politics with a side of fries

Oh austin- you never fail me. So yes, this is long overdue but I can’t skip it- so here goes… T and I decided to go to Austin for new year’s this year (collective gasp at how behind this is). The friends we went to stay with decided rather than fight the crowds and do a big to do for dinner, we’d stop in a little joint they’d been wanting to try. The story goes that usually the lines were out the door, but since it was a night that is usually dominated by reservations at fine dining establishments we expected we’d be able to get right in. They were right. The place is on south congress, which in recent years has grown on me. I’ll pretend it has nothing to do with the fact that I enjoy just kicking back now instead of putting on my party shoes, but I would just be pretending. The space is pretty Spartan, open air, concrete floors, wood and metals abound. You open the door and the smell of their buns hit you like a freight train. Warm, delish, fresh baked breads. You just can’t beat that

there's no burgers this week...but something a little different. First let me give you some background on me. At different points in my life, acceptance by others has meant either everything or nothing to me. In high school, I was who I was, love or hate me, I was simply who I was. Part of it was because I neither realized people could not like me, simply for being alive nor even thought about it. I was naïve, but happy. In college, I started out the same but quickly found that people rarely needed reasons to dislike you. I had always started out liking everyone. Even if I disagreed with what they did or their beliefs, I had no reason to be mean. It was a wide world; couldn’t we all just play nice? Further, even those that once liked you could suddenly turn against you with little reason. It rocked my world, and hurt me deeply. I would have understood if I had done something to another person, but the unreasonable pain caused by people who barely knew me began to change me. I reall