Sunburnt and Sleepdeprived

And a little depressed. More than anything else, I attribute it to sleep deprivation.

I was on the beach, playing in an Ultimate Frisbee* tournament this weekend. I played a lot on Saturday and we won all three of our games. (Please note that there is no actual correlation between these two facts.) Today I played only a couple of points per game, and we won one and lost two. The first game we lost, we were overwhelmingly outclassed. The second game, we definitely could have won for third place. Instead, we took fourth.

Fourth place of twenty-four teams is pretty darned respectable. In fact, I think it's the best placing I've ever reached that I substantially participated in. And the weather was great today, so great that I went for a dip in the ocean. Chilly at first, but totally swimmable. If I think about it objectively, it's fantastic, and I should be celebrating.

Beach pickup in FL in February. I'm in a long sleeved white top and shades.

Would I have been in a better mood if we had gotten third place? Maybe. It certainly feels better to end with a win than a loss, even if it's a win that puts you in 15th instead of 16th place. But I still probably wouldn't be in a celebratory mood.

The fundamental problem, I think, was this: I had to wake up at 5:30 for two days in a row. I go to sleep around midnight and usually wake up between 7 and 7:30.

Saturday was fine, but today I...

• Played less but got tired more quickly. Less stamina.
• Didn't have enough time to recover from the previous day, so muscles were tense and sore.
• Made poor decisions on the field.
• Was too lazy to properly apply suntan lotion to legs and re-apply it on face and arms. Thus, sunburn.
• Also too lazy to take advantage of some of the fun side events. (At least I went swimming. There were fish! About three or four of them, a foot long, in water 3-4 feet deep.)
• Was taciturn, felt irritable.
• Too tired to actually do anything, but not sleepy.
• Just generally felt like crap!

Actually, most of these things were true Saturday too, but they were even more pronounced today.

Next time, 

I need to think a bit more proactively about finding a place to stay near the tournament rather than taking the train two hours each way. I have a friend who lives nearby the beach who I probably could have crashed with. And I should keep couchsurfing in mind as well.

Otherwise I'm just wasting a good time.

The name of the team involves a pun
which I really don't feel like explaining here.

*Have I mentioned that "frisbee" being trademarked annoys the hell out of me? Other sports based on the names of their equipment (pretty much anything ending in 'ball') don't have this problem.

Los Angeles Downtown - Smalltown, USA?

At around 3PM the Starbucks in California Plaza is overrun.

It seemed like there were a lot of Deloitte and Touche folks, but there were plenty of folks who were not so tagged. Regardless, the members of this prodigious line of people were individually addressed by name by the baristas, who go on to inquire if they would like their regular beverage. Granted, these people probably come every single day. But now it's an hour after I first got here and the line has maintained a constant length, which potentially says interesting things about the average random distribution of coffee breakers throughout the afternoon, but is also a testament to Starbucks' processing power.

I felt like I was mucking up the gears of a well-oiled machine, a solitary, silent outsider, adding a longer seek time to the process in order to acquire my name and order.

At the corner of 2nd and Main,

The Burrata Pie: Arugula, hazelnuts, tomato sauce, burrata cheese.

Eating outside at Pitfire Pizza (something I have had the infinite pleasure of doing twice), I felt like I was at the corner of 2nd and Main in a town one ten-thousandth the size.

People walking by on the sidewalk called out to friends passing by in cars, who waved back.

People enjoying their meals greeted passerby, exchanging a few words before they moved on to their destination, whether lunch or post-lunch.

Police officers strolled by chatting with civilians.

And there were so many more bicycles than I had expected for the center of one of the most famously sprawling urban areas in the world.

I'm singin' on the bus

A final anecdote.

Driving through downtown one morning, as my host was preparing to drop me off at a café where I would work that day, a singular noise penetrated the car as a bus pulled up just behind us.

"Huh. He's singing."

I: "What?"

"The bus driver's singing."

"What?"

"Roll down your window."

I rolled. We listened, speechless, waiting for the light to turn.

Finally, I asked, "Is his window open?"

"No, he's using the loudspeaker."

The light turned, and so did we. I watched the bus go past us, and sure enough, there he was, a rotund fellow, cradling the mike in his left hand, piloting with his right, joyfully belting out some tune. I wish I knew what he had been singing.

Not possessing a good ear for these things, I have no way of reporting on the quality of his performance. But it is enough for me that there was one in the first place.


Maybe my casual-interaction-with-strangers muscle 
(medical term: 'anterior smalltalkoids') has atrophied.  

Perhaps this post is more revelatory of how garbled my image of what a small town is. Or of the groove my mind has worn itself into living in Tokyo. Singing and dancing in the streets - have I been watching  musicals? Still, my expectations of downtown were of people corralled into office buildings and shopping malls, exclusively car traffic, no social interactions or kindness, exhausted and destitute bodies curled up in doorways. Not that there aren't homeless, but they somehow coexist (though not without friction) with a multitude of other groups out and about on sidewalks, public places, and outdoor cafés.

Eating The East Bay

Soundtrack: eels - Saturday Morning

There was a project.

This project was to consume three delicious east bay meals: breakfast at Ole's, lunch at Chez Panisse, dinner at the Blue Nile. Inevitably, things did not go according to plan.

Instead, we ended up eating pretty much anything and everything we could cram into our greedy little gullets.

We woke early to depart for our first stop: Ole's in Alameda.

Delicious waffles topped with fresh strawberries and chopped nuts.
Eggs, hash browns, linguiça.

We had time before our next appointment, which was at Chez Panisse. Getting a reservation there on short notice was nothing short of miraculous.

Serendipitously, there was a vintage car show, ranging from the venerable Model T to the 60s.

Serious doubts were expressed about the concept of a $100 prix fixe meal, but we enjoyed the Chez Panisse café. D had rigatoni, R had calamari and mussels, and I had lamb. All of which were great, but I think what really set Chez P apart was the fantastic sauces. Don't eat your bread right away when it comes - wait for your food, then soak up some sauce.

What phallic tower?

Then we strolled around Berkeley, tossing a frisbee around in old haunts: Memorial Glade, Willard Park, People's Park. The exercise made us feel justified in picking up a picnic snack of salami, cheese, and hot pumpkin soup in the middle of the afternoon.

Once it got dark, we headed back up Northside to pick up some delicious pizzas for the next day's pizza party. Which was a good time. Friends old and new shared in the yum, and they were introduced to the joy of ultimate frisbee.

Roasted potato and onion with Gruyere and
mozzarella cheese topped with fresh mixed herbs
and garlic olive oil.

When I look at Pizza Hut's 'Idaho Special' in Japan I shudder in horror, but if Cheeseboard decides it wants to put potatoes on its pizza today, well, In Cheeseboard We Trust. And since it is Cheeseboard, they gave us bonus slices to go with our half- baked pizzas. Maybe we could have just tucked those fresh, steaming, tantalizingly odoriferous slices into the boxes to eat the next day. And maybe pigs can really have torrid affairs with frogs - while flying.

It is possible that cheese and bread and garlic and potatoes may have spoiled our appetite a tad. This brought us up to a grand total of four meals, and we still had to meet my friend T for dinner.

We had time before dinner, so we drove through the Solano tunnel. I thought it would be nice to get a night view of the bay, so we picked a road which happened to literally be straight up the hill, because switchbacks are for weaklings. After nearly killing Dunk's car, we made it up to the top, to a place where there was no view whatsoever.

There was a decent view and venison (did not eat - sad) on the way down, at least.

Finally, dinner. Dinner was to be Ethiopian food, but the Blue Nile has apparently closed. I think they had been around for a long time, too. Fortunately, there was another Ethiopian restaurant - Finfine - right across the street. It was in a small alcove where we usually went for Korean barbecue and fantasized about going to fondue (though we always ended up getting distracted by KBBQ).

Ten years later, perhaps our willpower was greater, because we resisted the magnetic pull of our old favorite and had a light meal at the Ethiopian place. Salmon and lamb. The proprietor was kind of annoyed because we ordered two portions for four people, but after all we had eaten so far, we were well satisfied.

Impressed by the triumph of willpower and wisdom for meal number five? Don't be. In explaining to T (a recent arrival to Berkistan) the local hot spots, Fenton's Creamery was mentioned.

Then there was nothing for it but to go to Fenton's.

At Fenton's, you might imagine that we would continue the trend of small portions and sharing.

You would be grossly wrong.

There were two of these.

On Saturday, the Eighth of October, 2011, the three of us ate breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack, a pre-dinner slice of pizza, dinner, and then the alpha and the omega of desserts.

Good thing we got a lot of exercise that day and the next.

When in Rome, Do as the Vaticans Do: October 17, 2006

Your imagination will have to provide
the organ music and the choir chanting
to the glory of god.

Continuing the recycling of old posts from a 2006 cruise with my parents, but now with 100% more snarky comments!

Yeah, about the pictures? I lied. Didn’t have any time in the morning and forgot my camera in the rush to get to the train. I’ll take them tomorrow. In the meantime, my dad took some pictures, which I will eventually obtain.

This has become a trend. I tend to let people with more megapixels do the photography. Then I get copies of the pictures, edit them, and give them meaning, like here. So if you've promised me pictures, and haven't given them to me yet? I'm coming for you. Oh, and I hate getting pictures off Facebook. They're low quality and fb completely destroys the metadata.

It’s just a 20-minute ride in, if that, to the station right by the Vatican. There’s plenty of trains, they come reasonably often, they’re fast (top speed I saw was 140 kph, around 90 mph), and they’re well-used by commuters. Didn’t get a chance to ride the subway or muni buses, though we did take one of those bus tours, which was not only pretty damn good but also could serve as a convenient day pass (your ticket is valid for 24 hours).

90mph, eh? How about that. Hey, CalTrain? BART? Yeah, that's right you friggin' underperformers, I'm looking at you.

Piazza San Pietro

The bus tour drove by a huge amount of interesting spots, and there was narration, though I couldn’t understand or wasn’t paying much attention most of the time. It was hard to connect the spoken narration with what I was seeing, without someone pointing at what the hell they were talking about.

Oh, god, History! Why? And you were just an innocent bystander... how tragic, to die in a drive-by sightseeing!

"We repel terrorist cavalry charges with
our pikes and garish outfits!"

Before the bus tour, though, we went through the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. 

The line for the Sistine Chapel was like a treadmill. Basically, at the back of the line, some tour group assistant would recruit you to be part of a tour group with the promise that the group was way up ahead in the line.

So then you’d go way up ahead in the line, cutting ahead of hundreds and hundreds of people, and you’d join a group. Except, here’s the thing - all those other people at the back of the line, and the new people who arrive, are also being recruited.

Not big believers in blank spaces.

The end result was that though you had jumped ahead, there were tons of other people jumping ahead of you. After a while, you find yourself back at the back of the line hoping another tour group will recruit you, and round and round you go.

This is, of course, highly but not totally exaggerated.

Anyway, nice city.

Pizza Party Sunday October 9th at Noon.

Hello Bay Area Friends!

Many of you are refugees from the embattled municipality of Berkistan.

Some of you are not. But even so, you may have heard murmurs of the legendary collectively-owned eatery. Maybe rumors of their exceedingly fine gourmet ingredients have reached you through the tendrils of the (organic) grapevine. Perhaps you've overheard former wild-eyed hippies holding forth on how Bezerkeley, back in their day, was a hotbed of activism, even in food, and how the co-op and Chez Panisse led the charge for orgasmically delicious food everywhere, or at least in the place that came to be known as the Gourmet Ghetto.

photo credit: keenduck on flickr

They're called the Cheeseboard Collective. You may have heard of their pizza.

Our phallic tower is bigger than yours.
That's why you don't get Cheeseboard.

That's right, folks, we're making the fraught, eldritch, as-yet-unconnected by BART journey up to Berkeley, and we're coming back down with an epic stack of succulent Cheeseboard pizzas.

We deal with the:

• Death of Independent Bookstores
• Damn Dirty Hippies
• Absence of Nuclei
• Odors of Patchouli, Pot and Poop
• College Kids, and their
• Sense of Entitlement
• Also, They're Ten Years Younger Than You
• Shit! Well, Back in MY Day...

so you don't have to!



Your intrepid Pizza Retrieval Team:

Dunk

Tony

RGL-22

You should show up at:

photo credit:
ingridtaylar on flickr

The Dunkenpad* - with the possibility of sidling over to Cupertino Memorial Park next door, weather and logistics permitting - at 12:00 PM on Sunday, October 9th. But leave your pistols at home.

Instead of your pistols, you should bring:

$5 for the pizza, unless you'd like to gorge yourself in a fit of freshman 15 nostalgia (Highly endorsed! It's Cheeseboard, so it's, like, healthy. More so than West Coast's artery-clogging cheesy stix, anyway. Mmmm.) in which case we'll accept 10 bucks. Additional contributions of beverages - alcoholic and not - as well as alternative, non-pizza food, are very welcome.

Respond Soon Very Pleasure to
Tony at aweiss42@gmail.com or Dunk at rincewind@mac.com
so we can adjust for the optimal person to pizza ratio.

*my car is still there on street view! if only. *a single, lonesome tear falls*

Fregene: October 16, 2006

Part two of the exciting walk on the wild side - a stroll through my mind for two weeks that I spent on a boat in the Mediterranean. Actually, it's part three, but part two was so devastatingly boring that I've done you a favor by skipping it. To give you an idea, it was about waiting at the airport to be picked up. See? We're all better off.

It’s the name of the city I’m in. It’s, maybe, a half hour out of Rome? Not even that.

It’s a little town, by the beach. There’s several bed & breakfasts around, and the advertising on the street for local restaurants suggests that tourism is reasonably significant.

I probably don't need to say this, but the food was good. It's Italy, right? If I could only pick one country's cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it'd be a toss-up between Italy and Japan.

Now, though, it’s pretty quiet. The weather’s pretty decent, though - I was able to get away with just wearing a t-shirt during the day.

I’m in Europe. People are speaking Italian on the street. It still hasn’t sunk in yet, though. Unfortunately, my Italian is nonexistent - I can understand it pretty well, but when I try to form sentences in my head they’re some bastard mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, and even Japanese. I don’t even bother trying to speak it.

The next time I was in Italy, I found Italian to be really easy. Getting languages mixed up is still a problem, though: last year I had an Argentine visitor. I spoke with her in Spanish just fine - up until, as part of the conversation, I pointed to a map and said "Shibuya." The next sentence came out in Japanese. I paused, and tried to start again. Still Japanese. I apologized, shut the hell up, and had to take a few deep breaths before I could get back to Spanish. 

Hopefully I get more comfortable with it over the next week, so I can get around in Venice and maybe Torino after the cruise. Greek is a lost cause. French, well, I should be able to get by with some combination of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I won’t be there for long anyway.

Ended up not going to Torino. I had met a super hot girl who was from there. I barely knew her, but hey, a boy can dream right?

I’m writing this from the front patio of this 2-bedroom house that we’re staying in for 2 nights. It’s hideously nice. The garden is small, but it’s full of all kinds of plants and fruit trees. Grapevines are growing above my head. I’ll take pictures in the morning, I suppose.

I'm going to post this for now, and update it with pictures later. I'm doing some major reorganization of my photos now that I've got better hardware, so finding appropriate pictures will be easier. But I want to get a post up. But I've been spending time tagging rather than selecting pictures. Meh. 

Blog archaeology.

Before the dawn of time

Around October of 2006 I obtained my very first Mac.

Well, my only Mac. I'm still using it. It's rapidly approaching the point where I will need a new one, but that's another story.

Precambrian and Cambrian posts

With that new computer, I resolved to explore the myriad new apps that I was confronted with. I thought it would be pretty nifty to experiment with iWeb and write a blog. I didn't want any part of MobileMe, though, which complicated things. So I just wrote things up and didn't bother to publish them.

Shortly thereafter, I went on a cruise with my parents. There wasn't much to do on the ship except read and write. I wrote a travel blog, and put it online, writing posts in iWeb and Pages and then copying and pasting into a crummy web interface. The workflow was terrible, but still, nothing better to do. Which helps explain why I stopped writing shortly after the cruise ended. (Read: I once again had inexpensive internet access.)

Meteorite impact

Does anybody remember blogging sites from 2006? I know for sure I didn't post on livejournal, xanga, blogger, or myspace. But I can't recall the name of the site that hosted the blog. I can't find any emails or bookmarks relating to it. I've tried searching Google for unique phrases from the posts, to no avail.

I never told anyone about the blog, either, so it is irrevocably lost in the space between the Interwebs.

Digging up fossils

"How do you remember unique phrases from the posts?" you ask.

I have copies of what I believe are all the posts, in iWeb, Pages, or both. Also, I do remember that I hosted the pictures on photobucket, and there they have sat.

Now, that blog is quite distinct from this blog, because I've actually told a non-zero number of people about this one. Also, I'm still writing. Partly due to improved workflow - I still like using Blogsy to write on the go, though today I'm at the computer. But also partly because I'm getting better about these things.

To the museum

At last, we arrive at the point, or at the very least, a point.

I plan to restore the old blog posts, and add them to this blog. But it'll be a director's cut, with additional photos, video, and commentary as suits my whims.

Paintball

During my visit to the Philippines, I had the opportunity to try out paintball for the first time.

It's not how big the paintball gun is, it's how you use it.

It was fantastically cheap. It only cost 400 pesos, for renting the gear and 40 pellets. That's about $10.

The battleground was the side of a hill in a pine forest, with the addition of some wooden planks and stacks of tires to provide additional cover.

In action

It was two on two, and we were sent to the top of the hill, while our opponents started below. I figured this gave us a pretty good tactical advantage. However, instead of sticking to our fortified position, I wanted to move around and try to come up with some fancy tactics. Imagining my partner would move laterally and help me pin down one of our opponents who was advancing, I tried to flank him and immediately got myself pinned down behind a tree instead. My partner (perhaps wisely) stayed safe behind a wide fortification and didn't budge.

The rule was, you were in till you ran out of pellets, regardless of how riddled with holes you were. So once the initial shuffling around was done, it basically degenerated into a stalemate, where you would poke your head out, take a couple of shots, and then duck back away, till our ammo was gone. I could have said to hell with it and taken a few hits in exchange for finding a better position, since there was no consequence to getting hit, but the visceral fear of getting shot was strong enough that I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Ouch.

Not that I didn't get shot. My left eye and shoulder were hit, so I was definitely quite dead. The head shot was pretty sobering, and racked up the adrenaline several notches.

My partner was shot in the head - just above his face mask, which left a shockingly large red welt for a few days. One of our opponents was hit in the head and body. The other, I don't recall.

Weary wounded warriors

Next time, I want to do some target shooting first, to get a better feel for a paintball gun's range and aim.

Clearer sets of rules seem like they would be interesting. Not to mention they would help avoid the deadlock we hit and clarify victory or defeat. But having to leave the game early due to being eliminated is no fun either. Maybe some sort of rule where you had to return to a safe zone before you could rejoin the battle. Basically, respawning.

Adding more rules and adjudication would probably break up the adrenaline and tension, though.

The fascinating thing about video games is that all of that can be handled automatically, permitting smooth play despite extremely complex rule systems.

I looked to see if there were paintball video games available. (A video game simulation of a game which is a simulation of war?) The only one I found was way too realistic to be fun.

Something bright, colorful, and arcade-y, with paint splashing wildly everywhere, seems a lot more appealing to me than trying to compete directly with drab and hyper-realistic shooters, which have explosions. The lack of viscera and death should make it accessible to all ages.

Maybe an augmented reality game? M did mention technology to map the camera view to a 3-d space.

Road Trip: The World

"You're making that face again," R said.

The first time I made that face was when I heard that R, J, and E were going to be road tripping in a Japanese car - one made in Japan, with the driver's side on the right.

I was making it now because I had just understood that the starting point of their drive was Vladivostok, on Russia's eastern coast.

"Because the Trans-Siberian Railway is for pussies?" I asked.

He nodded. "We don't need that kind of luxury. We'll be camping, mostly, across Siberia and the tundra and everywhere else."

Later, I asked about the southern hemisphere. "I thought driving around the world was good enough," he declared defensively. Apparently, I wasn't the first one to ask. I hastily explained that no criticism was implied. If they were driving across Siberia, who knows? Maybe they were driving across the Sahara and through the Amazon, too.

To sum up the trip in three sentences:

Go to Japan and buy a cheap used car. Drive it across the Eurasian continent. Then drive it across North America.

Or in one sentence:

Drive across the northern hemisphere with the steering wheel on the right side.

I was making a face because I thought they were fucking insane.

I was also making a face because I thought it was fucking fantastic.

The most exciting sight on I-15.

Road trips are great. I enjoyed crossing the U.S. twice in 2004, even on a limited, rushed schedule. When I had the time to do it properly in 2007 - two weeks instead of less than one - it was one of the best trips I had ever taken. With more time, we could take state roads instead of interstates, and spend time at every stop instead of only sleeping and then moving on.

On state roads, everything is awesome.

So if a road trip for one week is good, and two weeks is great, it follows that six months would be amazing.

Unless, of course, it turns out there's a sweet spot somewhere between rushing frantically from one place to the next and ennui, group tension, cabin fever, murder and cannibalism.

I can think of a few suggestions for staying sane on an extended trip.

Have a goal:

I don't know about you, but six months without something to do sounds excruciating. I'm planning a ten-day trip to the Philippines and even that long without something to procrastinate about would make me pretty uncomfortable. Come up with something to work on. It could be a document of the trip, whether in words, sounds, images, or video. It could be a project that you've just never had the free time for till now. Obviously, it'd have to be something portable. You don't want to lug around a two-ton block of marble.

Take a vacation from tripping:

Periodically take a day or two, or even a week, off from traveling every once in a while. Find a cheap place where you can hole up and catch up with what's going on back home. Work on your project. Sunbathe, chill out with a book, watch movies all day long. Take a break from sightseeing, going from one place to another, meeting new people, the works. It's hard to keep the good times rolling indefinitely. After your vacation vacation, you'll face the world with renewed enthusiasm.

Take some time off from your companions:

totes sole m8s 4eva!

Who knows, you might be soul mates that want to see exactly the same museums, the same pubs, the same sights. Go at different times anyway. Especially to museums or art galleries, everybody has a different pace. If you're based in the same city for a while, plan some days to pursue your own interests. Or go separate ways and meet up in a city further down the road. Absence makes the heart less murderous, reducing the festering resentment of the million little quirks you're subjected to on a daily basis.

If (when, dammit) I get a job here, I won't be able to go on an extended road trip for a while. Even if I don't, it would be pretty hard to justify one. So I guess I'm just envious.