Starship Down

I read the wikipedia article on Watership Down and then listened to In the Light and then I wrote this.  Then I did some work.

Starship Down

it all goes back to the beginning
thats where this starship ends

I can't stop cause its in my blood
despise this sorcery, let it down, let it down

I just want to let it down, but I'm glued
I'm spinning and running and tripping on edge

there's no quotient for my motion
thats how the starship ends

Cause For Alarm: The Alarm Strikes Back

Yeah I'm fine.  At least, I don't have any scary diseases.  I'm still not allowed to exercise yet and the fate of my pilot's license remains an open question.  On the bright side, today, the 12th Ave bridge was mostly empty and I got to floor Jessica on the way across it while Memories by David Guetta was playing on the radio.

Cause For Alarm

"Hello, this is your captain speaking.  There is absolutely no cause for alarm."

...

"The wings are not on fire."

--John Cleese

I finally made myself promise to see a doctor about it when I was on the second of two flight legs, stuffed in the cramped airline seat of maybe a 747 flying from Denver to Seattle, feeling a sudden onset of what I can only describe as scary-weird-lightheadedness, which is quite different from the typical and much more pleasant lightheadedness I normally experience.  There was the weird feeling of something wrong, and the breathing, and then the panic as my vision and hearing faded while I scrambled to find a comfortable slouching position from which I wouldnt cause a scene when I lost consciousness seconds later.  Fortunately, thank God, I didn't actually lose consciousness.  I just hung on the edge for a few minutes.  I actually fumbled in front of me for my waterbottle and took a drink or two during the time that I could neither see nor hear.  Then I saw red, and then slowly the cabin came back.  A few minutes later I felt fine.

I later decided against seeing a doctor, because I pretty much hate seeing them unless I have no choice.  Don't get me wrong;  I do love going to teaching hospitals and interacting with all of the attractive medical students.  But I still hate dealing with my health in a professional capacity unless I am about to die.  I forget what changed my mind last week (yeah, this happened a while ago;  I originally wasn't going to tell this story.  Don't tell my parents) but it must have been bad because guess where I was monday?  The belltown clinic.  Oh thats right, I realized I didn't want to fly myself anywhere until I had at least talked to a doctor or something.  My penultimate visit to this clinic is the one where I got a flu vaccine while I was really sick and later passsed out just outside of a rite aide.  Same doctor too.  I probably should have told her about that.  Anyway.

Sooooo.   Medical stuff.  Medications.  Medicallyness.  Medicaidecare.  Yeah.  My doctor...well...apparently losing consciousness in a sitting position and for no apparent reason is a Big Deal.  I also had some random rash on my foot, which had appeared like the morning before, and which I wasn't planning on telling her about.  You see, my body is kind of like a car;  when things start breaking, like one of the door locks or a sticky turn signal switch or a faulty indicator, or a giant inexplicable bruise on my foot, I just get used to it and forget about it until someone points it out.  Well, she asked specifically if I had a rash.  How did she know?  Science magic.  Anyway.  It must have been scary because she called in like two other doctors to look at it, like it was a zombie bite.  They asked a bunch of questions, especially about previous visits to people like cardiologists.  Getting a medical history out of me is a rather difficult process, since as I can't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday it is really tough to remember what some cardiologist said two years ago after I crashed my car into a minivan.

In any case, the doctor ordered a bunch of tests and told me I'm not allowed to exercise, because there is a small chance I might suddenly collapse and die instantly.  Something about having an aorta that is too big.  I'm not entirely sure I'm a fan of any medical condition where something is too big.  Also, she told me I definitely shouldn't pilot anything until this is sorted out, and to not even step on a plane (I guess as a passenger).  And with those words, my FAA Medical Certificate just became worthless.  Except for when I pulled it out to find out the last time I had a physical.  I think half of the people I talked to are under the mistaken impression that I am an actual, professional airline pilot in my spare time from being a programmer.  In retrospect, I probably should have gone straight to an FAA certified doctor, because I'm going to have to go to one anyway for a new medical certificate.  Assuming I can get one.  I'm going to have a hard time swallowing the irony if I can never again exercise the privileges of my $20,000 private pilot license for lack of a medical cert.

I didn't know this, but doctors can order "stat" tests.  Like, this-is-an-emergency-do-the-test-within-48-hours kind of tests.  So I got an "echocardiogram" which is just like when a pregnant girl gets an ultrasound in the movies, only the aim it at your heart and try to stick it in between your ribs, specifically, right where all the still-painful scar tissue is from the chest tube from when I crashed my car into a minivan.  Oh, and they also did a bubble test.  You know how accidently injecting yourself with air can kill you?  Well, a bubble test involves injecting air into your veins to make it go into your heart.  They give you an IV, and then they take this special Y-adapter for syringes, and by alternately pumping two syringes back and forth, they mix some kind of saline solution until its "frothy" and then inject that directly into your vein while the person watches the bubbles in your heart with the ultrasound thingy.  It did not hurt, but it was seriously disconcerting to watch.  Then, this like, intern, stayed behind to practice her ultrasounding skills on me.  She was kind enough to mention that they hardly ever see someone as young as me.  So, great.  I've done so much sitting and programming that my body is apparently deteriorating like a 50 year old.  I probably deserve it--there are days that I've consumed like 4 sodas and then had McDonald's for dinner.  What can I say?  I'm a lonely, incompetant cook.  My older sister's family gave me a recipe book for either my birthday or christmas and I only got around to trying one of them like Sunday.  I had to pass up the first two because not only were they too difficult to even try, but I didn't even recognize the ingredients and I don't even know what the hell ratatouille is, other than being a cartoon about a rat chef.  The recipe I found bascially involved buying raw shrimp, throwing them on a pan with some old spice and "broiling" them for like 5 minutes.  I even had trouble with that.  First, I bought raw shrimp that were mysteriously nearly as expensive as the cut and cooked ready-to-serve cocktail shrimp, which made me call into question the entire point of cooking for myself.  Then, I had to looked up "devein" on the internet.  I also had to look up the word "broil."  Then, I had to figure out how to thaw the shrimp because they were frozen and I had already turned the oven on to "broil," thinking it needed to preheat.  Well, that got turned off again before I could start.  So the shrimp are finally like thawed after three minutes in cold water, and then I discovered that they were already deveined.  Then all I had to do was pull the shells off of each of them.  As I got near the end, the shrimp that were still in the thawing water bucket (an unwashed throw-away tupperware container I just bought) started to get really soggy, like they were going to just melt away.  This seemed strange to me, since I believe shrimp actually come from water, but then again this was fresh water...idk.  So I had to empty that out.  Eventually I git all of the shrimp lined up on the pan.  Then I tried to shake on the old bay.  That didn't go so well on account of me failing to realize that the container had more openings than the giant hole that was, in every shake,  dumping a quantity of seasoning so large that it was comparable in mass to the shrimp it landed on.  Then, I turned on the broiler again, and like ten minute later I ate all of tasty shrimp before I could even pick out which netflix movie to watch.  Then I had a stomach ache.

Sorry, I digress.  The echo cardio people (who I suppose precede the foxtrot-cardio people) told me that someone would look at it and blah blah blah the results UNLESS there was some major problem (like I'm going to suddenly die and become a zombie and bite people) -- then someone would call me.  Unfortunately, my phone (made by LG, plan with AT&T) gets really bad reception at my desk.  The reception is so bad that I cannot send a text message unless I hold the phone up, above my head, like an electronic simba, and when I get a call, the call gets dropped before I can reach an area of the building where I can actually hear the person.  I've basically hung up on almost every medical person that has tried to call me in the past few days.

I also got blood drawn.  The waiting room was full of people that were sick and/or in those ugly little electric go-carts that they always advertise during episodes of the original Star Trek series.  This served to remind me again that I'm not supposed to be having problems like this yet.  Then this melodramatic and gay looking Edward character with sparkles on his face sucked some blood out of my vein.  Just kidding; it was a polite asian dude.  He took like five vials of it.  I didn't look.  Thanks to television and videogames and Dexter and that child birthing video we saw in health class this one time I am normally immune to gore.  I can actually handle any amount of blood as long as it is not my own, and like, on its way out.

So, I don't really know whats going to happen now.  My new plan to walk to work every day just got shot to pieces by my doctor.  Thats pretty sad that walking is exercise for me--I need to be way, way way way wayyy more in shape to handle the incredible ski season I plan on having but can't afford this winter.  I'm not worried though.  They'll probably tell me, once again, that there is something mysteriously wrong with some part of me and they don't know what it is but it's not going to kill me, and maybe there is just some random thing I can't do. 
Like before, when I found out during and indoor soccer game that I can't be out of shape and then sprint for 30 minutes straight without ever catching my breath.

What I do know is that I am probably going to have to cancel the solo bender I had planned for this weekend in Portland.  I had found three bars on the internet that sounded promising.  One was apparently, like, all pink, and served martinis, and gave you a free manicure with your drink order.  I was pretty sure there would be some girls there.  This was going to be the first of the trips where I find out if I am capable of having fun in other cities (i.e. whether the fact that I hate my life here is Seattle's fault, or just me).  Going out and meeting people, I have discovered (thanks to a secret and miserable trip to New York I took on one of my birthdays) is really tough to do alone.  However, I don't think I have any single guy friends I want to take.  I have plenty of guy friends that are dating or engaged to someone.  Also, if I brought anyone I would need a least two people then.  For some reason, I really only like hanging out in groups of 3 people or more, because when its just two people, I'm responsible for like half of the conversation and I really just can't keep up.  Its ends up being draining and awkward.  There are some people that I get along with great when it is just me and them, but...well they are almost all girls.  I mean, come on--tell me you didn't see that one coming.  Most of them live in a different time zone also.  So, if I ever get around to test driving Portland, its just going to be me, Jessica, and a lot of rum.

Anyway, I only wrote this because it is a good story.  Please do not do anything awkward like call...anyone,  or experience emotions such as sympathy, or breathe a word of this to my parents.  Based on the way their reaction to a minor 3-day hospitalization a few years ago, I think the optimal form of notice is for them to not know anything until my death certificate is signed.  Ok maybe thats not true.  It sounded great in my head though.

Carbon 250 - Chapter 2

Its not november yet, but I am bored and I have to write this one before I forget it:

Its like I waited my whole life

all for this one night

Carl swaggered into the bar, proud but unsure what to do with his helmet.  He would later learn that hanging it from one of Carby's mirrors would do just fine, unless you were worried about theft, in which case you had to wait for Carby's twin exhaust pipes to cool down before locking the helmet in the poorly placed D-ring.  Carl sat down and the bar and looked around.  Typical bar crowd, at least for this area.  Maybe there were a couple extra guys wearing riding leather.  He couldn't tell.  Carl had yet to go out and buy all of the special biker clothes, although he did know exactly what kind of armor he wanted:  the super sexy space marine armor.  That wasn't the brand name, just the name Carl made up in his head.  The bartender shot him a glance and Carl asked for a beer.  Then someone leaned against the bar next to him.

"Let me guess, a 250?" the stranger asked.

Carl looked at the guy.  Dressed in mostly black, extra shadowy five o'lock shadow, and eyes like lightning.  There was also a  couple scars on his neck.  Despite all this Carl would completely forget the face ten minutes later.  Carl responded, "Yup!  Its awesome."

"Two-fifties always are."  The stranger stuck out his hand.  "Biff."

"Carl.  Do you ride?"

Biff turned aside for a second and caught a can of mountain dew that the bartender threw at him.  He cracked it open and took a long sip before answered.  "Pretty much all the time.  It's all I really do now."  Biff's tone made Carl curious, but before Carl could speak again, Biff was walking away.  "See you around," he said, over his shoulder.

An hour later, Carl left and rode.  He rode every night, exploring the city, tearing up the highways.  Then Carby's clutch cable broke.

The guy that showed up to tow him was Terry.  But Terry did not tow the motorcycle, because Terry had brought a normal tow truck for cars.  Terry left, and then Jack showed up.  Jack had a flatbed, and asked if Carl needed a ride.  Carl didn't.  He was just gonna walk home.  That was fine with Jack.  Jack gave Carl a card and said to call on Monday.

Jack's route back to the cycle shop took him through a mountain pass.  Strange, I know.  I don't know how it happened either.  Maybe he took a wrong turn.  I mean, it was late.  Like 1am.  That's late for a guy like Jack.  So Jack is driving along with Carby all tied down in the back, and despite all the air whipping over his farings he's feeling a bit claustrophobic from all the racheting cables holding him down to the bed.

Jack pulled over when he saw someone walking and offered him a ride.  The guy was wearing a tattered air force uniform.  Jack was briefly worried that he had just picked up a bum, but the man didn't smell, and he carried himself with a certain amount of pride.  They started small talking, and Jack mentioned he was getting married tomorrow.  His passenger gave him a long, hard look and asked why he was still taking calls the night before his wedding.

"Gotta make ends meet, you know?"  Jack explained, and cringed a little when he thought about the deposit and the check that were racing each other in the mail.

"Oh I understand," said his passenger, "sometimes you're flying on fumes and you still can't see whats ahead."  Then the guy changed the subject.  Started asking Jack questions.  Some of them were a little too personal.  Sometimes it looked like the man was sizing him up.  Jack finally started getting annoyed and asked the guy where he was headed.

"Just up that street, if you don't mind.  Its only half a mile."  Jack knew the street--his bride-to-be Lisa had grown up in a house on that street--so he knew he wouldn't have any trouble with the flat bed.  He made the turn, wordlessly.  His passenger pointed,  "that house right there."

Jack flipped the left blinker on and looked.  It was Lisa's old house.  "There?" he asked, looking back at the front seat.  The man was gone.  Jack slammed on the brakes in surprise.  Both cabin doors were shut and the windows were rolled up.  There was no way the guy could have gotten out without him knowing, but he was most definitely not in the cab.  Jack checked the motorcycle.  It was still there, untouched.  Nobody in any of the mirrors.  Jack slid his butterfly knife out of his jacket and just sat there for a minute opening it half an inch, feeling for the cutting edge, and then snapping it back together.  It was a nervous habit of his.

The street itself was quiet, with nothing amiss except for a flatbed tow truck just sitting there in the middle of it with its brakelights on and turns signals flashing on the left side.  Jack opened his door slowly, holding the knife in his right pocket.  If there was trouble, he could have that thing open and in somebody's neck in less than a second.  But there was no trouble, and no graybearded air force vet on either side or under the flatbed.  Jack got back in the truck and shrugged it off.  Must be wedding exhaustion.  He checked the motorcycle again.  It was fine.  All he had to do was get that to the shop, safely, get to bed, and up for the wedding on four hours of sleep.  He could do it.  He didn't know how, but he always managed.

The next day Jack was in a church wearing a tux.  He was shaking, slightly, from overdoing the coffee, and from seeing Lisa.  Someone was playing something gay on the piano, and half of his friends were staring, but as far as Jack cared the damn place was empty and it was just him and her.  Lisa walked towards him, alone.  Her father has passed away years ago and to her family's dismay, Jack had suggested she walk down the aisle alone.  He didn't care;  most of her family already hated him anyway.

Lisa was not walking down the center of the aisle.  No one else seemed to notice, but Jack did.  When she got closer, he saw what looked like footprints in the rug.  They were right next to her.  Lisa approached him and so did the creepy ass footprints.  Jack felt chills run down his back.  Lisa offered her hand and Jack took it automatically.  Then he watched the footprints back away.  They were there; they were totally there.  Didn't anyone else see them?

"Is something wrong?"  Lisa asked.

Jack jerked his head up and smiled.  "Nope.  You look amazing."  The feeling of creepiness had passed.

The ceremony was a blur.  Love is always patient, and long, and drones for quite a while and then BAM!  "I do."  Kiss.  Dip, kiss again, with tongue, make sure her entire family gets an eyeful.  Then pictures, the reception, talking, eating.  It was mostly a blur for Jack, but the one steady constant was Lisa's beaming face.  That didn't change.  The only remarkable thing that happened was when Jack and Lisa were doing the rounds to go say hi to every table for like 12 seconds and they stopped near where Terry was sitting.

"Dude, I think you left this in the flatbed last night."  Terry had something shiny in his hand.

Lisa snatched it out of Terry's grasp.  "These are my father's wings!  From his uniform.  Where did you get these?"

Suddenly the previous night made a lot more sense to Jack.  He half-assed an explanation and looked around, expecting the ghost to appear.  But the air force vet never appeared again;  he had gotten all he came for.

The Little Engine That Couldn't

You don't get another chance

Life is no Nintendo game

--Eminem

Philly, philly, philly.  The last time I came to Philly I just blasted out a couple messages on facebook about which bar I would be at on which night.  That had a success rate of about 50%.  In other words, I went the entire trip without seeing half of the people I meant to.  This time, I figured, I would just make individual plans with everybody.  Well, that didn't work either.  I think I have more friends in philly now than when I left, where friend is defined as either someone who wants to see me when I visit, or someone who gets offended if I don't invite them out for drinks.  I think the main problem is that I can't keep track of them all.  This trip I still missed like half of them, and a lot of my plans fell apart.  I originally wasn't going to post this...and I have no idea what I was going to write here.

Whatever the case, next time, I'm just going to book my flights and tell people when I'm in town, and see what happens.   So here is my trip summary.

[Where is the horse and the rider]

Friday night I had plans to go salsa dancing but the people I was going with bailed on me.  I texted a bunch of people and to my surprise Kristen actually responded.  I met up with her and her friend Laidback Colleen, who I so named because she doesn't throw a fit regarding the pronunciation of her name.  They were out to celebrate Laidback-Colleen's successful bar exam, or something.  She wants to do copyright law but doesn't know who Lawrence Lessig is.  Sitting there at the martini bar, I realized that both of those girls were quite attractive and I would have loved to make out with either of them but my hopes for anything like that were dashed when they spent half the night describing their perfect mate:  The Mountain Man.  Picture Aragorn, son of Arathorn, standing on the deck of a corsair ship, shirt open to the wind, and he is chopping wood, but unlike the movie or reality he is cleanshaven--babyfaced, even--and also loves sports and doesn't take long to get ready.  For a super dressed up occasion he maybe throws a button-down shirt over a sports jersey.  Here is an artist's rendering of what a mountain man might look like:

I took a look around at the male clientele in the martini bar and wondered what made the girls want to drink there.  More importantly, this is basically an opposite description of myself.  I don't take long to get ready, and I do shave, but I am no mountain man.  I'm tall and thin and look like I was assembled with pencils and my apartment doesn't even have a damn fireplace.  Plus, I know pretty much nothing about sports.  I mean, I know which ones I like to play.  Watching others do it is boring.

We parted company and I went to Brasil's by myself.  They put a new lock on the men's room door.  The old lock had a problem where it didn't actually lock and people would walk in on you.  I discovered that the new lock has the same problem.  There was this girl there that seemed kind of into me, but I blew it, mostly out of old habits.  Then I walked back to center city and slept alone after watching a movie where these guys kidnap some guys and hold them in a chemical factory, but there is a fight which causes one of the chemical canisters to open, and suddenly everyone in the building gets knocked out and when they wake up they can't remember if they are the kidnappers or the ones who got kidnapped.


[Heaven holds a sense of wonder]

I met up with this girl I know, and started to think she was the girl of my dreams.  She told me she isn't dating or kissing anyone for like 5 years.  I'm still thinking of a...uh...anything.


[It all comes back to you]


Met up with Ariana one night.  She is super hot.  I don't know if she is one of the one's that got away because I don't know if I ever had a chance with her, but I do know that I didn't really try and she has a boyfriend now.  She also told me that it was too bad she didn't know I was in town friday night because she and her friends had an awesome time staying up until 4:30am drinking all over town.


[When its just me and you on the dance floor]


I had been hoping that Betsy was single and interested by some miracle but those hopes were dashed when she showed up to the wedding with her boyfriend.  Even worse, she looked gorgeous;  it sucked.

The wedding was in an awesome chapel.  I know this because as I was ushering I rarely made it halfway down the aisle before the person I was escorting mentioned what a great/lovely/wondering building it was.  What can I say?  People are suckers for old stone buildings with no bathrooms.

During the ceremony I stood next to the dais, and in between trying not to pass out (I am apparently physically incapable of standing still for an hour in a hot, stuffy church without getting lightheaded) I imagined someone in a somewhat princess-like, not necessarily white, dress walking down that aisle, alone, to me.  Then I pushed it out of my mind.

I hate weddings, or more specifically, being in them, because weddings have many, many, many many many single points of failure, and if you are a groomsman, any number of them could be your fault.  I managed to survive the wedding without screwing anything up, and later received unwarranted praise from family members for whatever it is that I did that day;  all I technically did was show up and put on the tux.  Maybe I simply looked good in comparison to a certain other groomsman who didn't bother picking up his tux until the day of the wedding (ref: single points of failure).  Then again, I was late to this gay picture-taking thing where the photogropher takes pictures of the guys while they are getting ready.  This part of the wedding process was new to me.  Who wants pictures of that?  Thats like me asking a friend to take a picture of me sticking my arm out of the shower curtain to give a thumbs up on my first day of a new job.  I could possibly understand it if all of the guys were in some old hunting lodge, lounging around in our suspenders, smoking cigars and sipping Ketel One against a backdrop of wood panels and stuffed dear heads.  But we weren't.  We were a hotel room at the Sheraton at 707 Lancaster Ave wearing some lovely cream-colored ties, while random girls popped in and out to yell at me for ignoring their calls.

I also got bitched at by a number of friends, mostly Mulan;  a lot of people I know seem to have been born with a visual impairment that causes them to think I am frowning, or even scowling, when actually I am not.  I don't know if it is congenital, or hereditary, or what, but I don't want to sit next to Mulan at any more weddings.


[the devil himself could be pulled out of me]

Yeah, then at the wedding afterparty, which was really more like fifteen-drunk-people-in-one-hotel room, I met a girl who made club-style dancing enjoyable.  I didn't know that was possible.  Unfortunately, it made my life here seem that much more miserable when I got back.  I've lived here one year and 9 months and I'm still meeting more attractive girls in philly than here.  WTF?

Carbon 250 - The Epic Tale of a Kawasaki Ninja

This is fiction.  I mean, I'm admitting its fiction up front.  You may want to skip it.  It ostensibly has nothing to do with my life. I'm doing this because of some writing contest that starts in november, and because I am sitting in a starbucks in King of Prussia with nothing to do.   Stories of my weeklong bender in Philly, which I will perhaps refer to as The Littlle Engine That Couldn't, will be forthcoming at a later date.  Oh, yeah, Kev just called me wondering why I didn't bother inviting him (note to self: just have fun with the story)

The PenIs Mightier

--Will Ferrel

Deep in Trench City, on the corner of 1st and Kemp, there was a giant ass sign for Starbucks that was never lit because the Starbucks there had been closed.  Behind this sign was a motorcycle dealership with a small lot.  Every day the people that worked at the dealership would bring the bikes out and shine them up, and every night they would put them back in.  Tiresome work but it only takes two morons, some pvc tubing, and a pickup truck to steal a motorcycle.  Actually, sometimes it just takes two morons.

Ok, before I continue any further, I just had a great idea for the internet:  when people attempt to correct each other's grammer, the comment should only be allowed if it is accompanied by a page number in The Elements of Style.  No other source of grammatical whatever is allowed, most especially personal correspondence with my english-majoring ex-girlfriend's English teachers.  Anyway.

There was one motorcycle that was taking a while to be sold.  A delicious black little Kawasaki Ninja 250 with purple rims.  Don't let the purple fool you;  this little Ninja is a male ninja, and there is no body kit in the world that could make it truly believe it was a girl ninja.   That blue Suzuki over there with the short ass seat for girls--thats a girl bike.  Anyways, the reason that the little black ninja took so long to get sold was because everybody in Trenchtown, as the locals called, mistook themselves for badasses, and couldn't be seen with on a tiny little sportbike with only 250 cc's of displacement, never mind that it was easy to handle, dominated on the curvys, and got great mileage.  All in all it was a great commuter bike, and also go you laid.  But the trenchcoats, as they were called by outsiders, didn't know that, and no matter how manly they thought themselves to be, they were still too insecure for the little black ninja.  Maybe that blue girl bike, but not the baby ninja.

Slowly, as weeks turned into months and months turned into more months, the black ninja became self aware, and quite bored.  Don't get me wrong now:  this is not the cute and cuddly science project type of self awareness, but the diabolical, badass, world dominating kind.  Fortunately for everyone else, the ninja had no opposable thumbs, and so the U.N. would continue mismanaging the globe for quite some time of come.

Now that we've covered the important detail, the ninja's self-awareness, lets move on to the most important thing:  his first owner.  This guy was a lean, scrappy artsy kid who didn't really like other artists.  He also got beat up a lot in high school, that is, until he started sneaking up behind people with a knife.  Well, he actually never did that, but he was three large drawings of such an event hanging on the brick walls of his loft apartment just across the water from Trenchtown.  Now, the reason this kid thought he needed a motorcycle and the reason he actually needed a motorcycle are two very different things, and a subject he was most confused about.  Fuck I can't belief how easy it is to write when I'm just making shit up.  You realize that don't you?  I'm just writing what sounds good.  I have no idea whats going to happen next.  I mean, a disney castle made of Legos is coming up, but--whatever lets get back to the story.  So anyway the reason this kid thought he needed a motorcycle was because he was just another thin, geeky kid with not much going for him except for some failed attempts to draw girls at parties, and a replica of the Disney castle made of Lego bricks that he had finally realized  was cockblocking him more than his own shyness.  And the girls he was interested in down at Delta Lamba didn't seem to like pasty thin guys either, they went for guys that looked and talked like walking brick walls.  He needed something to raise his status.  After discussing this with several friends he decided that that thing was a motorcycle, because motorcycles have sex appeal, they said.  And he believed.

However, thats not the real story, only what was bouncing around in this guy's head.  By the way, his name is--no, its not Dave--his name is Carl.  Carl's actually a cool guy, and what he did not notice is that ever since he was a little boy, riding to the beach in his families station wagon and watching live-fast-and-die-instantly 20-year-old morons tear up traffic on their beaufitul, shiny sportbikes which matched the colors of their helmets--and ever since he watched action movies and saw his favorite action heros save the world on two wheels--he had always secretly wanted one.  He had  just lost his way somewhere--perhaps during high school when girls started slapping him when he'd mention just how much he'd like to [do a] charcoal [of] their breasts.

So in Carl walked, or over, really, because he didn't have a car and walked the whole way to trenchtown, realizing, once he was balancing on the concrete road barrier with an 80 ft  drop to water on one side and cars whizzing buy at 90 miles per hour on the other, that the bridge had no pedestrain path.  Then he got to the other side and hid in a rusty barrel, because of the cop.  Its a sordid story; lets skip it.  Carl was on the lot, an the black ninja was out in front of the main entrance because the owner, Bob, really wanted to sell it, and had insisted that if they put it their, instead of the bigass grey hyabusa that looked like it didn't have a bitch seat.  Bob had gotten in a giant argument with his top salesman, Spit, about the fate of that spot and Spit rightly put up a fight, because nobody wanted that ninja.  But Bob swore that it would be gone before midafternoon, and also he was the boss, so Spit gradually rolled the baby ninja out to the yellow half-circle painted on in the lot.  The ninja took one look at Spiff and didn't like him, although Carl would have.  Spit was kinda wiry himself, but with lots of muscles, and a purple, fading tatoo that he had gotten while drunk one night.  No one really knew what it was, but he told girls it was purple fire.  Unless they weren't going to sleep with him, in which case Spit told them to fuck off.  Thats the kinda guy Spit was.

Carl, though, was more of the love at first sight kinda guy, and when see saw that black ninja he thought it nearly glowed underneath the red (from pollution) sky.  It was as if the othe motorcycles faded into grey.  He jogged inside, nearly running into Spit, who glared at him, and arrived at the desk, breathless, hastily inquiring if that awesome black motorcycle had been spoken for yet.  Behind the counter, Bob grinned ear to ear and held his hands wide in triumph looking at Spit.  Spit ignored him and just shook his head.  In Spit's defense, it was pure dumb luck that Bob had but the ninja out there that day, but Bob would never go too long without bringing it up, nevermind that that trick failed to sell a lame-ass moped that got delivered to the dealership by mistake.

Carl was not an experienced rider, and had quite an interesting time getting it home, but he was tripping balls the whole time and made it home without falling.  He had a name for his  new bike.  He didn't know why, or where the name come, but it sounded perfect for some reason:  Carbon 250.  As time passed he referred to it as Carby for shot.  He did know know tha Carby's engine was too underpowered to cause female riders in the second seat to have orgasms at traffic lights, but neither he nor Carbby even knew that was physically possible, and both were estatic at the beginning of their new lives.


What happens next?  Does Carl get laid?  Does Carby?  Do aliens attack?  Tune in at some indefinite time in the future, possibly never, to find out.

Give Me Peace

What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?

--Alec Trevelyan

I am undone.  Words failed me once again this evening.  Despite my every effort it seems that I've played the same game and lost the same way.  I don't know when to put the beginning of this story, but it doesn't matter so I'll skip to the end.  There is a princess in a tower.  I crouch in front of her, looking up into a face so beautiful it could disarm a dragon.  The only light streams in through a window behind her, shinning through her hair and bouncing off her cheek.  I have one finger on her chin, staring at her, speechless.  The original plan was nothing but a single step:  move in for a kiss, but don't quite kiss her.  I was going to hover inches away, dragging out the moment before our lips touched.  However, while I was still drawing her close and too far away for the hovering when she said "no kissing either."  I had been previously trying to get her to sing.

More words were exchanged, and the content of those words was so unexpected my mind ground to a halt.  I had no words.  I had no filler words.  No quips, no dry humor.  I'd brought a pocketknife to a gun fight and now stood bleeding from the left side of my chest.  I held her there, while I could, with a hand on her shoulder and a finger on her chin, to at least draw the moment out, this moment that was the closest thing to intimacy that I would get.  One moment became several, and then they were gone.

I hear girls like this referred to as "the ones that got away," and I have more than one, but to be totally honest with you, I never really had this one.  I thought I did once, long ago, and briefly, and the exuberance I felt in that moment is something I compare to arriving on the shores of heaven.  I wanted for nothing, then, but I was mistaken.  The later realization of the depth of that mistake led me, like a zombie, to a restaurant in atlantic city wherein I swiftly consumed every beer that I was handed and ended the night with the faint taste of vomit on my lips.

Tonight, I love her.  It was a risk I knew of when I came and I came anyway.  I've never had so much be said while so much remains unsaid.  She told me not to look so emo.  I thought my face was expressionless, but apparently I have not the mask I need.  Tomorrow, or  perhaps a day more in the future, love will settle down into infatuation, or lust, or something else that is manageable.  I will drink rum with friends at bars and her name will come up and I'll nod or raise my glass.  Her face will flash through my mind, and I might even picture her blushing under the moonlight, and then the words will continue their course downstream as I sit there on the barstool, shackled to the status quo.


Am I, as I am and will be, someone she would ever fall in love with, perhaps if the planets were aligned just right and other guys weren't around?  Or am I instead just another inconvenient suitor, just another guy who wants but can't have, who will never stand in the doorway of a fresh apartment watching the streetlight bounce off an empty wine glass as he listens to faint sounds of her breathing in the next room?  If I told her how I feel, would it ruin my chances forever, or would she even believe me?  I don't know.  I don't know if she knows, and if she does know, I don't know if she would tell me, especially if the answer to that first question is no.  Yet, that is the most important answer.  And she might.  So I might, ask, at least, if the words don't fall out of my mind first.

I have minutes to decide whether to post this, and the consequences could be many.  Other girls could read this.  She could read this.  A lot of people actually read this --and here goes the battery.  Well, Wolverine would push the button.

Drinking on the Job

A design discussion is a meeting where important but contentious topics are discussed, which usually pertain to the design of our software, or the methodology we use to accomplish things.

My team is too large.  I know this, because many design discussions are whirlwinds of arguments, where one person can barely finish a thought before they are interrupted.  The sad part is they are frequently interrupted by someone who shares their viewpoint but thinks they can articulate better to the morons with the opposite viewpoint.  When it gets heated enough, it resembles an episode of Crossfire, although the only episode I've actually watched is the one with Jon Stewart.  I have nothing but disrespect for crossfire.

So.

I invented a new drinking game, where you take a drink every time someone gets interrupted during the design discussion.  Today, I finally remembered to bring in a bottle of Jack Daniels Whiskey and brought it to the design discussion.  On the way, before drinking any of it, I nearly tripped and broke the entire bottle.

Unfortunately for me and my new game, half of the most argumentative people were missing.  In addition, the person leading todays discussion had some kind of wierd new process he wanted to follow.  He thought we should break up the discussion into a "brainstorming" section and then ...and then a second section.  I don't know what it was; we never got to it.  The brainstorming section consisted of going over this chart he made, which he referred to using acronyms he made up on the spot, and also assigning "levels" to various...things, as if they were monsters in a role playing game.  "Ah, yes, interpreting the integration test results, thats a level 4."   I am not kidding. 

The meat of the discussion involved bascially saying things and then being asked to write them down on a little post it notes.  Instead of drinking every time someone got interrupted, I instead spent the entire meeting trying to avoid getting caught saying an idea that I would be asked to write on a post it note, and just sipping my Jack and Cherry Coke out of uncategorized frustration.

The Death Zone

Human contact!  It is wonderful.  Some kinds are of course better than others, and my mind just thought of a million different directions this paragraph can go, but sadly, they are all dirty so I'll just start at the beginning.

Recently (within the past year) a number of events occured indicating that my resistance to hypoxia had grown worse.  These events include passing out on a commercial flight (in a cabin pressurized roughly to 8,000ft), feeling symptoms of hypoxia while flying at 6,500 ft, and trying to buy a shoe rack which required walking all over Seattle looking for a store that I was sure I could find even though I forgot the directions at my apartment and suddenly feeling quite faint and dizzy and terrible and nearly passing out but arriving at a McDonalds (down on the waterfront) just in time to eat something and feel better.

Now, as many of you already know, I have, all my life, both flown commercially, and had plenty of random adventures wherein I cover great distances on foot by the end of the story.  Therefore, I knew that something was unusual.  The likely culprit, I thought, was the moldy food in my fridge.  Having no real medical knowledge at all, the best experiment I could do was to stop eating moldy food (or anything from the fridge) and see if I felt better.  I also cleaned the fridge.  You know, it turns out they are really easy to clean.  I mean, it took like 5 hours, but it wasn't much of a challenge.  Except for when I tried to put one of the food bins in backwards--that was a bad situation.  But I digress.

Here is the interesting part:  ever since I passed out on that red eye to philly, I have been quite fearful of passing out again.  In fact, now when I fly the fear of hyperventilating and passing out actually makes me start to hyperventilate and get lightheaded.  A really nasty cycle.  I managed to fly to vegas and back without any incident, however, I noticed that reading my book made me really sleepy.  Oh, and then there was that girl who was flying back to Cali, and she was all worried because she thought she only had ten minutes to make a connection because she didn't know about time zones, and I should have been like "hey now that you have all this extra time want to get a coffee in the terminal?" but I didn't because my previous experience talking to girls had gone so horribly.  Well, and because she appeared to overreact when I told her I was a programmer and where I worked.

Anyway, the point of all this is...I started researching what it would take for a person to improve his (<-- see there!  male pronoun used for both guys and girls!  femenists kiss my ass) tolerance for being at high altitude.  Not getting sleepy on commercial flights is not the only benefit;  there is also the unpressurized cabin of the Mooney M20K that my flight club owns which can reach flight level 240.  I'm a long, long long long loooong way from flying the mooney, especially now that I just added up how much money I spent in vegas, but it is nice to have goals.  Also, people who do outdoor stuff on mountains would benefit.  And my one Aunt and Uncle live on a mesa.  So anyway, here is the results of my survey of waits to improve your high altitudeness.

Rent a cabin on top of the mountain.  I first thought of this, actually, when I went to Crystal Mountain with Luke and the sheer altitude made me tired roughly 20 feet into the run.  That was a long day.  Thus, I began to fixate on this fantasy where we go up and rent a cabin the night before we go skiing, and I would have tons of energy the next day, and also girls would come to the cabin with us and play monopoly and hang out in the hot tub.  Unfortunately at Crystal,  the cabins are at the bottom of the mountain, which will not help with the acclimating.  A rigorous (at least 20 minutes) set of google searches failed to reveal any cabins above 8,000 ft for rent in the Seattle area.

Exercise.  I haven't found a single reliable source that claims exercising will increase your ability to absorb oxygen at altitude, however I figured there must be a positive relationship there, and I need to exercise anyway.  Especially since I get winded after walking for half an hour.  So I started walking to work.  It is uphill both ways.  Literally.  In fact, if you plan your route wrong, its like uphill twice in the same direction.  Visit Seattle and try to walk around this place and you'll find out what I mean.  Oh, and I started swimming.  Swimming is fun and relaxing.  Except for the part where the only board shorts I wear are mostly white, and I discovered that the wet-t-shirt phenomena actually works with men's swimwear.  I don't know why anyone would make mens anything that becomes uncomfortably translucent when wet, but I am the unfortunate owner of such an item, so I try to only swim late at night.  Actually, I was already swimming late a night just because I am antisocial towards the people in my building, but now I have two reasons.

Altitude Tent.  Ok, hold on, its coming.  Wait for it.  Amazon affiliate link go! Wow that was easier than I remember.  Anyway, so apparently a lot of athletes use these devices that reduce the amount of oxygen in the air, as a way to simulate living at altitude (which causes the body to make extra red blood cells).  Unlike blood doping, sticking your head inside a tent and trying to suffocate yourself with an expensive machine is not considered illegal by most sporting associations.  In the long term, I am thinking about buying these, especially if I start flying small planes above 8,000 ft.  The machines that reduce the percentage of oxygen in the air cost thousands of dollars though.

Something about a mountain.  Yeah, so I visited Mt Rainier on Saturday.  The plan was to hike up to 8,000 ft, and try reading a book and see if I passed out.  If I didn't, that would mean that exercising and not eating moldy food had paid off.  Long story short, it was a retarded plan.

I did make it to 6300 feet though.  Here are some pictures.  There was a cloud layer below me, maybe around 3,000 or 4,000 feet.  It looked really cool in person.  Unfortunately for you these pictures suck.  If you can see it, the clouds are that white stuff below the mountains in the background.

 Yeah, this one especially looked amazing in person:

And then on my way down, a deer walked right up to the path:

Oh thats why these pictures suck...because I had to text them from my phone to my email and they got all ugliefied in the process.  Well, you don't even want to hear what happened when I plugged the data card in my computer and tried to just copy them.

So anyway, during my research, I learned about this thing called The Death Zone, where you are so high you can never acclimatize and will die without oxygen.  Exciting!  It starts at like 26,000 feet.  I have felt symptoms of hypoxia as low as 6,500 feet.  So...maybe someday.



[Some other notes]
1.  Jessica's speedometer reads high.  I discovered this when I looked over at the speed my gps was reporting.  All this work I put into evading cops, and it turns out I haven't been exceeding the speed limit by as much as I thought.
2.  There is a store in Ballard that sells art that I actually like.  I discovered this when I went drinking with Gwen and her boyfriend after getting back from the mountain. 
3.  I may be wise to stop telling people that I like corsets.  Or not.  I guess there's a couple different ways you can take that.  Its probably not a normal thing to say--I also discovered this while drinkign with Gwen and her boyfriend saturday night.


[Life Balance]

There appears to be a zero-sum game between projects, such as getting various piloting licenses, attempting to come up with a polynomial time solution to 3-sat and building Serenity out of Legos, and my social life.  Time spent on one takes away from time spend on the other.  Also, too much of either can be detrimental.  When I spend too much time on my projects, my social connections slip away and I get incredibly lonely, depression, and obsessive-compulsive.  When I spend too much time with people...I feel incredibly rushed, like I'm not getting anything done.  So I need to find some kind of balance...maybe if I could learn to do things without obsessing over them and letting them take over my life.  Or I could stop going to work and also never sleep.  I mean, how am I going to find time to build an R2 unit?  Oh, speaking of which....I thought of another way to talk to the hot girl at work:  bring in doughnuts (or some other food) and pretend I'm sharing them.  I appologize for the bold, that is only so I can find that sentence again.

[A new friend]
I started reading the craigslist ads again, because none of the girls on PlentyOfFish respond to my messages.  Met up with this one girl who posted in the "friends only" section because I need more friends.  I'm tired of making up silly names for girls I meet here, but still want to protect their names, so instead I took an md5 hash of her first name: 8d560f307b46b1662ac4ec3a4f747bb9.  I'm going to call her BB9 for short.  Anyway, me and BB9 met up in a coffee shop and talked for a while and then went back to my place and played most of the way through Castle Crashers all afternoon.  I was the Blue ice guy--who, by the way, is totally awesome.  His magic thing freezes enemies, which is ridiculously useful.  Anyway, I have no plans to attempt sex on a regular basis with this girl, and she is unfortunately one of those girls that hates other girls and most of her friends are guys, however she likes to dance (salsa, swing, ballroom) and she likes to party so she's a keeper.  BB9 also likes videogames, except unfortunately most of the games she likes are console first person shooters (FPS).  I tried to hide my disdain for console FPS's.  Seriously though, if you have ever had the pleasure of using a keyboard and a mouse to play a first person shooter, playing the same game with a gamepad is like going to second base while wearing mittens:  I don't see the point and I don't understand why other people like it.

[Poker night]
I played poker tonight at a friends house.  It was fun.  Also, I won.  That was awesome.  I am so tired.  I was going to go on about how I just realized I'm the awkward one in that group, which is new because in most of the social circles I've been in there as always been someone else with the least amount of social skills--someone who annoyed everyone more than I did--someone who was that guy.  Well, now I'm that guy.  Well...either that, or they all think I'm really cool.  Its really hard to tell the difference between those two.  I'm going the skip the exhaustive analysis because I want to go to bed.  I really shouldn't have written all this;  I should have just gone to bed an hour ago.  I don't think I'm even going to proofread it.  Seriously, if you've read this far...you need a hobby.  I recommend Legos, but thats just me.


[Edit]
Kev's wedding has a web page!

Fuck The Rules

Picture yourself, the great hunter, fancy hat, red flanneled jacket thing, and a shiny new rifle.  Welcome to the world!  You are hunting the elusive elk.  Today is the first day of hunting season, and you have just arrived in the 200 acre of game reserve.  It was a bit crowed.  You actually had to spend all day looking for a parking space, and finally ended up driving back to the nearest town and walking in.  Its kind of tough to walk around;  the forest is filled with annoying, loud, smelly hunters that fart a lot.  Nevertheless, you press on, looking to bag that elk.

You spend too weeks in the forest, mostly running into nothing but other hunters.  You see a couple walking back with some very fine-looking elk hides, but not many.  No, the only Elk you've encountered are a couple fat ones, and maybe one or two pregnant ones, and them some babies.  Nothing you really want to shoot.  All the good elk have already been shot or driven off.  You should have been a jackass and violated the hunting season thing like all the successful hunters, but you didn't, and now its too late.

Yeah, in case you didn't figure it out, that was a metaphor.  If you don't know what the metaphor was about, you clearly don't know me very well because I really only think about one thing most of the time.  In summary, I hate being the one that has to do all the chasing when you find that special someone.  Approaching girls is like poking a finger into a yellow jackets nest, looking for quarters:  I've never found what I'm looking for, but I'm sure as hell got stung a lot.

I'm writing this because I just discovered this book called The Rules, which I had previously heard of (forshadowing!) from certain friends of mine--the kind that make a big deal about which way your shoulders are pointing when you talk to a girl.  Based on the bullet point list in the wikipedia entry, the book advocates basically every behavior that makes my life difficult.  For example, number 2 there, says don't ask a guy to dance.  Thats retarded.  The rest of them are basically a list of ways to basically avoid someone and give them the impression that you don't want to date them, when you really do.  There is something to be said about the fact that the only girls who read this are the kind who read self-help books, which probably aren't the kind of girls i'm interested in, but I don't know for certain.  What if attractive, confident girls read this?

Let me...paint you a picture of a not perfect, but ideal, date.  I'm in a nightclub, like brasils.  Someone who looks like Krystal asks me to dance (while we're dreaming, lets pretend its also like that night where I was the only good male dancer in the club).  We dance a bunch of times throughout that night including a nice sexy bachatta where I dip her at the end and make her think I'm about to kiss her but don't.  Then, maybe, I suggest we get ice cream (or she does), only this time we don't walk halfway across the city only to find scoop deville closed; we simply go two blocks over to the ice cream place in old city.  Then we laugh and have a good time and (violating rule #3 there) she does more than 50% of the talking and I use up less than half of my drinking stories.  Then we go back to my place to play rock band and halfway through Nine Inch Nails' The Hand That Feeds I ninja-tickle-attack her left flank in order to make her screw up the guitar solo (I am on the drums) and then like a verse later she straddles me on the ...whats that called...drum stool thing that I dont even own in real life, and starts trying to make out with me but I manage to finish the song anyway even though she dropped off with the guitar because I am so awesome.  Then we make out on my couch and she takes off my pants and I turn on the tv....

Ok just kidding about that last part, but it is necessary so I can say this:  the girl's behavior in that fantasy pretty much violates every applicable rule in that book.  I mean, maybe not, since I didn't read them that closely, but probably most of them.

I am very much opposed to this thing where women make it so we chase them.  I've done quite a lot of chasing myself--quite a lot--like if you had any idea what I've done to get certain girls it would be the most depressing thing you've ever read in your life quite alot--and I can say that there's a big problem with the "playing hard to get" thing which is that it is nearly indistinguishable from the "I actually hate you but you're a nice guy so I'm going to lead you on for a few years" thing.  And then ten years go by, and you are a 26 year old "programmer" whose closest thing to a relationship with someone that doesnt hate you is ...one girl that hates you and a picture of another one hiding behind a door.  As well as a few horrific dates with girls you never want to see again.

Just so we're clear, I also hate the other end of the spectrum, with the feminist bullshit.  For example, people who suck at statistics but claim women make less money than men.  Or the people with the retarded sounding gender-neutral pronouns.  I am a big fan of using the male pronoun for any generic situation where the gender is undefined.  I know that somewhere, someone imagines some kind of link to sexism that I don't care about, but they can die in a fire.  I'm also a big fan of having girls that are not famous actresses change their last name when they get married, for no other reason that I grew up with it and I'm used to it.  You know what?  Even if I met a girl with a cooler last name than mine, and we got married, I think I would first change mine to hers, but with a different spelling, so that she would still have to change her--ok that won't work.  Anyway, the femenism thing is out.

No, I am very much a fan of the new archetype of the strong female, who is able to both assert herself without being an annoying gay-ass hippie feminist, and is also able to be hot and beautiful without just being worthless eye candy.  The kind of girl that fits as easily into a gun belt as she does a dress.  Oh, and definitely doesn't have super short hair; girls like that always look like male cancer survivors.  Pretty much every female character Joss Whedon writes, as well at the character Kate Becket from the tv series Castle (Nathan Fillion's new show) is such a character.  I haven't confirmed any girls like this in real life though.  All of the potentials are taken or live thousands of miles away.

So.....yeah, The Rules sucks.  Just wanted to say that.

In other news, I am considering telling the hot girl that works here that she should dress up as Carmen Sandiego for Halloween.  It is literally the only thing I can think of to say to her, besides stuff like "you're hot I want to make out with you" which Bridget tells me I shouldn't even think about saying.  It is october, so the halloween costume thing isnt far off.

Whatever.  There is a "monthly beer bash" party right now for the entire male-dominated software division I am a part of, so I am going to go drink a beer and pretend I'm interested in meeting these guys.