My driver's side mirror has gone missing. I don't really know what happened to it, although I have a hazy recollection of bumping the mirror on a telephone pole while parking at OB & schemer's. Still, it's much more interesting to assume that it got ganked by some vanity-obsessed hooligan, or perhaps that it was clipped by one of those old people on segways that I see in my neighborhood sometimes...
I try to go to the gym 3 times a week. It makes it a lot easier when other people want to go too... usually if you have a group of 3 people to go lifting, only 1 is actually motivated to go on any given day, but they convince the other two to go anyway. Pancho villa (above) and the schemer have been going too since they showed up as first-years.
This is what I'm working to. Well, that, and walking around my office in a wife-beater on International Mustache Day.
On Tuesday, E said something like you know I'm a desert rat when... That got me to thinking: I'm definitely not a desert rat. Here I am in the desert, and I'm probably more of an squirrel or an otter. I like the desert, but I miss forests and streams and lakes. (All this makes me think of those Brian Jacques books of my childhood, too... if only I could be as bad-ass as those badgers...)
Last night, at optimist club, I had a dance-off with some guy. I think he won with his last little spin maneuver, although he couldn't replicate my desparate 6-step response. After the contest, he took off his knit cap and stood next to me, revealing the same curly mess of hair and scruffy beard. Well met, indeed. And it turns out that E can really spin, too.
Song of the Day: Electric Six - Danger! High Voltage
You're not supposed to get a ticket while riding your bicycle on a first date. I mean, technically, we only slowed for the stop sign, but we looked both ways, saw that there was no traffic, and continued. We didn't cut anyone off, and we didn't breeze through. I mean, stopping requires some effort on a bike, especially on an incline... and we were pretty tired from climbing.
Maybe this is just some sort of conservation of goodness. I suppose I had it coming to me, for how good the whole evening was. (Or we had it coming to us?)
Hammer Time!, my grad student league softball team, had its first game today. Yesterday, at our "practice," I kept swinging and missing... since I'm the captain, I felt pretty shitty about sucking so hard. So today I took my trusty Hammer (above) and a ball, and pounded the ball against the back wall of my backyard (any patrons of the art gallery on the other side of the wall may have been a little confused). Anyway, we dominated... I was all ready to do the hammer-dance (it's called the typewriter, says one of my teammates), but we also had to forfeit because we were shy a couple of girls for the co-ed rules.
Hellmouth also headed back to PA this morning. I hope he was as happy to see me as I was to hang out with him again.
All in all, I'd call it a top 100 weekend*. That is, I expect only 100 weekends to be this good over the whole of my lifetime. My state of mind is evidenced by my Friday-night conversation with k-luv, who I was too drunk to remember to be mad at:
me: so how's life? k-luv: uh, pretty good. i'm tired now, I guess... me: what? why are you tired?!? k-luv: because it's 1 am! [pause] k-luv: how are things with you? me: oh god... awesome... life is good, I mean... the best! the best ever! shit, there's so much... I mean, I was just in chile. you probably heard about that, right? k-luv: oh yeah, everybody was talking about it me: what? really? k-luv: no, I was just making fun of you. but yeah, I heard about it me: okay... uh... I'm going to go over there now
Now I'm just finding my feet again, trying to catch up at work.
Song of the Day: Modest Mouse - Ocean Breathes Salty
*Why do I like making such lists and proclamations? Probably because I've watched High Fidelity too many times. It is, after all, in my top 5.
We worked with 25 gallons of mead and beer last night... that's 5 gallons each of:
1. smoked porter (title in progress: cotton-pickin' ale) 2. apple belgian (see photo above) 3. ESB 4. OB's mesquite honey mead 5. drinking team's dry mead
Oh, sweet delicious life of mine.
The meads were absolutely exquisite. In fact, they were so tasty that we've converted Pancho Villa, who is almost certainly going to start brewing as well.
Next, me and surly barnacle are going to brew a batch of sake. And then, with our 10 gallons of mead and sake... VIKINGS vs SAMURAI PARTY!!!
Stone Hands (center, with the open collared shirt and delightfully perplexed look on his face) is getting married on Sunday. To celebrate, he called out The Bike Gang. It was a glorious, glorious night, a once-in-a-month kind of celebration.* Bike ganging is quite simple. The pieces for last night's extravaganza:
1. a bicycle 2. "improper wedding attire" 3. fortitude and will
Stone Hands wore a frilly shirt and vest, borrowed from his boss' 70s wedding singer days. I wore the 3-piece pinstripe suit that my dad got married in. There were beers, there were bikes, I got to share it all with hellmouth... and there were girls, too :).
* The fact that I consider amazing nights, like the bike gang, to happen once per month should not lessen the fantastic-ness of the evening in any way. It simply indicates that the life of a grad student is awesome.
It's rained a lot since hellmouth came into town. In fact, I don't remember the last time it rained here 3 days in a row. So instead of going out into the desert, I'm introducing him to the city. This involves:
1. No Anchovies 2. Zachary's 3. B-line 4. Pico de Gallo 5. homebrew & bbq's
We did take a walking tour of downtown today also, which in my opinion, not enough people do here in Tucson.
My old friend Hellmouth is in town visiting with me for the next few days. He's an editor for the Jewish Exponent, as I am fond of telling everyone...
me: yeah, [hellmouth] works for the jewish exponent. But he's not a real Jew, more of a fake one. hellmouth: and by fake, he means Irish Catholic
But I usually talk about him as a poet. He is, after all, a published poet. And he may be going to grad school in an MFA program next fall for that purpose as well. The first thing we did after I picked him up from the airport was compare our recent readings and writings.
I'm doing my best to show him that grad school is [my version of] the Good Life.
Yep, I got really badly burned. Note the distinct backpack-pattern on my shoulders. Here I am with some aloe, getting ready to lube up and prepare for the day.
Since I'm spending all day (from 7 am today through 1 pm tomorrow) on buses and airplanes and in terminals, here's another photo from the backpacking trip.
The way I see it, through most of the trip I was dehydrated, sleep-deprived, and mentally stressed from the language barrier. So it was sort of like a vision-quest. I kept dreaming about having a puppy while I was out backpacking too. This may be extremely significant.
When I explained this to the surly barnacle: surly barnacle: yeah, and vision-quests worked out real well for the native americans, huh?
Regardless, there's a strong possibility that I'll break down and get a puppy this weekend.
Song of the Day: Belle & Sebastian - For the Price of a Cup of Tea
Next time I travel to Chile, I swear that I'm going to remember to bring sunscreen.
On my way back out of my short 2-day backpack, I figured I'd just walk the 11 km to El Abanico. But instead, without me even sticking my thumb out, a family stops their car and asks me where I'm headed. A few exchanges of their broken English and my broken Spanish, and suddenly I'm in the car with them for 1.5 hours all the way back to Los Angeles. I can't believe how friendly and generous Chilenos are. They dropped me off at the plaza, and I promptly checked into a hotel and took a much-needed shower.
Song of the Day: Calexico - Not Even Stevie Nicks...
8 am: shuttle from Las Campanas to La Serena, 2.5 hours noon: flight from La Serena to Santiago, 1.5 hours 2 pm - 10 pm: walk around Santiago midnight: night bus to Los Angeles, 6 hours 9 am: bus to the tiny village of El Abanico, 2 hours noon: hitchhike to Parque Nacional Laguna del Laja, 20 minutes 2 pm on: hike ~7 km over broken lava rock, gaining 1 km of altitude.
All this with my favorite Spanish phrase being lo siento, entiendo solo poquito espanol. I'm tired. But this is goddamn magnificent.
The control room of the telescope I'm at in Chile. There are exactly 20 monitors, plus my laptop and a PC in the back corner. I only use this laptop to surf the web / check my email / play old DOS games, and the PC's only use has been to play music through the stereo (it's playing Blonde on Blonde at the time of this post). Every 40 minutes, I re-align the telescope, and I set up another 40-minute run. Then I go back to web-surfing / playing colonization / reading about backpacking in the Patagonia. Sometimes I get really ambitious and run some reductions in the background. And sometimes I step outside and check out the galactic bulge and the Magellanic clouds (for you non-astronomers, these are galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way, they look like great big fuzzy patches on the sky).
This is observing. I'm happy here.
Song of the Day: Bob Dylan - Temporary Like Achilles
There's a little town on the pan-American highway between La Serena and Las Campanas Observatories which may or may not be called Huasco. In my imagination, I figure that it probably has the best sea food ever. Maybe I'll find out one day.
Song of the Day: R.E.M. - Can't Get There From Here
Flying all day and night (around 18 hours of airports and airplanes, Tucson -> Dallas -> Miami -> Santiago -> La Serena).
I wonder why airports feel so much like limbo-zones. Is it because of their function (holding people until they go somewhere else) or their design (like warehouses)? Apparently the Santiago airport isn't very popular on Monday at 7 am, above.
Song of the Day: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Heavy Metal
I've been hosting one of the five prospective graduate students visiting my program over the past few days. At one point, trying to convince them that my opinions were honest, I said you know, nothing really happens to us whether or not you get accepted here. it doesn't really matter to much to us. Shortly afterwards, I realized that in our own best interests we current grad students should be convincing these people *not* to come, in order to save more funding for ourselves.
The prospective student flies to visit Santa Cruz or Caltech or Berkeley (I forget) tonight, just in time for me to fly to Chile tomorrow. I've been using the book in the photo above to try to figure out a good backpacking trip to take after I finish the observing. If you know me, you may want to take note of the rough itinerary I have posted below, just in case something goes wrong. After all, entiendo solo poquito espanol.*
Finish observing morning of Fri, 3/16. Fly back to Santiago arriving at 1:20 pm. Taxi to terminal alameda, then 7-hour bus to Los Angeles, terminal santa maria. Taxi to local bus terminal santa rita, then 1.5-hr bus to El Abanico. From there, an 11-km hitchhike / hike to the Guarderia Chacay, the entrance to Parque Nacional Laguna del Laja. Then two days of backpacking around Volcan Antuco, followed by a return trip. And maybe hotels in Los Angeles the nights before and after the trip.
Song of the Day: Neil Finn - She Will Have Her Way
*In fact, I'm not even sure if poquito is even a real word, but I do seem to get the message across well enough when I say this.
Luca played at Congress last night. It rocked. And... it was for charity, too. Some lucky homeless dude is going to get a can of delicious baked beans, all thanks to me.
Monkfish knows the Luca's frontman (Nick Luca), so we chatted with him after the show. I always get a little flustered and giddy when I'm talking to rock stars. Of course, you've almost surely never heard of Luca. And while they have a couple of albums on the market, I think that's largely because Nick Luca works for a recording studio. So they're not that big or anything... but it doesn't matter to me. It's a huge rush
Oh god oh god how I want to be a rock star.
I didn't have my camera, and my usual contingency photographer, nop.bot, left his at home in favor of his flask. So instead, you'll find a photo I took the day after, at the courthouse downtown.
At the show:
1. We met a guy who moved to Tucson solely to live in Tucson. Previously, I had assumed that all people in Tucson either (a) came here for college and never left, (b) had family ties here, (c) are passing through, or (d) are republican engineers / air force people / rich snowbirds. Well lo and behold, at least one guy moved here just because he thought it would be a cool place to live. According to L, usually when there are fun things to do in a city, it has a high cost of living. But in Tucson, it's ridiculously cheap (as a grad student, I make more than the median income), and yet there remain fun things to do.
2. Talking with kat, the hot librarian: kat: you know, I've never slept with a virgin me: me neither.hmm... is that Islam, where you get like 80 virgins when you die? who the hell would want that? i mean, who wants to have sex with 80 people who don't know what the hell they're doing? kat: [laughs] how's the no-virgin thing worked out for you? me: pretty good... you? kat: awesome. Song of the Day: Calexico - Feast of Wire
Yearrgh. Getting this email today made me spontaneously cringe and want to kick somebody in the throat.
Back in November, the enormously wise voters of Arizona put into effect a new set of "we hate brown people" laws. This is one of them. Why oh why do some people feel the need to designate others as something subhuman?
Song of the Day: Johnny Cash & the Highwaymen - Plane Wrech in Los Gatos
Tucson city league ultimate frisbee again tonight. My blueballer$ played pretty well, and are a decidedly average team (we're 2-2). The only bummer was that there were several moments of arguing on the field... ultimate is self-officiated, with no referees, so sometimes there are contested calls on the field. In my opinion, city league ought to be treated more like a hippie-sport. It just seems wrong to get ultra-competitive when it's a game of frisbee!
Song of the Day: Neil Young - Yonder Stands the Sinner
In summary, the shredders and skiers on the Vail trip, from left to right:
MAchine aka george washington carver little monkey sassbox the renegade rock 'n' roll AJ pancho villa (taking the photo) saucy brute (not pictured) the diamond (not pictured)
love also goes to A, B, P, and the monkey mobile
This morning I had to give a lecture on extremophiles to my astrobiology class. After the attendance quiz, about a dozen students left class. I probably shouldn't take it personally, but that's pretty offensive when you're a teacher. It threw me off pretty badly, and I think the lecture suffered for it. Bummer.
Back to sunny & hot AZ today. Before I left for Vail, I thought, hmm, why do people love skiing so much? Now I know.
We got to spend last night with the brothers A & B, plus their crazy friend P, who told us the following stories... 1. Jumping off a lift (from 15-20 feet), and landing cleanly to snowboard down the mountain. 2. Getting stopped by a US marshall while snowboarding down after half a bottle of Jamieson, telling the marshall fuck off! gimme your gloves! want a bagel?, then being forced to walk all the way down the mountain after the officer took his board.
Later, B says, you know how you guys are here on vacation? Well, it's just my every day.
Song of the Day: Big Joe Williams - Somebody's Been Fooling #1
Even if I'm still not that good at skiing, at least I have no fear of going fast / falling. I rocked out a couple of blues today while hardly falling.
In the video above, note the intense tuck just before the disappearing act. It starts out with nop.bot aka george washington carver on his ass after a fall. Pancho villa took the video while snowboarding behind me, and you also see little monkey sassbox and the renegade shred past me at various points.
Song of the Day: Neil Young - Keep on Rockin' in the Free World
Vail, day 2. Today, I learned how to snowplow. That may have been good to know yesterday. Apparently, today was also the busiest day of the year at Vail, with 20,000 people on the mountain.
Other than skiing, the today's highlight was taking the monkey-mobile through snowbanks on the way to the grocery store. Those SUV-driving republicans sure must have a lot of fun...
I'm in Vail, Colorado, going skiing for the first time. Picture above are the renegade & little monkey sassbox, en route up the mountain. Sassbox hooked us up with her uncle's ridiculously pimp condo, and the saucy brute's brothers A & B hooked us up with free rental gear and discounted lift tickets.
Here is my progress in skiing: 1. Get off the first lift, fall down. 2. Fall down every 2nd turn. 3. Start going fast, tuck in, realize I can't slow down, then wipe out in an explosion of snow. 4. Make it down a section of moguls by a combination of skiing 20 feet and falling 10 more, over and over again to the bottom.
Coming up with a beard-full of snow and frost sure makes me feel like a man. Even if I suck at skiing, I'm damn good at falling down.
Song of the Day: Cypress Hill - Insane in the Membrane (as played in our giant white Durango, aka the monkey-mobile)
