Ass up!
We went tubing down the Salt River on Sunday in a rather poorly planned fashion. All would have been well if not for the forgotten fact that you can't buy alcohol on a Sunday before 10AM. This led to us being separated as half of us continued on to the park to get the tubes while the other half stayed behind to get the beer once it was 10. This of course led to the other group being unable to park at the entrance and due to the po-lice they weren't even able to drop people off by us while they found a parking spot. Flash forward to 3 hours later, all is resolved by patience and a little faith in everyone's respective abilities to meet up at the top of the river. Not exactly the best way to start out my first time on the Salt River, but the next 5 hours were quite worth it.
It's really kind of strange, I had this image of us all floating down the river all relaxed and peaceful, leisurely drinking our beers as we coast along. That lasted about 10 minutes. Then our raft of tubes caught up with everyone else, the river picked up and hijinx ensued. Due to lack of space (I'll leave it at that) we couldn't fit any water bottles into our cooler so the only liquid available was beer, which made everything more interesting. The whole experience was really fun, more than I had suspected; I was never bored for even a moment. I'm also rather surprised how little everyone was sunburned afterward. Save for right above my knees and my feet, I was just fine. And one poor girl who had a little too much to drink was looking pretty lobsterrific by the end of the day but evidently was just tanned afterward.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
STFU
One of my pet peeves that's been coming up lately is people who don't know when to keep quiet, or at least not shout as loud as possible. My first clear memory of this problem was in high school when I made some quiet joke to someone about someone walking by. The ditz replied very loudly "I don't get it!" and despite my attempt to quiet her down, when she got the joke she happily cried, "Oh I get it! You're saying he's...!" I don't think there was anyway for the target of the joke to have not heard it. And I'm positive the two weren't friends, so there was no reason for her to do it deliberately, she was just a moron.
I find myself encountering this again at work; when I notice an attractive female customer, I honor my manly duty and make sure the nearest male coworker has the opportunity to check her out as well. But some people don't get the rules here. One coworker, a thuggish Mexican, has a complete inability to control his volume, so that when I discreetly direct his attention to a hot girl he'll loudly (perhaps vulgarly) agree with me so that the girl, indeed most of the restaurant, knows what we were talking about. Needless to say, I've stopped pointing them out to him.
So if you're going to be a loudmouth, you'd better be prepared to miss out on what everyone else notices around them.
One of my pet peeves that's been coming up lately is people who don't know when to keep quiet, or at least not shout as loud as possible. My first clear memory of this problem was in high school when I made some quiet joke to someone about someone walking by. The ditz replied very loudly "I don't get it!" and despite my attempt to quiet her down, when she got the joke she happily cried, "Oh I get it! You're saying he's...!" I don't think there was anyway for the target of the joke to have not heard it. And I'm positive the two weren't friends, so there was no reason for her to do it deliberately, she was just a moron.
I find myself encountering this again at work; when I notice an attractive female customer, I honor my manly duty and make sure the nearest male coworker has the opportunity to check her out as well. But some people don't get the rules here. One coworker, a thuggish Mexican, has a complete inability to control his volume, so that when I discreetly direct his attention to a hot girl he'll loudly (perhaps vulgarly) agree with me so that the girl, indeed most of the restaurant, knows what we were talking about. Needless to say, I've stopped pointing them out to him.
So if you're going to be a loudmouth, you'd better be prepared to miss out on what everyone else notices around them.
Friday, May 18, 2007
No Hope
Hope's End by Stephen Chambers. A borrowed book which naturally came recommended. Unfortunately I didn't like it all that much. It's a fairly good effort considering the source (a then college sophomore) but objectively it's kinda dull. The setting seems interesting but it doesn't really make the story by itself. A dystopian future society on another planet that has regressed to Medieval technology where reading is forbidden by the Church. The author I think was trying to be too clever in his exposition, very deliberately coy about things to the point of being obnoxious. Constant reflections by the main character regarding strange artifacts with cryptic writing like "Campbell's So" Oooo what could it be!? The characters are not the most compelling either. There are a couple of badass female characters who are mysteriously attracted to the main character who has a knack for delivering lines that would make Anakin Skywalker blush. He also is frequently hit on the head hard enough by rocks and sword hilts to be rendered unconscious for a rather long period of time (generally when it's convenient for him to get from one setting to another without having to write how he got there) yet suffers not ill effects. I'm no doctor but I think repeated blows to the skull like that would at least make sword fighting difficult. I guess they just build 'em tougher on that planet. Though his quality dialog might be explained by being a little punch drunk. None of the characters are very well developed or likable, so when they die you don't really care, though you're very blatantly prompted to by the author. And while the author constantly drops hints about what the colony's founders were like and what they believed in it wouldn't kill him to give a little back story of how or why they left Earth. Given how unpopular their ideologies are it seems unlikely they would just be allowed to leave or that they would have enough voluntary followers to create a colony.
Hope's End by Stephen Chambers. A borrowed book which naturally came recommended. Unfortunately I didn't like it all that much. It's a fairly good effort considering the source (a then college sophomore) but objectively it's kinda dull. The setting seems interesting but it doesn't really make the story by itself. A dystopian future society on another planet that has regressed to Medieval technology where reading is forbidden by the Church. The author I think was trying to be too clever in his exposition, very deliberately coy about things to the point of being obnoxious. Constant reflections by the main character regarding strange artifacts with cryptic writing like "Campbell's So" Oooo what could it be!? The characters are not the most compelling either. There are a couple of badass female characters who are mysteriously attracted to the main character who has a knack for delivering lines that would make Anakin Skywalker blush. He also is frequently hit on the head hard enough by rocks and sword hilts to be rendered unconscious for a rather long period of time (generally when it's convenient for him to get from one setting to another without having to write how he got there) yet suffers not ill effects. I'm no doctor but I think repeated blows to the skull like that would at least make sword fighting difficult. I guess they just build 'em tougher on that planet. Though his quality dialog might be explained by being a little punch drunk. None of the characters are very well developed or likable, so when they die you don't really care, though you're very blatantly prompted to by the author. And while the author constantly drops hints about what the colony's founders were like and what they believed in it wouldn't kill him to give a little back story of how or why they left Earth. Given how unpopular their ideologies are it seems unlikely they would just be allowed to leave or that they would have enough voluntary followers to create a colony.
Art
Couple of stream of consciousness ideas that just came up. The phenomenon of surfing the web, copying and pasting links and emailing them to people is wholly contingent on the modern era. The only thing close to a historical analogy would be sitting in a library going through books, documents, encyclopedias and albums, writing down the articles or tracing the illustrations then putting them in an envelope and mailing it to a friend. And that's not including multiple recipients or forwarding YouTube videos.
Also, flowering plants only started appearing around the time of the dinosaurs. Imagine if that little evolutionary experiment hadn't worked out. How many foods, concepts or metaphors would no longer exist? Just on the poetic/aesthetic aspect, how would civilization have coped? What would Van Gogh have painted? Roses wouldn't be red, violets wouldn't be blue, there would be no sugar to be sweet and you know the rest.
And how would aliens with no sight organs create art? Would it all have to be tactile? That limits them to portraits and still lifes since they wouldn't be able to create a recognizable representation of a landscape. Would they regard paintings as some kind of abstract form of koan? Like maybe the way the paint is situated on the canvas is symbolic of the place where it was painted or a general pattern of paint represents a cloud. They'd sense the paint but couldn't understand how it represents a landscape. That said, they may very well have some other form of long range sense we do not comprehend and have developed art based around that sense. What, then, would we make of that?
Couple of stream of consciousness ideas that just came up. The phenomenon of surfing the web, copying and pasting links and emailing them to people is wholly contingent on the modern era. The only thing close to a historical analogy would be sitting in a library going through books, documents, encyclopedias and albums, writing down the articles or tracing the illustrations then putting them in an envelope and mailing it to a friend. And that's not including multiple recipients or forwarding YouTube videos.
Also, flowering plants only started appearing around the time of the dinosaurs. Imagine if that little evolutionary experiment hadn't worked out. How many foods, concepts or metaphors would no longer exist? Just on the poetic/aesthetic aspect, how would civilization have coped? What would Van Gogh have painted? Roses wouldn't be red, violets wouldn't be blue, there would be no sugar to be sweet and you know the rest.
And how would aliens with no sight organs create art? Would it all have to be tactile? That limits them to portraits and still lifes since they wouldn't be able to create a recognizable representation of a landscape. Would they regard paintings as some kind of abstract form of koan? Like maybe the way the paint is situated on the canvas is symbolic of the place where it was painted or a general pattern of paint represents a cloud. They'd sense the paint but couldn't understand how it represents a landscape. That said, they may very well have some other form of long range sense we do not comprehend and have developed art based around that sense. What, then, would we make of that?
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Spindelmannen! Spindelmannen! Does whatever a spindel....kannen?
Spider-Man 3 with Tobey Maguire and James Franco. Yeah, the reviews are sadly accurate this time. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. And there are certain parts I really empathized with, especially since Spider-Man has always been my patron superhero. The movie is too long, suffering from the common affliction these days of directors getting so full of themselves they forget that it is possible, nay, preferable, to tell a story in under three hours. Eliminating the Sandman entirely would have made the movie shorter, the story better and everything generally less cluttered. I liked Harry Osborn quite a bit in this movie, though the big fight at the end was just dumb. Fantastic Four dumb. I didn't like MJ very well this time, I understand her difficulties and how Parker was being a little too self-absorbed but she was being such a girl about it all. Plus she's dating Spider-Man, she knew what she was getting into. Cut the guy a little slack, he can't always be there for you. That said, Parker was being kind of a jackass, even before the black suit. People in the reviews bitch about how Tobey Maguire was the wrong choice because he can't pull off evil, just creepy. I counter that Parker is inherently so good that even when his dark side is brought out it's still not actually evil. And it's only because it's skinny little Peter Parker that makes his behavior creepy, if it was Flash Thomson it would have looked better. And while his whole emo style was just plain silly, my favorite part of the movie is his slick moves with the ladies (and their varying reactions).
In other news, I went to the doctor to have my sore throat checked out. They use a tongue depressor, a stethoscope, write me a prescription and *poof!* I'm all better. THAT'S how going to the doctor should be!
Spider-Man 3 with Tobey Maguire and James Franco. Yeah, the reviews are sadly accurate this time. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. And there are certain parts I really empathized with, especially since Spider-Man has always been my patron superhero. The movie is too long, suffering from the common affliction these days of directors getting so full of themselves they forget that it is possible, nay, preferable, to tell a story in under three hours. Eliminating the Sandman entirely would have made the movie shorter, the story better and everything generally less cluttered. I liked Harry Osborn quite a bit in this movie, though the big fight at the end was just dumb. Fantastic Four dumb. I didn't like MJ very well this time, I understand her difficulties and how Parker was being a little too self-absorbed but she was being such a girl about it all. Plus she's dating Spider-Man, she knew what she was getting into. Cut the guy a little slack, he can't always be there for you. That said, Parker was being kind of a jackass, even before the black suit. People in the reviews bitch about how Tobey Maguire was the wrong choice because he can't pull off evil, just creepy. I counter that Parker is inherently so good that even when his dark side is brought out it's still not actually evil. And it's only because it's skinny little Peter Parker that makes his behavior creepy, if it was Flash Thomson it would have looked better. And while his whole emo style was just plain silly, my favorite part of the movie is his slick moves with the ladies (and their varying reactions).
In other news, I went to the doctor to have my sore throat checked out. They use a tongue depressor, a stethoscope, write me a prescription and *poof!* I'm all better. THAT'S how going to the doctor should be!
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
4D
I'm done with the semester! I'm amazed as everyone generally is how quickly the year has gone by. Yes, it is trite to mention it but I'm genuinely surprised by it. Especially considering how long my stay in Sweden felt. It was only a little longer than a normal academic year but it felt like forever, which is why I suppose I was not really upset to leave Sweden as I felt I had gotten adequate time to experience it.
Why is that, I wonder? Time is supposed to fly when you're having fun and I've never had as much fun over a year as in Uppsala. If anything, it should have gone by even faster than in the US. Maybe it's analogous to the missing time when one works too hard only to look up from their books and find it's 3AM. Uppsala was definitely low stress so that phenomenon never occurred. The class schedule might have had something to do with it as well. In high school you had all your classes every day and so my base unit of time was the day since no matter what, something was due the next day. Freshman year of college, my class schedule was different every day with some classes meeting only once a week. This resulted in me changing my base mental unit of time to the week since I could afford to not do homework for a class the night it was assigned. Experiencing only weeks instead of days would definitely make the year fly by a lot quicker. In Uppsala I had classes every day (or evening, in this case, which might add another factor to my sense of time) but the academic week was shorter so while there was always something due the next day, my week ended on a Wednesday. So not only did I experience time in days again, I had more weekend days to enjoy my experiences. Also worth considering is the possibility that experiences themselves might contribute to my perception of time. High school seemed like an entire lifetime but then again the multitude of experiences, even if they weren't scintillating, made it seem longer than it actually was. Freshman year of college kinda sucked so maybe its uneventfulness made it just run together. Uppsala, of course, was nearly constant waves of new experiences and ideas so it felt like more was accomplished. Then again, it might just be as simple as I experienced my stay in Sweden as a contiguous year and not split into two different semesters.
Whatever the cause, I'd like to know how to duplicate it. As much as I enjoy zipping through boring classes weeks at a time, I wish I could slow down sometimes and experience a day, a week, a year like it is meant to be experienced.
I'm done with the semester! I'm amazed as everyone generally is how quickly the year has gone by. Yes, it is trite to mention it but I'm genuinely surprised by it. Especially considering how long my stay in Sweden felt. It was only a little longer than a normal academic year but it felt like forever, which is why I suppose I was not really upset to leave Sweden as I felt I had gotten adequate time to experience it.
Why is that, I wonder? Time is supposed to fly when you're having fun and I've never had as much fun over a year as in Uppsala. If anything, it should have gone by even faster than in the US. Maybe it's analogous to the missing time when one works too hard only to look up from their books and find it's 3AM. Uppsala was definitely low stress so that phenomenon never occurred. The class schedule might have had something to do with it as well. In high school you had all your classes every day and so my base unit of time was the day since no matter what, something was due the next day. Freshman year of college, my class schedule was different every day with some classes meeting only once a week. This resulted in me changing my base mental unit of time to the week since I could afford to not do homework for a class the night it was assigned. Experiencing only weeks instead of days would definitely make the year fly by a lot quicker. In Uppsala I had classes every day (or evening, in this case, which might add another factor to my sense of time) but the academic week was shorter so while there was always something due the next day, my week ended on a Wednesday. So not only did I experience time in days again, I had more weekend days to enjoy my experiences. Also worth considering is the possibility that experiences themselves might contribute to my perception of time. High school seemed like an entire lifetime but then again the multitude of experiences, even if they weren't scintillating, made it seem longer than it actually was. Freshman year of college kinda sucked so maybe its uneventfulness made it just run together. Uppsala, of course, was nearly constant waves of new experiences and ideas so it felt like more was accomplished. Then again, it might just be as simple as I experienced my stay in Sweden as a contiguous year and not split into two different semesters.
Whatever the cause, I'd like to know how to duplicate it. As much as I enjoy zipping through boring classes weeks at a time, I wish I could slow down sometimes and experience a day, a week, a year like it is meant to be experienced.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
It burns!
At this moment I'm suffering from the pollen saturated air in Tucson but nevertheless had every intention of writing about how much I had missed the desert in the springtime. Even though the sun is blinding, oppressively hot (and it's not even July) and everything is covered in thorns, it's just so beautiful. It's something I had really missed in Sweden, not to say that I didn't absolutely love Sweden in the spring, but the nature of the, well, nature is completely different. There's no way to compare the two nor a way to combine them. Plus, the scent of the desert in the spring is so compelling but I don't quite know how to describe it. It's spicy, but I don't know if that's just the collective scents of the cacti in bloom or maybe the pollen in the air burning my sinuses. Oddly enough, while some people were near literally incapacitated by their allergies in Sweden, I was perfectly fine. I wonder if you get an immunity to pollen you're not used to and the pollen you are normally exposed to eventually finds your weakness and destroys you.
At this moment I'm suffering from the pollen saturated air in Tucson but nevertheless had every intention of writing about how much I had missed the desert in the springtime. Even though the sun is blinding, oppressively hot (and it's not even July) and everything is covered in thorns, it's just so beautiful. It's something I had really missed in Sweden, not to say that I didn't absolutely love Sweden in the spring, but the nature of the, well, nature is completely different. There's no way to compare the two nor a way to combine them. Plus, the scent of the desert in the spring is so compelling but I don't quite know how to describe it. It's spicy, but I don't know if that's just the collective scents of the cacti in bloom or maybe the pollen in the air burning my sinuses. Oddly enough, while some people were near literally incapacitated by their allergies in Sweden, I was perfectly fine. I wonder if you get an immunity to pollen you're not used to and the pollen you are normally exposed to eventually finds your weakness and destroys you.
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