Ghost Pubs are Impossible to Find

Dear Diary,

Why do I wake up 2 hours before I leave home if I'm only going to be rushed getting dressed because I spent all my time watching Glee and eating waffles? And why would I throw on my new skirt without checking to make sure it was appropriate for work and not crazy short and annoyingly see-through like I did yesterday? And obviously my plan of lying low didn't work seeing as that it was my co-worker's birthday and everyone had to mingle in the main room.
It happens.
It seems as if there's different people working in this office everyday. And since I've only met some, I cant introduce myself to everyone without accidentally introducing myself to people I already know. So I just insert myself into conversations without any preface. Like at lunch, it's easy to be anti-social since we have our own office apart from the different organization. But I forced myself to eat lunch with some Three Faiths Forum. And by "eat lunch" I mean lean against the cabinet, drink a smoothie and casually tell them facts about the US Postal service and then go back to my desk. Wow, who was that fascinating stranger?

At our magazine staff meeting, we had a woman named Miriam Lorie speak to us. She works at a different interfaith organization which hosts religion-based events and activities. She mentioned they were constructing an 'interfaith garden' for the West End. What do you put in an interfaith garden? Jerusalem tulips?

She told us about another event they host titled Scriptural Reasoning. In which they take a topic, such as charging interest, set out Bibles, Korans, Tanachs and have people discuss the different views from different religions and then apparently everyone learns something and everyone becomes friends. Now, I'm totally for everyone becoming friends but I asked her what exactly the end-goal of this night is, because I'm sure when you have hot-topic issues like homosexuality or Israel, it's not going to be as tame as discussing Halal vs Kosher. I would love to see how this plans out. How do you argue different religions? Or how do you argue when you know there's no "winner"? I've never been very good at debate team, I've always been the time keeper. She said that they save the controversial topics at the end, and that maybe as seeing that WE (the staff) were an interfaith group of people, we'd like to do our own session of Scriptural Reasoning. I guess I forget that we are an interfaith group, and not just journalists. So that should be interesting.

My night plans had included going to a 'haunted pub' with my friend Jackson, which became Jackson, his friend and my roommate. Which was awesome. Except the fact that I got the directions wrong and we finally found the place at 11pm. So we sketichily hung out in Hyde Park so everyone could smoke. Jackson's friend was interesting. She's not in college but she's here for a month doing a internship at parliament. She told me that as long as you have connections, you don't need a diploma to work there. She mentioned that last summer she hit someone's car in a cafe parking lot and went into the cafe to find the owner. He turned out to be lawyer for Virgina's state department or something. And instead of making her pay, he offered her an internship with the firm because he "respected her honesty and could tell she was a good person." Yeah, he doesn't think you're a good person, he thinks you're a hot person. But hey, maybe in Virginia they really do give people jobs based on whether they get a "good person vibe", not so much in NY.

Have a good Wednesday!

Love,
Aviva