schneeschuhe and freakishly good music

went snowshoeing (sic? hell, i don't even know if that's a real word---but guess what? i don't care either) yesterday. it was pretty awesome, even considering that even though i originally invited 17 people, the only person who actually came with me wasn't on that list; i asked maurice at the last minute. but thomas got seven others to come with us, so it was a nice size group (thomas, david, patricia, walter, joanne, amanda, martin, maurice, and myself).

now for the irony (of course, there's _always_ irony). i've actually been pretty proud of myself that maurice and i have always spoken together in french. the other seven were all swiss germans who are used to speaking with me in english, though. and, naturally, maurice also speaks swiss german. well, so much for my french doing me any good... i tried to turn it into an opportunity to work on my german, but rather than being particularly effective, that mostly just provided entertainment for the rest of them, and frustration for me, not merely due to the fact that when asking 8 swiss germans how to say something, you're guaranteed a minimum of 10 answers (most of which will probably be countradictory), and often you even get a good fight out of it. hahahaha. wow. well, i've got lots more work to do as far as any kind of german is concerned. that's definitely for sure.

we started in st. luc, and went up to the weisshorn, where there was a little restaurant that we had a drink in. then we walked back down the other side. and even though my shoes weren't waterproof, my feet somehow miraculously still managed to stay dry. unfortunately, what they didn't manage to do was to stay free of blisters... ouch. at home when i'm not wearing shoes (my preferred state of being), no problem at all. but putting shoes on to come in to work? wow, it's like i can't walk, because walking will cause my shoes to rub against the raw spots on my heels, and then---the _paaiiin_... i hope they heal soon.

two weekends ago, i went with peter on a whim to see a random british band i had never heard of called "the editors." the warm up act, "gliss," was nothing special, but that might have just been because they predictably fell victim to the "we did the sound check for the headliner" phenomenon, so it was too loud, and not particularly well mixed/balanced. but hot damn, the editors were awesome. i can't stop listening to their album now. it's really quite addictive. almost reminds me of the texture in some of the earlier U2 albums... there's a possibility these guys could end up making it big. who knows? the best part was that this new venue in lausanne actually has decent prices---i bought my ticket in advance for 20 francs! hell, they jacked the prices at the movie theatre again, and now even for a student ticket it's 12 francs (not to mention that you have to buy them in blocks of 5, and they expire every six months if you don't use them fast enough... how ass is that?). anyway, this concert was great.

but even as great as it was, it couldn't compare to the one last weekend, when we went to see "death cab for cutie" in fribourg. fucking fabulous. i used my elbows and got all the way up to where i had my hands on the stage. i guess the sound technician that night was retarded, because all the vocals were coming out the side monitors, whose cone of view was behind me, but i didn't even really care; i know most of the words anyway, and the music was just that good. i was a little surprised, though, that it wasn't more of a team effort. watching them on stage, it's really just "ben gibbard and supporting musicians" rather than an equitable music group, but nobody's perfect, right? i was also reminded of jim's comment about "yo la tengo" when we saw them last summer; it's really refreshing to see people that are successful (even kinda famous in a way, one might say) who aren't exactly "magazine quality," if you know what i mean. they weren't bad looking, but they're just real ordinary looking people, and even towards the short-and-round side of the spectrum as well, which naturally drew my empathy and admiration even more.

still kinda in catch-up mode, i feel like i'm glossing over plenty of details that otherwise would be worth mentioning... sad... regardless, there's no way i can neglect to mention the monstrosity in fri-son's (the venue) bar. i swear to samhain, there was a mirrorball hangin from the ceiling in the shape of a freaking *skull* about 5 feet in diameter. unbelievable.

how many trains can you almost miss in 36 hours?

okay, upon returning to switzerland, life got all crazy-like almost immediately. mostly work shittyness, since the simulation plugin i was trying to write at home wasn't working yet, and the lab we were supposed to use it in for the class was rapidly approaching. there were some looong days put in... however, i took off the following thursday (the 12th) so that i could do stuff with mike turk and his friends, who were blitzing through town for (no joke) approximately 36 hours. mike and jason came and met me at work on wednesday afternoon, and i showed them around a little and explained what we do, and they were kind enough to feign interest. ha. then we grabbed the necessaries at the grocery store on the way home, and once kelly, adam, and wendy showed up, we had a very nice fondue evening. six people sleeping in my little apartment required a tiny bit of creative engineering, but we made it, and were all reasonably comfortable, as far as i could tell.

the only problem was that i, in classic fashion, forgot once again that moving multiple people around takes much, much longer than getting just myself somewhere. so getting packed up and trying to get to the train station to go skiing the next morning involved a fair bit of sprinting, and i honestly didn't think there was any chance in hell that we were going to make our desired train (there would be another one an hour later), but somehow we did (with naught but about 2.7 seconds to spare), and in the rush, i think the lady at the window had screwed up, since even without the demi-tariff, their train+lift tickets were only about 60 francs (this is a phenomenally good deal). then, naturally, i let my guard down, since we were on the train, and we came within a hair's breadth of not getting off at the right stop to make the change. unbelievable.

but we did get off, and caught the little line going up the mountain to champery, where we rented them skis, and somehow the guy didn't charge them for the boots, so all in all, this day turned out to be a real steal. it was awesome.

once on the slopes, kelly pulled a deer-in-the-headlights, and suddenly couldn't do anything. she said she had been skiing before, just not for a long time, but for some reason she was too scared to try a lot of the time, so for the morning, mike, jason, and i took turns staying with her and trying to teach her stuff while the other two would take a run or so. eventually, we got her up and moving, if slowly, which was good. she wanted to stay on one of the smaller slopes, so at the beginning of the afternoon, the three of us took a quick loop around the near part of the french side of the mountain (we've got pictures of us in france [grin]), and then when we got back we took one more short run with kelly and it was time to head down so as not to miss the train back. got their equipment returned, got the train, and met adam and wendy back at the station in lausanne (they had opted to stay in lausanne for the day, not being interested in skiing). unfortunately, i had the dumb idea of trying to go across the street to the restaurant "ticino" where i had been before, and in general, it's a pretty nice restaurant, but swiss people don't understand that when you say you're in a hurry, and you only have an hour to eat, and they say it's okay, they're expected to make good on this promise. by the time we got our food, we had about 8 minutes to eat it, and the waiter was really pissy because we had the audacity [gasp!] to not order drinks. fucking bastard. well, at least the visitors got to see first-hand that i wasn't lying, and the stupid people here really are as irrational regarding beverage sales as i had said.

after inhaling dinner, and running back across the street to get their suitcases out of the locker in the train station, we got them onto their train to the airport, but only just barely [rolls eyes]. it was a rough and tumble 36 hours, with (as you may have noticed) what seemed like more than it's share of close calls, but i had a blast, and am really glad that they could come.

actually, i'm going to visit turk next weekend (march 3-5) in cambridge. i'm pretty excited about it. never been there. should be fun.

sixty-second theatre (continued)

so like i said, i spent a massive amount of time working, even though i was technically on vacation, but there was also plenty of good stuff.

christmas gifts were fun. probably the most exciting was that i tried to buy a piano for carissa. the money is all set aside; unfortunately we're still trying to find one though. (i asked aunt eleanor to ask her piano technician, which she did, but he hasn't gotten back to her yet.) probably i'll start exploring some other leads sometime soon.

of course the best part of any trip is the people. saw lots of old friends. got to do a couple things with treye, and i even got to see jon wall, who drove up with his family to see some aunts and uncles for christmas. that was pretty awesome, even though we only got to spend one evening together. caught up with jaime, and her new boyfriend shawn, who is pretty cool---if for no other reason, then because he winks from time to time. instant bonus points in my book. don't know why, i just think it's amusing. and steve, of course steve. the poor guy's been marooned in japan for the last two years; hadn't seen him since graduation at oxy. they've restarted the band, now named "matinee," and i saw a show they put on in the mississippi pizza pub downtown. damn, people just started coming out of the woodwork; there were PAA people there, there were oxy people there, there were friends of steve's cousins that i hadn't seen since that godforesaken youth camp years and years and years ago (been trying to forget the camp, but the people were still nice and good, so it was okay). ben and natalie were both there. ben is doing bronze sculpting and looking at a graduate program in england. also apparently has that enviable talent of just meeting random people and making friends with them; he was telling me about a girl he had met a few days prior, and it sounds like they hit it off rather well.

i think the most "interesting" part (it's really hard to pick the right adjective; it wasn't really weird, or strange, or enlightening, or re-affirming, or surreal... but some bizarre mixture of all of the above...) was seeing some of the people from my old high school drinking. it was likely amplified by the fact that i wasn't, since i had driven myself, but listening to them talk while mildly intoxicated somehow made them seem infinitely more human. i know this isn't going to make any sense to anyone but me, and i don't care; just nobody take it as an insult ('cause it's not), okay?

high school is awkward for everyone, i'm sure (or at least that's what i try to tell myself), but i think there are huge chunks of it that i actually have finally succeeded in forgetting. i remember fear and uncertainty, self-loathing and a general overarching sense of unhappiness, but most of the specifics have finally faded from my recollection. i suspect that this is actually a good thing, though clearly i have no idea. in what few images that remain accessible, i remember how i must have given all of them more credit than they might have deserved. i don't mean to say that they were deficient in any way, they just weren't flawless the way i idealized them at the time... seeing natalie, i am sure she was always kind to me, but just as sure that we never belonged to the same caste, at any time during the four years together. which i suppose is why it felt just a teeny bit strange to have a conversation as equals. later, she was a little tipsy, and said a couple of things which gave me pause; i wish i knew what she was thinking at the time. anyway, if i understood correctly, she should be in colorado now with her boyfriend (i think they moved there so he could be a ski instructor). i hope they're happy and doing well.

overall, from all these people i hadn't seen in forever, i was again getting a little bit of the vibe i described before when i was talking about having seen "garden state." a lot of people seem to think i'm off in exotic places doing amazing things, but i don't feel like i have anything to show that warrants that at all... okay, i'm going to stop, or i'll end up rambling on incoherently for hours.

on a brighter (or at least more humorous) note, surely no trip home would be complete without the requisite maniacal shopping spree! i was really out of control in a couple of cases, but the most amusing (i think) was when i realized that lots of places had these display stands selling dvds for like seven or eight dollars... and renting a dvd for one night here costs about seven or eight francs... (you do the math). hahahaha. so, of course, over the couple of weeks i was there, i started my own dvd collection, eventually amassing somewhere between 15 and 20 pretty decent films that i brought back with me. in fact, now that i let myself start, i can feel the collector's itch, and there are several other titles which i would like to have, but that will have to wait for another trip, i guess.

and of course i bought lots of clothing, and stacks of books---the gods will smite you if you come to portland and neglect the pilgrimage to powell's. pay homage where homage is due. god, i love books. i always have. i wish i had more time to read... well, we make do with what we can.

my cousin grant is turning into an unbelievable jazz pianist. he just turned 15, and he's already got a combo together from his high school, and has made a few recordings both with them and on his own. it's rather awe-inspiring. well, that, and it makes me jealous. but it's my own damn fault for not having practiced enough, i suppose. or, more accurately, for still not practicing enough now. though i have been playing a fair bit recently; i photocopied some piano scores of philip glass music that i got from the library, since they're apparently all out of print and i couldn't find them anywhere to buy (i really looked everywhere; i wanted to buy them, i just couldn't). the guy is crazy, and i remember when dr. grayson had us listen to a couple of excerpts in that music history writing seminar i took at oxy my first year, not thinking that they were all that interesting, but now, i can't seem to get enough of it. i guess i understand how to appreciate it now; it's quite simply genius, in my opinion, though others will probably disagree.

when buying the plane ticket, i couldn't resist saving $350 by flying sunday->sunday instead of saturday->saturday. the stupid part about this is that with the time change, the return flight lands 24 hours after it takes off, meaning that i was scheduled to land at 8:00am monday morning, and i had a 10:00 group meeting. amazingly, i actually made it, by coming directly to work from the airport, suitcases and everything. but for the love of god, i hope i never do that again. complete insanity. and again, this time less intentionally, getting over the jet lag was a reasonably long and painful ordeal (like nearly 10 days to get fully straightened out again).

alright, i'm sure i've forgotten something, but at least we're making progress, and we've made it back to switzerland. hopefully after the next one we'll be back up to current time.

sixty-second theatre

"where we try (unsuccessfully) to pack a two-hour hollywood production into 60 seconds. today's presentation: chris's life over the last three months."

okay, this is going to be a quick and dirty post, and we're going to pretend like i wrote it a long-ass time ago (when i should have written it, which is to say not the 21st of february, when i'm actually writing it).

alright, between thanksgiving and christmas, there was a lot of crap happening, mostly work, but a few notable evenements that stick out sufficiently for me to remember and be worth mentioning.

principally, mom and dad finally sent me the "gps / heart monitor / running gadget / thing-a-majig" that i think i mentioned ordering a while back. it's the garmin forerunner 301, and it's pretty awesome. i've used it about a half dozen times, which isn't bad, considering its the middle of freaking winter here. the relative (differential) positioning with the gps is pretty good, but the absolute reference leaves something to be desired. i plotted my trajectory from a lakeside run, and i can clearly see the contour of the lake as i went west, but when i turned around to come back, i see the same contour laterally offset by about 15-20 meters. ha. well, it's still pretty impressive. and i like playing with the heart rate graphs. probably i should read up on all this "training zone" stuff and figure out where my heart rate is supposed to be and whatnot. (alternatively, if you know, and are willing to explain it too me, my lasy-ass self will appreciate it greatly.)

(slightly related, for those of the geekly persuasion: the provided software that came with it is naturally both crappy and windows only, so my current neglected side-project is doing some background reading to see if i can try to write a simple usb driver that will allow me to pull the raw data points off it and plot them in matlab, the way god intended. hahahahaha.)

then there was the whole fiasco with my motherboard (r.i.p.) and the "stolen formula for super-exploding capacitors (tm)." some jap gets pissed with his boss, tries to jack a secret electrolyte recipe and take it to his new job in china. too bad he only got part of it, and subsequently all the consumer grade affordable computer equipment manufactured in ~2002 is breaking because the botchilistic capacitors have burst and oozed yellow corrosive goo all over everything. yes, actually, i am a bit bitter, thanks for noticing. thankfully, i was finally able to find a store here that still had a socket-a motherboard at a semi-reasonable price (60 francs ~ $48) and replaced it, but i'm sad that i don't have firewire anymore. oh well.

then on december 10 (the first day of the season), i went up snowboarding with some friends---first time with my new board! it was awesome! we went to diablerets, which is the closest area, about 45 minutes drive from lausanne. we were teaching sara, who had never been skiing before (well, she's from egypt, what did you expect?), so it was a nice slow and easy start, which was more than fine with me. it was a blast. i could really get used to this. and have i mentioned how much i love my board? it's sweeeeeeet.

in a (frighteningly predictable) fit of irony, i invited everybody back to my apartment for fondue. good thing i had also invited some other people who didn't come skiing with us, because i was the only one of the skiers that actually showed up... but jim, fabius, steph, and i had a good time anyway.

the weekend before that i left was, well, "memorable." in the shamefully embarrassing way, at least. so my flight was out of geneva early on sunday morning. antoine was planning another movie weekend in "the garage" (the converted garage at his parents house which is an absolutely fabulous home theatre, where we did the lord of the rings marathon, and where they did the star wars marathon while i was in pasadena for the SIS conference). this time the theme was all of quentin tarantino's films. that by itself didn't excite me all that much, but it sounded like it could be fun anyway, and even though i would be leaving halfway through, it would put me already in geneva, and thereby closer to the airport. everything sounds great, right?

so there i am, packing everything saturday morning, and subsequently pacing around and around the apartment trying desperately to figure out what it is that i had forgotten this time (since the laws of the universe inequivocally state that i have to forget *something* every time). i couldn't figure it out, so i grabbed my suitcases, and went to meet fabius at the train station, hoping it wasn't anything important.

wrong move.

now, to make matters even more annoying, i still didn't even realize it until we got off the train in geneva, and was recounting this story to fabius about the awful feeling i always have when travelling that i've left something behind. to which he jokes: "well, you've got your tickets and your passport, so i guess everything else will just work itself out, right?"

have you ever had a moment where you can actually feel all of the blood drain out of your face? its instantaneous, and in that very moment, you finally understand what it means for someone to look "ashen," even though you can't see yourself. i swear to god i wanted an anvil to fall out of the sky and put me out of my misery. (i'll give you a hint: the tickets were electronic...) i still can't believe i could have been so stupid... but, well, there you have it.

so i'm berating myself, and getting increasingly pissed, as we take the bus out to antoine's house, fabius laughing at me like a drunken idiot the entire way. luckily, fred took pity on me and lent me his car to go back to lausanne, get the passport, and come back to geneva. i don't even know if he noticed or not, but i filled his gas tank for him afterwards anyway. he is now officially on my list of personal heros. about an hour and fifteen minutes later, i was getting off the freeway in geneva, and trying to reverse the directions to get back to antoine's. good luck. lesson number 481: directions in switzerland are not reversible. corollary: even if you know which way you want to go, the completely irrational lane changes necessary to accomplish it are prohibitively many. which is to say, that i had a good idea of where i was going, but failed to realize that in order to continue straight once i got to the other side of the bridge, i had to switch into the left lane, thus getting pushed off the street to the right. and everything is narrow, curvy, and one-way. literally, it took me more than half an hour just to find the bridge again so that i could start over. fucking ridiculous.

but i did eventually make it back, and in time for the dinner break, which was convenient. i had missed pulp fiction and reservoir dogs, and then after dinner they did the kill bills in sequence. at this point it was about 3am, and i needed to get on a bus to the airport at 6:15ish, so i climbed up into the loft and tried to get some rest while they watched from dusk til dawn. from what i heard of it, i'm pretty thankful i couldn't see the screen. hahaha.

i guess the flight was rather uneventful, but definitely long (as expected), and delayed in newark (probably should have been expected). by the time i got in, it was about time to start working again [rolls eyes]... i like the time change better when i'm over here; if there's a deadline on the west coast, you get nine extra hours---but if there's a deadline in switzerland, and you're on the west coast, you have to be nine hours early. let me tell you how much that sucks.

of course, my family was upset because i had so much work to do (i was still putting in between 6 and 10 hours per day while i was there), but there's not a whole lot i could do about it---trust me, if it wasn't absolutely necessary, i wouldn't do it. i definitely didn't want to... well, i guess that was one upside to jet lag; i could get 4 to 5 hours in before the rest of them woke up. was a really messed up sleep schedule, though.

alright, that's enough for this installment. we're not caught up yet, but we've overrun our "60 seconds" a long time ago, and my fingers are tired. (and i also have work to do, like usual.)