More fun than Mayonnaise... or at least equally fun... OK, it's less fun, but you're still reading...
More fun than Mayonnaise... or at least equally fun... OK, it's less fun, but you're still reading...
Floor 12
Enter elevator
Floor 10
Old lady enters. Exchange of polite, but cool, head-nod hellos.
Floor 6
Athletic girl skates onto elevator, adjusts songs on iPod Nano.
Floor 5
Old Lady: You know it's illegal to skate inside.
Floor 4
Girl: Yes, I know.
Old Lady: It tears up the floors and ruins the wax.
Floor 3
Old Lady: I guess that's your generation.
Floor 2
Old Lady exits.
Girl looks at me like, "what's her problem"
Floor 1
Me: I am completely appalled by you. I almost got out at floor 2 as a protest.
We say goodbye and exit separate doors.
I wonder what I had been thinking about on Floor 11.
Fri 6/2, 8pm: Player
Sat 6/3, 8pm: Player
Sat 6/3, 10:30pm: Announcer
Sat 6/10, 8pm: Player
Sat 6/10, 10:30pm: Player
Fri 6/23, 8pm: Player
Fri 6/23, 10:30pm: Player
i've never been a big fan of children, but i saw one of the worst behaved children/most apathetic mom while i was at the post office. the postal lady went back to get apathetic mom a package. mom sets full-of-dirt obnoxious child on the counter. obnoxious kid tears the postal stickers off of all the pens and throws the bits of sticker and naked pens on the floor.... all the while, apathetic mom was saying, "you really shouldn't be doing that... oh really... no..."
conversation i wish i had had with the mother:
me: they put those flags on the pens for a reason. tell your kid to knock it off.
a.m.: have you ever tried to raise a kid? there's not that easy?
me: no. i was planning on waiting until i was mature enough to handle the responsibility.
conversation i ended up having with the postal worker (while standing way to the side of her register so that I didn't have to use the counter top where the dusty kid had been sitting):
her: i wish parents could control their kids.
me: that kid was really obnoxious
her: we put these flags on the pens for a reason.
me: you probably don't want them to be stolen.
her (in true civil-service fashion): i could care less about that. without the flags, they roll off and i have to bend down to pick them up....
it was a looooooong trip home. my "window" seat was windowless and after 11 hrs I began to feel a little like a coffin-dweller. particularly since a large chinese man was blocking my view of the onflight movie.
a presidential visit and weather delayed pretty much every airport we tried to leave from. because my flight(s) from philly kept getting delayed, i would go get a new boarding pass for a different itinery because i was going to miss my connection to MSP. after the 3rd itinerary change, security pulled me aside, questioned me about all the changes, bomb checked my shoes/jacket and patted me for weapons.
finally got transfered to midwest airlines, a company i now love. their coach section is like first class with extra wide leather seats + ample legroom. the prices were close to normal coach prices.... best of all they fresh-bake choc chip cookies on every flight. now that's my kind of airline!
Every May 22nd must be Annual dinner with a strange Jess.... last year, I had a long brunch in NYC with a Jess I had never met before. This year, I did dinner with my dad's co-worker's daughter who's living in Barcelona. While last jess was more punk, this jess was more apple pie americana. I'm excited to see what next year's jess is like. Maybe she'll be an astronaut!
P.S. Tuna Tartar is raw.... not tuna with a mayo/pickle tartar sauce.... thankfully, I was able to change my order before the damage was done. Do they not cook any food in Europe?
the computer was down for two days... (interstingly, the same thing happened in the middle of my may trip last year)
highlights:
- tibidabo: amusement park on mountain overlooking barcelona... unfortunately, we didn´t go to the park... you had to buy a full amusement park pass and we only wanted to the ferris wheel above the city... the view was still nice, although polluted...
- bistec cappriccio = beef cappricio = raw beef.... i only saw the beef ¨with parmesean cheese and butter sauce.¨
- susie planned day trip to figueres to visit the dali museum designed by dali for dali. it was very dali.... a little tacky at times... a little dark and disturbed at times... but very intersting and much better than the picasso museum (just his early work) that we saw the day earlier.
- tried ¨horchata¨... supposed to be almond juice... tasted like carrot juice with cream... yeah....
- today i ate every pastery i could find coated in chocolate... croissants... dessert waffles... and chocolate pudding in a crisp kit-kat cone coated in chocolate. shot for the chocolate museum, but was never able to find it.
36 hours left....
tried going a bunch of places, but we couldn´t find them, they didn´t look interesting or were closed... however, the day was not wasted:
- finally found a real chocolate shop and spend 7€ on different desserts... all very good...
- wound up in a ¨family area¨ ... outdoor school basketball game... children playing in a park... and a group of 60-80 yr olds doing the traditional sardanes circle dance to a live, outdoor band dominated by double reeds. i´ve never seen so many old people jump at once before.
- walked by the meditteranian and waved to heather around 3pm. couldn´t tell if she was waving back.
- found a great italitan restaurante. the back patio (surrounded by concrete and ivy) was a beautiful garden terrace area. the weather was perfectly crisp. there were no smokers around us. it was the best ambiance we have found in bcn.
susie and i swiped our subway cards and started down the stairway. i always get very excited by metros... the routes are map-reading at its purest (no turn towards the gas station when you reach the barn) and i love the efficiency of 300 people barreling down the carpool lane... i saw a train at the bottom of the steps (which is even better, so we don´t have to wait). we made it just as the doors closed. then, susie looked at the train name. not only were we on the wrong train, but we were headed the wrong direction so we couldn´t even connect.
sagrada familia
... was the whole reason i wanted to see barcelona, but the tour was disappointing. i had no idea that they were less than 50% done. scafolding everywhere. however, our second pass through the church (after a trip to the museum) was much better. the museum talked about how gaudi used nature (seashells, spirals, leaves, trees, waves, etc) as his basic church elements. you could see them all and it was really quite fantastic the scale he used them at.
most nerve wracking: climbing up to the top and crossing the stone bridge. i clung tight enough to the handrail to leave an imprint. my thighs hurt all night from hundreds of steps of shaking.
i knew spaniards had a tough upper lip, but i never thought they also had an equally tough roof of their mouth. the caustic crust on the french bread sanwiches are tearing my mouth apart... but they are delicious...
in a jetlagged haze yesterday, we visited sagrada familia and i was grossly disappointed... but today, with those 18 hrs of sleep under my belt i mandated to my sister that we visit casa batllo. a-fricken-mazin! gaudi is, in fact, the genio that i knew him to be. everywhere you looked was beautiful... wood carved doors, stain glass room dividers, swirled ceilings, window handles that clung to your hand. by far, my favorite was the dining room overlooking a mosaic balcony. (it was the perfect tour= i was blown away by the beauty and creative expression. susie was impressed with its structural solidity and the engineering aspects of the tour). as we left my mind quickly flipped through its rolo-dex of ideas, looking for the million dollar screen play which would allow me to build a house like that.
eating dinner on la rambla, we ran into the airport couple who was flying our itinery. (mama was big-city demanding and always checking in to make sure they would make their connection to barcelona.) if susie and i were more social, we would have asked them to dine with us. but being engineers and computer guys, we sighed when they kept walking.
exiting the subway on the way home, i saw a second amaing builing: an office park built on stilts above a pool of water.
day one is a jetlagged blur... i vaugely remember doing or hallucinating these things:
- eating a bacon and cheese sandwich while people watching on la rambla.
- seeing the Sagrada Familia for the first time. dissapointed that you can´t get any perspective.
- lots of public work projects. bcn seems junky. 2000 construction sites, 4 workers total
- tried to replicate a fire in hearth with pretzel logs and moterella. my matches keep breaking and i can´t get the fire started.
- rode subway to subway because it´s the only way to stay awake. sitting equals sleep.
- htoel has english breakfast, but only for the english. being american. we don´t qualify.
- finally, at 5 pm went to bed. slept until 11.30am the next day. feel so much better...
check in:
you can´t check in because you´ll for sure miss your connection. the plane leaving chicago is delayed.
proper respose:
like hell we´re giving up like that.
flight 1:
kid kept kicking my thigh with his dirty shoes. as much as i hate the germy airline magasizines, i set one on my leg so he would kick that. susie and i hold memorial when we were supposed to be leaving for barcelona. preparing for war.... can they get us any where to spain? to europe? can they extend our stay by a day since they stole one from us?
flight 2:
...is delayed... we have 12 minutes to run and catch it across 2 concourses. near end, a cart picks us up, literally drives us around a corner and says ¨¨you´re at concourse A, you can walk from here¨¨
we make it... we try to sleep... mostly impossible for me... i can´t even sleep under normal conditions...
with 60 minutes of sleep under my belt, we arrive at 8am... our first day in bcn.
* attended a 3 hour graduation. (imagine 2 hours of reading the phone book, getting up once to stretch your legs and use the civic center bathroom... ick!)
* mother's day river boat cruise with a dixie band and band concert featuring a whole troupe of retired band instructors.
* haven't had a real meal in a couple day... mother's day ice-cream cake... baptism brownies... grad party cheese platters (featuring the new Salsa n' cheddaaar)
* final preparations: tomorrow's the big flight. just want to be there. it's been busy with illinois activities, but my mind has been oogling la sagrada familia....
my friend ramando went to best buy to try out a camera that was on sale at bestbuy.com.... he loved it and wanted to buy it, but it wasn't on sale in the store. the clerks wouldn't price-match their own corporation, so he sat at one of their test computers and bought it over the internet at bestbuy.com...
now how's that for a good chunk of americana.
site note: tomorrow begins my travel log, updated on an as-computers-are-available basis.
Walking home, I stumbled across a leather bag near my apartment. It looked like someone had left it on the top of their car.... took the corner too quickly... and then it rolled off and down the hill, spewing its contents everywhere. Pawing through the wreckage, looking for a phone number, I was amazed to unwravel this guy's life:
- Real Estate Agent commissions on pay stubs
- Covey Planner with daily checkboxes for "exercise", "walk dog", "prayer", "reba time", "reading".
- Does he like the TV show Reba? Her music? Actually, a "Rebecca" was listed on an emergency contact slip.
- Banks with Anchor; Phone through AT&T. Lives in the metro, but his family is from Hudson.
- Carries a picture of his dog in the front cover of his leather planner.
- came off as very professional. leather. nice pens. well organized. expensive looking
It made me wonder, what's in my friends' bags? what would someone think if they found my bag?
- Toothbrush, toothpaste, fingernail clipper, aloe klenexes, lotion, vitamines, aspirin, lactate, vitamin c, zicam (to ward off colds), cough drops
- Metro Transit map.
- Calendar (3 months), filled with "shows" and "rehearsals"... about twice a month, someone's name is listed on a box.
- arm strap about ready to break.
- Inside composed of two plastic grocery sacks (to "waterproof" my stuff). One sack contains my writing journal with strange stories and ideas scratched here and there... along with 4 plays, pages of poetry and other stories I have printed out in really small font. (2 pages per sheet, duplexed to 4 pages/sheet... most filled with corrections...)
- The other sack has my improv notebook with rules for 60 improv games.... notes for me.... lists of shakespearean words.... lists of words that begin with different letters.... lists of relationships people have... random sequences of letters scrolled across the top...
- ipod headphones (but no ipod)
- plastic fork, empty ziplock bag.
- a finance book critically evaluating modern portfolio theory and asset allocations.
Once a year, I fall in love with a movie. Last night, it was LA Story. It had a beautifully suspended magical realism, like Like Water For Chocolate; a wit only Steve Martin could bring to the table; and masterful weaving like Annie Hall. I can't begin to express how much I enjoyed it... instead, I find myself obsessing over when I can watch it again.
- The profundity of Harris being unhappy, but too busy being happy to realize...
- The insanity of the El Pollo Del Mar five-star hotel...
- The quest for any sort of sign to save you from your boredom beyond belief.
Last night I dropped off a baby gift for a friend who's due any day now....
Dream Snippet
My friend and I were driving to the park for a fun afternoon.... we were sitting in the back seat talking, but there was some strange, curly haired man driving us... I'd never seen him before. When I'd say, "There's our exit," he'd keep driving. All of my suggestions were ignored.... we went everywhere he wanted to go.... we did everything he wanted to do.... and I had to be quiet when he started talking....
My friend doesn't know the sex of his baby, but I bet 98 to 2 that it's a curly hair masculine chauffer.
"Big Bad Bertha" was driving today. She's cantankerous, full of spirit and requires a double-wide chair. Usually she's able to control herself, but today two cars induced honking fits. Oh my, to have been the horn on that bus.
Equally fascinating was the man-version of me--what I'd be like if testosterone were pumping through my vanes/vains. He was confident, self-assured and dressed to the 11's with a black pin-stripe suit and white partially-unbuttoned man-blouse. My backpack was replaced with a leather attaché case and my iPod shuffle was upgraded to a Nano. We both, however, were handsome, intelligent tall-drinks-of-water. Before B.B. Bertha started jarring the brakes, we both approached the bus exit. We raced for the same Blegen door. He was one of the few people I found challenging to keep pace with.
Is it May? That kind of sneaked up on me....
Dream Snippet: Blair's Net
I was doing an expirament with wood thickness, density and boyancy.... but PoliSci Professors kept interrupting me to ask about my research. The expirament was for the first chapter of the financial advise book I was authoring. Too many of my friends had declaired bankrupcy, so I decided to write a book to impart monetary wisdom. I was going to start with the wood expirament and then demonstrate how that's a metaphor for my saving guide.
Wendy R. told me the book reminded her of Blair's Net, a finance book her brother wrote. I told her that book was my inspiration and asked her how he came up with the title. It turns out the author's real name is Mr. Blairsnet.