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.)