The Final Year

Great!

I woke up late.  Showered (a frothy, filthy, fungus-filled typical hostel shower), dressed, and packed, I dragged almost all my belongings downstairs to the lobby and found a place to sit so that I could call United and pay a $110 inconvenience fee to book me on a Saturday flight instead of a Sunday flight. There’s just no need for me to be around all weekend. Knowing my schedule, I checked out of the room and changed my reservation here at the hostel to one additional night instead of two. Then I found a locker downstairs and paid $5 to put my bag in it until I could check in again later in the day. Then I went back upstairs and walked to the front door, where I realized that I had left a plastic zip-lock bag with my sunglasses and my book on the air conditioning unit in the now securely locked and unavailable room. Was I surprised? Not in the slightest. You’d think I plan these things, they happen so often. I wondered if it was worth the incredible hassle to get someone to escort me back into the ‘hostel members only’ area, up the locked stairs and finally into the locked room. These people have been less than friendly at the best of times. I saw someone going through the first layer of security while the guard was distracted by a rediculously pretty australian girl, so on the spot I decided to just break into the place and get my stuff back. I slipped my hand into the doorway as it was shutting and yanked it back open to gain entry to the lounge area. Then I paced nonchalantly back and forth in front of the stairway door, and in just a few seconds I had given a hearty ‘goodday mate’ to a startled asian dude as I barrelled past him into the stairs. Five flights later I was on my floor, hoping and praying that the door to my old room would be ajar as it sometimes was when people had gone to the shower. If not, it would be nearly impossible, as the doors had high-security card-key locks on them that blinked menacingly red when you jiggled the handle without the proper swiping action. Sure enough, it was shut and locked. My last and only hope was to knock, but by now it was 10:30 in the morning, and I knew most of the people would be gone. I knocked. Instant reaction, the door flew open. One last big German dude was just about to struggle his huge frame backpack on and would have been gone in just moments. There was my stuff on the air conditioner, just as I’d left them, and I swiftly snatched them up. I turned back around to leave with thanks when I was confronted with a big, orange-haired german cockroach laying on its back in the center of the room flailing its legs and arms furiously in the air, weighed down by the equally prone pack beneath his head.

"Urf. Orf. Unh." he said, kicking and flopping about. I literally could not get past his waving limbs. I looked down with just a moment’s amusement.

"Would you like some help with that?" I said, wiping the smile quickly from my face.

"Oh, for yes. Could you please be the helping up? I am quite heavy in the package."

"Ur, ok." I reached out a hand to lift him to his feet, pack and all.

"Nein, could you please be under the package with lifting?"

"Oh, right. Of course." I grabbed his package by the strap and held it up while he clambered to a standing position.

"Oh, thank you American. From Wisconsin you are?" (no, really, that’s what he asked me)

"Um, no. I’m from Los Angeles. Do I look like I’m from Wisconsin?" I asked that last question quite innocently, not threateningly like someone from New York would ask it.

"Oh, no. You look Choormann." (German)

"Oh."

Awkward silence.

"Well, I’m going to be off. Have a nice day!"

"Thank you big American!"

Ok.

I went back down to the lockers and found that in order to add my book and things to the locker I already rented I’d have to pay another $5 to open it and lock it again. So I did. Then I got to the front door and remembered why I had remembered my stuff in the first place. I needed my sunglasses. And I just spent $5 to PUT THEM IN THE DAMN LOCKER. Sigh.

I met up with my crew in Manhattan before heading over to Queens to visit our site in Long Island City (which is in Queens). We walked around Queens for a while looking at the neighborhood and filming before PS1 opened for the day. PS1 is a party spot/museum/gallery/architecture showcase. Every 6 months five architects are invited to compete for a chance to build something in the open courtyard in front of PS1. Only the best, brightest, up-and-comingest architects are invited, and the temporary structures they design are always written up in trade magazines like Architectural Record. It’s a great honor that quite a few of my professors at SCI-Arc have won. I’d always wanted to see what the place was about, and the piece that is currently up and on display is rad. We stopped into a local deli next door to grab lunch and sit out under the winning entry to eat.

After a half a relaxing hour we set off again for Manhattan. We had a 2pm appointment with the NYC planning department that was complete news to me. After a short walk through the Wall St. area and city hall we found a little out of the way building that housed the planning department. We were shown up to a conference room where four stern-looking besuited people looked at us with puzzlement. I think they were expecting a bit more polish. I spit into my hand and ran it through my hair. There.

It was a very surreal experience to go from lounging in a sail-sized hammock under a big plastic pink canopy to a buttoned-down conference room looking at a powerpoint presentation on city planning. Nonetheless it was entirely fascinating and relevant, and we all felt as though this 2 hour meeting had saved us two weeks of research. Not to mention the fact that they were more than willing to provide us with their 3D model of ALL OF NEW YORK CITY. Holycrap.

So we had Ground Zero next to see, which we did, and it looked as I expected, a big construction hole blocked off by tarps you couldn’t see past. But at least now I’ve been there. There was a cross erected at the nearby Catholic church made up of steel from the fallen buildings signed by relatives of the victims of the day which was moving in a I-know-they’re-just-trying-to-be-moving-on-purpose-but-I-don’t-care-it’s-moving-anyway sort of way. By that time people were so beat that we were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Gordon smacked Kris in the face for gbouncing sunlight off his sunglasses into Gordon’s eyes, and Yazmeen was curled in the corner with her head on the lap of a homeless man playing Amazing Grace on a beat-up old flute. It was time to go.

I headed down to the subway and took four trains back to the hostel, where I was finally able to check in again. I dumped some stuff on my bed to make sure everyone knew it was occupied and called Gillie to see what was up before I returned to the subway, intent upon seeing MOMA at least for an hour before it closed. When I emerged at 86th and 2nd it was dropping threatening globs of sporadic rain onto the map which told me I had somehow taken the wrong train 5 stops too far. When I actually arrived at the correct station there was a torrent of people flooding into the station looking like they just jumped out of the way of a bulldozer stampede. Actually, it was the sky opening up and absolutely DUMPING on the city. I was in a great hurry, pushing my way through the opposite-flowing throng that was looking increasingly wet the closer I got to the exit of the station. Then, I saw it. An entrepeneurial man had just placed a rack of umbrellas outside his shop right at the entrance of the subway station. I grabbed one and handed him a $5 bill just as the rack was set upon by hyenas to a zebra. It was nothing but bones in seconds. Feeling thankful, I gave incredibly patronizing looks to all the great idiots in full rush-hour business attire fighting like mad for every square inch of dry space under each and every awning as far as I could see. HA! Smarter than the locals, for once. I traded a woman a dry walk to the nearest subway entrance for directions to sixth ave and 53rd, and found MOMA without much more difficulty.

The place is huge. Way more than 1.5 hours huge. It has Monets, Degas, Picassos, Pollacks, Van Goughs, Bentons, and a hundred other works that adorn the covers of high school art history textbooks. AND, in a stroke of AWESOMENESS, they let you take all the pictures you want, as long as you don’t have your flash on. And you don’t want your flash on anyway. CRAZY! They finally get it! I think I took 100 pictures in there. The building is new as well, and was interesting of its own accord. But to add pastry to perfection, the place was COMPLETELY FREE to enter. There wasn’t even a cost for the audio tour. Wow. Unbelievable.

By the time I got out of there the rain had quite literally disappeared. No clouds, no rain, not even a hint of water on the ground. Just gone. Now everyone scoffed at me as I walked by with an utterly useless umbrella. Oh well. I had my laugh. I went to dinner at a place in Times Square before returning to the hostel feeling like a baby seal after an Orca encounter. The blisters have not gone away.

I am very glad to be returning a day earlier. I just can’t take this frenetic pace any more. It’s time to get back to the nice, slow Los Angeles tempo. Sigh. See you all soon.

-C

K, so I’m in a lot of pain right now. I think I have fourteen blisters. I tried to count them, but some had merged together before I finished. It’s amazing how such little things can completely incapacitate a person. Also, we walked something on the order of a quadrillion spans today. I’m not 100% sure of the conversion rate, but that’s like 8 miles. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. Naked. With a skunk chasing you. Ugh. It’s 9:45 and I’m already ready for bed, when it’s supposed to feel like 6:45 to me. I’m all screwed up.

I began the day at 7:30 in the morning by waking up nine disgruntled foreigners with my cell phone alarm. After repeated blows to the head I managed to find my way to the showers and pretend I wasn’t contracting diseases just by touching the door handle. At least this hostel has doors. And lockers. All you need, really. I was ready to go at about 8, and after a call from Kris Feldmann telling me how to get there, I headed for a bakery in SoHo where I was to meet my classmates. I hadn’t seen anyone but Lina yet, and didn’t know who actually made it after all. The answer was practically nobody. My two professors sat on a bench outside the bakery and Kris and Gordon were inside, but that’s pretty much all of the fifteen people in my class who were there at 9:20 (I was late on account of the not knowing where I was most of the time).

So, we sat and waited. And waited. And waited, until about thirty minutes later Lina showed up. The five of us, ready to set out, began what was to be a VERY long and VERY confused walk across Manhattan and Brooklyn. ‘mommy‘. Or, at least, that’s what I would have said had I known. We first walked 20 blocks to a building that I’d read about many times but never would have found near the Hudson river. After sufficiently looking at it, we walked another 20 blocks to another building that was entirely blue and devastatingly ugly. It was just being finished, and looked as though it were designed and built to the cutting edge 25 years ago. Ghastly, really.

Lunch time had arrived, so we walked 10 blocks to an eatery that served very small, expensive ’boutique’ sandwiches. I had two, and wished I’d been like everyone else and gotten three. There’s another 20 down the drain. We gathered ourselves and began the longest trek of the day, aaaaall the way down to the edge of the water at the Brooklyn bridge, only to find that the only way up and across it was to go aaaaall the way back to where it actually touched ground, 20 blocks away. We finally got to the end of the damn thing and were so wiped out that we had to stop to catch our collective breaths before heading out again.

I’m not sure I mentioned how miserable it is here. It’s as though we are indirectly in the midst of a mighty rain storm. But instead of it falling straight from the clouds, the moisture is simply hovering in the air, making it so humid that all the people of New York are sweating a downpour into the streets. There are literally rivers of sweat running through the gutters. It’s the kind of weather that isn’t really that hot, but makes you want to take a shower every time you step out of the shower. By the time we got to the end of the Brooklyn Bridge we were all ready to change pants. Not with each other, I just mean…nevermind.

So, removing a slew of video cameras from several shoulder bags, we began our looooong slooooow march across the most famous of NY bridges. There were throngs and throngs of hot, sweaty, disgusting tourists like us madly snapping pictures along the entire span of the structure. I was reminded of the time I wandered naked through a spa for infirm slugs. Very much reminded.

After an hour or so, we made it to the other side, full videotapes in hand, and set out to find a subway station back to Manhattan. 20 blocks and three sets of directions later, we found a hot, dark, crap-infested hole and gleefully charged down to the platform. We arrived back at Fourth Street in Manhattan 20 minutes later and disembarked, happy for the only-headache-inducing heat of the topside. We all bought hot dogs and threw them away just to get some napkins to wipe the swimming pools from our butts, and then set off to find a building by Herzog and Demeuron that turned out to be about 20 blocks away. It was, and we saw.

It was time to make a choice. Either make the 40 block underground sauna trip to a bunch of art galleries that were going to close in 50 minutes, or find a place to drink. After such a long, sweaty, long day, the latter was chosen by all, and we walked 20 blocks to find a nearby pub. Beer on an empty, dehydrated stomach is really quite coma-inducing, and after one and a half Stellas, I was ready to call it a day. Gordon and I thought we oughta put some food in (to mix in with the alcohol), so all went their separate ways and Gordon and I found a subway stop 20 blocks away. Three trains later we emerged in Times Square and found a cheap little NY pizza place about 20 blocks away. By the time we were done eating, my feet were the size of softballs, which I guess if you ball up a foot into a sphere really isn’t that big, but it was all blister, so that’s bad. Gordon and I hobbled back to the station 20 blocks away and split up, he to his friend’s place in SoHo and me to my hostel on the Upper West Side.

I emerged from underground and dragged my bluddy stumps (for some reason I find it to be more descriptive when it’s spelled like that) only two blocks past the projects (actually, project singular), where a nice crack dealer helped me stumble across the street to the hostel’s front door. I have not gained the courage to tackle the five flights of stairs up to my room, and am using this time of hopeful recuperation to write this blog. Unfortunately, now I’m done, and I have to stand up. Which makes me very very sad.

Oh, one last bit of info, last night I went to meet Gillian at her friend’s place, which turned out to be a mansion stuffed into the fifth floor of a gigantic building full of mansions. Like a can of sardines, except instead of fish they are mansions. I had to convince three separate security guards (one who doubled as a gun-wielding elevator operator) to gain entry to the place. Gus’ friends are very nice, very well-connected (in terms of dead grandmothers) people, who were a fun bunch to hang out with. After a while of sitting on one of their many couches talking about stuff with the crew, Gillie took me to a nice diner down the street and I drank water (remember the slug sauna?) while she ate dinner (since I’d already eaten). Just thought I’d mention that bit of my night, because it was cool. Some people have all the luck.

-c

Well, it took me twelve and half hours, but I finally arrived at the Hostel NY at 7:30 pm. Ok, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it 12.5 hours, because three of those hours were lost due to time zone issues. But still, my flight was supposed to leave at 7:00am sharp, and I locked my stuff in my room at 7:30pm local time. I say my flight was ’supposed’ to leave at seven because it actually left at more like 8:30, due to an unexpected loss of fuel-level-monitoring capability. This was discovered just moments before we hit the accelerator to lift our 30,000,000 tons of metal into the air. So we had to turn back around, wait to determine if there was really a problem, wait to determine the course of action, then finally taxi back to the terminal to have it looked at, then wait while they diagnosed the problem, then wait while they installed a brand new fuel-level-monitoring device, which looked oddly enough like a rather-too-young-looking chimpanzee. Standards certainly have fallen since my day.

As a nice piece of fortune I ran into one of my classmates (Lina) in LAX, and we not surprisingly were on the same plane. That meant that I didn’t have to make the trek out to Manhattan by myself, and instead meant that I got to shuttle a quivering undergrad girl around for seven hours. When she stepped off the bus in the city I swear I heard her say something akin to ‘mommy‘. Her hostel was in SoHo, and we were north of SoHo, and my hostel was north of that. So, instead of going to mine, we went to hers and I made sure she got in ok. Hers looked like a dump, and it was the one my professor reccommended to us. My hopes were not high. I took the 6 train to the 7 train to the 1 train uptown and exited at 103, where I was confronted with a rough-looking public housing project and 100 rough-looking housing project residents all staring at me like I was made of pastry-flavored cotton candy. ‘mommy‘. I figured as long as I looked like I knew where I was going, and could convey my now well practiced f-offishness, they would leave me alone. And also I saw a sign for my hostel across the street. To be honest, it’s just a big smashup of people, and there are so many that it’s easy to just get lost in the crowd. No big deal whatsoever. I went inside the place and found (as expected) that they had no room for me, even though I’d made a reservation last week. They got me a room for two nights, then another reservation for a different room for the final two nights. Oh well.

After slogging my stuff up five flights of stairs I got it locked up in my 10 person dorm room and quickly headed back to Grand Central station (1 train to 7 train again) where I met up with Lina to go to dinner. We found a nice on-the-street restaurant and ate, then walked around a bit, then went and got grocery-store food, then walked around a bit more, then went back to our respective hostels. Now I’m going to go hang out with my friend Gillie, who has also just arrived in the city. We shall see how that goes.

That’s what’s up.

-c

(Finally, we’ve reached the end! The time is now! Here’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done! So far! Oh, and I’ve done away with the present tense bollocks. This tale doesn’t deserve it. On we go!)

#1: The Gas Station of I’M SO STUPID! AARRRGH!!!

So, to make a long story short, I don’t have $7000 of spare cash, which made a very loooong one and a half hour trip out to Santa Monica from the north part of Downtown during rush hour completely fruitless. Had I any inkling that what I was looking for would cost AT MINIMUM all the money I have in the whole world, I would obviously never have attempted the pointless errand. What errand, you ask? What I was trying to do is really not the important thing. What’s important is you know I was sad that what I wanted (and had been looking forward to for several weeks) was completely out of my reach. On to my story.

‘What does this mean for me?’ was the question rattling around in my head after the ingratiating setback. I noted somberly that on top of the impending slog back home through Westside traffic, my car was out of gas. On the corner of Sepulveda Blvd and Santa Monica Blvd is a gas station. Though I am dumb (see above) I can put two and two together. No gas + gas station = go places. Go places = 4. Did I just blow your mind? Forget it. It’s not important. I approached the station uneasily because my car is dirty and all the other cars were shiny Mercedes’ and above, if you know what I mean. There were at least twenty people in the large fueling station, and they all seemed to be leering at me when I drove in. There was one open pump.

A trek to the gas station in my car is a half-hour affair, as my tank is so large that Saudi Arabia sinks by a couple of inches every time I go to the pumps. If you’ve ever tried to watch someone fill a swimming pool with honey using an eyedropper, you’ll have some idea of what it’s like. Man, that was a fun weekend. Anyway, after a dozen minutes thinking about fluids and their flow rates I felt a Pressing Need of my own, and scampered tight-legged into the GREAS-E-MART.

“Dyuhavabathroomnywher?” I asked, clutching my crotch furiously.
“<POINT>,” the man pointed. He was very annoyed at having been interrupted. Reading a fascinating article in InTouch (possibly InStyle, or maybe InAne) about the lamentable conditions of Paris Hilton’s jail cell and how she OHIDON’TCAREIHAVETOPEEFORTHELOVEOF*diety*!

Successfully emptied I walked past the man on the stool who showed me enough courtesy to look up from his enthralling literary piece long enough to make sure the dirty look meant for me was successfully conveyed. I thanked him for his time and strolled outside. I looked for a split second at my surroundings, feeling very poor with my no-good don’t-have-any-money looks-like-a-greenish-pile-of-dirt Isuzu Planetwrecker and the dozen or so shinemobiles looking down their hood ornaments at me. I usually don’t care about that stuff, but I was particularly downtrodden and sensitive to those things at that moment. In disgust I hopped in my car and sped away from the pump.

CRASH

My car was jolted like I’d just run into a dumpster. I looked around for the dumpster. There was no dumpster. There were only very expensive-looking Mercedes. And no, they were not what I’d hit. Everyone was now DEFINITELY looking at me, with an array of expressions running from disgust through bewilderment to utter amusement. I looked instinctively in my rear-view mirror and saw the sickening flailing severed limb of the suddenly very expensive-looking gasoline pump. With horror, I realized that I had driven off with the nozzle still firmly planted into my gas tank. And what was worse – IT HAD STILL BEEN PUMPING.

Daa daa da da da daa! IDIOT SHOW!

Of course, you’re wondering if there was a great spray of gasoline flooding the station behind me. No. Believe it or not, I wasn’t the first to have performed this tricky little maneuver. Clearly, some had come before me as the hose had been severed at a cleverly-designed metal coupling device that not only allows the line to break cleanly, but also (and perhaps more importantly) ceases all fuel flow instantly. I looked at the swinging stump hanging from the top of the pump and double-checked my rear-view mirror to see if the rest of the hose and nozzle was still hanging from my car. It wasn’t. What to do? As far as I could tell, I had three options:

1. RUN!
2. Go in and explain that their pump had broken of its own accord and they should fix it before someone pokes their eye out.
3. Go in and explain that their pump had been broken by a great big ninny and ask how much money they want from my meager college fund.

I, being an omega male, chose option three. This meant, of course, another trip inside to talk to the Paris Hilton fan. Now stopped out in the middle of the thoroughfare through the gas station, I decided to put my car beside the broken pump again. I winced through my forced, jovial grin as I heard the loud crunch of flattening plastic and metal under my tires. There’s the nozzle! Everybody in the station cringed. Sigh.

The Paris guy was in an animated conversation with a customer about the shocking stupidity of some people when I walked in and interrupted their discussion.

“Um, sorry to bother, but I just single-handedly destroyed your gas station (yes, hello there, hi, I’m the one, yes, thanks, sorry, please step aside so I can talk to the nice man on the stool, oh, haha, yes, I know, I’m an idiot, thanks, excuse me…).” All that second stuff was to the small crowd of people in the GREAS-E-MART that I had to wade through to get to the counter. When I reached the altar of Formica, I was greeted with the most charming scowl I’d ever seen. This was a practiced sort of look, reeking of loathing and disdain, supported by a superb confidence in its ability to make even the most aplombable quail, so that I lowered my head and said to the man, “Uh, what do I do now?”

There, again, were a couple of ways I could have seen this going. He might have grumbled loudly at me and told me to go away and never come back. Or, more disturbingly, he might have grumbled loudly at me and told me I’d have to pay for the replacement of his nice, new, digital $10,000 gas pump. I really had no idea. I looked as helpless and apologetic as possible (my own highly practiced look, and, if I may say, quite a match for his scowl). We were like two cage fighters in a stare-down death match. TO THE DEATH! Finally, he heaved a great sigh.
“You must pay damages!”
There went option one.
“Ok.” (apologetic look) “How much will it be?” (helpless)
Great sigh. “Replacement of the pump hose costs $96.00.”
Great sigh from me this time. This was not nearly as bad as I had feared. My formidable ingratiating look had beaten his meanitude. I handed him my debit card in triumph. He seemed to sense my relief and blurted, “You must pay cash!”
“But I haven’t got that much on me!” (double whammy of helpless and apologetic)
“<POINT>” There was an ATM near the end of his finger.

I returned a few moments later, handed the man five twenties, got four ones and a receipt (I asked for) in return, and was finally on my way. I pulled out of the gas station driveway and came to an immediate stop in Santa Monica Blvd traffic with a mixture of sadness and elation. I don’t think I could ever top that one, but I’ve lived a short life, and there are many years of Idiot Show opportunities ahead of me. Maybe someday I’ll have to update this list.

(Continuation of the top three Chris’ Idiot Show episode countdown. See the previous post with the #3 episode first!)

#2: The Driveway of Obscurity

I admit, I will go see movies on occasion. Sometimes, I go to theaters which have little-to-no parking available nearby, mostly ones on the West Side. One night in college (2002) my friends and I decide to catch a flick in nearby Culver City, land of S.W.A.T. raids and halfhearted gentrification. Needless to say: very little parking. I am to meet them there, but alas, I am running late (see above). I know for a fact that finding a place to stash my car will be difficult, but them’s the price for quality entertainment. I think we were seeing ‘Scooby-Doo’. (Just kidding. It was ‘Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams’.) Anyway, imagine my utter shock to find someone pulling away from a spot across the street from the theater just as I approach, making it likely that I might get inside before the start of the movie! I slam my car into the tiny parallel niche, jump out, and run in to join everyone. Laughter and frivolity all around.
We leisurely stroll out the front doors of the shabby multi-plex after the movie to find it dark and bustling on the streets of CCity. (SK2:ILD is a LONG movie!) I need to go home and finish some homework, so I walk back to my car to find someone has double-parked right next to me, blocking me into the wee parking space. Indignant, I storm up to my vehicle and find the owner of the Mustang-shaped barrier sitting nearby chewing on a toothpick. It might have been a crowbar. I couldn’t tell.
“What is this?!” (sigh. That’s me.)
“What do you mean, ‘what is this?!’ You’re parked across my FREAKING DRIVEWAY is what this is!!” I sort of realize that this man may be a tad upset. And I may possibly be the cause.
“Oh.” The weight of what has occurred slams down, an anvil on my gingerbread house of contentment. Daa daa da da da daa! IDIOT SHOW!
I spend the next almost twenty minutes trying to explain to him that I am stupid and that cutting off all vehicular access to his property was in no way a slight against his lovely home or his tiny, crumbling, dirt-covered driveway. He wants nothing more than to remove my head and throw it into the street like a pumpkin on October 30,  but eventually gets tired of chewing me out. He moves his muscle car, and I screech away with my (figurative) tail between my (literal) legs. The worst part happens when I get home and talk to my roommate Tom about it. He’s a very understanding, kind sort of guy, and I need some moral support. He had witnessed the aftermath of my dumbtacularity firsthand and smartly pretended that he was not my friend and in fact had never heard of me nor did he know where I live.
“I can’t believe I just did that.” (I SAID) “It wasn’t that moronic, was it?” I pleaded with my eyes for encouragement.
“Actually, Chris, I don’t think I could ever do something as asinine as put my car across someone’s driveway and think it was a parking space. I’m going to go to bed now. Please don’t talk to me for a week.”
Crap! NO! Confirmation of my idiocy! And you know what’s really astonishing? #1 is yet to come. It occurred just two days hence, and is the reason I launched into all this messy verbiage in the first place. It is the most classical kind of stupid, and it happened to me.

If you’ve lived as long as I have, and you are as dumb as I am, you have probably accumulated quite an assortment of episodes in which you are the star of The Idiot Show. Most of my Idiot Show moments come thanks to a shocking lack of foresight. To warm up the foresight concept, I’ll first describe the most common of my Idiot Show moments that happens almost every night/morning.

I’m pretty much always late for work. It can be by as little as a couple of minutes or as much as a quarter hour. It’s not that I’m lazy, or that I drive slowly, or even that I’m not aware of the hour. I just can’t make myself go to bed early enough to get the 8 hours of sleep needed before I have to wake up so that I can make the drive to work on time. Which leads me to ask myself (every day) why is this so hard? I can’t figure out when to go to bed? That’s completely retarded! (Excuse my French)

If you can’t plan ahead 8 HOURS, I don’t know how or why, but sooner, not later, you will die a horribly embarrassing death. 8 hours is nothing, a blip, a tiny moment, a Michael Jackson-sized nose. It’s been a completely insignificant temporal quantity since, I don’t know, my 21st birthday or so. When you’re a kid, of course, you might remember that 8 hours was an eternity. I’ll demonstrate:

Kid: Dad, when’s Santa coming?
Dad: Well, kid, it looks like (pauses to look at watch) in 8 hours we can start opening gifts!
Kid: 8 HOURS!! Now I’ll NEVER get any presents!

But when you’re an adult, 8 hours passes like a white guy in a comic book convention.
Guy 1: Dude! It’s July 20! Wanna hit the bars for my 29th birthday? Last one before the big three-oh! It’s only 8 hours from now!
Guy 2: Dude, it’s February.
Guy 1: WHAT?!
Guy 2: And you’re 42.
Guy 1: DAMMIT! How does this ALWAYS HAPPEN?! Now I’ll NEVER get any presents!

Ok, I’ve completely lost track of what I was talking about. Anyway, yeah, 8 hours from right now is not that far away. I should be able to just go to sleep at 11:30, wake up at 7:30, get to work by 8:30, and be praised by my bosses for my timeliness. Instead I roll into bed at quarter past midnight, hit the snooze button until 8:15, frantically shower and get ready in ten minutes, and hurry to work by 9:05. Which, I should reiterate, is five minutes late. Typical Idiot Show episode.

However, because of recent events, or recent event, I should say, over the next few days I will count down the top three episodes of my personal homebrewed Idiot Show. I will enumerate them in present tense, so that you may well appreciate and accurately experience the full measure of my benightedness.

#3: The Toll Bridge of Obtuseness

The setup:
It is the summer of 1999 and I am living in Berkeley but working in Palo Alto, a two hour drive away. For two weeks while I look for an apartment near the Stanford campus I live with my best friend Steve, who has graciously allowed me temporary shelter in exchange for a VCR. I complain often and audibly about the toll I must pay just to drive to work across the Bay Bridge.
Day 1:
Having gone out on the town the night before, Steve is aware of my completely empty wallet. I wake up (late, see above), fly out the door, and begin my drive through Berkeley toward the bridge. I receive a call on my cell phone. “Hello?” (it’s how I answer the phone)
“Chris, do you still have no cash at all?” (Steve’s on the line. See, I thought that might be obvious, and didn’t want to go into a lengthy explanation about whom I was talking to, but I’ll spell it out just this once: It was Steve.) I pull out my empty wallet, which is completely 100% empty, and also has absolutely nothing in it. I look ahead, and realize that I am speeding with reckless abandon toward the onramp for the freeway/toll bridge.
“Um…yes.” (That’s me again. See if you can follow along now.)
“You know the Bay Bridge has a $2 toll. Do you have any coins in your car?”
“Um…no.”
“Where are you?”
“Down the street from your place.”
“Pull over, I’ll be there in two minutes.” I comply, and sure enough, two minutes later (my friend has none of the time issues that I do) Steve’s silver Toyota shows up (Steve’s driving it. You know what? I think you could have figured that one out.). He gets out of his ride and walks to the passenger side of my car. I sheepishly reach two fingers out the crack of my window and hide my face as I pull two dollars into the car before driving away in shame.  I see a glimpse of Steve shaking his head in disbelief in the rear-view mirror before I turn the corner and continue on to work. Stupid, eh? YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW THE HALF OF IT. Or, maybe, you technically know exactly half of it.
Day 2:
THE VERY NEXT DAY. I awaken (late, see above), fly out the door, and begin my drive through Berkeley toward the bridge. I think about how nice Steve was to not only chase me down and give me toll money, but to even think of me and figure out how much money I had and how much I would need and put it all together before I got 4 blocks from his house. What a friend! I look up from my thoughts to find a man angrily staring into my car. He is dressed in a big shiny yellow toll booth. Daa daa da da da daa! IDIOT SHOW!

If you’re still not with me, I have exactly the same wallet with exactly the same contents in exactly the same configuration as the day before. Dammit Steve! Where were you this time! (He probably assumed that I was smarter than I am. Many people have made this mistake.) I spend the next few minutes filling out a form applying for membership in the ‘Please Just Hit Me In the Face and Get It Over With’ Association as twenty-odd commuters murder me with their horns again and again and again and again. On the bright side, I’ve been a member of PJHMItFaGIOW for almost nine years now, and the networking possibilities alone have been worth the hefty dues. It’s how I got into the architecture business!

(check back soon to see which episode took the #2 spot!)

Hey everybody! I’ve been away for so long! But I’m back, and my arms are killing me. This will be an update of some strange things that have happened recently, in no particular order.

Part the First -
It is written that Chris will never work for anyone who is not connected in some way to one of his family members.
Thus I arrived with little trepidation at my job interview with a firm called Johnson Fain last Tuesday. Nevermind that this was my absolute final chance of working in a firm this summer. And nevermind that what came out of my mouth at said interview would not only reflect upon me and my school, but also my father and a principal at JF who is one of my dad’s old sailing buddies. Despite all that, I had a bit of a nerd bounce in my step as I took in the carefully cultivated "unfinished" interior of the building that signals power and prestige in the architecture world. Blissfully suppressing the squirming lava monster of nerves that yearned for a chance to screw up my life, and a cookie, I strode headlong into the three month employ of one of the largest architecture firms in Los Angeles.
And now I reap the punishments…which are also rewards, which is why I want to crawl into a hole and read books for the next twelve years. With Jessica Alba. I bet she wouldn’t force me to sand 6" cubes of basswood until they reflect the white of my teeth. Did I mention that my arms are tired?

Part Deux -
It is written that nothing interesting ever happens, until it does.
A couple of days ago I was full witness to an honest to god, four-network-broadcast high-speed police chase. It felt a bit like an episode of Benny Hill, so play that song in your head as you read further.
In the car are Nick, Sylvie, and Chris. We are driving to the Rose Bowl for some leisure activities after sundown, when up in the sky there arose such a clatter, we all raised our heads to see what’s the matter. The moon on the gray-watered grass of the bowl was nary ’nuff light to make vis’ble the whole. When what to my wandering eyes should appear, but a miniature Ford F150, and eight tiny cop cars. With gaggle of news choppers, so reckless and quick, I knew in a moment it must be a high speed chase, Nick.
It flew by silently several miles up the canyon, only flashing lights of blue and red visible, so we said our oohs and aahs and forgot all about it. However, just a few moments later, we arrived at the bowl, and a rather pathetic-looking policeman on a bicycle tried to appear authoritative as he held up his almighty hand to halt our trespass into the intersection of forbiddenness. Perplexed were we, until there arose a much greater clatter than before, and who should appear again, right next to us, but that bugger of a fugitive, and his whole entourage, spotlights and all. He tore past us like a bear on fire, trailing at safe distance a string of obedient wailing pandas. We stared in wonderment at the display, shielding our eyes from the hot UFO light of the hovering fleet. Then, to our continued astonishment, the big thug flipped a U-turn a hundred feet down the street, and shepherded his patient flock through the forbidden intersection once again, the whole spectacle disappearing up the same road from whence they had come. I almost saw credits rolling in front of me over the whole scene. That’s another Benny Hill reference, in case you’d stopped playing the song in your head. You probably were confused at the Night Before Christmas reference there in the middle. That’s ok. It’s not important.

Trilogy
It is written that meals should never cost as much as a new computer.
My cousin, bless her, just graduated from Medical School. My other cousin, bless her, is getting married. So it was that we three from Altadee squeezed into our favorite Alaskan metal sausage and flew to Seattle to celebrate. As a ‘Way to Go!’ gesture, twelve people went out to a steakhouse on Lake Union. My initial assumptions about steakhouses and their formalities were almost immediately swallowed as our waitress noticed that we had been sitting in a hot car with no air conditioning for an hour prior to our arrival. How did she notice this? She stood near us, and felt the heat from twelve sweltering bodies. She snapped her fingers, and at once a parade of aproned strongmen emerged with pitchers of ice water, unable to hold back their glee at the thought of a mere grin from our direction. I downed the first sweet serving of cool liquid, but was astonished to find my glass completely full the moment I laid it down on the table (so attentive were the servants). They filled our glasses and our bladders until not one person at the table was empty, and then disappeared like clownfish in a reef.
This new addition to my constitution led inevitably to the Pressing Need, so I slipped unobtrusively away from the table as the rest of my party held six simultaneous conversations. Thus relieved, I returned to my seat to find something amiss. What was different? I put the thought away as I reached out to once again return my napkin to its comfortable lappitude. That was it! My napkin. It was folded! I looked around violently. Who had dared disturb my nappy’s natural rest? There, in the corner, with a look of stoic pleasure, stood our waitress, awaiting our next slightest need. I turned back to the unbeknownst fray, and joined in with the festivities. Soon, another diner in our group stood to leave, and before they had so much as turned the corner toward the rest rooms, the waitress was upon their napkin like a bully to a kid with glasses. Within seconds she had deconstructed the disarray and flipped the small piece of fabric into a decorative triangle, and without so much as a whisper, zipped back to home plate. The person returned, looked at their napkin with perplexion, looked at the stubbornly silent waitress, shrugged, and returned to conversation. This required more exploration.
I yawned and stretched nonchalantly, then reached out and mussed up my napkin in a flash, shoving corners of it under the bread basket and into my water glass. Then, I looked around at the people at my table. Convinced of their being occupied, I slid silently out of my chair and purposely did not acknowledge the woman at the ready as I went toward the restrooms again. Just as I was about to round the corner, I saw her zip over to the table and I jumped into a nearby booth to witness the performance. She gave no thought to the state of my napkin, only flipping it flat, then folding it neatly before returning to her station. I giggled at my transgression, waving away the punches from the Chinese couple in whose dinner I was kneeling. I returned to my perfect pyramid of cloth as if nothing had happened, sat for a few minutes, wrapped my napkin around the candle, between the bottles of wine, and into the vase with the chrysanthemum. I strolled by the waitress like a man who just won a poker game.
This time, I walked…..as…..slo..w..ly……as……po.ss..ib..le away from the table, keeping her in the corner of my eye. She appeared flustered, stepping out from the wall, then thinking better of it, returning, then back out again, until she was sure I was far away. I wasn’t. I hid behind the frosted glass partition in the kitchen and watched her deftly untie my napkin from the table and return it to its properly creased state. Unbelievable. This woman was good. She completely won me over, and I ceased my nonsense.
I was pleased to note that after a minor squabble over who would get to pay the $660 bill, my uncle gave her a $100 tip. I like to think I was partly responsible for that.

Ok, that’s all. See you soon!
-c

The top 10 things I learned while in Europe:

10. Mosquitoes like it when you leave the lights on and the window open.
9. Cars don’t have to be nearly as big as they are.
8. Air conditioning is the greatest invention since en-suite bathrooms.
7. Don’t buy cheap metal sunglasses if you are going to sweat.
6. Traveling during the World Cup is a blast.
5. There are a lot more Canadians in the world than I previously knew.
4. The American way of life is actually very strange.
3. I don’t need my iPod.
2. Never let anyone take your passport from you, even if they have a badge.
1. People are exactly as rude as you are.

This is a very sad blog. It’s the last one about Europe. The End. Goodbye. I’m back home, jetlagged and not just a bit confused. I couldn’t even remember which light switch in my bathroom is the one that doesn’t turn on the heat lamps. But there were a few more days in England that were fun, so I thought I’d just finish it up. Here goes.
   When I last left you it was Friday night, with three more full days in London. On Saturday morning I let my parents go to breakfast without me in order to sleep a little longer. I knew we were going to have a late night and I wanted to get as much as possible. We had three tickets to see a midnight showing of Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe Theater, so we decided to make it an easy day. There were a few things I wanted to show my parents in the area near our hotel. First, after a few minutes searching, I led them to the little quaint neighborhood in Kensington and Chelsea that I’ve previously written about. I was happy to find it again, as it is kind of a small place, easily missed but worth the effort to see. Smack in the middle of the area is a pub, as pubish a pub as any pub has ever pubbed. We stopped for some Strongbows and food that was almost never brought out. On the tv was first a cricket match, and then when the barmaid got bored with that, a music channel that only shows videos of songs from movies. I sat through such classics as "Because You Love Me" by Celine Dion, from the movie Up Close & Personal, "All for One" by the trio of Bryan Adams, Sting, and Rod Stewart from the movie 3 Musketeers, "The New Pink Panther Theme" by Freak Nasty and Beyonce, and "Don’t You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds for the Breakfast Club soundtrack. "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate from the Full Monty was playing when the waitress finally acknowledged my hails and told me that my food order had somehow been misplaced. If I would just wait a few more minutes it would be ready. I asked her very politely if she could please first put my ears out on the curb and then shove sizzling British sausages into my eyeballs. She laughed confusedly and backed slowly away. My food arrived shortly thereafter, while Loverboy’s "Almost Paradise" delivered random love scenes from Footloose to an unsuspecting audience of soon-to-leave pub patrons.
   How could we ask for more? I swear that I could see forever in Kensington and Chelsea. So we went in search of the Notting Hill Portabello Market. Boy did we find it. All we had to do was walk out onto the main street and follow the gathering streams of people. It was an absolute zoo of antique shoppers, so we just pushed our way around for a while until I found exactly what I didn’t know I was even looking for, an early 20th century hand-made level with brass top plate and dual axis indicators that would look great on my desk at school, for only 18 Euros. Score! Portabello Market seen, we tried to decide what to do next. Unfortunately, we were of differing opinions. On the one hand, there was an argument for going back to the hotel and sleeping and/or reading until it was time to get ready for the play. On the other hand, I had been told by an extremely attractive British girl I met on a train weeks ago that an exhibit on Modernism at the Victoria and Albert Museum was bang on. So we split up, my mom and I heading to the museum, my dad back for a well-deserved nap.
   The museum was much larger than I expected, and so was the exhibit, which included some really interesting items focusing on the period between the end of the first world war and the beginning of the second, encompassing the Russian revolution as well. I won’t bore you with most of the details, but the Le Corbusier stuff was amazing, if only for the fact that there were original Corb sketches that I’ve seen reproduced in every introductory Architecture textbook I’ve ever read. There was also a really cool study of how the iconic London Underground map was developed, and it’s various iterations. Anyway, I wish I had been allowed to take pictures, because we just didn’t have enough time to see everything I wanted to. Back to the hotel went we for waking up, cleaning up, and dressing up, then off in a London cab to the theater. As I think I’ve mentioned before, it was built as much as eight years ago, using only tools, techniques, and materials available when the first Globe Theater was built mpfhundred years ago. Or so. The play was really difficult to follow at first, but as time went along (and after we found a synopsis at intermission), it became easier to understand. It was very funny, but that may have been mostly because of the actors’ performances, as I felt like every other joke written by Shakespeare went completely over my head. I was expecting an hour and a half show, but it actually was more than three hours before the riotous curtain calls, and after four in the morning before we walked through the door of our hotel.
   Somehow we woke with vigor, perhaps mostly because we were all excited about our plans for the day. We got it in our heads that the day after staying out until four am would be a good one to take a long trip down to the southern coast of England, to Portsmouth. It was actually quite easy, British trains being as reliable as they are, so that we were smelling the salty air by just after two in the afternoon. The train station doubled as a ferry port, so we hopped aboard and drifted over to the other jaw of the port’s mouth, to where most of the marinas were. Once there we happened upon the very boats sailed in the Volvo Ocean Race I had seen the finish of way back when I was in Rotterdam. They were hauled out of the water and up on lifts in a dockyard, and we found that if we went around to the back side of the place we could stand right underneath them and see the rare view of them from below. It was hard to believe these things that look so fragile had sailed around the whole world. It also provided a nice bookend to my trip, seeing these at the end after watching them near the beginning.
   I wasn’t feeling well for some reason, a similar set of symptoms to the last time I was sick in England, so I sat on a bench while my parents explored the place. They found out firstly that there’s no such thing as a "Yacht Club" in England, but secondly that, inexplicably, there was a "Yacht Club" down the way where we could have a bite to eat and meet some of the locals. It was situated on the aft deck of a light boat, a boat usually anchored outside of a port with a lighthouse-ish thing mounted on the bow, in case an actual lighthouse was unavailable. We had to prove our associations before they would open the gate for us, and when we walked in we were confronted first with a paunchy, pale man in a leather vest, hat, chaps, and no shirt, then by the tiniest bar ever crammed into a "Yacht Club", whose sole type of food consisted of thin potato slices fried and salted and stuffed into a cellophane bag. Not quite what we were looking for, but it did give us a chance to sit out on the deck and watch the insanity that is Portsmouth water traffic. Tiny fishing boats the size of my shoe steamed through the chop, only to be overtaken by enormous naval battleships and automobile ferries, while endless streams of large sailboats turned about in vain attempts to take their sails down in 15 knot winds and a 10 knot current. We left disappointed across the water once again, arriving at the station approximately half an hour after six in the evening. Should we go home? Should we go to Oxford? Uh huh, you guessed it.
   The 7:00 train to Britain’s oldest University (I just made that up, I have no idea how old it is) lasted just over an hour, and when we arrived we found out that trains from Oxford to London left at "half nine" and "half ten". That’s a European term I had to learn early on, and it means "half PAST whatever", not "half OF whatever", something I somehow managed to avoid finding the meaning of the hard way. For some reason the phrase "half nine" indicates to me 8:30, or perhaps in the mathematical sense, 4:30 (which I used my tremendous logic to immediately discard as being too complicated). The half nine train would land us in London at about 10:45, in time to take the underground back to our hotel. The half TEN train would dump us out in Paddington Station with fifteen minutes before the whole system shut down for the night. Could we see all of Oxford in one hour? We could at least try! Except there was really no way. So after an hour and a half of seeing the incredible buildings strewn about the small University town we didn’t buy a pizza at an old, local family-owned restaurant (despite our attempts otherwise), and made it back to the station with just 3 minutes to spare, to find out our 10:30 train had been delayed by 25, then 31, then 36 minutes. Eventually they just re-routed another train that was on its way to London through Oxford, and sent us out only ten minutes late. Of course, ten minutes late meant an 11:50 London arrival, and therefore no Underground, so we hailed a taxi to take us straight home. We arrived at our hotel at precisely midnight.
   That meant, interestingly enough, that from midnight to midnight, the full twenty four hours of Sunday, July 16, 2006, we went to a Shakespeare play in London, went to a Yacht Club in Portsmouth, and didn’t buy anything from a Pizza Hut in Oxford. Sleep.
   The next day was our last, and promised a 7:30 performance of "The Producers" in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane that evening. There was one thing I really wanted to see/do, and one thing I really wanted to show my parents before then (yeeeeshaspiderjustranupmyleg). The latter was the place I lived for my first almost two weeks in London, a little place called Ealing. We took the Tube out west and got off at the Ealing Broadway station, the way I’d done so many times before. First we went down into the shopping district to buy my mom some socks. Don’t ask. Then I forced my parents to march up the long, steep walk to Kenton House, showing them all kinds of interesting things along the way. Ok, by "all kinds" I mean the Ealing Cricket Club. There’s not much to see on the walk. We stopped at my former abode to get some water, and then, as we were now running quite late, we hailed a cab back to Ealing Broadway and took the Underground over to the Victoria station, where we picked up no-wait tickets to the London Eye, then hopped on the tube once more to Westminster, where the big ferris wheel looms over the Thames and the rest of the city. We were treated to a half hour ride up and over in a large 20-person glass room, heating up to lethal proportions under each new minute of the blazing English sun.
   Back aground, there was no time to waste in getting back and dressing up for the theeayter. We Tubed over to Covent Gardens and went through a quaint little piazza before arriving at the doors. It was hot. There didn’t seem to be any air conditioning in the place, so they were handing out "The Producers" hand fans. Later in the show the main character, played by Nathan Lane in the recent movie etc, but played by someone else I’d never heard of here, addressed the audience directly about the lack of air conditioning in the place. I don’t know if it was a clever ad lib or written in, but if it was the latter there is the possibility that they left off the air conditioning just for this joke, which means that I hated The Producers. If that’s not the case, then I loved The Producers. It very amusingly walked the razor-thin line between poking-fun-at-insensitive and being-actually-insensitive. Horribly, shockingly, dangerously insensitive. I mean, a musical about a musical promoting a world war two winning gay Hitler could really ruffle some feathers, but I haven’t heard much along those lines from anyone since Mel Brooks revived his truly awful 70s movie for Broadway. In any case, we all loved it, and after a slight altercation with a drunk and belligerent London cabbie, we made our way home again.
   That was pretty much it for us, as the next morning we spent packing and getting to Heathrow, where my parents flew out non-stop to Los Angeles and I flew out non-stop to Manchester. In Manchester I had a hotel room booked, for a lot of money I didn’t have, that was right in the center of the city. It was a palatial set of rooms compared to the potato sacks I’d been staying in for most of the last two months. It had not just a bedroom but a living room and separate bathroom, and the floors were made of clouds and the sun shone through the ceiling in filtered rays of gold and, oh yeah, there was a fountain shooting out bags of iPods and laptops in the center of my balcony. Totally worth the $90. Anyway, I spent three hours on a cloud in the sun with my new laptop sifting through the pictures I’d taken on my trip, then set out to explore the city a bit. I found a place that didn’t want you to have ever heard of Chipotle to get my very first burrito on European soil, which strangely enough tasted just like the ones from Chipotle. In my later wanderings I found an IMAX theater (which I’m surprised aren’t called iMax now, given the trends) which was playing Superman in 3D, so I went. The movie was great, the 3D was not. Luckily it just happened during the action segments, so I could see Clark Kent and Lois Lane looking forlorn without the glasses on. I made the harrowing journey through the scary midnight Manchester streets back to my hotel and fell promptly asleep, knowing I had a terrible day ahead of me.
   I had the front desk call me a taxi, but when it didn’t arrive for half an hour I snagged one myself and got to the airport by nine in the morning for my eleven am flight. Checking in was quite an affair, but security turned out to be a breeze, so I had plenty of time to sit and contemplate the seven hours of cramped Airbus 330 seats in my future. I struck up conversation with a nice girl from Indianapolis who turned out to be my seat mate, so at least I didn’t have to sit next to a 300lb Air Force grounds-crewman, and with the entertainment center having "16 Blocks" (a movie I’d wanted to see in theaters but hadn’t) and Zelda: Oracle of Seasons available, I barely noticed the time.
   In Chicago I had approximately one hour to get through customs, get my bag from baggage claim, re-check my bag, and sprint from terminal five in O’Hare to terminal one, section C, gate 19. Terminal 1 was five very. very. slow. train stops from terminal 5, and section C began at the end of section B, which began after a very. very. long. security line. If you think there’s no way I would be able to make it, you’d be thinking the same thing I was at the time. Somehow, however, I arrived just as they were boarding the plane. I found my seat, the middle one of the middle section between two unhappy Chicagian women, and squeezed in, breathless and sweaty after my haul. The captain came on the loudspeaker. "Good afternoon folks, you’re flying the On-Time Airlines, United. We’ll be leaving the gate exactly as scheduled, at 2:55, and we have a bit of a southwesterly tail wind caused by some thunder storms over Colorado, so our trip should be much shorter than 4 hours and 20 minutes, more like 3 hours and 40. So, buckle up, because we’re heading out!" We taxied out to the runway and sat for a while. After 20 or so minutes, the captain came on the loudspeaker again. "Well, folks, as you can probably see we’re pretty much stuck out here with everyone else (a cursory glance out the distant windows revealed a parking lot of jumbo jets on either side of us). The traffic controllers have closed down our route due to thunderstorms over Colorado, which is unfortunately the type of delay that could mean minutes or could mean we need to get you on another flight to another city than LA. Sorry folks, but we’re going to be here for a while." Thanks, On-Time Airlines. 40 minutes passed. The captain again. "Well, you know how there are good days and there are bad? Well, today’s not our day. It seems our battery charger has died. At least, that’s what the little light on the console tells me. Now maintenance says that nine times out of ten that just means we need to replace the battery itself, and they actually have one in stock here at the airport, but we’re going to have to return to a gate where they will be waiting with the battery in hand to replace it as quickly as possible. They’ve opened up our route again, so as soon as we get this thing replaced, we’ll be on our way." Just-A-Little-Behind Airlines to the rescue. Taxi back to the gate, wait for the fixin’s. 30 minutes go by. Captain. "Ok, well, they’ve looked at it and are sure we need to just replace the battery. They’re just about to start on that, and they say it’ll just be about a 20 minute job." 40 minutes more. "Ok, folks, we’re back in business! The battery’s been replaced, and that fixed the problem. So once we have the 11 people back who left the plane, we’ll be good to go!" 10 more minutes. Planefull-of-Fuming-Passengers Flight 121 prepare for departure. A man walked into our cabin with a bag of McDonald’s, proclaiming happily that he knew they wouldn’t take off if his luggage were still on board, for security reasons (bombs being left behind, and all that), so he wasn’t worried about being late or anything. I don’t think he realized that I was physically restraining the largest of the two mean Chicagians sitting next to me. After taxiing back out to the runway, I began to hear gasps from the window seats. The smaller mean lady began to babble incoherently, but I understood the "13" she kept repeating was referring to the number of planes in front of us waiting to take off. We sat. 20 more minutes. The now dreaded captain. "Heh. Well. Um. Yeah, so we’ve just had a low pressure system pass through. For those of you who know, that means a front. Unfortunately, we’ve had a 180 degree wind shift, so the controllers are re-routing all traffic to the other end of the runways. Heh. Looks like we’ll have to taxi a bit. Sorry." Thank you for flying Totally-Disastrous-Airlines. Please be sure to take all your belongings with you when you run screaming back up the Jetway. 20 minutes later, we were taking off, exactly three hours to the minute after our original departure time.
   I flipped through the little brochures to find out what we were getting for dinner, as I was pretty much hungry by then, having not eaten in 6 hours. I couldn’t find anything about it, but there was a Flight Attendant pushing a cart in our general direction, so I waited. When she arrived, she had the unmitigated audacity to say, and I quote (which is more obvious when writing than speaking), "Sir, would you like to buy a SnackBox(tm) for five dollars?" *SMILE*.
"Um, excuse me? Did you just ask me to pay for airline food?"
*SMILE* "Well, it’s a SnackBox(tm)."
"Is it full of a steak dinner and champagne?"
*SMILE* "Oh, haha, no sir. It’s got a bag of thinly-sliced fried potato in a gourmet cellophane bag, a fruit cup, and a cracker. PLEASE Ma’am! Stay in your seat!" I wrestled the big Chicagian down again, which I was pleased to note I was getting better at.
"Um, what about a drink? Does it have a drink?"
*SMILE* "Of course, non-alcoholic drinks are complimentary! A cart will be by in about an hour. Would you care to buy a SnackBox(tm)?" She was talking to the smaller Chicagian now, who looked at the state of the two of us and greedily snatched one of the expensive things. In about an hour I poured the contents of a 5oz can of Pepsi into a shot glass and dribbled it onto my raisined tongue. The in-flight movie started. "16 Blocks".
   I was so relieved to be off that damn plane, seven hours later, that I sprinted through baggage check and into my mother’s awaiting car. After almost two months, eight flights, 16 train trips, and 35 nights in hostels, I was absolutely delirious to be home. I arrived to find my room straightened up and vacuumed, my bathroom scrubbed, my car washed and tuned up, and my dog shorn. Then I slept.
   It’s been a wonderful, scary, perplexing, moving, hilarious trip. I don’t think it’s something I could ever forget, but I’m glad I have these things to remind me of the nuances. Thanks for reading them, everyone. I’ve missed you a lot.
No more later.
-C

Ok, it’s been a furious bunch of days. It’s also been a long time since I could sit and write. So now comes an abridged version of the abridged version of the past few days.

   I set out from my large, stinky hostel in Geneva to see the lake, one of the main reasons for my stop there. I really oughtta know more about Geneva, but I don’t, so I was content to just go out and sit in the sun by some water. When I reached it, across from me was a water spout of tremendous size. It spouted a hundred feet in the air and looked like it was about a foot around at the base. I strolled around the long end of the lake, which Geneva grips like a baby holding a carrot, and headed out onto the spit of man made breakwater that the spout shoots out the end of. They allow you to walk right up to it, stopping you at about five feet away. In actuality, the spout is about six inches across at the base, and is angled carefully away so that we tourists remain perfectly dry even in such close quarters. A boatload of teenage boys drifted by under the fallout about twenty feet away and were practically blown off the boat under the exceptional downward force of the water. The best part was that occasionally the wind would blow a cool mist of the water onto the pathway, a brief respite from the blazing sun.

   I decided I really wanted to be out on the water, so I found a tour boat dock past an interesting sidewalk that is just inches above the water line where you can hand-feed swans, and boarded the massive vessel for a one hour tour of the buildings that sit along the lake’s coastline. It was an hour of being on the water, baking in the sun, and listening to absolute rubbish. The tour left me unfulfilled, so I went to a nearby dock where they rented motorboats by the hour, and splurged +50 (that’s 50 Swiss Franks, approximately $40) for a self-guided tour. I sat down, got the instructions, cranked the motor, backed away from the dock, and floored it. The engine gave a great bellow and shuddered violently, sending the boat forward at just zippier than a snail’s pace. They had clearly rigged the thing to keep speed down to a minimum, so I had to keep the throttle at maximum just to get past the throng of paddle boats. I putted around at a loud pace for about forty five minutes, then went back towards the dock. Across from the spit of breakwater that has the water spout is a almost identical man made spit of land covered in nude sunbathers. Well, not completely nude, but with the girls laying about in nothing but tiny thongs and the guys laying about in nothing but tinier thongs (no, Nicholas), it reminded me of some of the seal beaches I’ve seen in California. Aurf aurf aurf went the mass as I passed by back into the marina. At the last minute I took a detour to explore a little inlet I hadn’t seen before, but was stopped immediately by sidearmed police men on menacing looking boats. I also was stuck in a current. I didn’t quite realize before that moment that Lake Geneva is just a really wide, gentle portion of a river. A river that begins again right next to that police boat. A river that gets suddenly narrow, converting the great gentle flow of the entire volume of lakewater into a narrow channel in a matter of feet. And I was going down it, past arm waving cops screaming in French. I threw the gearbox into reverse, which successfully buried my back end into the water, and proceeded to fill my fiberglass bathtub at an alarming rate. If I were an inexperienced boatsman, I might have jumped ship at that point. However, I drew from my years on the sea and spun the steering wheel as sharply as I could while simultaneously shoving the throttle past neutral and into full blast forward, the now heavy back end spun around gracefully, and in front of the gaping policemen I did a perfect sliding 180 degree narrow-channel-u-turn. Then I sat in front of them for an awkward set of minutes as my pathetic, loud engine inched me against the current back towards the marina again. I gave them my biggest "Hello, I’m a Tourist" smile and ignored their nonverbal insults until my boat was successfully on the lake. I approached the dock and gently nudged the bow into the rubrail, walked forward and hopped off onto floating dry land, painter in hand, and tied the boat to a cleat as though it was half full of water when I rented it. Hands on my hips and a smile on my face from having been at least momentarily waterbound, I set off to see the rest of the city. I saw it. There’s really not much to see specifically in Geneva. There’s a lot of pretty views of the Mont Blanc mountain range, a bridge to an island in the bay, and that water spout. And the nudists. Other than that, I just sort of sat and took in the place. Eventually I returned to my hostel and had dinner with my Australian roommate who wanted desperately to discuss the declining state of video games, despite my numerous attempts to steer the conversation elsewhere. We also learned that our other roommate from the day before had missed his train because he had returned to retrieve his left-behind cellphone, which turned out to have been stolen by the manager of the hostel, who was forced to return it (sans sim card, which he claimed, inexplicably, was never inside it) and give him a free night’s stay when my roommate called the police and reported the theft. The police in Geneva are scary.

   The next morning I awoke with just enough time to checkout (carefully, with all my belongings), and go to the train station. I had the shock of learning that all the trains to Paris were full for the day (a first for me), but found a way to get there by changing trains in Lusanne instead.

   After a few wrong turns in Paris, I found 23 Rue de Godot de Mauroy, walked in the front door, and gave my parents a big hug. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it, but there they were, standing in front of me, in a hotel in Paris. After all I’d seen and done, it was odd and wonderful to have them here with me. No more hostels, no more backpacking, no more communal showers. My trip is almost over.

   That night we found a wonderful little brasserie on a little cobbled street across from a gigantic columned building called le Madeline. I still have no idea what it is, of course, but it served as a landmark for most of our feeted (I don’t mean fetid) excursions. The next morning we all set off for the Louvre, the Seine, and Notre Dame cathedral. I was expecting an enormous line at the largest museum in the world, but there was none. None. I don’t know why, but we were allowed to walk straight in, where we saw some incredible stuff like the Winged Victory and Venus de Milo sculptures, the Mona Lisa, and a crayon drawing of a Horcrux done by a child on the back of his ticket while he waited for his family to finally get done staring at boring stuff. We walked around for a couple hours, not even scratching the surface of The Louvre (I don’t know how the French can take words that should have 4 syllables and pronounce only one, then take a word like "Louvre", which has one syllable, and draw it out for three or four), but I had to leave SOMEthing for when I come back to Europe. So, after exiting the museum and throwing away my horcrux drawing, we hit the Seine, lunch, St. Chapel, and Notre Dame cathedrals in quick succession. Notre Dame was particularly disappointing, as inside it just looked like a regular old (old) cross-shaped Catholic cathedral. As everyone was pretty grumpy by the end of the day of walking, we went back home, ordered a pizza, and went to sleep.

   The next day went much more smoothly. We decided to try for the Eiffel Tower and Arch de Triumph. We discovered that nearby was a tour bus that hit those and did a river tour on the Seine for a four hour excursion, so we signed up and headed to the bus station. We sat down in the upper level of the double decker bus, and proceeded to see the bottom 20 feet of some famous Parisian landmarks. I could tell by their footings that they were very old. The Arch de Triumph was especially stone-like at the bottom. Then we were branded and herded like cattle down a gangplank into a floating greenhouse, where we spent an hour looking at the bottom twenty feet of some more famous Parisian landmarks from the water.

   After our trip in the heatbox we disembarked at the Eiffel Tower, which was the first thing I’d seen in Paris that hurt my brain. I just can’t believe how light that collection of hundreds of thousands of tons of steel looked. And I didn’t know this, but it actually reflects the sun, so it positively glimmers in the afternoon sky. We had tickets to the second floor, so again we herded to the impressively complex two story elevator, slid up the inside of one leg of the structure, and took in the incredible Paris skyline. Our day was complete. The bus eventually deposited us back on street level, where we found a nice little brasserie, different from the nice little brasserie from the previous night, to have dinner and some Italian ice cream. Sleep.

   Having completed most of our tasks, my parents decided to allow me to plan the next day, and I wanted very much to see a couple of the famous modern buildings in the city. The first is called Le Grande Arch, and it’s a skyscraper in the business district that is perfectly cubical, with a gigantic gaping hole cut out the middle. It looks a lot like a really deep picture frame. There’s an elevator that shoots right up the middle of the empty area to the top floor, where you can look out over Paris right down the central axis that connects the center of this building with the Arch de Triumph, down the Champs Elises (or however that’s spelled), through the Arch de Carousel, and to the tip of the new IM Pei glass pyramid in the center of the courtyard out front of the Louvre (loovera). It’s such a great way to give the entire city a feeling of connectedness and singularity, unlike, say, Rome, that felt like a hodgepodge of preserved ruins and dirty buses.

   After the Grande Arch, we went to what I always call The Inside Out Building, which is properly known as the Pompadu. It’s a modern art museum that has all it’s structure and mechanical systems on the outside, leaving the inside for the art. The structural system is quite ingenious, converting the downward pull of the weight of the floors to an upward tension handled by thick cables anchored to the ground, but you really don’t care about all that, do you? Outside were some people playing traditional Australian instruments, and amazingly a group of Tibetan Monks doing Tuvan Chants, where they sing two notes at the same time. It’s an absolutely remarkable sound, unlike any other singing you’ve ever heard, and takes years of practice to master. It was beautiful and haunting, and made me reach into my pocket and give them five euros. Then I went inside the massive museum. They were having a special exhibit on Los Angeles in the postwar decades, and also one on Morphosis, the LA based architecture firm headed by recent Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne. It was interesting, but not nearly as interesting as running into one of my SCI-Arc professors, named Roland Wahlroos-Ritter, outside the doors. Talk about uncomfortable. Neither of us knew quite what to say, so we just hemmed and hawed until a sufficient amount of time had passed that we could not-impolitely say our goodbyes.

   The next stop was le Grande Palais, a glass-domed thing built for the Paris Exposition of 1900, but it was closed, so we just walked around it and headed over toward the Eiffel tower, having dinner on a riverboat on the Seine beneath the towering sunset-lit structure.

   We had decided not to just take a train through the Chunnel to get to London, but to find a way across by water. A short taxi ride got us to Gare De Nord, one of the main train stations in Paris. From there, we took a train through Lille to Calais. Another expensive taxi ride got us to the Calais port, where a ferry shoveled us through the English Channel across to the incredibly white, incredibly cliffs of Dover. Pictures pictures pictures. A rough bus ride from the large Port of Dover got us to the town’s main train station, where we caught a final set of cars to London, Waterloo station. Braving the underground (well, my parents braved, I felt right at home, finally), we found our tiny little tiny of a tiny hotel and found spots for all our combined stuff in our tiny little tiny of a tiny room. It has a small cabinet that opens up to reveal a full kitchen, complete with pop-up Soux Chef.

   We found a nice little British Pub and had Chicken Tiki Masala and Guinness, then went back to the room and crashed. Today, we woke up rather late with the intention of seeing Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and The Eye, with a stop off at the famous Harrod’s department store. When we got to Harrod’s, however, we spent two and a half hours there, looking at (and occasionally buying) the amazing things they sell there. For instance, there is an entire room full of fossils you can buy. Yes, fossils. There was a wood-inlaid antique table for sale for £56,000, just sitting out amongst all the other furniture. That’s more than $100,000 out on the floor, in just one item. We also stopped to get tickets to The Producers on Monday night, which I’m very excited about.

   The List sufficiently destroyed, we headed on the Underground to Green Park, near Buckingham Palace. We stopped to get sandwiches and chips and drinks and sat out having a picnic and feeding the pigeons until a gruff man forced us to pay £1.50 each for the chairs we were sitting on. As we strolled through the park I noticed that there was quite a bit more security around than the last time I’d been through there. We arrived, took the obligatory pictures of the guards and their changing, then looked over as a small black car containing a waving Prince Charles and Camilla shot down the driveway and through the rapidly closing gates. That’s right, stunned beyond belief, I got to see the future King and Queen of England today. For about half a second.

   We wandered around in flabbergastion for a while before we headed off on foot for Big Ben. When we got there, it was surrounded by a mile-thick throng of camera’d tourists, all snapping madly at the big clock as it stood over us thinking, "oh, dear, I wish they wouldn’t all push so," in a slow, deep British drawl. We pushed our way past the rest of the Parliament building and Westminster Abbey into the park I’d previously visited for a nice sit on the bank of the Thames. Then we rose, and went back to the Underground for a crowded ride in rush hour subway traffic to our hotel. I have no idea what everyone wants to see tomorrow, but we have midnight tickets to see Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe, so that should be interesting. More later.

-C