Says My Auld One To Your Auld One

It's hard to keep this thing updated; I find that when I actually do things worth mentioning, I'm too busy to blah blah blah. Same old song and dance.

Started up lessons with Lester again -- got another road test in a few weeks. We spent the entire time parallel parking on Saturday. I think I've narrowed my problem down to not adequately watching the car in front of me. Lester also bolstered my spirits a bit by pointing out that the inspector I was assigned last time (#700) is widely regarded as being the toughest out of all them. Dunno, maybe Lester's just earning his keep, but I'm feeling better about this next test. Also, he'd burned his hands something terrible in a grease fire at his apartment a few weeks ago; the blisters are only now starting to heal.

Nina and I managed to attend the Saturday presentations at HOPE 6. I gotta say, it was a bit disappointing. One of the seminars I'd wanted to attend (on quantum cryptography) was cancelled, and the other stuff was all pretty much, you know, entry-level. Ultimately, she and I variously managed to attend:

• Constructing Cryptographic Protocols (given by one of the main dudes from cDc)
• Breaking Down the Web of Trust
• Law Enforcement Wiretaps: Background and Vulnerabilities

We ducked out of that to hitch a ride on the Q-train party that was going down, but when we got to Union Sq., the attendees seemed a bit too awful to deal with. From what I can suss, there's this kind of geek party scene you can tap into these days in NYC, and, you know, people throw these "theme" parties, and every dresses up in homemade costumes. The way I've been describing it to people is that there's this SNL sketch about a student council election getting "swept by nerds," and Rachel Dratch, thanking her constituents, points out how much is owed to "the kid who wears the fedora." These people, these party people -- they're all wearing fedoras, actual ones or no.

Also attended a Best of Animateka feature at BAM -- Animateka being an Eastern-European animation festival. The shorts were predictably gloomy, and some were downright terrifying, like this one, which apparently won a prize last year. (It doesn't look like much in the picture, but the whole thing kind of squiggles and groans at you in a most unappetizing way for like 10 minutes.) After the show, we poked around in some construction detritus that was sitting around in the lot behind the big Salvation Army offices on Hanson Pl. (The results are in my Flickr photostream.)

So that was all the weekend before last. Saturday night, a bunch of us (incl. Jegga and Sophie P. of HCHS fame) went down to Coney Island for the One Night of Fire party, the organizers of which promised a wild bonfire + bacchanale on the beach. It turned out to be a bit more subdued, with a higher percentage of. One thing that's remarkable about Coney Island, at least at night, is how much it seems like the end of the world out there, especially when you're out on the darker parts of boardwalk away from rides and arcades. We all ended up going on the Wonder Wheel -- Aanie and I in a normal car, everyone else in one of the slidy ones that careen up and down the spokes of the wheel. Fans of going to Coney Island with me may remember that I do not do very well on the Wonder Wheel (though not as badly as I do on the teacups; hurfff), and that night was no exception.

I'm seriously considering making the preparations to attend the Gütersloh bug-squashing party for Debian Etch. I've never been off the continent before. It'd be expensive and a little scary, and, like someone on #debian-bugs mentioned, 8000 miles is a long way to go to fix bugs, but I don't know... I think I should do it. Razor said he might like to go to Amsterdam. I'm fucking down, guy. Let's not let each other back out of this one.

Pretty Girls, Pretty Boys

So Ticketmaster was able to cancel my Buzzcocks tix and reissue them such that I could pick 'em up at the show, and so Nina and I went to Warsaw last Tuesday. I'd never been there before -- my understanding is that it used to be the site of a Polish National Home, but that it really isn't anymore? Not sure. They serve pierogies, though, and this sweetish Polish beer. The opening bands weren't listed, but the one directly before The 'Cocks was this L.A. band called The Adored. They were basically awful.

The Buzzcocks were every bit as gross and old as they look in the pictures I'd seen of them, particularly Pete Shelley, who, believe it or not, actually used to be pretty handsome, but they played a really tight set (though Pete Shelley couldn't quite seem to keep up vocally with certain songs) and played basically all of Singles Going Steady as an encore. The crowd was awesome -- a mix of hipsters and sort of middle-aged punks (and a set of fairly elderly ladies who really liked The Adored) but all very lively and dancing around, much to the irritation of the enormous Polish bouncer, who kept having to dive into the pit and pull some errant mosher out by his neck. I got hit in the face; I literally almost clocked this drunk blonde woman who wouldn't stop trying to pick a fight with Nina. Hormones and that.

It was my birthday on Saturday! Since, believe it or not, it was Sophie's on Sunday, we threw a joint birthday party in Prospect Park and invited all of our friends -- and they all came! (Well, with a few notable (and forgivable) exceptions.) It was kind of shockingly well-attended. But we planned ahead and bought like twenty lbs. of ground chuck and hauled that gross little hibachi grill out of my closet. I cooked hot dogs and hamburgers for all comers, and I don't think I gave anyone food poisoning. Thanks for coming, everyone! I have pictures somewhere -- p'raps I'll post them later. It's sort of hard to keep this thing updated. I feel like I'm always busy, even though I do practically nothing.

Loot-wise, I got really nice and thoughtful presents from everyone, including Tom who got me Red Roses for Me by The Pogues, which features my new favorite song, Transmetropolitan:

This town has done us dirty
This town has bled us dry
We've been here for a long time
And we'll be here til we die
So we'll finish off the leavings
Of blood and glue and beer
And burn this bloody city down
In the summer of the year

I went through a stretch in high school where I was telling everyone that I didn't think I'd make it to 25. It wasn't for any particular reason -- I didn't have any specific awful thing in mind, though I did want to kill myself pretty bad off and on for a stretch -- but nonetheless it's sort of a pleasant surprise to be here. Hi, everyone.

A Drunkard's Dream If I Ever Did See One

So I just got back from a really great weekend on Cape Cod at Katharine's dad's "cottage" in Wellfleet, untanned but mosquito-bitten as all get-out, certainly not quite ready to face the office. We (me, Nina, Katharine, and Ted) left Thursday night after an awful, hectic day, which I should probably say something about first:

I failed my road test.

I am willing to accept most of the blame for this -- the fault of mine in any endeavor that I'm most ready to acknowledge is that I'm pretty fucking careless. When something's not fun or exciting, I tend to just sort of slop through it, even when I'm really trying to pay attention and be careful. It's fucking pathological. So I'm pretty sure that's why I got the following marks on the test:

• Poor judgement in traffic
• Fails to anticipate the actions of: Other

...even though I have no fucking idea what either of those mean. But that stuff only came after I'd already failed (i.e., gotten more than 30 points) for the following reasons:

• Unable to park properly (I hit the curb)
• Fails to adequately observe / use caution (I didn't check my passenger-side mirror when pulling over for a three-point turn)

That last one, which cost me 15 points, I totally blame on Lester, who, I swear to Christ, never once fucking mentioned that fucking mirror to me. I was also in an unfamiliar (shitty) car, since I'd registered for the test through the DMV instead of through the school, and Lester wasn't available. Instead, I got Mr. Hester, who was basically a nice guy, if a bit taciturn. He seemed kind of surprised at how bad I was, and snorted derisively when I told him Lester'd never gone through that with me (which might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it is). "Lester!" he said. "Man, you got to check your mirrors!"

So I was pretty disconsolate after I finished my 10 minutes, not least of all because the inspector, who was a real nice guy, had reassured me at the beginning of the test, "Don't worry -- this test is really just for beginners, to make sure you are safe enough to be practicing on the road to be a better driver unsupervised." And the cost of scheduling 3 more 90-minute lessons didn't make me feel any better, either. But I didn't have time to fret over that too much, because I also had to run to Nina's place to help Aanie move some IKEA furniture that we'd purchased the week before over to her place and then head up to my shrink and then get back to Brooklyn to help Nina get stuff together for the trip. We just barely made the 7:38 train to New Haven (Nina used all of her powers of haste to get us from the Time Sq. shuttle to gate 107 at Grand Central in under 4 minutes) where Ted and Katharine met us with the car that they'd picked up from Ted's parents' place.

We stopped at a deserted 24-hour Stop & Shop that smelled like a rabbit cage and loaded up with supplies. Ted, rogue that he is, stole two barrel-like containers of Poland Spring.

Day One: After blueberry pancakes, bacon, and eggs aux gruyere, we went to the beach at Newcomb Hollow. The water was too cold to swim in, though we waded a bit, and played with this brown seaweed that looked and felt disturbingly like hair. Nina and I took a walk and began a collection of pretty stones from along the shoreline that turned out to be kind of dull once they dried off. After that, we drove over to the bay and ate fried clams at the place we went last year that serves Moose Trax. Nobody ordered Moose Trax, but we all stuffed ourselves, and the place gave me a free iced tea by accident. A bit later, we made Ted-burgers -- well, Ted made them, and everyone else ate them.

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And then we got plastered listening to The Rocket and went for a walk, at substantially the same hour (late) and to the same location (Duck Pond) that everyone went last year, but it was about 40 degrees warmer this time. We sang along the way and brought a candle, which we planted in the sand by the pond and lit before going skinny-dipping, which is something I hadn't done since sprouting hair on my back. The water, or, at least, the sand, was surprisingly warm, and Ted and Katharine swam pretty far out -- halfway across to the pond towards this house with visibly lighted windows on the opposite shore. To my dismay, when I went to go join them I discovered that I'm not quite as strong a swimmer as I used to be. But there were tadpoles swimming around our thighs the whole time; pretty delightful. After a while, we headed back to the house and drank more, and everyone got sick but nobody threw up. The sun was way up by the time I fell asleep for real.

Day Two: In the morning, we swung by Gull Pond and rented a canoe for an hour, sufficiently overcoming our lingering nausea to make it around the perimeter of the two adjoining little ponds. Rowing is hard, and Katharine is fairly terrified of lilypads, it turns out.

In the evening, we headed down to Falmouth to see a reading of a new Adam Rapp play called "Essential Self-Defense" that Ted is trying to get produced by Edge. Paul Sparks and the two fat dudes from Living Room in Africa were in it, and everyone was pretty good, but the play itself was, I don't know, a little too silly? It was a lot of fun, though, and I think it'll be way more intelligible in its final staging.

At around 1:30 AM, we tried to hit up The Beachcomber (it would've been my first time), but even though it was packed with Massholes, the guy at the door said the place was closed. Oh, well.

Day Three: Went on a nature walk through this swamp next to an old Marconi telegraph station that's part of the National Seashore. The swamp itself was totally beautiful -- mossy lumps of earth rising out of this eerie red brine (colored by decaying leaves, we think?), and sporting strange, deciduous beach trees. About halfway in, though, I looked at Nina's back and realized she had, no kidding, about 10 mosquitos on her shirt attempting to drink her, and so did pretty much everyone else. I think we all kept admirably calm -- nobody (read: me) spazzed out -- but we were smacking ourselves and each other at regular intervals, leaving sheaves of dead and dying Culicidae in our wake.

After that, sadly, it was time to head home. We made a pit stop at Bruce & Betsy's to drop off the car when we got to Woodbridge, and they fed us homemade pork fajitas while we drank wine and clucked over their cat who'd lost a chunk of her face in a fight, and then got on the Metro-North back to ol' Jew Island. It was around midnight when I got home, cradling a carton of orange juice, my take from the spoils of uneaten food from the weekend.

Overall, a great vacation!

Got in to work Monday to find my desk covered with a fine dusting of copper and plaster. The orthodox jews who engineered the air conditioning system for our machine room are drilling and installing this water-cooling system right above my desk and Joel's.

Those Buzzcocks tickets I bought haven't come yet, or, more likely, they did come, in one of those shitty, nondescript Ticketmaster envelopes, and I or somebody else in the building threw them out / took 'em. I'm gonna go through my paper recycling this evening, but the show is tomorrow! Oh nos.

This morning Nina and I counted our respective mosquito bites: I've literally got about 50; she's got 25ish.