Returning from the Void

Hi! Thanks for tuning in or reading back to this post.

It's been a while since updates and I owe you an apology. Unfortunately for me, it's got to be a bigger apology than just one blog post. This blog has been dark for quite a while. Some things changed, others stayed the same.

Most importantly, very shortly Brandi and I will welcome our daughter into the world, at which point this blog will likely be inundated with pictures and anecdotes about the cutest baby in the world. I don't really believe this. Most babies to me look like Winston Churchill, but they say all that changes when it's your baby. We'll see. Babies steal your brainwaves, so if there's an even longer gap (say, until she goes to college), well, at least I tried.

I've changed posts within the University and now work at just one office as an IT Support Specialist, a title made up just for me, which automatically makes me an expert in the field. Consider me the sniper of malfunctioning applications.

I've been published! (Online.) I will be posting links to stories as I find them. Some, I've microblogged over at Facebook and need to dig up once more, but if you're interested you will be able to find my fiction.

More to come!

GRR

From Acme Heart Maker.
Inspired by my work with Dell Tech Support.

The Holiday Lush Decorations Must Come Down!

I saw this yesterday on a walk through my neighborhood, an entire
wreath made of corks at the doorstep of a local charity resale.
Finally, the Christmas decorations for alcoholics are coming down.
(We've been busy, dammit! And sick!) Maybe it's time to start on a
brand new cork wreath, which means spending less on screw top bottles
and maybe dipping a little more into our dialysis money. I wonder if
they found a use for the bottle tree and the beerstletoe.

On a side note, Brandi and I bought a bunch of wine on our trip to New
Buffalo, MI, which apparently has winery tours where they drive you.
Wow. A frozen paradise, we stopped into the supermarket for snacks and
toothpaste and walked out with six bottles of wine and no toothpaste.
The only thing standing in the way of drinking, womanizing and writing
like Hemmingway is that I am no Hemmingway, since I never received the
requisite turtleneck. Some fantasies must remain forever that.

And some, like a wreath made of corks, are blessedly within reach.

Me and Tuxedo Cat

Patrick and I try a Photo Booth shot together. I think it turned out well, particularly because he's always so well dressed.

I deliberately cut off the top of my head because my hair has gotten too darn long. It's a protest against cold weather and snow. I don't think winter got the message.

Mammal

Brandi and I are on our writer's retreat at the southwest corner of Michigan. We came in last night, taking off from work early and braving the beginning of rush hour traffic and sub-zero temperatures that caused the windows of our car to not only fog but ice up. It's always particularly frustrating in winter to put on all of your layers, hop in the car, and then struggle to get the top layer off while you're sitting at a traffic light or, worse, driving on the highway. I've grown quite skilled at yanking my gloves off with my mouth.

Of course, even if you get down to just a t-shirt in front of vents pouring out heat like jet engines, you've still got the long underwear and pants, and, if you're like me, the pajama pants you added in between because, hey, it's not layering unless you're having trouble flexing your knees.

Oddly, I'm starting to get used to the weather. Today, it warmed up to ten degrees and on our trip to the grocery store, Brandi and I couldn't stop remarking about how warm it felt. Is it warm when a can of soda will freeze so hard it pops the top for you? Warm when you can't get the car washed but have to settle for brushing the salt off the windshield with your glove? Warm when the icicles on the house across the street stretch practically roof-to-ground? Compared to yesterday, my body somehow says "yes."

This is the crazy part of being a mammal.

I made the choice Thursday to walk from a train stop up to a Polish restaurant where Brandi and her work friends (but good work friends, Diane and Ryan) planned on tucking away the heaviest potato-and-veal-based foods Eastern Europe has to offer. It was about minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and I had the option of waiting for the bus, but Chicago bus drivers have the same "meh" attitude you saw in the Soviet Union.

"It's not as though they have to stand out in the open," they might say, and they would be right, because the CTA saw fit to provide shelters every mile or so with roofs and walls that only leave a two foot gap at the bottom, so the wind chills only your feet, ankles, knees and lower thighs. Most have advertisements that you can read over and over again while you curse your god and wait for the bus that never seems to arrive.

I walked about forty minutes and saw a bus come only once, when I was about a half a block away from the restaurant. True irony? or just the Alanis Morisette style of terrible events that nobody wants to happen to them? By that time, the cold had killed the battery in my iPod, which went from a 50% charge to 20% to dead in the span of about a minute after I took it out of my coat pocket. If you're like me, you never pay attention to the optimal operating temperatures of electronic devices when you buy them because you so rarely come close to them. Next time, I'll probably keep it on the inside.

Of course, I didn't realize that cold had killed the little music player at the time, so when I got to the restaurant--first, as the rest of our small party was running late--I pulled it out, trying to figure out how I could plug in my USB to charge it. It was so cold, the glass on the front began to acquire condensation, and then that condensation began to ice up. Remembering what water can do to electronics, I treated the player like a hypothermia victim and stashed it close to my belly. It worked. The little guy is still alive and kicking to this day.

This is the great part of being a mammal: saving electronics with your own belly warmth.

I look forward to the springtime, when my antlers begin to grow and I am forced to spar with my fellow males over the attentions of the females who will bear our young. Luckily, unlike some species I don't care to mention (spiders), they will not eat our heads when we mate.

This, too, is the great part of being a mammal.

Testing the Limits of the Unknowable

I read an amazing article in New Scientist recently, about scientists searching for gravitational waves and possibly finding something much more important. This is kind of a neat by product of good science, where the person doing the testing finds something went wrong and says, "Oh, that's interesting..." before going on to, for instance, invent the microwave oven, penicillin, or the flying machine.

You can pretty squarely blame Stephen Hawking's brilliance. Once again studying event horizons , he theorized that information from an "evaporating" black hole does not get lost when it disappears, but is mapped onto the virtual quantum particles at its edge. That edge, kind of like a shadow, is a two dimensional form that exists in our three dimensional universe, and that information has to make a weird transition from the inside of the black hole, where it's 3D, to the outside, where it's 2D. Another good example of 3D information mapped onto a 2D surface is holograms, hence the title, "Our world may be a giant hologram..." which is slightly inaccurate, since the set of things that might be holograms include every particle in the universe, of which our world is only a tiny, tiny part.

They go on to connect more dots. The event horizon of a black hole is roughly analogous to the the Big Bang, when everything in the universe was packed into a segment of space smaller than an atom. What blew it apart is a complete mystery still, but the behavior of all that mass in that tiny amount of space is exactly like a black hole. Even more amazing, if you were able to travel faster than light, 13.7 billion light years in any direction, you would reach the edge of the universe, where you would see an inside-out version of the mapping going on at the edges of black holes. In fact, all of the matter in our universe would have the information of the big bang mapped onto it.

All of this really gets my science and science fiction juices flowing, so I'm going to subject you to some of my thoughts. Here goes:

• As a black hole evaporates, the event horizon grows smaller, since the mass inside of it no longer has the ability to capture light as far away from the singularity inside of it. Our universe is different, though, since it's basically a black hole turned inside out. And evidence has shown that the energy inside of our universe is increasing, as matter is pushed farther apart as the result of "dark energy," which might, uncounted eons from now, result in space flying apart so quickly that even atoms are unable to hold together. This would be called "the Big Rip." (Which is the opposite of what scientists expected when they made up "the Big Crunch.")
  
• Does this mean that the total amount of information in the universe is increasing? And can an increasing amount of information result in the one-way temporal direction known as entropy?
• What caused the expansion of the universe in the first place? This is beyond the scope of the article, but I'm dreadfully curious. Since the force is so mysterious, almost any speculation is useless, but I wonder if I can spin another analogy with atomic nuclei. Put two protons near each other and they fly apart, but include a neutron and they stay together, forming a helium nucleus. Put two neutrons and it's a helium nucleus in a special case known as an alpha particle. Three neutrons and it's unstable again. Move up the periodic table of the elements in order of neutrons and protons and you see this happen again, with the more things packed into the nucleus, the more unstable they become. Except... as humans experiment with energies not found in nature, there is some evidence that there might be what some call "islands of stability" hidden in the far recesses, well after Thorium and Einsteinium and Yourmomium. What if the universe is the inverse of that, with a lot of stability in relatively lower masses ("lower" being a relative term, since we're talking masses smaller than galactic superclusters), but explosive when enough mass is reached.
• Given that quantum mechanics means almost anything can happen if you wait long enough, and virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear and disappear constantly at a scale impossible for us to detect, eventually in a very, very long timeframe, it is possible that a particle could appear that is the mass of the entire universe. The challenge is that it's impossible to test, except in very, very long timeframes, and I just don't have that kind of patience.
• One result of the above is that an antiparticle would have to also have been produced, which is interesting, because I always wanted to have an evil twin. And now I've got one.
  

Normally, I like to include a picture with a post, but the photographer I sent outside the universe to take a snapshot is bound by the laws of spacetime, and promises to return in 27.4 billion years, which is well below the time constraint for "the Big Rip," but too late for this post to have any relevance. I'll do better next time.

Traffic Out the Window

Surreal and beautiful.

Up in the Air

On my path to the north end of the park, I spied a cluster of people
who climbed into the trees to get a better look at the mega screens.
People stood in a big fan in front of them and sat in rows along the
curb at street level. Families, including a surprising number of kids
under ten, are starting to find seats on the lawn. Here in the "B-
list" rally, we were allowed to bring in bags and blankets, so we have
that over our 78,000 friends. Food is not permitted... to bring in,
though Connie's Pizza thankfully bridges the gap for the hungry. Lines
for pizza and sodas are as long or longer than the people camped out
in front of the CNN displays.

In my quadrant, police took the unusual step of forming a double line
of modular fences to split the field in two. For the life of me, I
cannot fathom the reason for this, except perhaps to give them a place
to hang out and scan the crowd. Not far from here, super bright arc
lights create a pool of daylight no doubt attractive and useful to the
numerous camerapeople wandering the rally. I briefly considered
hanging out for camera bait, but mischief is far from my mind tonight.

Red states are starting to go for McCain, pushing him over 135. In
spite of the jump, CNN explains that his path to the White House is
increasingly perilous. People cheered when CNN brought up the Senate
race in Minnesota, Al Franken versus the Republican incumbent, what's-
his-face. I like those people. I read at dinner that Hillary Clinton
made her 75th appearance in favor of Obama while promoting Franken and
trying to push a 60 Democrat filibuster proof majority in the Senate.
Good on her.

CNN is showing Star Wars-level 3D graphics that lead me to suspect
that after this race they are going to assault the Death Star.
Meanwhile, the third person has tripped over my feet while I sit here
writing this. For the umpteenth time, I wish I had packed sneakers to
go with my black leather dress shoes, all-but invisible in the pool of
darkness formed by my body.

I was stopped on my way here for directions to Monroe, a challenge
since there is one way in or out of this rally and it does not cross
Monroe.

A Land Rover commercial just came on, voiced over by the actor who
plays Mohindet Suresh on Heroes. Just one problem with the soothing
British tones emanating from the tube: the actor is American
(surprise!). What a pity for that actor to achieve fame unrelated to
him as a person. I guess he has to settle for diving into his vault of
money a la Scrooge McDuck. Poor soul.

Live from Chicago's Election Rally B in Millennium Park

I walked from work over to the Millennium Park election rally. I'm
kicking myself now knowing that I could have had tickets to the 78,000-
attended "A-list" rally through Brandi, but it's time to make lemonade
from lemons.

A number of enormous, 150" televisions around the park make it feel
like an enormous sports bar, minus the liquor and crappy food. On the
way in, I watched a couple students take a pull from a hip flask, and
my heart opened to envy. After running the Chicago marathon last year
and the year before, it's nice to spend time in this place feeling
something other than exhaustion. Or at least, exhaustion of a
different kind.

Entrepreneurs make their way through the crowd selling Obama t-shirts,
buttons, photographs. A silver-painted man is posing for photographs
with some out-of-towners. Also on the way in, a number of fringe
groups earnestly handed out pro-whatever literature: Communism,
Socialism, Darwinianism (I think). Greedy.

The lines aren't too bad at the port-a-potties, which are themselves
showing above-average decorum. Around construction sites, you see them
with funny names like "Lepre-CAN" and "Honey Bucket." Here, we see a
simple sticker reading "National." Way to go, toilets!

Every time CNN calls a state for Obama, the crowd raises a cheer, and
a boo for McCain. A lot of the talking points echo meaninglessly from
competing monster stereos near the televisions, unless you're huddled
closely enough. Obama is over 200. It's time to move out.

Failure as Artwork

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a shiny toy while Brandi was out of town: an eeePC netbook, 8.9" of screen almost enough to squint at while writing the great American novel.

Almost immediately, my attention was drawn to it, especially after I realized I wasn't going to make it through my Java programming class in one piece. So I dropped the class and picked up the mini computer.

After a day's worth of tinkering with it, I realized I had completely hosed the system and had to wipe it, reinstalling from the DVD Asus kindly included. This happened shortly thereafter when I installed the wrong system, very deliberately as it turned out.

Eventually, I figured out a less ambitious vision of what the computer could accomplish and put that together. The final system could compose documents in OpenOffice's Writer, race lightcycles in Armagetron, and play text-based adventure game Dungeon Crawl, a game so addictive that it advanced ahead of the twenty-years-more-contemporary Wii to become my favorite computer addiction.

Eventually, I got curious again and started adding things to the system. I went a bridge too far on that one. Turns out, the package manager for the Basic desktop is not compatible with the Synaptic Package Manager, and the security update I thought myself so clever for downloading hosed my system to the point where, to update any programs, Synaptic told me I had to uninstall absolutely everything. Xandros, and probably Linux in general, is one of the few environments where you can actually dig so vigorously that you will open a hole underneath you into which you will promptly fall. And so I did.

I lost a few things: the ability to compile Java, a few weeks' worth of diaries that mostly recorded my angst at dropping the class (and yet still receiving email updates from the teacher) and trying to write more stories to fill the gap of creation, a desktop I thought pretty cool. I wish for the life of me I could recall how I ever got the Java compiler to work on this computer, but it may call for the blood of a goat, and we ate the last of him two weeks ago.

Also hammering home the lessons of failure for me this week, my agent sent me on two auditions, with a third one tomorrow. I don't think I did well. Today, I spent an hour and a half waiting to perform four lines of a monologue about the great, low prices offered by a local flooring/carpeting company with a famously low-rent theme song. Ninety minutes to memorize the four lines, and when they asked me to go off script ("Okay, now we'll drop the crutch...") I just stared blankly. Off... what? I'm terrible at memorizing. The first two went all right, delivered in a spokesman tone, but the last two, a testimonial, I'm pretty sure I whiffed. And here I'd hoped I'd finally made it (locally) to be played ad nauseum in local commercial spots. Damn my Absent-Minded Professor attitude!

At least there's always tomorrow.

Blue Sky Day

Today, I:
- Drew a picture.
- Submitted a short (98 words) story.
- Folded laundry.
- Worked.
- Programmed Java.
- Blogged.
- Told my wife she was the best thing that happened to me.

Tonight I will:
- Work out.
- Clean.
- Pet my cats.
- Eat dinner.
- Sleep.

I am:
- Very happy.

Invader from an Alternate Dimension

I got tired of shaving my whole face this week, so the evil look is
starting to take shape.

Funny thing is, I carved out the shape of the Van Dyke (goatees are
chin only; no mustache) Tuesday. Thursday morning, as Brandi and I got
ready for work, she turned to me and said, "When did you start growing
THAT?" We'd been hanging out for a day and a half already. I think my
baby needs new glasses.

New Term Friday

It's Friday, and, not necessarily apropros to the day, I would like to coin a new term I'm finding a lot more in my job: a Vystery. This is the error that happens in Windows Vista that happens once, or perhaps over and over, and which has no obvious or search-friendly reason or solution. It just happens. It's happening to me, now, on a new tablet, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why this particular Fujitsu freaked out on me when I went into tablet mode, then refused to give me the Task Manager when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.

"Logon process has failed to create the security options dialog," is about as friendly as it got, which wasn't very.

Yet after restarting the little beast, everything was nearly hunky-dory, as though, in the locked room Agatha Christie mystery, the lights went out and the body just disappeared. Still, as your faithful computer Poirot, it's my job to see where that body went and who did it. And I'm looking at you, Captain Fellswarth. Your sordid history with Windows DLLs means it's entirely likely you kidnapped C:\Windows\system32\dbgeng.dll and stashed her in your secret cove, only to have her washed away with the reboot tide. Your days are numbered, Fellswarth.

Get Curious!

The weekend before last, Brandi and I gleefully took a few days off and headed out west to Portland, Oregon, to see Bob and Stacey. A bit of backstory on those two: Bob and I started working together years ago... a number perhaps measuring as high as a decade... when we both took classes at the Annoyance Theatre. Bob later joined the cast of my children's show, "Kid Mystery," which alarmed director Fred Mowery and I due to the fact that after we had cast him as the insatiable eater Tad Huff, he revealed he was a diabetic and shot up insulin three times a day. He also said it was okay, and that he wouldn't eat before a show, which in retrospect should have shown me just how dedicated Bob was to the art of performance.

Later on, I would have the pleasure of performing with Bob on iO's longform improv team, "Space Mountain," in ComedySportz, and forcing him to both sing and dance in my other children's show, "The Paper Spaceship," during which time he took his first tentative steps towards a relationship with his now-fiancée, Stacey.

Much to my regret, I would not have a chance to hang out with Stacey much until the formation of the movie making group, Monday Pictures. Time wasted! Stacey has a rich history in theatre, improvisation, animation, film making, production, and, oddly, credit history. She gave me good advice on everything. Stacey also performed with Bob's Playground improv group, International Stinger, and with the all-ladies group Firecracker. A woman of talent, Stacey had an extraordinary dream:

TO BUILD A THEATRE

So when Brandi and I went off to Portland, we felt a bit of trepidation as to what we would find. Would we have to "ooh" and "ah" after some two-bit shopfront operation, knowing that our amazing friends would some day turn it into a viable operation? Or would it be some seedy establishment, the burned out husk of a former porno theatre, abandoned after a developer's halfhearted stab at condo renovation? Or would there be nothing at all, an abandoned hobo's hat on the ground next to a cloth where seven wannabes performed their interpretation of Julius Caesar via an hour-long game of Freeze Tag?

I'm happy to say we saw none of those things. Curious Productions is going to be amazing.

The theatre space is enormous, as you cannot tell from this picture of Brandi with Bob, exposed steel studs behind them forming what will eventually be the coat room and part of the bar. With seating for 120 people, perhaps more with the balcony, the buildout has so far taken months and the time and efforts of many talented volunteers, all coordinated by Bob and Stacey, and all of which you can watch from the safety of the web, here. When we saw it, everything was wood studs and exposed drywall, but Stacey, who somehow holds all of this more or less in her head, hauled the architectural renderings out for us to show us how the footprint of the finished product would look. At the time when we first looked at it, we hadn't seen the space, so the stage looked a bit small to us, so we just nodded and smiled. Then we saw the space. The stage is normal sized, with a few steps up and a foldout handicapped ramp to accomodate wheeled humans and heavy sets. There's a classroom on the second story, a restaurant space, Men's and Women's handicapped bathrooms, a coat room, and additional bathrooms and showers in the back to accomodate bicyclists, of which there are many in Portland. In front, a water flows across a peaceful rock garden. It's THAT classy.

All of this would be meaningless without productions to put inside of it, which, to Bob and Stacey's credit, are numerous. There will be a sketch show, a musical, improvisation, and much, much more. Bob and Stacey are nearly tearing their hair out getting everything done, and yet they flattered us with not just their presence, but their company and conversation. It was one of those trips where I felt slightly guilty relaxing with (and occasionally without, as when Brandi and I took a short trip to the Portland zoo) my friends because I could tell there was always something MORE to do.

(By the way, the photos above are from a fancy restaurant Stacey took us to that, true to most fancy-schmancy restaurants, served amazing food with portions large enough to please a small cat. Brandi and Stacey had the tortellini with flavored foam. FOAM! I ordered and then gulped down glorified spaghetti with meat sauce, and Bob had the monkfish, which you can recognize because they shave their heads and live in oceanic cloisters. Afterwards, we went out to Ground Kontrol to play video games and try to talk amidst the general chaos of a Rock Band party, then over to Hobos, where we met friends and more or less ate dinner again. It was an amazing time.)

I can't wait to see what Bob and Stacey put together, because if it's half as good as what we saw in the pictures, it will be a million times better than anything we could have anticipated. We look forward to helping with that, as much as we can, stuck in this podunk Chicago neighborhood. It's going to be awesome.

If you would like to donate to the theatre, and I suggest you do, click here.

All-You-Can-Think

It's been my shame over the last four years to have worked for a university and not taken advantage of the free tuition they offer as part of my job benefits. In recent months, as chances of any significant pay raise changed from "slim" to "none," it became a kind of mission for me to squeeze the brain juice out of this State-run behemoth. And, yes, when I'm tired, I use big words. Litigate me.

Being a state-run institution, the University of Illinois runs atop an enormous bureaucracy that, if given the chance, would grind you underneath a mountain of its paperwork wheels. I should know. Two and a half years ago, I switched with a co-worker to the Alumni office, noticing as I did a small pile of equipment to surplus. The University requires us to follow certain procedures before we get rid of computer parts, so it took me a few months to determine the proper forms, their recipients, machine labeling and Babylonian deity and its preferred sacrificial meat. Still, the equipment sat. I stacked everything into a small wall atop the filing cabinets that for some reason took up a wall in the tech office and contacted my bosses in Urbana to let them know that their lackey in Chicago awaited their word on surplus. Nothing. They took away the filing cabinets shortly before we replaced more equipment. I re-stacked the equipment and waited. And waited. To this day: nothing. The air grows close in the confines of this office. Tell my wife I love her...

...at any rate, I had low expectations for any answers I had about taking classes, but it turns out that if you determine you want to do something here that does not involve a lot of heavy lifting and cross-campus coordination, and you go about it like an Agatha Christie inspector unraveling a locked room mystery ("SOMEONE here has the proper forms for a Graduate Student, Non-Degree Seeking, and none of us are leaving until I get it!"), you can shoehorn yourself into classes. Unfortunately, by the time I had lined up all my scholastic ducks, the easy class I wanted to take, Spanish, was irredeemably filled. I settled for something I knew would complement my job: CS 102, Introduction to Programming.

I like the class and writing Java input with things like the Scanner method (import java.util.Scanner; Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in); userInput = keyboard.nextInt();) really rocks my world. Seriously, I'm courting obsession here. Studying has become something like a videogame, especially since the intructor uses a homework-tracking and programming site called CodeLab. There, you complete assignments, and if you've done it wrong, it marks it in red and gives you a chance to correct it. Once done properly, you get a little green box and move on. In class, someone asked a question several assignments ahead. I'm about a week behind in the reading and a week ahead in CodeLab because I WANT TO WIN.

It is funny to sit in class with people almost twenty years younger than me and compare our experiences. We took programming in middle school, writing BASIC or LOGO on Commodore 64s. Rich people owned computers with tape drives, or 5.25" floppies. My freshman year of college, my dad bought me a Mac with no hard drive, just two 3.5" floppies, and it was great. Yeah, and I walked six miles to class, uphill, both ways. These people grew up with the Internet. They take Open Source for granted. They think A-ha is retro. (They're wrong. Analogue came out in 2005.)

I also find myself going through all of the same anxieties that going to school used to bring out in me. Can I get to class on time? Will the teacher notice? Am I even in the right classroom? Laugh if you will, but I've already attended the wrong lab for the ENTIRE LAB. I also went to what I thought was the right lecture hall and started to get out my books when I realized that all the students around me HAD THE WRONG BOOK. Lucky me, I figured that one out in time.

I spent half of Monday morning running back and forth to the professor's office trying to log in to the University UNIX system, something I had not done because I'd foolishly taken two vacation days after Labor Day (for an awesome trip to Portland and my awesomer friends Bob and Stacey, and another trip-within-a-trip to Seattle to see equally-awesome friends Darrah and Jason; it was so awesome, I'm probably going to need a new adjective soon).

Sweat poured off of me as people approached me in the office, for my job, saying innocent things like, "Can you take a look at something weird that happened to my computer?"

"NO! I mean... can I come back? I've got another issue to attend to at the moment."

In the end, I find I sympathize more with those who juggle education with jobs, family, taxes and all of the 1,001 distractions of modern life. I hope I pass this class and, if not, at least acquit myself with dignity as I debug my dodgy code.

Where am I not? Work.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Washington, on a train ride as easy as Sunday
morning, on Sunday morning. The only sad thing about the trip was
having to temporarily say farewell to friends Bob and Stacey after
they kindly drove us to the train station. But we'll be back, taking
the same train south in two days. Good times ahead.

The Shirt I Did Not Purchase

In Toronto's Kensington Market

Toronto Dispatch: Rainbow Photomontage

You could not beat the weather on the drive up with a stick. The sun came out, dramatic clouds filled the horizon, and we were in Indiana for a blessedly short period of time. It was so nice, I said to Kathy, one of my car mates, "Man, I hope we get some rain on the way back. It would be a shame to have to drive through the SAME weather all the time."

Later, when it rained cats and dogs and we were stuck in a construction-related traffic snarl for forty-five excruciating minutes while we watched lightning play havoc in the sky, arcing horizontally from cloud to cloud over the horizon, Kathy said, "Wish granted."

So, like any city next to a Great Lake, the weather changes on a dime here. Before the start of my my long run yesterday, I made sure to give my teammates a dry t-shirt so I would have something to change into when we got to the theatre. Unfortunately, they forgot it. Later, they realized I could have worn one of Ben's shirts. O fickle fate! At any rate, I was never too uncomfortable, having grown if not accustomed at least resigned to the elements during my marathon training.

On the way to the theatre last night, the skies opened up again with big, fat drops that felt much colder than should be legal during the summer. At the same time, we were treated with golden hour sunset. I told my mates to look around for a rainbow, since low solar angle + heavy rain = rainbow. It turns out that warning was unnecessary. Plastered over the sky, in the direction of the theatre after we parked, was a complete rainbow. It was beautiful, and a good sign for the show to come (zombie infestation at a wedding in the middle of a dramatic love triangle; I was an inadvertantly stoned fifteen year old who knew jujitsu but could only pick up a piece of drywall and say "BAM!" because I'd accidentally eaten a joint). Pity my iPhone has no zoom. Enjoy the crudely-assembled photo montage!

By the way, it's sunny and completely cloud-free right now. Later, though, weather calls for a 20% chance of precipitation. Judging by yesterday's drenching over a 30% chance, I would say there is a 100% chance that is bullshit. Time will of course tell.

Toronto Dispatch: Boozing

Edison, part one of two of my roommates, likes to wake up at six o'clock Chicago time (seven Toronto) and was up for two hours at least before I got up yesterday. We still beat Chris, the final chapter in my roommate saga, by another two hours, so we got up and wandered around the block, settling on a little bar/coffee shop next door called Croissant Tree. This place was super cute, very like a shop back home except for fact that they also served beer. We took note of this, but did not drink, observing the "before noon, and you're an alcoholic" vacation rule that I just made up in my head.

Still, this did not stop us from returning later in the day, when the rest of the group needed a place to go to and I noted that Croissant Tree also had free wifi (with purchase). The gang headed over, laptops in tow, to get lunch, compute, hang out, and, for me, do some random work stuff that always seems to hit me on vacation. At some point, Chris, who had eaten already, wandered in and, pressured by the French Canadian (Quebecois?) coffee house owner, ordered a soda for himself and a beer for me. Oh! How kind! Well, we can hardly allow this beer to go to waste, right? So I drank it while the heavens first threatened us and ultimately poured down their mighty wet wrath upon us. I had omitted bringing a bag for my laptop, so I dallied a little longer, enjoying my teammates' company, eating my soup and a work webpage with the latest applicant PDFs, just like I would have at home, except that I was drinking beer.

Of course, this would bite me in the butt later.

After the coffee place, we planned on visiting the Bad Dog Theatre, one of the two places we at which are performing for the Toronto Improv Fest, to pick up whatever they use for passes, check in, and hand out fliers for our second show, Open Court, which relies on audience participation to build instant long form teams, and would kind of miss the point if it was just us, again. Not that I would be sad to perform two festival shows with this group, but we sold ourselves on the fact that we integrate seasoned improvisers with those more new to the fold, and we surely hate to renege on that promise. My Google Maps showed the theatre was only 3.3 km away, which is meaningless to me, since the English system has poisoned my brain, but others assured me was about two miles, an easy run for me. I programmed the route into my phone, handed a clean t-shirt over to the driving crew, and headed out.

A vital note: when getting directions for a trip, make sure the first few streets on the actual route agree with the virtual map. Otherwise, there is a very real chance you're headed in the wrong, and perhaps opposite, direction.

As I was running from urban to suburban Toronto, this exact thought failed to occur to me.

It was not until I saw that I had been running for twenty minutes--plenty of time to reach the place, even at a my slow pace--that I thought to re-map my route. Instantly, or perhaps not, my route changed from two miles-and-change to four miles. I phoned the group, who had also gotten lost en route, and turned around, this time checking and actually finding Bloor Street, which was vital since both theatres were on it, separated by a distance of four miles. After dodging downtown foot traffic for four miles, I made it, noting with dismay that the theatre was dark. Nobody would stir until shortly before the improv fest began and, what was worse, my team had gone AWOL. Ben, ever the gentleman, called me to let me know that they had been waiting patiently but, like Bishop waiting for Ripley at the end of James Cameron's Aliens, had been forced to move the ship/car because emissions from the nuclear meltdown made it too unstable to hover nearby/signs said they couldn't park on the street during rush hour.

Chris and Ben offered me the chance to ride in the car to the other theatre, but, having just run six miles, I only wanted to go back to the hotel and get cleaned up. Also, with five improvisers in their car already, I would not fit and while their plan to displace two teammates to ride the subway to the other destination was clever and very kind, I knew I still had another two miles in me. So I ran back, on the way pausing to snap a couple of shots on the bridge leading out of the city.

All this is to say: at first on the run, the alcohol held me back, made me sluggish and kind of bummed me out. Later, I was grateful for the carbs keeping me going for eight Canadian miles, which is equivalent to a bazillion kilometers, according to my fake English-Metric conversion system.

Toronto Dispatch: Lifesavers

International Stinger is taking the Toronto Improv Fest by storm... or
at least performing there. This is the first of hopefully many posts
describing the experience. And since it's Saturday morning and I'm
grumpy after a restless sleep last night, I've decided my first post
will be a picture of my ears and blue earplugs.

Like safety glass and airbags, these things save lives. I took mine
along to wear in the car, during naptime on the ten hour drive, but
then I drove all the way here. When we got in late, late, late
Thursday, I was not long for consciousness, and, bidding goodnight to
my roommates, stuck them, turned over and slept like the dead. Good
thing, too, since one of my roommates shores like a chainsaw breaking
up with a woodchipper. Without these, I suspect the relative fun of
our trip would have been marred in short order by a murder-suicide.