happy mystery diary!

My pitas page

Today is Sunday, July 20, 2008. It's funny how a year has gone by since my last post, but I find myself in a disappointingly similar situation at work as I did last year. This time though, I deliberately spent a great deal of time on various creative projects, so I feel much less like an overly excitable deer in headlights than last year. It also helps that those closest to me are in good health, and getting better. . . And for the record, I created and contributed to various smaller, concentrated websites rather than finishing one big one (the sort of website I imagined having last year is still not ready yet though). Anyhow, since I last wrote, I started creating a dungeon using the company's proprietary tools (the first 8-10 hours last October were spent putting the cell mesh together and decorating two rooms, then starting late March until May I spent another 20-30 hours coming up with gameplay, scrapping the first gameplay idea, creating more gameplay plans, and then decorating the rest of the dungeon accordingly. Now I'm at the point where I can place the rest of the monsters, test, get feedback, test and fix stuff... etc.... almost done... ); finished various photo series for a couple competitions and for myself; revived an old comic/illustration project with l.z.; completed a summer course in black & white illustration and am currently taking a life drawing anatomy lessons. All of those projects have done wonders to revive my confidence in my ability to meet deadlines when working on creative tasks, as well as dump fresh new work in my lap. This is all great stuff for that website that will be someday :) Anyhow, I didn't mean to get all reflective (it's just the sort of mood I'm in now I guess... all in all things are going well despite my gripes with my current job.). I came on to write about this concert b & I went to on Friday (July 18th) - the Squirrel Nut Zippers played at The Paradise with HUMANWINE as their opening act! The instant I read about the show (from the HUMANWINE newsletter?), I arranged for tickets, for the idea that two of my favorite groups of musicians were to be on stage together in one night was exhilarating. And what a night it was! HUMANWINE rolled up in their black bus-haus (they are totally mobile now! hooraaaaay for them and their awesome dreams made reality!) which was a sight to see... and then played their usual set of tunes with a slightly expanded band than what I've seen before - the addition of two fiddlers in lieu of the bass made for a more emotionally charged sound overall, and blended even better into the headliner than I had expected. Until I read that the two bands were playing together I'd concentrated more on the lyrics and stories told by HUMANWINE, rather than the danceable qualities of the music... but that is the great thing about their work for me - how beautifully and energetically their serious transmissions are deployed. It makes me think of the time I gave a great friend of mine one of their CDs. "What the heck is all this?" said he, scrunching his nose as he read through the blocks of manifesto-like lyrics printed on the liner notes. "Oh, they're a kind of political band" was my quick reply, to which he scrunched his nose even further. The mood of the conversation changed though after I shrugged my shoulders and just popped the music in. Their work is a grand balance between delightful and thoughtful. Man that sounds goofy, you just have to hear it for yourself. Anyhow, the Squirrel Nut Zippers are just as I remembered them, and better yet! You barely ever get a chance to see black and white cartoons (or movies for that matter) with the soundtracks produced live, further more with a large band! But yes! For a grand finale (BEFORE the hour-or-so long encore, where everybody got up on stage for some extra jammin' goodness) they projected 'The Ghost of Stephen Foster' video upon the wall and played the track to it live, giving the show an extra multimedia/old time twist. As if that on top of their usual amazing jazz-solo speckled style performance wasn't enough, the first songs they played back out on stage in the encore were with members of Morphine... oi! What a great night of old and new. I guess to wrap up the nostalgia and reflections, it would be worth noting that I went to see the Squirrel Nut Zippers once years ago, with my dearest friend at the time f.b... it was a night of dancing and freedom and total joy, which was repeated maybe two or threefold on Friday. I hope you're doing alright these days, f. goodnight.

Today is Monday July 16 2007. On my way to work this morning I found a large beetle flailing on it's back along the side of the road. I flipped it over with my shoe but then it wouldn't let go. As much as I would have loved to have a stag beetle pet accompany me to work I figured it probably wouldn't appreciate the sorts of bugs I deal with all day, or the air conditioning. It turns out the little bugger was stuck to my shoe because of a sticker than had landed on my toe from the apple I ate earlier in the morning. aaaar. As usual life is so exciting and full of stuff to do I am busy all the time and enjoying myself. Jim just got his new website up and I am reminded of my pact to myself that I wouldn't waste my life on "myspace" type pages and instead focus on making my own site. It will be done by the end of the summer. YESSSSSSSSS.

Today is Sunday, February 25th, 2007. The only thing that would make this better would be if it was in my handwriting, and could also show sketches. But we'll make do with words! Over the past year I've been spoiled with lots of exciting shows around Boston and elsewhere. This year I've decided to buckle down and get more work done outside of work because honestly, I'm a show off and I like to share the stuff I care about with whoever will look for a moment. (Yes JT, I guess you were right in a way - but don't most people like their little share of the spotlight at least every so often?) I'm not sure being a performance artist for more than two weeks a month would really be feasable for me but that's the beauty of everything else I like to do. Anyway. Today I'm not here to tell you about the final act of the Pilobolus programme where all the dancers flailed around masterfully to music that wouldn't be considered by most to be danceable, nor will I elaborate on my trip to San Francisco last November or the multiple evenings I have spent being entertained by the Steamie Bohemians or Humanwine. No. This morning, sometime around 5am, I heard one of the best sounds one could ever hear in a lifetime. I was miserable and sick to my stomache and achey and grumpy that even though I somehow managed to get up at the right time my constitution would not hold up for a day of skiing because of a stupid cold on the brink of being fought off but then - this crazy chirping streams through the window. This winter's temperature and weather must be confounding to the birds because it's been mostly mild (only this month have we had what the newspeople would call "wintry" New England weather)... so I've been seeing & hearing lots of funny birds at weird times this year... but I don't know what was outside the window this morning. It was captivating. The sound, in my mind, looked like a horseshoe with three cat claws striking it up the middle, or a skimpily hairy scrotum, or a dysfunctional Q that couldn't figure out how to close itself properly. Every time I heard it, the image would draw itself in my head in a kind of neon light on black manner. That sound, which as it dipped would be momentarily interrupted by three or four higher pitched slashes, then head back up to higher octaves again, kept repeating very closely to the dimly-lit window for about 15 glorious minutes. Or maybe it was only 5! Who knows. It was one of those times the universe slowed down a bit so you could enjoy whatever is going on for a little bit more. After the bird started moving away I laid back listening to it fade into the distance and was put in a good mood that would last for the rest of the day. I don't remember being so impressed by a bird song like that since I lived in Tokyo - where I got to hear a Nightingale in the garden outside my room for a few months of the year.

Monday Dec 4, Note to self: Invent a typographical means of indicating that the text written at any given moment is actually sarcastic in tone.

Today is Thursday, November 23, '06 (holy smokes Thanksgiving in the USofA!) in the wee hours of the morning. Tomorrow I plan on engaging in lazy weekend sleeping behaviour, since it is a day off from work. K8 and apacheboy flew into town finally and it's wonderful to see (well... feel?) the little balls of stress drip off them in slow motion. It's not for everybody, but traveling definitely wrings you out sometimes. The time I'm spending with them keeps reminding me of my meeting with mr.n last year, which I still recall quite fondly. You'd think I would have scanned in some of my slides/negatives from that visit though... hmmm. All the more fun when I do though maybe. Hmm. Last week I dug up some photos from my stay in Tokyo and I couldn't believe how gushy I felt afterwards. The piles of photos really were meant to be my memories spread out into plastic to preserve some kind of detail... so I guess it's not surprising they'd evoke such reactions from me since I loved it there so much. Hmm. There's a lot to say, and it's late so I'm rambling but today I found out some news that stirred me up like I haven't been in a while. (Sure my life's not lacking exciting entertainment & social stimulation lately, despite being very busy at work... but I honestly felt this news like a punch to the gut). Today as I frantically scribbled a map for k8 over breakfast she said that plans for a freeway in Tokyo included the rearrangement or demolition of parts of Shimokitazawa. This has been on my mind all day ever since, and confirmed by a few internet searches. I haven't read through all the websites I found yet, but I feel a burning need explain what that place meant to me - something that words in any language won't fully do justice to. It probably won't stop the "progress" or help the (masses?) of protestors much (it seems like it may even be too late), but by the time I'm through, folks will be able to see a slice of this place that might not last very long. As much as I like the idea of transient art, and firmly believe that nothing is forever, it's difficult of returning to a Tokyo without Shimokitazawa. Mind you I have been back since 2002 and noticed that this or that has changed, like the disappearance of the weird pig mural inside what looked like an abandoned shell of a telephone booth... but minor physical alterations to an enviroment don't necessarily equate to major ambient shifting (heh maybe I could argue the other way too...). Having a huge freeway slice through that pleasantly twisted mess of small bars, theaters, cinemas, boutiques, music shops etc, would probably alter the very feel of the neighborhood. Usually when I travel, most pleasure is derived from visting friends. It is very rare that I find joy in a *place* for itself, but Shimokitazawa is definitely high, if not on top of that list of exceptional spots. For all it's worth I'd like to get a website or an exhibit up of the best photos I've taken from that ultimate center of hipness and hours well spent in Tokyo.

Today is Thursday July 20, 2006. Even though the water is out I still get fun ideas when I am bathing (in this case with nothing but four white plastic buckets, one filled with a gallon of water boiled in my beautiful red kettle, and a two gallon dispenser of poland spring water). My body must really enjoy being in the water. I wonder what would happen if I got an anti-skin wrinkling to raisin suit and a portable bathtub, or just a tank and some underwater computers to work with at work.... what amazing waterfalls of good ideas might come my way. Or maybe my body would get used to it and the good thoughts would leave (because you know, being in the water would cease to be special). Anyway, I thought of two great things. One would be a TV game show where contestants would participate in a competition to live for one month or so under stick rules to make their homes more Green. So say, the stylish game show host would give viewers at home tips on how to make their house less wasteful, maybe focusing on themes like water or gardens or garbage from your kitchen etc. In the meantime there could be educational bits about the Kyoto treaty or grassroots efforts to curb waste or recycling, and the contestants would be encouraged to follow those tips and facts to ultimately learn to appreciate their habitat and help it flourish too. At the end of the month the contestants would all get together and tally up stuff like how much water they used, how much of their trash could be recycled, how much their eco-friendly alternatives to common methods of temperature regulation helped them save money or fuel... and in the end the most eco-friendly folks could win some solar panels or energy consultation or something like that. Green companies could place products or educate the world about how to help in the preservation of the Earth, and it could be called something like Eco-Friends. ... The other idea I had was to take photos of what a product sees in a store. That series would be called "Product Placement" hehe...

and again i forgot to write the date: today is june 2, 2006. life is good!

holy smokes. i'm on one of those sad trips right now, but as usual music and confounding visuals brightens things up again. No, i'm not in some black streak like i was a few weeks back while working at a job i didn't like (this one should be washed away once my whoremones decide they need to rush back from whence they came, and just as quickly!) - this is just that time to celebrate my freedom from Real responsability again. on the jobfront i transfered from one department to another in the company i've been working at which is fine because i overall enjoy my time there on several levels each day. Now things are even better because i get the extra added bonus of contact with and exposure to japanese people and their fantastically amusing language on a regular basis. And hey! I learned Server stuff today! learning new things and experiencing increasingly curious drivebys makes the life at work significantly more meaningful and exciting than what i was up to before. well, and the biggest shame was that the brunt of the work wasn't even what really inspired me to push for a departmental swap again. the house i moved into is quite the adventure in itself as well, as it is old and funky. i love my new roomies though and am looking forward to rocking out in an upbeat canter for the rest of our contracted year.... oh yeah, we dubbed this opulent manor the Big Gay House. hee hee! ~anyway. I just wanted to remember something that made me bust in to peals of laugher - 8-bit burlesque. dear gourd, it must be done.

Lundi, April 17.2006. So I just found out from Wikipedia that the Railroader of the Year in 1982 (a very good year) was A. Paul Funkhouser. Wintery Tamarind Fusillade? In other news, I am making moves to transfer to another department in the company, and will soon me moving from my apartment into a large house with some co-workers. The house has a barn, a big bathtub, a swamp and some holes in the garage for the messenger pigeons to fly into. Oh yeah, and some broken solar panels. Speakeasy soiree anyone?

by the way it is monday april 10th, a very special day in the year. last friday was another good day, as it was astro boy's birthday. i hear the cherry blossoms in japan are nice now. another great thing i learned the other day is that while march is the month in which tasty sea urchins can be farmed in maine, april is japanese sea urchin season. scarfing perfect cherry tomatos off the vine is almost as good as dining on super fresh sea urchin. shoot i need to plant my veggies.

the folks on boing boing put up a link to a video of yoko ono's performance piece where she sits on a stage and gets bits of her clothes cut off by the audience. i'd heard about it many times but had never seen it until now. she simply sits staring pretty much straight ahead barely making any motion while one by one they snip bits away. i wondered who nobody cut bits off her back (maybe they just didn't show it in the video) and who was in the crowd anyway? there's a little bug flying around and landing all over my arms, it's so slow. this morning i helped out with another meeting between the company i work at and another potential japanese partner. this is the second time, and this time around for sure the need to brush up on game related technical terms and business vocab has become appearant. i'm surprised at how much i've retained and can still process though... the last time i wrote was probably right before we started crunching at work to prepare for the game launch (which was rather anti-climactic). things exploded instead on the first major update, which happened last week. i switched departments to a full time job and moved closer to work in order to make it easier to work shifts. it's not entirely been my cup of tea so i'm looking to resubmitting my application to other departments soon, as the exasperation i experience almost every day at my current job reselmbes how school was much of the time - and that's no good. the awesome thing that happened today was how one of my co-workers had brought a bike in to work for me to use as his sister was no longer giving it any attention. i love bicycling even more than walking so that was a great thing. the other interesting thing is that pretty much at the same time that my friend was telling me about the bike, my cousin called up asking whether i would like to go out bike shopping with him soon. i didn't get his call because my phone reception is close to none inside the office building... i like it when those things happen. something else that happens that i've ben very amused about way after the fact was man scooting around in a wheelchair with a bumper sticker on back that said "Keep abortion legal!" - this was an amusing sight at the pharmacy in itself, but the moment was all the more interesting because I had just found out that one of my then roommates was a catalyst for one of my new friend's descisions to delve into a lifetime of theater and performance art. she'd even named a very recent show her troupe had performed in after a play he had helped her figure out when they were still in high school. hmmm!

same day as before (12/1/05) i almost forgot... the whole reason i sat down to write when i got to the office in the first place was because i didn't want to forget this --- how about using a wacom tablet as a sound distortion device? have they figured it out already?! man, from the website it seems like they themselves haven't realized the full potential of those tools. (they are now marketed to "pro" photographers and graphic designers as essential tools for processing images). wacom tablets could save kanji, and maybe work like a kaoss device. what are they waiting for?!?!

Thursday December 1, 2005. I love the DVD burner on my new laptop. I love malt beverages (like malta) but i do not like malted milk balls (like milkduds). (they sound promising for many reasons but they are a ripoff - when you inject DUD into the brand name that ought to indicate something to you) oh yes, and i love the internet, and hanadensha. yesterday after picking up my thoroughly exciting batch of negatives/slides in harvard square, i went to the Tea Stop (ho hoho, it's my kinda store - they sell quality bubble tea and gyoza) for dinner then hit the funky record store under it. and what did they have waiting there for me? some HANADENSHAAA! as if the name wasn't entertaining enough ('flower train' in japanese) the stuff that i've heard by them before was trippingly good. !! i think i just made up an english word to fill the great hole in my english speaking soul that is left by the lack of a proper translation for "filipante." mmm. kind of. ... it is so early in the morning right now that not even the post office is open, yet i am sitting at my desk at work. why? because i shuttled one of my roomies to the airport at the buttcrack of dawn this morning. (the lucky bastard is off to san francisco for the company.) anyway. lately i had a curious revelation about the [true craftwork of the devil under the guise of an educational child's toy called] Speak and Spell. For whatever reason, some electronic musicians think it's retro-cute to have this abomination do it's thing as part of their songs (like freezepop or omac). ((erectrocute me please.)) i find that Speak and Spell chatter straight up in a song is not only disturbing because that is what satan would sound like, but also pretty tacky. although i wouldn't normally give it the time of day, i've heard an interesting tidbit about it lately. The guy who engineered the Speak and Spell used to be an employee of my company. his name was butch. AHHH AHAH HA A HHAA! So that's that. The post office should be open by now.

november 28, 2005. This was my first weekend after moving out of the house that left much to be desired. in fact, i think the disappointment i ground through ink into my notepad failed to completely drain out because i've been sinking into deeper pits of dejection all throughout the day. you could say i spent my whole weekend creating baudy shirt designs and furthering the project zer0g efforts if you were to try to put a spin on it. but i know from days and months of miserable existence at school that reguardless of my mood, i can generally pump out enough decent work to get by. once i graduated, i vowed to focus more on improving my quality of life, so the treatment i recieved from some people this weekend was unacceptable. i shall tactfuly not deal with them again anytime soon -- i'm so ticked that i could have flown off on some great adventure and didn't because they said they would see me. at least my belly is full of japanse and korean food. hmm.. the three best things that happened were seeing n.a. late on sunday afternoon, discovering a korean noodle fix in harvard square and finally sending in four rolls of film to be developed (i can't even remember what some of them were from so i'm really looking forward to wednesday). n.a. made some exquisite bangladeshi vegeterian dishes, one of which was sauteed "botoru." she said that the way you say "they kicked the bucket" or "they passed away" in bangladeshi is "they picked the 'botoru.'" we have no idea what 'botoru' is called in english, but it is delicious - it's like a faintly sweet, bite sized zuchinni. ambling around chinatown this evening while waiting for the return train reminded me of my venture out there a few weeks ago when i met with bri, k. and s.g. for dinner. the food was fine, but the real treat that night (aside from the company and movies) were the fruit drinks! They had fresh durians in from who knows where (how?!) that they made into a shake. Yes, it smelled like a sweaty jockstrap infested locker room which betrayed it's subtle then strong taste. If you just slurped the smoothie up quickly you'd miss the pair of tastes that chase each other... it was well worth it. hmm. stinky fresh fruit... man this is just one of those days where i would lock myself in, curl up in bed and play gameboy all day once my appointments were over. in that respect, it's nice that my work involves playing a game (nobody will care or even notice if you get really into it for extended periods of time). that reminds me of another highlight of the weekend... mum and i had an epic conversation about public personas, and the difference between being a certain kind of visual artist and a performer. one conclusion: you can hide in the back and be drunk or dressed in a neon bondage suit for all the gallery goers care because they're busy looking at your work and not you; whereas a performer must go out in front of the crowd to get on with the show, no matter what state they are in. i've been in both situations (well, minus the bondage suit) and have found that performances in general (while totally fun no matter how stupid it gets) tend to be much more taxing. it makes me wish i danced a little more at the percussionlab. ahhg chikushoooo. i think i'll watch some music videos.

sunday november 27, 2005. dooooood. if i ever got an extravagant piggy bank it would be an arcade machine with an awesome game on it. which game you ask? i cannot tell you because i'm not sure what i could get my hands on but... i'd shoot for mrs pac man or some sci fi shooter. yeah. that goes right up there with the refurbished locomotive and cars to ride around in. actually i would rather have the refurbished locomotive to take my friends and family on trips with. i'll call it my mobile neon pleasure palace. maybe it could even be rigged up to run partially on solar rays and have a greenhouse or a hydroponic garden on it somewhere so i could have fresh fruits and vegetables anytime on the road. man. where's the ant farm when you need it? supposedly dad knows the dude whose farm the cadillacs were buried in... while i like to take what he says with a grain of salt, i must admit if anybody i knew was going to be my six-degrees-of-separation to ant farm he would be it. hehehe. i'd forgotten until now: if my memory doesn't fail me they also started out in san francisco too. thanksgiving is this time to let the cheese be bountiful and be thankful for stuff (or, if i were still in school, that time to write a list of things that i feel like i've accomplished to quiet my mind as it flies by the seat of my pants in preparation for the finals to come...). i like the spirit of the thing anyway, so this year i find myself wrapping up threads of thoughts even though i don't have any serious personal deadlines at the end of the year to be enslaved by. if anything, the big stuff i hoped to have done by winter has already been worked out (by getting THE job and moving away from VT!) so i'm feeling pretty comfy. it's all work on the website and various other pleasantries from here till spring. yehawwww! but i'd like to take the time to thank my generally tolerant parents for letting me sort myself out in peace at home, the friends who stick with me by overlooking time and space, and the exciting folks around the bay area. with all that help i got back to focusing where i'd really like to be going, as well as discovering new places and ways to push the technology in my posetion. not to mention the art shows, lectures, and serious photo shoots i managed to be involved in... who would have thought my bread and butter would go from being a photographer to a game tester. ... well. me of course, because it was all part of the master plan. mwahahahahhaaa! /queso

november 25, 2005. that's a nice date: 11.25.2005. kind of paralelly (if anything can be that). the day after thanksgiving is always so quiet, and this year it is the same. you sit around and do little chores and catch up on sleep and all those other things you missed out on because the world wasn't on a break. while cleaning i found one yet-to-be-used half of a dartmouth coach round trip bus ticket. i make sure to buy round trip everytime i ride even when i don't plan on returning because it saves you enough for a used videogame or an extravagant dinner at oga's. i've had plenty of opportunities to really sit down and draw lately (say, on the ride to work when i'm not driving, those indefinite stretches of time when the game servers lock up in a zen moment, quiet times in the morning or late at night...) mostly i've been doodling into a pad of recycled wellesley fundraising campaign paper i got from c.s. on a very random encounter right before i moved here. when i'm at home it's more fun to sit in the light of my blue neon sign and draw directly into the computer with the drawing pad. for those nights when the conversations are sparse i've finally got something to keep me engrossed. come to think of it, that's not much different from when i doodle in real life too... sometimes, anyway. from all this i've made a lot of progress in some projects that had been kicking around with no escape, as well as come up with new ones. the design heavy nature of some projects has gotten me on a clothing-design tangent, so i've been spitting out ideas for t-shirts etc. i've learned that having silkscreens made for a few t-shirts can be quite costly (i'm making 3-4 color designs here), and i'm not ready to just dive into learning how to make them myself yet. if i come up with enough decent designs i will buy some fabric paints and work on prototypes that way. learning to silkscreen stuff myself is somewhere down the line though. in the meantime, i'm just having way to much fun coming up with designs and interfaces... the guys at work have (jokingly? for real?) been trying to recruit me as a bass player for the thing they're starting up. as much as i like to jam, i know close to nada about stringed instruments and currently do not own a bass guitar. if i found one for 25-50 bucks i would at least get myself one to play around with it. but something tells me an instrument of that price would sound like crap for one reason or another, and that might just be a waste (unless they enjoy the sound of fingers sliding up and down strings while changing the notes or keys or whatever that's called like i do). the thought crossed my mind that i could be their laptop musician, and make computer bass noises instead (this would be THE great excuse to seriously dive into the possibilities). it really depends what kind of sound they want though. (based on the little heavy metal cover i attempted of a tune from YS, i decided that it would just be 1. more fun and 2. better sounding if at least the guitar parts had been recorded from a live session) it could be that i just need better programs, but for now, i say it really is much more amusing to imagine a live metal band pelting out the song in question. i guess thinking about metal/hair bands is just amusing in general. anyway, that's what i'm going to propose to the guys on monday: "say guys, how about i be your laptop bassist." and then i could show them the photos i snapped of nullsleep rockin' out with his (computer) keyboard slung over his shoulder. (dude he rocked out so hard he lost his glasses somewhere) mwahahahhahaa! what a superb weekend that was... i'll be fininshing that entry soon. by now my laundry should be done though.

nov 22.2005.densha otoko # i need to see densha otoko!! jumper cables (red +, black -) keep them BOTH on the batteries! $ mmmm so sleepy... i was thinking about NYC again a lot today. sleep assails me though might as well...

November 21, 2005. The more i sit and listen to peeps babbling around me the more i realize i am surrounded by percussionists. quality of life is rising, thank you whacked out percussionists. i hope they don't spontaneously combust anytime soon.

thursday november 17. 2005. so i sorted through a bunch of photos tonight and as i was sending them out it started to feel pretty funny. they're photos of people rocking out at a concert but they're really nothing more but rgb shadows of what actually happened there. it's almost ridiculous to send these out to anybody who didn't attend because the point of the whole event was the noise. the visuals were kinetic too... so the whole experience might just be too much to sum up with shots from my toy stealthcam. the snapshots are all i've got besides the blurb that's still in the works though. that was an intense weekend so even mulling over it for a while after the fact won't dull the memories down anytime soon. but back to the point: while i thought it was silly to share the concert photos, i realized that they're part of that fasciantion with visualizing sound i've had going... and aside from the garrishness of the flash (which in some cases actually made cool effects) some of those shots actually do the thing justice! (although it's too bad the ones from the night before didn't come so well... it was just too dark and the flash really wrecked anything there... i'm hoping the film stuff comes out better)

hahahahaa!

Nov. 15, 2005. fffffffffffffffffffffffast forward woah-hit-pause PLEASE! I'm completely grateful for my graveyard shifts this week. Little do they know that the evenings (or the very early mornings) are the very best work hours for me. It also has finally let me catch up on sleep. Way to be in tune with my routine... I hope that I get that GMing job, it could be wonderful. Anyway, there aren't many more refreshing things than introducing old haunts to curious eyes. I suppose this may be an underlying drive for procreation: when you show somebody something they have never seen and it delights them, it makes that something all the more special for you (err, rather, this is a phenomenon that some people observe when they HAVE kids... their kids help them see the world in a new light and they feel joy again or something).The bits you love about the world come back to shine for the n00bs... I get a huge kick out of being in a place i've been before with friends who have never been there. The same old rotten log in the middle of nowhere can become that happy mystery woodland you hear about from the postcards. Likewise those cities and suburbs whose grey buildings get cluttered with the dust of unwelcome memories clear up pretty fast when they're being rediscovered by travelers. a few weeks ago i lamented my inability to pick up and become a roadie in europe.... those thoughts were dispelled by a reminder to myself that i totally lucked out with the job (ftw masterplan!!), and really, that tour wasn't my own trip at all. i'm amused to find that my drive to be on the road again hasn't gone into hibernation though. heh, like i may have mentioned before, the next most exciting thing after going someplace else myself is when my friends go on trips. the cherry on top of course is if the trip involves visiting ME! and that is just what happened this weekend: a lovely ... uhh... old... new... mmm 'net friend ran with my suggestion that he take a little joyride out east, to see what he could see. Saturday we did Cambridge, Sunday we did Boston. We pretty much spent every second not eating, caffineing it up, or utterly conked out walking around EVERYWHERE. It was positively delightful. If you want the bloody details, you should charge up your auxiliary battery pack and come to visit me yourself for the grand tour. You'll be in good hands ;)

Nov 9-10 (early) 2005. Wicked thunder storms, hilarity. Why am I always visiting the sullies in crazy weather? In any case, it turns out that p.s. was a total fantasy book/game geek-yo back in the day, so i kept tossing retro gaming stuff out at him and watched the nostalgia flow. ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh~ it's always a gas with p.s. ... i hope he gets his booty to thanksgiving! anyway, one game we really had a good laugh about was ADVENTURE. i discovered adventure this summer when the chairman sent me this link: http://www.simmphonic.com/programming/flash.htm ... it is fun, and r e a l l y funny. (did it ever have music?) i spent days mucking around in that game. this was around the first week or so that i had my new computer. anyway, i say those dragons look like seahorses. he says they look like ducks, and that is what everybody was calling them in 1978. bahahahaa! 1978... we watched 'the interpreter' tonight and gabbed about hardcore biking & lance armstrong. appearantly he's short but has a HUMONGOUS aura. (and fat head to match it...) in any case, these people are like rockstars in europe, these bikers... it's fascinating to hear people's reactions to ridiculously famous people like that. i can't wait to get my new bike. in the meantime i've got human pong to play... hahaha! i was all hyper this afternoon after a very interesting meeting so i went for a walk with some of the folks from another department. those little walks are one of the gal's main sources of exercise so she was criss crossing and walking as quickly as she could to burn more energy. we got to talking about old games and tanukis for some reason, so i suggested we make a human game of pong. she was the ball, some other guy and i were the boards. that all makes sense right? mwa ha ha. i had a lovely dream last night, and i think that helped my mood. (that and the warp videos i guess. anyone smell quality ?? hehe)

Suiyoobi. Jyu-gatsu 9 nichi. Blue Velvet in the Brattle Theater on the 17th at 10pm!!! AHHHH!!!! Sweet Sweet World! I don't really enjoy renting feature length movies to watch them on my own but I'll take myself out to a flick on the big screen anytime! Especially when it's a video nobody ever wants to rent with you. hahaha! Man, you know they'd show Pink Flamingos at midnight somewhere in this town... (and when they do I AM SO THERE)

well. my brain fizzled out on me earlier. i looked at the clock and realized i'd been writing for basically 2 hours straight (and most of the while this thing in the back of my mind was saying DAMNIT IT'S ALL CRAP JUST STOP ALREADY). but the point is to just write what needs to be written, reguardless of quality. (this journal has many functions too. i'd rather have something to work with than the mulled over stuff my memory dishes out if i wait too long. it likes to poke holes, especially in the strife and bad bits, like fingers poking through a paper door). anyway, i digress into a babbling fit again. remember that bit about my crappy videos being the a/v equivalent to stick figure drawings? well, i'm amazed at how anything, when executed properly (and taken in at the right time for extra punch), can be exquisitely beautiful. I just saw a music video (Plaid's Eyen) in which a 3d stick figure world unveils itself layer by layer before your eyes in black, white and gradients. of course making something like that is much more complicated than it looks, but it just goes to show you how good a 'stick figure' video CAN be. mwahahahahaa. point taken, thanks again b.b. ... goodnight.

november 8, 2005. so here i am, wishing lasers to sprout from my forehead with which I would fry things in general. recently i heard from a guy who heard from another gal that females tend to use the time when frida assails them as an excuse to be bitchy. i've thought the same thing at times, and while some people might actually do that i make an effort to at least maintain good humor. i know it will just go away in a few days, but what matters is the now, right? we snap photos and write these things down in an attempt to remember how it was. you just hope you make the statement strongly/clearly enough so that the feeling will poke out from it later. (hmm but what about the stuff you do to drain yourself of some feeling) hmm. keep it flexible. i just thought of two other entires i've written recently where i say that making stuff is a way of keeping a copy of something i want for myself. this is not so for everything, especially if it was somebody else who has requested the things be made. (ie. i wanted to see and remember as much as i could about life in tokyo so i took a tremendous amount of photos -- over 100 rolls of film and who knows how many digital pictures. quantity, as much as i could whenever i could. while flipping through them later it was easy to subdivide them all into other reasons for taking them but in general, i just wanted to remember as much as possible. sometimes I take photos of myself and the things around me when i am in a miserable situation so i can remember that too. then there are jobs for other people. these are few and far inbetween but every once in a great while somebody i know will request some kind of photo job and i'm happy to help them with it. be it to teach them how to work the cameras while we get some studio shots snapped, the collection archived, or the portraits shot... it's their idea, my execution, and the only thing i desire there is to get some excellent work done.) i've got to get better at working for myself though. anyway. one thing at a time my dear gatsby... so here's something funny my co-workers said yesterday (this is my evidence that yes, my efforts to stay in good humor despite my completely jet-black mood and random bouts of phony symptoms of illness are prevailing) ... they all decided that if they could distill the essence of me and pack it into little vials to sell on the streets it would become a wildly popular and highly illegal drug. (tee hee, they've caught on to the crack factory in my brain.) hmmm. so is the pain not there because nobody else sees it? or because other gals don't get it themselves? who doesn't need some degree of attention at any given point in time? ah well i'm almost simplifying the thing. at least i'm not weepy listening to depeche mode remixes like i was this afternoon. their music makes me want to scream and sit in front of the duck hunt for hours blasting pixelated waterfowl more and more these days. actually it's not the music, just the way people use it. funny how this triggers that. speaking of which, i never got around to talking about the weekend in NYC. nothing bad to report there at all so i think i'll do myself a favor and dive out of the 'darkness of my soul' stuff for now. (i hate sitting through those bits by myself.) so monday b.b. shoots me an email about this 8bit music festival going on over the weekend in NYC. as if that wasn't fantastically good news in itself, it also happens that nullsleep would be one of the performers (!!) so of course i had to go. and it was blaringly obvious that r or c had to come with me (who else could get as psyched as i was for this?). r had work or something, and it turned out that c was already planning on going! haha! in fact, at the very last minute (thursday? maybe friday afternoon?) i found out that he was planning on making an appearance at another show friday night... so i hopped an acela express at the 128/university station right after work on friday for a weekend of drifting in NYC. Despite some rain on and off the weather wasn't that bad at all, so this acela express trip wasn't the hellish ordeal that my last one was. in fact i didn't think much about it until afterwards, when i realized that it was the very same route that left me stuck wandering around outside worcester one depressing winter like i was stuck on that blizzardy mountain in the lord of the rings. (complete with two towers hahah!) another pleasant surprise was the mass of people sitting at tables with their laptops open, tapping away, in the car i walked into. it was a regular laptop party, minus the file exchanges... i managed to get some website experiments done. hmmmm. and some planning too! i called up s.s., e.f. and y.s. on the way in to see any of them would be interested in the shows, or getting together, or dinner, or putting me up... it's nice to have this all organized enough to do that haha! y.s. said she might make it, s.s. said he might too, especially saturday. in any case it was nice to hear them over the phone. i made my way easily enough to the lucky cat by about 9 only to find that the show wasn't even close to starting! i found out from the first dude i bumped into that c. wasn't around yet and the show wasn't going to be starting for a few hours. you're the organizer for the show, and you're playing in it too? cool. high time we sat down in the sofa area and had some bananas i said. so we did. soon after the fruits were gone and some laughs were had over the ridiculous amount of gadgetry we packed we were joined by another dude and his gf. he too was playing in the show, and was wondering where the heck c was. p. had to run off and do something so i spent quite some time chatting with n. i can't wait to play the game he's working on -- it's a space ship shooter game. we took turns watching each other's computers while the other went out to get some food. mmm fuzzBLEEEEPSHIKKNMMMMMSHSHHHHHH.

lundi 10.7.05. nothing like music videos and videogames to opiate this mass of stinging guts. when i get to doing 3d animation, i hope it's as awesome as what you find on hybrid medical animation (http://www.hybridmedicalanimation.com/index.html) ...up until very VERY recently (like, weeks ago) they had a much simpler website. it was a black background with some vivid menus. it was very simple. in fact it inspired my months app design. (this website's been a fountain for me since summer 2003). i haven't explored his new site much but it's also quality. the body's a cool thing, eh?

nov 5, 2005. MORE. two things: i find it simultaneously horrifying and amusing that this page turns up in the query when googling "khonner NYC." it makes me curious about a few things... the other thing that never fails to get a rise out of me (or if you turn it around in this case, can be turned into amusing dirt about me) is smell. isn't it interesting how certain smells remind you of certain people? sometimes so overwhelmingly that it's like a slap to the face? folks in the heian period made a game out of guessing what ingredients were used in the preparation of perfumes... upcoming topics: death, NYC, ichi the killer.

November 5, 2005. today is saturday; the last entry i wrote was tapped out in the morning before heading off to work on friday. this morning i woke up and realized that i already have some crappy recordings of typing noises in a digital format so i can play around with those later. it's always nice to recycle... there's something rather poetic about stealing the audio track off one of the most gut wrenching videos i ever made. the more i think about it, the more i realize that putting those videos from last spring onto my portfolio page would be the equivalent of displaying stick figue scrawl into the "drawing and painting" section. maybe i'll pick the best one and slap that up for now, and remix the ones worth remixing (like Just A Game, I have two ideas for improvement: 1. clean up the visuals a bit more and add that sfx/music track 2. add in the animated special effects that i originally had planned for, along with the sfx/audio track. maybe i could make two versions of the soundtrack. The raw and the finesse versions hmmmmmm...). at least i have some animations i'm proud of so my kinetic presentation section won't be terribly barren. heh. animation is more my style anyway. i'd need some dedicated & adventurous assistants to really make live videos the way i want them to be. in the meantime i can draw and make all my dreams come true on paper/pixels. holy smokes it was only about a year and a half ago that i did those videos --> three and a half enernities have rolled by since then. finally i'm back to the more comfortably fasted paced audio visual lifestyle that suits my tastes. the summary: dinner with b.b. at the ever fabulous oga's monday night involved much banter and plotting about electronic music, videos and electronic music festivals. once we were booted out of the restaurant we followed that up with a laptop party and art video showing at the hotel. i forgot how much i enjoy watching artsy fartsy videos and resolved to make it out to some film fests in boston this year (heck, tonight i'm headed to the brattle theater for SWORD OF DOOM and the skipping over to the coolidge theater for the midnight showing of JERICHO'S ECHO: PUNK ROCK IN THE HOLY LAND. so that's monochrome samurai goodness followed by a documentary about punk rockers in israel. yow.) maybe i'll submit a video remix to the boston underground film fest in the spring. ooooOOoooooo a deadline.... maybe that's just what i need.... now that the despiration of trying to move out of my house is washed away i can really sit and think about the fun stuff. did i mention that the ad for the boston jewish film festival sports one of these punk rockers with a fat chain around his neck, a tattoo of the israeli flag and a freshly cut green mowhawk? (oh man, the fresh cut lawn...) if anything, tonight will be hilarious. this week really has been a synesthesia overload. moving on... c. made it down on tuesday and brought even more fun stuff to look at. dim sum at china pearl brought back memories of meeting with k and b.b. and nandu in the spring (which was only one eternity ago heh). Might i reccomend the pearl balls. not only do they have one of my favorite words in the name, they're also divinely tasty. don't mind what's in it... just rememeber it's good... when we got home, after oralizing the entire way about how much we had been wanting to see naked lunch we ended up watching ichi the killer. more on this sublime flick later though. (i just looked oralizing up in the dictionary to see if i spelled it right and it's not there. i grabbed it from a monty python song, it just seemed appropriate.) c. and i traded stuff, and i sent him on his merry way on wed. i wish i had a hanky to wave at him on the train platform, that would have been funny. i get so excited when my friends go on cool trips like that. thursday was spent in a daze recovering from mon-wed, and finally friday i was awake enough to start on some of the music i got monday. smashing. halluciante. i kept looping bits of Raiding the 20th Century by DJ Food... the way the track skips from song to song made me a little jittery at first (when you're not paying attention it sounds like somebody banging away at the skip button on your radio when you actually want to hear what's playing on each channel) but... there's a reason for the madness, and when i finally settled down and LISTENED to the thing it was BRILLIANT! content and execution, just fascinating. that plus the awesome gamelan music i just got from a co-worker were just what i needed for that nutter friday afternoon.

why is it that everytime i go to meet my new cousin p.s., i've got a flamming little tattoo on me? it's like a cosmic joke. heh, i sure got him good. hahahah! if i ever had the guts (you should never drink alcohol before you get a tattoo, you'll just bleed all over the place. it ain't pretty) and the cash to blow (actually, i'd rather feed starving kids in africa) i'd get something epic. i think the only solution if i ever wanted to get a real tattoo is to learn how to do it myself. crap my arm is losing it's circulation. i had another dream about being all covered in blood i couldn't wash off. only this time i said FUCK IT!!! (yes!) and i ran off with maggie gyllenhaal on some violent rampage. one of the random characters i generated for testing yesterday looked just like her. it was uncanny, and i loved it, because she is one of the HOTTEST actors out there (hah, just like Jake). the dude sitting next to me named his avatar Patrick Swayze, and so i kept thinking about donnie darko all day. i'm bringing the soundtrack to work today. and going to pay my respects to the living. i feel like visiting emmerson's grave sometime soon so a trip to concord this weekend may be in order. this is the best time of the year for it after all. /hemmingway

november 1, 2005. while shopping for my kheema ingredients on sunday, i also did my part for the weekly shopping for the house. one of the items that i could barely make out on the list was HASH. "hmm, i probably know where i could get some hash up in VT but.... why would my rromies want hash?" -- they hardly even drink alcohol let alone.... so i laughed it off and just figured it was a joke. when i got home i found out that hash = corned beef hash... "you know, a home comfort food" to which i wrinkled my nose and said, well I'VE NEVER HAD IT IN MY LIFE. kheema is my home comfort food. :D

november 1, 2005. given my fascination with fandom, i am quite amused that my first long term employer outside of college goes by the name of TURBINE. their moto/slogan: "powered by our fans" ... to sum it up, my first almost month of work has gone smashingly well. i am very pleased and excited. the only bummer is that i have to get to bed at a certain time.... but you can't have it all at once!

oh but can i tell you how much i love spain too??? aye me... i shall live in barcelona at some point in my life. but for now i must go on a search for the mythical land of JapA�a :D oh yes, and before i forget.... i was having all these profound thoughts about images and sound earlier (after some good conversations last night and the digestion of another chunk of Camera Lucida this morning...) hmm some of it has just gone on vacation while my body gets ready to sleep but i do recall thinking about how some of the projects i work on take about 6 months to 2 years to incubate before i can just get it out in about two or three periods of intense concentration. the same things will bug around in my head for years even as newer ideas pop up... these old and new ideas will make friends and smoosh together into something better if i'm lucky. that's some of the best stuff i guess. oh yeah, and sometimes it just takes a while before i can figure out the proper means. aie what a backlog. it feels like somebody's hitting the fastforward and rewind buttons all at once on my neural mix tape. oh yeah, and this is highly satisfying: http://hanazuc02.ld.infoseek.co.jp/cassettes/cassettes.htm (these are my last thoughts for oct 24, 2005).

lundi, 10.24.05. hello slow universe. let me start off by saying that my new house, ontop of sporting a bountifully stocked kitchen and being inhabited by some of the most interesting people i know, has a wonderful bathtub. it's quite deep, and although it's not quite long enough to stretch all the way out the wooden walls and nest it's resting in give it this great ofuro feeling. (deep bathtubs surronded by wood really remind me of japanese counrty bath houses). and there's not much that can beat a good hot bath. i realized when i lived in japan (and found myself with enough time to bathe everyday like i used to before getting into college). ack. mind you i bathe regularly, but there's blasting yourself with a quick shower and then there's proper bathing. if i was an old woman i wouldn't complain about how the crazy kids these days never eat breakfast and make a feast of eggs and muffins in the morning for them... i would instead sigh woefully at the long lost days when people had a proper long bath. (hah, have you seen "The Shower" yet? they capture this sentiment among others brilliantly). ... anyway, bathing is more consistantly refreshing to me than sleeping. and sure, i get great ideas while dreaming, but bathing lets them out faster and certainly with more clarity. i'm positive that one of the elements that made me so prolific while i was in japan was my regular relaxing bath. man, the only other vehicle besides a train that would make a great spaceship or timemachine would be one of those old style bathtubs. i think nemo flies around in one... ah well. so that's my ode to baths and great bathtubs for the night. NOW FOR THE IDEAS: so. after years of hating writing journals (only psychos keep journals right? well that's some stupid idea i clung to for way too long...) i've come to enjoy here, for notes, for posterity, for myself, to keep my projects straight and my ideas when they come to me... (and to make an effort to explain it in WORDS). in this web journal form it's easy to search around and find old entries and ideas... but now as i have been working on a new webpage and how to present the stuff i keep stumbling on ways in which i could make it more personal. i love writing stuff down by hand because it's faster and it lets me draw in the sidelines and muck with the fonts/style/colors and all that stuff in any way i want almost in an instant. sure, i'm learning new tricks for doing this on the web too but... it still comes out as computer text. it would be lovely if i could draw little pictures up on this journal page.... but that would be tough. while a font that looks like my handwriting would be really fun. and since it's computer generated it wouuld still be searchable... sure it wouldn't be perfect but if there were some way (to program it into the font... or maybe write a web applet that would generate the text...) to make a font that has more than one character assigned to each keystroke that would be great. when you look at my darn handwriting you'll notice that it doesn't all come out the same... sometimes i write one letter in cursive, other times i won't, oh yikes i'm writing with the left hand cause the right hand is busy... etc. i don't know how it comes out that way but it does, unless i'm making an effort to keep it consistant for clarity or design purposes. in order to factor that in, this new writing system would need to randomly toss out one of maybe three options for each character. and in order to make the text flow better there could be certain conditions that would lean towards a connection of more cursive style letters. i wish i knew whether this could be programed as a font file (can font files contain complexity like that?) or would this make a good web applet? or what? this certainly needs more investigation. oh sleep is coming... i have so much to tell about the weekend.... that was the best weekend i've had in NYC ever...

samedi oct 23, '05. ON CONSUMPTION & DESIRE AND HOW TO DEAL WITH IT: fgnegrq qenjvat naq frggvat hc rynobengr fprarf jvgu penc nebhaq gur ubhfr gb gnxr cubgbf bs bhg bs qrfcrengvba naq oberqbz. naljnl gb xvyy gur gvzr gung v pbhyqa'g or jngpuvat gi. fbzrgvzrf qenjvat fghss ghearq bhg gb or n tbbq jnl gb bja vg. be gnxr abgr bs vg sbe yngre, jura v pbhyq unir vg. be sbetrg nobhg rira univat vg orpnhfr gur pbcl jnf tbbq rabhtu. naljnl, nsgre n juvyr v ernyvmrq gung vs v qvqa'g xrrc znxvat vzntrf, v jbhyq tenqhnyyl tb ahgf jvgu jvguqenjy (be vf vg qrfver?). gur pncgher bs jungrire shryrq zl zvav bofrffvbaf orpnzr n jubyr bgure zbafgre va vgfrys.

friday october 21st, fresh early spankin' mornin' edition. hear ye hear ye, that remote control that got shattered in some freaky spastic accident last friday night will be replaced FOR FREE by the cable company whose wares it pertains to. i had a moment of merry dancing to celebrate this fine turn of events. by the splinters of the old remote we might have even been able to read auspicious signs for the whole week. may this weekend be even more excellent than the last...

Thursday Oct 20, 2005, the night is young but i should be catching up with sleep for the day job. Maybe this'll probably hurt in the morning but.. it will all be worth it. I hope the creature clawing at my door slowly is just a cat and not some zombie. Maybe if I type fast enough it'll go away heheheh... ANYWAY. The one ditial photo I took on Saturday night (the 15th of Oct) was from the bathroom of the Drake Hotel where the show was held. It's a hilarious photo of a man from behind wearing nothing but a pair of shoes, dark knee-high socks and a white cat-ear hat (seriously looks like the one I've got...) while running away flashing his buttcrack all over the universe. The rest of the photos I took were on the demi from the dancefloor while the show was going on. I am very excited to get those shots developed... Anyway. Saturday night couldn't have gone any better! The smoothness with which the weekend flowed by would make any beautiful river in New England envious, and it's good vibes have carried over into this week with a vengence. The first thing I saw when I stepped outside from the train station in Toronto was the gorgeous full moon at top voltage. It was then that I really felt the blast of fresh air that had been hiding from southern New England because of the rain that had swamped it all week. The night was pleasantly cool, perfect for making your way around town on foot. I had to catch a cab to the hotel though because I had no idea how to get there (and neither did the first cabby I asked a ride from ha ha!). The Drake Hotel is a REALLY spiffy looking place with video art, photographs and installations spread into every nook and cranny. the bathroom decour was rather like the hoop (R.I.P), in decoration and feeling. Past the bathroom is "The Underground" where they had chairs and tables set up surrounding the dancefloor, three video projections of the show splashed up on the walls and a stage at the back, opposite the bar across the room. Zwicky and I looked up some nightclubs around Toronto the night before in hopes of figuring out where the club scenes for QAF were shot and it turns out that those clubs don't shut down until about 6 am... Toronto is another one of those slick cities that never sleeps. The trains and buses even run throughout the night! Hah! So if we rewind back to me entering the hotel just GIDDY with having succesfully made it, two seconds after stepping into the lobby you'd hear a wide eyed ".....GiuliAUNA?" -- I made it just in time to intersect c and a on their way out for a pizza run. Good thing too because I was so hungry my hands were shaking. we just chilled and ate dinner in the near darkness of the Underground show floor, observing the crowd build up gradually. khonner later cleared the house with a few fell swoops. most of the people in the room just up and left... it was AWESOME. it was too much for them. heh. two other guys opened for him. one stood there and oooohed and aaaaahged into a mic attached to his G4 laptop (he had an electric guitar hooked up to it too which he would sample and layer over and over like cotton candy). that was interesting... kinda catchy beats... it was cute that the kid's parents were chillin' in the crowd. then polmo polpo (a very sweet guy who baked some cookies to share with us at the end of the show) played a fresh set. everybody got up to dance for that one. all the while the three projection screens were displaying phsychadellic colors and shapes. when it got to khonner though, they put up some creepy video of a baby elephantitis or something awful like that, and after a while they put up an animated .gif i made of him being a crazy bastard in a graveyard. hehe. the music wasn't all that sweet or dance-able. Khonner's new stuff is exceedingly dark compared to his work in Handwriting. so the cocktail of raw noise plus the disturbing (possibly offensive) visuals turned many off. oh yes, he did have some technical difficulties with his computer but those got ironed over by the end of the set, which carried the remaning listeners through about 1.5 - 2 hours of music in the blink of an eye! it really was spectacular... the last time i was at a concert where the musicians cleared out the house i remember thinking that not all music is made to PLEASE .. god that band was rockin rockin so hard in fact, you could feel your internal organs jiggling around. it was pretty raw too... the crowd was there for the light and fluffy... and they got brutally assaulted by the music and visuals (in this case weird videos, in their case severe synchronized thrashing). i love it ...Oh with mono, they were opening for Freezepop, which I would describe as light electro-pop -- They're silly and colorful and light -- just like a freezepop! They're music is pretty beepy boopy making noise with old computers... 8 bit stuff you know .... but mono... It's really hard distorted guitars and drums.Their songs are a slow crescendo, starting out despirately low and then building gradually till they get so loud and deep that it literally blasts your body with sound WOOOOOOOSH... sonic boom! Not that your ears will bleed to pieces, but you can feel it inside you, the reverberations. It's loud and invasive ... +++start interjection+++ G Funk: So imagine going in hoping to see Freezepop and the like and having a group like mono get up on stage and pulverize you with noise instead? (10:17:24PM) k8: hahahaha sounds just like you.. (10:17:11PM) k8: meek and quiet and then BOOOOOM (10:17:18PM) G Funk: R O F L O L (10:17:30PM) G Funk: Thank you K8 (10:17:33PM) ... Add quotes to the narrative to spice it up they say. Well there it is, internet style. k8 you amuse me. +++end interjection+++ anyway, khonner's set was elemental and rather invasive. what more is there to say? c invited me to an aftershow party (which we missed because we arrived at the dashingly fashionable fourth hour in the morning) and his friends were kind enough to offer their futon to crash on after that. i didn't have to hop to the Fly club for the rest of the nigt (hah! no QAF site hunting this time...) but even so i didn't get a wink till i got onto the bus headed back to vermont at 7:30 the next morning! we spent all night ambling around the streets, playing with cats, avoiding skunks and laughing over photography, noisy music and our misadventures... what a fantastic crowd! cheers.

tuesday, oct 18, 2005. a song gets stuck in your head, you grab a tape while concentrating on the road, push it into the player and THAT tune is the first to come up. you mention how neon green the moss was for the photo shoot and a neon glistening with the newly fallen rain passes you on the highway. those kinds of days are interesting to say the least. it makes me think that the world's pretty well oiled up anyway. a third testament to how well the machine's working is what an excellently smooth tracendence of space and time this weekend was for me! deterred by heinously hiked up airfares, i had abandoned my plan to head up to toronto earlier last week. only to find myself pestered in the early hours of the morning by sad dreams of life i let slip by... so after a few nights of connecting dots on roadmaps i figured out some feasable routes on land via car, train and bus! not like i had any homework due or anything ;) and this weekend i was officially off, free to enjoy it as i pleased to the last drop, as it would be one of the last weekends in the next six months where i wouldn't be expected to work overtime. a fine time for a last hurrah i said, and i was off friday night after work. the first stop was zwicky's house in warren VT. it took a good 4.5 hours to drive there in the rain but it's a gorgeous drive by night as well and nothing i hadn't handled before. five minutes after entering the apartment i jerked back in my chair at amazement over something hilarious on the computer and somehow managed to disturb the flimsy table behind me, upsetting the remote control to the cable tv so much that it shattered into about 5 million tiny pieces all over the living room. even the circuit thingy INSIDE the zapper was splintered into a complicated mess. that was a little embarassing. we managed to watch some queer as folk anyway though, so the incident was somewhat forgotten. it turns out that QAF was filmed in toronto, so when zwickey heard i was headed up there she promptly searched for hot spots to visit if i had time. in case of a lack of shelter for the night emergency i could hide out in one of those clubs :D appearantly toronto likes to stay awake, so some of the clubs were open till 6 am or so. perfect timing, as the bus ride back to VT would leave at 7:30 am... anyway, after we had our laughs over hellen keller and other methods of alternative communication via the spastic body, i snuck into the shower while she searched the web only to discover one of the funniest tissue dispensers i have ever seen: shiny, garrishly lit silver nestled right into the wall next to the sink, with the length of the plate pointed down. oh oh zwicky.. anyway, our meeting was short but high quality as usual. she had to get up super early in the morning so we didn't stay up much later than 2 hee hee! and then i was off again on my way to white river to pick up the bus. there's free parking for as long as you like at the bus station there... and you can buy tickets ahead of time right there! i was worried for a while once i got on because i may have been turned away from the border for NOT having my passport, but all was well in the end. i made it to montreal to catch the train, which would get me into toronto just in time to catch the show (which i thought started at 9 but actually ended up starting about an hour after that i think??) but more on the show later. we'll fastforward in time to note that i left the house at about 6:50... 7 am.. and made it to the bus terminal in toronto just in time to catch my bus back, which made it to white river junction just on time. i had a fine dinner accompanied by even better cider at this place i've always had my eye on because of their crab cake dinner (which they had NONE of when i got there!) and then i picked up my mum just as promised. much rest was had during the trips, and last night. i am so sleepy now.

friday october 7, 2005. have you ever heard of biker's high? well i think i had it the other day (ototoi) while i was peddling up some beastly dirt road outside of town. my legs were shaking with muscle cramps and my looney abs were punishing me in their usual way so i had to get off the bike and walk. step. ow. step. oww! step - gee, am i able to walk straight here? - when all of a sudden WHOOOOSH! all the cramps were gone. by the time i made it to the top of the hill i was totally pumped and luckily for me the rest of the ride was downhill. it was way better than downhill skiing, and more raw than going down a waterslide at some aquapark. RAW being a word i reserve only for special ocassions. well, in an equally exhilirating state of mind i managed to finish up my long overdue printing session from the lunar eclipse of 2003. the astro lab instructor (dr. steve) and i braved the fridgid fall air and had all of MIT's optical observation facilities at our disposal to shoot photos that night! it was gloriously clear. i tried three different setups for star trails, shots of the moon close up in color and in black and white. it was the B&W ones that i finally got to print and i'm very pleased with the results!! not bad focus jobs considering my gloveless fingers could barely feel a thing in that -2 degree weather! i'd wanted to make a little booklet from the shots as a thank you gift, and so i'm psyched they came out well. mwa hah ahaa! a rather exhilarating photoshoot followed my darkroom excursion (this darkroom is in barre, VT). we'll see what happens to those photos though... hehehe.. today after some deep sleep late in the morning c. and i biked out to lunch in lyndonville. on the way back my back tyre died and i had to call up my old japanese teacher for a ride back to st johnsbury! hahahaa! that bike was falling apart the whole way! one of the handlebar covers has gone missing too! what a mess. the day was warm with dark clouds looming over it, perfect for a fox's wedding no!? (well there was one, and now it's raining but it's still warm). maybe tomorrow i'll go out to the dam to find that moss field again. holy smokes. so after spending an adventurous weekend in monstreal i came home to find out that Turbine planned on hiring me after all! my first long term job out of college will be play-testing the pre-release versions of the D&D MMORPG. mwaaaaaaaaa hahahahahhaaaa! i move into my new dwelling on tuesday, and start work on wednesday (the 12th) next week. wheee! my period of exile and contemplation in the mountains is about to end, and i'm glad i'm going out in style. anyway. here's something cute my brother found for me:

lundi, 8:52, sept 26, 2005. IDM is a funny term. like a grammatical term. on one hand, i think grammatical terms are a pain in the ass and not worth remembering (i mean, think of all those times you can see the gears grinding in somebody's head... you can just HEAR the squeaky squeaks of them trying to process verb conjugations down the boot to get to the one they want lest they speak a faulty phrase)... anyway, at times i think we should all trash grammatical terms and just SPEAK but then i remember that once you can get over your fear and just do it, learning the grammar in the first place may help train your brain for the gymnastic katas it must perform. in a similar vein, dividing everything up into itty bitty labels (think taxonomy, biology, greek letter combinations for every radio wave emitting object in the sky) can be rather useful, especially when you'd like to convey messages about groups of similar things. i guess the problem with labeling stuff is when the lines between what is * and isn't * aren't quite clear cut. the potential to stir up that battle between the folks who are completely anal and those who can handle the ambiguity of life is high. basically, labels apply to groups of stuff, while names apply to the individual. labels, like grammar, help you talk about a number of (possibly changing) things all at once so they are useful, but you shouldn't get stuck on THEM. anyway, speaking's like jumping off a bridge (in a non-lethal way man) for me. for better or for worse... everything's a double edged sword isn't it?

Tuesday Sept 20th, 2005. Bam! Other than some silly BS last night, these past three weeks or so have been incredible. I'll just take that little disturbance as a reminder that it is time to be moving along soon. No "resting on my laurels" or whatever you call it. "We'll sleep when we're dead" etc etc. hehe. It is worth noting that the old good fortune that seemed to have slipped out of my ear about a year ago has creeping back and is now on full force. Things have lightened up around this old log that is St. Johnsbury. Part of it is because the weather is cooling off. I can get back on a regular running routine with this kind of weather for starters. Anyway, I spent the weekend in CT, around Jackie's place mostly. His mum took me along with her to find a tagsale, and on the way we saw a car with the most amusing paint job I have seen yet: A massive, very particular shade of brown Buick. First all we saw was the back of the car as it was waiting at a stop sign ahead of us. It had these red and white stripes painted over the trunk... at first it just reminded me of a large mint. But why would some dude with a poop colored Buick have a candy stripe mint theme? Once I got over the synesthesia overload I just knew it had to be a large American Flag. Sure enough, when the car pulled around the corner, the red and white lines zigzagged along the side of the car until meeting a big blue hood strewn with white stars. You win the pride prize buddy!

sunday.september18.2005. went to bed very early last night and miraculously woke up a little before 8 am. (hee hee) as usual things are pretty quiet in the morning. i guess that's the same everywhere unless you're in school. (why they make people be at school at 8 am is beyond me but hey...) slavedrivers make those kinds of decisions. (heeehaaa haaa!) well. i've been reading an english translation of roland barthes's 'camera lucida' finally after putting it off all through college. one reason i'd been reluctant to pick it up was an incomprehensible lecture about the book i attended sometime late junior or early senior year. it was delivered by some pompous english professor who managed to stretch the talk out about an hour extra. after a while i just turned off my language receptors and devoted my full attention to the slides. i felt a little less humiliated after the lecture when i learned that i was not the only one who couldn't understand anything the man said before the final seven minutes! (hee hee.) at the time i figured the book itself must be ridiculously verbose and boring so it got tossed into my 'read when you have some time and need some stimulation' directory deep in the bowels of my mind. (my mind MUST have bowels!) anyway, i'm glad to announce that 'camera lucida' is an exciting and easy read! nothing's really punched me with its brilliance yet but there's much potential (from what i've gathered in the first 30 of 100 or so pages). Basically it's a man's meditation on what makes Photographs exciting to him. One of the things that used to drive me crazy in Photo class was when J would ask me "well WHY do you take photos of that?!" to which I would reply "because i LIKE/LOVE that stuff!" -- "but WHY!?" she would reply. why indeed, you could write whole books on that. (but do i really want to tell you the whole story?) or you could streamline your presentations to make them pluck nerves and associations in the people you're showing the images to. (play them all like instruments with my manipulated photons.) it's just interesting stuff to ponder and a pleasure to read somebody else's take on the whole thing.

Kinyoobi, kugastu no 16 nichi. 2005. I think I forgot to mention the mad flashbacks to life in Puerto Rico that I have whenever a tropical storm with warm torrential rain rushes through New England. It's happened from MA to VT quite a few times this summer and it's always surreal. See, in the western mountains of Puerto Rico there is an interesting summer phenomenon in which, without fail, this incredible nearly apocalyptic storm of hot rain and violent thunder&lightning will pour down for about 30 mins to an hour starting exactly at 2pm. On one of these rainy days, I was in a dark colored Jeep with an open back being driven by a cousin of mine blasting reggae music. We laughed the whole way down the highway as the rain smashed into the windshield. It was fantastic. It was just part of a weekend that went by smoothly like a machine, where I was the oil slipping in and around the gears. Or the electrons, or whatever moves around in machines. Anyway I get a charge driving around old Canton CT. DRIVING, ME. I could go anywhere in this town now since I'm the driver. Ha ha. Since it's been rainy the mists well up all around the trees and over rivers, and it was a quiet and gorgeous drive down. The only time I really like the sky to be clear and blue while I'm driving is when it's deep into fall, and you have orange and red and yellow against the blue. Smash! happy birthday september valentine!

eh?

Friday September 2, 2005 (1 am): In early May I was stuck with a terrible case of 'da mopes and I thought September would never come. But here it is. This is sure to be an exciting month. I forget what moved me to write my last message (see that's why I wanted to write it down...) but maybe writing some more will bring it out. Sometimes I can't remember new stuff unless I explain the old stuff. These days I have been hearing how having a photographic memory has it's bad sides too. I forget what they were but it, like most everything else I can think of, is a double edged sword. Oh yeah, Nati Gan is actually Natty Gann from the appropriately named movie "The Journey of Natty Gann" --One of the movies I used to watch religiously but forgot about until mum made a comment on my desire to hop onto the next train car headed out of town. Anyway, I'll start by picking up where I left off before: It is interesting to see the shops downtown go in and out. After my favorite hang-out spot closed (The Simple Joys cafe across the street from Catamount. None of the other hipster coffee shops that opened up after that could shake a stick to the wares and atmosphere there.) I always thought how great it would be to open my own cafe on Eastern Avenue. I would serve awesome tea and coffee and fresh juice and smoothies, and for those of you with the munchies - epic sandwiches to stuff in your pockets as a snack for thelate show at Catamount, or various kinds of noodle dishes for the sit-in crowd. One wall would be covered with comic books for patrons to read. There'd be a little stage space for poetry readings, lectures and shows. And the noodles would be quality man! Thinking about the research that needs to be done for this kind of project is rather exciting :D (especially the noodle bits, because I'm not just talking Italian, I'm thinking Asian noodles as well). OK, the Brian Jacques tangent is over for now (although I must note that when gogling his name to see if I got the spelling right I learned that there was a Redwall Opera!!!). Heh. YEAH! Well... An extra army recruitment office has been set up in the space I fancied for my shop. Oh the irony. hmm... The taxonomized squirrel in a miniature canoe I wanted to photograph so badly in one of the shops on Railroad Street must have found a home because it's gone. The little guy even held an oar his size - the whole thing was ghastly. I paid a visit to the fine Floridian running the shoe store in town to see if she'd finally ordered some Campers but she said she never got to touch a real pair so she hadn't. I showed her mine but they were in sad shape ha ha ha! They've walked all over Europe and East Asia with me at this point, so it makes sense. I guess the point of even mentioning this pair of stylish black sandals is that they DID walk all over the place with me for a year, and only when I subjected them to about 10 hours of continuous running and dancing a couple weeks ago did they really start to fall apart. Spanish Campers. The rednecks screamed at me from their trucks, the drug rug crowd glared at me from their brooding spots. I guess the humid heat of the day elevates your awareness of that kind of thing. Oh yeah, I did make a stop at the Fairbanks Museum earlier to have a bit of plant life I picked up at the Comerford Dam identified. It is Cladoniaceae, or deer antler moss. When rich and his friends and I went out there on a miserably wet day in mid May TJ took us through the woods for about twenty minutes to get to a clearning where the sandy reddish ground was completely covered in this squishy electric yellowish moss. Light shone through the mist here and there so the effect was pretty otherworldly then, but even when I went back a few months later to see if the moss fields were still there the sight was fantastic. It really is like a page from A Princess of Mars, when John Carter takes a first glance around the planet he was just transported to. (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/People/rgs/pmars-table.html "My Advent on Mars") I still haven't gotten around to shooting any photos there yet but if I don't have to up and leave for CA this weekend I think I'll do that instead. It sort of looks like lichen, especially the bits sprouting out from the rotting trees scattered particularly over the small hill before the basin (beyond the first field of moss there is a small hill and then a large basin just full of the stuff)... So anyway, it's nice to finally know what that stuff is. It's nice reading up on plant life in Wikipedia (among other things!) but I had forgotten how exciting it can be to just find some mysterious flora on your own and have somebody explain what it is to you. The folks at the Museum love it when people come in to ask questions like that too. After that walk around town I went to retrieve my copy of A Princess of Mars from the I.s, and on my way home I saw a perfectly square cloud hovering over the treetops. After staring at it for a good long while I realized it was definitely photo worthy and I caught it just as it began to fade out. I slapped that baby up on my geocities website and soon afterwards got an e-mail from yahoo-geocities saying that my website had been temporarily disabled because of heavy traffic. haa haa! I must get my new website up soon!!! On a similar note, J.G. dropped by for a surprise visit a few weeks later and commented (as I sat in the thyme patch in my front yard emoting about the speedy herds of clouds swooshing through the sky) that I better get out of VT soon before I end up enrolling in some meteorology program nearby. hee hee! (One friend tells me to "Live in California once, but leave before it makes you soft." and another one tells me to "Live in Vermont once, but leave before you become a meteorologist.") I'll miss the view of the Milky Way from my driveway in whatever city I end up in for sure, but you can't have it all at once can you?

Wow. So lots of interesting things have been going on and I am so busy that I can't write about them but I am afraid it's all going to fall out my ear. So here's a list of interesting things I have seen and learned of late. The day I got back from CA was an especially crazy day. I got very tired after setting down in Boston so I ended up taking the first bus I could striaght back to VT. I took a walk around town that day running errands and I noticed a lot of weird stuff around town. There was a rattle made out of a dried up turtle on display at "The Sunshine Boutique" that had feathers and a claw for a handle... The lady took it specially out of the display so I could take a look at it. It wasn't just the turtle shell, it had a dried up turtle head too. Next I noticed that two or three new offices representing our fair department of defense have recently moved into the long deserted storefronts of Easten Avenue. I walked to the drive through ATM and some cars lined up to wait till I was done (which is always amusing) and once I finished I noticed and attractive red caboose on the railroad tracks. Too bad I'm never around the tracks when these darm trains are moving -- I know I'll pull a Nati Gan some day. Maybe I'll do it from the south this time to go North though, as I have already run the entire length of the Amtrack rail headed south from White River Junction. It ends in Miami. But that story is forthcoming. We're talking about the (almost) now here. Oh wait. Stop (this is August 31. 2:30 am)

Sevqnl, Nhthfg gjragl-fvk, gjb-gubhfnaq naq svir***Whfg erzrzore: fhoyvzr ebpx'a ebyy tyhr.

SUNDAY JULY 24th 2005: Holy smokes people, I know I promised you something substantial soon, but here I am with more (hilarious) online test results. Maybe they're hilarious because it's 4 am. Maybe they're hilarious because they're just RIGHT ON. lol. In any case, here they are:
You Are a Glam Rocker!
You put the "show" in rock show with your larger than life self. No doubt, you are all about making good music... But what really gets you going is having an over the top show. Glitter, costumes, and wild hair are your thing - with some rock thrown in!

What Kind of Rocker Are You?

You Should Learn Japanese

You're cutting edge, and you are ready to delve into wacky Japanese culture. From Engrish to eating contests, you're born to be a crazy gaijin. Saiko!

What Language Should You Learn?

SAIKOOOOOO!! Is exactly the kind of work I like to hear at 4 am. Oooooh my goodness. I guess I can give you an update. The iTunes Music store and I have become friends in the past few months. My collection of mondo cheesy music is ever expanding... for example, Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" just creeped up the queue to pleasantly assault my ears. No cover of this song can even touch it. Some ya-hoo did a cover of it while I was in college... but it just doesn't cut it. Oh my goodness. So if you're still with me here, I'll also mention that I'm quite entranced by the work of a band called M83. I don't know about you, but when I see a small structure of a name that consists of an M and some ##s... I think Messier Objects! (http://www.seds.org/messier/data3.html) Yeah. Goodnight! :)

One day soon I will add something substantial, but in the meantime... Surprise surprise... @--->--- @-->----- @---->---- @---->---- @--->----- @--->---
You Are 19% American
You're as American as Key Lime Tofu Pie Otherwise known as un-American! You belong in Cairo or Paris... Get out fast - before you end up in Gitmo!

How American Are You?

What you've always wanted to do.
I know I have.

and another one.........

GIULIANA
G	is for	Goofy
I	is for	Insane
U	is for	Unreal
L	is for	Luscious
I	is for	Impressive
A	is for	Animated
N	is for	Neglected
A	is for	Amazing

What Does Your Name Mean?

ha h aaa ha... i guess i'm ready for the future eh?
You scored as Anarchism. <'Imunimaginative's Deviantart Page'>

Anarchism
100%
Democrat
83%
Green
67%
Socialist
50%
Communism
33%
Fascism
8%
Nazi
0%
Republican
0%

What Political Party Do Your Beliefs Put You In?
created with QuizFarm.

hi! today is Friday Feb. 18, 2005. this may be the newest post this year. (hmm) anyways. a funny thing happened. i just finished watching napoleon dynamite, and then i found that somebody had called us (but the computer fax picked it up before we did. the loon, we've got to fix that). well anways, i called the number back, and a lady who couldn't speak english answered the phone. she spoke just like the mexicans in the movie i had just finished seeing. the end.

You Are Chocolat Orange Pocky

Your attitude: funky and flavorful Rich and deep - yet zingy and zesty You are the perfect partner in crime

What Flavor Pocky Are You?

Hmm. So it�s 5 something-or-other in the AM again and I�m completely insomniac. This sleeping pattern is starting to get in the way of things I want to do again so it�ll have to stop soon� in any case, it�s been an interesting week. Every once in a while I feel like one Main Point is being driven into my head for a short period of time, and this week is one of those times. in a fantastic deja vu moment at the beginning of the weekend I had this week�s theme recapped to me in one lovely sentence: "who dances divinely with their first step?" It�s so good it could have been a quote, but the one who said it might have very well made it up on the spot. Either way, it�s stuck in my head all weekend like the lyrics of a song that�s caught my fancy. So enjoy! Over and out, g~

december 6th, 2004. earlier this weekend i was in atlanta on my first mercinary job. soon after stepping off the plane i called a few people and then started heading into boston on the blue line. on the way in i caved and stopped at the aquarium :) they're done something new and metallic to the exterior and now there is an imax theater!! inside they've set up a new jellyfish exhibit (many many moons ago i remember being impressed by another "jellies" exhibit)... where i learned that jellyfish are thriving more than ever due to human overfishing and global warming. ha! the rest of the time i ambled slowly around the main exhibit searching for the sea turtles. at one point i found myself checking out a lovely girl with waist length blonde hair and an ochre cordoroy jacket. well, i dragged myself away from her to check out the other side of the informational panel on fish that live in the connecticut river. soon after i found myself being warmly hugged from behind by some crooning guy. "WOA WOA WOOOOOOA!" i say and turn around to see who the hell it could be ("i do know folks around boston but... none of them know i am in the aquarium today...") and the guy's jaw drops. "omg!" says he, apologizing profusely and exclaiming that he had his gf by his side not a minute before. i smile and laugh, which gets him to calm down. (or maybe he was just breaking into nervous laughter). in any case it was funny, because this guy just looked like somebody who i would bump into at the infinite corridor and make fast friends with. "ha ha ha haaa!" he laughs nervously as his girlfriend comes from around the informational panel, and i just keep on laughing. it's the girl i was checking out two minutes before. ... i left the aquarium soon after taking a long gander at the various kinds of penguins and the seals in the tank outside. ha~ after dinner at a hole-in-the-wall african fusion restaurant near central square i met some more lovely friends in town to see the cherry-on-top-of-my-day. the movie "closer" -- which you all must see, if only to fully appreciate this diary entry. and now here i am in the happy apartment again; it is 12:45pm this fine monday. what a week it has been!!!!!

my dear my dears... for some reason my lovely laptop thinks it is sunday, april 11, 1976. what the heck is going on? i know i'm a little outdated in my tatses sometimes, but my compy is definitely living in another age right now. well. it can be that way since it's five years old. in computer years it is like 147 or something.... ah well. i just learned how to install ram in my computer so even though it is being senile it runs faster than it ever did before... :) enough about that. it is actually the 24th of november 2004. i have been back from my trips/coming out of summer mode for about a month and a half though. many beautiful and interesting things have happened since i came back... but before i recount any of that i would like to reconstruct my adventures of the summer from my notes (when i was too preoccupied to be plugging away at a computer i just scribbled notes in a small book). so it's coming... slowly but surely. hopefully i'll also have a revamped version of my art website up sometime before the new year. in the meantime.... i just looked over my accounts of my last days in romania and i realized what was missing... (even as i had been writing it back when i did... i knew something wasn't quite right). the SATURDAY of the medieval festival in sigisuara was so exciting!! i'm not sure how i left it out and then deemed my romania chapter done... so. here it is: ************************************************************** (soon to be put in...)

oct 13th, 2004..................well. other than the fact that my computer tells me it is tuesday, february 7th 2040 (cool i'm in the future!!) i'm pretty sure that it will be OK. in the middle of my visit with the fam in puerto rico, it all of a sudden stopped booting up for me and for all intents and purposes i deemed it comatose (still alive, but unable to communicate or function like it normally would). but it turned out it was nothing i couldn't handle, and so here i am again connected with it once again like in the days of yore.... and i mean that in the "i am browsing with internet explorer 4.something" kind of way. hehe. it is a little inconvenient since barely anything is still compatible with this ancient version... but i am determined this time to systematically and patiently make SLOW changes to this computer (instead of just redumping the remnants of my old system software/prefs/extensions, which is what made it relapse into a coma in the first place). or maybe what is really messing with my computer is how no matter how many times i change the date and time settings it still manages to get confused again on it's own.... well. whatever it is, i'll actually figure it out this time and add to the life expectancy of my lovely machine. in other news... i seriously need to fill in the gaping holes in this summer journal... thank goodness i took written notes down when i couldn't spend lots of time in front of a computer. i guess the lesson learned here is that, even though my intentions were good and to save typing time later.... it is still hard to keep an online journal when you are traveling around all the time... and really, do you want to spend all that time copiously recording what you are doing then?!?!? maybe if i had taken my laptop with me (or if i had one of those newton-type machines...) i would have... who knows. ok. bedtime. a lot of things have happened since i "got back" from my summer trip but i'm not about to tackle it all tonight. goodnight! :)

HELLOOOO JOURNAL!!!! today is august 19, 2004. i feel absolutely giddy today for so many reasons, the immediate one being the new cd spinning away in this computer (franz ferdinand, by franz ferdinand)and the fact that i can play MTV all day if i wanted to (which is what i am doing now, on mute mode so i can listen to my spanking new cd). the funnest part of this setup is when one of FF's songs comes on the telly, i can play the song from the cd and watch the video all at once. you can play it off a little so everybody dancing in the video is off, and i find it super-duper amusing! haaa ahhahaahaaa! (this is the kind of stuff that entertains one deprived of pop music and music videos as a very small child). you know, the little animations between videos on mtv are probably really fun to make. ok!!! one reason to be excited about ff aside from their catchy (lusty?) tunes are the excellent videos to accompany them!!! they are like old russian propaganda posters meets monty python's animator! ahh!! and as i suspected, that big poster head of terry wogan (the bbc dude) IS supposed to look like some kind of stalin propaganda poster. hehe. well, it's been a long time since i've discovered a band i've liked so much (rather, the last pop star to arrest my goldfish-like attention this way was david bowie) ho ho hooo. so yay. i bought a cd today :) in an hmv store right next to the endless escalator to heaven in The Center of hong kong at 9:20 pm! this was after being led halfway up the unending escalator by a chatty lady on her way to church (at 9:30 pm on thursday??)... let me tell you. the longest escalator in asia actually has an end and it isn't very interesting at the top because the buildings surrounding you are to tall to show anything else... but it seems like the road you get to up there leads you to a botanical garden, and a little further on to a big park! so i think tomorrow i will head back there again to check out these leafy havens. you know, i get a little ticked when folks show tokyo as this mess of neon signs and skinny streets squeezed in between towering skyscrapers in the movies... and after walking around the center of hong kong all evening i have to say maybe that picture lends itself better to this part of town. the high rise buildings shoot up everywhere like some kind of modern forest for people only... (although on my way up the escalator i saw a nice orange cat sitting on the wall near the entrance to a mosque) but the cool thing is that on one end there is this enormous bay full of big boats and wavy water, and on the other, through the slits where there are no buildings to block your view, you can see bright green mountains! so from what i understand after taking the train ride from the airport to the central station, and from what peeks through the tall buildings, there actually is a nice leafy haven out there. this shall be investigated tomorrow though, and hopefully it won't be so mucky and rainy then. the biggest bummer about this town so far is how choked with haze it is here. yesterday i went out in the late afternoon and stared right at the sun for a whole two minutes. it was this neon red ball hanging over a painfully smoggy harbour. i've only ever seen anything that freakish on the side of the highway in new jersey... (ok i know new jersey is the garden state and all, so it must have some nice leafy havens of its own somewhere, but this hazy sunset really made an impression on me...). ha. so even though it is sticky hot here, folks are really nice and helpful, and it is exceedingly easy to get around town here thanks to the multitudes of tramcars and double decker buses (even the buses are tall! hooo!). just for kicks this afternoon i rode around the bus loop just to see town as it was getting dark out. before that i was just sleepy so i napped in the afternoon. and that's all! i made it to hong kong on the 7th at around 6 am.... had some troubles trying to make payphone calls so i just gave up trying to find a place to buy a phone card (at six am everything in central station was pretty much closed!) and hopped in the first cab i saw. after some confusion, i got the cabby to call yan up for directions and voom! i was there. y lives in the tallest high rise hotel building on the western tip of hong kong island. it has airconditioning, mtv, and a view of the massive pool which is open from glorious 9 am or so till 10 pm! the trip over, and the week beforehand was pretty busy so i have just been resting and recovering since i got here, and today was my first real excoursion into town (although yesterday i slipped out in the early evening to scout out a grocery store!). it is fun poking around the streets here... and really half the fun is walking through streets with kanji signs surrounding me on all sides again... i never would have guessed how useful my small kanji vocab from japanese would be here! but when you think about it... the essentails are really just the same (like toilets, washers, food items etc.) it is getting me into another mode though and i am pretty pleased by this. i don't know how to describe this mode fully, but maybe i'll just close by saying that it adds significantly to the giddiness i mentioned at the beginning of this post! oh! post! goodnight!

Oooooon Sunday august 1, we ended my stay in Romania with a wonderful picnic in the mountains! Sabin�s family has a retreat there with a brook running by it (where you can hide beer and watermelons) and all kinds of fruit trees growing nearby. Yes! So we spent the day there playing ball, cards, running around and eating delicious dead animals and veggies. Yum. Before we returned home we stopped by c�s grandma�s place to say farewell, and she seemed pretty lonely. She even asked me when I was coming back, just like my own grandmother. Later that night we al just hung out at home watching old home videos� of course it was funny to see all the people I had come to know over the past two weeks in miniature, but it was also amazing that some of the videos even existed!!! For example, one of the birthday videos we saw was from early 1989! The kids were playing with some toilet paper with was a bit of a luxury in that time because it didn�t always appear in the market. At the end of the year communism in Romania came to an end so finally the toilet paper, among other things flowed freely once more!

Saturday july 31, 2004. the weather today was probably the best all week so ellena and I finally got out to the open air museum outside of town. it is a gigantic park with a lake and forests dotted with old style traditional houses from all over Romania. Although it seemed to me like they might have been reconstructed based on plans of old buildings, ellena said that they were actually brought there. It is the biggest collection of over a hundred houses and buildings like it in eastern Europe, and I think it is a world heritage site! The park was mostly full of houses from different regions of Romania, but there were also gardens, mills (some working), windmills, saunas and barns. In some houses there were old men waiting to talk you ear off about them, and because of the cultural festivals going on all week there, they had a music festival going on that day which attracted legions of brightly colored Romanian folklore enthusiasts. Live music and dancing was going on all day, and I must say the best of all of them for me was the CHEESE DANCE!!! Where the men, women and children carrying a large wheel of fresh cheese on a staff and pranced around to some lively music. That group made great skits to provide transitions between the dances they performed. We spent the whole afternoon ambling around this park and we still weren�t able to see the whole thing, so rather than trying to describe it all I will just recommend that you not miss it if you are passing through Romania some time�. The only thing I can think of that in a very small way compares to this park is Sturbridge village, which is a good example but for some reason lacks a kind of elegance of presentation. This probably has to do with how the open village is snuggled into the hills and forests surrounding it, or how a glance across the lake past the small wind mills seem to only frame the bluish mountains behind it. Yes!!!! For the millionth time the landscape in Romania is amazing!!!

Friday July 30, 2004. today is c�s last day at her summer architecture program. She worked hard the past two weeks and it seems like she is proud of her group�s proposal!! I am glad for her�. See how sometimes not having a plan can be a good thing? (she was introduced to the program last minute by her architecture prof�) anyhoos, yesterday ellena and I went out to the brukental (sp?) museum, which is the most famous attraction in sibiu. It was the mansion of a famous lord whose illegitimate son was one of the men who brought Romania to modernity and a sense of being its own nation. One of the things he did was insist that Romanians replace the Cyrillic alphabet that had been pushed on them by their neighbors, and begin using the roman alphabet which lent itself better to Romanian because of its roots in latin. the manor has been converted to an art museum but several of the old rooms have been preserved in their old form, with the walls covered in silk patterns and tapestries, and elaborate decorations plastered all over the ceiling. This is similar to many aristocratic mansions I have visited but these rooms had an extra lovely addition above the doorways � ovals in gold featuring small relief scenes from greek mythological stories! Those additions were my favorite part of all those rooms� and sometimes it seemed that the paintings in the rooms, the colors chosen for the silk on the walls and the stories or characters appearing in those golden ovals were all chosen to correspond with each other. The best example of this is what I call �the Chinese room,� where in the golden oval you find a Chinese man! The walls of this room are completely covered with Chinese style silk paintings of birds flying around flowering trees. When you first take a look at the trees, flowers and leaves they looks like they are arranged in an elaborate pattern, but a closer look reveals that each wall panel is slightly different, and it seems like none of the millions of birds is repeated twice! That room was exciting to look at but unfortunately you could only look at it from the doorway because it was roped off. The next section of the museum shows off halls after halls of religious paintings, altar pieces, robes, jewelry and relics made for the saxon and orthodox churches in the area. A lot of the gold and silver, like goblets and jewelry was made by the guildsmen in sibiu itself! The rest of the museum holds more modern paintings from the 1800s on. Here and there you find a fancy chandelier, or a set of furniture, but in one corner of a smaller hall there was a simple but lovely dress. The interesting thing about this dress is that if you look carefully you can find this dress worn by a young woman in a painting down in the next hall. The girl is wearing a colorful embroidered coat with a dark fur lining, but fanning out from under it is a long dress skirt similar to the one in the previous hall! I couldn�t find a label for the dress anywhere so I can�t be sure, but I bet they are the same. I wasn�t thrilled by many of the modern paintings near the end of the walk, but my favorite painting had a boy reading on a sofa in the sunlight streaming through the window behind him. It was a great show over all and now I know why everybody comes to see it! And now that they just had a collection of A.D. workshop etchings and prints donated, I bet more people will come to check those out too.

Tuesday july 27, 2004. plans to go back to ocna this morning with cor fell through when we worke up at 6 am only to find that it was starting to rain outside� so we ended up sleeping in and passing the time before she had to head off to work playing cards. Man, we play this game �macao� which is basically uno, but with a deck of trumps (you know, the spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs�). Later in the afternoon c�s mum and I went out into town for a walk to see if we could catch the art museum before it closed but by the time we got there we only had 15 minutes� so we left and it rained again. Ha! so today is that rainy day you need to have every once in a while. Relaxing. Restful. A good time to finish updating the journal eh?

Monday july 26, 2004. after reading through �einstien�s dreams� (yay!) this morning I went to an amazing place! C�s father is doing therapy in the salt lake spas in the neighboring town called ocna sibiului� and they invited me to come along if I wanted to go for a swim. That is the perfect cure for these impossibly hot days� so c�s mum and I went to the salt lake together while c�s dad was being tended to� and what a place! Since it was a weekday the humongous pools were pretty clear of people� when you hop into one of these lakes you just float around, and no matter how hard you try you really can�t go underwater for very long. You end up bobbing back up in an instant! That is something new for me� the other cool thing about the area are the old abandoned bathhouses that were built around 1900� they look like alfonso mucha drawings and I do hope I get a chance to go back and take some photos. To get an idea� the buildings have curvy fences, windows and rooftops� with thick decorative borders like waves on water. One of the buildings has some slim towers and a dome, and another one has a red tile roof and some balconies� that one in particular looks like a mix between a mucha or a gaudi building and the bathhouses in spirited away. That is all I can say about it but I think a few pictures would do the great buildings more justice. Ah well.

Sunday july 25, 2004. today jenny and marius and c�s fam and I took a trip to the bran castle! That is the one that supposedly has connections to Dracula waaa hahahahaaa! But what we found out was that really, mr vlad only stayed there a few nights (possibly in prison, possibly just for the night). he actually lived in sigishuara, which is the town I will be visiting for the medieval festival next weekend. Even though the connection to Dracula only turned out to be thin and built up only in hopes of attracting more tourists� the castle is worth a visit for sure! It was built in the 1300s as a guard tower to defend invasions from hungary because the border was nearby back then� and it continued to serve this function until it was given to the people of the area centuries later. Finally when a monarchy was established later on, the royal family made bran their summer home. In the late 1800s to the early 1900s queen mary and her daughter in particular took fancy to the castle and they had a lot of work done to change the castle from a fort to a nice home. They had the windows in the three meter thick walls expanded and made into comfy spots to sit and read� and they filled the halls with elegant furniture from all over Europe and from many different time periods. Instead of being spooky the castle was actually pretty cute. The killer was the doorway with a little heart-shaped hole in it for decoration! The lines of the woodwork in the balconies and staircases were also very attractive. It is probably one of the prettiest castles I have ever seen. Oh! Here is an interesting tidbit� the daughter of the queen loved the castle and the surrounding area so much that she requested that her heart be held in a chapel nearby after she died. Mwaa hahaa! Hm. On the way to bran castle we stopped in the beautiful town of brashov (it is actually spelled brasov, but with a little comma under the s to make the sh sound�). They are currently holding their yearly music festivals there so the main plaza is full of the music of the acts practicing for the night, and the stage and chairs� this town is a little better kept than sibiu and it has similar architecture, but the best thing we saw while we were there was this hidden orthodox church right on the side of the plaza� all over these towns you can find great arched doorways with gates in them and a smaller door where people usually pass through. They lead into the gardens or courtyards or spaces to park the cart or car� but this arched gate, which was surrounded by some elaborate church-like decorations, leads you into a small courtyard enclosing a pretty little orthodox chapel. We were lucky to catch a wedding on its way out. After we were done with our tour of bran, we took the scenic mountain route home� on the way when we stopped for coffee I discovered a WWI memorial up a long staircase in the side of the mountain. There is a small museum with artifacts and newspaper clippings and photos from the time� and at the top of the hill in what looks like a kind of church is the memorial� the outside looks kind of drab but the inside was completely covered with brilliant mosaics� and in the basement the names of all the folks who fought for Romania were carved into the wall, and behind a wreath and flowers there was a glass box containing the bones of the dead soldiers who had been buried in cemeteries in the nearby towns�

Saturday july 24, 2004. hello! Today I was woken up and after getting ready and wolfing down some food raluka (that is how you *say* her name anyways!) cori and raluka�s parents and I hopped in the car and drove into the mountains we had visited last week� it was so great to get back to the mountains again! Aside from being much cooler up there it is also so beautiful! We passed the spot where we watched the sun go down, and after a little while we got to a small ski resort! Cori and raluka and I took the chair all the way up to the top and took a million photos. On the way up we went through a forest of all kinds of pine trees that were almost completely covered with lichen at the bottom� that was one thing I have never seen. Later when we got back down to c�s house everybody packed up and went to her grandma�s place for a barbecue lunch (at 3pm!)� and there in the garden next to the chicken pen there is a tree just bursting with a kind of sour tasting fruit that I had never seen before. They look like bright yellow cherries without the long green stem� when you pick them off the tree their skin in a little dull but you can buff it up on your shirt or something to make it shiny. Yum! After lunch we went to the park across town and there I saw the third thing I have never seen before: some flowers with leaves just like a miniature palm tree curling around this long stalk with bright red bunches of flowers that look like a mix between an iris and a lily!!! The tallest one was the same height as me! So, today I ate a lot of good food, and saw many new and amazing things. Haaa~ to end the day we all returned home and put on the boob toob� and what did we find? First we found the remaining six videos in the MTV European top twenty (among which are kylie minogue�s AWESOME chocolate video� and my favorite Brittney Spears video ever � you know, the one where she almost drowns but in the end she comes out ok and she feels like a newborn baby). Hmmm. Next we jumped into the best part of some weirdo movie about a photographer and a model�? To sum it up, the woman begs to be taken in by this photographer, who loves her even though she ditched him bigtime six years before and ruined his career, and happily celebrates the reunion with some hot sex in the elevator. Hmmm! Next we see them in his apartment and she beeeegs him not to take more photos of her because it is stealing her soul, just like in the superstitions of �peasants in the country�� the guy ignores her of course and takes photos of her nude while she is asleep. In the end she finds out and escapes only to find a mob of media people outside his apartment who proceed to film and snap shots of her, until she is cornered and explodes into nothingness. . . the end. Hm. After that, we caught the last section of a quality movie: Doctor Zhivago . I had forgotten how awesome it was.. and that alec guiness was in it too! For those who have missed out, please go rent it now�

Friday july 23, 2004. finally it cooled down a bit during an instant thunderstorm in the middle of the day while we were out in town buying some plane tickets. I have discovered that driving from munich to Dortmund takes about six hours and a half, so I think that I will abandon the direct flight to hong kong from munich idea. If it takes that long I might as well just go northwest and take a plane from England or france. Unless I can find something from Holland or one of those northern places� Haha. I stuffed myself for lunch with a monster bowl of Quality pesto spaghetti today. And this afternoon I have been lounging around a lot. Yesterday was an excruciatingly hot day, but we did about a million things around town� the first was a visit to the amazing sibiu museum of natural science!!! Their collection of rocks and stuffed animals is housed in an elegant building near the new theater. There are two large halls with the displays and a massive staircase lobby area with the minerals exhibits� the best thing about this lobby area is the intricately painted walls! They are so colorful and well done the shading and highlights make the painted columns and lettering and leafy decorations pop out as is they were carved into the walls. I have never seen a building so meticulously painted� the large hall displays neatly brought you through the world of invertebrates on the first floor� the largest mussel shell I have ever seen (it was about the length of my arm!) and an extensive butterfly and moth collection were the highlights for me there. And on the top floor were the vertebrates. They had everything you could think of except very large animals like elephants or giraffes of course, but the funny part was that as I was walking through, I thought to myself how fun it would be if a natural science museum had holograms of live animals so you could see how they moved around when they were living� and at the end of all the halls packed full of stuffed animals they had some fish tanks with guppies and black and white stripey fish swimming around. It was kind of morbid in a way. Hahahhaaa. It was a beautiful museum. After lunch at our favorite terrace by the Luxembourg house we hopped a few houses down to the traditional culture museum. the special displays on the bottom floors showed traditional style ceramics from the sibiu area� in another large hall they had an exhibit showing off exquisite traditional saxon (ethnic german Romanians) and Romanian needlepoint quilts, rugs, and costumes� but my favorite part of that exhibit were the small displays with old photographs and a blurb on a famous historian who wrote down the history of sibiu. Many of the photos were painstakingly hand painted and they were lovely. It is too bad there were so few of them! Although these days there are few Saxons left in the sibiu area (many of them moved out during and after the communist rule which ended about 15 years ago) every once in a while at night you bump into groups of people all dressed up like there was some medieval festival going on somewhere� appearanly there are groups or clubs of folks who get together regularly through the evangelical church and other saxon establishments to retain some older saxon traditions! Ok. Back to the museum�. at the top there was the usual collection of weapons, containers, fans, money pouches, etc made in the traditional ways of their respective cultures� I like that next to each of these displays (which were divided up more by related objects, rather than separating all the objects into sections on their respective cultures...) were the large drawings and photographs that showed these items in action, or who might be using them right next to the display cases. Every once in a while there would be quotes by famous archeologists, authors or historians or diagrams to explain details� but I really liked the illustrative images. Hmm! One big surprise was at the end of the exhibit, there is a mummy and a sarcophagus! Ahh! The mummy is still wrapped up and all, but somehow I wasn�t expecting it at all. Heheh. So that is all for today� the only other news is that I have finally finished Gatsby� and it was super. Without reading all the end notes etc. you can tell he worked really hard to tie that novel all together� if the novel was a stone it would be hard and kind of smooth, with brightly colored shineys bumping out of it that would glow if you held the rock under a black light. Yes. (too much nature center for me???) but seriously, after you get over the dull first two chapters or so you are in for a treat. Even the descriptions of the victims of the tragedies are in a weird way very lovely. Hm. To end this entry I�ll leave you with the last sentence of my favorite paragraph in the book: �For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy�s wing.�

Today is Wednesday, july 21, 2004. yesterday I was in bed all day getting over some kind of food poisoning or something. Actually I think that I got sick from drinking a fresh glass of tap water (mind you the tap water here is okay to drink, just like in spain, but since I have grown up drinking tap water somewhere else my body can�t handle it). Anyways early yesterday morning I was throwing up and feeling ill, and trying my best the rest of the day to get over it quickly. A fantastic summer storm blew by for most of the late afternoon which was nice weather to take a nap in, and watch a great lightning show. People came in and out of the room to visit and check if I wanted some more tea. Now is a time to be at the greavu house because everyday we have some new guests coming in and out to go for dental checkups in sibiu or to visit for dinner and spend the night. ha. Today has been very hot, so we have postponed our walk around town until a little later in the evening when the sun isn�t bashing us in the back of the head. To beat the heat I have been reading inside for most of the day. The new book of the week is �The Great Gatsby� by f. scott Fitzgerald. This weekend I finished reading �catcher in the rye� which is a total hoot compared to the dull life of the fancy people next to the giant eggs on long island. The opening of the first chapter to describe one of mr gastby�s house parties hinted so strongly of something great to unfold within a luscious chapter about the lives of these people -- but no! I guess it is hard to compare one book to another without having read half of the second book yet�. But at least the style of �catcher in the rye� could punch you through the duller parts of the story with a laugh� Gatsby makes you think something wildly sexy is going to happen but just leaves you high and dry. And in the three and a quarter chapters I have read already about a million more things have happened than in the entirety of �catcher in the rye� so bah. I am sure Gatsby will start to pick up soon, but I have to say that it has been a really long time since I have been thrilled by just the writing style of a book! Somebody told me once that the only reason catcher is so famous is because some assassin was wearing it on him when he shot his victim� but I bet they just never got around to reading it! This is kind of a strange thought, but the characters in catcher in the rye really lend themselves to a shojo, borderline shonen manga mini series (translation: to an emotional comic book drama geared mainly towards girls, but might also appeal to boys). Hmm.

Monday july 19, 2004. today I woke up pretty late. Rather I slept in while cristi went off to her first day orientation for the architecture workshop she has enrolled in. bwaa hahaha� Sleeping in is so nice. Anyway, shortly after I woke up and had breakfast I realized that cori was going to the station to pick up her cousin so I decided to go along with her. we couldn�t find him at all even though we were there a half an hour ahead of time, and spent another half an hour searching� but about 15 minutes after we made our way back home we heard the doorbell ring and were relieved that he was able to make his way to the house on his own. He didn�t have a house number or a telephone so it took a little while!!! Oops! It was pretty funny. Almost everybody in c�s family is interested in medicine and in particular dental medicine� so he was being sent to a dentist recommended by his family. For sure he knew he had to have some drilling done so instead of running away he just sucked it up and came to the best place they could tell him to go. I have no idea how you spell his name for sure but it was holyah, which sounds a lot like an anime sound effect to me. C�s mum and I accompanied him to the dentist (who it turns out I had met the day before at the party), and only while we were sitting in the waiting room did he start speaking to me in english! You might say the prospect of having cavities drilled out soon was what got him to loosen up a bit. Hehehe. Anyway it was great how everybody in the waiting room winced exactly when we heard the eardrum piercing squeal of the dentist drill� and then when he walked out smiling he said �I liked it so much I am coming back for more tomorrow!� Ha! I love it! Afterwards c�s mum took us on a walking tour all around the upper AND lower parts of sibiu, of which I had only seen the upper part in the days before. I know I said it before but, the buildings in this town are super! Later on in the evening after the sun had gone down, cristi and her cousin and I went out for some drinks on a terrace by the Luxembourg house. The terrace right in front of the house was packed so we grabbed a miniature table at the bar next to it. I tried out some of my new Romanian words and managed to order some juice. Have I told you about how great the juice is here? There I had some blood orange juice and later some thick pear juice� but while I was waiting for the train in Bucharest I had this fantastically refreshing lemon-lime soda. It wasn�t so sweet or fizzy that it would shock your teeth, and it actually tasted freshly squeezed somehow. I guess that is what I like about the fruit drinks here � they don�t taste like they have been sweetened. So, over our beers and juice, cristi�s cousin struck up some deeply depressing conversations about the tragic life of the cousin she had come back from visiting� when she realized that neither cristi or I were too hot on the topic of young tragic deaths, she tried to switch it some something more exciting like �boyfriends� but that topic wasn�t a winner for me or cristi either. I think if there had been more alcohol flowing through our bodies at that point we would have cried. But nothing can really be that bad when you are mulling over it on an outdoor terrace in the middle of Transylvania with your cup of juice though, and I managed to lighten things up a bit by cracking ridiculous jokes and pointing at the lovely troublemaking punks running around across the street. Well, chilling out on an outdoor terrace is fun anywhere you go, if you ask me.

Sunday, july 18, 2004. once we were awake and fed cristi�s dad took us out into the hills by the town for a walk. There are a lot of dirt roads, and cobblestone roads on the outskirts of town, and it is not rare to see folks being pulled around in small carriages by tiny horses. They say the horses are that small because they are underfed� but they do remind me of the horses that you find when driving around the countryside in Puerto rico. A lot of things about sibiu remind me of the countryside in Puerto rico!! Namely the multitude of rundown but brightly colored houses surrounded by lovely hills covered with forests. We passed a large quarry and a forest of red pine trees before we came to an opening at the side of the hill, where we parked the car to walk the rest of the way. On the way down from the top of the hill was a herd of mostly white fluffy goats! Off to the side under the shade of a cluster of trees there was another herd of cows that just stayed there. It was getting to be midday at that point so I am glad those cows and a family of goats we passed by had a place to cool off. At the top of the flowery hill we found a disintegrating brick watch tower from which you could see the whole town of sibiu. We stayed up there for a while snapping photos and movies and finding all the houses and buildings we had visited earlier. Later that afternoon the whole family and I drove into the mountains to visit a family friend who had just finished building his new house and wanted to show us. to everybody�s surprise we met up with many more family friends having a barbecue outside in the plot of land next to the other friend�s house! There we stayed eating and chatting away all afternoon, and before nightfall we drove up to the top of the mountain to catch the sunset� there are very few people living up in the mountains so mostly it is just you and nature up there, and it was super. Later that night cristi and cor and I went out to a local disco called �chill out� and had a good time dancing the night away. It was in the medieval basement in the center of town and it was packed. Good times good times�

Saturday july 17, 2004. wow! I woke up from a peacefully long sleep late in the morning� everybody was amazed at how long I could sleep but I reminded cristi how it is at school. You know, during finals time�this afternoon we went to visit c�s old apartment house across town. That is where her old schools were (and her father�s schools!) and that is where she grew up. Her old neighbors were throwing a party since their children were in town together for once. These days one lives in paris and the other in Chicago when he is not traveling around for work so this was a time to celebrate. We had a really fun time chatting, eating snacks from never ending trays of food and drink, and watching movies from their travels� I don�t think I am generalizing too much when I say that many folks, especially the younger ones, learn to speak English (and other languages like german or French) really well because they start early on in school. Another great thing they have going here is that when a foreign film or even a tv show comes to Romania, they just subtitle it and keep it in whatever its original language was! That must be fabulous for folks trying to learn other languages� and you don�t have to deal with terrible dubbing jobs!

Friday july 16, 2004. Thursday I spent all day in transit, from 6:45 AM on a bus from Zaragoza to Madrid, then on a plane to Bucharest, then on a train to Sibiu. Cristi and her mother met me at the station in sibiu even though it was 3 am in the morning (I guess 2 am Spanish time). Although most of my time was spent traveling I did meet some excellent people on the way. In the airport in Madrid i met a sweet Romanian woman who was going home from one year abroad in Valencia. She is a chemistry professor. I was so sleepy when I got off the plane in Bucharest that I totally forgot to say goodbye to her which is too bad� an old family friend of cristi�s met me in the airport almost instantly after I got out into the arrivals lounge! I was pretty surprised because I didn�t expect to meet him for another hour or so� and he managed to find me without the sign (I was going to draw his name �sabin� on a sign so he would know it was me!) just by cristi�s description. He was super nice and helped me change money, buy a phone card and figure out how to buy a ticket at the train station. What a massive train station! It was lovely there watching the sun set and all. The only thing you should avoid in the gara nord in Bucharest are the sketchy bathrooms which are about ten times worse than the �nastiest bathroom in the world� you see in trainspotting, with the doors ripped off their attachments and left to lean on the back wall and everything. Haha! That is all the detail I really care to go into there� sabin recommended I buy a ticket for a first class car so I did. The seats were comfy and when you leaned back the right way it flattened itself out more into a comfy position for sleeping. Maybe for taller people it would have been awkward but it was perfect sleeping space for a small person like me. I shared my compartment with a softly snoring woman, a really sleepy man with a colorful cellphone and this seedy looking man who I think was Italian who didn�t stay for long. Every once in a while the woman would wake up for a snack and talk away at me� which was awesome even though I had no idea what she was saying until I understood that she was also going to get off at sibiu and she wanted me to know that she would wake me up when we got there, which she did. It was so great to meet cristi and her mother at the station! They grabbed my suitcase for me and we hopped across the tracks and walked home, where I had a plate of cheese, tomatoes, ham and some bread waiting for me. Once I had eaten my fill a new plate covered with fresh profiteroles was put in front of me. That is when I knew for sure that I was in good hands. (I am going to try to learn how to make them, so that the uninitiated may have a chance to eat possibly the greatest dessert in the universe!!) Ya, so now we get to Friday: I got up at around 1 and ate some great food (including a white pepper� which they say is actually a green pepper but it really looks white to me�) Then Cristina took me out on a tour of Sibiu. We dropped off her bikes to be tuned up at ACTION SPORTS and then we walked through the small plaza. There are a lot of restoration projects going on around town. Although a lot of towers and buildings are covered up in scaffolding or rough from having their plaster coverings ripped off I am sure they will look great when the work is done! One that we saw was the �Luxembourg house� which has been newly painted up in off white for the decorations and peach for the flat parts� the work in front of the house has left a wonderful terrace open for business until the wee hours of the morning and below this they have also redone the wall that swings under a beautiful cast iron bridge. C says that if somebody tells a lie on that bridge it will crumble� On the other side of the bridge you will find a basement bar where younger folks hang out at night, and an old house that is undergoing some major restoration. The men working on it let us poke around inside though so we could see the big lobby and staircase leading up to a balcony hallway� on the sections where the plaster was ripped away the crumbling old bricks that made up the house were exposed. We went through a shortcut across some ditches with small temporary bridges across them to the anthropological video library. The building is newly redone but still maintains some of its medieval elements with its wooden pillars indoors to hold up the roof. The video viewing room has lots of black wooden beams running through it and tiny windows. I also loved the bathroom because it looks like a greenhouse � above and next to you sat all kinds of small potted plants, and the glass roof made the room bright and gave it an open feeling. We saw a video about sibiu there � it mostly focuses on the old architecture in town hoping to encourage funds for restoration projects� but it also explained the 800 year old history of the city. the first people who settled the area we romans, who mined for salt nearby, and much later Flemish folks and germans made their way here under an agreement with Hungarians to protect the area. Fortifications were built in the form of churches and towers with walls in between. the towers were maintained and protected by the different guilds that used them for their workshops� all these forces have managed to defend sibiu from all invaders, and no wars or natural disasters have ever hit so the old sections of the city have been pretty well preserved� until the communists came into power and started cramming lots of people into the towers and the houses, and knocking down some old walls to make way for more housing. There are so many people who cannot afford to fix up the areas they are living in that their dwellings are now falling apart. Since the creation of the video in 1999 the local government and other investors from abroad (like prince charles) have put in money to get some major restoration projects underway. In addition to improving the living conditions of the residents, this is also a nice way to receive the many folks who come for the major European theater festival that is held every year in sibiu� and for 2007 when sibiu will be the cultural capital outside of Europe for that year. after our visit to the video library we crossed the newly filled in street (while we were on our way into the building a tractor and a team of men were busy filling dirt into a hole where some pipes had been replaced underground�) we went to the evangelist church, which was set up by the Saxons, or ethnic germans from Romania. The man taking care of the church for the day let us climb to the top of the tower to get a view of sibiu from above� I love the twisty roads and decorated red rooftops. From that view you could also see the many other churches and plazas spread around the center of town. A lot of rooftops in sibiu have a distinct window that resembles an asian style eye (whose lid lies over the eye smoothly instead of folding like a western style eye�) poking up in pairs that look like they are staring at you calmly� these are appropriately named �the eyes of sibiu� and at night they can be a little freaky. Anyway, the painted sculptures and wall decorations in the church are also very cool. There was one with a blind pair of lovers, another with a moustached saint george overtaking a dragon, a third with a massive coat of arms and he last with lots of chubby angels and skeletons. The last one almost looks like the inspiration for the cd jacket for a heavy metal band. Hehe. On a similar note, the coat of arms of sibiu is very elegant� it is two crossed swords (to symbolize the myth that sibiu was founded when a saxon and another leader of two tribes of men crossed their swords and thrust them into the ground when they vowed to join forces to protect the land�) with a vine of heart shaped leaves entwined between them and a crown at the top (which is probably just an indicator that it is the coat of arms of a town). Another coat of arms associated with sibiu is a shield of a single tincture with seven small towers stacked in three rows with one on top, two in the middle and then four lined up at the bottom. They all represent the seven �burgs� that joined together to become a stronger town to defend the area from invasion. The last cool bit about this church is that it houses the largest organ in Romania! The mother of one of c�s childhood friends is the organist, and she was practicing that day� as we sat listening to the concert we caught whispers of the conversation she was having with a tourist from Holland and we found out that when she plays, it is not the old organ, but one behind it that is playing. Hehe. On the way home we stopped by the greek-orthodox church which was spectacular! They were doing a mass baptism or something like that so we didn�t stay very long but the inside was lavishly decorated with paintings of all kinds of angels and saints. The small windows around the main dome in the center of the church were all tinted yellow so the light cast inside was interesting. Once we got back home I laid down at about 8 o clock for an hour long nap. We were thinking of going out to a terrace for a drink or something later that night but I was totally pooped and I ended up sleeping for the rest of the night (15 hours!! Ahh!)

hi today is july 14th, 2004 - tomorrow morning very early i will be going to romania!! i forgot to mention the new fashions of the women in zaragoza.... one is that many women, old and young, like to run around town with one shoulder of their shirts hanging off to the side so that you can see their bra straps.... and the other is that the mullet is the IN haircut for women this summer :) hee! that is the zaragoza fashion update. i will be in romania for five days checking out sibiu which is near transylvania!!! after that my friend and i will be heading up to germany together. more to come later.

hello. it is still july 11, 2004 right now. i took a nap because i was feeling pretty ill but now all is well. this is the kind of time when i wish i was in japan and had unlimited access to their fine painkilling drugs. which reminds me, i must translate the ingredients of that package of eve so that the doctors in the states can study its contents... and hopefully mix a batch up for the homeland. yeehaw, eve. ok, but i did not come back here to tell you about pain killers.. i just wanted to say a few things, like, i think that most of the screen settings i have for my online spaces are periwinkel color for some reason... the more i think about it the less time i have to write up the notes i took from my grand time in france... and in the past five minutes i have learned a new word and discovered a new and awesome website - www.imdb.com (the internet movie database! yow!). the word i just learned from my lovely english major kate is creat. look it up for yourself on www.dictionary.com. hmm! i learn new things everyday. little by little!! just as we all do i guess. i am pleased to hear that all is well back in the states. the next time i post i will tell you all about our (alejandro, richard and co) amazing adventures in france the land of fromage and tasty yogurt drinks called yop!!!!

aloha, it is still july 11th. below is a summary of what happens in zaragoza, spain, in the middle of summer. other more specific news is that alejandro has signed up for driving lessons with joss; joss is the king of an ocean consisting of pirated xbox videogames... one of them is otogi II, possibly the most amazing game i have ever seen. for classical japanese lit geeks and manga fans alike, this game has it all. just imagine the tale of genji scrolls + onmyoji + samurai showdown style characters + a generous dollop of shinto witchery + nights into dreams .... and for those who are not privy to half the items in this recipe, the assurance that this is another one of those amazingly weird japanesey games should be enough explanation. my buddy only has the japanese version to boot... so you can tell that the names of the characters etc. are taken from various classics of japanese literature. maybe the most amusing thing is that the most well rounded cybernetic looking knight in the game (with a waterfall of straight black hair trailing behind) has been mistaken by my friends as a badass woman. no! he is the videogame version of the ever androgynous genji. ahh hahahahaa! ok, enough about that. the 7th of july, which also happens to be the japanese star festival tanabata in japan, is the start of the festivals of san fermin. this is when the men go into the streets to run with the bulls! did you know women are officially prohibited from running?? anyways. dennis rodman is here running with the bulls. it is pretty funny watching him run alongside the bulls because he towers over everybody... so! the 7th is when the huge and famous festival starts, but in the smaller towns the date to celebrate is on other days... so, instead of eating some apple pie or watching fireworks on the 4th of july, we went out to the tiny villiage of gallur to watch men on horseback and "vacillas" run! vacillas are miniature bulls. we were invited to eat lunch at the porter's house, which is amazingly big and completely built by her husband... we feasted on all kinds of great spanish food... so we had some fried codfish, calamari rings, crab croquets, jamon serrano, thinly sliced beef and mushroom pepper and onions.. yum! after lunch we went down into town to hear the local folk artists sing about different saints, and the ebro river (which runs pretty strong through that town!)... and then we took a walk around town before we found a spot to watch the encierro (that is what they call the event when they close off a road or two in town so that horses and bulls can run through). in this town the main attraction of the encierro is actually the horses, which are impressively groomed show horses... so that is why the bulls that run are small. there were seven bulls running along with about ten men on horseback, and one old spectator racing against them. so that was my exciting 4th of july! happy bday america! heh. other fun news is that we were out clubbing until after 6 am the other day.. yay! so that is my spain update. before i head out i'll make a round around the city to take some photos... and then it is off to TRANSYLVANIA!!! bwaaa ha ha ahaaaa!

today is sunday july 11! on thursday i will be heading out to romania to visist a friend of mine from school!! yay! today i have been finishing up the postcards that i got while i was in france!! i am glad i waited because it seems like the stranger ones might have been pinched if i had sent them on their own! (sometimes the mailmen collect cool postcards....) hmm! so now for the update. rich alej and i moved back to spain at the very end of june. since then we have been hanging out with old friends and lounging around watching two episodes of the simpsons a day. one of our buddies just got his own apartment house and within the complex there is a great pool!! on most evenings of the week we gather at the pool to play cards, play on the star trek the next generation pinball machine in his house and fight tooth and nail over a beaten up soccer ball in the pool. hee!

hello; today is monday june 28th. we are leaving for madris via brussels tomorrow and the folks at the photo station still havent found the photos which is a total bummer..... BUT there are many other great things to counter that misfortune... more on that later. for now i will recount the exciting tale of the loud orange museum of a few weeks ago: i thought i would tell you a story about a museum i saw in a town whose name i cant really pronounce but is at the end of the tramway that runs by our part of town. from the distance this museum's large windows glared dully from the giant green holographs installed in them... a sharp contrast to the bright orange wall with elaborately decorated white trimming that all the houses in france and belgium tend to have.... (i mean, the houses all seem to have trimmings with funny animals, bugs and heads making crazy faces, not orange walls that would make the ghost of the 4th floor shout an obscenity). we walked up to this loud looking museum and were ushered in by an extremely excited lady with too much makeup on... and we were told how lucky we were to get in for FREE on this day that they were technically closed because one of the artists was visiting but since we were darling she let us in. the old man's exhibit was the best thing --- there were several large mirrors propped up against the walls of this gigantic room... and each of these mirrors had a photo realistic painting of... a woman with her back to you pointing in the distance, a wound red rope like the kind they keep you in line with at the movie theater, an artist sitting behind his easle painting a portrait of himsemf... and depending on where you stood in these mirrors the whole thing changed. so we went to the museum to see ourselves:: and that was really amusing :)

ps; i have been in paris for the past few days... IT WAS MORE AMAZING THAN I COULD EVER IMAGINE. but more on that when i have the right time to devote to it. right now i;m just pumped about the GAME ON exhibit i just ran out of to write about and see if i could recruit some fellows to join my party....

friday june 25.2004. i have only a short time right now since i have some email to attend to but i am so excited... it is like the european union knew i was coming and in an effort to make my stay more pleasant they put up an epic exhibit dealing with videogame history and culture that would knock my socks off (which i did in the ddr room). they have everything. games to play, original concept art stations to listen to music from games or inspired by them, movie screenings of game movies REALLY REALLY old game machines... this is out of control!!! my only regret is that i went to this exhibit by myself (i have been having problems getting to see things that i would most like to see so i decided to go do or die today). yea. they even had a life sized warp zone for you to skip the old machine history part and onto the more modern games..... ooohhh man i hope they bring this to the states so other folks can see. and i can get a pamphlet in english for once. hehehehe. just kidding! like all the other attractions for this cultural capital of europe thing almost everything has a super translation caption to go with it at least into english. on another note... the exhibit on the floor above the GAME ON there was this fantastic exhibition of contemporary african art! there were soooo many VIDEO installations (my favorite was this charcole drawing animation....); they even had a steve mcqueen video... the one where two black men are carrying some tropical plants through the city.... (i met steve mcqueen when he opened up an exhibit at wellesley... he sat and talked to my videoclass right after he had gotten out from the airport so he was pretty jetlagged...) anyway: that was a great surprise. the exhibits they have for this festival are amazing... i cant wait to see the japan one. ahhhhhhh....

friday june 25.2004. i have only a short time right now since i have some email to attend to but i am so excited... it is like the european union knew i was coming and in an effort to make my stay more pleasant they put up an epic exhibit dealing with videogame history and culture that would knock my socks off (which i did in the ddr room). they have everything. games to play, original concept art stations to listen to music from games or inspired by them, movie screenings of game movies REALLY REALLY old game machines... this is out of control!!! my only regret is that i went to this exhibit by myself (i have been having problems getting to see things that i would most like to see so i decided to go do or die today). yea. they even had a life sized warp zone for you to skip the old machine history part and onto the more modern games..... ooohhh man i hope they bring this to the states so other folks can see. and i can get a pamphlet in english for once. hehehehe. just kidding! like all the other attractions for this cultural capital of europe thing almost everything has a super translation caption to go with it at least into english. on another note... the exhibit on the floor above the GAME ON there was this fantastic exhibition of contemporary african art! there were soooo many VIDEO installations (my favorite was this charcole drawing animation....); they even had a steve mcqueen video... the one where two black men are carrying some tropical plants through the city.... (i met steve mcqueen when he opened up an exhibit at wellesley... he sat and talked to my videoclass right after he had gotten out from the airport so he was pretty jetlagged...) anyway: that was a great surprise. the exhibits they have for this festival are amazing... i cant wait to see the japan one. ahhhhhhh....

today is sunday june 20 2004;; i had a fantastic rest of the day yesterday.... after taking a nap and going stir crazy not finding my photo reciets for the millionth time and then not even having any milk to cook with i resolved to go into town on my own to go grocery shopping: and it was all good: i met a gal photographing grafiti with the same camera that i had yayyy and later that day i met this art student who looked like will if he were a french art student waiting for the tramway home: it turns out that he goes to a school in southern lille that specialises in videogame creation; but he is more into video and drawing::: it was really funny meeting him because he was carrying this huge bag that said CANSON and he was stuck to the wall photographing the space in between the shade for the florescent lights and the wires that it hid;;; aahhh it was funny. im not the only one who uses a cheapo digital camera to snap funny pics to draw from later: it was pretty inspirational meeting him and i woke up very early in the morning today and started working on designs for some new comic projects: other news is that we will all go to paris on tuesday and wednesday yayyyyyyyyy; i cant wait: i am so glad to be in a better mood now than i have been in the past few days: it is too bad i get into such funks sometimes::: i hope the offended can excuse me: heheh: today spain and portugal will be playing in a football match::: and we will stop into a bar to watch it, and before that we,ll see an exhibit of japanese contemporary art.. i am so excited!!! the last newsflash is that the plans to visit romania and germany are SET YES!!!!! more to come in about a week.

Hi, today is saturday june 19, 2004. my firstclass account will die in about ten days thus completeing my total ejection from the wellesley college society as I knew it. I suppose I am always welcome back for a visit or even to try and get a job but I know I won�t be back for a while, and it won�t really be the same. So here I am in lille still� this is a drag of a day. I woke up when my feet were assaulted with unrelenting ticklage while I was still sound asleep. Then i was told that I had to be ready to get out the door in half an hour but then I was cut in line for a shower, and then when I finally got my chance constatly pestered to see if I was finished� Until I told them to just bugger off and go ahead into town because I didn�t really feel like eating lunch with their little friend anyways. It is so grumpy of me to whine like this when I�m getting free room and board in france, but at the same time being a guest whose request are completely forgotten or ignored in favor of the other friends in town for two weeks is really getting on my nerves at this point. And stupidly I lost the oh so sacred receits for two rolls of photographs I put an order in for two and a half weeks ago� and even after a week and a half of searching they have not been able to find them. Grrr. so I�m not a happy camper right now. If they want to drag my ass to a party until 5 am and then demand that I wake up early and get ready after them, and then complain to me that they want to go or maybe I don�t want to go and pester for half an hour... I say just please, let�s split up into groups and go into town with one late party and one on time party, and things will work out fine. Yeeesh. I learned another important lesson here� that paper in france is a very sacred thing, and any evidence on writing once lost can really ruin everything for you here. (ok so that is a little dramatic when I haven�t really had to deal with the famous beaurocracy here� but it really sucks for me because I lost my photos that I worked hard to take and paid money for to buy the film) aaaaaahhhhg. well, now I�m about to embark out into town to run some errands on my own. Ohh ho ho ho THIS is exciting! This is exciting... i made it all the way into town on my own AND by chance i found the internet place... it is right next to the station. And who was there but rich and randro and igna.... i think i must be really bad at explaining things to them... or they are pissed at me or something since it takes forever for me to convince them that i want an email check when rich can get it just like that: this will be further investigated::::: ha: in the meantime:: it is nice to take a walk alone;

Today is June 15, 2004. hello!! I am in lille, france now. That is at the very northern tip of france about an hour away from brussels and london by train for you nuts who can�t get by without checking the map to know where you are every five minutes. But more about lille a little later. Richard and I arrived here about ten days ago and we�ve been having a pleasant time since. I was under the impression that I would have some constant iternet access in order to make frequent updates to this journal, but now I know that is impossible at the moment� so instead I�ve started typing up my updates and saving them on Alejandro�s computer in order to transport them via floppy disk to net cafes, where I can then update my journal quickly AND do my e�mail so I don�t leave you all in the dark anymore boooo. (end of note to self� but I do hope that I may have given you ideas about how to update your webjournal, should you be stuck traveling/living in a place where you have no internet at your base but are trying to do an open journal so that your cult following can read about your adventures.)

I just realized one more thing --- Alejandro�s keyboard, although it is also fitted up with some french bells and whistles, is NOT ALL MIXED UP. The three times that I have had the opportunity to sit down and check my e-mail quickly I have been baffled by the anti-QWERTY french keyboards� it is so cute how the french customize everything for their own special needs� now, europe may seem like one big landmass of all-the-same-european-stuff from afar to some folks, but this is a hilarious example of how european countries are definitely NOT the same� and probably will never glom into one very like minded USoEE (just think about it, are all the regions of your country all the same?). ha ha ha. Anyways, slowly slowly i am getting better at avoiding the new tilde keys when i want to just type a comma or something. One nice thing about these keyboards though is how they have a handy-dandy � key (just in case it doesn�t appear on the web, that is an enye, a spanish n with a squiggly line over it).

Now let me tell you about lille. In early spring this year I had the pleasure of riding the bus up to burlington from boston sitting next to a surfer/marine biologist frenchman. We had a great time chatting nonstop about comics and manga, a little bit of politics, and a dash of travel, which is something he also liked to do. When he heard that I was planing on visting friends in lille for the summer he laughed and said �ewwww you are going to the armpit of france! Lille is so dirty and ugly!� but luckily for us, he mentioned that it might be fun because this year lille has been designated as the �cultural capital of europe� � yayyy! So here�s the deal on Lille � it is much like the wonderful city of philadelphia that I went to visit last summer!!!!! They both are medium sized cities with a lot of history and fancy old buildings on the inside, insulated by poorer areas of town from the surrounding insustrial sprawl. Amongst the resident french folks and people who need to travel to london and brussels often there is a booming population of students, many of whom are on international exchanges and living here to study french! This is a great place to have as a base for study and travel because it is a quiet town that is about an hour away from london and paris, 30 mins away from brussels, 4 hours away from amsterdam etc� I used to be 30 mins away from boston by train studying at wellesley!�but wouldn�t it be fun to spend a year here in the middle of all those exciting places? anyway, this town is pretty exciting even thought most of it shuts down pretty early (sorry party freak spaniards�). Also, I think because lille is so close to all these other countries there are more french folk here who are interested in foreign affairs and languages� it just seems that way because on the trains and while walking around town I have met maybe ten locals young and old, and several shop owners who were interested in chatting us up (in conversations that weave between french, spanish and english) to ask about all kinds of things, or adjusting their businesses for foreigners but not in a touristy way. The french dude from the bus was right about the cultural capital festivities adding to the experience� many of the streets have been decorated with lights and small buildings from other cities like shanghai, or art insallations shed a new rosy pink light all over lille�s main train station� there are many great exhibits going on like the collection of rubens sketches, paintings, design plans and tapestries (it was soooo great to see those in person!!), a huge expo of japanese photography, multimedia projects, experimental videos and giant pink plastic bunny installations called AKIMAHEN!� and GAME ON -- �the first major exhibition ever organized on the history and culture of video games� yayyyy! A few years ago I picked up a slim but interesting collection of essays about this very same topic sporting the very same name� and a lot of the contributors were also from europe, so I am curious to see if the folks who organized that exhibit are the ones who put that lovely book together. Last but not least, it seems that every time we take to the streets for an evening stroll or whatever we do there always seems to be live music playing and folks DANCING! One time they had a mid-day rave in front of the Palais de beaux-arts where the rubens exhibit was held, another day there was argentinian tango in the main plaza of lille (where there is an installation of an upside down forest of trees covering the whole plaza�), and on another day there was ballroom in the lovely building with a courtyard inside of it left over from the time when lille was an outpost of spain. And these are just the events and exhibits that interest me! So that is fun� but even a walk around town (that yes, in some parts is pretty mucky and littered over) is really nice! It is easy to overlook how interesting the buildings that surround you are when you live in a place so I can understand why mr frenchman on the bus could say that lille was pretty drab� but I assure you that even the little houses and apartments that line the streets are neat to look at because of their little decorated fences or carvings of animals or faces in stone above the doorways� many of the roads are cobblestone with nice big sidewalks to walk around everwhere on (or even bike, since the only really crowded places are the open air markets)� and from the view on the top floor of my house, inside these houses I can see that there are small gardens and patios in each of the houses. Which is all hidden from the road behind brick walls with doors in them. Nicer houses would have bigger gardens, while the less nice houses or apartments can get pretty cramped (like student housing!)� it is just interesting how it all looks pretty much orderly and the same from the street� while the inside is pretty private and can be surprisingly open! On last note about the buildings in the old part of town (which are the prettiest of course!) is that hidden amongst the shops you can find the oldest pastry and candy shop in lille. Yum! I hear the weather isn�t so sunny most of the year, but since Rich and I got here it has been pretty breezy and summery with only two days of light rain. The neat thing about the sky here is that the sun doesn�t really disappear until 11:30 pm, and it rises again very early in the morning like at 5�. Since midday is pretty hot here in the summer I do wonder why they don�t just keep the shops and restaurants open a little more during the evening like in spain. Ahhhhh well now I�m sounding like my spanish friends. Spain is spain, france is france. So that is lille in a nutshell, the more I live here the more I like it� you know I love to get around by foot and tramway/metro! Now on to the stories!!!

Home was pretty stressful with moving and family and goodbyes and all that stuff so I�m glad to be on the road again finally. The plane trip across the atlantic went fast for once and they showed some cool movies (one about sufferagetts fighting for the right to vote in the US, the other about a touring play troupe in medievail times trying to solve the mystery behind a muder spree in a little town). We had some delays with air traffic getting into london and were delegated to de-plane at the side of the runway instead of the handy little tubes connected to the airport� so in the flurry to get onto the next bus that would cart us to our terminals and the fact that we were practically the last folks off the plane made us VERY late for our next flight� and when we finally got through customs and the end of our stinking check-in line, which was being held up by a stoney attendant, we had missed our connection to paris. Boo. (Once I�m done writing my important thank you cards and hello letters, I plan on sending a letter of complaints and suggestions to solve those problems to American Airlines in hopes that they will make our flights even better in the future.) In the meantime we got stuck paying a fine of equal worth to a super fancy dinner for changing our plane tickets since there was no way for sure we were ever going to catch any other plane to paris that day� and we ended up connecting to brussels instead. (in retrospect what we should have done was taken the train that goes under the english channel straight to lille, which would have been the easiest and cheapest thing to do to begin with!!! If only I had known that the international rail station on the underground in london was called waterloo�). Aaaaaaaaaaaanyways, brussels was beautiful!! I plan on riding back there one of these days to take a closer look and have a bite of the best chocolate in europe! Hehehe. All I can tell you about brussels at the moment is that they have some pretty funny murals in the international airport there� they just covered the walls from floor to ceiling with these 1960s flower power kind of collections of all the traditional things associated with different european countries� it was just a funny sight at the time I guess. So, we got to lille by train from brussels at around 8 or 9 pm and met alejandro in the station! Yayy! That evening we got a quick walking tour of the center of town, and then we met up with all of Alejandro and Ignacio�s friends at this kebab restaurant called Le Riadh, where they show the best of middle eastern pop hit music videos on the tvs, and serve delicious couscous, kebabs and soups. Yum. I one of the guys who works there what the Riadh meant (besides being the capital of Saudi Arabia) and I learned that it is also a first name for men, and a monument in algiers as famous as the eifel tower is to france! It is super there, as the folks who work there speak in french, spanish, russian and english very well. There are lots of places like that around lille so at least in stores you know you have a chance even if your french is really limited. So when we got home that night we had some time to meet the master of french in the house: kinga, from poland, who has been alejandro and ignacio�s apartment-mate all year. She is so great!

The next day (June 6, �04) ignacio had to go back to spain to take his last test for the year and kinga and alejandro and i went grocery shopping at the big open air market in town. There they sell any kind of food that you like in the raw, or already cooked if you go to the stalls the restaurants around town open up for the market. I found myself a stall selling some loquats (my favorite fruit ever, they are biwa in japanese, and nisferos in spanish yum) so I bought some for everybody to share. We even found a stall selling polish sausages, pickles and other preprepared food to kinga�s delight. That afternoon kinga cooked up some traditional polish veggie and meat dish, and some tasty sausages. Yum yum! We didn�t go out after that because we were tired so I started a table top game loosley based on D&D rules for alej and rich. We watched Battle Royal before we went to bed, which is an awesome movie. I think alejandro had gotten it from spain or something� but it was missing the back story for the �loser� girl who gets whiped out by the crazy older kid near the end� which was a shame because it really explained why she was so intense. Ah well. More to come later.