Cognitive Jettison

Thinking about starting this up again

2006-09-06T01:11:00.000-07:00

It's almost been a year, but what better time to start writing on the old Cog-Jet than now?

A lot has happened since last I wrote here, in some ways I am a better person, but mostly I just have a better tan than last year at this time. I leave you with some frogtography.

Thanksgiving Pics

2005-11-29T12:09:00.000-08:00

Jeremiah and I bouldering at Lake Tahoe. Pre-Windchill air temp: 22 degrees.

A karate kid moment. Still Lake Tahoe.

It is a mystery how Tahoe gets it to snow only on the trails.

Magic: The Geek Gathering

2005-11-29T11:28:00.000-08:00

An article I wrote for The Oxy Weekly this week.

The Millennium Falcon, an AT-AT walker and a Mr. Potato Head called Darth Tater decorate my apartment. I live with a life-size cutout of Han Solo and Chewbacca, but I knew I would not be the biggest geek in the room last weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center. The upper levels of the geek hierarchy would be dealing damage to each other via (sorry to break it to you) imaginary minions of monsters and sword wielding, spell casting heroes on a quest against the gathering forces of darkness.

These hero types come together once a year at Gen Con, which fantastically stands for Geneva Convention, but refers to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin where they brought together the first group of gamers rather than the international treaty outlining acceptable treatment for prisoners of war.

An aspiring gamer, I made a pilgrimage to the temple of the gaming religion because of an internet add telling me to “Roll my own,” (they were referring to the dice) and my own desire to cultivate the part of me that reads the Star Wars Encyclopedia and plays Star Wars Monopoly on weekends. (I would like to make it clear that I subscribe to the definition of geek referring to someone’s singleminded accomplishment rather than the definition referring to performers biting the heads off of chickens.)

Although I encountered surprisingly few of the 20 sided di used in Dungeons and Dragons, I was more than satisfied with the dedication and over-the-top displays of enthusiasm those in attendance exhibited. Some sported medieval costumes, with thick leather armor covering intricately stitched tunics and the decorative hilt of what was probably a plastic or wooden sword attached proudly to their belt. Others showed off their exact replica storm trooper or Boba Fett costume with blaster and utility belt. Security guard Juanita Cooley told me that Gen Con is one of the few conventions she has worked where the games run 24 hours a day.

The crushing masses of 15 to 35-year- olds, mostly male, ruthlessly utilized both incisors and cuticles to position themselves closest to the bulletin boards displaying the next round match ups of the card game “Marvel Versus.” They were inspiring until I learned that these rushing hoards were competing for a $40,000 grand prize and there was a quarter million in total prize money for this single tournament. (According to two teenage card sharks, those eliminated from the 40k tourney are automatically shunted into a “small-time” tournament with a meager $10,000 cash prize for first place. A card and game shop owner from Tucson told me that there are about 12 players in the United States whose main source of income is prize money.) Many of these gamers come to GenCon for the prizes, turning “Marvel Versus” into a sort of skilled BINGO night for those nursing a comic book superhero fetish.

I encountered the true enthusiasts at the convention in the board game section, recruiting players for a mysterious strategy game called Diplomacy. Apparently I exemplified the two qualities they were looking for in that I was wandering around alone and had no plans for the rest of the day. I had never played the game before and figured those sitting at the table with me must also be beginners. After a 25 minute explanation of the rules, I was thoroughly bored but no closer to understanding game play. Edi Birsan captured it best in his completely inadequate but concise description: “It’s like Risk with no dice”
Basically, seven players represent seven different European countries with roughly equal military strength and form and break alliances with each other in an attempt to take over the continent. There are no individual turns, countries simply confer with each other and write down the orders to their armies, which can be changed once in the spring season of the game and once in the fall.

The game moves at speeds amazingly close to the real changing of the seasons, and I spent most of the hours fighting off hunger and trying to figure out a way to quit without ruining the game for the other six players. I need not have worried. As the game progressed, I learned that Birsan, my recruiter, was currently the number one ranked Diplomacy player in the country, and spent much of his time as a sort of international ambassador of the game in an effort to popularize it overseas. Others around the table were ranked in the top 100 and my early exit only bolstered their standings. A week after the convention I received my ranking- I am second to last, somehow beating out a competitor by one hundredth of a point in two categories. My inner geek has much room for improvement.

I walk the rest of the convention, sitting in on card games, watching would-be gladiators pound each other with foam-covered weapons in an event called Belegarth and take in a surprisingly Lyger-less fantasy art exhibit. The geek within me is feeling sufficiently stimulated when I am nearly trampled by a platoon of pretty girls in army fatigues jogging around the convention. They sound off and bring it on down at the request of their drill sergeant. I am compelled to follow these ladies, but looking around, the tractor beam drawing me in seems to have been deactivated for everyone else. They watch from a distance and avert their eyes to the ground as the girls come within range of possible interaction. I trek back to my car, defeated. There are some things I will not sacrifice to become a true geek.

Things to Look At

2005-11-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

I wish I could remember how to make these hyperlinks, but I can't.

www.dahrjamailiraq.com

A compelling speaker, journalist, and all around bad-ass who has been living in Iraq for 8 months. He did this as an independent journalist, so without any kind of protection, troop convoy or anyone to look for him if he got into trouble.
I haven't checked out the site myself yet but he said he has some stories there and there will be something of his published in The Independent (UK) tomorrow about American war crimes.

Occidental Football made the front page of the LA Times sports section. I know pretty much everyone quoted so I am recommending it.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-oxy9nov09,0,2306210.story?coll=la-home-sports

The Promised Land

2005-11-09T21:25:00.000-08:00

With the stress of midterms and the inherent time commitment of stepping on every leaf that I think may make a satisfying crunching sound as the seasons change, this blog has been neglected. I will attempt to remedy that now. With so many exciting things to write about, it is difficult to know where to begin.
Lets start in Utah, the promised land. I spent last weekend about an hour out of Salt Lake City in a budding metropolis called Logan. I’m not sure how, perhaps it was the roving groups of extremely vertical, the matching sweatshirts, the matching vans or the fact that we were getting over excited and taking pictures of each other in the snow, but the indigenous Logans were able to mark us as out-of-towners immediately. They would eye us suspiciously, as if there was something wrong with us for wanting to visit their town and once they had determined that most of us were not dangerous or liberal, (Logan may be the most conservative place in the world that’s not in Texas) they would approach with a “so where is Occidental, I’ve never heard of it?” (In truth, most of us are liberal but when outsiders hear us joking around with each other they figure we’re too stupid to have a political affiliation. For the most part this is not the case. Although one member of the team made the comment, “I’m not liberal or conservative, I just kick it,” we had a discussion today while we were stretching before practice about the special elections California just had that I wish I could have recorded and sent in to Ah-nuld. Basically we spent our 6 minute stretch naming things he could have done with the $250 million spent on an election that, at least from the rumors I hear, was completely pointless in that none of the measures passed.) We would then explain that Occidental is in California, right outside of downtown LA and they would scrunch up their face and ask why we’re in Logan. “We’re playing Utah State.” They would then ask us if we’re going to win, which we would have to reply, “Probably not, we’re a D-III school and they’re paying us a bunch of money to travel here and get tossed around.” But we didn’t get tossed, in fact, if their best player hadn’t hit a running prayer in my face with one-second left, we would have gone into halftime with a lead. As it was we were down one.
That’s pretty much everything of interest from the Utah trip. We made countless Mormon jokes and one of our players thought he left his ID in the hotel room and thought he was going to have to spend the night in the airport. He was finally allowed on the plane after furnishing a medical card as a form of ID.
I’ll be posting soon about a talk I just went to by Dahr Jamail, a journalist who recently spent 8 months in Iraq and shed some light on the invisible bias and near-impossibility of accurate information coming out of Iraq. (that’s not at all what his talk was about but that’s what I took from it)
If anyone’s curious how I am, I’m relatively healthy, well-fed and surviving a pre-thanksgiving rush of school work that I can only hope will not continue through December and finals. I’ve been writing more for the Oxy Weekly and was encouraged to apply for a contributing-editor position next semester which means that I’ll write something every week or a really big feature every couple weeks and not only get to choose my own stories but get paid for about 1/8th of the time I put into them.
So long from rainy (today) LA.

The Lego Light Box

2005-10-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

I finally got my Lego Light box filled with lights. This has been an ambition of mine since I received the box for my 20th birthday. It now lights up, filling the living room with a friendly red glow of Lego Love. On the table is the updated Lego collection, along with an AT-ST walker and "Darth Tater." The box is three feet tall and three feet wide and has a dimming function for those romantic Lego builders out there.

2005-10-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

2005-10-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

Ten ways of Looking at an Oreo cookie, located mostly underneath the oven, on the floor

2005-10-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

This is a poem I wrote after reading Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. You can find that poem here

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-13ways.html

Ten ways of Looking at an Oreo cookie, located mostly underneath the oven, on the floor

I
Nearly visible
A tasty treat lies in wait

II
Sniffed out, if only
paws could reach

III
It is dark and hot here
Where is my friend the milk?

IV
Oops!
How long is 5 seconds?
Better not to try.
You would have enjoyed your time
Next to my sandwich

V
Oreo.
How long has it been here?
White stuff.
Is anyone looking?

VI
I have no
chocolate wafer
Goodness stuck in my teeth

VII
This is my kitchen
I say.
She is unimpressed.
Perhaps a perfect seperation
of wafer and frosting
will win her heart.

VIII
This
will feed my colony
for a month

IX
What did you put
in your mouth?
Dad says.

X
Fifty three
and a third
calories
I am counting
on them
To pick up.

The Zach Braff String-Along

2005-10-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

Crowded into corners, curled around strangers’ feet, more than 50 people found whatever space they could in a classroom barely big enough for its 25 desks. Space was further minimized by copious amounts of string running from wall to wall. “This is a full on fire hazard,” observed Junior Leah Concannon, one of the contributors to the event. Lured by a posting in the Oxy digest announcing a talk by Zach Braff, star of the film “Garden State” and the TV show “Scrubs,” Oxy students filled Weingart 210 past capacity amid an onerous spider web of twine and yarn crisscrossing through the room.
Many students took the posting’s urging to “show up early, as seats may fill up quickly” to heart, taking seats at noon for the 1:30 talk. At 12:30 a group of students claiming to be from AV began setting up the room. Bringing up a microphone, a video projector, and rearranging desks, the students finished their set-up by running string and twine through the room, taping it to walls, desks and chairs. From 12:30 to 1:30 students eager to hear Braff kept filing in, making their way through the string to find places to sit among the compressed bodies.
Few realized that they were a part of something other than an audience for a guest celebrity, as the group claiming to be from AV told them the string was part of Braff’s presentation. Emily Cunningham (sophomore) was excited by the idea of the speech, but was mystified by the choice of room and the string. “I’m confused, because I think if a movie star comes they would pick a bigger room than a tiny corner here. I don’t know why they put the string up either. People are getting claustrophobic,” she said.
Grayson DeJesus (sophomore), on the other hand, had high hopes for Braff’s talk upon seeing the string.
“I think it’s some kind of like, artistic presentation. It seems like he’s going to do some kind of presentation involving the string,” he said. Dejesus was correct on one account. The event was an artistic presentation. However, Braff himself was not a part of it.
Oxy students unknowingly crammed into Weingart 210 for an assignment for Professor Tom Folland’s Contemporary Art class. Two separate groups were assigned to stage a “happening” in the spirit of the 1950’s beat poets and other artists they were studying.
“I asked them to re-create a beat poem from the 1950’s or a happening. (Happenings) were an assault upon good taste and an assault upon convention so they were trying to capture the flavor of that,” Folland explained.
In the end, two groups from the class unwittingly merged their happenings together. Concannon explained that her group saw the posting in the Digest about the Zach Braff appearance but did not realize it was the work of another group in the class. For their project, Concannon’s group decided they would show up and hang twine all over the room. Meanwhile, the Braff group was unaware that the other group was going to stage such a project and were as confused as everyone else in the audience.
Unknown to Professor Folland, the Braff group, Lucilla Haskovec, Jake McGuffin, and Max Podemski (seniors), Paige Johnson (junior) and Zachary Kaplan (sophomore) have been an art group staging happenings since they met at a performance workshop in Rotterdam, formally becoming “The Sound and Water Collective” in 2004.
According to The Sound and Water Collective, originally Braff was going to show up.
Haskovec explained, “Zach Braff is actually Max’s cousin, and he will be coming in a month, probably. He just canceled on us last minute… but a happening is all about spontaneity and chance, so in reality it was successful because we didn’t even know that he would cancel in the last minute.”
Calls and emails by the Weekly to Braff’s talent manager proved unsuccessful in verifying these claims.
Considering this their most successful happinging in the Los Angeles area, the group is proud of the ripple their happening caused in the pond of Occidental College. Kaplan said, “The happening is still going on. People today are still talking about it and thus, it’s still working in the collective unconscious right now.”
Johnson added, “It’s about changing your expectations and then learning to adapt to what the world presents you with. It’s not just a reversion to innocence but it’s also a lesson in life.”
Despite the artistic value of the happening, some students were upset and felt they had been misled.
“They broke my heart and destroyed my day,” said Jackie Herrlin (first year).
“I was just kind of irritated,” said Gerry Maravilla (first year). “I’m not a huge fan, but I still took time out of my day.”
In response to the fact that some people were upset about the happening, Kaplan said, “I think the people came to hear a speaker, but what they didn’t know before they got there was that they would see the limit of their artistic mind and how they understand the world around them.”
Podemski continued, “I expect that Zach Braff (not showing up) is going to be (the focus), but that’s really not what we were going for. That was a device in the expansion of the conscious. I think anger is a stage in that… some will come to a greater understanding.”
Through a lack of communication, the event became an instance of chance and circumstance that played directly in to the spirit of the art style. Although the event was not what anyone originally envisioned, The Sound and Water Collective are proud of the art that emerged from the happening.
Kaplan said, “The entire campus becomes like a canvas. I think it was very much like Occidental College became like a live painting.”

CHEESE!

2005-10-04T02:01:00.000-07:00

Five years of production work culminates in a fantastic adventure when Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, opens October Seventh. The first full-length feature to star Creator Nick Park’s beloved characters, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit delivers legitimate fun and laughs for everyone without straying from the clean, tongue-in-cheek style that made the original Wallace and Gromit short films a standard in claymation excellence.

Were-Rabbit is decidedly old school, foregoing any and all pop-culture references and sticking to the dry, character driven humor of Gromit the dog’s loyal supervision of his owner, Wallace. In this adventure, Wallace and Gromit are running the pest control company “Anti-Pesto,” specializing in humane pest-removal and protecting their neighbors’ prize vegetables for the annual Giant Vegetable Competition. They run into trouble when trapped rabbits overrun their house and they turn to one of Wallace’s untested inventions to solve their problem. Suddenly, a vegetable eating pest, the Were-Rabbit, begins ravaging the neighborhood’s gardens at night, which could end the 500 year run of the vegetable competition.
While the plot sounds more like Veggie-Tales than Tales from the Crypt, the humor hits with all audiences and the duo’s inventions are as clever as ever. Gromit’s eyebrows, the sole means of expression for this K-9 character, convey more feeling in the each scene than most animated characters manage in a full movie.

Not as quick or sharp as a Shrek or Toy Story, Wallace and Gromit is timeless, riding characters that demand to be loved and relying on self-contained, universal humor and a generous helping of cute rabbits to keep the audience engaged. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit may not be as continuously laugh-out-loud funny as other animated classics, but will appeal to anyone in the theater and is a more complete movie experience than any recent animated competition.

Strung Out to Dry

2005-09-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

I’ll admit I was suckered just like everybody else. I got a call Monday night from a fellow Scrubs obsessive who had read that Zach Braff was going to be speaking on campus. I got excited immediately, but tried to contain myself until I verified the info and checked that my schedule was clear. I was going to hear ZB speak! I could finally ask him all those questions that had been pressing on my mind since I saw Garden State and began, with the rest of the world, to respect him as a legitimate voice in the movie making world with insight to his craft and exceptional musical taste that had influenced my life. “So like, is Natalie Portman THAT hot in real life?” I could see myself asking, at which point we would laugh, because YES! OF COURSE! And he would say “I like your style, we should write my next movie together.” And I could respectfully decline saying “I appreciate the offer, but I don’t think my material would be as effective rendered visually and while I respect you as a filmmaker there are journeys one must start alone.” And then we would both contemplate that for a moment and continue the interview.

In order to get this interview though, I was going to have to have some sort of credibility. Luckily I had been to the Occidental Weekly’s story assignment meeting that morning and was currently assigned to review the new Wallace and Gromit movie. (They call me Peter “Hard News” Frick-Wright around the Oxy Weekly)
“Please please please please please please please can I cover the Zach Braff thing for the paper?” I wrote to the Managing Editor. “Ok.” She responded. I was in.

Well, sort of. I could get in, apparently they have to let you in to events if you say that you’re covering it for the paper, but 30 something Writer/director/actors do not have to consent to your interview requests. I would hop that stream when I got to it though, because 30 something Writer/director/actors usually will talk to anybody who will listen about the new movie they are promoting, especially if that person works for a publication with a weekly circulation of 1,000. That sounded more impressive in my head.
“Is there anything you want to share with the students of Occidental College? An Oxy-specific music reccomendation? Advice for young filmmakers trying to get their name out there?” “Yes,” he would say, as our interview concluded. “Be sure to write your movie so that you make-out several times with Natalie Portman… because, damn.”

It was with no small amount of anticipation that I showed up at the specified room an hour and a half early to wait in line with the other loyal fans, all of us wrestling with tough questions like, Why is he speaking in a regular classroom with only 25 desks? Why is he at Oxy at all? Why did they wait to announce it until the night before and only do so on an Oxy events publication that most only skim through?

“I totally skipped all my classes today so I could be here. He is so cute, when he walks by I am just going to reach out and grab him.” Ok, so many of the other loyal fans who respect him as an artist were First Year (the new PC term for Frosh) girls armed with camera phones and front-row seats who had come to Oxy to be in LA because there are celebrities around every corner. I was still the only guy in line, but there was still an hour before his 1:30 appearance and I was covering it for the paper. I HAD to be there.

They let us into the classroom to wait and I took a seat in the non-stalker-ish third row. A few minutes later the AV crew showed up to set up the equipment for the talk.
“Hi, we’re from AV, we’re going to be rearranging some desks and things for Zach so we may need you to move.” The problem was, and don’t ask me why I know the AV roster so well, none of these people worked for AV. Suddenly, I got skeptical.

The “crew” started setting up a projector and a microphone, both of which looked to have been new in 1980, and I started thinking about putting my things away. When the crew then got out a ball of yarn and some twine and began taping ends of both to walls, lights, desks and running them throughout the room to create a spider-web effect, I decided it was time to go.

Not for good or anything, as a semi-serious prankster myself and because I still had to write about something for the newspaper, I was still interested in the story. I went to get a photographer. By the time I left the scene at 12:45 the 25 desks were filled and people were filing in to sit on the floor. A few strings running through the room were beginning to inconvenience people as they moved. When I got back, an approximate headcount revealed almost 50 people sitting in the room, (40 girls and ten guys) and enough string to keep everyone’s brown paper packages secure for the rest of their lives. The lights were off and there was room only in the aisles, but people kept filing in.

“We’re going to see Zach Braff!” Seemed to be the most common sentiment, instead of “Perhaps something could be amiss given that the lights are off and the entire room is filled with string?”
At best, it was “I wonder why Zach wanted them to fill the entire room with string? Oooh, there’s a spot where we can sit!” By 1:15, some people had been waiting more than an hour, much of it in a dark room filled so completely with string that the “crew” had stopped moving around and was simply sitting in front staring at everybody. As an intrepid journalist, I went looking for someone, anyone, who seemed to have figured out the joke or who even had a skeptical look on their face. I found confusion at best.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” a sophomore responded when I asked why she thought they would fill the room with string.
“You aren’t skeptical at all?” I asked, “Maybe thinking about leaving?”
“I’m just really confused. Maybe he’ll show up. I don’t have anything else to do.”
Another sophomore was similarly perplexed. “I’m confused, because I think if a movie star comes they would pick a bigger room than a tiny corner here… I don’t know why they put the string up either. People are getting claustrophobic.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since 12:50.”
“It’s almost 1:30 now, how long are you going to stay?”
“Probably until I can see his face and hear him utter one word.”
“Are you uncomfortable in here?
“Yes! It’s hot!”
“What brought you here? Are you just a Zach Braff fan or was it Garden State…?”
“Yes, I also want to see if he’s just funny because he has a script or if he’s funny in real life.”

I felt like Bruno interviewing the fashion world on the Ali G show. I was trying to keep a straight face but few would admit any doubt that Zach was indeed going to show and reveal the secrets to a successful career in Hollywood. I finally found someone who would accept some force-fed skepticism.
“Why are you here?”
“I do a lot of theater and I want to be an actor.”
“What do you think is going on with all the string?”
“I have no idea, maybe it has to do with his new movie.”
“Are you skeptical at all?”
“A little, it might be like a joke.”
“How long would you be willing to stay?”
“Till 1:45.”

A male voice from the madness:
“What brought you here?”
“I heard about it actually this morning, I wanted to stop by. I actually can’t stay because I have class. I just wanted to see him.”
“What do you think is going on with the string?”
“I think it’s some kind of like, artistic presentation. I’m actually really sad that I don’t get to stick around because it seems like he’s going to do some kind of presentation involving the string, which would leave me to believe that he might have planned a nice presentation out so… that would be pretty interesting.”
“Yeah, too bad you can’t stay.”

When 1:30 came and went, I did find two girls who had been sitting in the front who were willing to believe that someone had pulled a fast-one.
“What do you think is going on with all the string?”
“I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s a pretense situation set up by a contemporary art class. I’m kind of irritated but I think they’re testing what people are willing to do for a certain celebrity.”
“Yet you’re still here.”
“Yeah, it would be kind of difficult to get out of here.”
“So you’ve embraced the fact that he’s not coming.”
“Yeah we embraced it a couple minutes ago.”
“Can I get an exact time, it’s 1:30 right now.”
(They debate for awhile)
“About seven minutes ago. 1:23.”

As that interview concluded the lights were shut-off once again and the room quieted in anticipation. The “crew” turned the projector on and a fuzzy image of ZB was projected on a dry-erase board. They approached one by one with markers and scribbled random lines all over the board before making their way through the string to the hallway. Other members of the crew, having handcuffed themselves together and covered their faces with western-style bandanas, began running stronger twine around the room.

Another member of the crew stood in the aisle of the desks and began wrapping herself in masking tape, using a majority of the roll. Everyone watched for several minutes, the “crew” escaping to the hallway.
“Has it ended?” The contemporary art professor who had assigned the project had been sitting in the front the whole time. “It’s ended. You can read about it in the school paper.”
Few said anything, and few seemed surprised as they filed out to the hallway. Most just seemed disappointed. A few first year girls were visibly upset when I caught up with them ten minutes later in the quad.
“That’s so fucked uuuuupppp.” One wailed.
“They broke my heart and destroyed my day.” Her friend echoed.
“I called friends back home to tell them I was going to see him.”
“Write that it was messed up… but make it sound more sophisticated.”
Me:“A more sophisticated way of saying it was messed up… it was… scrambled?”
Both at the same time: “YEAH!”

That’s as much as I know about what went on. I have interviews with the professor of the class as well as the students who pulled it off. I am, of course, still trying to get an interview with ZB, (I think it would be hilarious if he actually DID come to campus this year and no one showed up) but I might have to wait on that one. I’ll post the real news story I write on here, as well as my review of the Wallace and Gromit movie.
Until then peace, crackers, and practical jokes.
-Peter

Preview

2005-09-28T00:53:00.000-07:00

If you are reading this now, be sure to check back in the next 24 hours for an excellent story. Would I put a preview for a blog entry up if it wasn't going to be something special? Probably not, this story has everything you could want. Love, hate, outrage, celebrities, Freshmen, projection equipment, microphones, handcuffs, and string. A LOT of string.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

2005-09-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

This post was adapted from an email. It is 100% true.

There are certain life goals that can only be attained through hard work. For example(taking one from my own personal list), a victory in the World's Strongest Man competition. Other goals can only be realized through monetary avenues or an overly generous friend, such as riding a jet ski around a pool with a giant statue of yourself in the middle, a la the Manakin Piss. And still others that require you to be in the right place at the right time with the appropriate attire and swimming skills. Yesterday, Saturday September 17th, I swam with a pod of dolphins.

Now before you even think it, let me say to myself: "Congratulations, you must get up very early in the morning."

In fact I did get up very early in the morning. I rose earlier this morning than I have since I came to school, greeting the day at the ungodly hour of 8 am. It was not difficult to get up in the morning though, not with the task of saving the world ahead of me.
I met my fellow environmentalists at the Oxy fountain at 8:45 and we headed to the International Beach Clean-up Day in Malibu. Now I thought the city of Malibu usually just pays someone to clean up their beaches during the night, but someone volunteered us to do it for free today. For our efforts, the quiet beach community popularized by Malibu Barbie provided what I like to call "EPIC surf" but what most of the surfers were calling "perfect effing waves brah."

As a result about 1000 surfers in the water, (I wish I was exaggerating) watched about 50 environmentalists and beach enthusiasts (I put myself in the latter category, having not completed my third merit badge yet) walk around with rubber gloves and plastic bags picking up seaweed and squeezing it to see if it is in fact natural or if we should add it to our collection of cigarrette butts. It might have been easy if I didn't surf, but watching those waves and seeing the elation on the faces of the countless surfers enjoying loooooong rides(over a minute per wave) was hard on my sense of duty to the environment. "Thanks for being so beautiful and enjoyable Mr. Environment and I hope you get yourself cleaned up really nice... but have you seen these waves?"

He said he had, and that was bad planning on his part, and I really couldn't be expected to pick up trash on a day like this, so I turned in the six lbs (2.6 kg) of trash my group had collected, took a few scoops of ice cream (also courtesy of the city of Malibu) and headed up the road to Zuma beach, for the Malibu pier was off-limits to everything except surfboards. Some of you may remember Zuma as the site of my first California College beach adventure, in which my good friend Ian and myself were joined by a sorority from UCLA who wanted to play beach volleyball (we enthusiastically accepted, and I decided that college was going to be an acceptable way to spend four years), or from another trip when we were approached about being extras in a volleyball movie (we enthusiastically declined, but only after getting a hug from Angie Everhart, formerly of Baywatch).

The dolphins arrived just after our game of one on one beach volleyball, a contest in which Ian bested me, which was to be expected given that his high-school is one of the few in the US with a male volleyball team, which I believe he captained. A trip into the waves (which had suffered a severe reduction in quality up the road at Zuma) to cool off had us fighting a formidable rip-current that would have kept us out of the water for the rest of the day if it weren't for the dolphins. The conversation went sort of like this.

Pete: That was one STRONG rip current.
Ian: Yeah, we probably shouldn't go out there anymore. We might die.
Pete: Look! Dolphins!
Ian: Lets go out there and swim with them!
Pete: OK!

So we jogged down the beach to get ahead of the southbound pod and swam with everything we had in hopes that our bottlenosed friends would be in the mood to tow us around or kick footballs through goalposts. We got within about 20 feet of them, but they were late for a very important dolphin date and did not feel the need to jump through hoops for us or do that half-out-of-the-water backwards dance. Perhaps they were on there way to combat Zipper, Flipper's evil nemesis.

Dolphins are beautiful, swift creatures that are very inviting from far away, but very intimidating from a few feet away. As I fought my way back to shore I wondered what I would have done if they had gotten close enough to reach out and touch. I know if I'm on land and a dolphin suddenly hits me in the side I'm going to freak out and the last thing I want is a freaked out dolphin with friends. These are wild animals. It would kind of be like seeing an NFL team in an airport and just deciding to tackle one of the players. You're probably not going to hurt anybody, you just want to play like you've seen them play before. But you're still tackling a giant.

I guess the moral of the story is that, when you've got the chance to fulfill one of your life's goals, the only way to realize it is to head out towards the dolphins without hesitation or thought of the riptides. It seems everytime you take a big risk, even if you get sucked out farther than you feel comfortable and are a little intimidated and out of your element, you're always glad you did it.

If you must, I understand.

2005-09-10T01:38:00.000-07:00

This is a short story I just wrote. I was limited to two pages and the only direction I was given was that it should be about Loneliness and Longing. I was going to write about Lego's and Licorice, but I was in a more romantic mood.

If You Must, I Understand

Dear Jasmine,
The reasons I miss you are all so powerful, pure, and chaste, I feel it borders on blasphemy to in any way rank or stratify them. But were I forced, (and I assure you I would much rather have a gun to my head than endure this incessant longing that is my constant companion now that we are apart) I would say that it is your smell that has been most enduring in my memory. Call it hormones, pheromones, or chemistry, as soon as you came up to me with your sweet vanilla mango scent, I was transported to a place far away from the monotony of what my daily life has become. Your smell has stayed with me, and reminds me every moment of what it was like to touch you and feel you close to me.
Your smooth skin is remembered for its clarity and perfect tone, complemented nicely by the sleek, platinum blonde hair that fell past your shoulders in its wet, wavy curls. My mind is filled with thoughts of the happiness of a thousand paradisiac lifetimes that will be ours I’m sure, as soon as we are together again. I cannot rid you from my mind, a feeling I’m sure you are also experiencing, for a love this strong and immaculate, these emotions so pure and powerful, can be nothing less than the meeting of two instant soul mates. I love you. I need to be with you.
I was captivated by the way you moved, your grace a prowling lioness bold and intent on its prey. It lured me in, and now I am yours without thought of consequence or requital, only confidence in what I now know to be my kismetic destiny.
I was hesitant when my friends convinced me to go out with them, but now I shudder in horror at what my life would have become had I not gone with them to the club and met you. I’ve never met anyone whom I’ve felt so at ease with, so comfortable and easy to flirt with. I will see you again. I must.
You captured my attention so completely I didn’t even mind spending all that money on you. But tonight wasn’t about the alcohol, or the dancing, it was about you. And me. Together.
I never wanted to leave. I can’t stand being away from you. I followed you backstage because I knew how much it would hurt when you left and I wasn’t prepared for that. I didn’t know that you would be coming back out to perform again. When the bouncer grabbed me, I felt he was trying to pull me away from life itself. I don’t know if you saw the struggle, you were so startled by the security guard’s reaction when I touched you that you took off on a full sprint, high heals and all. Perhaps one of the other girls can tell you about it, I did not let you go without a fight.
The back of the police car embodied all the things that you will never be. Rough, hard, and uninviting. But when you have love in your life nothing is unendurable and what is thirty days when afterwards we can be together forever? Until then, I do not think you should visit me and see me in here, but if you must I understand.
I write with a love more capable than any Eros himself ever dreamt.

-Louis

The LA Haze

2005-09-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick word to combat my feelings that people don't update their blogs often enough. I check them at least three times a day, if you can't be bothered to write at least twice per 24 hours then maybe you should reevaluate whether or not you're ready to be in the blogosphere.
School and classes and stuff have hit their stride and I am feeling a little uneasy. My classes aren't abnormally hard, and I hope it's just scholastic rust built up from the summer, but I have a sick, undermining fear that my bike accident has really set me back cognitively. I can't seem to concentrate, remember things, or read like I felt I used to. I've been doing stupid stuff too, like locking my keys in my locker on my way to the weight room and losing my wallet. My friends here are telling me that this is just proof that everything is normal but all kidding aside, I feel like I'm lost sometimes.
My neck isn't healing as fast as I thought it would either and all of the constant notetaking to compensate for my fear of forgetting things is putting a strain on my post-it supply. Maybe I should eat more fish.

Remember, laughter is the best defense against hurricanes.
-Peter

Automathography

2005-09-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

I ran into this organizing some files on my computer. I wrote it for a math class that asked me to write a few pages about my personal history with math (This was not your typical math class, I believe the title of it was something like "Math for Liberal Arts Majors" or "Math for people that don't do math but need it to graduate") This is what I came up with.

Peter Frick-Wright
Freshman
Undeclared, no majors under consideration
Phone #: ext 4060
Residence: Newcomb 358

Math Experience: None

I want to take this class because it fulfills a math requirement and I’ve found that non-traditional math classes are easiest for me to learn in. I’m running low on classes that I need to take for general education before I choose and work on a major, so I slotted this one in.

Automathography: My math education started long before my first day of school. Born into a family of teachers, one of which taught at the elementary school I would be attending, I was plopped down to drool on myself at a weekly school event called “Family Math Night” before I was old enough to count. These nights featured math games much like Poison (a game we learned early that day) for kids to play with their parents and there was always a particularly difficult problem or logic puzzle at the front and a prize to be had for the solver of the riddle. Due to my competitive nature and perhaps because the nature of the prize was often candy, it became my goal each week to solve that puzzle before anyone else and flaunt that prize in the faces of the minds I had just defeated. I was six years old.
Despite my best work, and efforts that sometimes crossed the line of cheating, I never did get that prize. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I could have failed so miserably once a week for so long and not grown bitter at Mathematics, but bitterness did not occur until seventh grade pre-algebra. Based on my sixth grade math grades, I was placed into the more advanced pre-algebra class where we were asked to solve problems like 3 X a =12 a=? For the life of me I could not figure out how the letter a had gotten so lost as to end up in a math class, and after a long and embarrassing exchange between me and the teacher in front of the whole class which ended in my yelling “But why are there LETTERS in MATH problems!?!?” I transferred out of the class because it turned out I had missed some important math concepts somewhere along the line.
The rest of my math experiences are a scattered re-living of seventh grade. The distributive property puzzled me for months in the class that I transferred into, but there were no lower levels of math to run to. Tangent, Sine and Cosine were completely foreign concepts to me and too similar to remember even today, much less in junior high. In high school I found my math niche in a class called Integrated Math, where every problem was supposed to be based on a “real life event.” My favorite “real life event” was when we were learning about exponents and the Skittles the teacher provided for a hands on approach were not too old to eat. For some reason, the hyperactivity of the class was the only thing that grew exponentially.
Honors chemistry two years later was a week-long realization that I again lacked some basic skills in math. Luckily this time there was more tact during the teacher-student exchange.
Teacher: “Peter, I don’t think that you have the Math skills to be in an honors level Chemistry class.”
Me: “What makes you say that?”
Teacher: “Well, in the calculations section of your last lab report, all you wrote was ‘Taste the Rainbow.’”
Me: “But all my friends are in this class.”
Teacher: “You should transfer.”
So I dropped the class, got an excused hour, and spent that time volunteering at the same elementary school where I cheated my way to the bottom all those years ago. I started as an all-purpose tutor, helping kids with everything from tying their shoes to writing about Lewis and Clark, but after an episode in which I was forced to distract my student with candy so that they would not find out that I could not help them with their long-division, I became a reading specialist.
This trend of running from Math has followed me to college. I changed my intended major two days after arriving on campus and seeing the math requirements of a degree in Kinesiology. I am now undeclared and searching for a major that incorporates things I’m good at (See: Not Math) and things I enjoy (See: Skittles).

Confined to Quarters

2005-08-15T19:18:00.000-07:00

I am lying on a bed, staring straight into the ceiling. There are two parallel rows of fluorescent bulbs, unlit, their fixtures butted against each other end to end to create a rectangular frame around my main field of vision. Two more bulbs resembling heat lamps glow with such faint luminosity that someone may have merely painted them a burnt orange rust color. They are positioned just inside the fluorescent bulbs, continuing the perfect symmetry of the ceiling fixtures and they form the top two markers of what is beginning to look like the five on a dice as I try to make sense of what I am seeing. The bottom of the five is an expensive looking smoke detector on the left and an Ethernet cable port on the right. The Ethernet port is too low to maintain the perfect symmetry pioneered by the heat lamps. The middle is an emergency sprinkler positioned so perfectly above my forehead that interrogators using Chinese water torture could not have put it in a better location, but it two is an maddening 4/7ths of the way across the ceiling when it should be right in the middle. There is a red sticker, the kind of garage sale pricing fame on the smoke detector with an upside down 93 Sharpie’d on it. It does not occur to me until much later that that may be an E6. There is an Ethernet cable arcing from the port through my field of vision and I wish I could remember what was behind my head because I cannot imagine what it is connecting to.
I would look around at other, certainly more interesting things, but my neck has been secured in a foam collar. My head is immobile, and my body is complaining every time I try to sit myself up to look around the Emergency Room that I checked myself into what must have been hours ago. It occurs to me, that the ceiling is an interesting analogy for patients in the hospital, because it is usually an abrupt disruption of the general symmetry that is the human body that brings people to the ER in the first place, where they work to restore symmetry, despite the evidence on the ceiling that they don’t seem have it down themselves. The fact that I can have thoughts of this sophistication while supposedly having suffered a head injury is reassuring. The clock mounted in my peripheral vision that seems to be skipping chunks of time is not.
My head is immobile despite the fact that my injury happened 23 miles into a 30-mile bike ride and that after my body decided that my head should hold it in the air for once, I rode the last seven miles to the car, stopping to swim once on the way. In fact it wasn’t until after the swim that the first thoughts of going to the hospital entered my head. Sure there was the initial panic after my helmet impacted with the ground before any of the rest of me and the obligatory 5 minutes of lying with my face in the dirt, breathing Central Oregon’s finest volcanic silt while I fished the floating fragments of enamel out of my mouth with my tongue and spit them on the ground, but going to a Doctor seemed like a bit of overkill for a crash with minimal blood and soft dirt for a landing pad. It wasn’t until I realized that we had taken a wrong trail and I had absolutely no idea how long we had been riding it that I started to think about medical attention, and it wasn’t until I took off my shirt to go swimming and discovered a searing pain in my collarbone that I made a final decision. On arrival at the ER I quickly made friends with the guy next to me with blood oozing out of his knee who was obviously a fellow biker. We swap stories. Like most serious biking injuries, he was on a road bike and had a run in with a car. We try to convince each other that the other person is more seriously hurt. “That cut looks deep, they’re probably going to need to operate.” I say to him, by which I mean they’ll need tweezers and some peroxide for the gravel embedded in his skin.
“Well they’ll probably have to keep you overnight for observation.” I don’t like the sound of this. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, right, you’ve been calling me ‘Lance ’ ever since you figured out I ride road bikes.”
At this point I was called back to meet the second nurse of the night, the first having taken my information and typed it onto a wide pink bracelet that I wore to identify myself. Nurse 2 asked me more detailed questions than before, and as I describe the details of the landing, a burly man named Frank is summoned to collar me, as if I’m going to resist. He immobilizes my head with a flourish and asks me how it feels. “Uh, fine.” I say. “You don’t sound nearly gracious enough. I can get you a much less comfortable collar.” Apparently Frank takes a great deal of pride in his neck braces. I twist around to make eye contact, which takes a few seconds and a considerable amount of resolve on my part. “It’s comforting like a warm scarf on a cold day in the winter. Thank-You Frank.” I manage to pull this off sincerely, without any sarcasm or self-importance sneaking into my voice and Frank gives a happy giant-nurse smile. I feel like I’ve proved myself worthy to the guardian of the medicine and I get to go get the real treatment. Frank takes me back through the key-card protected door and hands me off to Nurse #3, a small woman with dirty blond hair who seems to have spent too much time in the sun. Frank motions her over but speaks loud enough for me to hear, “If he gives you any problems get me and I’ll put one of the yellow collars on him.” I am shown to my room, bigger than I expected but for the next ten minutes all I can think is, “Please don’t make me wear a gown, please not a gown, no gown please, no gown for me, I wish to remain gownless.” And thoughts of that nature.
I am cold and alone, but I would bet that I’m not dying. My short, shirt, and sandals remain on me but I’m beginning to wish I had that gown to use as a blanket. In the bottom of my field of vision there is a giant laser beam or a neutrino emitter pointing at me that I keep hoping will malfunction and give me super powers. Chances are that it is simply a very bright light.
My eyes are still in a staring contest with the instruments above me but my attention has been diverted to the sounds of the hospital. A woman is reading jokes to her husband in the room next to me. My concentration is not such that I can catch both the beginning and end of the joke, but hearing them laugh is comforting. An alarm chimes rhythmically, two notes, I’m guessing about a fifth apart, somewhere on the other side of the room or maybe behind a desk. Duh Da…. Duh Da… Duh Da…. Duh Da…. Duh Da… It is exercising, doing ten sets of five and then resting. I assume, based on footstep frequency and vocal inflection that there is a child on a tour of the hospital. “This is where Dr. ------ works, you remember him don’t you?” I can’t remember names, Frank being the exception, and I think I’ve been watching too much of the TV show Scrubs because as I think back through the three nurses I’ve met they all seem to be Nurse Espinosa. The Doctor would be Dr. Cox if she was not female, and she comes through with the line of the night as I’m making a concentrated effort on listening to every sound I can hear. She is on the phone just outside my curtain and I’m ignoring the details of the conversation until I hear, “Well you’ll just have to make someone sicker so they have to spend the night.”
Silence.
“Because if they get one more patient they can pull an extra nurse and that will lighten the load on everybody.”
It makes sense, but all I can think is “I do not volunteer, please not me. I want to sleep at home. Although.... an overnight stay will increase the likelihood of a super-powers granting laser-beam malfunction...”
Someone knocks on the curtain, and you have to work in an ER a long time before you figure out how to pull that off. I am wheeled over to cardiology for some CT scans. I never have to move for any of it, the nurse and the CT tech sliding me around on my little mattress pad like a kid on a raft. I am told to stay perfectly still so that the expensive equipment can shine lights at me and scan my C, and immediately afterwards my T is scanned as well, both of which are located in my head and neck if you were curious.
The CT tech is a considerably more confident driver of my bed and we make it back in record time. That clock is still skipping minutes and seconds. The sprinkler is now dripping on a spot just over the left side of my head. Now the thing directly above my forehead is a cut in the ceiling that I would not have seen if I hadn’t been moved. Sad how you only notice things in their relationship to your own current situation.
I wait in my room and my friends and fellow riders Jeff and Ben are allowed to come back one at a time to visit. There are no results to discuss but we do laugh a lot about the urine sample container and the different types of superpower providing accidents that could occur in a hospital.
The time ticks by and I am told that there is a problem with the clock and it has to catch up sometimes. Shortly after that the Radiologists stop playing cards long enough for one of them to glance at my scans and tell my Doc that they are negative for anything requiring my neck to be immobile. From there I am basically loaded into a cannon and shot outside with a shout of “You’re going to be in a lot of pain for two days but deal with it.” The relief of knowing that I’m going to be fine is almost enough for me to forget about the hunger of coming from a 30 mile ride to the hospital without eating anything, but not quite. We stop at Safeway for some Ibuprofen and string cheese, which is one of the only things I can eat with various parts of my teeth missing and no pain meds yet. The next day the dentist tells me there’s nothing I can do for my teeth, they were smashed together extremely hard on impact and that’s why they hurt, but there aren’t any fractures or damage other than the chips I previously spat onto the ground. I nod and thank him but he doesn’t notice as the muscles in my neck have tightened up so much that it takes the better part of a minute and a half to complete the movement. I am relegated back to bed and the several children’s books I have that I can follow the plot of. I am under orders to get a massage sometime in the next few days to help with mobility, and to stay off of my bike until I replace my cracked helmet. I am stuck inside on my beautiful days off of work, bored out of my mind without the mobility or attention span to entertain myself. My arm is in a sling. There is little food in the house and hummingbirds are taunting me about my confinement as they hover outside my window. I am extremely lucky.

Fireworking

2005-07-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

This is a hopelessly late post that was written minutes after the fourth of july but was not posted for reasons involving emotional childhood memories, long-division and gaudy flowered hats.

The Fourth of July has always held a special place in my heart. Something about projectiles of fire in the air, for no other purpose than celebration delights a part of me that is otherwise satisfied only in the event of a water landing. I feel more like the thrill-seeking, immature kid that I can become (with proper amounts of sugar and caffeine) on the fourth than on any other day of the year, for reasons that are more pyromaniacal than patriotic.

2004’s celebration quenched the thirst quite sufficiently with a special, planned trip to purchase fireworks, complete with lists and recommendations for alterations, resulting in an almost choreographed home display of National Pride and combustibility. Firecrackers popped as Picolo Pete’s wailed and screamed as the mortars that could only be described as “Illegal” went up like we were sieging Bastogne. Roman Candles were plentiful. Supervision was not.

This year may be the first year to pass without a single firework set off in my presence. Not a boom was heard. The anticipatory hiss of a lighted fuse was absent from my Independence Day. I traded the serene lap of waves against the shore for the adrenaline rush of ringing ears and a duct-taped two liter bottle with a bag of gunpowder inside, my day riding my bike down a mountain instead of trying to show the neighbors’ display up.
Nothing says Land of the Free like being free to go out in the land, so we exchanged fireworks for food and spent the day in the sun at Todd Lake.

I have pictures to prove it. Hopefully they will be available on this website soon.

Besides looking at and taking pictures of the beautiful surrounding mountains (Broken Top and Mt. Bachelor) there’s not a lot to do at Todd Lake. No rope swings from trees, paddleboats, waterfalls… I had to invent my own sport. The sport consists of me jumping over a log with a bagel in my mouth. I call it Bagel Jumping, which actually makes as much sense as calling my sport Log Eating, but my decision stands anyway. I don’t have high goals for this sport, maybe get it on ESPN 2 with a devoted following of people who have tried to play, kind of like Soccer.

Just kidding about Soccer, I love it at approximately the same level that a stereotypical overweight youth loves cake.

Recipe for excitement: a cowboy who talks like a pirate is riding a beautiful dragon on the way to rescue a horse, which is being guarded by a fire-breathing princess.
This is based on a recurring dream I have that seems to be fraught with indecipherable hidden meaning but so far has only revealed this snippet of a scene for what seems to be shrek 3.

If you have a really bad caffeine addiction, try getting a bad sunburn. You’ll forget all about it.

Hot like a sunburn

2005-06-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

So it’s like this. I’ve been working my bike shop job for a few weeks now. Going on five I believe, and it’s treating me well. I couldn’t really ask for a better living and work situation with full-time hours and decent pay at a job that has allowed me to watch almost every game of the College World Series. I also helped my good buddy Jeff get a job at the bike shop, which has turned an already enjoyable job into “hang out and talk about bikes and the pretty girls in the shop with your friends” time.

Speaking of pretty girls. I did meet one and had a date. It was nice. I will forego all other details for reasons of superstition (no one talks to a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter) but I will had that I hope the fact that she is on her way to Grad school in Vermont in three days does not limit the possibility of another date.

My most recent trip back to Portland for my “weekend” was an anticipated and required trip for a Dentist appointment, the previous week however was a last minute decision spurred by the knowledge that one of my favorite author’s was speaking and signing books downtown. Nick Hornby is as British as he is funny and was in rare form at the First Unitarian Church on 12th and Main. He read out of his new book and cracked up the crowd with his opinions on books and music, but it was by no means a soul revealing tell-all Q&A. In fact I think his visit’s most lasting impression will be that my internal reading of his books are now going to be in his own cheaky reading style instead of the Americanized dialogue I had been constructing.

Returning home to the Cabin after my phantom dental work (direct quote: “No, you don’t have a cavity, we’re just going to drill and fill two of your teeth.”) visit, I was greeted by a capacity crowd in Sunriver. And when I say capacity I mean that I HAVE to ride my bike into work because the cabin is just about the closest parking spot to the bike shop. This weekend has been the product of a large tennis tournament and the Pacific Crest Triathalon taking place on the same weekend during an already busy season. Inject 4,000+ tri- athletes and their families into the resort along with a few hapless vacationers wondering what happened to their copy of the memo and all of the grocery store’s toilet paper and you get the atmosphere this weekend. (another direct quote: “You’re right, we normally do repair and replace bearings, but since it’s 4:30 and I have yet to get a lunch break much less sit down or do anything other than check people in for the triathalon bike shuttle, I don’t think we’re going to get to it today… Yes the grocery store is still sold out…our bathroom is located next door…. Yes Subway has plenty of napkins…”

As hectic as it has been, I have developed a considerable appreciation for the difference in personality types that different sports attract. Tri-athletes, I have decided, may be the most agreeable athletic demographic from Golfers to those that play Jai Alai (Jai Alaiers?) Generally, the athletes are a well-balanced mix of the super-goofy-and-giving-runner-type, the semi-snobbish but reasonably cultured cyclists, and swimmers, who are happy just to be out of the water for once.
(I base these three generalizations on the year I spent on the cross country team, my co-workers at the bike shop and bike enthusiasts in my life, and my friends who make it through 3 practices a day on the Occidental swim team.)
A typical conversation with a Tri-athlete goes like this:
Ridiculously Super Fit Swimmer-Biker-Runner: Excuse me, but do you have any cycling shoes?
Me: I’m sorry, we don’t carry any in-stock. The bike shop across the street carries some though, you can check there.

RSFS-B-R: Oh I’m SO sorry, I didn’t mean to waste your time, I’ll run right over there and check, I understand that you don’t get much serious cycling traffic in here and I understand why you don’t carry them for the one weekend a year that you would need them. I was going over there anyway, let me just make sure my resting heart rate hasn’t dipped below 20 again and I’ll be out of your way. Can I offer you some bottled water or complex carbohydrate goo to increase your glycogen input so as to not inhibit the inefficiency of your bike repair and rental operation?

While an interaction (I hesitate to call it a conversation, more like making contact) with a serious tennis player goes something like this.

Me: Can I help you with anything?

Primped and Pressed Williams Sister Wanna-Be: You don’t have good tennis racquets.

Me: This is a bike shop.

PPWSW-B: You just carry crappy Wilson’s.

Me: I have nothing to do with it. I didn’t even know those were there.

PPWSW-B: My racquet needs to be restrung. I will be back in ten minutes.

Me: It takes like two hours and we don’t even do that here. (this second statement is actually not true)

PPWSW-B: What kind of store doesn’t sell tennis racquets. I hate it here.

Me: This is a bike shop.

Not only are tri-athletes considerably easier on your patience, but their sport has become sort of interactive over the weekend. I mentioned that I bike to work, but you should know that about half of my route is shared with the final leg of the bike ride. Meaning, I not only get to ride on a race course, but on my bright yellow bike with shorts and a t-shirt on some spectators start cheering for me as I ride to work. It seems to be a lot louder if I pretend I am having trouble pedaling up the hill and put a my-electrolite-levels-are-low-and-I-may-not-make-it-without-crowd-encouragement grimace on my face. You’ve never seen such drama on a 2 mile ride to work.

Well that’s it for me tonight. I still have another day of triathletes and tennis coming at me tomorrow so perhaps there will be some real stories to tell.

Please and thank-you and washing behind my ears.
-Peter

Doing the things a spider can

2005-06-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

I saw Nick Hornby speak last night. He is the author of the books the well-known movies High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, and About a Boy are based on and I have to say he exceeded my expectations. He was funny, witty, clever, which I believe the Brits sum up with the word “cheaky.” His inspiring words graced my ears less than 24 hours ago, but I will save that for another time. Instead, since my last post, it has been two weeks of gripping stories of fallen heroes, redemption, true love, and underdogs attaining success like Buddy, the athletically inclined Golden Retriever of Air Bud fame. So naturally, this update will not detail any of that and instead consist of some thoughts about my reading of Volume One of “The Essential ‘The Amazing Spiderman’ Collection.”

I have always considered myself a closet Spiderman expert, and it is my joy to share my opinion on the collection of the VERY first Spiderman comics ever produced, a historical look into an era when serious money was being made through the creation and distribution of 5 cent comics to adolescent males, some of whom were engrossed in the characters, storylines and overwhelmingly literary qualities of the series, and some of whom were drawn by the fact that the kind of art and action displayed in comic books was the next evolution of the kind of boyhood fantasy games they had enacted with GI Joe’s doing flips and flying off the couch to jump-kick the bad guys they had designated as such based only on the surly expression and stereo-typical Cop “power-mustache” polluting their plastic physiognomies. (Feel free to pronounce that “Puh-hiz-iognomies” if it makes you feel better about my slant alliteration)

Before we go on, I must warn you that the above-claimed Spidey expertise is based solely on the fact that, as far back as I can remember, I have REALLY wanted superpowers, to the point that I sometimes hung around toxic-waste facilities hoping for that fateful accident and engulfing wave of Super-Speed and Invisibility granting glowing goo.
I also read “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” which is not only a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and one of the best books ever written but a crash course in Comic Book history by an author who was an outside consultant for the X-Men movies and reworked the Spiderman 2 script to give it humanity and depth (the hilarious scene in the elevator is Michael Chabon’s trademark irony and charm in visual form although I have no confirmation that he did indeed write that scene).

So, in my expert opinion, the original series of Spiderman comics are densely populated with guffaw inspiring dialogue, logic-jumps and assumptions that would have the reader rolling on the floor if they weren’t numb from the shock of reading such banal attempts at humor.

The first few Spiderman comics are relatively believable, he gains his super-powers from a bite from a Spider who unluckily descended into the beam of a radioactive rays during a demonstration, at which point Peter Parker (I love when Superheroes and I have common names)he goes into wrestling and lets his uncle’s future murderer escape just as he did in the movie, becomes a photographer for the Daily Bugle, then goes on to deliver and install a guidance system on a descending orbital capsule, as it’s descending into the atmosphere, by standing on a supersonic jet as it pilots itself close to the erratically flying capsule and then swinging over to it to install the guidance system, allowing the pilot to safely land the aircraft as Spiderman creates a parachute out of his webbing and lands softly next to the capsule.

But what I really want to share is Spiderman’s greatest, most unlikely adventure in my reading so far… “The Uncanny Threat of THE TERRIBLE TINKERER!” The story opens with tie and sweater-vest wearing and “top science student” Peter Parker hard at work in the lab, mixing bubbling chemicals in ridiculous looking beakers, a little cocky with the new superpowers as he neglects any kind of protective eyeweary.
Teacher: There’s Peter Parker, our top science student!
At which point a Peter Parker’s beakers explode into a thousand pieces covering the class with boiling acid and turning the whole high school into a beach and the students into scuttling hermit crabs of death which spiderman defeats by using his web to flip onto their backs and then bringing in oversized seagulls of justice to let nature take its course.

Or at least, that would have been a better story than what actually did happen. In Spiderman’s confrontation with the terrible tinkerer, he goes to pick up a radio from a repair shop and discovers a secret workshop underneath the store full of Aliens (the ones from outer space) who have implanted secret cameras and listening devices in the radios of the leaders of the western world and are using the information to plot an attack on the eastern seaboard (spidey’s territory of course).

Alien: Yes! Our electronic spy devices hidden in radios belonging to important earthlings, have enabled us to learn much about their strengths and weaknesses, before we ATTACK this unsuspecting planet! How clearly we can hear and see! My devices never fail.
Another Alien: Silence! I must remember what they say! (This is one of those rare alien civilizations that has figured out interstellar travel but has yet to invent the tape recorder.)

The action picks up several panels later however, as Spiderman’s perch is discovered and the aliens respond by throwing stuff at him.

Alien: If he escapes with knowledge of our plans we are LOST!

Alien 2: Hah! That inverter mechanism thrown at him, (sic) loosened his grip on the ceiling! He’s falling!
Now we have him! Render him helpless! (I swear I am not making this up, this is how they talk, as if no one has ever tried to capture a Superhero before.)

In the scuffle, Spidey jars the arm of an alien with a ray-beam gun who destroys their control panel.
Alien: You FOOL! You jarred my arm! I-I’ve destroyed our control panel!
Alien 2: It would take MONTHS to rebuild that control panel! We haven’t the time! (I guess these world-conquering aliens are more of the weekend-warrior variety.)

And just to tie up loose ends:
Alien: Safe at last! Press the button which will destroy all our spy devices by remote control!
Alien 2: It is DONE! We can never again return to Earth—They will be on guard from this day on!

Which means that, Spiderman has discovered Aliens on Earth, made contact, discovered a plot to conquer the world, been captured by the aliens, escaped, foiled their plot and ensured that they will never again attempt an attack on Earth, and accomplished it all in less than 5 pages.

Amazingly, this issue did not trigger the end of the Spiderman comic book run, and in the very next issue the world was introduced to Doctor Octopus, a villain who basically reserved a place for Spiderman in the Superhero hall of fame.

If you liked this post, or even are still reading, check out Batman Begins. It is a worthy addition to the Dark Knight legacy.

If anyone needs to buy a bike, I’m selling mine.
-Peter

The News

2005-06-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

Today is Bad News Day. I prefer to do Bad News in one spirit-crushing shot, so if you've got any ANY even remotely Bad News that you'd like to share with me please inform me within 24 hours of 10 AM this morning. So that means you have until 10 AM Friday to contact me and after that I will be accepting only positive information submissions.

On the bright side, if I ever decide to start a brewery, I've decided to name it Bad News Beers.

-peter

More Thoughts

2005-06-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

Being at home for my "weekend" (I get Wednesdays and Thursdays off) has reminded me just how much I enjoy instant messenger and how addictive it is. Not having internet at my lodging in Bend has demoted my computer to basically a big MP3 player and Word Processor with some video editing capabilities for the Spring Break 2005 movie I'm working on. I like instant communication, and NO, my cell phone is not instant enough.

Max Payne 3 is in the works, you heard it here first, looks like it's time for me to play the 2nd one. My eyes are fighting a losing battle to stay open, so I will leave with a line from something I might someday write that I find funny.

"What am I, your slave?" Cinderella shot back.

That's it.
Good Night
-Pete

Rentals, Wranglers, Ridiculous Customers and the Kibble Cacophony

2005-05-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a fire blazing in the fire place, a dog snoring on the floor next to me and the day off from my new job. The stage is set for a fine time reliving and recounting my first week as a Rental Technician at Sunriver Sports. Join me?

I’ve always said that the first week of work is always the most eventful, like the first act in a play, or Episode IV in the Star Wars Sextolet, it introduces the characters and sets them up for whatever conflict may occur in The Empire Strikes Back. At my last job, also in the rental industry at Penske truck leasing, my first day consisted of riding around Portland with my boss in search of an impounded rental truck that had been rented and never returned from a location in Wyoming or somewhere. I guess if it was Wyoming than the truck was “Wrangled” from a location and the woman responsible could possibly be guilty of “Truck Rustling,” which sounds like it could be a show on ESPN 2 if the World’s Strongest Man ratings continue to plummet as they seem to be and may very well attract a considerable audience if the History Channel continues to air documentaries explaining the Rain Gear of World War II or the Preferred Interior Wood Paneling of Hitler’s Double-Black-Diamond-Top-Super-Secret Wine Cellars…. or maybe I’m mixing up the definitions of Wrangle and Rustle.

I was brought along on this Two-Thumbs-Up-Ultra-Important-Mission-Impossible to recover the Wrangled truck of Laramie, Wyoming for two reasons: 1. I wasn’t much help in the office on my first day on the job and there wasn’t much for me to do. And 2. We were going to an impound lot full of the finest most upstanding figures in the city of Portland and I am big and intimidating if I put on my Secret Service Poker Face and no one actually tries anything. It was pretty good for the first day of a desk job, unfortunately that was the last time I got to outmaneuver shady desperados who hadn’t come to their senses through the streets of Gresham. The rest of my summer was devoted to answering phones and preparing Rental Agreements in an air conditioned office in an industrial park near the Airport but not close enough that I could watch the planes take off and land.

That was the first day, on the third day I was rear-ended on the freeway on the way to work and got to drive half a car home.

Yesterday was the last day of my first work week and I thought I was going to escape the first week without two noteworthy events taking place, but that was not the case. Let me start by giving you a brief picture of what my job consists of. I handle bike rentals in a bike shop in a resort called Sunriver in Central Oregon. I also do some repairs, adjustments, tune-ups, and whatever I know how to do on a particular bike while the real Bike Tech who also manages the shop handles the complicated stuff and gives me the bullet points on what he’s doing so that someday I’ll be able to figure it out on my own.

It’s a pretty relaxed atmosphere, I would say about 30% of my time is spent on actually working on bikes, the rest is a healthy balance of snacking, talking with co-workers, and watching OLN, the fishing channel, or the weather channel on the TV above the door. I spent most of yesterday splitting attention between a Star Wars documentary called “When Star Wars Ruled the Universe” on VH1 and the bike I was working on. I’ll admit the bike may not have received my finest work as I relived Luke and Leia’s trials and temptations by the dark side.

The people I work with are for the most part, interesting, engaging and knowledgeable about their particular area of retail or repair. I have two bosses, both named Jim, which is not ever even a little bit confusing, 2 fellow full-time employees, and maybe 6 part timers working their way in and out of the schedule at different times of the week.

Few at the shop/store have made enough of an impression on me to describe them with any confidence; generally people possess all of the attributes listed above and that is all I really know about them.

My first week on the job story starts on Saturday, about 11:45 in the morning as I’m learning about spokes and their various adjustments from my manager Jim. An officer of the law, a member of the Sunriver “We-have-nothing-to-do-so-consider-yourself-warned, infractions-of-the-law-whether-you’re-traveling-at-a-grotesquely-excessive-speed-of-30-MPH-in-a-25-MPH-zone-or-failing-to-walk-your-bike-in-the-areas-designated-for-dismounted-travel-or-moments-of-accidental-flatulence-in-our-Stepford-community-in-a-manner-other-than-those-which-the-moniker-‘silent-but-deadly’-could-be-applied, may-produce-a-police-action-wherein-we-are-forced-out-of-concern-for-public-safety-to-approach-your-car-or-vehicle-with-shotgun-or-assault-rifle(Verified information)-in-ready-position-with-a-round-chambered-and-the-safety-off-in-order-to-safely-determine-whether-the-party-that-‘smelt-it’-actually-‘dealt-it.’” Police approached my manager and requested an audience in a more private location. Now I am not aware of his gaseous tendencies, but his infraction was apparently obvious enough that he was handcuffed and taken to jail for the rest of the day. Further inquiry found that his lawyer had failed to notify him of a change in his court date for a driving violation of the serious kind that he is contesting and he was cuffed and taken into Deschutes County on a “failure to appear” charge.

Excited as I was to see the Sunriver Swat Team in action, I was left at the bike shop to manage things on my own for the rest of the day on my fifth day on the job. Actually it’s a bit like Penske if suburban moms drove semi-trucks and some truckers needed training wheels.

I handled the shop on my own fairly well, and only one person came in requesting a part that I didn’t recognize. It was nothing however, compared to the cyclone of activity that was my next morning. A morning in which I was scheduled to be alone, without any idea of how alone I would become.

I do not have keys to the shop/store, so someone else came in and opened for me at 9:00 am and hung around for an hour before the other front shop employees were scheduled to arrive. At 10:00 I told her I could handle the store for 5 minutes before everyone else arrived, and I worked cleaning the cables and housing on the Seven Speed Schwinn Tandem Bike while I kept an eye open for anyone needing help on the retail floor. At 10:15 customers started coming at me from both sides and I realized that whoever was supposed to be coming to help me was late like a February Firework.
I spent the next two hours running from the back of the store to the front of the store yelling to the customers “If you’re ready to purchase I’ll be in the back of the store and No I Don’t know how to open the dressing room doors, please crawl underneath if you would like to try anything on” and then running to the back to help someone adjust their seat or teach them how brakes worked or things of that nature. At noon help arrived in the form of an extremely pale, extremely hung-over coworker that had slept through her alarm. I was greeted with a nod and a “Sorry Dude” as she collapsed on the cash register and mumbled something about helping somebody whenever someone came through the door.

That pretty much concluded the excitement of my first week. The only other noteworthy event was the family that came into the bike shop and would almost literally purchase two of whatever I pointed at. As they picked up a seat:
Me: Do you have any questions about our seats?
Them: Can we have two of these?
Me: Two Barca-loungers, sure, here ya go…. Anything else?
Them: We’re looking for something to make noise
Me: Like a bell?
Them: Yes, and one of these.
Me: Aaah, a handlebar chew-toy, you’re going to want to test each one of those squeakers at least 50 times before you purchase because right now I can stand your presence and we can’t have that…. Do you need a saddle-bag or a helmet?
Them: YES! One for each of us! In each color!
Me: Odometer?
Them: Yes!
Me: Gloves?
Them: Yes!
Me: Reflective arm and leg bands?
Them: Yes!
Me: Pancake and Waffle Syrup?
Them: Pour it on us!

Other than that, I am looking forward to Memorial Day Weekend and the 90+ degrees that are supposed to arrive with it. The cabin is slowly becoming finished looking, and it may be the altitude, but my dog Toby is now compelled to move only to remain in the shifting angle of the sun and by the unmistakable cacophony of kibble.

That’s all I can manage right now, I’m working on turning my life’s most embarrassing moments into almost true short stories, so I might post some of those if I like them.

Peace and a Full Moon last night
-Peter

T-Shirts, Star Wars, and Olsens

2005-05-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

What's this? You're wearing the shirt of the band you're going to see? Don't be that guy.

If you recognize this quote then you are definetly a product of the 80's/early 90's period that was still the 80's.... but you probably didn't need this quote to realize that you came from a time of great music and leg warmers. And if you did, what are you doing? Get your life together!

I am definetly the guy who wears the shirt of the band he saw last night though. Thank you The Shins, you were rocking my sockings and I have a great t-shirt with some sort of eyeball thing and a backwards cartoon bubble with the name of the band I saw. I just realized this now, but the eyeball thing is quite similar to the thing that pops up just before something tries to eat Luke (I've never been convinced that they were the same creature) in the trash compactor scene in Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope. If you're unfamiliar with the movie think an eyeball on the end of a thick pipe cleaner with a right angle bent in it to make it look like a periscope and then once you've visualized that go out and get the movies because they're part of the national culture and history (at least, the part of it that got made fun of throughout middle school because they wore sweatpants every single day and brought different sweatpants to change into for gym class and whose parents were substitute teachers at the school and would make them stop reading their spiderman comic books in class even though they had already finished the assignment... not that I have any personal experience with that sort of thing).

The Shins may have the best lyrics of any band this side of the Postal Service, so I would like to compare and contrast The Shins lyrics with lyrics from their opening band, The Brunettes.
Shins:
"You want to fight for this love,
but honey you cannot wrestle a dove,
so baby it's clear.
You want to jump and dance,
but you sat on your hands
and lost your only chance,
go back to your home town,
get your feet on the ground,
and stop floating aroou-hound.

Brunettes (From "Boy Racer")
Engine Roaring-really loud
Tires spinning-leave a cloud

There's more but it's too painful to put down. It wouldn't have been all that bad if they hadn't tried to perform those lyrics in this awkward kind of half-serious spoken word poetry style. It got weird.
The thing is, the band was from Auckland New Zealand, which made me really want to like them, but after they did synchronized YMCA style letters to their opening song B-A-B-Y without any sort of smile or indication that they were just goofing around I found it hard not to watch with a big goofy grin on my face. By the time they closed with a song about the Olsen twins in which 6 of the 7 memebers donned Mary Kate and Ashley masks I was nearly crawling on the floor I was laughing so hard. Again, I'm not sure if they meant it to be funny.

I'm moving to Bend today, I should probably start the loading of the car.
Jump and Dance
-Peter

Thought

2005-05-15T11:38:00.001-07:00

"If I ever have a kid, I'm changing my last name to 'Parking' and naming him '3-hour Max' not only because of the obvious sexual connotations that he will appreciate after puberty, but he's going to have reserved parking all over the city.... that will come in handy when he's giving rides to his sister 'No.'"

Game Face

2005-05-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

Lip curled up in half sneer half grin, the other side of the mouth completely level. Eyebrow flexed at 40% of it's full range of motion. Eyes sitting dead to the world, inactive but interested, skeptical but believing. Every movement in your body not slow but unhurried. Thus is the making of a good Game Face when dealing with the world of high stakes used car shopping.

Entering a used car dealership is like taking a guided tour through an organized crime safe house. Everything you see has a price and the idea that you're under surveillance lingers in every plastic plant and unnecessary wall outlet. The thugs wear ties. The game face is important, possibly more important than actually knowing anything about the car you want to buy although that is an acceptable substitute if you can't muster an acceptable air of informed patience, the kind that scare salespeople to the core of their (gnarled, usually nicotine hued) teeth and keep them asking "Would you like some bottled water?" Instead of "What would it take to put you in this baby today?"

My dad and I found ourselves in the market for a pickup after we remembered that they were really manly. Ok, we really did it so that I wouldn't have to fill up the van at $80 a tank all summer, effectively reducing my profit from my job by 50%. Instead, I only have to spring for $35 a pop and we still have something we could theoretically haul a mattress and pick up chicks in. (Not while the mattress is in there, I'm talking later, like in the country songs.... 'I had to wash my truck, and dress up, to pick her up to watch TV...'"

I'll let you know if there really is something women like about pick-up men. My theory is that they just know they can use you to move their crap across the city when they get kicked out of their apartment, but I don't have any first hand experience.

Peace and pickup lines.
(It's a row of trucks!)
-Peter

Adams Apples, Bike Shops and Jetting out of SoCal

2005-05-07T22:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching a lot of the BBC version of “The Office” recently so if I slip into Brit-speak I apologize in advance.

Last time I posted I was in LA and having trouble sleeping. I am happy to report however, that neither of those maladies still affects me. (Sorry, that’s dangerously close to Brit-speak, and definitely an “Office” style joke) I left LA (that’s Los Angeles for those of you having trouble with your geography) upon learning that Jessie had an adams-apple.

You may have interpreted that the wrong way. A few weeks ago she had me feel a lump on her neck that could have very easily been an adams-apple if she were the correct gender for that particular physiological development. She went to a Doctor to investigate, in fact I took her to the very same Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist that she took me to one year earlier for my broken nose. I did not recommend him. “He’s kind of a jerk,” I believe were my words, which were confirmed minutes later when I overheard this exchange.
Dr: So what can I do for you?
Jessie: Well I can feel this lump in my---
Dr. (interrupting) Whoa, did you know that one of your nostrils is slightly larger than the other one?
Jessie: …
Dr: We can do surgery on that if you want.
Jessie: I have this lump in my throat…
Dr: Let me feel--- Yup, it’s a growth on your thyroid…. That really sucks. It might be serious but probably not. Let’s do some scans and try to figure out exactly how big it is. Here’s a disconnected phone number to a CAT scan facility that doesn’t have time for you, make an appointment and get me the results.

So that may not be an exact transcription, but you get the idea. There’s something about LA doctors that turns me the wrong way. It’s like they’ve lost all perspective on medicine and they really think people are just trying to collect sick-pay from their jobs or something.

Upon learning Jessie could possibly need surgery, she decided that it would be preferable to go under the knife closer to home. We had been planning to drive to Oregon together anyway, and since I didn’t have anything pressing to do in Cali except for final exams, I said I would drive her.

Jetting out from my SoCal haunts early was a blessing and a curse. I took my finals with me and did them in Bend minutes before they were due in a stressful time crunch situation and I didn’t get to say goodbye to ANYONE at school… but I did get to sit in Bend for two days with nothing to do except read and play with my dog (he’s getting old, when his back legs get stiff he forgets about it until his front paws are securely out the front door of the cabin and down a little step at which time he tightens up and looks back at me like “Can I just stay here?”)

My time in Bend did land me a job at a Bike shop, this is the first time I’ve ever gotten a job where I didn’t know anybody on the inside and the employer wasn’t my dad. It feels kind of good, but it turns out that the owner is one of Jessie’s neighbors. He didn’t know that at the time though. He was unaware.

Well, as far as a rambling history of my last few weeks go this is entirely incomplete but will have to do for now. Since I’ve been home I saw Brian Regan in concert, The Faint and Bright Eyes last night, and spent a lot of time hanging around Evan’s apartment. But all of that stuff will have to wait as I am exhausted.

Peazzzzzzzze,
-Peter

Benadrynsomnia

2005-04-30T00:47:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I started taking a medication I was allergic to. I became itchy, with an upset stomach and a lack of energy. Benadryl helped with the itchiness, so I started taking it. Now I am off the antibiotic, off the benadryl, and I cannot sleep. I am exhausted my entire day until the second before my head touches the pillow as I go to sleep, at which point I jerk awake and stare at the cieling or update this blog.
At least I know the cause of this semi-insomnia.
Thoughts as I drift off:
Has anyone noticed that the word Huarache has been popping up more and more now that Nike is making a shoe with that same name? Huarache means" A flat-heeled sandal with an upper of woven leather strips" but I think it also means a blend or mixture, kind of like an amalgamation but with multiple elements, and I've seen it in several pieces of OLD writing recently.
Is Bling-Bling onomatopoeiac? It's not really a sound-maybe it's referencing the ring of the cash register? It is definetly pronounced like it is reproducing sounds in real life though.
I feel like we're descending from the peak of a civilization poised for collapse in many aspects. What if the nineties really were the best it could get. It certainly seemed like everything was chill. I would love to expand on this thought but I think I am finally getting close to being able to fall asleep.
Peace please.
-Peter

Yeah Pennsylvania!

2005-04-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

A quick update while I catch my second episode of the OC.

If you have the capability to listen to the audioblog, you know last night I went to a DECA conference in across the street from Disneyland in Anaheim. You also know that DECA enforces a "business-like" dress code which means no jeans, and some sort of collar on your shirt.

Shoot, the OC is not on... I shall relocate.

OK, because I am not a fan of dress-codes in general, and I felt the need for some post-teenage rebellion that night, I went to the convention in my cargo pants and Star Wars Legos T-shirt. I brought along a collared shirt, in case I was confronted and shown the door, but I brought the brightest, gaudiest collared shirt I could find. I wore the one that my friends got me for my birthday last year when I said I wanted a "loud" shirt.

I wore them both that night, for about equal amounts of time, and I was suprised to find that people actually cared about the dress-code. Only one person said anything to me about the Legos (and it was not to congratulate me on an incredible shirt as I expected) but I got several looks of a mix between suprise and disgust from the people walking around the big auditorium. This may have had something to do with the fact that as a State's name was announced during the "opening ceremonies" I was running over to stand in front of their section and pretending to whip them into a frenzy by running back and forth waving my arms, or with the fact that if that section was too far away (there were 14,000 people in this room) I would yell at the top of my lungs "Yeah Pennsylvania! GET SOME!"
But you have to realize it would be like doing those same things in a club with the lights out, the music loud and a laser show going on because, well, the lights were out, the music was loud, and there was a laser show above us. So I didn't make as much of an ass out of myself as it may have seemed like.
Also, the people at this conference were wearing shirts with sayings on them like "I could be your boss someday." and "When I grow up, I don't want to be a princess, I want to be a CEO." And I'm totally cool with the CEO vs. princess thing, you can make a lot of people's lives miserable as a CEO whereas as a princess you're generally limited to a dragon, the occasional frog or two and your stepsisters. But these kids were walking around saying things like, "If I'm ever rich I'm going to merge Phillip Morris and Pepsi!" which shows that A: they're learning bad and socially unconcious business and are really only interested in top-loading an already saturated conglomerate to increase their own liquid value... and B: that they have no imagination because there is no cool name to be made out of Phillip Morris and Pepsi. MoPep is the best I could come up with and that's lame. If I were that kid, I'm merging Exxon-Mobil and Subway. Call it Sexxon-Mobil.

Anyway, other than being introduced to the 13,500 of the 14 K in attendance that Jessie knew (she was the representative of the entire west coast at one point and was asked to break-dance onstage in front of the whole crowd or something like that so a lot of people knew her) that was pretty much the night. Otis Spunkmeyer, the cookie man, was there giving out free cookies, so there were a bunch of things that could have gone a lot worse.
So, in conclusion.....
-Peter

2005-04-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

Large Gonads

2005-04-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Don Holmes, a family fisherman friend and teacher in Alaska once said, "The only things you need to go fast on (I'm quoting from memory but I believe it was)a motorcylce, are large gonads."
I went to an open-mic at the laugh factory last night and, other than about 6 hours of free time on a Tuesday afternoon, that's pretty much all you need to get onstage too. I was going to support my buddy Clay Tolbert, whose gonads are apparently large enough to not only get up there, tell 3 mins worth of jokes and retreat, but to FILM it for a documentary he's making.
I guess that would actually make it easier, giving him a reason to get onstage, and having recruited 15 of the 46 people in attendance to come and laugh loudly at your jokes probably didn't hurt, but he exceeded all of my expectations.
We stayed for the second show for free (one more drink on top of the two drink minimum)and saw a fantastic lineup. Skyler something from the TV show CON rocked the place, and then the host of "Street Smarts" kept it going... or so I'm told, turns out he's shorter than a horizontal microphone and I couldn't really see him from my seats in the luxury box. (When you stay from the first show you get your choice of seats) Tom Papa,who is that guy that you can't place but seems familiar like he was the voice of somebody on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was also there, but I don't remember much of his show because my roommate by that time had had 4 long island ice teas (as well as several drinks before even leaving for the show) and punctuated each one of Papa's jokes by poking me in the ribs and saying, "Pete, we're wearing the EXact same OUTfit." By which he meant that both he and the comedian were wearing a blank black t-shirt and jeans.
The highlight of the night had to be Joe Koi though, who I had seen before and wasn't THAT impressed with, although not dissapointed... last night he burned the place down. If only I'd had the energy to laugh, by the time he hit the stage, I was just physically exhausted and wanted it to end.
Anyway, the point of this post is that Clay thought I should go back with him next week and throw some things out there and I think I'm going to do it. I haven't written any jokes in awhile, but I think I still have my envelope of post-its with things written on them like: $1 move-in sign, who needs? 99 cent store. I'm sure that was a full fledged joke at one point, but I can't remember what the 99 cent store had to do with any of that now.
I'll just get up there and figure it out.

laughing

2005-04-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

Things that made me laugh today:
The fact that I'm in a relationship(?) with someone who has a good friend named Liz, and every time I say "Hey Liz" I feel like I'm in High Fidelity... this may be a main factor in why this friendship turned romantic... I wish my life had a script.
That I can't remember names, and as I was struggling to remember someone in one of my classes names (Sara) the only thing I could think to call her was Jonathan.
The song "Gay Eskimo" by Tenacious D. Check it out, get the version with the SNL cast and the impressions at the end. And keep those seals singing.
That Legoland is having a Star Wars Legos weekend this weekend... well, that's not so much making me laugh as just giddy.

2005-04-25T23:08:00.000-07:00

If you give a mouse a blog...

2005-04-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Cognitive Jettison, my own personal forum for all the stuff that gets edited out of my daily life by propriety, circumstance, and company. There are some great moments in the stuff I don't say, and I would like to give them a voice here. I'm also going to be putting up stuff that I think is really well written, cool, or interesting to me, and might even start to write down those embarrasing moments that I've been compiling on a piece of paper and meaning to write when I get some free time.
Also look for movie reviews, raves about restaurants, or events that I attend and write something about. Whatever it is, I will be doing my best to keep it funny, lighthearted and interesting. I'm starting this project as I head into the summer, so that means I will get into a habit of writing and posting if all goes according to plan.
Now, as will become common practice I'm sure, I will leave this post to go get something to eat...
Peace and Carrots,
-Pete