| carrier | flight no. | departing | at | arriving | at | cabin |
| aa | 826 | orlando | 6.17.2003 08:02am |
chicago | 6.17.2003 9:41am |
first |
| aa | 153 | chicago | 6.17.2003 11:00am |
tokyo | 6.18.2003 2:00pm |
business |
| aa | 128 | tokyo | 6.24.2003 5:15pm |
san jose | 6.24.2003 10:15am |
business |
| aa | 452 | san jose | 6.24.2003 12:06pm |
dallas | 6.24.2003 5:35pm |
first |
| aa | 3054 | dallas | 6.24.2003 7:13pm |
orlando | 6.24.2003 10:42pm |
first |
Monthly Archive for May, 2003
tonight i felt melancholy, and too tired to go to bed. you see, i spent the bulk of the night at malibu grand prix, where i spent dollars and dollars of other people’s money on house of the dead 2, jurassic park, star wars: pod racer, cruisin usa: exotica [?], and skee-ball. you might wonder (a) why i was at an arcade, (b) who i was there with, and (c) why i was spending other people’s money. these are all valid questions of course, but i don’t feel like answering them.
the point is that any night full of shooting lasers at zombies, and full of going for the 100,000 hole in skee-ball (with zombie-like tenacity), is bound to be a night of deep questioning, soul-searching, and identity-seeking. and what better method for searching than google? you see, it occasionally occurs to me to wonder who i am, how i am identified, and such. i am sure questions like these occur to most people a good deal of the time, but i am blessedly unperturbed by them for the most part. still, there are moments where i would wish to examine my roots, revisit the history of my life, trace out the pattern of my growth–essentially, to assure myself that i am not disconnected from my own history, and that the narrative of my life is unfolding in a meaningful and acceptable way.
roots, however, are notoriously hard for me to come by. where am i from? not california. not florida. texas? maybe. maybe not. papua new guinea? i wish i could say yes, but i can’t, on pain of posing. arizona? probably not. which are my childhood streets? there were so many…
of course, i jealously regard my childhood as the best imaginable, and the multiple moves as pre-requisite to a fuller understanding of culture and the world. so in the end i can’t be frustrated with the situation. and i’m not. still, it makes my past more hazy to me–more mysterious. less accessible by car or phone. all my pre-collegiate friends, from 1st grade on, are thousands of miles away. so who is there with me, keeping an eye on who i’m becoming? no one.
so it becomes necessary for me to go back periodically…to engage in the equivalent of looking over old scrapbooks and what have you. tonight i opened up microsoft outlook and went to my e-mail archive. i am fastidious about the storing and organizing of e-mails, so in a moment’s time i was reading the oldest e-mails still on my computer. as it happens, i have every e-mail ever received or sent by me since exactly 4 years ago. before that, alas, i was not so concerned with saving such information (all too precious, little that i knew) and the memoirs of my early internet days remain lost, forever unable to be teased piecemeal out of correspondence.
luckily, enough was left from before the move to florida that i felt sufficiently transported into the past. i was slightly shocked by what i read: my words were so very different, and yet so very alike, to what i would write now. the attempted wit and sarcasm were very much there, but it seemed so young, so un-cynical. i was less wise, and also less foolish at the same time (if you think this is impossible, you are wrong: i sense both growing in me every day, to my frustration).
i pored over e-mails to and from old friends with whom i haven’t spoken, in some cases, since those very letters were written. it became addictive, drug-like…i couldn’t get enough of the words of the previous selves of my friends, and the words with which my previous self responded, sometimes after having been painstakingly constructed to impress, to delight, to woo, to influence, to control…
clearly, the past is a powerful thing. powerfully dangerous, of course: nothing is easier than becoming mired in it. but powerfully instructive. i hope that these old e-mails will continue to exist, as they age like good wine, ripe for the tasting of my 40-year old self. how much wisdom will i have then? probably not so much that i couldn’t learn still from the advice of my friends and myself: age 16. a digital time capsule, if you will.
but i ramble. the excursion into the former days inspired me to look up old friends and see what they were up to. hence the reference to google earlier. thanks to its speedy algorithms i now know, in some cases with surprising detail, what a number of my friends from texas are doing, where they are going to school, etc… and though i didn’t speak with any of these friends, or connect with them in any real way, i feel as if i did connect in some sense, as i was reminded that they continued living their lives after i left. this comes as a shock to me every so often–that people move and think and grow when i am not looking at them. it’s a scary and humbling thought, really.
of course, the decision to extend the night further and write about this melancholy has taken some of the sweetness out of the past’s draught. reminiscing is very certainly one of those things that must be done, not talked about, for it to have any use. and now i have destroyed its gift. but it is not a loss without some recompense, for some day, possibly years from now, i may read this entry and come to realize some important thing about myself through it. which is, of course, exactly what has been under discussion. so it is no doubt a reasonable expectation.
but it’s damn late. good night.
last thursday i flew home. shortly after arriving at my house, i left again to see the matrix reloaded with my friends. it was a fantastic movie, and i’m still shuffling bits of it around in my head to construct a coherent plot structure.
the few days after that were filled with parties. graduation parties, mostly, but i also attended one wedding (an outside wedding, on the grass, sunny, 95 degrees, and humid as a glass of water). the parties were also fun. at the first one i went to (my sister’s), i was able to run around with my brother outside in a terrific thunderstorm, tossing a frisbee. later on in that same thunderstorm duty found me on the roof, unclogging one of our gutters, and praying that if lightning decided to strike, it would go for something besides me. the rest of the party was spent gradually losing a game of chess to my good friend josh, and eating little croissant hot dogs or something.
i realized all of a sudden at these parties that my sister and her friends have grown up. it seems that until last weekend i had still been thinking of them all as if they were high school freshman, trapped in shy and insecure bodies and minds. and then, magically, they now appear 5 or 6 years older. the girls are all beautiful and no longer the annoying, giggle-prone crazies everyone knows high school girls are, and the guys are for the most part taller than me, laid back, studly, and surprisingly wise. for the first time, maybe, i was able to hang out with many of these people, not because they were my “sister’s friends”, but because they were fun in and of themselves. (this again shows my snobbiness in who i find enjoyable, and for what reasons. however, i think maturity is a somewhat allowable criterion for enjoyable hanging out)
obviously, most of these kids were just as mature and just as fun a year ago, and so you might wonder what the big deal is. the deal is, i think, that there is a line crossed when someone graduates from high school, and this line, in the friendship calculus, adds a few years. so, if i am allowed to be friends with people at most 3 years younger than me, i will be able to hang out with high school freshman when i am a high school senior, but when i am a freshman in college, i can only hang out with high school seniors and up (or perhaps juniors). this puts those who were high school freshmen when i was a senior out of my “friend” range until they graduate.
obviously, that’s a bunch of crap. but it’s fun to make up. the point is, my little sister’s all grown up and i’m so excited to see who she will choose to be in life! and the other point is, if you are an older brother with a younger sister, don’t be too mean to her and her friends when they are in the awkward high school phase, because if you’re not careful they will grow up to be amazingly hot and you’ll be kicking yourself. then again, you could always date older women, like me.
what else did i do in orlando? i went running a few times with david, once at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, in a sunny 95-degree swelter. i went to a pool hall for the first time in my life and lost miserably at cutthroat and nine-ball. and, get this, i randomly went to the pete yorn show at the house of blues in orlando on monday, thanks to the paste-musicking of jason killingsworth. it was a pretty good show.
soon enough, of course, the fun and not-working had to end, and i flew back to stanford on tuesday. luckily, i had a lot to look forward to, as the following night was the pedro the lion, ester drang, and starflyer 59 concert. it was in san francisco, and i went with show-loving friends mackenzie, chuck, and alex. i haven’t thought about it enough to say for sure, but it may have been my favorite SF show ever. ester drang was beautiful, starflyer was actually entertaining, and pedro rocked harder than he ever has before. in particular, the live version of ’second best’ (played with 6 people on stage) alone was worth the price of admission. on top of that, not being satisfied to provide us with musical delicacies which can only be likened to the sad addictiveness of life itself, dave bazan was on his best verbal game, making clever comment after insightful observation time and time again.
and that brings us to now. 2 am. back from seeing the matrix reloaded a second time. as i said, good stuff. and as i now say, good night!
back from a trip! it was great. details to follow…
for me the way to deal with failure is to write music. this song is the result of many, many failures:
last weekend:
i drove down to santa barbara on thursday afternoon with one of my suitemates, dave. we stayed at his house near thousand oaks thursday night, then woke up early friday morning to reserve a campsite north of santa barbara at el capitan state park. we did this because last weekend was the class of 2004 cornerstone surf and camping trip. as it turned out, there wasn’t a whole lot of surfing, because the waves pretty much sucked. instead, we played hours and hours of beach football and volleyball. i had lots of fun scrambling around the seaside cliffs in the cool air that brought out the bright blue of the sky. we cruised around santa barbara like the studly men that we are, picking up chicks left and right. there were so many chicks following each of us, you would not believe. we barbecued and lit stuff on fire and generally had a sweet time. i slept outside in the 40-degree weather, no tent: just sleeping bag and therm-a-rest. it was gorgeous to roll over and see the ocean shimmering with the reflected light of the bright moon, and to feel the strong sea breeze. california is where it’s at.
next weekend:
i’m going home on thursday for my sister’s graduation (which is the following monday). i plan to (a) see the matrix 2 with my friends, (b) hang out with my friends and family, and (c) sit in the spa for an obscene amount of time smoking various forms of tobacco and reading. this will more or less be the extent of my time at home, and i will love it.
now:
in between these two trips, i will struggle to find motivation to (a) catch up on the work i didn’t do last weekend, and (b) get a head-start on the work due when i get back from next weekend’s trip. in the end, i won’t find that motivation, and i’ll spend way too much time sitting in front of my computer either procrastinating or….well, that’s about all you can do with a computer i guess.
on the positive side, there’s really nothing due until 2 or 3 weeks from now, when i have 3 massive papers and projects to turn in. also, tonight i’m playing laser tag. life is good.
just a few moments ago, i was in a somewhat contrived and predictable bike accident. see, every time i bike back to my suite, there is a rather narrow walkway, at the end of which is a 90-degree left turn. at this intersection of sorts there are usually any number of bikes parked in any number of random configurations. thus, biking through them usually takes the skill and balance of an acrobat.
until now, i have never failed to go through this gauntlet successfully. either i use my mad biking talents to navigate the choppy waters, or i realize it’s futile and walk my bike along.
today, i said to myself as i approached said Corral of Death, “this will be the hardest one yet!”, meaning of course that it looked well-nigh impossible to turn without crashing into the other bikes. i thought for a moment about calling it quits and walking safely through, leading my bike at my side like a trusty steed (in fact, the brand of my cycle is “iron horse”). instead, i recklessly decided to take my chances.
i neared the Turn of Utter Dismay and slowed down to a halt, using all my balance to keep steady (this is exactly what you have to do to make it–stop almost completely and then hop the bike around while stationary). all was going well, and i let out a bit of air to release some pressure. just at that moment, my right pedal brushed the rubber of a nearby tire, and caught slightly–of course, i knew then it was all over. i struggled valiantly but ultimately vainly to regain balance, but my initial over-compensation shot me down to the left, where i crashed into a girl’s pink mountain bike. this bike was attached to a rack so it stayed where it was but just turned sideways–me on top of it and my bike on top of me.
i took stock at that point and realized that my leg was pinned between the two bikes, my foot having scraped along the gears on the way down. i tried to right myself, but i was horizontal and my bike’s drop-forward handle bar extension on the left side had interlocked with the water bottle holder of the pink bike, making it impossible to clear the way for some leverage. eventually i had to extricate my leg, scraping it again on the chain in the process.
then i was able to untangle my bike, right the other one, and walk the five meters back to my suite.
it was a failure, true, but i’m not ashamed. i don’t think anyone else could have managed it, either. of course, i do have a few scrapes to show for my hubris. fortunately, one of them, when looked at from the appropriate angle, looks quite like south america, and the chain grease and blood on my foot form a pattern that clearly resembles a ribbed and leathery dragon wing. i feel that these battle scars are a glorious form of art, and i shall leave them unattended until i am forced to take a shower late tonight.