Day One: Transmet and Annoying Sorority Girls

When I was a fresh-faced first-year graduate student a thousand years ago, my cohort ate at Transmetropolitan (Transmet to the cool kids) about two days a week.  Being poorer than dirt, we had quickly discovered that slices of amazing pizza and glasses of PBR could be acquired here for a handful of dollars.  Transmet is one of those college town-ish places that is simultaneously affordable and higher-end, a hang-out and a place you could take a date.  The existence of places like this makes me always want to live in college towns.  

One of my grad school colleagues once took some gossip-like flack for hosting her 10-year-old son's birthday bash on the top floor of Transmet, footsteps from the bar.  I was less worried.  The little guy was so mature that he actually preferred to be around adults.  A kid after my own heart.  I thought the choice was more a testament to how enmeshed this meeting place had become in our group of friends.  It was the site--at least for me--of tipsy evenings and football afternoons, business lunches and beer lunches, moving conversations and conversations I wish had never happened.  When you love a place that much, you end up having to step away from it after awhile.

I convinced myself that I was sick of the food, but that's pretty much impossible.  After a couple of years on hiatus, I returned in recent months to watch football and basketball with friends who kept me sane in the dissertation completion period (during which some days I wanted to puncture things with a nailgun). When I decided to write photo essays about my favorite Athens places, I knew this had to be first on the list.  I returned yesterday for a solo lunch on the patio and immediately remembered that they have stellar paninis I should be eating more of.

The problem with Transmet is that's across the street from the string of what I like to call "sorori-boutiques."  On Clayton Street, you will most likely always see at least a few young sorority ladies shopping around with their monied, jobless moms.  Yesterday I encountered about a hundred.  I saw a coral blazer I wanted so badly, but three minutes of witnessing vomit-inducing whining and I had to jump ship.  See, there are some parts of Athens that kind of suck.  Honestly, sometimes I wish it was possible to have a college town with no college students.  Har har.

xo