Tag: personal

survival

I know you know. But I’m going to tell you anyway. The story of my life for the last month and a half (except, of course, the beautiful respite of my 10-day winter break). This is what I’m going to tell you. It won’t take long. You wake up. You shower. You eat breakfast, and make 2 sandwiches. You take these up to “the lab,” which is really just an office but you call it the lab to differentiate it from the place where you got a salary and fringe benefits. See, it’s better! It’s THE LAB. It’s SCIENCE. So you settle in around 9am, knowing that there won’t be any company until early afternoon, because you’re only hardcore if you work in the lab from 2pm until 3am, the 9am to 11pm guys are weaklings.

You settle at your tiny desk (tiny because there are already 7 students in this office, but the alternative is to sit alone in a room with no windows), and you spend roughly the next 12-15 hours rearranging the magnetic fields on a hard drive. Change this one to a zero, this zero to a one, etc. Nothing fancy. Somewhere along the way eat your sandwiches or go out for fast food that isn’t any better for you because it’s Thai rather than Burger King–coconut milk is a bitch. Go home. Pretend you have time to do something before sleep, realize you don’t, sleep.

Now, fundamentally, this bitching is bogus. We both know it is. And yet, no matter how perfect the scenario, there is always something to bitch about. So I’m just going to bitch away here. The last 36 hours or so were excellent. Deadline: 2pm Wednesday. Go in on Monday, work your “normal” hours. Tuesday, after 8 beautiful hours of sleep, head in around 9am. Finish the crucial elements of the submission around 10pm. Decide to do another example. Spend the next 12 hours or so getting that working. Around 5am, decide to only allow changes to the paper text by 3-way consensus of the authors (language faculties slipping). Submit final paper around 7am. Order delirious co-authors to sleep as necessary, sleep none at all yourself until the last frame is rendered, roughly noon. Submit.

SUBMIT! Submit. submit.

And then, it’s over. The last few days have been a beautiful, chemically-induced haze. I think I may almost be ready to face normal life again.

texas again

It’s amazing after having been away from Austin for 1.5 years until this thanksgiving that I should be back only a month later. We only had a day down there, leaving yesterday morning from Dallas and turning right back around today to head back. Still, the trip was worth it. We saw some of the development that’s been going on downtown (including a visit to the huge new Whole Foods on lamar, it’s like the IKEA of hippie food or something). We also had the chance to spend some quality time with my parents, who had us over for dinner on Friday (ham, yum). We also exchanged gifts, although Jeff wasn’t there (he’s in SoCal with Sophie and her family) it was still nice to get to sit around and talk a bit.

The most amazing thing happened last night–an old friend of mine got a bunch of other old friends from high school together in some random bar east of 35. It was quite a crowd… something that hadn’t coalesced at least since ’99 (6 years ago? Really?). It was great to talk to people I hadn’t seen for so long, and I really hope that lines of communication that were reopened last night will survive.

Now it’s 24 Dec, and I’ve still got quite a bit of time (8 days!) away from SIGGRAPH to look forward to, including 4 bopping around NYC, which should be a blast. We’ve been using the new fancy camera we bought, so expect some pics on gallery soonish.

december time

The semester is almost over. I’ve got two more meetings of my oh-so-painful math class, but I “finished” (or at least turned in) the last two homeworks so I can focus on the SIGGRAPH paper, which will basically be my life until 25 January at 5pm. Which is okay, really, considering how relaxed things are for the rest of the year. I do still have a week or so in late December for Texas and Christmas that I’m not being forced to give up, and I’m sort of mentally separating the remaing time before the deadline into two death marches, one from now until the 22nd, then from the 2nd until the 25th. Seems much more manageable that way.

Almost got to see the Trey Anastasio show on Friday, but after getting patted down we were bounced at the door since it turned out our tickets were for Saturday, not Friday. Oops. Transportation made it hard to get there yesterday so we ended up selling our tickets (or at least one, I gave the other away) on craigslist and staying in for the night, which was fun anyway since Doug and I were starting work on our FFVII reunion tour. Sephiroth, Cloud, the whole gang.

Now, back to work.

texas turkey tour

It was a whirlwind tour.

Day 1: Fly out, arrive in Austin 5pm. Proceed to parents house. Socialize. Watch excellent slide show prepared by my parents. Discover that even at 7 days I was a master face contortionist:

bryan as baby making face

Which goes a long way toward explaining this infamous pic:

adult crazy bryan

Then we ate a late (8pm) early (Tuesday) thanksgiving dinner with all the expected accouterments. It was delicious and incorporated a lot of good catching up with my parents. We headed out after dinner for drinks with friends at Trudy’s (a classic), and managed to rustle up most of the remaining people we knew in Austin. We stayed and talked ’til about 1, then threw in the towel.

Day 2: We woke and puttered while waiting for my mom to give us (very graciously) her car for the rest of the trip. When she did, we headed downtown. I left Les at Schlotzsky’s (also a classic; you’re sensing a trend perhaps?) and had lunch with an old friend at Ruby’s, because in Cali people’s idea of BBQ is anything that involves charcoal. Then I took Leslie down to Opal Divine’s on 6th and took myself on a self-guided tour of campus. It was weird–not the first time of done the walk-around-your-old-campus-reminiscing thing, but the last time I did it it was less than a year after I’d graduated, and I really felt sort of displaced then. I wanted to still belong, but didn’t. This time, I knew I didn’t belong, and felt like an outside observer. I went to see a few people at the place where I used to work, and chatted with an old professor, and realized that my time at UT had really passed into some former version of me, one that I’m not anymore. That was a bit sad but mostly encouraging; I want to know that I’m still not fully baked. So I stopped by the co-op (which has expanded so much that it took over the Barnes and Nobel next door) and unabashedly bought a couple of UT shirts. Now that it’s a closed chapter of my life, I can lord it over people like a real alum :).

I retreived Leslie and we hit the road. She was anxious to get on the way, and the traffic had settled down by 5 or so when we left. We made good headway, except for slowdowns in almost every town/city on the way to Dallas, and pulled in just under the wire (about 9:30) for dinner at Cisco, one of three restaurants that Les’s parents own. It was great, I got a cap and good beer, then we went home, collapsed.

Day 3: Turkey day! I slept in until 9 or so, woke up, scoffed grinch-like at the Macy’s parade, mellowed out with an excellent bloody mary courtesy of Marc, then enjoyed an absurdly good “dinner” around 1pm with Leslie’s family. After dodging all of the dishes by launching plastic leaves at each other around the table, we packed up and headed out to the ranchlet for some ping-pong, football, and bonfire. Oh, and leftovers.

Day 4: More leftovers. Climbing in the car, girding myself for some more driving (my back is calling out for some yoga at this point), we head down to Austin again. Some xmas shopping at the cool little strip that south congress has become (would you like a “keep austin weird” hat, bumper sticker, shirt, thong, or postcard? You’re in luck), chilled, exhausted, at a coffee shop on 4th that in another incarnation Leslie and I had our first date at, and finally headed down to Lisa and Eric’s place for fun with dogs and excellent alfredo. We went home, tired from our travels, and were about to hit the sack in preparation for our 6:30 flight the next morning when I got a call from a HS friend, so I headed down to a pub until about midnight, then home for a few hours of sleep.

Day 5: stumble out of bed at 4:30. Stuff happens. Home again around 9am. the end.

Be sure to check the gallery.

25 years

A quarter century. And I’m still in no danger of being grown up anytime soon. Heck, I’m still in school. This is the life. Friday I had a merged birthday with Haley, a friend from Berkeley who happens to share a birthday in the “everyone’s already home for Thanksgiving” danger zone. It was cool–we started out in a nice Chinese place (I hardly ever eat Chinese these days for some reason), then moved on to Spats for board games. Then we moved on back to my apartment with Doug, Phil, and Nelson in tow for some “Mario Party 7.” Yes, seven. I am vaguely aware that they keep making this game, continually feeding their party game base, but attaching a number greater than three to a game requires Final Fantasy-like hubris. I suppose if anyone can do that it’s Nintendo on their own platform.

Another awesome gift, from Jeff:

They are doortags for my office at Berkeley. Each one has velcro on the back for easy swapping based on mood or season. They are so cool!

On Saturday I had a celebration with Leslie. She laid out a plan for the whole day, kicking things off with a matinee of the new Harry Potter movie, which I was quite entertained by–I’ve managed not to become jaded by special effects some how, and appreciate them more than ever when they’re done well or at least to good cinematic effect, which they certainly were for the movie. Then we went to a cool new bar downtown called Beckett’s for some Boddington’s, then finally on to a swanky new restaurant in down town called (appropriately) Downtown. We had some absurdly good pork short ribs and salmon, along with some awesome Hefewiesen, and rounded things out with ginger-pear shortcake. Mmm.

This morning I’m off to Texas. It’ll be my first time back in Austin since May of 2004–that’s my longest time away ever. I’m sure it still has it’s old charm.

halloween shenanigans

George is in town and we had an action-packed weekend. We kicked things off Friday with a trip in to San Francisco to visit Toronado, a bar that is close to the hearts of Doug and Nelson. It had an amazing selection of beer, which was awesome, but according to some law of bars they continually turned up the music from about 9pm when I got there until 11:30 when I left, at which point it was almost intolerably loud.

On Sunday we went to the dia de los muertos festival in Fruitvale (a neighborhood in Oakland), saw altars, ate greasy food, had a good time all around. Here are some skulls that kids made of their favorite dead (note 2pac):

skulls

On Halloween itself we girded ourselves for one more trip… this time to the infamous (and gigantic) Halloween party in the Castro. We went a bit early, had dinner and plenty of margaritas at the excellent, very Texas-feeling Puerto Alegre in the Mission, then headed to the Castro for the madness. There are some pics up on gallery, but I’ll leave you with a pic of my lame costume (some sort of scary pink rabbit creature, don’t ask me:

rabbit costume

back to “work”

Ann Arbor persisted in being entertaining all the way to the end. On the second night, we hit “Conor O’Neils” for some decent hefewiezen and trivia. Although we knocked it out of the park in the science category, we did pretty poorly on music (other than me recognizing a Portishead track) and the rest was a mixed bag. Some scurvy dogs brought laptops to the trivia challege, which if nothing else made us feel a lot less bad about losing.

The next night we played a bit of poker. It was a blast, $10 buy-in, tons of fun games. I was a big fan of Omaha in particular, maybe because the hands are so dynamic with each turn of the cards. More entertaining than non-stop, no-limit Texas hold’em, which people in Berkeley seem to like to play. Overall, I managed to get zero pictures of the trip… pretty pathetic, actually. How will I tell my grand children about that one time I went to Michigan?

And now I’m back in Berkeley, with my prelim behind me, and nothing in front but a vast expanse of semesters stretching nearly to the end of the decade that stand between me and a Ph.D. I guess you could say at this point I’m far enough in to have a clue, but not so far that I have any idea what I’ve gotten myself into. I mean, really, what could take 4-6 more years to finish?

i watched 13 minutes of a football game

No, really… it was the Michigan vs. Wisconsin game. And by “13 minutes” I mean “approximately for fucking ever” since football transpires in some parallel universe where time has no meaning and the network’s idea of entertaining me is a bunch of shots of people pacing around looking pissed. I would get bored and look away, only to have my attention drawn back suddenly by shouts or wails—when I did this, I would see perhaps several consecutive seconds of activity on the field, chased by more pacing. Truly a riveting game, that.

This was the prelude to Ali’s party he was throwing at his new apartment. I’m in Ann Arbor visiting, partly in celebration of being a post-prelim individual, partly because the tickets were dirt cheap. The party was fun—in poor yet excellent taste someone brought the parts for making hurricanes, which I tried. Rum… such a strange thing, foul by itself but laid low by a splash of pineapple juice. I proceeded to get Not Very Drunk while many people around me got Quite Drunk Indeed, and I discovered that in Ann Arbor, if the party is not entertaining enough, the guests will not leave. Instead, they will seek out and ingest ever increasing amounts of alchohol until the party becomes fun. You have to admire the determination, or desperation, or whatever it is.

It’s not actually cold here at all. In fact, it’s detectably warmer than in Berkeley—I constantly delight that places like Michigan exist where it is both too hot and too cold. Suckers.