overt.org

an unexpected party

Fun was had this weekend. George arrived in Cali with Clare (surprise!). We spent Friday night on trivial pursuit, taboo, and ultimately Shrek. Jeff and Phil joined us. Saturday was spent shopping for books, seeing the third harry potter movie (fun but unfocused. I don’t think i would have enjoyed it w/out having read the book), and going to the end-of-year TFA “party” at Pixar. The venue was swank, and so was the food (free sushi!). There were several speeches given by both ‘03 (Leslie’s year) and ‘02 (they’re finished now) corps members. It was a long drive to/from Emeryville (near Berkeley) for the event.

Yesterday morning, I carted Clare and George back to the airport. Clare is headed back to Texas, and george is at West Point being a bad-ass as usual. After they left, I came back home and cleaned the bathroom and did a few other chores (such as churning out another 6 DVDs from netflix). Then I hit the climbing gym for stress relief and exercise. I also spent some time on the little eliptical strider thingy–a feature of the gym that might be enough to entice Leslie to join me there once school is out. I went home and promptly dozed until dinner. Dinner itself was beautiful: Leslie got some “sashimi-grade” ahi, which we seared on the stove and glazed in a ginger-garlic-honey sauce. Mmm… half-raw fish.

After dinner I was inspired to rebuild our apartment network by turning our linux server into a router, and relegating our commodity netgear wireless router to the status of simple access point. I did this mostly to give me more control over the firewall after learning that some netgear routers have a back-door administrative account that can’t be disabled, and also so I could easily run an internal DNS server. Yes, I spent hours working on it just so that I could refer to the music server as “music” instead of “192.168.2.74.” Think of it as geek redecoration.

climbing, ashtanga, KUT, KoToR

Nothing special going on this week. Just slogging through the second-to-last week of school for Leslie. I’ve never anticipated the end of someone else’s year so much. We all know why it will be nice for her to finish. In addition, I’m selfishly looking forward to getting up at 8 again (die, alarm, die).

I bought a membership at a nearby climbing gym, and I’ve been trying to go a few times a week. I’m getting my old strength back quickly, which is encouraging. When I started, it was clear I didn’t have the mettle I did when I left UT. I’ve also been trying to go yoga every week, which is fine, except that there is really only one place in the south bay I can go to. The teacher there, while good, is a little too hardcore. He told me last week that he doesn’t think I should come to the led classes anymore, that “it’s time to take the training wheels off.” What this means is that I’m supposed to come several times a week (6, ideally) in the morning from 6:30-8:00 to do ashtanga so I can “move my practice forward.” Now, I would love to be able to do ashtanga 6 times a week. I’m sure I’d be in great shape if I did. But I’m just not going to rise at 5:15 every morning to drive to Mountain View and pay $11 a class for the pleasure.

Some people see yoga as a part of a religion, or a way to find personal spirituality. To them, it’s less about exercise and more about some abstract concept like wholeness or meditation. Some even pay exorbitant amounts of money to go to india and be abused. They say that if you’re only thinking about the physical aspect, you’re not doing yoga. You’re just stretching. I’d agree to an extent. Except ashtanga is the most ass-kicking type of streching that I’ve even done in my life. It makes me feel looser, gives me more energy, and makes almost all of my aches and pains disappear. The trouble is, the people who often embrace the religious aspects of yoga the most are the teachers. So, as I get better and want to learn more stuff, I have to put up with more spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Can’t I just do second series without bowing to the lotus-feet of Patanjali?

mayurasana pose

I had a great instructor in Austin who wasn’t at all hung up about the spiritual stuff, but now I’m stymied by the new age hippies here in the Bay.

Leslie suggested that when we’re looking for a new apartment, we could try to find a place that has a hardwood floor so that I could do yoga at home (carpet is too squishy, bad for the wrists). Brilliant. And George will be here soon, to the east, so hopefully that might motivate me to find another place to do ashtanga.

Another great thing that happened recently: I discovered that KUT is now offering an MP3 stream of their station. So now I can listen to Eklektikos with John Aielli every morning at work. It’s helped me to miss Austin a little less.

One other thing. I have sworn off the Xbox for various rational and irrational reasons, but I’ve still been taunted by a couple of games that have come out for it: Knights of the Old Republic and Halo. So, I pieced together a Windows (shudder) computer from spare parts I had, and bought a copy of the game for PC. It is indeed great. It offers more lattitude in the way you solve problems than I’ve seen in an RPG in a long time. Example: yesterday I had to work logarithms to solve a puzzle. If I’d wanted to, I could have solved the same problem by interrogating a prisoner or simply blasting my way through a bunch of guards. Also, you have the macroscopic option of choosing the light side or the dark side of the force. I’ve gone the light side, mostly because I made the decision early before I realized that being dark wasn’t a disadvantage. But the two paths are rich enough that I could see myself playing through again as dark just to see how evil I could get. Also, the game is broad enough that I’ve never felt hung up or frustrated, and it’s full of optional quests and side games. I haven’t once felt the need to hit up gamefaqs.

T-minus 7 days of teaching left for Leslie.

Comments

leslie — 2004-06-02 15:21:16

Aw, thanks for the moral support. Will your anticipation of June 11 translate into flowers and chocolate that afternoon?

bryan — 2004-06-04 07:32:21

damn you! now i need a new plan.

back from austin

We got back last night from a very satisfying trip to Austin.

We got in on Friday night, dumped our stuff at Clare’s, and then I went over to Doug’s house for a bit to say hi to everyone. I headed back to bed pretty soon so I could wake up on Saturday morning to go to yoga with my old teacher, Annick. It was ass-kicking, but good. I spent the rest of the daylight hours around UT, eating at familiar places and walking the drag a bit. I also stopped into the co-op to buy some UT paraphenalia that I finally want after shunning it for the four years I was there. I got a burnt-orange hoody that says, quite clearly, “TEXAS” on the front, as well as an orange tie-dyed t-shirt that says the same. It seemed a pleasing blend of my past and future.

Saturday night we had a fancy dinner compliments of Clare’s parents at a tiny restaurant on Lamar called Wink. I personally had raw bison, skate wing, rabbit cake, chocolate soup, lemon tart pot and a nice glass of muscat.

Sunday I had lunch with Ellen, which was wonderful. We gave in to our greasy urges and got bacon cheesburgers at Players and talked politics and personalities. From there, I had dinner with my parents and viewed some excellent pictures from their recent excursions to Honduras and Portugal.

Sunday night was Patrick’s bachelor party. It was the first bachelor party I’ve been to, which was a bit unnerving. I can only guess at the parade of them I have to look forward to in the next few years. We spent the night downtown in bars, exploring the nations of the world via beer. We ended up at Opal Divine’s at 2am, sitting on the porch smoking cigars. Good times.

Monday we got a big group together and went to Schlitterbahn for the day. It was awesome–the kids were still in school, so it wasn’t too crowded, and the sun managed to come out in the afternoon. We rode rides, but also spent a good amount of time just floating lazily in their interminable rivers. We made several trips to their snack dispensaries for turkey legs, ice cream, and funnel cakes.

After we were home and showered, we went out to the drafthouse to see an appalling documentary called “Stupidity.” I won’t even go there.

Tuesday was a lazy day. We all slept in, then I struck out on foot for a nostalgic tour of campus. I dropped into ECAC to say hi to old folks, and then went 0 for 3 trying to find my old professors. I guess they got the hell out of dodge as soon as finals were over. After that, I rendezvous’d with George at half price books where I picked up Dune Messiah and Farenheit 451 for $.98 each. We rounded out the afternoon with a trip to REI where I managed not to buy anything, with a quick pitstop at Best Buy where I gave in and bought the PC version of KOTOR.

Then Doug shuttled us to the airport, we hopped on a plane and before dark we were standing back in our apartment. What an awesome, perfectly-timed trip. Now back to this grind for a while…