The Great American Road Trip: Day 90 - Hanging with Toph, Visiting Rachel

Most of the house was still asleep when I woke up on Sunday, so I took a quick trip up to the apartment to drive Toph to church (since Katie still had the car at her parent's house). I really enjoy getting to talk with him - he's a fountain of information on the most interesting and unexpected topics. He works at a company that distributes royalties collected from online music streaming to the recording artists (his job is tracking down errors in the system that have lead to uncollected money sitting around waiting to be claimed) and he manages to make it sound like a really interesting challenge, frustrating but fascinatingly complex.

We were talking about a class he had taken in college that explored Art, Pop, and Folk music throughout human history, and how some kinds of music have transitioned over time between two or all three forms ("Art" being music performed by trained performers, "Folk" being music performed by not-trained performers, and "Pop" being any kind of music that was being listened to in more public, popular spheres, rather than being performed in private homes. See, I learned something new!). We also had a great conversational detour about language usage contributing to feeling welcome in certain environments - in this context, it was word choices during the ceremony that had convinced him to choose this particular church over another one. It really reminded me of the kinds of conversations I had with friends in college (when you have time to sit around and expound on those kinds of things :p).

I made it home in time to see Annie off on her trip back to New Hampshire (with two cats in tow, none the less!), then got ready to drive up to Maryland to visit Rachel. Rachel and I met at college - we were roommates our sophomore year living in a triple with our friend Krystle. We'd fallen out of touch since then and I was pleasantly surprised when I got a message from her asking if I would like to come visit her and her family while I was in town. I was pretty exclusively the medically-inclined roomate in college, but she just finished a medical coding class and is working at a company that does statistical survey research on many things including medical treatment outcomes - funny how those things work out, no? We sat around and chatted for a few hours about our lives, books we've been reading, and our families, then headed over to a local bakery whose name I just can't seem to find online - it had some amazing pastries though (the almond macaroon was delicious!). It was another one of those "I'm so glad I'm traveling and getting to have these kinds of conversations with old friends" moments that are making the sometimes crazy logistics of this trip well worth it.

(Kind of randomly, Rachel lives in Germantown, home of "the most trusted man in America", Frank Warren, who runs the PostSecret blog. If you've never had the opportunity to read the blog or one of the books, it's well worth it - www.postsecret.com, or read the wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostSecret)