Two incidents of amazing absent-mindedness I wish to document for the day.
Number One. I leave my car parked & running with the keys locked inside, started to walk off even. Thankfully, Yun was with me & she left the passenger side open. She got a big hug for being so careless.
Number Two. I am getting ready for bed & see in the mirror that I missed a belt loop. It had been like that all day. Worse, it was a belt loop on the front of my pants. What? How?
The line for Fahrenheit 911 nearly stretched out the door, but we went instead to see Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, a Korean movie about a Buddhist monk. We were two of 4 people in the entire theater.
Afterwards I wanted to scream at the masses that got instead sucked into 911, which we will all forget about anyway in a few years. Whereas, in a thousand years, I think this stripped down tale of a Buddhist monk and his cyclic existence will still speak to people. It isn't nearly as exciting as putting on face-paint and waving your private parts defiantly at your enemy, true. But soon enough a new chieftain will take power, and some new instance of tribal warfare will claim your short attention span; some new pair of genitalia will emerge and wave defiantly.
(Well now that you have my take on politics...)
Then again you have Howard Schumann's review of this movie which is none too favorable, calling it "labored" and "inauthentic." Well maybe so; seems to me he's probably just pissed off because this is Buddhism for the masses & is an affront to some perceived personal expertise of his on the subject. Demanding that the director himself be Buddhist...whatever. Thank god he wasn't otherwise he never would have made the movie. And, you never would have had the chance to shoot it down Mr. I-have-reviewed-262-movies-thus-far-smarty-pants.
Yeah so there just isn't much time for blogging these days. And besides, not much to blog either. Even though you think there would be: my 30 hr work week does not crowd out my actual life, so I have one right now. Basically it consists of doing something athletic like rock-climbing or frisbee right after work, hanging out with friends until midnight, and then going to bed. While fun I guess there just isn't much extreme experience to document as a result of this regimen.
Alternately, I could start documenting the trite and meaningless observations that abound such as: last night a table of 40 something men got drunk next to us & started talking business & finance loudly. Apparently, "strategic equity" is something you get really psyched about at the age of 40. And your portfolio. And ways you've found to rip off the IRS. Please dear reader--if you care about me--kill me if I start to become so lame & so evil.
Heck, kill me now. Already I'm heading in that direction--my job is slowly becoming one of strategizing & making decisions--and I find it kind of fun. E.g. what bugs to fix & features to add that will gain us the most end users, or avoid bad PR from certain naysayers. This is where the cancer starts...then someday you wake up and realize your job is to stand god-like (mickey mouse like?) on top of a mountain, waving your hands & making decisions. The artist in you weeps; you create nothing.
If you aren't already please start reading Brennen's weblog instead of mine. Especially for entries like this one.
Yeah, Japanese guys singing karaoke tonight at Wasabi. Dudes, that really rocked my face off. I have no idea what any of it meant although I assume it had something to do with mountains, since every video began with Mt. Fuji or something like it.
On a related note, I wish I was cool enough to be the chode who paraded around bare-chested long-haired in the Hotel California video...god, the porn industry must be using these karaoke videos as a filter.
Tonight we went to the Saltdogs game--Yun's first baseball game ever. And she also met Jake for the first time.
After about three minutes in the car she turns to Jake & tells him he & I are very different...he's quieter, and shy. This is of course ridiculous nonsense & to prove it Jake leans on the horn for a few blocks screaming stuff out the window. Yun instantly gets really embarassed, as she will be countless other times that night when we make her stand up and sing "take me out the the ballgame" or Jake does the chicken dance or we both leapfrog up a hill.
Dawn, Jake's girlfriend & the Saltdogs mascot, comes over in her giant dog suit at one point. Of course we wrestle around and Yun gets pictures with her etc. Jake & I, still, are sort of in denial that it's really Dawn in there, it just seems like a separate big fuzzy entity. I'm sure it's a lot weirder for him. Anyway.
As I'm trying to explain the rules to her I realize that baseball is a baroque sport...so many special rules and cases and weird terms for things. The "batter" walks up to "the plate" for his "at-bat." The "pitcher" throws the ball to him, if it's a good one it's called a "strike," otherwise it's a "ball" (what? the ball is sometimes a ball?). Three strikes and you're "out," four balls and you're "walked." I think if you aren't a native English speaker none of this is going to make any sense to you. I mean, try to imagine that you don't know any of the English words for all these things, or maybe that you know them but from other contexts, and are listening to me Alan Grow try to explain the game to you...
Saturday I'm awakened at noon when lightning hits the house next door. I am groggy & out of it but manage to make a few phone calls and then go back to sleep, waking up at 4:30 that afternoon. The weather is crazy--tornados etc.--so our camping plans are shot. Instead Jake & I sit out on his porch in the heart of suburbia and jam, while black clouds roll in and rain pours down.
Oh yeah I have a bass guitar now. It's an amazingly easy instrument to just pick up & start playing, until you want to hit something more than root I guess. Am taking lessons from Craig, Mark & Brian's little brother and an awesome bass guitar player, besides being a fellow frisbee player.
One of the strangest and most amazing sunsets later that night. For about a half hour, the sun glared orange from between a black cloud blanket and the horizon. Kind of like that apocalyptic afternoon I was in the belltower in Munich. Only this time, at the other end of the sky, a perfect double rainbow formed, the brightest and biggest rainbow I've ever seen in my life.
We (Mark Henry Jeff and I) decide to go up to Omaha for the night and hit a club. We touch down at a place called the Cactus Cafe, which is decidedly not our kind of joint. It is midnight. Uninspired rap interleaved with 80s hits. There are no available chicks left really, but there's this one super cute chick who looks a bit like Jodie Foster.
I'm too chicken to go talk to her. What the hell happened to me since last summer? Use it or lose it I guess. Anyhow Mark pulls a cool move and starts talking to another chick, asks her for advice on how to introduce himself to Jodie Foster, and once he gets Jodie Foster's ear he starts telling her about me. "My friend's really shy etc." He's pointing across the club at me. Mostly, I'm cowering, because the situation is not one a 23 year old man should ever find himself in. Maybe if you're 14 and you just got passed you one of those do-you-like-me-yes-no-maybe notes.
Nothing of course came of the subsequent introduction except that Mark got 5 points up on me. Then the 4 of us went to the boats and all won money. At three in the morning we started back for Lincoln.
Jeff, who didn't drink much but was somehow trashed, started puking. Seems like every 5 or 10 minutes we were stopping on the interstate shoulder for him to puke in the ditch. The trip was dragging on interminably: normally it takes about 45 minutes to get from Omaha to Lincoln, and we'd already been on the road an hour and a half. Then a cop pulls up behind us, lights flashing, spotlights trained on Mark as he held Jeff, tells them to stay away from the car.
Because, what would a night of fun without the cops be like?
After a cursory survey of the ditch situation she walks up to Henry, who's driving, and decides she wants to put him through the test. He had had 2 drinks 5 hours ago & we all knew he was fine. But the whole thing adds an extra half hour of sitting around in suspense--and I'm getting madder & madder by the minute.
It's just too ridiculous to me. I see too much of cops these days--nothing ever transpires, because nothing really wrong is ever going on--and they're always on a mission not to help & serve but to bust. There's a particular mindset that goes along with these random exercises of authority, and I think this mindset can be a pretty sick one.
I'm saying this stuff as we drive back to Lincoln. The sun is rising. At 5:30 in the morning I finally get back to my car at Mark's place, and the argument between Mark & I is getting heated. Finally I have an outburst, jump in my car and peel off angry. I wake up that afternoon and wonder, now what the heck was all that about? Words too cold to the heated deed breath gives I guess, I seem to have forgotten all my righteous rage. The intensity of feeling that had brought me back to life, for once, was extinguished, and I was again in my usual dreamlike state.
Blaring from the ice cream truck today, as it drove through the mostly black neighborhood up the street from us: "Mammy's little baby loves shotenin, shotenin, mammy's little baby loves shotenin bread." Something not right here.