Eight Mexicans (out of 100 surveyed) believe that "one week" is a time less than which a couple can be considered recently married.
At least three Mexicans believe that "illness" is a good excuse for not going to work, although two of them believed this after one member of their team had already believed it, and after the host said that "problemas familiar" (family problems), the number two answer, encompassed all manner of illness.
The second Mexican said, "fiebre" (fever). He earned a strike.
The third Mexican fooled us all, by initially answering "incapacidad" (inability, incapacity).
"¿Qué clase de incapacidad?" (What kind of inability?) the host wondered.
"...de enfermedad!" (illness!) responded el tercero mexicano, cleverly.
This does not compete with the two stupidest utterances i have ever heard in english, which probably not coincidentally were brought to me care of good ol' American "Family Feud". The second stupidest was this:
"Name an animal with more than four legs.""Dog!"
The absolute stupidest was this:
"Name an animal with more than four legs.""Dog!"
"[bzzt bzzt]. Try again."
"Horse!"
My Spanish fanboyism has me resisting the temptation to look up lyrics, trying instead to puzzle them out in a vaguely masochistic attempt at improving my listening comprehension. However, i found myself flummoxed by this line from the chorus of LOdVG's "Pesadilla":
Despiértate
Olvídalo
Aquello nunca ______
Todo fue una ilusión
Superiór? Su terror? Suterió? None of these possibilities make sense, and some of them aren't even real words. So i finally gave up and googled. Apparently, the word is "sucedió", except that LOdVG son españoles, so the "c" is pronounced as "th", which really isn't fair.
When we arrived in the airport in Buenos Aires during the almost entirely unplanned Argentinian leg of the South America trip, one of our first tasks was to get some of the local currency. One of our second tasks was to convert this cajero automático-distributed local currency into usefully-sized local currency. I queried a nearby security guard about this, but even now i have no idea how to usefully express the idea of "breaking a [denomination]" or "making change" in Spanish.The security guard finally understood what i wanted, but he used a strange word, which sounded like "bi-zhet-te". It was only an hour or so later when i saw the word "billete" (bill) in writing that i remembered that the Argentinian accent resolves "ll" as "zh". And again, i felt the deep shame of the hapless, half-educated gringo.
The chorus translates as:
Wake up
Forget it
It never happened
It was all an illusion
which comes off in english as far too short, and generally silly-sounding.
I'm liking LOdVG quite a lot at the moment, though i suspect that i would deride them as v´cio and boring if they were singing in english. Fortunately, spanish makes everything better. For example, which psuedo-communist dictatorship would you rather live under: the Great Firewalling, ideograph-simplifying, opium-smoking Chinese one, or the cigar-smoking, salsa-dancing, whitewater-rafting Cuban one?
I just don't know what to do with myself.
I had a dream about Greg (the high school one, not any of the work ones) where his interface with his work was a brightly colored video game, with flight physics similar to Monkey Target.
I also had a dream that i was teaching at the Cal Diving pool with an unknown female instructor, and the class that was supposed to be five people turned into like thirty, and several of them were obnoxious about wanting to be in the class in spite of not having shown up to the first lecture, or signing up or anything.
No es fácil de eligir
Las mil formas de sentir
Las mil formas de vivir
The Fast and The Furious is my new favorite movie. I happened across it on tv last night. Holy crap. My favorite parts were the ones where Vin Diesel tries to, like, convey emotion. Like when his bitchin' Civic rolls while trying to hijack the semi which, like, sometimes knows it can ram a fucking Civic off the road because it weighs a couple tons and a fucking Civic weighs about 30 kilos, but usually forgets. And Vin crawls out of his Civic, and breaths hard for a few seconds, and then says something utterly forgettable in a voice which says, "you will know that i am scared because i was breathing hard just a moment ago, even though i am no longer breathing hard because i am reciting a line".
Plus: Hahahahah they made a sequel.
The main side effect of viewing TFATF was that i realized i'm about due for another viewing of Hackers, which is a surprisingly similar movie, but with more charming subject matter, and a mindboggling bit part for Penn, who apparently allowed himself to be convinced that his career as a comedian/magician should be parlayed into a role as a, like, first tier netops guy?
I would just run Snort. Or whatever. And ask Penn to stop reading logs and catch a bullet in his teeth.
Pearl Tea is weird. I don't know how representative a Hot Almond Milk Tea With Pearls from Tapioca Express in Fake Castro in Mountain View is of the whole crazy subculture, but it was an interesting experience. Maybe i'll try something with a weirder name/color next time -- Taro Milk Tea sounded intriguing, and would almost certainly be purple, though it would probably be just as weird, though perhaps in different ways.
Overall, the concoction was too sweet over its duration. I did not enjoy the feeling of crystallized sugar on my teeth for the two hours after ingestion. Nor, i am certain, did my pancreas appreciate the assault on its integrity.
I realize that the vast majority of art and culture since the beginning of art and culture can be boiled down to this very statement, but here it is:
Dating is weird.
I have very little (which is to say, almost zero) experience with dating, so it's weird to me to watch people (and myself) doing things i've read about, heard about, or seen on Blind Date (or Elimidate, or Fifth Wheel, or whatever). Stuff like the flirtatious upper-arm touch. The conspicuous attempt to introduce sex into the conversation. The contemplating of the timing and content of the follow-up phone call. Obviously, i was aware these behaviors existed, but it was interesting to see them in person. Like how i've heard (and said) over and over that panicked divers will rip their mask off their face and take their regulator out of their mouth, but then was still really surprised when i saw a diver during a rough day at Monastery get into trouble and do this very thing.
Gay dating introduces some new logistical problems that i find myself especially unprepared for. When saying hello or good-bye, what is the appropriate action to take? Hetero men and women can hug each other under pretty much any circumstances, but a handshake between man and woman strikes me as somewhat formal for any kind of date setting. Even the terrible dates on TV usually end with a hug.
With two guys, a handshake seems reasonable, but it also seems too business like. We're here to kiss and fuck and stuff, not to sign contracts or play golf. But then, i'm a hugger. I believe huggers are more commonly found in the homo than in the hetero, so a hug becomes a viable option. But how to pick? Clearly, we need a negotiation phase, like in TCP. Of course, this negotiation phase in TCP is a "handshake" so it appears that my attempts to govern my social behavior from the behavior of network services fails. Again.
The question of "who pays?" has additional dimensions as well, though these have probably been covered by famouser, gayer people than me. Still: Dutch? Inviter? Invitee? Butch? Femme? What to do when these qualities are indeterminate?
Also, i'm sufficiently retarded about homosexuality that it isn't necessarily clear to me whether someone is a top or a bottom, nor how to ask someone whether he is a top or a bottom, nor whether it is considered offensive to ask someone if he is a top or a bottom. And yet, to some people (myself not really included), this is an important question.
So, basically, a lot of problems.
Having lived in Berkeley for so long, it was a bit disconcerting to discover that my "neighborhood" Safeway was hughgantic.
Going to a new grocery store is always frustrating, because none of the shit i need is where i expect it to be. This problem is compounded by my inept, JIT approach to shopping. [aisle = pasta.sauce; aisle.enter(); "Oh, right, i need pasta sauce"; pasta.sauce.acquire();] There's no real planning involved.
I am also easily annoyed by floor layout patterns that defeat a simple sidewinder strategy for visiting all the food nodes. The Stater Bros. in Poway is especially bad for this, inexplicably having some of the aisles set at right angles to the others. That Stater Bros. also decided that the heaviest items i ever buy (cases of Diet Pepsi for my mom, large bags of cat food for my mom's cat) should be in the corner of the store most remote from the cash registers and exits, because when i'm in Poway, in a grocery store, shopping for my mom, i am usually at a local maximum of convenience, and thus am in need of some braindead product placement to offset my convenience function. Thanks, Stater Bros. At least your workers weren't striking the last time i was in Poway.
My new Safeway is sufficiently large that it is participating in a grand social experiment: the self-service check-out line. The full-service check-out lines weren't particularly busy, but self-serve has a lot of draws. First, how could i resist the opportunity to play with my very own UPC scanning device? Second, i am unlikely to be confused when i put some of my stuff in my backpack and want the rest to go in paper bags, please. Finally, i will not double-bag a block of cheese and a bag of potato chips unless the block of cheese is made of, say, uranium.
The self-service check-out experience was somewhat disconcerting. I like that the computer tells me what i've just scanned, and then reads off the price. I'm less excited about the machine's meddling in where i put the items once i scan them. I don't fully understand why it cares, but there are scales in the place where it expects me to put my groceries, and the machine notices when i put things down and when i pick them back up. It even yells at me: "Please place the item in the bag. The item has been removed from the bag. Please replace it." I guess this is supposed to prevent some sort of fuckery with the system that i wasn't clever enough to think of at the time.
There were between one and three Safeway bouncers observing people in the self-serve lines at any given time. The one who was around while i checked out didn't seem too worried that i wasn't putting all my groceries onto the scale-table, in spite of what the suddenly unfriendly, suddenly male computer voice told me. He did help me figure out where i could punch in Matt's telephone number, since i have no idea where any of my club cards are, or with what phone numbers my club cards are associated.
The machines are even empowered to give me cash back when i buy groceries with my debit card. The future is now!
Given the weather report, i would probably have rather gone skiing this weekend, but i haven't been wet for a while, and diving turned out pretty good.
The forecast had been marginal all week, but the storm predicted in the swell model kept getting pushed back by one day until on Friday is had stopped on Sunday, leaving Saturday looking pretty decent (6-8' from the west).
Due to a miscommunication, James failed to pick me up in the morning, so i told him he had to do a recreational dive with me to make up for it. This worked out well, as vis was in the 15' range with light surge. After the three students finished their tests, we wandered over to Breakwater and dove the reef between North Breakwater and the Plaza. In spite of the predicted building wave activity as the day wore on, surge and visibility remained good.
We entered the water around dusk, and then penetrated the kelp, which left us with something quite close to a night dive. James didn't have a light, though, and so got to pretty much look at what i wanted to look at. I didn't find anything particularly new, but we did have a nice seal encounter, and there were a lot of large (especially for Breakwater) fish about. Some schools of señoritas, surf perch, and a few yellow and black rockfish (i want to call them "China Rockfish" but i'm not sure of the id).
I always forget that the sand around Breakwater is frequently carpeted with tube anenomes, and i always forget how cool-looking they are, especially the purple or neon orange ones. I also forget that sometimes decorator crabs get bored being all decorated and hidden, and sometimes haul ass across the sand. A fairly large one charged towards me until he bumped into my light, then detoured around.
The highlight of the dive was probably an inexplicable orgy of dozens of tiny snails and hermit crabs, several sea stars, and two tube anenomes on a bed of some five or six mussel shells.
For dinner, i returned to Señor Taco, my new favorite Monterey guilty pleasure. If no one told you, you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish the food from Taco Bell's food. Since my objection to Taco Bell is more philosophical than culinary, this is, unfortunately, a desirable quality.
We had a restless night, because the next room over was inhabited by a couple of guys who decided to have drunken arguments at various points during the night. They went something like this:
"Goddammit, Michael, you're 37 fucking years old, and you have a bad attitude when you're drunk. Look at you! Shut the fuck up and go to sleep!"
"[mumble mumble] fuck you ... not a felon. You're not even supposed to see her anymore."
"It's four o'clock in the morning and you're being an asshole! Shut up!"
Etc.
At 06:30, James threw my copy of Barrel Fever back at me and told me to get up.
"Okay, but i was hoping we could have a drunken argument first."
So James shouts, "Goddamn you, you slept with my wife."
To which i responded, "Fuck you, Michael, you're a fucking drunk."
Day Two showed some signs of the promised increase in wave activity. I noticed that the wave period was very long, which often, i have read, means deeper, more powerful surge. This was definitely case -- 15-20', which picked up enough sand and crap to reduce vis to a murky 5'. A perfect day for compass work.
With conditions so miserable, we called the day, which meant a much appreciated early return home.
My instructor moment of the weekend happened while trying to figure out why Sam was having so much trouble doing a reciprocal course (that is, turning around). I noticed that the hose his console was on was really short, and he mentioned that it was hard for him to get the compass level. So i popped his compass out (and nearly dropped it -- which would have been hella fun to try and find in the surge and murk) and rotated it so he could get the lubber line lined up with his body more easily. This seemed to help him a lot on the next run. This is a stupid example, but you have to start building your toolbox somehow.
My collection of music in Spanish is growing such that most of the Monterey driving was done en españold -- La Oreja de Van Gogh, Ozomatli, Manu Chao.
Dive log:
3 23ft 25min
2 32ft 36min
1 23ft 28min
After a lot of hemming and hawing, i've started exploring some dating options. However, because i'm a big loser, the ways i've chosen to do this are with Orkut and craigslist.
I managed to avoid Friendster when it first turned up, and i continued the trend by avoiding Orkut, but after Rick and Benjy were talking about it at Kirkwood last weekend, i thought i'd take a look. It's nice to have guided metadata about someone you might try to court (i find music, books, and movies to be the most useful, but we'll see how that goes), but has no one noticed that Orkut ripped off nearly all of its "romantic" questions from match.com? Not that i went to the trouble of making a profile at match.com or anything and then realized it was a pay service (duh), and knew that i didn't want to pay, and so abandoned the whole project. No. That didn't happen.
I've poked through the craigslist personals before, and continue to feel a mixture of bemusement, awe, sadness, frustration, and congratulatory goodwill about the community that exists there. I've always known (and occasionally demonstrated) that gay men have a unique superpower: we can get laid anywhere at any time, given a little effort. This is because men are absurd, horny, cock-bound creatures, and gay men don't have to reconcile these facts with the presence of women and their bear trap vaginas. Gay men can fuck as often as straight men wish they could.
To put it another way, you know how you can be home alone on a Sunday, and nothing's really on tv, and you don't feel like being productive, but you're kinda horny, so you just masturbate, like, six or fourteen times? It's like that, except it's actual sex instead of just masturbation.
But every once in awhile, amidst the torrent of 2 HORNY & CUTE ASIAN GUYS LOOKING FOR A TOP TO PLAY WITH.... and SUCK THE CREAM OUT OF A TWINK (y) TONIGHT and even TAKE A SHIT WHILE I WATCH ($$$)[1], you'll find a guy looking to just meet for coffee, and maybe date. These guys are what i'm after.
So i posted an ad. It's pretty short and simple, has a little description about me and what i'm looking for, and this fairly important sentence:
"I'd like to trade some emails, then maybe meet for coffee, and see if we get along. I'm not looking for a quick fuck, nor am i really looking for anything serious (though i'm also not averse to either of those things). Let's hang out and see what happens."
Within a couple hours, i had a reply. I'm not going to post all of it, but as opening sentences go, this one is, uh, probably a pretty accurate representation of what comes after:
You like rock....my cousin is lead guitar for a local rock band...Mettallica...Kurt Hammett.
I showed the response to Matt and Allison.
Allison's favorite part was this:
Into alot of long erotic body contact, roleplay, BJ,JO,69,massages,and even friendships cool .
About which she said:
i especially like that he places the period a space away from the sentence and butted up against the beginning of the new sentence.
Matt focused his love elsewhere:
I also enjoy the fact that he can't spell Metallica when his cousin is in the band.
My favorite part, though, was the picture he sent, which really cemented the knowledge that he either didn't read or didn't understand the key sentence from my ad quoted above. I wasn't going to look at it at all, since it was clear that he wasn't what i was looking for, but Matt and Allison convinced me i should take a peek.
In the picture, he is NAKED but DOESN'T SHOW HIS FACE.
To be perfectly clear, there are lots of good reasons to have such a picture, and there are lots of good reasons to send that to someone you've never met over the Internet. However, if i just want to meet you for coffee, i probably don't need to have verified that your claim of "7"cut" is true, and i probably really don't need to have thought, "Wait... well... maybe when it's hard...".
A couple more encouraging replies arrived after this, and i don't know what any of these guys' dicks look like.
Yet.
[1] This is a psuedo-random sampling. Personals are only up for seven days, so those links probably don't work anymore. The titles are all real, though, baby.
K&S is the second largest rental management company in Berkeley[1]. They are also, apparently, largely comprised of fucking idiots. Every single time i have interacted with someone from K&S, they have fucked something up. Every time. Even Microsoft and the IRS get things right some of the time.
The fun began in July, when my landlady decided she didn't want to deal with the rigors of managing the building herself, and contracted K&S to take over. Around the same time, former roommate Alex moved back in with me[2]. Alex was still on the lease, and in fact, i still owed him $750 for his share of the deposit, which he'd kindly never asked me to give him back.
K&S handled the situation with characteristic aplomb, and directed former roommate Alex to fill out an application to move in. They then directed me to fill out an application to continue living in the apartment in which i still lived. They also wanted us to pay them a $60 processing fee for the privilege of them running credit checks against us.
I was in South America for most of July and August. Shortly after my return, K&S threatened to evict us for not having paid our rent. A perusal of my bank account showed, however, that they cashed my check for half that month's rent. They evidently decided not to cash Alex's half, even though both checks were delivered in the same envelope, and then decided that threatening to throw us out was the best way to handle the situation.
After that was straightened out, we had a quiet period for a couple months, until Alex decided to move out, thus providing me the impetus to move. We declared our 30 days notice and started in on moving out. Alex was going to Europe over Christmas, and would be evacuating before he left. I was going to San Diego and Oregon, and would deal with moving the absurd amount of junk i'd collected over the intervening years in the week after New Year's.
One outstanding question about our move out was what we had to do as far as cleaning. I'd been in the apartment for four and a half years, so there was a significant amount of wear and tear. The biggest question was our nasty-ass carpet. It had the requisite stains of a college apartment, and had been mushed into nothingness in the high traffic areas. We thought a sensible landlord would probably replace the carpet, or at least have it cleaned. Alex called our friends at K&S, and spoke to someone who said that the maintenance person wasn't there, but that they usually did have the carpets cleaned. Foolishly trusting an employee of K&S as a reasonable representative of the interests and policies of her employer, we checked "clean carpet" off the todo list.
Three weeks later, as Alex was eating schnitzel in the Alps, i scheduled a preliminary walkthrough of the apartment with the building manager. One of the first things he told me upon arriving at the apartment was that we'd have to have the carpets cleaned -- professionally -- and provide them a receipt, otherwise they'd charge us for the carpet cleaning. It was not sufficient for me to rent a steam cleaner and do it myself. This was Friday, three days before my move-out day. I called around that afternoon but couldn't find anyone who could do the cleaning by Monday, so i was at K&S's mercy to have the carpet cleaning done[3].
Move out day arrived, and i spent the morning packing up the last detritus, cleaning the last obviously dirty things, and driving full-to-the-brim Isa to the lovely K&S offices in Albany before waving my final good-bye-as-a-resident to Berkeley and going to a day of being swamped at work. I showed up in the K&S office, filled out the final move-out paperwork, and gave them my key.
"Do you have the other key?"
"No. My roommate must have it, and he's out of the country."
"Well we can't mark you off as having left the apartment until we have both the keys."
"You think i'm going to give you the key and tell you i left and then just keep living there?"
Further discussion ensued, during which they expressed concern that if i didn't give them back both keys, they would have to change the locks -- and charge me $50.
"You don't change the locks anyway?"
"Not usually, no."
"But i made copies of the keys so that my friends would have them if i got locked out. You can't know how many of those i made."
A guy in the back, to whom i had not spoken before and to whom i was not talking then, interjected, "The keys say 'DO NOT DUPLICATE'".
"Uh, no they don't."
He didn't reply.
The receptionist i was talking to went and fetched the manager, who provided me no new useful information. So i said i'd see if i'd packed my roommates key (which is probably what happened), and get it to them later.
Fortunately, i hadn't collected the spare key i'd given Dave and Viv, so i got Benjy to fetch that key, make a copy -- just in case they remembered what i'd said about making spares for friends --, and return both keys.
Fast forward a couple weeks with my debts mounting and my deposit check still missing. I called after it, and they told me they'd sent it to the forwarding address i'd given them.
"Ok. Can you tell me how much it's for?" i asked, since i expected them to fuck me on the carpet cleaning and wanted to argue about it earlier rather than later.
"I don't know, and our accounts payable person is out today."
"Ok, can you have your accounts payable person call me?"
"Sure."
She never called.
The next week there was a message on my answering machine, saying that they'd attempted to mail the check to me, but that it had been returned. She then proceeded to read me the address they have for me.
They sent it to my new address, with my old apartment number.
Now lest you think this is the fault of my awful handwriting, i will reveal that i now live in apartment C-as-in-cat, whereas i used to live in apartment D-as-in-dog. There are a few ways to make a C into a D, but they involve a completely extraneous line and, in at least one case, a 180 degree rotation OR a flip across the y-axis.
Also, i don't really understand how the denizens of $NEW_ADDRESS #D could receive mail for $NEW_ADDRESS #C and think that the easiest way to rectify the situation is to send it back to the fucking post office. But i can't blame that on K&S. Probably.
So i call K&S again, and again give them my address, and i make the receptionist read it back to me. This is good, because she has helpfully changed some digits in the phone number i just gave her. After that's squared away, i again ask if she can tell me how much the check is for.
"No, we don't know that yet."
"You don't know that yet? You mailed me the check but you don't know how much it's for?" i ask, incredulous, which sets Benjy to chuckling in the next cube over.
"No, i mean, i don't know."
"Ok. Can you have your accounts payable person call me?"
"Sure."
She never called.
I finally got the check over this past weekend. They returned all but $100 of the deposit, which was more than i thought i was going to get, since the building manager quoted me $150 for having them do the carpet cleaning. They also noted that they'd changed the locks. Goddammit.
The check was also made out to both Alex and i. Now i guess this makes sense, but it of course led to this question from the bank teller when i attempted to cash the check today:
"Do you and Alex have a joint account?"
Alex is back in Massachusetts, so i got to call K&S again to ask how we could deal with this. The woman i spoke with (i think it was the elusive accounts payable lady) said she wasn't sure what she could do, but that she'd have her manager call me.
It's now two days later.
He hasn't called.
[1] Reddy Realty, whose patriarch, Balireddy Lakireddy, was charged for the death of a teenaged sex slave he brought over from India who died in one of his apartments due to some kind of heating/ventilation malfunctions, is the largest. They own Pasand on Shattuck. If you eat at Pasand, you are supporting sex slavery (the bad kind).
[2] Which was convenient, as he and others pointed out, because i wouldn't even have to change the answering machine message that i'd neglected to change in the intervening two years since he'd moved out, skiddly-bop-ba-dow.
[3] I also couldn't find anyone at work with an answer to the question, "Hey, what's a reputable carpet cleaning company?".
I finally allowed myself to get dragged to see Lost in Translation on Saturday. I had somehow managed to not know anything about it, except that everyone i know who saw it said it was great. They were not wrong. Bill Murray is just so fucking good.
Over dinner at Sliders, i expressed surprise that Bill hasn't won an Oscar. Allison wondered what roles he'd been in that would warrant an Oscar, and while i seriously suggested Rushmore, i would rather if he'd received one for his work in Kingpin.
Lost in Translation was playing as a double feature we didn't know about with 21 Grams. It having been a long time since any of us had seen a double feature offered, Matt asked the ticket seller woman what the deal was.
"Yes. It's a double feature with 21 Grams," Raechelle replied.
"Oh. Thanks," Matt replied.
"That was helpful," Allison and i agreed.
21 Grams was interesting, but i was waiting desperately for it to end in the last half-hour. The fluid approach to time undertaken by the film assured that we already knew what was going to happen, but getting to that final scene took forever.
Allison desribed the movie as "a little too fraught with meaning", and while i initially thought something snotty, i think she's right. The symbolism and themes were interesting, well-done, and novelly developed. The three intertwined male principals, for example, were all played by actors who looked similar. The hypocritical Christian renounces Christ even as he is surrounded by people who sacrifice themselves to save him. But ultimately, these themes take too long to work themselves out, and the plot and characters can't quite support the burden for long enough, creating the very slow-moving last quarter.
This morning, while waiting for Deion Sanders and Boomer Esiason to shut up and let the Super Bowl go on, Matt and i watched Spirited Away. It was also fantastic. Apart from being very colorful and pretty, i liked the handling of the movie's morals. Standard fairy tale stuff (hard work, kindness, and love are rewarded), but woven into the texture of the movie, rather than stuck on at the end or sticking out of the fabric painfully and conspicuously.
The net result of Lost in Translation and Spirited Away was that my desire to go to Japan was strongly re-awakened.
It also reminded me that my fawning adoration of foreign languages i don't understand isn't limited to Spanish. I was really excited by the small snippets of Japanses conversation i could pick out (the director said "look at the camera" and "there's not time"!!!) -- at least as excited as i am by the medium snippets of Spanish i can pick out of Edward Tijeramanos or Cien Mexiicanos Dijeron or whatever.