This dj kills fascists

Far in the future, but in the works nonetheless: a Labor Party for Labor Day. What would such a party entail, do you think?

(a dj is not a machine, I know, but ok.)

T-R-A I-N-W R-E-C-K-Y

MCCLELLAN: I’m well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation…

QUESTION: (inaudible) when it’s appropriate and when it’s inappropriate?

MCCLELLAN: If you’ll let me finish.

QUESTION: No, you’re not finishing. You’re not saying anything.
You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson’s wife. So don’t you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn’t he?

our skin gets thicker from living out in the snow

I'm homesick. I want to eat neighborhood food, hear my house's noises, walk under all my old trees.

that right ain't shit

The problem with the supreme court is that it stays however you put it pretty much until somebody dies.

In other news, ICSG may not actually leave town after all, and work is intellectually cool and progressing satisfactorily. I still kind of want to go home; things there are cheaper (and for the most part just as good), I have more friends, I don't have to drive so much, etc etc. I am also looking forward to the drive home, during which I insist upon stopping at Saleem's. Matt visited this weekend and that kind of made it worse - it is like how being hungry gets worse if you have a snack, or maybe (though I don't know this firsthand) how keeping a vow of silence is harder if you accidentally say "Oh shit."

what our knowledge amounts to

The story of ICSG continues: we went on a hike, then met her girlfriend and my neighbor for beers in one of Boulder's tiny brewery-things. They will probably leave town for good by the end of the week. It's unlikely that I'll ever see ICSG again, and I only really hung out with her for a total of maybe 4 hours. I'm still kind of down about it, though.

Today I got a ride to & from work with one of the other interns (car in the shop). It was a lonely time; on the way there, the Angry White Boy Nu-Metal station he listens to was talking about "My girlfriend's parents took a 7-year-old kid to the water park on Gay Pride Day. Oops! What a time for young eyes! Not that there's anything wrong with that." On the way home, it was "The Supreme Court says police don't have to enforce restraining orders. This guy who called in says women really just do that when they don't like their boyfriends anymore, anyway. No big deal."

Remember a long time ago, that MIT study about somen in science? Where they found that discrimination isn't "I just don't like women having that kind of jobs" so much as a more passive trend of not taking people seriously as people in one way or another?

Speaking of, a while ago my roommates were watching this show, "Crossing Jordan," maybe? It's about some sort of crime investigating lady. Anyway, the show was unremarkable, except that in nearly every scene some man would grab the leading lady by one or both arms and steer her to one side - usually up against a wall - and give her forceful, unwelcome advice (at best). Maybe with some finger-wagging. Even at her job this happens! I'd never stand for that. Weird how on UPN or whatever men can still literally push women around, even if they do allow them to have exciting crime-investigating jobs.

Also, I had a dream the night before last that N., one of my original martial arts big brothers, was back in CU for some practicing. I actually went back to sleep in order to finish a grappling match.

I used to think about you all the time; now I think about you all the time

I've been in Boulder for three weeks now. It has its ups and downs. Here in the apartment there's a strangely asymmetrical situation where I try to stay out of G.'s way and she is always annoyed with me for being in her way, or having been there in the past, or for letting her notice that I have attempted to get out of it, etc etc. I mostly just go to brazilian jiujitsu - because what is more out of the way than out of the house? Those guys are cool and not weird about girls the way some other martial arts guys are.

I've met a few people here that are nice. One guy from bjj asked me what kind of music I like and his eyes didn't glaze over when I answered - if he is at practice again later I will try to find out what his name is again because I forgot; one girl I met tonight at the ice cream store is leaving Boulder next week but I'm going hiking with her tomorrow night (if she calls me); one guy I work with is unconscionably hot (and also very friendly, but mostly hot).

Ice Cream Store Girl moved to Boulder with her girlfriend, but they don't like it here so they're moving back to parts further east, I guess. ICSG was sitting around by herself while my downstairs neighbors and I talked about the daily show, and I felt silly excluding someone who was so clearly interested. The four of us sat there outside the store until it closed, and then we felt weird hanging around outside a closed ice cream store so we went home to watch the daily show, which is apparently not on again at midnight on fridays, even though it is on every other night. ICSG lives nearby but did not come with us for the daily show. I hope she calls me, though.

I heard from my downstairs neighbors that my roommates say I fight with G. a lot. I am not even going to address the kind of dynamic that that implies. I don't think I do - I feel uncomfortable around her, sure, but I go out of my way to avoid fighting with G. I think this situation is so weird because she clearly doesn't care to go out of her way to avoid fighting with me. Like I said, asymmetrical.

Downstairs Guys are Taiwanese and [from Shanghai-I don't know if there is a special word for that, but we can go with Chinese which is simultaneously true], and they are all right. They say they will practice Chinese with me, but I am very shy and kind of afraid I'll suck. I suppose they expect it though. I'm going to need a dictionary.

So, Boulder: good and bad, but in general better if I am not at home.

pls update yr blog thx

I'm in Boulder now. My roommates are pretty much as I preemptively described them before. They're okay, if quirky. It is likely that they also think I'm quirky.

I drove past the jiujitsu place today. It's gratifyingly close to my house. So are ASIAN DELI, whole foods, and world market. This is one of those weird states where grocery stores don't sell wine - I hope world market still does.

Also, the sun is very very hot all the time, even when the air isn't. I'm going to need some sunscreen.

the infinite connectivity of the center of the sun

Matt and I are in Phoenix now. It's nice, though I have been pretty much constantly thirsty ever since we entered New Mexico. I haven't seen much of Phoenix yet, really, but there have been some other cool things.

1. Nebraksa's katamari is really huge. Actually just Nebraska. We drove all the way across it on I-80, and it took the better part of two days of driving. Also there is oil in Nebraska. I had no idea.
   
2. My new apartment is nice, if a little plain. I hope I can say the same for my roommates (the nice part, not the plain part).
3. Mountains make my ears hurt, and one of them took a while to get back to normal, but I think it's improving now. It will help that we are staying someplace flat for the next few days.
4. There is nothing to do in Albuquerque at 6:30 on a Tuesday. Also, it is hard to find any Mexican food, which was surprising. What we did find sucked.
5. Apparently some hotels set up their TVs so that you can't connect your gamecube or other external AV device to them. Stupid!
   
6. I saw the Very Large Array in New Mexico (this is at National Radio Astronomy Observatory). The VLA is very cool in its own right, but it's also where they filmed "Contact," so I guess non-engineers like it too. It's got a stupid name, though.
   
7. We drove through Pie Town, NM, but we did not stop for pie. I regret that immensely.
8. We finally found some awesome mexican food in Show Low. Ask Matt what he ate sometime when you have an hour to spare. It totally beats Albuquerque in that regard.
9. Because of the VLA, we took US 60 across to Phoenix instead of taking I-40. 60 is one of those two-lane roads that is Main street in all the towns it goes through. In many towns it was the only street.
   
10. Driving through mountains is pretty fun if you have a lot of time on your hands. If you're actually trying to get somewhere it gets old, though. Thankfully, Phoenix and its suburbs are flat.

I'd post pictures, but Matt isn't awake to host them.

a new goddamn era

The first pictures I took were a series of "how to tie your belt" instruction photos for my brother.

the west is dead and it's burning

For the past two weeks, I've had a personal soundtrack entirely composed of songs by the Books. I hope it keeps up; it's nice having songs in my head that I never get tired of listening to.

Our road trip is going to begin in three days. I don't know what to do with myself. Pack, I suppose, since the trip is on the way to my internship, and I'll be pretty unhappy if I don't pack with foresight and judiciousness.

At work I'm also getting ready to leave, but in a strange way. I think my advisor thinks that leaving on Friday will make me superhuman. She wants a first version of this journal paper before I go, and I have stupidly committed myself to completely rewriting the whole analysis section (formerly three chapters) so that it addresses the three cases in parallel rather than one at a time. There's a good reason to do it this way, but right now I'm regretting what I got myself into.

This week marks a lucky confluence of many events: I had enough money to buy the digital camera I've been wanting right before we leave to go on the road trip. So it's just in time. Then I went to get a memory card for it, and there was a strange technology-price inversion where the really huge one was actually cheaper than either of the two capacities of cards I had originally thought it would be reasonable to buy. Finally, at work they are upgrading the network, so I'm working from home on the very same morning that my camera is supposed to arrive by UPS, and I don't even have to feel bad about it. Matt says he'll let me host pictures in his space, so I'll post some when it arrives. Clearly I can't take pictures of the camera itself, but I'll take example pictures or something.

Oh, and just now my biggest little brother B. told me he was standing around wearing his brand new tae kwon do uniform, which fills me with family pride and brotherhood and shit. I taught him how to tie his belt over IM. Aww.

Arch-ery

On Thursday I turned in my thesis, and it was a kind of strange feeling. I'd been editing it & making revisions for a couple of weeks off and on, and then I wandered up to the graduate college, they checked whether my figures were on the pages the list of figures said they were on, and took it. Excepting waiting, the whole thing took ten minutes. (The waiting was more like a half hour or more. That's part of why the in & out bit of it seemed so weird to me.)

Despite the anti-climasticity (when you have a master's degree they let you make up words) of that whole thing, it is lucky that I turned it in when I did. See, the deadline was Friday and not Thursday, but I had to drive to St. Louis on Friday for a kuk sool tournament. Matt & R. & I ate at IHOP in the morning, drove to St. Louis, R and I tested for black belt (1), and we didn't get time for dinner until about 11 at night. We went to this fantastic Lebanese place whose kitchen was about to close. Make sure you eat at Saleem's, y'all. I mean, even if we hadn't been imploding from hunger this would have been awesome food (2).

The next day there was a kuk sool tournament, which is what everyone except me was in town for (I didn't compete, I just tested). They had split up the tournament into kids' and adults' sections, with the kids competing in the morning and the adults in the afternoon. This was awesome, except they put the promotion ceremony/masters' demo in the middle of the day. They promoted me, and when they were ready to start the afternoon competition they were short on judges. They asked all the black belts who weren't actually competing to come down & be a judge. I didn't volunteer at first, because I didn't really think I counted in my hour-old black belt. But then they started threatening to come up in the bleachers and get us, so I figured I had better go. That whole thing was kind of uncomfortable.

(1) There were so many people in such a small room, working out for such a long time, that the floor-to ceiling mirrors and windows all fogged up. I hardly remember the test, I just remember the food.

(2) Matt ordered this great thing, which then was accidentally put in front of me. By the time we figured that out, I had already eaten half of it and I wasn't giving it back. I think it might have been called "mouzat" but the description I've found of that doesn't quite match what I was eating. Whatever, it had an M and a Z and some lamb in it. With rice.

in a second

I think that for the duration of the camping trip I miraculously turned into a badass. I'm not normally as awesome as all that, and now that I'm back the effect has worn off. I'm not a martial arts master, and lack of sleep catches up with me just like any other person. But man, this weekend was different. I kicked ass and took names.

And why is it that all I want to eat this week is rice?

every single molecule is right

That camping trip that I've been setting up all week starts today. This is a relief, as is the end of any period where you have to plan a 48-hour thing for 13 people. Yesterday I pre-chopped all the vegetables and bought a very impressive cooler, and now all that's left is to take some things out of the dryer and hope the teaching goes as well as the camping will.

Another thing that is nearing completion is my thesis. I gave that to the publication department - those people who check for grammar and formatting - yesterday afternoon. Within two weeks I fully expect to turn it in. Holy shit.

I've been trying to understand why I get so worked up about women-politics in particular. It's not like general politics affect me any less. But they don't get me into the kind of towering rage that things like anti-abortion wackos do. I mean, corruption? Gerrymandering? Dismantling social security and nominating assholes? Those things are pretty bad. But mention pharmacists and I fly off the handle.

tomorrow's lunch today

I have noticed that if I eat out less I get skinnier. This is nice, except it means I have to pack a lunch. It used to mean that, anyway. These days I can go to the food co-op (which is a block away from work) and buy cheese, bread, vegetables, whatever. I don't have a knife, though, so I have to eat them all separately, in torn-off chunks. I don't mind.

I am going to finish this edit of my thesis this week, I say. That gives me 2 weeks for formatting-type revisions and everything.

mighty, fallen, etc etc

The Riviera was a lot more impressive in the old version of Ocean's Eleven - where it really was the most sophisticated thing on the street - than it is up close & in person in the present day. Maybe I'm just not all that into the flashing-lights and things-made-of-gold scene. Other hotels have cool gimmicks - they are pyramid-shaped or New York-shaped, or they have Cirque du Soleil shows or rollercoasters. This one has a casino, a bunch of dancing-girl boob shows (3 or 4 simultaneously!), and a pool which is closed because it's not warm enough. It's got all these pamphlets that bill it as "the grown-up option." Yeah right. More like the "everyone who does government technological research is a man" option.

p.s. the time stamp is in Las Vegas time!

he might replace the earth with the moon

(if I had written it that's what it would be.)

Matt's had 154 in the car for the past few days, and up until now I didn't realize what a difference the CD makes. I've heard a lot of these songs before, but they were on tapes or mp3 or a few years ago, and they are different now. I drove a block: "Self, is this Wire?"

I've been meeting with T. and B. a lot to talk about a camp we're setting up for kuk sool - it was originally just a camping trip, but we have all these ideas, and it's turned into an all-day seminar. Exciting. They're talking about how we're going to try to change how ksw practices are run after I promote, and I'm happy about that too. Our old teacher rarely even had a lesson plan, and I don't understand how he could just wing it all the time. We're talking about meeting weekly, having goals for the class... refreshing! I wish we could expect people to at least work out a little on their own, though. I'd love to spend class time on making people better at kuk sool instead of just making them feel less guilty for eating.

Have I mentioned that before? I feel like a lot of people use practices as a time to make up for any pie they had over winter break. I have more than one problem with this:

1. Making up for pie in that fashion points to them having some weird attitudes about themselves, food, and fitness that I don't want to be part of.
   
2. If they were paying attention, martial arts would teach them not to eat too much pie in the first place.
3. They are in kuk sool to get badass, not to get skinny.
4. Workouts take away from practice time, and the curriculum moves way too fast as it is.

That last point is a result of a larger problem - at least, I view it as a problem: people want to have black belts before they graduate. Now, it is possible to get to that level in that amount of time. But people come in as white belts and they specifically want a particular color at a particular time. If they think they can't do that, a lot of them will quit because they "won't have gotten anywhere." So the class has to go at a particular speed because ksw introduced some artificial milestones. I want to make testing more optional - we should discuss students' progress with them and let them know before testing comes around whether they should bother with it or not. Then we can stop promoting people prematurely without so many hard feelings.

I'm going to visit my parents tomorrow. It's too bad they're not into roast leg of lamb, because that would make a great Easter dinner. I'm not so much into the eggs & chocolate event anymore, but I will take any excuse to make an impressive dinner.

np: Matt's mix that has "You Can Make Me Feel Bad" and "As You Do" on it

Iron Chef Urbana

Recently I've been consumed by a fit of cooking (and eating), brought on by my memory of the Clarkston Union's macaroni and cheese and fueled by my recent viewing of Steven Chow's God of Cookery. My weekly half-day of baking hasn't been enough, and I've been having adventures.

First, I dressed up my best chicken recipe for dinner with my brother when he was visiting. I served it with clever artichokes (we had two - there were four people - artichokes look awesome cut in half the long way - clever) and some squishy co-op cheese, and everyone was impressed.

Later on, after a couple of weeks of careful consideration, I determined that the secret ingredient in the aforementioned macaroni (besides the overt but delicious breadcrumb topping and ham chunks) must be parmesan cheese. The sauce was just mysteriously tangy. I was proved right with the aid of a little extra pepper.

Friday I watched God of Cookery with B., P., K., and Matt. Awesome.

Then I went to a wedding, which had good food, and a party that also had good food. But yesterday was the best adventure yet - I made a deliciously seasonal stuffed leg of lamb with all kinds of planty-tasting herbs and vegetables in it. I've never been so impressed by fennel. C. came over and had some, and we gave him some to take home to M. - I hope she liked it.

The combination of my culinary adventures and having seen that movie led B. to suggest a God of Cookery - themed party/potluck, in which everone is flamboyant and chefy. We'd offer a prize or something for Best Dish. But not everyone has seen this movie, and not everyone wants to cook like that. If they hadn't seen it, how would they know what to bring? We couldn't even accomplish that by showing it at the party, because then when would they have time to cook something suitable? But if we could work something out, it'd be the best meal most of us have ever had.

qualified

Is it Tuesday?

I think it is beer Tuesday.

Judgment

Today's the day. I'll let you know.

I am a great fan of triangles

My brother is visiting the university this weekend, since the college of engineering is having an open house. It's kind of like a science fair, and he's staying with me. I'm not sure what to do with him.

See, K. seems content to stay home most of the time. I asked him what he'd do if he lived here, and he told me "Oh, study, do homework, play D&D." Maybe I am out of touch with what he likes. But if he's going to move out of a Detroit suburb (even he admits there is nothing to do there) to a town that reguarly has concerts, plays, events, cool workshops, and all that, I think he ought to take advantage of it. I want him to realize the opportunity he has in going away to school - to try everything out and not just do engineering and sit in the basement. How do I get that across? I want him to treat engineering like his day job, and make sure that he tries out everything he can in his off-time.

One of my friends works at a jewelry counter these days, and I got something for my mom there (making sure I get mother's day under control). But I might go back and get this other thing that I saw, for myself. I'm very impulsive, but only around tax-refund time.