tasty
Today was the Taste of Tippecanoe.
I showed up around 6:00. 8 bucks to get in, 5 bucks for a sheet of 10 tickets. most of the good foods were 8 tickets per dose (so 4 bucks). So, the food was a little overpriced, but not too badly.
Lots of entertainment. 4 stages with bands going on them, plus the cooking stage and karaoke.
I didn’t stay for karaoke. One stage was a beatles cover band when I got there, and I decided I wasn’t going to stick around for that either. The “americana” stage started out with a fairly crappy trio of girls covering classic rock … I just kinda walked on by there too.
The jazz stage though … it went from good to better to even better. It started with this jazz pianist who was insane … he sounded like a dork when he talked, but that wasn’t when he was playing music, so it was fine. He finished up, and I left and caught the end of “Ranchero Musicale” — a durango band at the “world stage”. That was pretty cool … they were pretty hyper, as you’d expect. Then caught Bill Lancton and his ensemble back at the jazz stage, and then the end of the Groit Drum Ensemble …. african drums group. Pretty sweet. LNS rocked out back at the jazz stage, and then there were fireworks. Firework show was pretty solid, could have used a bit of a louder start to get people to shut up and pay attention, but it got there.
I’d say the only buzzkill was seeing a few specific people I know there… for different reasons. Ran into Rachel and Buck, who are still together and doing quite nicely with each other … they make a cute couple, and talking to them was cool. Ran into Tejas and Bimal too, they were cool, also not buzzkill-types. Then later on I ran into Richelle and her boyfriend. It depresses me a bit, because a girl like that is ALWAYS taken, and it was a definite confirmation of my earlier expectations that she was. Ahh well, that was fine too.
Then I ran into two other people from work. I know one of them is a prof, and the other is a graduate research assistant. But I came to the sad realization that the only thing at all those two were remotely interested was “checking out the scenery”.
I mean … I enjoyed it, as part of the whole experience, but it was a whole experience for me. For them, it was “look for chicks, stare at chicks”.
I ran into them at the fireworks on the footbridge … and they just kept talking about how unimpressive they were (for reference, the display was a damned nice one). It started to kind of grate on me. I think there’s two things that annoy me in particular, and they really captured the essence of one of them: haughty dismissiveness. (The other is disingenuity … I could handle the genuine interest in staring at chicks, even if it is pretty shallow … better than pretending you’re above noticing).
Yeah …. so I was only there from 6ish to 10:30 … but that was enough. I decided I was pretty tired … since I walked probably 4 miles between going there, coming back, and wandering around, it’s not entirely unexpected.
Stopped in at silver dipper and got a large smoothie on the way back.
All in all, this day is about a 9 out of 10. It could have been better, had it involved a girlfriend (which would have taken it to about 9.5) and maybe getting some action (which would have probably made it a 9.8 … losing points for dealing with the two guys on the footbridge still).