APOKALIPSIS

This is Apokalipsis

2007-09-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

I will henceforth be blogging at:
www.ThisIsApokalipsis.com

Please update your links and whatnot. The new site isn't fully functional yet, but it is more functional than this page ever was, and has all of my blarchives (that is, blog archives) going back to the day I started my first web log in 2001, so there's a lot to read if you have time to kill and feel like being totally bored and annoyed.

This site served me well, but I've been trying to start a new one for like a year and a half now, so I am glad to be moving on. Please join me!

In progress...

2007-09-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've spent some of my labor day weekend working on a new website, which should hopefully be ready to unveil tomorrow night. Regular posting will continue once that's all squared away and everything is shipshape. I hope you will like the new design!

Misc. and Match

2007-08-31T19:41:00.000-07:00

A couple of things related to the last few posts:

1. While looking through my bags (which are still only halfway unpacked) for a computer cable so that I could scan the Bhagavad-Gita the other night I found, wonders of wonders, an old, beat-up POG! A zombie POG even! I really wanted to scan it in so y'all could see it, but I still can't find that doggone computer cable. Then I thought that maybe I could just describe the POG and tell you that I held it up to the computer screen hoping that would be enough. Then I thought that I would have to actually DO that if I was going to write about it, which would look pretty silly. and THEN I realized that yes it would look silly, but I could at least take a picture of it with my webcam!

AMAZING, right? Hardcore!

It says "HORRORS CAPS 2001" on the back, which means it's the best kind of POG: a generic one!

2. Speaking of horror-related things and cap-related things, all the episodes of Monster Bash are now apparently freeware! This is great, because it means I no longer have to ask myself the awkward question of whether or not I would pay $30 dollars for a game that is nearly 15 years old. I hope this means that the original Jazz Jackrabbit is freeware now as well. For whatever reason, I simply have no desire to play video games that were released after I got a driver's license.

3. I was pleased to learn that Yahoo Buzz does not actually have a Wikipedia page yet. This means that no one who knows how to use the Internet actually cares about Yahoo Buzz. Which is good to know, because Yahoo Buzz actually sounds like it should be the name of a caffeinated chocolate drink. Wait, I guess that would actually be YooHoo Buzz. Is that a real thing? I would bet money that it is.

Yahoo Buzz also sounds like what Archie Comics would name a stereotypical punk character who would only appear in one story:
"Hey Archie, who's the new kid on the SKATEBOARD? He NEARLY ran Betty OVER!"
"I heard his name is YAHOO BUZZ! I guess he's from OUT OF TOWN."
"Yeah, and Mr. Weatherby is STEAMED at him already!"

Oh man, the hijinx that would ensue...

(as a side note, I REALLY want to try writing Archie comics now. I wonder if they take unsolicited submissions...

Faeries, Gitas and Bashin'

2007-08-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

If my first creative writing class of the semester left me feeling inspired, my first lit class left me feeling quite numb. It is on epic and romantic literature, which I
guess sounds good on paper, but in practice, it means we will be reading this book:

It is gigantic. It is bigger than the copy of the Bhagavad Gita that I bought for a quarter from a Hare Krishna at the Los Angeles Airport, which itself is a brick of a book. In fact, it looks less like a book and more like big, pulped chunk of TREE. Fortunately no one made me read the Bhagavad Gita, because a lot of it is Hindi. It also includes some illustrated pages, which are pretty scary -- although not quite as scary as that the picture of Queen Elizabeth I on the cover of The Faerie Queen. Sadly, my scanner isn't working right now, and the online gallery I found has slightly different, less glossy and less creepy versions of the pictures. One of my favorite pictures in the book features a chariot driven by horses who are each wearing a symbol of a body part around their neck: an eye, an ear, a nose, etc. There are a couple of dudes in the chariot and they are really freaking out.

The caption reads: "The chariot of the body. The five horses represent the five senses (tongue, eyes, ears, nose and skin). The reins, the driving instrument, symbolize the mind, the driver is the intelligence, and the passenger is the spirit soul."

Neat! It's so much less disturbing when you just put it in words!

Allegories and metaphors are usually easier to depict in writing than they are in art -- which I think is why a lot of religious art is so horrifyingly bad. The Faerie Queene is supposed to be an extended allegory about how great Queen Elizabeth was, and also there's supposedly some metaphorical jazz about how to live a virtuous life. But even if it's a really brilliant metaphor, I feel like I'd rather look at some silly pictures of doves and shining souls than read The Faerie Queene, because not only is The Faerie Queen about a gazillion pages long, it's also a dang poem! And it was written before anyone thought about standardizing the way you spell things, which means it took me a couple of tries to even find the darn thing on Amazon.com, since Edmund Spenser apparently liked his vowels too much to just call it The Fairy Queen. You couldn't get away with that kind of stunt today, no sir!

So by next week I'm supposed to have read hundreds of pages of misspelled poetry that was written 400 years ago, but made to sound like it was written 500 years ago. I would have started this evening, but I still haven't bought the book, and since I've had a couple of late nights in a row (and not by virtue of doing anything exciting), I was probably too tired to read archaic verse tonight. I had a hard enough time staying awake in class. In fact, I may have dozed off to the extent that while my head was leaning on my hand and my eyes were focused somewhere on the air floating over the page we were reading, my mouth may have lolled open and I may have actually drooled on the table. Maybe. I don't think anyone saw if I did or not.

Fortunately, while reading The Faerie Queene may be hard, other things are easy! Like downloading old DOS shareware games and playing them on my Mac! Who knew? I didn't even think this was possible, but within minutes of googling Monster Bash, I had downloaded it, found an emulator and was reliving my childhood.

For a game staring an eight-year-old boy in blue-spotted pajamas, this game was really gory -- everything exploded into bits of flesh when you hit it with your slingshot (even skeletons!). But the best part was that after you killed a zombie, his head would fly off of his body and roll around on the ground trying to attack you until you shot that, also. The plot of the game was that you had to rescue a ton of dogs and cats which had been kidnapped by monsters and scattered around graveyards and haunted houses. It was actually a lot of work and didn't really make a lot of sense, but on the other hand your character could jump 20 feet in the air, never had to sleep or go to the bathroom, and could get sewered five or six times without dying, so it was a pretty decent trade off. I spent hours and hours playing the game as a kid, bashin' monsters and freein' the pets.

It would be very easy to spend hours and hours playing it again, and not reading a single misspelled word of The Faerie Queene. Should we take a vote? How do YOU think I should spend my time, dear readers??

Writers Workshop

2007-08-29T22:14:00.000-07:00

Just got back from my first writing class of the semester. I think it's going to be really good. I don't usually take a lot of notes in class, but tonight I ended up filling up three pages.
I'm excited to start on a new story, which I'm planning to write about the Days of Rage, which was a youth riot in Chicago in the winter of 1969. Check it out:

This picture came from the Days of Rage wikipedia article. It blew my mind. That football helmet! Those sun glasses! College kids riding Greyhound buses cross-country to march in the freezing December winds and fill the Chicago streets with burning trash cans and smashed glass from shop windows ...
If that's not a story, brother, I don't know what is.

...
Also on the creative writing front, there was a question here a while back about whether I'd ever post more of the the pinball stories I was working on. I guess the answer is that you'll see them when I can bear to look at them again without burying my face in my hands. At this point, it isn't looking very likely, but you never know.

xxoo

It is a continent.

2007-08-28T20:15:00.000-07:00

Apparently Miss Teen South Carolina is the new biggest thing on The Internet. I know this thanks to Yahoo Buzz (which ... it sounds like a news from a late '70s sci-fi novel: "Melvin took a sip from his UltraNutri, then turned on the Holo-vision and took in the latest beat from Yahoo Buzz." Pleasingly quaint and kooky, but not exactly cool). I guess she flubbed a question about geography pretty badly, and Yahoo Buzz is reporting the fall out:

"Searches on 'miss teen south carolina' jumped 831%." Goodness! That is a LOT of percent! I thought people were ALREADY searching for "miss teen south carolia" a ton before this, but that is like, so much percent that it would get you kicked out of most math classes! 831%. Wow. I hope Miss Teen North Carolina can keep up.

But that's not all! According to Yahoo Buzz "Her convoluted response also spurred queries on 'miss teen south carolina video,' 'miss teen,' and 'miss teen usa south carolina.'"
This is the kind of hard-hitting news you can report when you are a search engine. I hope Google issues a special report soon about whether "USA" or "Iraq" gets more searches, because I bet that it would be really revealing!

Anyway, in case you happen to not be among the 831% who have seen this video, here it is:

I'm almost afraid to comment on it because I know thousands of bloggers have already beaten me to it, so the chances of me saying anything new are one in roughly 831%, but I will say two things:
First of all, as much as I really enjoy phrases like "the Iraq," and "Everywhere, like such as." (yes, with a period), not to mention "Aimee Teegarden," the poor girl really just looks less like she knows nothing about geography and world issues (I mean, she has at least one basically good idea: MAPS! People need 'em!), and more like she is completely nervous and scared out of her mind.
And I would be, too! After all, as this movie:

(which I saw in the theater) reminds us, behind the scenes of most beauty pageants is someone trying to take of the world or kill a prime minister or ... ok, I don't really remember. But I am sure it is nefarious.

Secondly, and the real reason I wanted to bring up Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, is that I have a story that can one-up her.

THIS IS THAT STORY:

We have student assistants at my office who help us with work that is easy and also boring. Sometimes they are reasonably professional and sometimes they are jaw-droppingly NUTS. One of them is a girl who often visits my desk to use my fax machine (which is the only one in the office). She struck me as a polite, basically competent kid, until one day we were discussing a staff member who started a charity to help kids in Ethiopia (which you really should read about), and she said to me, "It's really great that he's doing this, but do you know where Ethiopia is? Because I don't."
"Well, it's in Africa ..." I said.
"OK, but ... where's Africa?" she asked, completely earnest.

OH NO! This was not the response I was expecting. For a brief moment I thought, "Oh dang, that is a good question. "Africa" is the name we've given to a huge region of land, but is anything separate from anything else? Where does Africa stop and the ocean shelf begin? Is "Africa" truly a place, or only a concept? Does it only truly exist in the minds of those who live there?!" Then I realized this was not what she was talking about.

"Um," I said, "It is a continent. It's below Europe and Asia."
She looked at me and there was no flicker of recognition on her face. I was very afraid that she was going to ask me where Europe and Asia were.
"I'll draw you a map," I said.
As I proceeded to draw a not very to-scale map of the world, she said apologetically "I'm just really not very good at history."
I gritted my teeth and told myself, "She just used the wrong word, you don't have to say anything. She's IS a college student."
"Out of all the people who go to this school, I probably know the least about history," she said. "The least."
"The thing is," I told her as I sketched out a lumpy Cape of Good Hope, "This is geography."
"Well yeah, same thing," she said.
"Yes, they are related," I admitted. "Because when things happen, they have to happen SOMEWHERE."

This is the sort of thing that makes me fear for our country and our future. Maybe 20 years from now, instead of history and geography, college students will internet study search results and website hits. Who needs a map when you have Yahoo Buzz?

See, Miss Teen South Carolina will tell you that you do in fact need maps. Otherwise, HOW WILL YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

My weapon of choice is MS_PAINT

2007-08-27T17:09:00.000-07:00

A lot of my job involves the same thing every office job involves: the paper trails, the endless e-mails, the unfathomable memos, the crashing waves of existential angst, the giddy excitement of ordering boxes and boxes of pens, the acting need to act aloof when using the copier so that it doesn't smell your fear and start jamming again and again, the carpal tunnel, the interoffice small talk (everyone is "doing ok!" or "hanging in there!"), the desire to hang up after an annoying call so hard that the phone explodes, and so on, etc.
But every once in a while I get to do something that uses my own unique talents and abilities! For example, I received this photo that had to go in the employee newsletter:

Ignore that it is a boring picture, ok? It was important to include the three people in the front row, but the picture was way too wide to fit comfortably on the page I was laying out. I had to get rid of all that empty space between them in order to make it fit. So, I bust out my mad photo-manip skills, and BEHOLD:

Now, this sort of thing is very common thanks to Photoshop. Normal-looking women are made to look like terrifying beauty queens in order to sell magazines EVERY DAY! But I do not have Photoshop at my office. Nor do I have any other comparable photo-editing program. But I do have .... MS_PAINT! Which is to say, for those of you old enough to understand, that I have a stripped down version of Kid-Pix. But I am undaunted! I was able to take my old school skills to the mat here and convincingly COMPRESS TIME AND SPACE (ok, so probably just space) in such a way that I bet when the people in that photo see it in the newsletter, they won't even think, "Wow, did I really sit that close to that dude?" They will just assume that, yes indeed they did. They might wonder why they don't remember that dude smelling as badly as usual, but they will not doubt that they were mere inches from his (or her) armpit.

That's right, my skills are esoteric, BUT THEY GET THE JOB DONE!!
Wait, let me say that in MS_PAINT ....

(hang on a second here)...

BAM!

YES! Ok, that took a really long time, but wouldn't it make a great tee-shirt? Of course it would! If for no other reason, than because MS_PAINT has such terrible compression that it makes every image look like it was printed on cheap cotton and sent through the wash about three dozen times.
See, that would be cool if grunge were still in. But soon grunge will be coming back again! Just when you think worthless skills are worthless, they become popular again.

And here is proof.

That's right: POGS ARE BACK!
and: THEY ARE ONLINE!
... AND: THEY ARE NOT PAYING ME TO LINK TO THEM :(

xo, aro

My room is a lot bigger and my rent is a little less

2007-08-18T22:42:00.000-07:00

I just moved into a new house. I'm kind of exhausted from packing and unpacking, so I'm not going to write much tonight, but I want to brag that I now live in a place that has:
A washer and dryer!
A dishwasher!
Friendly roommates!
A garage that isn't crammed full of old junk!

I will really miss my beautiful backyard and BBQ at the old place, but I'm really happy to be here as well. My housing search was looking really dire, and then this came along at the last minute and so far seems like a perfect fit, which is a huge blessing. I'm also really greatful to all my friends who helped me move in one way or another. Thanks, everyone!

Goodness Gracious

2007-08-08T22:56:00.000-07:00

Smiley Smile by the Beach Boys is a really strange album.
It's like they wrote it after doing a lot of drugs that made them really boring.

OC Vagabond

2007-08-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for a new place to stay. I've been in this little room in this little house for just over a year now. Never signed a lease because I wasn't sure how long I was going to stick around. At the time I was considering leaving for Turkey to teach English for a year, but I decided to spent my time sticking around here and learning to be somewhat respectable.
After about a year of leaselessness, my landlord finally asked me to sign a six month lease or vacate in 30 days. Six months is not that long, really. But I took the 30 days instead, refusing once again to make any long-term plans in Orange County again. This time it's because I may or may not take a volunteer position in Nicaragua which may or may not be offered to me.
So once again I'm looking for a room in someone else's house that I can move into for an undetermined amount of time. It's almost enough to make me just pack up and leave for good. Honestly the only thing keeping me at my job is free graduate tuition, but I can't imagine sticking around long enough to finish the entire program and actually get my degree. So I don't know exactly why I'm here. And I have even less of an idea of where I'm going.
It's just getting a little bit old. For some reason I seem determined to be a vagabond.
Although I should mention that I got a sappy inspirational card from my mom in the mail today, which actually managed to give me some hope.
... which means you know it's bad, because, well ... it's a sappy inspirational card!
Oh well. I'll do my best to take it to heart.

xxoo

Schoolin'

2007-07-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

Before I was in summer school I had time to write stuff and cook stuff. Now Post Colonial Literature takes up good chunks of that time, and instead of cooking up delicious meals for myself, I am constantly finding myself foraging through my cupboards and fridge and hodgepodging things together. Halfway through the hodgepoding I invariably realize that I should have just made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but at that point it's always too late to turn back. Also, instead of writing things that are actually interesting all I have time to write about is how I managed to not eat a PB&J sandwich. Hmm.
On the plus side, I am learning a lot about Africa!

PDXtreme!!

2007-07-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

I usually like flying into Oregon because there are lots of clouds and everything looks wet and green. This time there were no clouds, no rain and the horizon looked like a blurry line of orange. It was hot and dry when I stepped off the plane. Even at 9 p.m. it was bright as midday and roughly 95 degrees. Strange.
My buddies Andy and Peter were there to pick me up at the airport. I'd left straight from work so I still was dressed up for the office, prompting them to ask "yo, what's with the tie?" or something to that effect. We got Frosties from Wendy's, went back to their apartment and played Streets of Rage and Guitar Hero, so nothing had really changed. I slept on the couch.
The next day I went to Powell's Books with my mom because I needed to buy a couple of novels for my summer class. Powell's is probably the best gigantic bookstore in the world, and I picked up a couple of zines as well as the required reading, because they have a great selection of them. Is there anywhere that even sells zines in Orange County?
So anyway, I was happy to be in Portland, at Powell's, buying great reading material. After paying, I turned around and who is in line behind me but CORIN TUCKER FROM SLEATER-KINNEY. I do not care much about celebrities -- since I've lived in Southern California, I've brushed shoulders with a number of famous people, and for a while I tried to keep a tally of who I'd met just in case anyone from Oregon asked me if I knew any movie stars, but I can't even remember who was on the list anymore. Except Coolio.
But Sleater-Kinney is basically my favorite band ever. I like a lot of bands, but their's is probably the only one that I would say changed my life, and I never got to see them live before they went on "indefinite hiatus."
So there's Corin Tucker right there paying for books and I would really like to ask her ten million questions, but she is just a normal person, really, and she's only trying to buy books, but thank goodness someone invented the concept of autographs, so that I'll at least have an excuse to say "hi" and then get out of her way, so I say to my mom "Do you have a pen I need a pen!" and she's digging through her purse and she can't find one and I am keeping my cool, because after all, an autograph isn't that big of a deal, but she can't find a pen and Corin's right there and Mom is saying "are you sure it's her how do you know it's her" and I feel a surge of adrenaline in my chest, which is just a little embarrassing (although I don't think anyone else can tell), and I say "Yes it's her, I can tell."
After she paid for her books, but before she was totally out of the purchasing area, I stepped up and asked if she was who she was (which, of course she was), and asked her to sign (in pencil) the course syllabus for my Experimental Course in Post-Colonial Literature, which was the most appropriate thing I had on hand. "I really like your band," I told her. And that was it. Whew!

(Note that she signed "s-k" along with her name, which gave me a tiny bit of hope that the band might eventually reunite.)

Mom and I went next door to Whole Foods after that to get lunch. The delicious pastries and fresh fruit alone would have been enough to put me in a blissful daze, but they were also playing the Beach Boys on the radio and I was carrying a bag full of wonderful books and I had just gotten one of the few autographs in the world that would mean anything to me, and there were interesting people with tattoos and green hair and strange suits all around me, and I felt that there could be no more perfect city than Portland.

Action-Time Movie Reviews!

2007-07-06T23:12:00.000-07:00

On the morning of the 4th of July, Ed and I celebrated our freedom by going to see Transformers and The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. There were a surprising number of people at the theater considering we got there around 9 a.m. I thought I would review these movies for you, but I really don't have much to say about them.
The Fantastic Four movie was fine. There were enough neat effects and strange action scenes to make up for the fact that Dr. Doom is boring and the Invisible Woman is kind of annoying. I imagine that like the first Fantastic Four movie I'll have forgotten what happened by the time the next movie rolls around, but it was entertaining while it was happening.
Transformers was better than I expected. I have no real knowledge about the franchise, so it was weird to watch from the outside as other geeks freaked out. Usually I am the one freaking out! I liked that the robots basically all sounded and acted like cartoon characters because it made them seem like they really were from another planet -- a planet where everyone only has one character trait! Despite being a Michael Bay film, it actually managed to have more depth than a Mountain Dew commercial, which was surprising. I still can't believe that this film is supposedly a big deal, though, and the thought of it spinning off inevitable sequels makes me a little nauseous. Surely it is time for Hollywood to invest in some new intellectual property? Please? I feel like it took a lot of people a lot of time, creative energy and focus groups to craft an suitable family film based around on a premise that came about because someone realized that, amazingly, boys like playing with cars AND playing with robots! I think they had to throw everything they had at this one to make it work, and I don't think a second film will fare nearly as well.
But then, who am I to talk? I have been convinced for years that robots and cars will eventually kill us all.

On Suits

2007-07-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

I've never been much of a clothes person. I have historically based my fashion choices first on not wanting to look like someone else and secondly not wanting to spend more than 15 seconds thinking about it. So when I lived in Oregon I wore basically nothing but Hawaiian shirts, and then when I moved to California I started wearing sweaters and my dad's old wool jacket.
Now that I work in an office with a dress code, I have to keep up appearances. I keep my hair short, wear a tie and even bought a belt, after not owning one for years. Looking like everyone else is a different sort of thing. It feels very culturaly specific -- the nuances and rituals associated with dressing nice are fascinating, and comforting in a way. Knowing exactly where the end of my tie should fall (the middle of the belt buckle) gives me confidence that even though I tied it while skateboard down the middle of the street on my way to work, I'll look like a respectable part of the office. It's the same thing with changing out of my skate shoes into the work shoes I keep under my desk. In a very small way, looking professional makes me feel more serious about my job, and more ready to be taken seriously.
The fascinating thing is that looking professional varies from place to place and culture to culture. That's probably a little less true now that suits are standard business attire in most of the world, but what was regarded as professional, serious attire in other times and places would be totally unacceptable in my office today. If I came dressed as a samurai or wearing a fez, I would probably not get away with it.
That bit of historical perspective lets me see wearing a suit and tie as a way of respecting and blending into the culture that surrounds me. It feels a little bit like wearing a costume, but for some reason I like knowing that if I were suddenly transplanted in another time or place, I would not look like part of the establishment as I do now -- perhaps in the distant future in a tie-dyed police state run by facsit hippies I would be arrested for having short hair, being clean shaven and wearing a collar. (I would like someone to make that into a movie!)
For those of us who have always resisted looking or acting just like everyone else, it's useful to realize that clothes are just a tool, and you can use them to your advantage just like anything else. After all, even the best-dressed of us all is still naked at the end of the day!

Six- or eight-thousand years ago THEY LAID DOWN THE LAW

2007-07-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

This is just a post to publicly declare that I am a fan of the B-52s.
I know this will come as a disappointment to some members of my family, but please understand that it is just very hard for me to not like a band that yells out strings things that don't make sense in strange voices in complete (if synthetic) sincerity, and furthermore, this does not mean that I like Neil Young any less. He is awesome, too. Just look at him!

ROCK OUT, NEIL YOUNG!

I wonder who would win a fight.

On Running

2007-07-01T01:25:00.000-07:00

They say that distance running is all mental. It's not true of course. Chess, perhaps, is all mental. Running is physical. It takes takes bone, muscle, joints, lungs ... and when you run you feel them all.
I ran my third 5k of the summer this morning, adding Villa Park alongside Saddleback and Anaheim. It seems that there's something of a 5k circuit out here and you could run a race every weekend if you wanted to. When I first started running someone told me that you get hooked, and I can now verify that it's true. I like getting up early in the morning and doing stretches. I like hearing hundreds of feet thumping the pavement all around me, and I like passing people. I like finishing and getting a medal.
That's not the race, though.
The race is you and your body. The race is that point where your body doesn't want to go further, but you push on; the race is the point where you are on the verge of giving up, but your body keeps going. The mental and the physical merge. There is a point where it hurts. You are lungs, you are legs, you are running. Your brain -- it's a physical thing, too -- pushes past feedback of pain and impulses to quit. But it's not your brain that's running. Something else drives you further along.
You don't have to be running. You could be still in bed, or surfing the Internet. You could be anywhere.
But you're here, you're running. At some point you will stop, but you haven't stopped yet. You're stretching, you're pushing. And if it's true that we each have a soul, then it must be the part that says "YES" when both mind and body shout "no no no." If it's true, then at the toughest parts of the race, when you walk the line between surrender and victory, when you must embody your intention moment to moment, then if it's true that we each have a soul, at that point, you become soul incarnate. You are gasps, you are strides, you are synapses. You are running.
Running, of course, is not the only time this sort of thing happens, but it has a way of abstracting it and making it easier to understand. The exhaustion I feel when I'm running is similar to how I sometimes feel when I'm writing, but it's easier to push onward when it's my whole body in motion rather than a pencil in a notebook. Running helps me to remember to embody my intentions and live them out. The race is seeing how far you can get, in spite of obstacles and your own resistance.
I met my goal of hitting around 21 minutes today. At the first race of the summer I came it at about 25 minutes, so it's a pretty big improvement. I knew I could get there, I just had to remember to push myself further.

Work is (sort of like) Hell

2007-06-15T11:25:00.001-07:00

They were supposed to fix the air conditioning in my office yesterday. People had started talking about needing to incorporate naptime into the work day if it didn't get fixed soon, because by mid-afternoon the whole office would be groggy and humid. We kept the window open and sometimes you could feel the breeze if you stood by the printer long enough. Some facilities guys in tan polo shirts finally showed up yesterday to install all the proper parts, and promised that everything would be in working order in the morning.
The morning was beautiful and cool, although you could tell it would be heat up another 20 degrees or so before lunch. I was freshly showered, awake and quite pleased with the world, until I stepped from the hallway into the office.
"They didn't fix it!" I moaned, loudly, without a thought of office etiquette. It was hotter than it had ever been, at least twice as hot as yesterday. It was surreal, like a practical joke. My chair and my desk both radiated heat.
Of course, instead of activating the air conditioner, they had left the heater on all night. Terrific! Fortunately, within an hour the error had been reversed, and our working conditions are now more pleasant. It was a strange way to start the day, though.

Satuday!

2007-06-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

-AC and I illegally ran in the 8th Annual Downtown Anaheim 5k Run, which we arrived too late to actually register for. It was a flat, easy course, and I shaved about two minutes off of my time in the Saddleback 5k! Hooray! Because I didn't have an official bib, they didn't let me actually cross the finish line, though. Instead, some old guy waved me to the side and yelled "If you didn't register, you can't finish!" I was maybe 2.5% sad. I was more much more upset that there was a big construction project going on right next to the course and the air quality was pretty sad. The best part about running a 5k race is that when you tell people about it, they almost always go "Oh wow! That's amazing!" because no one knows how long a 5k really is. It is 3.1 miles. That is not *that* far. It feels good though. Goodness, I can hardly believe that I've become the sort of person who talks about these sorts of things.

-We went to the Irvine Spectrum later that morning after AC bought hisself a bike from a garage sale. He had to talk to the cell phone people and I had to talk to the Apple people. Apple is supposed to make everything, but that has not been my experience. My laptop has not worked 100% correctly since I purchased it a year ago, and I'm going to have to go into one of their little mall stores at least two more times before I can get it in working order. argh. The Irvine Spectrum was not as terrible as I thought it would be, though. I mean, it was terrible, but the architecture was clearly inspired by the Alhambra, and there weren't a ton of people, and I didn't want to smash anything. Which is rare for me in a mall. I AM A MALL SMASHER!

-For lunch we hit up Tandoori, an Indian restaurant close to the sushi bar where I used to work that I had never visited. They had a cheap lunch buffet, clean table cloths and a crazy Bollywood movie on their flat-screen TVs. Also, our server was latina. It was great! I ate so much that I couldn't do much but lay around for a few hours afterward.

-Back at home, I read some comics and watched an episode from the first season of Northern Exposure, which I borrowed from the Chapman library. My parents often talked fondly about that show, but I had never seen it. It's a really good show, but beyond that, it's interesting to me because it's about a doctor who is only a few years younger than my dad would have been when the show was on the air. I wonder how much of himself he saw in the character. At any rate, it is much more interesting than procedural doctor soap operas like ER and even (gasp!) Grey's Anatomy, AND it has 100% more moose.

-Went to The Abbey in the evening to see The Cobalt Season play, which was really enjoyable. The band appears to have started as a husband/wife thing, and now they have something of a band, and also a baby! The baby was asleep during the show, strapped across the mom's front, which looked like it made maneuvering around the small stage a big difficult. I had a beer and a bunch of cookies, which was my dinner. Basically, that is the best dinner ever!

All in all, a pretty great day.

one man operation

2007-06-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone I know has someone to go home to.
A lot of my friends still live with their families, even though they're (mostly) grown up.
Others have roommates or housemates, usually about the same age, to hang out with.
A growing numbers have spouses and families of their own.

I've lived basically on my own for about a year now. In some ways I don't mind -- it has taught me a lot, and I'm perfectly able to function on my own. Being alone seems like a great environment to work and write and get things done. But when I leave work in the evening and don't have a real conversation with anyone until I get back to work in the morning, it does tend to get me down. It's too bad it's hard to be productive for very long when you're lonely.

grrrr.

Weekend Update

2007-06-03T22:37:00.000-07:00

The first Saturday of each month there is an open house at the Artists District in downtown Santa Ana, and I've made it a point to go as often as possible over the last year and a half or so. There are galleries filling nearly every space -- galleries that open up to the fountain in the central plaza, galleries underground hidden around corners, galleries in apartments and up firescapes. Not all the art is good, but that hardly matters when there's so much of it to see. There are always plenty of people, mostly yuppies in blazers and art kids trying to look bohemian, and generally it's not hard to find plenty of free snacks and wine, too. I have a lot of great memories of ripping the night open with all sorts of old friends, many who either don't live here any more or don't plan to live here much longer.
But last night I didn't feel much like running around and soaking up as many galleries as possible. The galleries all change, but I already know which ones hip, which are banal, which are provocative, so some of the mystery is gone. I decided to scope out the outlying area instead. Santa Ana is something of a cultural war zone as the only urban center in Orange County -- there are Mexican street vendors, dozens of quincenera shops, and lots of rundown low-income housing, plus big glass government buildings, plus "cultural centers," plus new trendy artist-friendly apartments, ultra-modern, high-concept architecture firms, and all sorts of people trying to claim a piece of downtown real estate. Half the storefronts seem to be in transition -- just as many are closed down as are opening up.
After wandering a bit and ponderin' stuff, I bought a burrito and returned to the Village. Then these things happened:
-Hung out at The Abbey with people from Canvas, scoped the new show by Jay Summers which focuses mostly on found art with some ceramics and silkscreens of blues musicians thrown in for good measure. There was live blues music, too, which was raaaad.
-Went with Amy to see a free jazz concert down at the The Episcopal Church of the Messiah on Bush St, where we'd gone for Ash Wednesday. It's a cool old church, and I dig it a lot. Got there in time to see the final song and grab some of the last remaining refreshments. Amy said none of the musicians looked very happy to be there, but I imagine that this is because playing free jazz can be difficult. (Or something?) I asked them to play one more song, which they did, even though there were only about half a dozen people in the audience left at that point. I felt important!
-There was a big party going down at the Amoreviejo Art Gallery, which is in the old deco-gothic courthouse building, so we scoped that out. It was hip chaos. I wasn't sure what was going on, which obviously made it that much hipper. Lots of crowded hallways, and a good deejay. Left pretty quickly, but also grabbed a flyer for an upcoming exhibition that will feature signs made by beggars. Sounds cool. Too bad there's not really any examples of the signs themselves on the website.
-Went to Bill & Kathy's new apartment for cake + hangouts. They just moved into a complex across the street from the main plaza which seems to be partially under renovations and is laid out kind of unusually. Bill & Kathy are an older couple who moved to California about a year ago and have been trying to find a permanent place to stay for just as long. It was good to see them getting happily settled, and Kathy makes a good cake.

Because I am an old man, we went home around 10:30 p.m.

Wednesday nite

2007-05-30T22:47:00.001-07:00

I went with AC tonight to see Glen David Gold read at Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens in San Clemente today. Gold wrote a big, bestselling book called Carter Beats the Devil, which is a pretty good name for a book, and is finishing up a new novel called Sunnyside, which he read from tonight. I think he said it was his first reading from the book, so we got a glimpse of something most people have not yet seen. Awesome. The book appears to be about Charlie Chaplain among many other things, and the opening chapters he read were funny and well-crafted. At one point he was describing a train and all of a sudden we could hear an actual train in the distance. He stopped and said "I bet you're glad I'm not reading the passage about Howitzers." Also of interest: he has written a few short stories for comic anthologies.
The Casa Romantica was nice, and struck me as a quintessential Orange County non-profit deal -- very clean, great view of the coast, with some interesting exhibits about Mexicans and Native Americans and hardly a person in sight who wasn't as white as the mission-style walls. It was, shockingly, more ethnically singular than Chapman. I almost felt like I was back in Oregon.

ahem

2007-05-24T23:04:00.000-07:00

I should have done some serious writing tonight, but I decided to watch some of Once Upon a Time in the West while I ate my pre-dinner burrito and ended up watching the entire film, which was very good. And also three hours long.

Run, Spider-Man, run

2007-05-21T23:18:00.000-07:00

One of the things I don't like about watching a movie is that I often feel like it's a waste of two hours -- you just sit there and don't get anything done.
In kind of a similar way, I'm sometimes not motivated to run or exercise unless I feel like there's some kind of goal or purpose besides the activity itself (I think this is why sports were invented).
Tonight I was able to reach a happy compromise, however. I ran a couple of miles to the local cinema, watched Spider-Man 3, which most of my friends have already seen or are not interested in seeing, then ran back home. It was a very pleasant way to spend an evening.
These things were discovered:
-Spider-Man 3 is not as good as Spider-Man 2, but it is not as bad as everyone says, if you are willing to be forgiving (I was!)
-My body likes to run! (I already knew this, but it is easy to forget)
-It is OK to go to the movies alone.

On The Road, part 1

2007-05-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

This is another part of my suite of pinball stories, tentatively called Multiball Blues. As of right now, it is the only piece that will work as a serial -- there are three parts of "On The Road" that tell Alison's story, which will be interspersed with the other self-contained pieces. As always, I'm interested to know what you think, especially since this is a work-in-progress. I just read through this, and realized that most of it is terrible. I almost took the post down, but in the interest of humility I'll leave it up for now. eek. Work. In. Progress.

"Jack Kerouac bounced around America for a while, then rolled straight down the continent to a gutter in Mexico, and very nearly never got a chance to try the whole thing again," thought Alison, who had just finished reading On The Road a few weeks ago, and now found herself couched inside a deserted box car which rattled with anticipation as she watched the desert roll by, whipping her blond hair into a tangled frenzy. "If that's his game, then let it be mine, too. I've had enough with responsibilities, with parents and college applications."
Alison was prepared, or so she thought, to tackle America head-on. After eighteen years of seeing the world through the eyes of older people, she was terrified of spending the rest of her life that way. She'd left in the middle of the night after a panic attack and hopped the train, hardly knowing where it would take her. It surprised her how easy it had been to slip through the cracks and break the rules. The wind rushing blowing through the empty box car felt like freedom, and wide-eyed Alison was electrified by it.
Of course by now she had a few destinations in mind. She checked her backpack one final time, making sure her cell phone and camera were tightly bundled in amongst her clothes, then crawled carefully to the door of the box car. Gripping the sides of the door frame, she pulled herself to standing, feeling the worn steel of the outside and peeling paint under her fingers. They were nearing another station.
She waited until the train was slowing just enough. She pulled back, then suddenly tensed and let go, propelling herself forward out of the train and into a vast, tilting sky, tumbling, stumbling on the cracked, brown earth.
She tripped over herself and lay there flat on the ground for a long while, feeling the warm desert until it stopped spinning. Then she shouldered her backpack, checked the map on her cell phone, and headed out toward the horizon.

Graceland

2007-05-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's been a kind of crazy couple of weeks, and I realized while standing in the lobby of Salem Hospital, surrounded by my relatives who had come to see my great-great-aunt before she died, that I had not gotten a really good night's sleep since sometime before May began. This has generally been for the best possible reasons, but I'm holding off a cold, and the body does have physical needs.
So now I've got an evening to myself and I really think I needed it. I've got a cold glass of Oregon water and Paul Simon's Graceland for the moment, and things will be crazy and busy again soon, and that is OK, that is great even, but for now this feels really good.

xxoo