Nothing To see

A cheap date

2011-02-24T23:09:00.000-08:00

So I went out on a date last night with my friends J and A which proved to be a delightful and cost-effective way to spend an evening on the town in LA (note: not actually a date).

It started off innocuously enough with a movie screening at a local mall, the AMC Century City (a wonderfully trendy, open-door mall within a few-pleasant-suburban-minutes' bike ride from campus). An audience-testing screening involving a Scantron-style review form and no deduction of money from my bank account. A movie whose identity I might share or about whose artistic merits I might be tempted to offer my opinion, were I not contractually debarred from disclosing such. Suffice it to say a good, if somewhat low-expectations-fulfilling, time was had by all in attendance. [NB: The author realizes this isn't that big a deal, but is kind of getting of on the intellectual exercise of excessively-self-aggrandizing doggerel.]

And afterwards, like one does, we decided to sojourn to Banana Republic for some light browsing of the summer fashions and a few glasses of champagne.

Because, of course, it's that one day of the season where the Century City Banana Republic offers its customers hors-d'oeuvres, gourmet chocolates, and champagne. Oh, and of course, the best part: 25% ALL PURCHASES! God knows why, but it was such a delightfully weird little experience that I felt compelled to post about it (and, of course, provide them with that grass-roots buzz that they so crave). And they didn't skimp, either! This was no Dixie cup (™ the Koch Brothers) of champagne and a Hershey's Kiss. No, no. These were full flutes of champagne and large, caramel-filled salted truffles. And constant, friendly attention from the immaculately-dressed employees, always happy to refill your glass or provide you with another bacon-cheese-stuffed mini potato. Professionals, they were.

I have no idea why Banana Republic thinks of itself as upscale enough to warrant a champagne evening, but who am I to turn down free food? We spent a good half hour in the store exploring, me serving A's desire to have a life-sized Ken doll of her very own for the evening, and it was delightful. I now know what I look like in a pink button down shirt/argyle sweater combination (spoiler: not very good) and have a new appreciation for the weird things marketers will do to push a product.

I almost felt bad that I didn't buy anything.

An ever-so-minor rant

2010-12-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

So I went to a rave a few weeks ago because, you know, why not.

It was an illuminating experience. First and foremost, I suppose, I learned that I am just way too damned old to go to raves anymore. Don't get me wrong! I had fun, the dancing was great and Moby's certainly a heckuva DJ. But the kids dancing around me, those young, fresh-faced little college kids who'd come to the event in their parents' borrowed Nissan Ultimas, wearing shiny costumes that they could just barely afford on the wages from their crappy afterschool jobs selling frozen yogurt at the local Red Mango. Those kids! A basketball stadium teeming with youth, every glowstick-bedecked head a quiet, bobbing sentinel, a vessel for a pair of piercing, intense eyes all focused on me, on my gray hair. Watching me. Judging me.

It was oppressive.

And I went to this thing and as I sat there in the limo I thought I'm going to challenge strangers to rock, scissors, paper because how cool and random would that be? To be standing there, alone, a sad anonymous face in a sea of thousands and then BLAM you're fighting for your honor in an intense, low-stakes game of Roshambo. What a delightful, unexpected little bit of oddity it would be in an otherwise staid and ordinary dance-hall extravaganza. Who wouldn't love to break the monotony of a massive dance party with a little bit of light person-to-person interaction?

I'll tell you who. Everyone at the goddamn rave. And not for my lack of effort! Time and again I would meet some stranger's eyes, hold out my hands in the traditional challenge stance, and wait for their response. Which was usually a vacuous gaze that, when roughly translated to English, means "Huh?" After a bit of gentle prodding they'd figure out what was going on and then, slowly and confusedly, they'd put out their hands. And play one, solitary, polite round. Then the hands went down, the head turned, and it was back to staring at the DJ, swaying mindlessly to the beat.

What the hell?! I get that you don't know me, but why not take advantage of a simple chance to inject a little weird into your life? A simple, no commitment opportunity to do something ever-so-slightly out of the ordinary and you dismiss it out of hand because it's not on the printed setlist. You boring jerks.

CODA

Last summer a few of us were dancing at Burning Man, at Opulent Temple (one of the bigger dance venues featuring, as pictured at right, flamethrowers on the DJ booth). A woman approached us and, as we danced there heedless of our surroundings, she took a moose out of her backpack. A small, dancing moose, which she placed on the ground and made an impromptu part of our dance circle. She left it there for a few minutes and the moose gyrated happily away, outdancing all the rest of us. I loved that moose. That one simple little moment, a pointless bit of randomness, made my evening. I want more of that and goddammit, world, I want you to help me.

Antiheroes

2010-11-04T16:53:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Lolita. I picked it up some time eons ago in a moment of faux erudition and managed to make it through -- enjoying it, I think, although it's hard to separate the experience of reading a Great Work from the experience of being someone who is reading a Great Work. I don't remember much of it from the first time through, certainly nothing that couldn't be gleaned from a quick skim of the back cover. I can't say that I any longer feel the need to work my way through the canon (Paradiso quite handily cured me of that), but having randomly come into possession of a (heavily annotated) copy of the book, I decided to give it a second run through.

It was a much more memorable read this time through and (the annotations are quite useful here) the wordplay and allusions are all quite clever. But, try as I might, I couldn't find it within me to give a damn for Mr. Humbert. He has an unhealthy attraction to underage girls, of couse, but he's also arrogant, alcoholic, and an all-around unpleasant personality. He really has nothing to recommend himself, and so, while I enjoyed the book, I spent most of it hoping that the guy would just get picked up by the cops or run his car off a cliff or something.

Of course, proudly announcing to the world that you don't care for a hebephile is hardly a controversial opinion, so allow me to generalize.

I don't like anti-heros. Can't stand 'em. I'm not talking about your good people caught on the wrong side of the law--your Jean Val Jeans, your Malcolm Reynolds, what have you. I have no especial attachment to the rule of law in my fiction, and it's not that I fell the authorities somehow need to be the face of morality. No, I'm talking about irredeemably bad characters, ones that have nothing to recommend them but for their protagonism.

You ever seen Reservoir Dogs? Movie about a diamond heist gone bad when it turns out one of the bad guys is an undercover police agent (played by the delectable Tim Roth)? There's this one character in it, Mr. White, who befriends Tim (without knowing, of course, that he's a cop) . Most of the movie is Mr. White and the cop interacting and, at the very end [SPOILER ALERT] the cop lets out who he really is and Mr. White gets all weepy.

I think you're supposed to empathize with Mr. White and for how horribly betrayed he feels at the end, but I couldn't have cared less. He's a nasty, unpleasant murderer -- why the fuck should I care what happens to him? I certainly don't feel any sympathy for Ted Bundy or any other real-life psychopaths. I just felt bad for Mr. Roth, who trusts the guy and gets killed for his troubles.

I just can't bring myself to care about these guys. I don't sympathize with them and I generally want them to die, be arrested, or otherwise get their just desserts.

I realize this sounds a bit moralistic and, therefore, uncool, but I don't think that's really my intent. I've definitely seen movies with thoroughly unpleasant characters that I've liked (American History X comes to mind). I just can't bring myself to root for them. Maybe it's just 'cause I'm a contradictionist and my immediate reaction is "Screw you! I'm not going to care about this guy just because you made him the star of your movie."

Or maybe not. What say you? (Also: hey! I just updated my blog! Crazy.)

Lots-o-running

2010-05-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

I ran a half marathon last weekend. Finished in 1:52:41 (8.6-minute mile). Kinda proud of that.

AIR GUITAR

2010-04-28T15:25:00.000-07:00

♫ I'm sailing away
Set an open course for the Baltic Sea
'Cause I've got to be free
Free to play guitar invisibly ♪

And with those inspiring words still echoing over the Troubador's audience, Björn Turoque strode on to the stage, microphone in hand and beer in the other, to MC the 2010 LA Regional Air Guitar Championships.

My God do I lead an awesome life! Yeah, yeah, I'm 28 and I don't know what I'm doing with my life and all of my friends are racing off and getting married and blah blah blah. But goddamn it, I spend my Saturday nights watching people in ridiculous costumes play hair-metal anthems from the 80s with imaginary instruments and that is a beautiful, beautiful thing. If you don't get that, I'm really not sure how we're friends.

Quickly, the setup: the competitors run onstage, ridiculously garbed (viz The Caplickster, in full, glorious regalia at right), and have one minute to flail away on their air axe to a song of their choice, impress the (increasingly inebriated) judges with their technical virtuosity, stage presence, and "airness",¹ and flee the stage with what little shreds of their dignity they can salvage.

How glorious. How absurd. How American.

(Also, how LA: Dee and Mac from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia were celebrity judges.)

It started off slow. The first two acts were... less than good. (The first was named Fretophile and you can imagine exactly what that was like).

Zero Prospects

And then BLAM HOLY SHIT Zero Prospects ran out on stage in crazy glam-rock regalia (her crotch clearly stuffed beneath her mini-skirt) and ROCKED THE SHIT out of my face. Notice her playing the guitar between her legs there? Yessir, that is pure, raw, unadulterated talent.

Good God, sir!

There was a shirtless guy rocking out to System Of A Down and a number of Demon Hell Things as well, if that's your kind of thing. Also a shirtless guy in boxer shorts and a lab coat.

It's glorious -- truly, utterly glorious -- living in a city so full of out-of-work actors that people will spend weeks working up a routine so that they can run out on stage waving a huge American flag with confetti falling all around them and a working, beer-dispensing tap on their crotch and stand on stage for a scant 60 seconds to spastically fling their arms around to Poison. And for what? For the momentary amusement of a couple hipster nerds on a Saturday night? Fuck. Yes.

For Christ's sake, Thai Elvis performed.

And the woman who won? The Bride Of Rock? Oh, fuck yes she deserved to win. This is a video of her (unrehearsed) winning performance. Watch this video. I demand you watch this video. The whole thing. NOW. (Preferably in fullscreen.)

That is commitment, my friends. That is awesome. That is rock and roll.

And in a final moment of glory, for a rousing encore, the entire audience was invited onstage to join in a mass Freebird ensemble. Yours truly joined in and muddled through the solo on a very rubbery air rhythm guitar. Sublime.

[Pictures gratefully stolen from the LA Weekly. Check out the whole set.]

¹ Oxford commas for everyone!

Trombottle

2010-04-18T18:43:00.000-07:00

Are you familiar with the trombottle? If not, you should be! It's the most unique¹ and innovative new instrument of our time. This cleverly-constructed device, recycling two humble beer bottles and repurposing them for greater things, was developed a few scant years ago by ingenious undergraduates at the University of Oregon seeking an environmentally-friendly way to discard of their spent beverage containers. Minutes of discussion and brainstorming resulted in an initial prototype, which was painstakingly refined over several iterations. After years of research and development, the trombottle was finally released to the public in the summer of 2009.

Deceptively simple, the trombottle is constructed of two beer bottles, one slightly larger than the other. Both have their base removed (a simple task for an experienced glass cutter). The larger of the bottles is turned on its end, its neck plugged, and filled with water. The smaller of the bottles, upright, nestles cozily in its larger brother. The instrument is played by gracefully blowing across the top of the smaller bottle—as with a flute—while moving the smaller bottle up and down in the larger, effectively changing its water level and thereby the pitch. Such an elegant concept, so simple in its execution!

Finally, after years of labor, its creators have consented to provide the world with a short performance. Featured below is a performance of the Bottle Waltz, a commissioned piece written by renowned composer Keith Kirchoff. Joseph Barker, the world's foremost trombottle virtuoso, solos accompanied by accomplished bottle performers Joe and L.

Sheet music, as well as opportunities for engaging the performers, available upon request.

¹ Yeah, most unique. You heard me.

Pimpin', part 2

2010-02-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

I'm glad to realize that LA has its own, homegrown brand of psychedelic limousine.

My adventure with Pee Wee

2010-01-25T16:57:00.000-08:00

I'm ever-so-slightly afraid that this post, coming hot on the heels as it does of Flight of the Navigator, will change the tenor of this blog somewhat, reducing it to a series of pithy commentaries on pop culture ephemera from the 80s. Which, I suppose, could be an interesting topic for a blog (certainly already being done, I'm sure), but a blog that I'm ill-qualified to write for¹.

Having not grown up in the US (you may have heard?) but having lived here for the past 10 years, I find myself in the odd position of being nostalgic for 80s childhood pop culture that I have no connection to at all. So far as television went, TV time in Barker household meant putting in one of our 10 well-worn VHS tapes of PBS kids' shows, watching reruns of Sesame Street (or -- my favorite -- 321 Contact). My parents' Varese Sarabande Classical Music Collection provided me with most of my musical education until I discovered Garbage my senior year of high school (also: Weird Al, for whatever that counts). Your favorite TV show when you were growing up? I've probably never seen it. (To those who didn't grow up in the US: don't worry, I probably haven't see yours, either.)

For Christ's sake: I watched the live-action Transformers movie for the nostalgia, despite never having seen a single episode of it as a kid.

I've done a whole bunch of catching up in my years in the US, to be sure. There've definitely been some pleasant surprises on the way (The Muppet Show and Nirvana: still quite good!) and some disappointments (I still don't see what you get in Ferris Beuhler's Day Off). And as uninformed as I may really be, I can fake it pretty damn well. Which is really all that counts.

And which is why I recently found myself standing at a smallish theater downtown, watching a man in a too-small suit conversing with an armchair.

I saw exactly one episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse when I was a kid, and I remember almost nothing of it. Pee Wee had a weird voice, wore a tight suit, and had a friend who was an armchair named Chairy. That was it. So I'm not exactly sure why I decided to say yes when my good friend J asked if I wanted to see Paul Reuben's new live show, a revamp of his original 1980s Pee Wee stage performance. Novelty, I guess?

The show was remarkably kid-friendly, I was surprised to realize. I guess I was expecting Pee Wee's playhouse, but with more adult-friendly humor (you know: like how Bob Sagat apparently now does really raunchy humor now that he's been freed from the PG-level humor of Full House). But no: it's a straight-up adaptation of the TV show to the stage². There was a tiny amount of suggestive humor and the death of a sentient cleaning device, but that was really it³. You probably would have been comfortable taking your 8-year-old child to see it (except for maybe the audience: they might have bothered you a bit).

Which was: awesome? Yes, I think so. Awesome. The recurring sketches from the show all came back to me: Jambi, the genie in a box who channels spirits; the secret word of the day, at whose uttering all must scream real loud! (today's secret word: Fun!); Conky the Robot who bounces around like a steam-powered epileptic fit; "I know you are, but what am I?"; "If you love it so much, why don't you marry it?"⁴. All this, a potent deluge of nostalgia, evoked from the memory of a single 20-minute video watched when I was 8. Crazy!

Through a surprisingly serendipitous confluence of events, I was able to get a Meet And Greet ticket to stay after the show and watch Paul Reubens (note: not Pee Wee Herman) talk with the audience. I somehow managed to finagle my way to the front row and watch him stand five feet in front of me for the whole 45-minute session. My closest brush with fame yet!

He turned out to be quite the charming and pleasant conversationalist which, I suppose, you have to be to become a reasonably successful entertainer. He had a whole bunch of cute stories (in particular, one in which Michael Jackson emphatically reiterated how mean Prince had been to him once) and was delightfully charismatic as a host. Plus, it was super cute to see the giddy super-fans in the front as they gave him a gift of two shoes for his Pee Wee doll and answered back to all of his rhetorical audience questions. Also, some big promoter sitting right behind me offered to take his play to Broadway right while I was sitting there, which was kinda neat.

It's totally unfair that I have to get my nostalgia fix from pop-culture references to your childhood, oh reader, but, nevertheless, I had a good time. I felt like the luckiest boy in the world.

¹ Yeah, that's a preposition ending my sentence. What're you going to do about it, style Nazi?

² The obsessive part of me feels the need to tell you that the show was originally performed on stage, only later to turn into a movie and kid's show.

³ I suppose some might consider the political humor about chastity rings and gay marriage inappropriate for a younger child, but I also suspect that those people are not reading my blog.

⁴ Site of the gay-marriage-themed humor referenced in the preceding footnote.

Flight Of The Navigator

2010-01-20T00:22:00.000-08:00

You remember this movie. You know you do. I was living in Egypt when this movie came out and I remember this movie. If you were a nerdy little sci-fi-loving kid like me (and if you weren't, how are we friends?), this movie was a highlight of a fleetingly brief period of your childhood. It had aliens! Time travel! And a really, really awesome looking spaceship.

I loved that spaceship.

Of course, as these things go, the details of the movie faded from the light in the dark, twisting passages of my memory. Oh, sure, I spent countless hours as a child (excuse me: young adult) fantasizing about it, running around the playground in my enormous, invisible spaceship (invariably by myself: I was a pretty solitary little kid, and besides, there was only enough room in the ship for one). How cool would it be to have your own personal spaceship? It would be rad. Tubular, perhaps.

My youthful enthusiasm, sadly, wasn't able to sustain itself through adolescence. All that remained of a treasured childhood memory were vague images of an enormous, silver football and an alien with an eyeball in its mouth (which freaked my shit out! -- how biologically implausible is that?!).

So, of course, when L and I decided to maybe re-watch the Childhood Classic, I squealed with joy. Sure, I'd already tried a similar experiment once, to disastrous results (childhood self: I'm very sorry, but Thundercats kinda sucked. As did the Transformers.), but c'mon: AWESOME GIANT SILVER SPACESHIP!!!

And, by god, it didn't disappoint. Don't get me wrong: Flight Of The Navigator is a Bad Movie. The acting is ham-fisted and cringe-inducing. The dialog would try even the most talented thespian (sample: "I'm afraid I can't talk about it. It's a matter of national security. You understand."). The plot is utterly implausible (and that's ignoring the time-traveling, Pee-Wee-Herman-voiced spaceship).

But so what? The movie is pure adolescent wish fulfillment and egads, does it do a fine job. A kid from a perfectly average, boring, typical American family gets thrust in to the middle of a stellar zoo-curating expedition and gets to fly HIS OWN SPACESHIP (which is still AWESOME, even to a somewhat less impressionable 28-year-old). Who wouldn't love having their own sentient buddy to fly them to Mars and back?

I guess there was a cute little sidekick alien, too, but that clearly didn't register with me.

I can't believe how many details of the movie I was able to dredge up from the dark recesses of my memory. The kid gets abducted when he's going to pick up his brother from a friends' house. He has a pet dog who sucks at catching frisbees. He makes Max the Spaceship let him out so he can take a pee-break next to some cows. The spaceship becomes sentient when he read's the kids brain and starts talking with the voice of Pee-Wee Herman (Pee Wee Herman! Speaking of which, how cool is it that he's starting to be popular again?!).

Although I didn't remember Sarah Jessica Parker being in it. You'd think that would have registered.

It's probably for the best that I don't get that caught up in movies any more. Lord knows my life is busy enough without re-imagining every damn movie I see with myself as the star. Especially with my current taste in movies (Donnie Darko: good movie, bad wish-fulfillment fantasy).

So I think I'll leave Navigator as a happy, nostalgia-filled excursion in to my childhood. You were good to me, Max, and you no doubt played a formative role in my blossoming in to an AI researcher as an adult. But I'll keep you nestled comfortably in the back of my mind, a happy memory that re-emerges every so often to bring a faint smile to my face.

And damn do I want that spaceship.

Pimpin'

2009-12-14T15:28:00.000-08:00

Walking down Fremont today (I'm in Seattle for the next two weeks, by the way), I happened to walk past this phenomenal, psychedelic stretch limo and thought I would share it with the world.

Foucault's Pendulum

2009-11-15T13:09:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Foucault's Pendulum right now. I've had a pretty good track record with Umberto Eco and, well, it's important to read pretentious books on occasion so as to have something to talk about at cocktail parties.

It's been a pretty fun read so far. It's what you would refer to as, I believe, a "literary detective story". The protagonist and his friends have spent pretty much the entirety of the book exploring ancient texts, reading about (and generating) conspiracy theories involving the Rosicrucians, the Templars, Masons, and myriad other secret societies. Think of it as a more intellectually respectable Da Vinci Code, perhaps.

It's pretty engaging. The characters are, for the most part, quite aware of the absurdities of the theories they're generating, of the ridiculous coincidences and leaps of faith that are required to make these stories seem even remotely plausible. There's a sense of ironic self-awareness that lets me read and enjoy farcical stories about deeply buried eschatological secrets and obscure rites without shame.

Even so, though, with Eco's carefully guarded framing of his story, and fully aware that I shouldn't be taking it seriously, I have no idea what's going on. I'm enjoying myself, but the conspiracy theory has me completely lost. For some reason, there's something important that's supposed to happen every 120 years, and I don't know why (or what). The Rosicrucians are maybe real or maybe just an insidious rumor? I don't know. Certain years being divisible by nine is very important, and the transition from Julian to Gregorian calendar is a very Big Deal. I think.

I'm pretty sure that there's some internal consistency here, that there's a coherent (if farcical) logic to the whole story. I just clearly don't have the right mindset to be able to internalize this kind of reasoning. I suspect that, if somebody were to present me with real, incontrovertible evidence of a deep, overarching conspiracy theory in real life, I wouldn't be able to process it.

I think, for the most part, this is a good thing.

Emotions

2009-10-12T22:38:00.001-07:00

I wish I could trust my emotions.

I don't want to depend on my intellect to filter my experiences, to tell me what feelings are valid. When I feel something, I want to know it's real. If I feel awful and depressed and sad then, by God, I want to know that I'll look back on this day and remember it for what it really was. Remember the frustration, the anger, remember why.

I want to always know why it was that I felt so much love for you. Why this day just felt so goddamned right. How beautiful, how gorgeous, how empty that mountainside was, tumbling away beneath me under the pitch-black night. How utterly alone and scared I felt that one time, lying in bed, worrying about my life.

It was real, then. It was real.

These are my experiences. This is my life.

I want it to be real. I want it to last.

Burning Man Part 2: Things to do

2009-09-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

It's amazing the things you see as you walk aimlessly around the Playa. Icthyosaur skeletons lie abandoned in the desert, a short walk away from a dance area ringed by the word LOVE, playing Sinatra tunes at all hours of the night. A naked man doing a performance piece with an array of blue and white umbrellas, the Hug Deli, where for the price of a compliment you can get your choice of an array of hugs (I got the Beverly Hills Air Kiss; L got the Gangsta Hug), an enormous, interactive Rubik's Cube.

An enormous, steampunk house on wheels. Rolling around the desert, occasionally stopping to disgorge an army of Victorian-era passengers, the Neverwas Haul was one of the more impressive Art Cars that drifted slowly across the cityscape. As the only motorized vehicles allowed in Black Rock City, the cars frequently serve as mobile dance parties, drifting around the cityscape festooned with glowing lights and attractive dancers. The Neverwas Haul was certainly one of the more impressive, but hardly the only car of interest. A giant, glowing rubber duck nearly ran us over one night, and an enormous reticulated bus done up as a sailing ship offered tours of the major art installations. A glowing mustache floated around, offering people rides (teehee) and an enormous birthday cake was there for your special birthday rides.

A minigolf course with toy dinosaurs and a motley assortment of obstacles because what better way to spend a week in the desert than by hitting Tom Cruise in the nuts with a golf ball?

And the rocket. The Rocket! Three stories tall, resting majestic on its launchpad, a fabulous relic of a grand, Buck-Rogersesque space age, laden with alien specimens, exotic launch controls and artists discussing in all earnestness how they intended to launch the vessel Friday night. They were working with "students from a New Zealand university", and were expecting to get a good one to three feet of altitude with their new, plasma-baffle rocket technology. I suppose it's not too surprising the number of people who believed them (including a particularly credulous Australian who warned us to keep our credit cards safely stowed away on the day of the launch).

No launch, of course, but a magnificent fireworks and pyrotechnics display to impress even the most jaded pyromaniac. (Tuesday evening, by the way, we were graced by an enormous display of fireworks at midnight, unannounced, and for no apparent reason).

... and there, in the background, nestled behind the elaborate, wire-frame artwork. A slide. An enormous slide. Three stories tall, twenty feet wide, and covered in astroturf. Grab a sheet of plastic, run to the top, jostle your way to the front, and barrel down in to a pile of large, foam blocks. No rules, no guidelines, so be careful not to collide with the slow-going guy ahead of you, who refused to get out of the way even as L yelled out warning. Stick around at the bottom for a few minutes to throw blocks back in to the pile for the benefit of the daring souls coming down behind you and marvel at the structure before moving on.

Admire the giant bunny and the giant birds' nest. Climb up inside it if you want to, relax on a couch, and look down over the expanse of desert.

Wander over to Thunderdome. Thunderdome, one of the more famous, longer-running institutions at Black Rock City. An excuse to break out of the happy, friendly, giving vibe of the institution. A chance to dangle from the ceiling on an elastic cable and beat the crap out of an opponent with a foam bat as bloodthirsty spectators crawl on the top of your geodesic cage and cheer you on. Two cheerleaders with a grudge to settle, a man dressed as the Green Lantern challenging yours truly, dressed as the Tick, to a duel, anyone. Climb in, let out your inner, violent psycopath and fight.

Not really my thing, I'll admit -- I've never found violent spectator sports particularly engaging and I walked away after two bouts. But climbing up on that dome, feeling the raging energy of the crowd around me. That was cool.

Too many other things to list. Just too many. I never got a picture of Root Society or Opulent Temple, the two major dance clubs that ship massive soundsystems, stages, and infrastructure to the middle of the desert and provide a huge, throbbing, week-long dance party.

I can't describe the genuine, moving, powerful experience I had in the Temple. Walking through the lotus-shaped building, looking at the memorials and testimonies that people had written to friends and family passed or passing, I was caught up and my normal, cheerful, cynical facade just dropped. I wish I had been there to watch it burn.

Too much else to list. Too much.

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Burning Man Part 1: Praise

2009-09-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

I was more than a little annoyed in the weeks leading up to our departure. I'd been given a good idea of what to expect from my friend F, who'd previously attended. Bring lip balm, sun screen, goggles, and saline nasal spray, she told us. Oh, and ex-lax. "Trust me".
The event is held in the middle of the desert, in the remotest possible part of Nevada. Occasionally the winds will pick up, raising huge clouds of dust to the point of white-out. Dust, by the way, which burns the skin due to its high alkali content.

The event organizers provide almost nothing in the way of services. When you show up, you're presented with a city layout, portapotties, and a place to buy coffee and ice. That's it. Attendees are responsible for their own food, water, supplies, everything.

And then there was the back of the ticket, which warned me in no uncertain terms that by attending, I was risking "serious injury or death".

I was so, so ready to be disappointed, and I mean that sincerely, without purpose of dramatic embellishment. I was pissed.

And this is what we encountered when we entered the gate, while waiting in a four-hour line to get inside.

Great.

But I was there, ticket in hand, supplies bought, and determined to give it a fair shot. After all, the alternative was to hop right back in the car and take that 14-hour car drive right back home.

The yurt provided my first moment of joy. We'd met up with our friends F and K, Voltroning our camps together to form a larger, more awesome super-camp, and K had done research into "hexayurts", a popular shade structure built entirely about of insulative siding and super-sticky tape.

It took us a day of dedicated labor, battling the high winds, dust, and complete lack of knowledge about how the hell the damn thing was supposed to fit together.

But we did it. And then, when we were done, we had a big, roomy, shaded area to rest in for the rest of our time there. And man, did I get attached to that yurt. It was a palatial enclosure, sheltered from the wind, heat, and, most importantly of all, dust. We spent hours upon hours in there, hiding from the windstorms, playing Outburst, and talking about nothing in particular.

I feel more attached to that damn yurt than to most of the apartments I've ever lived in.

Halfway through construction, we heard a cry coming from the nearby street: "Screwdrivers! Screeeeeeeeeeewdrivers!"

Two handsome gentlemen, clad in aprons and nothing else (nudity, you may have heard, being an important component of the event) were walking by, wheeling an ice chest and cooler, providing screwdrivers to anyone who wanted them.

This was my first real exposure to the Gift Economy, and it was weird. Attendees at Burning Man are not supposed to engage in commerce of any sort. No buying. No bartering. No trading. If you show up, you're expected to have something to provide to the community, and you're supposed to provide it willingly to the community, with no expectation of payment or compensation. This was, by far, the thing I was most expected to be disappointed by.

But, by god, it worked, and it was truly unsettling to experience. By and large, most people's gifts were small things -- stickers and medallions were popular. But then person after person would offer you free beer or ice cream and walk away, not even waiting for you to say thank you. Our next door neighbor brought a portable shower on his truck, trucking in 500 gallons of water with him to provide the gift of cleanliness. Other people provided elaborate pancake breakfasts.

And the art, of course, was a form of gifting. Massive structures carted in from hundreds of miles away. Multi-stage dance clubs, pumping out music and light at all hours in the morning. Lessons in tassel twirling, swing sets, mini-golf courses, free hug booths, incredible mobile art cars, flame-thrower shooting galleries, clothing boutiques. All provided by the attendees, without any thought of compensation, purely to contribute to the event.

I didn't expect it to work. I thought it would be a sham, a cute attempt at social bonding that would quickly backfire and fall apart.

But it worked. It really did. I was amazed.

Next post: pictures!

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Burning Man Preview

2009-09-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

I went to Burning Man recently with Joe and L. It was pretty fantastic, and I intend to write about the highlights in more detail when time allows. (Don't worry, readers of Joe's blog: some of my highlights will be totally different from his! And I have different pictures.)

At the moment, though, I'm involved in packing up my cute little studio apartment (how I'll miss you!), looking for apartments in LA (long story, but I don't yet have a place to live for the coming school year and I'm going to be in town in four days), and getting ready for the long drive home (one hour left!).

So, in the meantime, I leave you with this picture of one of the more awesome art exhibits we found on the playa. This spaceship was one of the more prominent features in the playa and served for a useful navigational landmark in our late-night wanderings. This shot was taken in the wee hours of the morning, after we successfully stayed up the entire night just to watch the sunrise. (That bright structure nestled up in the hills to the right, by the way, is the Man himself, standing ready for his imminent burn.)

The Grand Unified Theory of Work

2009-08-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

I propose a new theory: the Grand Unified Theory of Work. The theory states that the duration required to complete a task--no matter how necessary or entertaining--expands to fill any time allotted to it. Which is to say that it is impossible to speed along your work at anything simply by spending more time on it.

I have heard simpler versions of this theory proposed in past; these earlier versions, however, relate only to unpleasant tasks, such as work or household chores. The novel contribution of my theory (making it both Grand and Unified) is the discovery that this property holds regardless of the enjoyment of the aforementioned task. Writing an essay? Cleaning your house? Writing your marriage vows? Laying tracks on your model train set? In my theory, the distinction is irrelevant. If you have ten free hours or a hundred, that's how long it will take.

This summer, I have had the opportunity countless experiments testing this theory. For the sake of science, I have taken it upon myself to perform a slew of activities in my everyday life. Practicing my guitar, working on my research, knitting, updating my blog -- despite the greatly-increased availability of time in my quotidian experience, I progress in them no faster than when living as a full-time student.

What a surprising result! I was expecting this summer to be an endless fount of blog posts, musical extravaganzas, and endless entertaining reading. I am now, however, quite uncertain as to where exactly my free time has gone.

These results propose some interesting followup research. Previous results had suggested that this effect was due to the inherent unpleasantness of the task to be performed -- given the opportunity, any sane person would put off working on a homework assignment until it became pressing. We now know, however, that there is some other limiting factor at work. Playing the guitar is fun! Writing blog posts is (arguably) entertaining! If it's not lack of time that limits these activities, what mysterious force is at work here?

A potentially more dangerous line of inquiry would address whether this affect can be manipulated. By taking on jobs with earlier deadlines, can one's productivity be thereby increased? Taken to the extreme, could a person with an infinite number of hobbies be infinitely productive?

We must explore this. For science.

In between conducting experiments, I have had the occasion to participate in a number of entertaining diversions this summer.

L and I walked through a magical door and were transported back in time to the 70s, where we went to an awesome music festival in remotest British Columbia.

Also, I went to a wedding.

So that was fun.

I'm getting old

2009-07-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

How annoying is it to hear 20-somethings complain about how they're getting old? How they just can't keep up the same lifestyle they used to when they were in college?

I've heard many, many people complain about how their bodies are mysteriously sore these days, about how they just can't go out and party every night of the weekend because they'll be too tired (what exactly do you remember college being like? I was exhausted all the time!). You'd think you were talking with a bunch of octogenarians in a retirement home rather than adults in more-or-less the prime of their physical lives.

I mean, c'mon! Renting (or owning) your own house, holding down a steady job, being socially independent -- those are signs of adulthood, not age! When you need hip surgery, I'll start taking you seriously.

That being said.

I'm experiencing an unexpected and foreign desire to have a quiet weekend in. My summer, so far, has been consisted of a plenitude of social activities, including an SCA event, a trip to LA to attend the IJCAI conference, an out-of-town July 4th trip, Joe's visit to Seattle, my sisters' visit to Seattle, trips to visit Eugene, and attending multiple roller derby bouts [delightfully, at the most recent bout, the audience actively and boisterously cheered when the announcer thank the Ninkasi brewery for their sponsorship], and myriad other, smaller trips. In the upcoming weeks, I'm going to the Shambhala music festival, a friend's wedding in Oakland, and Burning Man. Also, maybe camping.

In a global sense, I'm happy to have such a busy life and the opportunity (while I'm still young, dammit!) to explore my life and have fun.

But right now, I would really, really just love to have a weekend in where I can laze about my house, maybe watch a movie, and not do much of anything. This is strange, and disconcerting. I'm almost never a homebody, and I almost never want "alone time". But at some point over the course of this summer, my psyche's decided it's maybe had a bit too much stimulation and that I should just slow-the-hell-down, thankyouverymuch.

It's too late for that now, of course, but maybe I'll think about this a bit more the next time I have to make long-term plans.

And then maybe I'll have enough time to actually update this blog.

Sundry tales of everyday life

2009-07-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

I realize that it has been A While since my last post. The reasons for this lag are, in general, banal and prosaic; stories of final projects, moving apartments, and the sundry workaday requirements of life. I could not, in good conscious, foist such pedestrian tales upon my devoted readership without some interesting framing device or philosophical narrative, neither of which I felt sufficiently motivated to provide. Absent compelling external narrative my blog has lain fallow, devoid of content.

For this, Dear Reader, I apologize. Absent inspiration from the muse, this post shall serve simply as a brief update on my life. For those who know and love me and care about my every movement and activity, this post shall perhaps provide you with valuable information about my life and doings. For my teaming hordes of anonymous Internet fans, the biographical information contained herein may be somewhat less scintillating.

The most relevant detail, of course, is that I'm currently in Seattle. My research work, thankfully, is the kind of work I can do anywhere (contingent on availability of power and Internet) and I have no classes to take this summer, so I decided to pack up a car's worth of belongings and ship on up to Seattle, where L and I are Living In Sin. *Gasp!* In between Shambhala, Burning Man, and IJCAI, it seemed pointless to try and find a summer job ("I'd love to work for you guys, providing you let me take off one week in July, two weeks in August, a couple days in early September...").

So we're living a quiet, happy little domestic life up here. Cooking meals from scratch, practicing and refining my trombottle technique, catching up on my guitar, driving down to a friend's Roller Derby bout in Eugene. It's a pretty pleasant little life. And, to my great surprise, I've actually managed to do a fair amount of research in my spare time. Wild!

Tonight, to K and E's for game night and ice cream! Oh, the wild and crazy Seattle evenings.

I've never quite decided what the most appropriate answer is to tell people when they ask where I'm from. I usually answer "Oregon": after all, I was born in Portland and lived for eight (!) years in Eugene, longer than anywhere else. While that's a somewhat disingenuous answer--after all, I certainly didn't grow up in Oregon--it's a lot easier than having to explain the story of my childhood again.

Apart from functioning as an awkward tangent to my post, this is something that has come to mind as I settle back in to life in the Pacific Northwest. I like LA quite a bit -- it's huge and busy and full of interesting stuff to do. But there's just something about the cities and culture up north that I really appreciate and haven't really found in LA.

In my first weekend in Seattle, L and I visited the Fremont Solstice Festival, which is held every year in one of the weirder neighborhoods in Seattle. It was a delightful spectacle, full of naked bicyclists, crazy artistic floats (including an enormous floating replica of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) and myriad examples of possibly-misdirected creative energies (like the street-legal automobile that had been converted in to a spaceship, complete with attached laser guns and bells to warn off aliens).

Days before, I had attended the Last Thursday Art Walk in North Portland, providing a similar array of weird people and fantastical art displays. The processions of stilted passers-by surrounding themselves in a makeshift boat made of bedsheets was quite the thing.

It's not just art fests, I like, of course. As best I can tell, it's the general sense of comfortable weirdness that pervades the area (or at least the parts I hang out in) that really does it for me (or maybe that's just the "Keep Portland Weird" bumper stickers that make me feel that way).

LA's certainly got its weird subculture, of course -- I've never lacked for apealling social engagement. But it feels just so much more the dominant culture in the Northwest, not something I have to seek out and make an effort to find.

I suspect I haven't really been able to capture the essence of what I'm trying to communicate here, and doubt I really can. I like LA. I'm happy to live here for the next couple years and I'll regret no minute of it. But dammit, now I just wish it were that slightest bit cooler.

Oh, well.

Forbidden World

2009-06-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

Like many people, I have a morbid fascination with bad movies. Oh, sure, for the most part I try to go out and watch important, highbrow movies so I can present myself as a sophisticated and erudite human being -- it's hard to fool people in to thinking you're cultured if you can't lecture at length on the latest Cronenberg, after all. Or, failing important (which I do rather a lot), I stick to well-regarded pop-culture movies. Your Dark Knights, your No Country For Old Mens, your There Will Be Bloods, what have you.

After all, if you're going to waste two hours of your time in a darkened theater, it's a good idea to try and enjoy the experience, right? Or, at least, make sure you can hold your conversational own at cocktail parties.

But there's some intrinsic value to watching movies that are just plain bad, too. Oh, sure, everyone knows that there are movies that are "so bad they're good" and you enjoy them for the shear spectacle of their awfulness. Why else would you watch Plan Nine From Outer Space?

And I swear I've gotten much more conversational fuel out of my viewing of Manos: Hands Of Fate (truly and utterly the worst movie I've ever seen) than I have from any of the classics I've viewed. I hated it at the time, but one must suffer for one's interesting stories, no?

My friend J gave me a copy of a movie called Forbidden World a little while back (also known as Mutant, if you want to track it down) and told me it was "the worst movie you will ever see". To emphasize the point, the gift was accompanied by a flask of whiskey.

The movie did not, by any means, disappoint. While I can't say that it's the worst movie I've ever seen (Manos, you still hold that honor), it was a strong contender. Truly, truly, a wretched movie.

At it's core, Forbidden World is just a lousy Alien ripoff. Rough-and-tumble types in a space station have to deal with an evil, violent monstrosity that would love nothing more than to jab its pointy bits through our fair heroes (and, this being a bad exploitation movie, this is at least once performed in a vastly more sexual manner than is required by the plot). For no particularly good reason, the plot also features a Han-Solo-esque space explorer (whose name, thankfully, escapes me) sent to the space station in question to help them deal with the menace (key quote: "My motto is, if it moves and it's not one of us, kill it.").

What fascinated me about the movie, though, was the evidence of some actual technical and artistic talent buried under the seething mass of hideous that was the plot and acting. Oh, nothing amazing, mind you. Nothing Oscar-worthy, certainly, nor even better than what one might expect from a film student (I have a concrete idea of what I'd expect from a film student -- do you?). But there, masked and obscured by the wretched acting and plot, was a concerted effort to make a real, honest-to-god movie.

Really, this was just basic, framing stuff. Slow pans around a room, providing an expository glimpse of the scientist (stereotypical glasses, unkempt hair, lab coat, and all) working feverishly to try and find the alien life-form's weakness. Nothing too exciting or flashy, but still: evidence of technical ability well beyond that of what I would have expected from a bad movie. It almost made me feel sorry for those involved (much like, in some way, I feel bad for the actors involved in the original (unreleased) Fantastic 4 movie -- perhaps a story for another time).

I guess with bad movies, my expectation is that of a well-meaning but utterly misguided director, who with all of the best intentions sets his woefully underdeveloped talents to work at creating a masterwork, only to fall dreadfully, dreadfully short. Forbidden World, however, was my first ever experience watching a well-made awful movie. And for that reason, alone, I recommend you watch it.

But make sure you have a flask of whiskey handy

LA Is Strange

2009-05-20T08:30:00.001-07:00

I went out to a bar last night with my friend C and my cousin N. Nothing particularly swanky. A dive bar. The kind of bar where, if you go up to the pool table and plug in some quarters, you'll be approached by a guy named OP challenging you to a game (I held my own). Not too bad.

After a few beers, the three of us got to talking, and I threw out the following nonsense theoretical question: Given that he is presumably more famous, richer and successful with people of his chosen gender of interest than you will ever be, would you want to be Steven Seagal? -- accepting that you would have to live your life as the washed-out star of such horrible action movies as Fire Down Below and Under Siege 2 (tagline: "It's exactly like the first movie - but on a train!").

We debated this question for a little bit (general consensus: "No. Why the hell would I want to be Steven Seagal?") before being interrupted by an onlooker. Apparently, said woman's boyfriend used to be Steven Seagal's chauffeur, and she proceeded to regale us at length with a story of her boyfriend getting pulled over for speeding only to be waved on when the officer realized who his passenger was.

I suppose this made us something like three steps removed from Mr. Seagal, so not the most direct connection. But still. Strange coincidence.

2009-05-13T23:42:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, during aforementioned trip to Portland, I did manage to find the time to drop by a party hosted by SonicLllama's household.

Apparently, parties in Portland are different from what I'm used to.

Graduation Faux Pas

2009-05-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

My sister graduated from college last weekend. Being a loving brother, I took a weekend out of my life to fly up to Portland and watch the ceremony (sorry to the Portland friends I didn't have time to see: I really didn't have much time for socializing). For the most part, it went quite well. A speech by Ray Suarez, a family picnic, and a carnival-themed birthday party where I dressed as the bearded lady (miniskirt and all). You know, the usual.

There was one slightly awkward moment, though. Sitting in the audience waiting for the Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony to start (she's a clever one, my sister), I took a little time to chat with my dad. At some point, I launched into a diatribe about how boring your standard graduation is. You know: you sit in uncomfortable seats for a couple hours, just waiting for that 10-second interval when your friend/relative walks across their stage, while watching ceremonies for awards that don't interest you and listening to Pomp And Circumstance (I loath that song with a burning, burning passion).

And then every speech you hear at these events is pretty much the exact same. The phrase "value of a liberal-arts education" gets used more often than can reasonably be accommodated by a drinking game. Every college has "uniquely prepared you for the challenges of the modern world". Everybody who has ever graduated is living in "a unique period of human history". I'm sure you've heard this speech. Many, many times. (Of course, it's not that this stuff isn't true -- but there have to be more innovative ways of presenting it!)

After several minutes of somewhat spirited ranting on my part, the ceremony got underway. It was a reasonably good ceremony, all things considered. And then around halfway through, the master of ceremonies announced that the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences would be giving a brief speech to the graduates. And so the dean stood up to talk.

From the chair immediately behind me.

He had apparently been there the entire time, listening to me complain about how awful I was expecting him to be. If there had been any doubt that he had heard me, it was quickly dispelled by his first few words when he mentioned he had overheard someone in the audience complaining about the formulaicity of all of these speeches.

I slowly sank in my seat and didn't rise until well after he left the stage.

Of course, he did end up making exactly the kind of speech I had been grumbling about. So that made me feel a tiny bit better about things.

A night at the opera

2009-04-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

I went to the opera last night. I'm not normally an opera-goer, of course, but the LA Opera's supposed to be quite the deal. And, since my friend E was appearing in the production, I had two free tickets. So that was cool.

I've never seen an opera before, so I had very little idea of what to expect. I know all but nothing about the opera experience, so this was a perfect opportunity to educate myself.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting. Fat women in metal bikinis and horned Viking helmets? Strapping tenors wearing garish Poseidon costumes?

I should have known better. Sadly, I had no camera on me with which to document the scene, so you'll have to rely on my unreliable memory.

I had some vague notion that the Ring Cycle had influenced Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, but I found myself more than a little surprised to see the production reverse the flow of inspiration: within minutes of the play's opening, fox-masked actors were streaming across the stage waving what were, to all appearances, light sabers. I mean honest-to-god red-and-green-colored, fluorescent-light tubes. Sadly, there were never any dramatic sword fights (only abstract representations of such), but the spirit of the climactic Darth Vader-Obi-Wan Kenobi duel permeated the rest of the show.

The costumery was similarly influenced. The two main characters, Siegmund and Sieglinde, appeared onstage in outlandish, piebald outfits, vertically bifurcated in blue-and-black makeup. One of the antagonists, Siglinde's husband and member of a clan holding a violent grudge against Siegmund, was costumed in an enormous red overcoat, while the king of the gods was frequently represented by a hunched man whose enormous floppy hat hovered over a single enormous eye swathed in bandages. The queen of the gods, meanwhile, was blessed with six-foot-long arms that dramatically waved about as stage-direction required.

All the while, a fluorescent tube slowly orbited the stage, representing the minute hand of an enormous clock that evoked the current timeline of the story (clockwise for present-day events, counter-clockwise during flashbacks). The clock was advanced by a small woman clad all in a black bodysuit, who carefully and deliberately walked in a circle around the stage for a good three hours straight.

Also, an enormous eye hovered in the top left corner of the stage. It served no apparent purpose and was never figured in the action of the play.

It was an unbelievably amazing appearance. The costume design was so utterly weird and incomprehensible and the art direction so sublimely unreal that I couldn't help but enjoy every minute of it. I don't know if this was what I should have expected or whether everybody else in the audience found the experience as strange as I did. Regardless, I'm truly happy I went, and the experience of seeing Flight Of The Valkyries performed live (it has lyrics, you know. The lyrics are about horses) was fantastic despite all of the cliche now seeped through that song. My friend E, of course, was fantastic (as were all of the performers!).

I can't imagine that I'll go to another opera for a while (note: please still offer me free tickets), no matter how much I loved it. They gave us two intermissions, yes, but despite that 5 hours of live performance is a bit much to sit through. I can only hope that if I do, I'll be just as happy with my next experience.

Oh, and I learned after the fact that Plácido Domingo played the lead role. This I was told as he walked about 10 feet away from me in a bar after the performance. That was kinda cool.

Triathlon!

2009-04-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

[NB: I have many posts in the works -- about travel and the opera and the like. Be patient!]

My roommate S is on UCLA's triathlon team, which strikes me as an all-around insane way to spend your spare time. He's up all hours of the day going to training sessions and spends his weekends on long road trips to participate in races and basically seems to have very little free time.

So when he asked me if I wanted to participate in the triathlon team's annual fundraiser -- the IronBruin -- I told him he was crazy and left it at that. I've taken to jogging a bit and I bike all the time, but I can't swim worth a damn. So why spend $35 on an admission fee just to embarrass myself? That's crazy talk!

So why, then, did I find myself crawling out of bed at 4:30 in the morning (on the morning Daylight Savings switched over, no less!) to head on to campus for a godawful early triathlon? I couldn't tell you. I'm still not quite sure.

But I was there, and I was committed. It was a bit of a fiasco getting everything in order -- there are a whole bunch of numbers you have to attach to your bike and body and I hadn't the slightest clue how to do so. And then after a short warmup, I had to stand in the cold (at 7:30 in the morning in only a swimsuit!) waiting for my turn to hop in the pool.

I was pleasantly pleased with my performance. After I had committed to actually running the race, I began a rigorous training program to spruce up my swimming performance (30 minutes, once a week). And it showed! In the swimming pool, I found myself consistently stuck behind slower swimmers, trying to edge my way forward -- in fact, I found myself swimming the breast stroke a few times when the pool clogged up.

Then, of course, there was the transitions. Between different sports, you have to run into a fenced off area, change into appropriate gear, and begin the next section. Between swimming and biking, this means toweling off and throwing on shoes and a shirt. Nothing too hard. This took most people 30 seconds. It took me two minutes. Not my most impressive performance.

But then, thankfully, I did well again on the biking -- well enough that I had somebody yell at me "Damn, where do you train!" as I lapped him. The only people passing me were wearing superslick aerodynamic helmets and riding bikes with only five spokes, so I didn't feel too bad about that.

Of course,that could only mean I would totally bonk out on the run. I did OK and never stopped. And I tried the strategy of picking somebody immediately in front of me and muttering (hopefully under my breath) "You're my rabbit. You're my rabbit" and trying to catch up to them (or at least keep pace). It didn't work. My rabbits all got away. Three cramps and a slow, embarrassing jog later, I strode across the finish line.

Overall, though, it went really well. It was a 400m swim, 13.5km bikeride, and 5km run and I finished in 1:27, placing a respectable 70th place (out of about 300). Pretty decent!

It's weird to think about myself as athletic. I'm still, of course, not much of an athlete. Most of my life, though, I've been particularly anti-exercise and sports, and it's only in the last couple years that I've actually managed to get any real interest in sports (or ability, for that matter). So it's really cool to have participated in a competition like this and realize how much different I am now (people who haven't seen me in years keep on telling me I'm thinner, I guess, which is something, too).

I can't imagine doing more than one of these a year -- it was fun, but I had trouble walking for a week. Still, though, I'm signing up for a swimming class this year, and damned if I don't take 35th place next year!

Kilimanjaro, Part 3

2009-02-28T12:26:00.000-08:00

After a fitful night's rest, we got dressed and set out for our hike. The weather had gotten steadily colder as we progressed up the mountain and now, setting off at midnight, I was bundled up in four layers of clothing and walking through a light dusting of snow.

The first portion of our hike, to Gilman's Point, was expected to take about 5 hours. If we made it, we would be at the top of the trail head in time to see sunrise.

A few minutes in to our hike, I made an unfortunate realization. Camera flashes, apparently, don't work well in the cold. They don't work well at all. After a few lackluster, fizzly attempts at taking pictures in the dark, my flash lightbulb burned out. And so, unfortunately, I have no photos to accompany the bulk of the hike itself.

We trudged, slowly, up the mountain. We hiked under a gorgeous, vivid ceiling of constellations, the Southern Cross to our left and Orion straight ahead of us. We slowly, achingly zigzagged our way up a snow-covered hillside. As we hiked, we could see tiny points of light above and below us, lines of hikers slowly inching their way up the hillside, miles away from us.

No matter how far we had already gone, there were always points of light far up on the mountainside above us. In the pitch black, the mountain itself was almost impossible to see. The hikers ahead of us looked like they were marching off into the sky, an impossible distance above us. Every time I felt like we had made significant progress, I would look ahead of us and dots of light far ahead of us, warning us of the distance left to travel.

And finally, after hours of hiking, we were there. Hans Brinker Cave. The halfway point. We stopped, ate granola bars, guzzled down water, and tried to convince ourselves that we were going to make it the rest of the way. As we continued upwards, we encountered a small but steady trickle of people hiking down. People who, suffering from altitude sickness, realized that they weren't going to make it to the top and were heading back down to base camp. We were determined not to be among their number.

Sleep deprived, exhausted, aching, we hiked onwards.

We didn't make it to the top before sunrise. We were almost there, scrabbling over the steep, boulder-covered final ascent when we saw a steadily brightening red glow behind us. Behind us, Hans Meyer Point -- the shorter of Kilimanjaro's two peaks -- was bathed in the morning light.

That picture cannot capture the sense of scale. The base of the peak -- near the edge of the snowline -- was miles below us. The large, multi-story cabin we camped near is smaller than the boulders speckling the landscape.

After sitting for a while to appreciate the vista below us, we slowly rose to our feet, put our backpacks on, and trudged the remaining hundred or so meters to the top.

And then, suddenly, miraculously, we were there. Gilman's point. We sat down, took some pictures, drank some tea (thoughtfully brought up by one of our porters) and rested for an hour. I broke out my cell phone and called L ($5 for a call that went straight to voicemail).

We were exhausted, relieved, fulfilled, ecstatic. But, also, not done. Gilman's Point, the top of the trailhead, is not actually the highest point of Kilimanjaro. No, to get there -- Uhuru Peak -- there's another two-hour-long hike. An easier hike. But a hike.

And we almost didn't do it.

After seven hours of hiking, exhausted, unable to breathe, beginnings of sunburns spreading across our face, we sat there, looked at how much further we had to go, and said "Maybe it's not worth it. Maybe we should just go back." The hike back down would take several more hours. And then, once we reached the bottom, we had three more hours of hiking to go before we made it to our final campsite. So, as incredible as it seems to think about now, we very, very nearly turned back.

But thankfully, luckily, we didn't. Through pure force of effort, we slung our bags on our backs, buckled down, and did the remaining hike.

Past glaciers, miles above the clouds, we hiked.

And then, finally, we were there. We looked around, marveled at the vista, took some pictures, and took a slow, easy descent back down the mountain. (For a reminder of what it looked like, check out my panorama picture from a few posts back).

The rest of the hike down was a bit of a blur. We stumbled down the (amazingly steep, in the daylight) hillside back to basecamp. And then, two days of hiking later, we were at the camp entrance, and done.

It was an amazing trip. I'm ecstatic I did it. I'm thrilled that I made it all the way to the top. And I will never do something like it again.

Likenesses

2009-02-21T13:31:00.000-08:00

I was told at a club last night that I look exactly ("exactly!") like the fellow on the left here (Fred), who is apparently a Luxembourger Internet celebrity. It was dark and the alcohol was flowing, but what do you think? A current picture of me is provided for reference, in case you'd forgotten what I look like.

The picture of me, by the way, was taken at the Freddie Mercury Cafe, in Zanzibar.

Kilimanjaro, Part 2

2009-01-25T14:51:00.000-08:00

The climb starts off easily enough; the first three days are a fairly straightforward, non-technical trail route up to base camp. The longest day was six hours, and we never hiked more than a few miles. The elevation gain was never excessive. And the trail looked something like this:

Pretty cushy, and with no real load on my back, it was all I could do to keep from jogging ahead of the pack. "No, no!" the guides would yell after me. "Pole pole!" Slow down.

Which I did. I was good. I dutifully trudged along, one slow footstep in front of another, the entire time convinced that this was silly and I would be fine if they would just let me rush on ahead.

I was wrong. Oh, so very wrong. I managed about an hour of regular marching pace before I was forced down to a slow trudge. Which was good, I guess. The slower I walked, the more I was able to appreciate the utterly gorgeous scenery surrounding me. The environment changed fast.

One day we were in forest.

Not long thereafter, we were hiking through scrubland.

Then, on our final day before reaching basecamp, we walked through a rocky, plantless wasteland. The only living forms we could find were tiny hardy little plants sheltered under rocks. It was amazing to see the almost completely dead wasteland only scant miles from a verdant, green forest.

And then, all of a sudden, we were above the clouds.

And there it was. That was what we were going to climb. Big, vast, and intimidating. And covered in snow.

A few days ago, I had been walking around drenched in sweat in the back streets of Zanzibar. Being that close to the snow now was weird. Sure, I knew it was going to be there. But still. Weird. This was the first patch of snow we saw.

And then, after a long arduous hike, we made it to base camp. Up to this point, we'd been more or less alone on the mountain. There were one or two other groups that were leapfrogging us the whole way up, but we had the trail essentially to ourselves. But basecamp was crowded. There were dozens upon dozens of hikers (not counting porters and guides) already encamped. And this was the first camp we visited with permanent structures -- huts for those who didn't want the camping experience.

We were at basecamp. The next day, at midnight, we were to start the last, hardest day of hiking. After a short dinner, we crawled into our tents amidst falling snow. In the middle of summer.

I lay there in bed, exhausted and fully aware of the long, hard day ahead of me. And I couldn't sleep. Oh, I wanted to. And I was exhausted. But my heart would not stop pounding. I was perfectly calm, at reast, and my pulse was racing as though I had just finished a mile-long sprint. And it would not stop.

And I couldn't sleep. I lay down, closed my eyes, and rested for 6 sleepless hours.

At 11:30, I was raised from rest for a short snack, and we all geared up.

At midnight, on a beautiful, moonless night, we set off through the snow, ready to attempt the summit.

Kilimanjaro, Part 1

2009-01-07T21:04:00.000-08:00

Before I advance too far into this story, let me make a caveat.

Climbing Kilimanjaro is kind of cushy.

Oh, certainly it's hard work -- I don't think I've ever had such an intense workout in my life. But consider:

The entire route up is a trail. The most technical part of the climb is a scramble of about 50 meters or so on the very final approach of the summit (or, rather, the lip of the crater -- the distinction will be elucidated later, when it actually matters). You can make the whole trip with nothing more than a good solid pair of hiking boots, which I did. No crampons, no ropes, no belaying, none of that. Just warm clothes and boots.

More importantly, you get porters. You do not, in fact, have to carry your equipment yourself. Or your clothing. Or much of anything at all, in fact, other than water for the day. For the five people in our party, we had no less than 10 porters and 3 guides. Yes, that's two porters per person. Witness our support crew:

What do porters mean on a trip like this? Well, for starters, they mean that all your gear -- your sleeping bag, your clothes, your Thermarest, your iPod -- goes up on someone else's back. They mean that you have a tent set up when you're done with your long, arduous hike.

They mean that you get a piping hot cup of tea, along with popcorn and biscuits, waiting for you at the end of every day.

So there's that. I admit to being a little more pampered on this trip than expected.

However.

The camp entrance to Kilimanjaro is already at about a mile of altitude and after that it's all uphill. Every day adds another kilometer or so to that number. Sure, it's a kilometer of gradual ascent, but it's there. The altitude and lack of acclimatization are killers. The entire climb up is taken at a pace I would describe as a "sullen mope". One foot ever-so-slowly in front of the other.

Altitude sickness is a very real worry. If you take it too fast or don't drink enough water, you risk experiencing what is colorfully described as "the worst hangover of your life." Some non-trivial percentage of people experience symptoms of altitude sickness on the climb. Every year a couple people die. On our very last day, we saw a woman -- a woman we'd been happily chatting with as we passed each other -- carried down the mountain on a stretcher. (Don't worry: it looked like she was going to be fine).

So, then: slowly up the mountain. Or, as our guides helpfully told us every hour or so in Swahili: "Pole pole".

Prepared, bussed out to the base of the mountain, we suited up and set out on the first day of climbing.

Oh, yeah. It rained the entire first day.

Next post: climbing!

Intermezzo

2009-01-07T15:42:00.000-08:00

This is just wrong.

Kilimanjaro Preview

2008-12-31T14:11:00.000-08:00

As some of you know (those who are friends with me on Facebook, anyway), I went to Tanzania over Christmas break. And climbed Kilimanjaro. Climbing was an utterly fantastic, amazing, exhausting experience.

I have 500+ pictures to sort through and a bunch of chores before the school term starts on Monday, so a thorough reckoning will not be forthcoming for a while. To tide you over until such time as I can give you a more complete account, I have created this panorama for you, taken at Uhuru Peak, the highest point in Africa.

It's huge, but worth it.

Korea, part 4

2008-11-24T23:37:00.000-08:00

Oh, yea verily, an aeon it ago 'twas when I set forth to document the course of my voyages. Oh foolish, foolish me! Such hubris, such unalloyed arrogance! to think that such a weighty endeavor could be writ in timely fashion. Muse! Forgive me my insolence, I beseech thee!

Humble reader, judge me not by my tardiness, think me not blind to your presence. For, if not for you, what am I? A pale shadow of nothing, a meaningless echo in the aether: without purpose, empty, and alone.

Recollect, I implore, the fragile tendril of a story with which I last left you: of Llama, my faithful companion, and I, as we set forth, bold and foolish, into a --

Alright, I'm not going to be able to keep that up for any longer... Let's see if I can do a narrative through pictures, instead.

Llama and I went down to Gyonju, which is this pretty spiffy town at the south-east end of the country (due to the awesomeness of high-speed rail (please, please work, Prop 1A!), it took us only four hours to cross the country).

Here, the quaintly urban scene surrounding Seoul Station.

And we'll pretend that this picture was intended as an artsy self-portrait, rather than evidence of my unawareness of the existence of flashes.

Wandering around Gyonju the following day, we encountered a number of mammarially-inclined burial mounds, a representative of which is displayed below.

The real treat of Gyeonju, however, is Namsan Park, a large, undeveloped swathe of land south of the city utterly littered with historic Buddhist relics. It was almost embarrassing wandering around -- one incautious step and you would probably end up shattering a thousand-year old prayer mound. Although noone would likely have noticed.

(Zoom in on this next one)

Of course, our trail was occasionally arduous, requiring sacrifices and feats of almost inhuman bravery. Witness this breathtaking precipice!

Marvel at SonicLlama's daring feats of rope acrobatics!

Of course, such a trial demanded celebration on both our behalves.

At long last, we reached the top of the trail ("a veritable Shangri-La," in Llama's words), a small monestary nestled at the end of a multiple-mile long hike up a challenging hillside trail. Complete with coffee-vending machine.

And large Buddha, around which we stood awkwardly while non-tourists conducted actual, sincere, non-ironic prayers.

Sadly, in punishment for our disrespect, SonicLlama was infected and turned into a werewolf.

And proceeded to shrink my head.

Thankfully, I was soon rescued by my new Vampire friends, who drove Llama off, howling in to the distance.

And helped me get back to the train station, where I hopped on and took the bullet train direct to Los Angeles.

And that's how it really happened, children. Now fetch grampa his Valium!

Righteous anger!

2008-11-08T12:15:00.000-08:00

Wow, that's a lot of cop cars. I must be getting close. I pull over to the side of the road to let a convoy of 20 or 30 police cars, sirens blaring and full of cops, pass by me on Wilshire Boulevard. It's 5:30, the height of rush hour. Traffic is normally slow. But now it's completely stopped.

Fortunately, I know what's going on, and I'm on my bike. After a few minutes delay, I hop on my bike and resume racing down Wilshire, passing mile upon mile of stopped cars. It's exhilerating.

At this point, I still harbor vague illusions that I'll be able to make it back in time for class -- I've got an hour, after all. That's plenty of time.

Normally, my Thursday evenings are spent going to my billiards class and generally goofing off. It's a good way to spend an evening and let some stress off. And, as this week had been particularly stressful for me, I was more than a little excited to take my brain off of classwork and paper-writing to spend an evening hitting balls with sticks. But, alas, as I sat there idly writing code for a class project, my cell phone buzzed. It was a text from my friend J.

J: "Huge no on 8 protest on wilshire just past westwood. Bring a bike and your sense of justice!"

Me: "What're people doing?"

J: "Closed off the streets! We're marching west! It's huge, cops, news. We're stalled right now but people are trying to push through"

(Perhaps you have not heard of Proposition 8 -- although evidence suggests that's unlikely. It's an amendment to California's constitution defining marriage as being valid between a man and a woman. The measure was proposed to counteract the supreme court's egregious finding that discriminating based on sexual orientation was, you know, maybe not so cool. It passed, sadly, 52-48%.)

I'm not sure if I was motivated more by my anger at injustice or my desire to flake out on classwork. It didn't much matter. I hopped on my bike, muttered a quick goodbye to my officemate, and peddled furiously south of campus.

And now, here I am, on one of the most major streets in LA, and it's completely shut down.

Sweet.

Luckily, I have no trouble getting ahold of J -- he's at the tail end of the march when I meet up with him, and I hop off my bike and start walking. We're in a crowd of thousands, marching and chanting. Sometimes in unison.

"Where are we marching to?" I ask. "The Mormon temple." I know the temple. I used to live right across the street from it. It's huge. Mormon donors (many from out of state) contributed a significant fraction of the Yes On 8 campaign's funding. And the crowd is marching to their temple to vent. I'm ambivalent about this -- it's frustrating to feel like someone else's religious beliefs are being foisted on you, but I worry that targeting particular groups like this will only serve to foster divisions.

But I don't dwell on this too much. I'm too caught up in the swell of people, chanting "Gay, straight, black, white: marriage is a civil right!" at the top of my lungs, driving myself hoarse. I talk to a man who looks like a young, gay Jesus, whose husband was one of the lawyers that helped overturn Colorado's anti-sodomy laws. He seems nice.

We make it to the temple. The crowd stops. Puts signs up on the fences. Helicopters, ten of them, perhaps, are circling overhead, passing cars are honking at us, in (I choose to believe) support. The police are being remarkably decent: they're clearly not too thrilled with us, but they are extraordinarily efficient about clearing the roads, blocking off side streets, and keeping things safe.

A couple has an impromptu Jewish wedding in front of the temple. Not legal, of course -- I don't even know if they're really a couple -- but it's cute. Everybody cheers.

But then we're restless. The crowd's enthusiasm is waning, and people don't feel like milling around anymore. "March! March! March!" We have huge swaths of the city yet to explore, and we want to move!

We set turn around and set off north. And we keep going. We march through West Hollywood and into Beverly Hills. My feet are killing me, but I'm exhilarated. I yell, I start chants, I smile at befuddled club-goers on the sidewalks. I don't know if I'm here more to support the cause or for the pure pleasure of walking down the middle of major streets and basking in the attention. I don't care. I keep marching.

I can't really bring myself to believe this is going to accomplish anything. The measure was a constitutional amendment. Short of a federal-level constitutional challenge (unlikely) or another ballot measure to overturn it (very likely, but it'll be a few years), I don't see what can be done. Maybe this will raise attention to our frustrations. It's been getting press -- apparently our rally made it to CNN for a short while. I hope that we make the issue a little more tangible, a little more real to some of the people we pass on the sidewalks.

But I don't think about that now. I'm caught up in the emotion and the noise. I keep marching.

Election 2008

2008-11-05T10:52:00.000-08:00

Alright! Time to prepare for four years of disillusionment!

Intermezzo

2008-11-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

I promised one more post about Korea, I know. I'll get there, as soon as I'm done with these fellowship applications and midterms and final projects and... and... Yeah, whine, whine, everyone's got a lot of work to do, I'm not special, I know.

But before I get there, you should know that GenderAnalyzer.com thinks I'm a woman. I had no idea.

2008-10-24T01:12:00.000-07:00

A (brief) interruption to my otherwise laggardly Korea-post producing rate. I just happened to be skimming through the Onion (procrastinating, of course, on writing an essay), and came across one of their regular columns, Statshot, which this week was asking "What Else Is On The Ballot?"

Item number 5 on the list is "Portland, OR: Joke about a guy walking into an election booth."

It is more than a little bit likely that I am making too much out of this, but it delighted me to no end to see such an incomprehensible (to most people) joke on their list. No one I know down here has even heard of vote-by-mail, and I can only guess at what they would have made of the joke. I just feel like I'm part of a little, 3.7-million-or-so-strong, secret club right now.

I guess it's kind of a joke if you don't know about Oregon's vote-by-mail, but then it's not nearly as funny.

And that's that. I now return to a more placid rate of posting.

Korea, part 3

2008-10-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

If, say, your next-door neighbor took it upon themselves to prune a tree that sat between your two houses and, furthermore, you kind of liked the tree the way it was and rather it not lose any of its branches, what would you do?

Well, if you were the nation of North Korea, you would kill your neighbor. Because, you know, that's how rational people resolve their horticultural disputes.

This is not some sort of weird, obscure political analogy: this really did happen, in the DMZ separating North and South Korea. In 1976, a small troupe of UN/South Korean soldiers were dispatched to trim the branches off of a poplar tree that was blocking their view of the North Korean side of the border. For whatever reason, North Korea decided that the reasonable response to this act of aggression was to dispatch a cadre of soldiers to convince them to stop -- in this case, "convince" meant "murder two of the UN soldiers with their own axes.

I knew North Korea was crazy. I knew that the government practices a policy of political brinkmanship designed to keep the rest of the world off balance. But murdering hedge trimmers? That's just batty!

Of course, there was only one logical response: escalation. Shortly thereafter, the UN launched Operation Paul Bunyan, in which a troupe of engineers armed with chainsaws, backed up by South-Korean taekwondo experts armed with axe handles and soldiers with claymores strapped to their chests, drove up in a convoy of armored personal carriers and proceeded to chop down the tree (leaving the stump, though, as a reminder). According to our tourbook, an entire aircraft carrier was diverted to the region as support.

And this is about where it all happened:

SonicLlama and I, being the nerds that we are, could not fathom the idea of going to the DMZ. And when we realized that you could actually go inside the DMZ and walk on the North Korean side of the conference room!, we were willing to move heaven and earth to make sure we got on one of those tours. Or, at least, give ourselves some very incovenient train trips.

On the course of the tour, our guide made sure to tell us the store of the axe murder incident several times. At the time, I thought they didn't have all that many annecdotes to tell us, but then I realized: this is a cautionary tale. It's not just that we're in one of the most tense, militarized areas on the world, but the people on the other side are completely insane!

So when they told us that there was a dress code to go on the DMZ tour, and that anyone with holes in their jeans or wearing excessively baggy clothing couldn't get through the checkpoints, we believed them. Because, sure, we now completely believed that the North Korean government would be taking pictures of us, and baggy clothing would be used as evidence that South Korea was so destitute its citizens couldn't afford well-fitting clothing. It made sense, right?

Duly warned, we hopped off the tour bus and into the DMZ (I keep wanting to write Neutral Zone: I believe that Star Trek has somewhat ineffably sullied me). Of course, most of the DMZ is military emplacements, so most of the interesting sites we ended up seeing (or, at least, being allowed to take pictures of) were explicitly designed for propaganda purposes. Like this statue memorializing the Phillipine soldiers that you also did not know served in the Korean War:

The ne plus ultra, of course, were the villages. North and South Korea each have villages that they keep in the neutral zone (with elementary schools among the minefields and everything). Our guides kept on laughing about the North Korean village: "They give it all the modern appliances, and it looks nice and all the buildings are big, but nobody lives there! All the lights in the village go on and off at the exact same time! We call it 'Propaganda Village,' because that's obviously the only reason it's there." "What do you call the South Korean village?" we asked. "Ah," they smiled, "we call it Freedom Village."

Apparently the two villages are the site of yet another silly patriotic spitting match. The South Koreans, eager to stick a nationalistic fist in the air, built a 100-meter-tall flag pole in their village. Because, after all, what convinces your enemy of the rightness of your cause but an enormous piece of cloth, right? North Korea, of course, would not be outdone and proceeded to build a 160-meter-tall flagpole in their own village. The South Koreans, apparently cowed, have not yet one-upped them.

Of course, we couldn't actually get anywhere near the villages, so you'll have to make do with this picture. The North Korean flagpole is visible slightly an inch or so right of my left ear. Maybe if you squint.

Not all of the sites were quite so garish or over-the-top, of course. For example, we came across this rather pleasing installment of pinwheels, which I can only assume must serve as some form of anti-war memorial. Or something.

But, of course, we weren't here for the memorials. Oh, no. We were here for buildings. Specifically, the main conference building where all the North/South Korean talks occur. The one where you can walk on the North Korean side of the room!

So, of course, there were talks going on. And the conference room was occupied. And we couldn't actually go inside. On the plus side, I was near something that was in the news briefly. You know when North Korea announced it was going to resume developing nukes a couple weeks ago? Yeah, I was there. In a tour bus. In the parking lot. Hooboy.

Here's the building. This was the best I got.

And then, of course, we checked out the gift shop, where I was able to find apparently the only available postcards in South Korea. Also some North Korean wine, and a bottle of hard alcohol that I've been too scared to try.

Back in our hostel room, we had a brief conversation with an Italian transhumanist--who gave us bad books about philosophy and Japanese grammar--and plotted our trip down to Gyeonju.

Korea, part 2

2008-10-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

A silly little pleasure I have when I travel outside of the US is finding visual juxtapositions between old and modern buildings. Yeah, I know, it's a clichéd observation. But every time I take a picture of an old castle or temple or funerary monolith, I find my eyes casting about for some little bit of modernity to add contrast.

I'm not sure exactly what the draw is. At least part of me is fascinated with the idea of visualizing the relatively modest (by modern standards) cities whose crumbled remains lay somewhere beneath the skyscrapers I walk by. It's hard to get a sense of the scale of human history sometimes, and I feel like the intrusion of ancient civilization on our modern edifices makes the historical events I read about feel that much more real.

Fortunately, Korea did not disappoint. As a caveat, most of the buildings Llama and I toured are modern-day reconstructions. They're faithful reproductions of the old buildings and occupy the exact same spot, but there was a tiny, niggling bit in the back of my head that said "Hey, this is kind of like going to the The Luxor and telling people I've seen the pyramids." But then I thought, "Hey! Castle! Cool!" and forgot my objections. [As a side note, it's always bothered me that the big Vegas casino containing pyramids is called Luxor. There aren't any pyramids at Luxor. The big ones are in Giza. Luxor just has a bunch of (really cool) temple complexes].

Of course, if you're going to rebuild a temple complex, it would be a good idea to ensure that the damn thing doesn't burn down again. Llama and I came across a number of these (presumably historically accurate) fire hydrants.

Suwon, a little city an hour's subway ride from Seoul, provided us with a solid day's worth of exploration. The primary attraction is an intact (but, I believe, reconstructed) fortress that occupies a huge chunk of the city. As seems to be fairly common in cities that have these ancient fortifications in their midst, the modern part of the city has enveloped and absorbed the older buildings, resulting in (for example), this city gate ensconced in the middle of a roundabout.

Reconstructed or not, I very much enjoyed the opportunity to walk along the city walls, overlooking the much larger but somewhat less impressive buildings below us.

Against Llama's well-intentioned but, I feel, silly objections on the basis of relegious respect. I ponied up 1000 won (~$1) to ring a Confucian bell three times, honoring my ancestors. Llama stood some distance away and would have pretended to ignore me had I not forced him to take pictures. Mom and dad, you better appreciate it.

And, of course, what ancient city would be complete without a hideously tacky tourist vehicle? We decided that, by night, this was probably the vehicle of a Chinese-themed supervillain, perhaps named Ming. We called it the Mingmobile.

And I know Llama posted essentially these exact two pictures before, but I really like them, so they go up on my blog. Hah. The first is a section of the city wall in Suwon overlooking the river. Notice the students walking along it -- I wish my route to school were so pretty. The second is of a Korean admiral who famously repelled a Japanese invasion of Korea with "turtle ships". Not quite as cool as the Mingmobile, but definitely worth an "attaboy".

And, finally, some historical reenactment. We visited one of the larger palace complexes in Seoul on our second day. Striding out of the subway station directly onto the palace grounds, we came across a spectacle of soldiers dressed in what I assume was historically accurate guard uniforms, participating in a changing of the guard. The whole routine, with musical accompaniment and rigid solemnity, took around 10 minutes. For a while, we thought this must be a particularly serendipitous encounter, since how often do you think they change the guard at the palace?

Apparently around 8 times a day, on the hour. We'd essentially watched the Korean equivalent of Civil War reenactors. Which was cool, mind you, but not quite the nifty anachronism I'd been hoping for. Oh, well.

Korea, part 1

2008-10-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

[Those of you who read SonicLlama's blog will notice some (strong) overlap between our stories and pictures. Perhaps my posts will provide you with new insight or aesthetic enjoyment, or perhaps you should just skip over these. I cannot instruct you here.]

Since I clearly haven't done enough fun stuff this summer, I rounded off the month of September with a trip to Korea with my dear friend, SonicLlama. We were there for only a week, so we had a bit of a rushed visit. Aware of our limited time, we did our damnedest to pack as much site-seeing as possible into our every day.

So, backpack on back, I strode off onto the airplane and into the distant Orient.

(As a side note, may I say that melatonin is perhaps the most awesome drug ever invented? I tried it for the first time this trip, and after only one day I was over my jet lag. Good lord!)

My first full day in Korea was spent alone, exploring the marvelously bustling city of Seoul. While the majority of them are recently reconstructed, the palaces and tombs littered about the city are something to see. I also apparently managed to show up in the middle of "Korean Thanksgiving", meaning that I got to experience some level of random revelry at completely unexpected moments.

First stop, the Seoul tower:

On top of a hill in the middle of the city, the tower provides pretty fantastic views of the city. And, because of aforementioned Korean Thanksgiving, there was a maypole dance going on.

And I have no idea what exactly this art installation was intended to signify, but there was a plethora of locks attached to a chain-link fence. I thought it looked kind of neat.

And, of course, there was the obligatory wash of neon lights.

While not as pervasive as in Tokyo, I was reassured to see a smattering of random pop-culture ephemera littering the streets. The first, a statue of Gandalf, was unexpectedly standing sentry at a coffeeshop near my hostel. The second, whom I can't place (can you?), posted himself in front of the Cartoon Museum at the base of the Seoul Tower.

And I'll leave you with that little taste of Seoul. To look forward to in upcoming posts: palaces (lots of palaces), enormous flag poles, North Korean soldiers, and Buddha statues (lots of Buddha statues).

Off the wagon

2008-09-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

So, there's this thing I've been meaning to tell you. I've been talking about it with a few of my friends, in private, because I haven't really been sure how to break the news to people. I mean, I know you all love me, and you care about me, and you would never think of judging me. But still, this is the kind of thing that really defines you as a person, and I'm a little nervous about it, rightly or not. Normally, I feel like this kind of thing is personal, and I feel a little bit uncomfortable airing the lurid details of my personal life with you. But I care about you, a lot, and so I feel like it would be wrong of me to keep this from you any longer.

It's a bit of a sensitive topic for me, so I hope you'll understand why it's taken me so long to come clean. I mean, it's not every day that you make a big decision like this.

You see, well, there's this thing, and...

Oh, hell. No more stalling. Out with it.

I'm not a vegetarian anymore.

You know, I feel a lot better now that I've told you that. It's such a relief. I had no idea you would care so much about my dietary preferences, but I'm happy we can be honest about these things.

I've been doing my best to fit in and catch up. Check it out! I've even tried silkworm larvae -- I hear that's a fairly common pick among you carnivorous types, right?

And, while SonicLlama has already covered a lot of the details of our joint Korea trip, worry you not, I shall have details of my own forthcoming, shortly. As soon as I finish moving, and get my classes sorted out, and figure out how UCLA screwed up my funding (again!), and apply for fellowships, and...

Road trip, part 2

2008-09-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

But, of course, meeting friends and family went fine. Why wouldn't it? Of course, though, visiting Eugene once again made me nostalgic for Oregon booze prices -- viz, the $9 pitchers that you can't quite see on the table there (am I starting to sound like a broken record about this? Sorry).

And so, camera in hand, we wound our way up the Oregon coast, on our way to Vancouver. It's been a long time since I've actually taken the time to explore the coast, and I'd almost forgotten how absolutely gorgeous it is. Alright, maybe not forgotten. But it was good to see again.

View from the Florence Jetty.

Looking down the maw of the Devil's Churn.

Gazing out from inside Devil's Punchbowl.

And then, with a brief stopoff at the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse, we hopped in our car, drove across the border to Canada, and pulled in to Vancouver.

Vancouver, of course, was our ultimate destination. Well, more accurately, we were heading nine hours east of Vancouver to a tiny little town called Salmo, for the Shambhala Music Festival. We were attending at the suggestion of one of L's friends and had almost no idea what to expect. Some sort of electronic music festival, we guessed, but hell if we knew any more than that.

It turns out we'd signed up for a four-day-long rave.

After Coachella, Shamhala is the second music festival I've attended. At Coachella, at least I knew most of the bands I went to see. I explored a few new bands and overheard music from neighboring stages, but by-and-large I was just attending a lot of concerts at the same time.

So I was caught completely off-guard when we pulled through the completely perfunctory security check, set up camp, and wandered into the main stage area. We were early, and music was already playing. In fact, music was playing at some stage at the venue for the entire time we were there, 24 hours a day. Unlike the pervasive security clearance at Coachella, you had to struggle to find a non-concertgoer: beyond the workers directing traffic and the people manning the pill-testing tent, the organizational presence of the festival was almost completely invisible.

And the effect was amazing. As we wondered around the festival at three in the morning, we were sucked up and completely enveloped by the experience. Wandering from stage to stage, dancing, getting lost in the forest between stages marveling at the weird costumes. At one point, at three in the morning, I decided I wanted to learn how to hula-hoop -- a skill which I never picked up as a child. And lo-and-behold, not 10 feet from me, we found a trio of hula hoops hanging from a tree and I distracted myself until we decided to wander on to the next novelty. An enormous bunny rabbit wandered handing out jelly beans to passing strangers, in what I'm almost positive was not an offer of drugs. A wandering fairy, lost in a sea of dancers, found herself fascinated with the facepaint on my chest ("It's sticky!").

And then we played a tractor.

The whole weekend now occupies my mind as an indistinct blur of color, noise, and dancing. It would be impossible, beyond my few paltry annecdotes, to adequately express what I experienced. With that in mind, I leave you with a few pictures.

Bicycles in hand, we set out for a day of exploration.

Building spaceships out of magnets, one of the many, many random activities strewn about for the amusement of festival-goers.

All suited up and ready for our first big night out. Our costumes for night two can be seen in an earlier post.

A late-night rest stop down by the creek. Delightfully cooling by day, eerie and ethereal by night.

The creek by day. Installing that music stage by the beach was one of the festival's more inspired ideas.

And a daytime shot of the Ewok Village, one of the three or four or so dance stages we spent hours lost in. The effect of the stages was much cooler by night, although I will admit to a little nerdy giggle of glee as I noticed the Ewok houses nestled up in the trees (up to the top left, there).

And then, far too soon, we were back in our car, driving down the West Coast, and on our way back to LA. Where I've now been for the past few weeks, working and resuming what constitutes, for me, regular life.

However, I'm flying out to Korea tomorrow, so that should be pretty awesome.

Road trip, part 1

2008-08-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

Three weeks. Just the two of us. Just the two of us. Alone. In a car. For three weeks.

Crap.

Oh, we knew this was coming. It's not like this had been thrust upon us: we'd been planning the road trip for months. Only now it was here, we'd made plans, we'd bought tickets to the music festival, we'd told everyone we were coming, we'd packed our bags and loaded up the car. It was too late to back out now.

So what if we got into a fight? We had a lot of driving to do; sitting in sullen silence in the passenger's seat of a car is hardly how I want to spend my vacation. We'd been going out for eight months at this point and not had any serious fights, but three weeks of long days of driving, camping, meeting new people -- that would tax anyone.

And then, of course, there was the judgment. I was meeting L's friends, L was meeting my friends and entire extended family (at once!). Of course, our friends and family are decent people and it would be silly to expect too much drama. But no matter what, that's a lot of time for both of us to keep our game face on.

So, with some trepidation, we started off our journey.

Our first few days were spent touring along the Pacific coast, courtesy of our good, slow, windy friend, the PCH. Starting off with a little bit of touristy camping seemed like a reasonable way to get things started.

L and I being us, of course, we decided to bypass the Hearst Castle for the somewhat less renowned Nitt Witt Ridge, a private residence constructed from the leavings of its more famous neighbor. It's a crazy, convoluted concoction of a house, with random knicknacks and gew-gaws slapped together in some semblance of order to construct a house. Sadly, we couldn't get a tour, and you'll have to make do with this picture taken from the roadside.

After a sadly poorly photo-documented couple of days exploring redwood forests and Berkeley, we found ourselves in the splendiferously cool Lassen Volcanic National Park. I don't really know what I was expecting out of a volcanic park. Lots of pumice, probably. But I got so much more than I was expecting.

Of course, there was just a lot of pretty scenery, like this delightful little waterfall we found after a short hike.

Mostly, I was happy to explore the magnificently named Bumpass Hell. A delightfully barren, ravaged piece of land, full of mudpits, sulfur plumes, and boiling lakes. The kind of place that has warning signs posted all around telling you that if you step off the walkways, you're pretty much guaranteed to die. Or at least lose your leg, as happened to poor Mr. Bumpass, the discoverer.

And, of course, when exploring strange forests, it's important to practice your tree impersonation so you can blend in with the natives. I've always found that candid photos work better than staged, and forests tend to be very suspicious and guarded if they know there are people around.

Our camouflage well-practiced, we headed down a hiking trail that felt like something out of Heidi. I damn well expected Shirley Temple to come traipsing down the path singing some godawful song about whatever-the-hell Heidi is actually about.

And then, finally, Crater Lake. Beautiful, stunning, gorgeous, blue Crater Lake.

And then, just like that, we were done with the easy part. A week in the car together, and L and I were still on speaking terms.

And then it was time to meet the family.

Summer

2008-08-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

And how's your summer been going?

[Yeah, some of you already saw it on Facebook. Sorry for the dupe, you guys.]

Trouble at the beach

2008-08-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

Remember: one day, this man could save your life.

A few weeks back, L and I went to the beach with some friends of ours. We showed up before the rest of the crowd and thought to ourselves: "Selves, what the hell? Let's go swimming." For me, swimming at the beach is still a bit of a novelty. Spending most of my adult life in Oregon means that I think of ocean water as a source of pain and misery, a place that one only ventures into as a right of passage and proof of one's masculinity. The idea that one might actually derive pleasure from paddling around in the breakers still seems surreal to me.

So, of course, I was thrilled to hop off the sand and into the water. And when L noticed a buoy a little ways off and suggested we swim to it, I was more than game.

I'm not an exceptional swimmer, mind you -- I was on the swim team while growing up, and have many seventh and eigth place ribbons from the myriad competitions I swam in. But still, swimming out to the buoy was a comfortable, easy little swim. After 10 minutes or so of gentle swimming, I was holding on to a buoy warning me that if I were a motorboat, I should be no closer to the Santa Monica Pier than I currently was. Not being a motor boat, I took the opportunity to relax and watch L swim the last few feet to the buoy. And then we rested and reveled in our triumphant swim.

Our celebration was quickly cut short. L: "Why is there a lifeguard swimming towards us?" Me: "What?" L: "Look. Over there. He's like 20 feet away." Me: "What?"

Needless to say, L was right. Lifeguards (two of them, as it turned out) had noticed our distress and been dispatched to rescue us from our plight. We tried to tell them that we were fine, and that we were just having a leisurely swimming outing, but they would have none of it. With no opportunity for rest, we were immediately turned around and led back towards shore. My lifeguard, in fact, was so concerned about my desperate state that he insisted on towing me behind him with his little red buoy (modeled above by Mr. Hasslehoff).

Being rescued for no apparent reason by the lifeguards was strange enough, but then we reached the beach. The beach that was now very conspicuously devoid of swimmers. Oh, there were plenty of people on the beach, but no one -- no one at all -- was in the water. For several hundred feet of beach on either side of us. Which only made us all the more conspicuous as we strode, sheepishly, out of the surf. In front of dozens upon dozens (hundreds?) of silent, judging stares.

After a remarkably friendly chat with my lifeguard (apparently he has friends in the undergrad CS department at UCLA), L and I finally managed to figure out what had happened from our friend I, who had cleverly decided to not complete the buoy swim with us. Apparently, lifeguards from several stations away had been called down to aid in our rescue, meaning that the now-unprotected beach had to be cleared of swimmers. And, apparently, they had considered sending a lifeguard boat out to rescue us, but decided our plight wasn't desperate enough (how should I feel about that? Flattered that they had sufficient faith in our swimming abilities? Or insulted that my life wasn't valuable enough to merit a boat rescue?).

After we'd finally been pulled ashore, we managed to finagle an explanation out of our lifeguards. Apparently, beach rules prevent swimmers from going out more than 200 yards offshore, which we had more than exceeded with our swim out to the 400-yards-distant buoy. Beach rules which, of course, are posted nowhere on the beach.

Perversely, of course, I'm glad that I didn't know the rules -- I would have felt more than a little bit guilty using up so many city resources for knowlingly violating a safety regulation. But now I've been the subject of a bonafide rescue operation and, hell, I didn't know any better! It was awesome.

And, for those of you who are fans of nostalgic, mid-90s song references, you may have realized that I went to Santa Monica and swam out past the breakers (I did not, however, watch the world die).

Pictures part 3: Scenery

2008-07-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

The last batch. Please to enjoy.

Even the smallest village on our trip had a little cemetery on the outskirts, with headstones dated centuries in the past. It's weird visiting a city in the US that's more than, say, a hundred years old.

There were micro-lakes everywhere -- we rode by a handful every day.

I took lots of pictures of lakes.

Did I mention that it rained every day of the trip but one? Because, yeah, it totally did.

For emphasis, here: it rained a lot.

There were lots of country highways. I feel that my captions are becoming somewhat less inspired.

I_tried leaves me in the dust.

Thomas Kincaid I ain't.

Would you describe the light here as "dappling" the road? 'Cause I would.

This is actually a crop, although damned if I know what of.

And the obligatory artsy shot.

Pictures part 2: Campsites and buildings

2008-07-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

At this rate, I won't be done making posts about this trip by the time I go on the next big bikeride...

A lighthouse. This was the only thing of interest we could find anywhere near our first campsite. Apparently there were some historic forts in the area. Being seasoned tourists, we didn't bother to check them out.

Man, we felt like hot stuff after our first day of hard biking. Featured here, I_tried taking a well-deserved nap. Oh, how naive we were in those first few, halcyon days -- we thought it would stay that easy forever! Alright, the first day. The second day sucked.

Lake Placid! Home of the Miracle On Ice! Which sounds like a lousy, Disney-inspired ice-dancing musical, but is in fact the name of a famed hockey game. Which only serves to reinforce my impression of professional sports.

Just a random sign near one of our campsites. I just like the color contrast in the picture. Thought it worked pretty well.

The Wild Center! A nature museum in Tupper Lake. Pretty overpriced, but hey -- nice building.

Duckies!

I cannot, with any honesty, claim that this brook "babbled". But it was reasonably pleasant to sleep next to.

More duckies!

I spent the entire trip looking for run-down farmhouses to take a picture of. For some reason, I got it in my head that this was an iconic image of the Adirondacks. This here is the closest I could find. Perhaps my preconceived notions were a bit misguided...

Pictures part 1: People

2008-07-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

Bright-eyed and busy-tailed, I_tried and I stand aside our trusty steeds, prepared to sally forth and subject our muscles to horrible, horrible stress.

At this point, taking the ferry across Lake Champlain, we've biked about a total of 15 miles. Which explains why we're in reasonably good spirits and relatively kempt.

"Great, now when you post your pictures to your blog, you can show off how far ahead of me you rode the entire trip."

It would be hard to overemphasize how much I_tried enjoyed this burger.

B, strong contender for the title of World's Nicest Bartender, poses next to Joe, probable winner of Bar's Most Valuable Patron Of The Evening.

Food, both the gastronomical enjoyment of and the excessive consumption of, featured heavily in our trip. Featured here, a peanut-butter, marshmallow, and honey sandwich. Highly recommended.

Depth-of-field is fun!

Yes, I_tried really did bring a summer dress on our 600-mile bikeride.

The trio, clustered in front of one of the many, many road-side food-stands visited in the later parts of the trip (I told you food was important).

And finally, yours truly, seated above Lake George.

Brief addendum

2008-07-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

So when I mentioned that we went 25 miles in the wrong direction, I may have not emphasized how ridiculous a mistake this was. After all, we were biking on rural highways, which are frequently unmarked. Perhaps we missed a street sign, and then biked 25 miles on an unmarked road, with no good indication that we had been following the wrong route?

Oh, no. This was a well-marked road. And not only were there route markers on a regular basis, we actually made a point of stopping at one and taking a picture. Actually, we took three pictures. And didn't once notice it was the wrong road.

Oh, my aching legs

2008-07-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

Food. Who would have thought it would be food?

"Oh, don't worry," I said, laughing at E's suggestion, "we've thought a lot about what we're planning on bringing on this trip. We've got it pared down to the basics. There's no way we're bringing more than we need."

"I'm telling you, man, you're going to regret every extra pound you strap on your bike. trust me!"

E had, himself, done an extensive tour of the US on bike, and knew what he was talking about. So, given that I was about to set off on a 600-mile, self-supported, bike-camping trip through the Adirondacks, this was the kind of advice I should have paid attention to.

And I thought I had. I_tried and I put a lot of thought into our bags. After all, we knew we were biking in the mountains. We're not stupid. (We didn't, however, know that we were biking during the rainiest part of the year -- whoops). We budgeted or biking well, and gave ourselves plenty of time for days off.

But how could we know that routes 3 and 30 weren't the same road? It's an honest mistake. It could happen to anyone. By the time we thought to ask a local for directions, though, we were already 25 miles in the wrong direction. In most circumstances, this would be a frustrating but not-especially-unbearable setback. As it was, we had only a few, already-long days ahead of us to meet up with D, who would be joining us for the remainder of the trip.

So we went crazy and started throwing away our food.

Oh, it made sense at the time. We had a lot of weight. Food weighs a lot. We can always buy more food. Ergo, throw out the food. Also, the umbrella. And the gas for our stove. And the petroleum jelly. And the earplugs. It felt like the right thing to do, at the time. I'm sure we saved ourselves a little bit of effort, and eating at restaurants is certainly easier than preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. And the fact that we threw out a full bottle of honey, only to re-buy honey a day or so later, only made me feel the slightest bit silly.

And when a raccoon (?) stole our garbage in the middle of the night, and we ran into a bear at the camp showers the next morning, I became convinced that it was only through divine intervention and our complete unwillingness to pay attention to road signs that we had managed to avoid a horrendous mauling death in the middle of the night. From that night forward, we followed a strict policy of buying every meal, at a restaurant or grocery store, and immediately throwing away everything we ate, so as to provide a distraction from the rabid animals of Tupper Lake and surrounding cities.

It worked. We weren't mauled in the middle of the night. We also won a stare-down with a moose. And I believe our sacrifice to the gods was the only thing that kept us from having a single flat tire over the course of 1500 (!) combined miles of biking. So go, team.

Directional problems aside, biking the Adirondacks was great. There aren't many big anecdotes to relate here, so I shall relate a few in bulleted form, because I'm not a good enough narrator to tie these together in any sort of cohesive whole. And on:

* Lakes in the Adirondacks are warm enough for swimming, but not enough for midnight skinny-dipping.

* There is no more satisfying feeling than witnessing the bewildered expression on someone's face as you tell them you just finished biking 60 miles, with thousands of feet of elevation gain, with 50 pounds of gear on your bike, in the pouring rain.

* Corollary: it rained every day of our trip, except one.

* Wilmington, NY, has the world's nicest bartender. A long-haired, Phish-loving bartender who introduced me to many glorious, low-priced, local microbrews.

* Lake Placid, NY has the world's nicest, cutest bike mechanic. This is more I_tried's thing than mine, and I can't believe she didn't ask for his number. Boyfriend be damned.

* Indian Lake has a lovely little coffeeshop. On the front door was a sign saying welcome, with, underneath, some words in what we were assumed Sanskrit. After perusing the store, seeing the enormous sword hanging above the counter, and glancing at the bookshelf full of Lord of the Rings memorabilia, we looked again. It was actually Elvish.

* Many other small annecdotes and observations of varying levels of interest, which I may or may not divulge, as suits my fancy.

Definitely, definitely a worthwhile experience. I don't think I'll ever match my sister's accomplishment of biking all the way across the US, but I'm definitely looking forward to a longer bike-camping trip before I get too much older.

For someone who needs constant, constant mental stimulation to save me from boredom, I was never -- not once -- bored during our 6-8 hours of daily biking. Oh, sure, the scenery's gorgeous (pictures fortchoming in a future post), but just clearing my mind and pedalling for hours on end was a weirdly fulfilling experience. I suppose it helps that I had an excellent conversational partner, as well.

And that's all I have, for now. I'll post pictures in a bit. You may be able to eke out some more information from I_tried's blog (linked above), if you're lucky.

And now I'm back in the real world, dealing with real life issues, and trying to get some research done. Perhaps something interesting will come of that, as well.

Synopsis

2008-07-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

So I'm home. Flying curse true to form, I have a lost bag. *Sigh*. I'll be writing a few longer posts in the future, with pictures. But I just got home, and I need to pack and catch up on errands. And I'm moving this week, so it may take some time. In the meanwhile, here's a couple random trip statistics.

Total distance traveled: 593.31 miles
Longest day (miles): 71.65 miles
Longest day (hours on bike): 6:17:34 hours
Max speed: 48 MPH
Miles added to trip due to dyslexia: 50
Number of flat tires: 0 (!)
Weirdest new word learned: "interesterified" (thanks, Milano Mint Cookies!)
Nights spent in hotel: 1
Nights wished spent in hotel: many
Most useless item thrown away while crazedly trying to reduce our weight: petroleum jelly. Or maybe the umbrella
Most useless item we wish we could have thrown away: Birkenstocks
Most dangerous animal seen: bear
Most awesome food item invented: peanut butter, marshmallow, honey sandwiches
Runner-up: Skittle-stuffed marshmallows

Incommunicado

2008-06-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

My blistering rate of postage is going to experience a bit of a slowdown for the next two weeks or so. I_tried and I are doing a self-supported bike-camping trip through the Adirondacks. It's a blast! Also, very rainy. I'm in Lake Placid (home of the Miracle On Ice!) at a public library, but I doubt I'll have much Internet access for the next few days (which is going to be hell when I have to sort through my emails: I had ~100 for the last two days alone).

We're having a great time so far, though. Yesterday: 60 miles, raining the whole way, with 3500 feet of elevation gain. Wish you were here.

Chicks on skates

2008-06-09T20:54:00.000-07:00

I still don't think I know exactly how the scoring works. Every time J and I thought we had it figured out, the round would end, and we'd be off by a couple points. Oh, sometimes we got it right. But not usually. "No, no -- that point doesn't count because the blocker skated past the jammer before time ran out!" "Do they get a penalty for riding their bike off the track? 'Cause I think she just knocked over the referee. Or maybe that gives them an extra point?"

Which is to say, I understand the rules of Roller Derby just about as well as I do any other sport: not at all. But I was utterly determined to not let that (and the $5 I had to pay for a can of Tekate!) get in the way of my enjoyment. So I grabbed myself a beer and a cookie, sat up on the railing, and did my best to follow along.

And really, how could I not enjoy an event that featured hot chicks on roller skates beating each other up, with pseudonyms like Kelly Kaboom, Crystal Deth, Judy Gloom, and Laura Palm-Her (points if you catch the reference)? Or a team whose mascot is the cookie monster? Where the sole objective of the game is to skate past the other team as they fling themselves into your way and try to knock you to the ground? Everything I could possibly want in live competition was there -- except chainsaws. Lumbersports still has a lock on that particular aspect. I've yet to attend a live sporting event that's nearly this much fun to watch. Although I suppose my only points of comparison at this point are American football and baseball, so competition's not that strong at this point.

Beyond the beautiful brutality on the rink, the spectacle on the sidelines was fantastic. Sure, American football has its halftime show, basketball its slam-dunk contests, baseball its... what the hell does baseball have, actually? But roller derby -- roller derby has ushers in fishnets and spiked collars, tattooed and pierced to the nines. Players committing too many fouls ushered off the field to Rage Against The Machine. A flag-wagging gorrilla on roller-skates setting up a marriage proposal in the audience.

And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. I was going to go on a little bit here about how it takes talent to orchestrate a mood -- an ambiance, if you will -- and how important the attention to detail (gritty character bios on the website, disco ball shaped like a rollerskate) is for the overall effect. But then I realized blah, blah, blah, who cares? Dammit, there was a gorrilla on roller-skates! Waving a flag! Proposing marriage! Just put that image in your head for a little bit. Just for a second or two.

OK, done.

Developments

2008-06-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

So it occurs to me that there are some random details in my life that I've been remiss in passing on to people. Details that a random reader of my blog couldn't care less about (arguably, that encompasses my entire blog), but that my friends might be interested in.

Banal stuff: I've (almost) made it through my first year back in school. It's been a good year; I'm almost used to being a student again, although that took a surprisingly long time to adapt to. Classes have been hit and miss: some really interesting, challenging ones and some really boring, challenging ones. I've also (finally!) started working on a research project; my adviser tries not to just hand off projects on to his students, so finding something on my own has been a bit of a challenge. I'm pretty happy with that, though. So yeah, overall, I feel like I made the right choice in coming back to school.

I've developed a fledgling social group. Nowhere near as extensive or deep as the groups I've had in the past, but it's definitely a start. As you may have gathered from my recent posts, I've done a pretty good job at keeping my life full and busy (next post: Roller Derby!) -- thankfully, LA makes that easy.

But that's all stuff you could have intuited; or, at least, it's not surprising. On to the bigger news. There's one piece of news, of course, that a few of you have learned about recently -- a pretty big development in my life. So, for obvious reasons, I've been on a bit of a hiatus recently; I've been trying to steer clear of commitment for a bit, and I wanted to enjoy taking a break for a while. Last time was good -- really good -- and I wanted to make sure that the next time I didn't make a mistake, didn't rush back into things before I was ready. It seemed best to try and make an intentional effort to avoid a rush decision, so that when I made my choice to jump back into the fray, I knew I was doing the right thing and (hopefully) wouldn't have any regrets. Those first couple months in LA were good -- steering away from commitment was definitely the right thing to do. And after a couple months of thinking about it, I decided I really was ready to start things up again.

So I got a new piercing.

(It's the bar across the top of my left ear -- sorry it doesn't stand out -- my friend K has my good camera at the moment, so you have to make do with the crappy cell-phone pic).

Oh, and also, I have a new girlfriend. Friends, meet L. L, friends. Play nice.

Summer plans that may be of interest to some. Those of you who read K's blog should know that the two of us are soon to be taking a two-week bike trip in the Adirondacks. Should be fun! I've spent far too much money on gear for the event, so it damn well better work out.

Also in the works. If you will be somewhere along the I5 corridor near the end of July/beginning of August, there's a good chance I'll be paying you a visit. L and I are making a road-trip up to Seattle, and we'll be wanting to see friends on the way. I don't know the exact schedule yet, so no promises as to how much of me you'll get to see. But hey, some is better than none, right? I'll keep y'all posted.

And that's that. Back to the grind. Love to all of you, and keep the dream alive!

Uh-oh

2008-05-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

My response to a recent telephone survey: "I'm sorry, but I'm not an Oregonian anymore."

I feel kind of empty inside right now.

Trashy TV

2008-05-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

Why why why do people in trashy TV shows all look like they're from LA? I don't get it. I just happened to be watching A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila last weekend, and one of the contestants is supposed to be a reporter (or something) from Seattle. Except she's clearly not. Nobody in Seattle looks like that. Straightened hair, oodles of makeup, dressed like she's out to go clubbing.

Everybody on the damn show had the exact same style -- overgelled hair, clothes like they're going to a job interview, men up to their Abercrombie-andFitchiest -- and I don't get it. I have to see this crap every time I go out, but why is it appearing on my TV as some grim parody of reality? Do people who make these shows think that this represents some form of reality that their viewers actually identify with? Or is this really just the way that the contestants look in everyday life, and those are the only people that are interested in trying to appear on reality TV shows?

Dirty music, part 2

2008-05-08T19:06:00.000-07:00

I love Pink Floyd. A lot.This is hardly an original aesthetic opinion to have, of course. But for much of my adult life I have been a devoted fan of Floyd, more so than is probably healthy. Sure, I listened to the Wall and Dark Side just as much as everyone else. But I also listened to Meddle. And A Saucerful of Secrets. I bet (most of) you didn't even know that Pink Floyd had an album called Piper at the Gates of Dawn, did you? (It's a very, very strange album -- prototypical 60's psychedelic music, and almost unfathomably different from everything that came afterward.) For Christ's sake, I even listened to the albums they put out after Roger Waters left the band, and they were but a soulless, empty husk of their former greatness, putting out pabulum like "On the Turning Away" and "What Do You Want From Me". I'm a little better, now, but my love for Floyd has certainly not faded.

So you can imagine my excitement when I learned that Roger Waters was the closing act for the last night at Coachella. I know next to nothing about his solo work, but as the bassist and primary songwriter for Floyd, I knew I couldn't miss it. And then when I learned that he was going to be performing a full set of Dark Side Of The Moon, I just about lost it. I was not going to miss this show. I would shove myself to the front of the audience, muscle aside small children, trample the sick -- whatever it took to get me to the front to watch.

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. Through judicious planning and a willingness to be heedlessly rude, we managed to finagle a spot relatively close to the front.

Not that it would have mattered. You could have seen the spectacle from miles away (and, undoubtedly, people did). Fireworks and gouts of flame exploded from the stage at regular intervals, carefully, carefully synchronized to the music and videos on screen. The enormou s inflatable pig made a careful circuit through the audience, inexplicably festooned with an Obama endorsement (also, they accidentally let go of it, and it is now in some unknown location in Southern California). Hell, halfway through the concert a freaking airplane -- adorned with a grinning shark's mouth -- flew over us and dumped glitter on us. I told you Prince was a spectacle? This topped it, hands down. I will never, never again in my life see a show drenched in this much elaborate display.

I was bored out of my mind.

Oh, it started out fine. We got a few famous tunes to start the evening -- Mother was a welcome surprise -- followed by even a few of their more obscure entries (do you remember Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun?). So, of course, I settled myself in for a contented couple hours.

I think it was really when Waters started his solo stuff that things started to go wrong. I'd never listened to any of his post-Floyd material before, so I didn't know what to expect. Suffice it to say that I wish I could have remained in blessed ignorance. Roger Waters' solo material is awful. Mind-numbingly, painfully, depravedly bad. Imagine Pink Floyd at their most paranoid, political subtext ratcheted up as far as possible, and none of the subtlety.

I hoped that the Dark Side set would recalibrate me and set me back on a path of enjoyment, and by all rights it should have. The performance was flawless, utterly flawless. The band never once faltered, the flow of the album was never lost, the Pink Floyd replacement musicians sounded exactly like the original band. I could have put on some headphones, popped in the CD, cranked up the volume and closed my eyes, and I couldn't have told the difference. The solos were -- note for note -- the same as on the album. The solo vocalist on The Great Gig On The Sky warbled the exact same phrases as the original. Even the drum breaks scattered throughout had the exact same timing, the exact same rhythms.

And with as much production, effort, and practice that must have gone into the production of this to get it work out, I feel almost ungrateful for disliking it. But dammit, if I go to see a live concert, I want something new, something that I haven't heard a thousand times before, memorized in the comfort of my own home. Some spontaneity, a new twist, a modification -- something that gives me the impression I'm listening to a real, live show and not a group of oddly dressed, lip-syncing actors. And I didn't get it.

I'm a contrarian at heart, and I tried hard -- so very, very hard -- to not let that get the better of me. I mean, how stupid does it sound to say that you didn't like a performance because they practiced too much, because they were too good at what they did? But even surpressing my churlish tendencies, even trying to appreciate the pure skill and effort that went into the show -- even that was not enough. It just wasn't fun.

And then, a few days ago, I happened to hear Comfortably Numb randomly playing at my local bar. And I was worried, more than a little. But I gave it a try. And I closed my eyes, listened, and smiled.

====

Pictures!

The largest twin tessla coils in the world. Since I doubt you can tell, these things are about 20 feet tall. Those are huge gouts of electricity shooting out, there. This is one of the highlights of the show. The moment these turned on, people started running -- literally running -- to come see them. About half of the audience for the Verve disappeared the moment the sparks started flying.

L and me, standing in front of this awesome steam-punk treehouse. The entire structure, tree and all, is constructed of metal. Later in the evening, people (through invitation?) started climbing up and watching the shows from the balcony. Clad, as I was, in my kilt -- I decided to not pursue that option.

And, just for the hell of it, one more shot of the pig. As underwhelmed as I was by the show as a whole, I was thrilled, utterly thrilled when the pig started wandering out from backstage.

Dirty music, part 1

2008-04-29T19:53:00.000-07:00

Why is a Tegan and Sara fan in this mosh pit?

For about two minutes, that was all I could think about. Nevermind that I, a more-than-infrequent listener of Tegan and Sara, was in the mosh pit as well. I couldn't wrap my mind around the presence of this demure-looking 20-something woman directly ahead of me, wearing her Tegan and Sara t-shirt and jumping around to Gogol Bordello with the rest of us. But she was excited. Lord, was she excited. Less so than the woman riding around on her boyfriend's (one assumes) shoulders, flashing the audience. Less so than the man in a superman cape and a translucent faceplate. But still, excited.

I'm an easily distractable person: the more things I have going on in my life at once, the better. If I'm focused on one thing, it's only a temporary condition until I decide to switch back to one of the five other tasks I have running in the background. It's overwhelming, sometimes.

So Coachella should be the perfect event for me. Camping out in a tent with your friends, you're woken up at 8 in the morning when the heat in your tent becomes unbearable. From then on, you have a day of pure, unstopping activity. Wander in to the stage area, and instantly you're presented with a plethora of things to do. Five stages, simultaneously showcasing music by five different bands. Myriad huge art displays, including a crazy multi-story tall bamboo sculpture and a pair of huge Tesla coils. Live DJs in a center stage, playing house music to accompany strange, choreographed modern dance pieces involving actors in nautically-themed circus makeup. Beer to drink. Food to eat. Thousands and thousands of people to watch.

"OK, so I'm going to spend a half-hour watching Devotchka, and then I'm going to walk over to see the last half of MGMT before checking out Stephen Malkmus, and then on to Death Cab For Cutie. Somewhere in there I need to get some food, too, and I think I might check out the Do Lab for a bit. If we time it right, I think we can get close to the stage for Portishead and then rush over to catch the last couple minutes of Flogging Molly before Prince starts up."

It was too much, even for me. By the end I gave up trying to plan, and just resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to be able to see all the bands I wanted to, and that was OK. If I just insisted on a few bands I really needed to see and just let the rest flow naturally, everything would work out alright. And it did.

I got to see Devotchka play, accompanied by an impressive pair of curtain acrobats (see: earlier post about clubbing experience. I can't think of a better description of them). The Breeders performed the only song of theirs that I (and, to all appearances, everyone else in the audience) knew. The Raconteurs, as uninteresting as their debut CD is, are enormously entertaining live.

And, much as I can't stand his blandness most of the time, it was weirdly relaxing being sung to sleep by Jack Johnson.

And Prince. Oh, my god, Prince. Before I saw his concert, I was woefully uneducated: I can't name a single Prince piece I'd heard other than Purple Rain. And, I suppose, the soundtrack to Batman -- but that doesn't count. So walking towards the elaborately constructed stage, preparing to be educated, I had no idea what to expect.

He introduced himself by saying "Congratulations, everbody. For the next two hours, you are going to be at the coolest place in the world." And he was right. I was overwhelmed. The man is a hell of an entertainer. I don't even know what he played -- I was so awash in spectacle and performance that I just couldn't keep track. Until very near the end, when a very familiar refrain hit my ear. I can recognize Radiohead anywhere. I don't think I've ever heard quite so unusual a cover of Creep before (hell, I don't think I've ever heard it covered at all), but there he was, up on stage, playing his own weirdly modified version. It was entrancing.

But even that couldn't compare to watching Portishead. Portishead is otherworldly in recorded form but live, they were almost more than I could take. I stood there for an hour, watching the stage, doing my utmost to keep my mind about me as I tried to take everything in, and just barely holding on. It was an incredible experience. I can barely even remember anything about the concert now, apart from the sheer, visceral sense of awe it inspired in me.

And so much for part one. Next post: a confusing incident involving a giant pig and shattered dreams.

Also maybe pictures, if L gets her photos developed and scanned. (who still uses film these days? Honestly!)

Crazy scientists

2008-04-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a class from a fairly prominent professor whose name I won't be divulging this term. He's one of the more well-known professors in the UCLA CS department -- he formalized the field of causal reasoning, which is what I'm studying this term. It's kind of neat taking a class from someone like that: on the off-chance that I meet someone in the outside world who's ever heard of this field, I can totally brag about how I took a class from a mini-celebrity! Oh, what an exciting life I lead.

In my admittedly limited experience, academics seem to care less and less about social propriety as they go along. A week or so ago, he was lecturing on the concept of Minimality in regards to Bayesian Networks. In essence, this is just a restatement of Occam's Razor, but recast in statistical terms. Basically it just says that, given two models that equally well describe the data, you should prefer the one that makes less assumptions about causal relationships. Very straightforward stuff. But to make sure we got the point, he decided to give us an example.

Prefaced by the very brief disclaimer, "I hope I'm not offending anyone," he launched into a fairly extended diatribe about how science provides a better model for interpreting the universe than religion. Imagine, if you will, with a thick Israeli accent: "You see, the difference is that science sticks out its neck! It sticks out its neck and makes a hypothesis that you can say is wrong! But in religion, something happens that you don't expect, and you say 'God did it!' and you don't explain anything. It doesn't stick out its neck! What good is that? Useless!" This went on for a good several minutes. Mind you, I completely agree with his rant -- it's just not quite the kind of lecture I expected to hear in a computer science class.

Unrelatedly, last weekend I went out to Cal Tech to listen to Stephen Hawking lecture about black holes (what else would he talk about?). Admittedly, I spent a huge chunk of the talk wondering exactly how much of the talk was pre-scripted -- I would have been surprised if he could form phrases fast enough to do a lecture in real-time, but it seemed kind of strange to have a lecture in which the speaker essentially sat still for several hours while a pre-recorded speech was played in the background (which was, in fact, basically what happened). As I sat there thinking vaguely disrespectful thoughts, Hawking makes a vagina joke. Hearing a prominent physicist joke about how the French read suggestive subtext into the name "black hole" caught me more than a little off-guard (apparently, the maxim "A black hole has no hair" only served to reinforce their suspicions).

He also said some other stuff about how information can escape a black hole and stuff like that, but frankly, that wasn't what stuck with me.

And, apropos of nothing, a lesbian stand-up comic called me a male hooker last night.

Spring Break!

2008-04-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

You know, it never occurred to me until about a week ago that I had never really experienced a spring break. Ever. I mean, I'd certainly had them, since I was in school and all. But I was always working, and never really did anything special for them. No trips to Cancun, no massive parties, nothing. I probably did some fun stuff here and there, but nothing leaps out as memorable. Alright, I guess maybe my freshman year spring break was pretty cool, but I'm not going to write about that here.

But that's the great thing about being back in grad school, right? You can pretend you're back in college again (because, really, you sort of are) and relive all the stuff you never got to do the first time 'round. Which, in retrospect, basically just means getting drunk. A lot.

My friend C decided to come down and visit for our shared spring break, so we spent a week bumming around LA. Mostly just site-seeing and bar-hopping, so nothing that would interest you that much. That being said, a few observations:

* I found a dive bar in Hollywood! Right next to the Walk of Stars! Mind you, a dive bar means that a Long Island costs $8, but that makes me kind of happy. On entering, the bouncer asked if we were cops. Apparently, that's more efficient than actually checking our IDs. Even better, though: It's Danny Boneduce's bar! Halfway through the evening, Danny walked in to the bar, much to my friend J's delight, and ordered a rather ridiculous amount of liquor. Coincidentally, my friend L tells me that he attends AA meetings at the theater where she works...

* If your friend has a tendency towards motion sickness and is drunk off of her ass, it would behoove you to not take her on a jaunt down Mullholland Drive.

* Did you know they're filming a Land of the Lost adaptation? Well, you do now. If you watch it (why wouldn't you?), watch for a scene where a bunch of kids run around screaming in the La Brea tarpits. If you look very closely in the background, you should see some very frustrated techies trying vainly to shoo a pair of 20-somethings off set. Apparently, film crews don't like it when random nerds crash the set trying to figure out what the hell they're filming.

* If you want to go out to karaoke in LA (BYOB karaoke! OMG!), make sure you start early. They close at 3:00 AM on weeknights, and it would be a shame if you only got in 6 hours straight of karaoke, like we did. We tried frantically motioning to the clerk that we wanted one more hour, but apparently there's only so much leeway they're willing to extend to a group that persists on dumping booze all over their songlists.

* Security at Disneyland is lax. Make sure you wrap your flask up in a sweatshirt, and they'll never find it. That way, you too can experience Space Mountain drunk off your ass. It's surprisingly more fun that way.

* Addendum to previous bullet point. Most rollercoasters have cameras on them that take your picture while you ride, which you can buy afterward for a ridiculous sum. If you and everyone else in your car makes coordinated, obscene gestures at said cameras, Disney will thoughtfully censor your pictures and not allow you to buy them. Try it!

* Joshua Tree National Park is gorgeous. The hiking is fantastic, camping is neat, and the scenery is amazing. Also, there are a lot of nifty secluded places where other people can't find you.

Pictures!

While drunkenly stumbling around Hollywood at midnight, we stumbled upon the footprints of a couple of my youthful heroes.

My friend L and I, having found a largish Joshua tree.

A Joshua tree by night.

Small update

2008-03-13T21:26:00.000-07:00

The end of the term has had a bit of a deadening effect on both my social life and my ability to update this blog. In a week or so, I should be back to my normal pace. So, slow, rather than glacial.

I thought I might take a break from trying to generate a realistic jellyfish simulation (trust me, it's CS-related -- I'm not quite sure how) to post a picture or two that I like.

This first is taken from a hike I went on a month or so ago with my friend J (yes, that means I was hiking in January). Weirdly enough, despite living right in the middle of LA, there are a fair selection of decent hikes not a 10-minute drive north of me. Nice having "mountains" in the middle of your city. Anyway, this is LA. The bigger buildings, aka "downtown" (such as it is) would be way off to your left. My house is about an inch from the ocean. Be warned, it's a huge picture. But a pretty spectacular view. Alright, so it was spectacular in real life. Deal.

[EDIT. Apparently Blogger limits the sizes of pictures it allows you to post, so the first version of this picture linked to a very small image. I'm hosting it on my website now, so if you click on the following image, you should now see it in its enormous, 8MB glory.]

This second comes from the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area, which is this still-functioning oilfield right in the middle of LA. I completely inadvertently discovered it on my first day in town; Google's directions to my storage area sent me down La Cienega Blvd and, apropos of nothing, I all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of this wasteland (yes, you spotted the obvious joke: have a cookie). I've gone to visit it twice, now. The place is fantastic. Lots of good hikes. Anyway, here's a scene:

And while writing this post, I managed to figure out how to get ODE's joint system to work! Hooray! Now I've got a week to get everything else working. Fun.

On with the show

2008-02-19T18:31:00.000-08:00

By all that is pure and holy, I am not going to get in to clubbing. It is not who I am. I go to bars. I listen to Indie music and drink beer. I get drunk, form strong opinions, and debate important topics. Frequently in italics.

Mind you, I've made some concessions. I will dance now, with very little prompting and (almost) no alcohol. I make no claims to my skill level, but at least no one points and laughs. Or at least, they politely wait until my back is turned until they do so. I have lessened my alcohol consumption, to better deal with $10 gin & tonics (!).

Which is all by way of explaining why last Friday, I found myself sitting in a chartered bus with my friends, furtively drinking vodka from a water bottle as we navigated our way through the dirty streets of Hollywood, and I'm now writing my second post in a row about clubbing. UCLA views it as its solemn responsibility to turn its grad students into alcoholics, because grad school just wouldn't be hard enough if you weren't fending off substance-abuse problems at the same time.

After plowing through a remarkably long line (but no cover charge!), my friends and I found ourselves in Boulevard3, by far the swankiest of the clubs I've yet been to. White leather sofas. A courtyard with a firepit in the middle of a reflecting pond. An enormous dance floor with all sorts of crazy light-making devices.

Being the adventurous sort, I gamely threw myself onto the dance floor. "Not to worry," I told myself, "these are fellow nerds, and will accept me as their own." Well, they didn't shun me, but I clearly have a few lessons in dance-floor etiquette to learn. Like, how exactly one begins dancing with other people. I witnessed couples (previously strangers) dancing, so I know it's possible. But nobody came up and volunteered to dance with me, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

On center stage was a throng of dancers, including two who looked like they were not just there for fun. I say this because they were much better than the average dancers, not looking to dance with anyone, and wearing only underwear. Before I'd been given much opportunity to appreciate the sight, however, bouncers begin clearing the stage. Which might have caused me woe, had it not turned out to be prelude to an impressively-well-choreographed dance routine, the beginning and middle of which you may find documented above.

Not long thereafter, normal dancing having recommenced, the charmingly attired fellow visible at your left appeared on stage. As we walked closer to me, though, I became confused -- I couldn't see his legs, but it became increasingly clear that he was not, in fact, on the stage. Rather, I ascertained as he began to dance immediately in front of me, he was on stilts. The man turned out to be a constant sight that evening: frequently dancing but also, even more frequently, clambering about on random edifices and structures, stilts still attached.

I admit to being more than a little surprised by the evening's spectacle. The dance floor dripped with talent. In addition to the aforementioned acts, we were privy to a dance-off between a trio of amazingly acrobatic (and hot!) male dancers, and a woman who danced while suspended from the ceiling by some sort of lacy, gauzy thingy.

But, of course, the night had to end. We were ushered outside, piled into a bus, and returned to campus. And all I have left is the memories. And, of course, these pictures.

It was totally worth the four hours of sleep I got before my six hour hike the next morning.

Carnival!

2008-02-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

You may not have been aware that LA has a pretty big Latino population. It's true! I suppose that, being at least somewhat vaguely aware of that fact, I should have been completely unsurprised that there are nightclubs in LA that cater exclusively to Spanish-language speakers. Well, you would be wrong. When my friend K invited me to go out clubbing with her last Saturday, I was slightly surprised to find that the club's website didn't even have an English-language version.

Which shouldn't have surprised me too much, I suppose. I mean, K is Bolivian, and the whole evening was intended to be a celebration of Carnival. Fortunately, my Spanish is good enough at this point that I could at least vaguely follow what was going on (although K had to keep me from raising my hands every time the MC prompted us -- "You're not Argentinian!" was a frequent refrain).

Lessons of the evening:

LA drink prices still suck. $11 for an AMF is unconscionable. Hell, I'm still pissed that $6 for a beer is cheap around here.

Dancing is fun. Dancing on stage is more fun. Getting kicked off the stage because you're not supposed to bring your drink up with you is not fun, but tolerable.

Brazilian Samba dancers are hot. I offer up, as paltry evidence, this crappy cell phone picture I took.

Oh, hell, just try to imagine it.

Miscellaneous Annecdotes

2008-01-31T15:56:00.000-08:00

My friend B had his birthday last Friday. Being a good friend and a fan of partying, I naturally accompanied him on an evening out to celebrate. It was intended to be a pretty laid-back evening: we went to a local lounge, and we were just going to hang out, have a few drinks, and chat for the evening. And that's how it started out. Met some neat people, had a ridiculously overpriced bottle of Arrogant Bastard (boo for LA beer prices!), and caught up with my friends.

And then the DJ started setting up. Cool! Music is good. He starts playing some standard (I assume) house music (my friend J, a tiny little white girl is ecstatic about the Snoop Dog and west coast rap). At which point two Indian guys get out in the middle of the lounge and start dancing -- and they're good! Really good. It's impressive. I'm used to women being the ones who are into dancing at clubs, and men just sort of gamely shuffling along to the music. But these guys are going all out, and it's great.

The DJ starts mixing in some Hindi dance beats with the music, which is pretty cool -- it's a neat fusion. At some point, it stops being a fusion, though, and he just flat out starts playing Hindi dance tunes. And the dance floor goes wild. Apparently, we had unwittingly crashed an Indian dance party.

Which, of course, is awesome. We all had a blast. I danced a bit (!), but was more than a little bit outclassed. I don't think I've ever been anywhere before where an evening out would unexpectedly develop this way, which is just one reason I love living in such a deliciously multi-cultural city.

I also love Venice. For those unfamiliar (and unwilling to follow that last link), Venice is an eccentric district of LA, about two miles south of where I live. I go there a lot on the weekends, since it's an easy bikeride and a fantastic way to spend an afternoon. It's full of all sorts of wonderful alternaculture, which I've been missing more than a little bit since I left Eugene. It's just nice to find a place where people dress weird and participate in strange hobbies for no damn good reason. Hell, I was ecstatic to come across an impromptu 200-person on the beach last week -- and I hate drum circles!

Also, every Sunday night, there's rollerdancing. Someone sets up a sounds system in the roller park, and several people (some of them very good) dance on rollerblades. For no real reason, so far as I can tell (although some of them are working on routines). I'm enthralled.

Picture!

Wistfulness

2008-01-21T13:09:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, there's a weekend where I don't have much to do and I spend a day at home. I wake up late, spend the morning in my pajamas before taking a shower sometime early in the afternoon, and eat a late breakfast. I do some homework, or maybe go for a short bikeride. I'll think about calling a friend and seeing if they want to do something that evening, but usually decide that I'm happy to have the time to catch up on doing things by myself. Sometimes I read.

Every day this happens, there's a brief moment where I look around me and realize that the sun has gone down. And then I realize that it's no longer afternoon, that evening has started, and the day is starting to come to a close. And every time this happens, I suffer a short, profound feeling of loneliness and loss; a feeling that the day has been needlessly wasted and is forever gone.

And then something catches my attention, and I forget, and it's evening, and everything's fine.

Grammar

2008-01-18T21:06:00.000-08:00

My mother, correcting my grammar: "It's 'who killed whom', Joseph, not 'who killed who'".

Les vacances

2008-01-10T13:46:00.000-08:00

My first Christmas in the US since I was but a wee three months old! How exciting! But I never want to hear another Christmas jingle again in my life. Ever. Good lord.

As per family standards, we didn't do much in the way of decoration or, really, celebration. In lieu of a tree, this year we had a Christmas Samovar, topped by the traditional Imam of the Season. Truly, a wondrous and inspiring symbol of the sacrifices made for us by our Lord and Savior.

Other stuff. My 10-mile, daily bike commute, aside from being the most convenient way to commute to campus, has had the nice beneficial effect of my becoming much fitter and losing a fair amount of weight. Hooray! It has also had the effect of reducing my alcohol tolerance to mortal levels and vastly increasing my propensity to hangovers. Boo! Being a good and diligent scientist, though, I had to perform several experiments before accepting that conclusion. It seems as though my only course of action now is to perform extensive experiments to determine exactly what my new levels must be.

On a more serious note, it's been really amazing to realize as I grow up how much more solid my friendships have become. There were so many times when, as a kid, I would meet up with friends I hadn't seen in a while (sometimes only over summer break), and whatever it was that brought us together as friends just wasn't there anymore. It's been amazing (and gratifying!) to realize that none of my friendships are like that anymore. I've met up with friends that I haven't seen for a while, sometimes for years, and it's like we've barely been apart. Maybe it's just because I'm more solidified as a person now, and there's less of me that changes, or I've just gotten better about picking my friends as I grow up. Regardless, I love all you guys. You rock.

Also, holy crap! Moose!

Well hello, Dalí

2007-12-09T22:06:00.000-08:00

First things first. To-do list, continued:

...

Roll down Rodeo
.. With shotgun
.. Without shotgun

And now on with the post.

LACMA has an exhibit on Dalí that I went to with some friends last weekend. Mostly, you know, so I can casually brag to people in conversation that I've seen the original Persistence of Memory and Metamorphosis of Narcissus ('cause, you know, that's just the kind of thing I like to do). (Did you know that PoM actually has a Dalí self-portrait hidden inside it? This was the first I'd realized of it...).

Among the exhibits were a number of short movies he directed, which are of a similar level of weirdness to his paintings. By and large, I love surrealist art, for reasons that I can't really articulate -- 'cause I don't want people to feel like I'm not in on the joke, I guess, For some reason, though, the movies left me entirely cold. Sure, there's weird imagery -- the man holding books that turn into guns, the closeups of a urin-stained pen, the jilted lover pulling a train of priests and pianos with horse carcasses on them up the stairs -- but the gratuitous weirdness just didn't seem all that interesting in movie form.

Which is particularly strange for me since generally, surrealist movies are my bread-and-butter: Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken have been staples of my TV-watching experience for years. Maybe it's just that Dalí seems to want his movies to mean something (read his scripts, sometime -- they're out of this world). ATHF and Robot Chicken are just surreal for the sake of humor, so I don't take them as seriously. Why does it work in painting form, though?

Any thoughts?

In completely unrelated news, parties in LA are very different from what I got used to back in Eugene.

To do: LA

2007-11-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

...

Take a trip down Mullholland Drive

Stroll down Venice Beach

Visit the Getty Center

Bikeride the wrong way up a highway onramp

Productive weekend.

And what did you accomplish tonight?

2007-11-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

My evening in a surrealist movie

2007-11-06T00:16:00.000-08:00

LA I hung out with my friends B and I last Friday. We weren't planning on doing much exciting, but I's friend J (that makes four of us now, for those of you keeping track at home) knew of a party way out in Downtown LA that we thought might be fun. After making the half-hour drive out there, we receive news that the party is, in fact "lame", and that our time would be better spent elsewhere.

Not wanting to waste a drive, we decide to hang out, and maybe go exploring. Visit the Hollywood sign, perhaps, or take a swing down Mullholland Drive. Eventually, we decide to visit Silverlake Reservoir, because it's supposed to be pretty and, hey, it's nearby. We look on a map and start driving. On our way, we pass a film crew on Sunset Boulevard. They've taken over a gas station, put two people on a motorcycle, and started filming under amazingly bright floodlights. "Neat!" I think to myself, since I haven't seen one of those before.

It is unclear what happens next, but about ten minutes later, without having turned around, we find ourselves passing the film shoot again. And then, ten minutes later, we pass it again. Weird, but hey -- we're new to the area. After breaking down and getting directions, we make it to Silverlake which is, well, a reservoir. And probably pretty during the day, when the park portion is open. So instead, we decide that perhaps a foray to the nearby Silverlake Lounge would be in order (we hear it's quite cool). At a nearby gas station, we ask for directions from a seedy looking gentleman.

On our way to the lounge, we pass a convent. And then, we pass the same convent again. And again. Hmmm. We find the lounge, though, and pull into the lot. And just as we get out of the car, we see... the exact same seedy looking gentleman from the aforementioned gas station. Bear in mind that we are several miles away from that gas station at this point, yet he's somehow ended up at the same place as us, anyway. "There are bitches dancing on the walls in there!" he tells us as we walk by. There are not, in fact, bitches dancing on the walls. Let down, we move on.

B has a friend in the area, so we park our car near his house and decide to go exploring. Our routing algorithm is: take the most scenic looking road. Which puts us well aways from our car. We spend a delightful hour or so chatting on a street corner, next to a Spanish-style house with terra cotta tiles and a nice garden. Eventually, noting the time, we decide to meander on. At this point, we're not quite sure the direction back.

"Fear not!" I say to my companions. "That is the road we're supposed to follow!" I point down route A. "No," says B, "it's that way!" He points down route B. "Silly people," says J, "it's clearly that way" pointing down route C. At this point, we have picked all possible routes except D. Well, we figure, let's just pick one and start walking. We pick my route, which is downhill (the correct direction), and seems promising. We walk for a good 10 minutes or so, keeping up a lively conversation. "Wait a minute," says B. "Doesn't that house look familiar?" we move closer. It is, indeed, familiar. It is, in fact, the exact same Spanish house we had just left, moments before. Somehow we looped around and came back on route D.

Well, fine. I was wrong. Route B it must be. We walk down route B, which is uphill at first, but we eventually see familiar landmarks, and sure enough, we're on the path back down to the car. Until J says, "Wait a minute..." And yes, somehow, we are back at the Spanish house. Route C serves us no better. A few minutes of walking and we are mysteriously back at the Spanish house. Take a moment to realize how this feels to us. We have gone traveled on all four roads leaving this intersection. Every single road leads us back to where we started.

At this point, I realize what has happened. LA is falling apart at the seams. The center cannot hold, and a vortex has formed around the Spanish house. Everything makes sense, now. The movie shoot, the convent, the seedy guy, the Spanish house, the lack of bitches dancing on walls. Yes, LA has finally collapsed under its own weight, and it's taking us down with it.

Fortunately, Google is not fooled. I plug in our destination on my cell phone and, ignoring the evidence of our own eyes, we follow its directions back to the car. Carefully, carefully, we drive home.

This is the path we were supposed to take back to the car:

As best as I can tell, this is the path we actually took:

Kooks and clubbing

2007-10-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

Are you familiar with David Horowitz's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week? Of course you are: you're an informed global citizen and you keep up on this kind of thing. Oh, how I love you, hypothetical erudite and well-informed reader of my blog. You make it all worthwhile.

There was a speaker for said event at UCLA last Thursday, to which I went. My friend B planned to attend it in hopes it would be "a contentious scream fest": intrigued, I showed up. I don't honestly know who the speaker was, and I can't say as I care. He was from Florida, and apparently spends his life researching Islamic charities on the Internet and trying to find links to terrorist organizations. Most of his speech was about said charities, and was frankly kind of boring. I wouldn't be surprised if everything he said was factually accurate, although it was really kind of hard to tell how significant it was: they were interesting anecdotes, I guess, but hardly proof of any sort of systemic failure of law enforcement. And frequently (surprise, surprise) misleading.

He had an anecdote about a speaker hosted by UCLA's Muslim Student Association, for example, who wrote an opinion piece a while back that called Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter and philanthropist. Which is nasty, of course, but it turns out that the paper was written in 1999. Mind you, you would have to be naive to think that OBL was a good person even back then, but he hadn't reached nearly the level of universal social condemnation and blame that he's achieved now. A fair number of people (again, naively) felt that he wasn't involved in a lot of the activities he was accused of. So to blithely misrepresent a pre-9/11 opinion as current and use that as a brush with which to tar the entire Muslim Student Association strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.

In any event, I was expecting to disagree with this guy, but I was (foolishly, I suppose) expecting to at least listen to a rational speaker, just one that I disagreed with. And at first, despite his boring presentation and questionable associations, I got more or less what I expected. And then it turned out that he was bat-shit insane. He told us how he would have conducted the war on terror:

1) Don't try terrorists in civilian courts, because civilians have forgotten 9/11 and are unlikely to convict terrorists (apparently this is a failing of the civilians, rather than a sign of weakness in the case against accused terrorists). When questioned on this point, he went on to say that if he were president, he would mandate military trials by executive order and "ignore" congress.

2) Go to war in Iraq, but as soon as we kicked out Saddam, tell the world we'd found the WMDs and leave. One of the questioners thanked him for his ideas and said that it was heartening to hear that we had reporters who recommended "blowing up the imaginary WMDs to win the war."

Somebody asked him why he thought that civilian courts wouldn't work against Al'Qaida, since the UK had used civilian methods fairly effectively against the IRA, whose conflict involved similar religious arguments. You could almost hear the gears screaming in the man's head as he tried to avoid saying that it was because Islam makes people violent and irrational, but the sentiment came through in his response anyway. It was horrifying.

As horrifying, I suppose, was the number of people who agreed with him. I would guess that half the audience was there for the same reasons as me: attending for the gruesome spectacle. The other half, though, seemed to genuinely agree with him and clapped along merrily.

In other, less depressing news, I went out bowling Friday night. Bowling alleys are dinghy, dirty places where people wear trucker caps, listen to country music and drink Budweiser from novelty, bowling-pin shaped bottles. Unless you are in Hollywood, in which case there is a man out front with a clipboard and earpiece enforcing the dress code (no "MC colors", construction boots, or white shirts), 7-dollar mixed drinks, and a live DJ.

Bits and sundries

2007-10-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

I found a major improvement on my bike ride in to class, which is nice. I found a dedicated bike lane parallel to Sepulveda which allows me to avoid the I405 onramps, which makes my life much happier. This is not, however, blog-worthy news. As I rode my bike in this morning, though, I was annoyed to find that the path had been blocked with yellow tape, forcing me to follow my old, less-safe route. I quickly realized, though, that the yellow tape was in fact police tape, and not much further up the road two police officers were talking over a dead body in the middle of the bike lane. I was less annoyed after that.

I saw a double billing of Ingmar Bergman movies at a nifty little art theater last week. This was my first time seeing any of his movies, and his reputation is definitely well-deserved. It's strange how juvenile a lot of the subject matter was, though: the first movie, Autumn Sonata, is about a mother and daughter hashing out the problems in their relationship, and features the daughter complaining at her mother because she was forced to go to gymnastics lessons and her mom made her cut her hair (among other such relatively banal complaints). The second movie, Cries and Whispers, features the emotastic line "It's true, I have considered suicide." It sounds like a bunch of angsty teenagers yelling at each other. But the movies are still really good! I mean, saying Ingmar Bergman is a good director is kind of like saying Shakespeare was a pretty decent writer, I guess, but still. It was impressive to see how good direction could make a banal subject (in Autumn Sonata anyway) really gripping (and depressing!).

And finally, for those of you who actually care about progress in my life and not just random anecdotes, things are going really well for me. My classes are interesting and engaging (even if I did intentionally give myself a light workload for the first term). I've talked to my advisor, who has given me office-space (hooray!) and ideas for research (hooray!). Overall, I definitely feel like I've made the right choice in coming back to school. Even if I learned this morning that I was the oldest person in my Spanish class. Including the teacher.

Indie movie stores

2007-09-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

I just dropped by a small indie movie rental store in LA. Similar in feel to Movie Madness in Portland, if you're familiar with that. There are two especially cool things about the store. One, they sell t-shirts with the names of famous directors done up like famous rock band logos (Fassbinder as Metallica, for example, and Ingmar Bergman as Iron Maiden). Two, they have an awesome categorization scheme. All indie movie rental stores seem to have atypical categorization schemes (sorted by director, or time period, or actor, or whatever), but this one was particularly clever. In particular, they have a section in comedy called Shade Flippin', which is dedicated to movies whose front cover depicts the slickly-dressed main actor looking out at the viewer over the top of his stylish sunglasses. Good examples would be Doc Hollywood and Risky Business.

I think this is awesome.

There and back again

2007-09-26T23:26:00.000-07:00

My easy bike ride to work in Eugene: mostly along the riverfront bike path (no cars, no stoplights, dedicated bike lane), a few residential streets, cross two major roads. About two miles.

My "easy" bike ride to class in LA: all streets (many of which are as big as the two major roads I had only to cross in Eugene), frequently no bike lanes, ride on Santa Monica and Sepulveda boulevards (5 lane highways), cross two freeways. About five miles.

Riding my bike here is great. I feel like I'm in a high-stakes game of frogger, but with more sex appeal. In all fairness, the part of town I live in (Santa Monica) is very bike friendly -- dedicated bike lanes everywhere, lots of low-traffic (it's a relative thing, of course) side streets you can take. It's when you get closer to the UCLA campus that things get hairier. On a positive note, though, I timed my ride home today: 22 minutes, which -- considering it's a 4 1/2 mile ride with stop lights and the like -- is not too bad.

Exciting times. In other news, I have a few pictures of my apartment. The outside's not all that exciting, but here's the living room and kitchen.

And here's my bedroom, before and during the unpacking process.

Also, I've been taking a little time to explore the greater LA area. I haven't done too much yet, but I've taken in a few things. By far the most notable are the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area and the Santa Monica Pier. The former is a park built around a series of old oil wells -- bear in mind, when you look at this picture, that this park is really right in the middle of LA (you can just barely see the ocean on the horizon). The Santa Monica Pier is basically a mini amusement-park -- it jets out into the pacific for a thousand feet or so, and has shops and a roller-coaster and other touristy attractions. Coincidentally, it's only about a mile from my house.

Anyone out there have suggestions for other interesting things to see/do in LA? Other than the Getty Center. I already know about that one.

LA update

2007-09-18T20:09:00.000-07:00

First things first -- I got a place lined up. Hooray! It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Upper end of my price range, five miles from campus, but decent. Theoretically bikeable to UCLA (previous tennants have done it), so let's see how my ambitions hold up.

Which, of course, means I have successfully made it to LA. Hooray! I drove down to LA a few days ago, packing all (well, much of) my worldly belongings in a truck. Fortunately, my friends K & T had been planning a road trip to the LA area as well, so they joined up with me and I had some company on the way down. Pleasant enough trip for the most part; K & T are awesome folk, and it was great to not be alone the whole way (even if -- since we had to take two cars -- there were periods of solitude). We had only one real hitch, although it nearly proved disastrous.

This is T, fooling around before the true nature of our looming crisis was made evident.

We had just recently made a brief stop in Tracy, CA (note, if you will, the remaining distance of our route -- 352 miles! -- which is relevant) to pick up some gas. I filled up the truck and looked over at T, who had been driving my car and (what with its much smaller gas tank) should have been done with filling the tank well before me. For some reason, though, he was still at the pump. And, while T (witness picture above) clearly has issues figuring out how to use self-service gas pumps, it's not that hard. I walked over to see what was the matter and learned that the key wouldn't turn in the ignition and that the steering wheel was locked. I didn't trust him, of course, and tried to start the car myself. No dice. So, to be polite, we pushed the car out of the way (into a handicapped space -- the steering wheel was locked!) and proceeded to continue jiggling the key in the lock. For another 20 minutes.

Well, crap. We finally realize that, delay be damned, we were going to have to call a mechanic. Who told us to call a locksmith. I tried a couple locksmiths before finding one who did cars. Who told me that this was an occasional problem with my particular model of car, and that I would have to take it into the Toyota dealer. Yerk. I called the dealer who said, sure! they'd be happy to look at it, if I got it towed in to them and waited 'till Monday. This was on Saturday. Remember the 352 miles remaining in our trip? This would have meant having us all crowd into the truck (seats only two!) for the remainder of the trip, and then I would have had to somehow get all the way back up to Tracy to pick up my car and then drive back down. Adding an extra 700 miles to my trip (and taking at least a day out of my apartment hunt). Yuck!

But we had no choice, so I called up a towing service and told them our predicament. I told the driver what the problem was, and what does he do? He sits down in the driver's seat and starts trying to jiggle the key. T & I roll our eyes (K, smartly enough, is in the truck taking a nap at this point). Then he takes a Leatherman and starts beating on the key, which makes me ever-so-slightly nervous. Finally, he sprays some WD-40 in the lock, swabs out a bunch of grease with the key, and starts the car up with no problem. Apparently, one of the tumblers in the lock had gotten stuck and just needed to be cleaned out. Grateful, and now running three hours late (but, in a positive light, only three hours late), K, T, and I resumed our trip. And we never took the key out of the ignition for the rest of the trip.

Below: the three of us and K's friend (the rightmost), with whom we stayed the first evening, mere hours before the incident. Also, a picture of a wind farm that we passed on the way.

Pictures!

2007-09-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

Alright, I've finally uploaded the pictures I took on my trip. I've broken them down into four sections, to peruse at your leisure. They're hosted on my home gallery, which also has many other exciting pictures that you may or may not be interested in.

Without further ado:

Tokyo Part 1, Akihabura, Ueno, Asakusa, and Kamakura

Tokyo Part 2, Karaoke, Shibuya

Kyoto

Hiroshima and Miyajima

And this is it!

2007-09-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Alright, guys. I'm hanging out with SonicLlama, watching Frisky Dingo (it's a cartoon, and no, it's not that type of cartoon), and this is my last evening in Japan. Tomorrow I take the Shinkansen up to Tokyo, hop on my airplane, and head home. It's been a great trip! SonicLlama and The Tomorrow Lady have been awesome, wonderful hosts.

So today, my second day of exploring by myself, I decided to go visit Hiroshima. Hiroshima is depressing. I suspect every tourist who visits leaves with some sort of insightful, heartfelt introspection that they share with those who're interested. But not me. I'm not that kind of guy. I have, however, attached a picture of the Atomic Bomb Dome, which is a sort of starkly effective testimonial to the power of the atom.

Less stereotypically, I scooted on down to Miyajima, which has a nifty Buddhist shrine right up next to the waterfront. Famously, there is a torii in the water, which I have taken a picture of, for your edification. I have also learned that, even if you can get strangers to take a picture of you in front of a famous object (pantomiming is your friend!), that is no guarantee of picture quality. So, few pictures of me. Sorry.

Alright, time to pack and go home. Toodles!

On my own...

2007-09-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'm in Okayama now, crashing at SonicLlama's pad. This is my last full day in Japan, and I take the Shinkansen up to Tokyo tomorrow and hop on a plane back to Good ol' Eugene. I am happy, though, that I have accomplished my one true goal for this trip. That's right, I got my picture taken with Astroboy. My life is complete. Behold His glory!

Since we're in Okayama, this means that SonicLlama has to get back to work. Which is sad for him and for me. Since this means I have to walk around Japan without a native guide. Fortunately, this is really easy. The train system in Japan is amazing, and the signs all have English, so getting around is easy enough. After that, stumbling around with a couple sumi masens and arigato gozeimashs, and I was able to spend a day yesterday stumbling around Kyoto looking at the tourist sites. Mind you, Kyoto's apparently the most tourist-friendly city in Japan, so it may not be the most impressive accomplishment. I'm still proud, though. We'll see how today goes, as I try for a repeat performance, this time in Hiroshima.

So in Kyoto, I managed to see Nijojo Castle, an impressive little edifice constructed by the Tokugawa Shogunate. This was my first time getting to see a non-European style castle, and yes, it was large and intimidating. Also it had moats, so that was cool. No alligators in the moats, though. Also managed to see Kiyomizu-dera, a Buddhist temple complex that dates back to the 8th century. It's one of the defining sites of Kyoto, and it's pretty easy to tell why. At right: the front entrance overlooking the rest of the city.

And that's that. No time for interesting annecdotes/stories. I'll try to have more interesting posts that are more than just "here's what I did today". Or maybe I won't be that ambitious. We'll see.

My time in Tokyo

2007-09-02T16:49:00.000-07:00

My trip to Japan thus far has really just been a trip to Tokyo. Which is not insignificant, since the population of Greater Tokyo (35 million) is greater than the population of most of the world's countries (average country population: 30 million by my rough estimate). We've spent every day since I got hear exploring a different part of the city, and we haven't come close to looking at everything there is to see. That being said (and being brief, sadly, since SonicLlama and The Tomorrow Lady should be waking up soon), here's a little bit of what I've done.

Firstly and most importantly, karaoke. Karaoke is the most awesome thing ever invented on the face of the planet. Two nights ago, we took a brief sojourn to a karaoke bar, where we got our own room (karaoke's a private affair, unlike in the US where you have to belt out ABBA to the entire rest of the bar). SonicLlama gamely went first, singing a deliciously pitch-imperfect version of Give it Away by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (a graciously executed performance, which made me feel much better about my own contributions). I performed many no doubt cliched songs, culminating in the high points: belting out Smells Like Teen Spirit and performing a duet of Sweet Child of Mine with SonicLlama (Prisoner's Dilemma fans: think of it as a mini reunion tour, with one fan/groupie).

Next up. Many shrines. There appear to be a fair number of these liberally scattered throughout the Tokyo region (either that, or my hosts have made a point to take me to each one). I don't have too much of interest to say about them, since I honestly didn't do too much reading on them: mostly I just looked at the buildings, said "Hey, that's pretty!" and took a picture. It is kind of neat to see Shintoism still being actively practiced. It's not a religion I hear much about outside the context of history lessons, so it was cool to see a few active adherents and not just tourists wandering around the temple complex. At left: a building (I make no claims to its religious significance) at Hase-Dera temple. Below: a prayer left by some smart-ass tourist.

High-tech life. You may not have known this, but Tokyo is well-known for being a bit of a tech-heavy kind of place. Which I've been fortunate enough to experience tastes of here and there. Between, you know, exposures to the rustic foreignness. Why, just yesterday, I encountered one of those snazzy high-tech toilets that I'd read all about. Was that ever exciting! (Mind you, this was a fairly pedestrian model, but it was nonetheless exciting). Other bits of interest: playing Soul Calibur in a four-story-tall arcade (Club Sega) (also, getting my ass-handed to me in a Guitar-Hero-esque Taiko drumming game), walking down an open-air market loaded with electronics (I'm kind of used to carpets at those kinds of things), and buying beer from a vending machine. Maybe that's not so high-tech, but I still thought it was awesome. So there.

My companions have awoken. I shall provide you with more anecdotes and pictures as time allows. Godspeed to you all.

Brief update

2007-09-01T22:50:00.000-07:00

I'm still in Japan. Things are awesome and I'm having a great time. I'm not, however, having much time on the Internet. There is Internet all around, of course, but I've been out and about doing stuff in the town and not spending much time in my hotel room, so I haven't really been able to use it. I promise to make more posts soon (probably tomorrow) with pictures of my exploits.

Brief summary of things I have done: karaoke (awesome!), seeing many shrines, getting drunk on a train, eating a crepe filled with cheesecake and ice cream, much hiking and conversation with my friends, playing a taiko drums arcade game, buying kitschy touristy stuff (pokemon condoms!), and many, many other things. I can't tell you everything, though, since then what would I write about tomorrow? 'Till next time, space ranger.

Hello from Japan!

2007-08-31T06:59:00.000-07:00

I hope you appreciate the difficulty I have gone through to provide you with this blog post. Specifically, since I am writing this from my hotel room in Tokyo, Google has thoughtfully decided that I must be a native Japanese speaker, and has translated all of the navigational controls on this website in to Japanese. Which I don't speak. I have managed to get by on muscle memory, so far. If you're actually reading this post, that menas it has carried me through all the way to the end. On that note, on to the meat of the post.

Look, at right. See the diminutive, coffin-like enclosure (also, my feet)? That was my hotel room last night. I am in Japan for a week or so, visiting my good friends SonicLlama and Kori the Tomorrow Lady. Kori, in charge of accommodations for SL and I, decided it would be good fun to book us in a capsule hotel. I am genuinely grateful for the unique cultural experience this provides me; I am also grateful that I get to spend tonight in somewhat roomier accommodations, with my own bathroom. Luxury!

My trip so far has consisted of wandering around Tokyo, gazing upon the vastness and shininess of its splendor. In coming days, I intend to have more detailed and interesting posts about this. For now, though, you should look at this picture of Joe and I, who have decided to get drunk (and also, apparently, blurry) in public, just because we can. Gaze upon the glory of our crappy canned beer! Revel!

Also, because I think they are hilarious, you should look at the following picture of King Kong climbing the American Club (what a glorious image we project upon the foreign masses, fellow countrymen!), and Darth Vader, reenvisioned as a samurai. Oh, yes. Awesome beyond measure.