penmanship

I just got a new pen.   I'm a sucker for fountain pens, because they improve my normally ghastly penmanship.   Granted, they improve only slightly, but I feel more sophisticated and at least reasonably more legible when I use 'em.  

Anyway, it's a Lamy Vista,  it ran me $25, and is of the fine (F) nibbed variety.   I heard about at this rather interesting article about hacking your Moleskine , which is the sort of site that makes me wish I was that kind of person, that would both get off on hacking my Moleskine, but also have an improved life due to better daily planning.   At least somebody's doing it.   Dollars to doughnuts I would be a little annoyed if I ever saw anyone with a hacked Moleskine in public, though.   I enjoy the simple hypocrisy of affectations only being cool when I or a select close friend demonstrate them.

Amusingly, I found that link at del.icio.us, in another unnamed person's link-list (who incidentally doesn't seem to realize that their list is public).   Approximately 1000 people have saved that link, which means it was on metafilter, and that people are dorks.

Disappointment

I had a perfectly good weekend imperfectly capped by a crappy movie.   My life is an unending stream of irritants. 

My uncle came and visited on Friday.   He's a biochemist, and of the previous generation, and as such has some odd ideas about my own (not biochem) area of science.   Granted, he's nowhere near as bad as the retired engineers are; he knows what energy is, and he knows when to acknowledge that just because something doesn't make sense doesn't mean it's not true.    He's a good guy, and among my favorite relatives; for my high school graduation he bought me Kip Thorne's brick of popularization, Black Holes and Time Warps, and even went so far as to have it autographed.   I hope he didn't walk up to Kip's office at Caltech, as he lived in Glendale at the time, but I wouldn't put it past him, as he is/was an academic and would not think it weird.    The book didn't really change my life or anything, which is ironic as it's much, much better than the poorly written Brief History of Time which had a much greater effect on me earlier in high school, but the gesture really impressed me at the time.

Come to think of it, my other uncle had given me Hawking's book.   And his old XT, which got me into computers, and saving my paper route money for a 386 instead of a jalopy.   These dudes were seriously influential on my course of life.   I'll have to let them know one of these days.

Friday I showed him my lab, and we had dinner at Luigino's near Metro Center, which was reasonably expensive and totally forgettable.   The caprese was flavorless and my risotto's texture was screwy.   Mental note: never order a risotto in a high-throughput restaurant, no matter how fancy.   It's too easy to screw up.   At least the calamari wasn't rubbery.    Saturday we caught up in my apartment, having coffee over my grandfather's (his father's) ancient desk, and talked about the science business a bit before decamping off to Acadiana, which was unbelievably good.   I had a Sazerac before dinner, which blew my mind.   I've been looking for Peychaud's bitters for so long now I'd forgotten why I wanted them.   And now I know.

The upshot is, the next day found me watching The Illusionist with the girlfriend.   And it was terrible.   What a lame, lame movie.   Visualize me shaking my head with wonder just like the Sideways guy does at the end, only I'm shaking my head in wonder that the movie could be so bad, not at the awesomeness of Ed Norton's caper.     Boo, hiss.

Goals

My goals upon arrival in DC were many. Meet women. Reverse debt curve. Go to more shows. Dress better. Be awesome scientist. Blog regularly. Figure out life path and early career. It's a snowy night, and I'm not feeling profound, so I'll address the simplest. Upcoming shows I'm excited about:

Mastodon at the 9:30 Club. Heavy music. I won't be bringing a date. Converge is opening, who at some point put out music I dug.

Explosions in the Sky, also 9:30 Club. Soft-loud post-rock. They're possibly past their prime, and I haven't listened to the new album. But they've earned a little attention from me for their amazing first few albums and the fact that Friday Night Lights (the movie) became a must-see because of them, if it wasn't already, which varies widely from person to person.

The Thermals at the Black Cat. An old friend turned me on this poppy Sub-pop punk band. Half the songs are in my head now.

Netflix

I just returned Kissing on the Mouth.    I don't know where I got the recommendation-- probably the AV Club over at the Onion.   It's shot like a documentary but isn't one, and revolves around a 25ish woman in a nameless American city that felt somewhat Portlandesque.    Oregon, that is.   Revolving around her are three other people: a female friend, a male roommate/friend, and an ex-boyfriend.   It's a little universe that's full of angst.   I wasn't surprised, as the movie purported to explore post-college aimlessness among the non-driven set.    What was surprising was my lack of annoyance at it all.

Ellen is trying to figure out what to do with her life, and she's sleeping with her ex-boyfriend Bucket on the sly while her roommate Patrick pines for her secretly and is the sad-sack nice guy.   Her mousy friend kind of likes Patrick but he's oblivious.   The device which drives the film is Patrick's art project, which is a collection of interviews with twentysomethings about their expectations for love and marriage and all that good stuff.     These interviews are the intermezzos and sometimes plain old soundtracks to the real scenes.    It was all pretty bittersweet, and while it didn't really resonate with me (the post-college period for me was an explosion of awesomeness, rather than a pining for the simpler campus days) it was a reasonably good character study.   

There's also a lot of sex, shot in an offhand and unglamorous way which I liked.    I wouldn't watch this with your parents, that's for sure, and if you're at all prudish about, say, dudity, I'd avoid the hell out of it.   And while it should be obvious, it's as indie as gay cowboys, so if you're in need of a boost to your cred, check it out.

Milestones

It's taken a long time, but I'm finally going camping a deux.    It's odd that for an activity that in principle is so important to me, I've never taken a girlfriend camping, but I guess the timing or urge has never worked out.   I'm oddly not all amped up about getting cuddly, or about seeing the particular forest, or having Coleman-stove pancakes and Nutella; in fact I'm pretty stressed out about the whole affair.

Initially the plan was to do solo camping this weekend.   I'd take off work early Friday, car-camp Friday and Saturday nights and get a long hike in on Saturday.   Yes, it's cold, but relatively clear.   I've wanted to lose my solo-camping virginity for some time now, and it seemed like a great idea, as I've hit a confluence of gear-ness where I have everything I need.    But oddly the subject of camping came up separately with the new(ish) girlfriend, and she seemed pretty psyched to get a little trip in.   My immediate doubts as to whether she could handle a really cold night out when she gets cold in my to-me-toasty apartment were immediately squelched, and I don't doubt her.    But she's not an experienced camper and I've basically been given carte blanche to get things organized. 

So, obviously, I'm stressed about minutiae.  What we're eating, what the fire situation is, what the disaster-preparedness situation is.   It's new to me.   My camping experience is twofold: with my parents, who are ubercompetent, or with buddies who are far more expert than I.     I guess the point is that I associate camping with backpacking or drinking, and I'm a little lost when neither intense physical exertion nor irresponsible inebriation (or both) is going to be the point.   Note the common thread of the pushing of personal limits.   Camping solo, the screwups are mine to deal with, but now, if the camp stove breaks, we're both screwed, and I don't dig on that.   So I'm hammering on details to make sure everything goes smoothly, because there are expectations.    And bears.   And rednecks.
 

Anyway, I'll try to post and let everyone know if drunk Maryland hunters kill me or I freeze to death.

Apologies

I'll have to figure out how to live with the fact that I can't include label information for Blogger Beta when I do post-by-email. Hopefully it won't mean that you RSS feedreaders will see duplicate posts days after the fact when I decide to add labels. I like the idea of labels.

Of course, I could just suck it up and not do post-by-email, but then I'd have to sign out of my non-anonymous Blogger/Google account and sign into this one, and, urrg. No comment yet on the fact that I have to enter Gmail's rich-text version to add basic html like italics and links to my posts.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

It snowed today, while I assembled IKEA furniture and watched playoff football.   Some of you may recall that I made two ill-advised bets in Vegas after Christmas with funds garnered from a double whammy of getting the victory and the over in the Holiday Bowl.    The first-- NYG to win the Super Bowl at 40-1-- was laughable; they faded away miserably in the wild-card game.   The second was one I seriously intended to win: NE at 6-1.  And right now I think I've got that locked up.   Peyton's got too much baggage to win this one, and I'll give you two great quotes to help us laugh at him:


We're talking about our idiot kicker who got liquored up and ran his mouth off.

I'm trying to be a good teammate here. Let's just say we had some problems with protection.



Of course, as I type this, it's now a one-possession game and Peyton's driving.   I'm calling it now: he runs for President within twenty years.

So this post isn't about Peyton.   I want every post to have a purpose, even if it's grousing about the people in my building who annoy me or carrying on about some date.   But that's for another time.   We have a film review today at Katzenklavier,  from a live viewing referred to in an earlier post.

I  chose a terrible venue to see Children of Men.    The Dupont Loews is a little art-house with what seem like twelve-foot-high screens and theaters that feel like screening rooms.   It's basically a first-run version of the Academy, which some of you may know.   The advantage of the Academy was that it was poorly attended, and you could find yourself alone in the theater, except for the mice, and as long as they're not too active it's a great way to spend an evening out solo or dated.  

Oh hell, they've tied it.   I'm such a jinxer. 

I sat up front and was privy to the annoying conversations of Dupont couples and groups, mostly drunk and younger than me; I was honestly surprised at how well-attended it was, considering the schtick of the film: both serious and genre.    Yikes.    I won't spoil anything not already in the previews, which is a blessing and a curse.    The setup: 2027 or thereabouts, and people stopped having babies 18 years ago.   The world is in flames and this blessed isle, this white rose, this fried gobbet of fish, this England is the last bastion of civilization.   Except even they've tended toward martial law as everyone else in the world tries to emigrate there all while everyone becomes understandably crushingly depressed.

Clive Owen plays this guy, who's a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat, long grown out of his youthful activism.    He's brought out of what basically is him running the clock out on life by his old flame, Julianne Moore, who he hasn't seen in twenty years and is running a revolutionary organization.   She convinces him to use his influence to get traveling papers for someone, and the movie takes off from there.   This someone is a macguffin-- a pregnant woman, the first in almost twenty years, and the film follows Owens' journey to get her to some offshore research installation.  

Tom Brady steps up.     This is gonna be a good one.     There's a challenge on this TD, though.

The feel of the movie was remarkably similar to 28 Days Later but is helped by a much stronger sense of characterization and, let's face it, not being about zombies.    It was a little tough for me to accept Owen as a good guy after having seen Closer (in the theaters, twice) wherein he plays perhaps the least broken member of a colossally broken foursome (Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law).     I wish I had read my dad's copy of Herbert's The White Plague when I was younger; I seem to remember it had a very similar plotline.    Maybe I'll order it from Amazon tonight.  

There are so many nice touches that mark great worldbuilding in a film like this: little scenes or characters that build a sense that there's real subcreation going on and the storytellers have put a lot of thought into everything.   I'm talking about Julianne Moore's character, Michael Caine's hinted-at past, Owen's brother/friend who collects art rescued from the torched cities of Europe, the subtle hints that it's the near, not far future, and the constant attention to detail in every scene, even when attention to detail means making everything as dirty as possible.   I particularly liked the understated religious symbolism throughout-- the baby born to save the world arriving in "such mean estate", and Clive Owen taking a bullet in the side as part of saving the life of mother and child...maybe I've taken one too many English classes, but as a result some of the scenes that could have been treacly and eyerolling were quite moving.

Indy's making another move.   Damn.

The refugee camps that feature very obvious Abu Ghraib references rang a bit of a wrong note to me; I don't like being preached at, and it could have been handled with more delicacy.     But that's a quibble. If you're at all into well-done sf, you should see this, and even if you think sf is all about Ren Faires and doors irising into crappy libertarian commentary, you should still see it: it's great filmmaking, too. 

It's stopped snowing.   Not soon enough: the commute in the morning will still be insane.   I'd better go stock up on bread, milk, and toilet paper...if there's any to be found.   It was two whole inches of powder, after all.

And now another Holy Roller to tie it up! Somebody wake me up.