on his commute, he said music, yeah, but he really loved howard stern. we both agreed that he’s the kind of guy that’s going to do that until he dies.
on the way into the hotel, this couple was also walking into the hotel at the same time and we got to chatting in the elevator. i live very very close to where one of them grew up.
these are incoherent rambles, obviously, but: i think it is nice to meet people and share in their company. this takes a lot of forms, and sometimes i am just reminded that there is actually just a tremendous amount of warmth all around, if you are looking for it and are open to it.
also, philidelphia is just pretty fuckin’ great, it turns out