cut it out!

stop bringing it on. really.

could i please buy that power-bar from you?

i rehearsed that line about 50 times going up a mountain. to put that in context, here's the story. so i wake up on saturday looking forward to an absolutely blissful, caffeine-free, movie-loaded day indoors without any of those unhealthy exercise-type things scheduled for the day. my weekly fix from netflix was on the worship platform in front of the tv and the freezer had a ton of colored popsicles (why do they even try to convince us that it's *real* fruit? gimme the chemicals anydays). so, in all, a great day for lazers united (as in people who laze ... in case you were wondering).you know the kind of day i'm talking about right?
and then, stealthily, it kicks in. the "oh but it's such a nice day outside" thought. sometimes you dream it up yourself and sometime it's that over-enthusiastic friend who's all charged up about going up a hill and coming down. and that was my thought, my own damned invention - to go up a hill and come down. and dammit, i'm not even english!

i went up mt.si. it was dripping a little when i started up but it wasn't too bad. i kept trudging up the trail kicking myself for doing it. i had to keep moving over for the elderly people passing me in the fast lane waving their sticks at me. so i'm a little slow, sue me. around the 3 mile mark i decided that this was stupid, i've proven a point, i've driven out 30 miles in the rain to trudge up a hill. time to get sensible.

and then i heard the bell again. i'd been midly irritated by a bell all the way up the trail. it wasn't very loud, but it was incessent and always seemed to be just a little ahead of me. so i walked a little faster and found the bell. the bell was attached to a small wooden keg. the small wooden keg was in turn attached to a great huge shaggy neck. the great huge shaggy neck connected a huge wooly head to the rest of a st.bernard. a big friendly happy looking dog. being lead up he trail by this dog was a blind man. now, mt.si is not a terribly hard hike but it's not for the faint of heart. it's pretty steep and the rain had made it pretty hard not to slip. that spurred me on and i decided to wing it.

and then it happened - i got hungry. it was this sudden transition. one minute i was wondering if the wooden keg (the one attached to the big neck) contained whiskey and the next i was hungry. ravenously hungry. all i could think of were krispy creme donuts. i'd passed the store in issaquah on my way. i pulled my backpack out to pull the power-bars out. no power bars. i'd left them in the boot of the car. so i trudged on. each time i passed a weary hiker munching on a power bar i'd drool. those unwary hikers had no idea that they were an inch away from a ravenous power-bar seeking humanoid. then it struck me that i could buy a power bar off someone. but i didn't get around to actually doing it. i'd left my wallet in the boot of my car. so i trudged on.

i wanted to do the haystack scramble at the top but visibility was about 20 meters. it was cold and wet and chilly and foggy and desolate at the top. there wasn't even a view except for a small break in the cloud cover over snoqualmie valley. given that i was soggy and my boots made a 'squelchy' sound with each step i decided to leave the scramble for another day. and i trudged back down.

word of advice - when it's cold and wet and it's been raining a lot, don't take shortcuts. or you'll end up sliding down quite a bit, seeing some of your life flash before your eyes, arresting your slide painfully using your bare hands, get up and try to wipe the mud off your behind and realize that you can't since your hands are covered in mud and pine needles. you will then end up trying to squirt water on your hands using your back-pack mounted water hose thingie and figure out that it's not easy given that you can't actually hold the hose using aforementioned hands. stick to the trail, take the shortcut when it's sunny.

but in all it was a great hike. i was up and down in about three hours and a quarter even though i spent quite some time on the top goofing off. mt.si is a great hike for a sunny day, it's not bad on a rainy day if you have a good rain-proof jacket.


yaaay! the halo2 beta is out. i've been waiting for this since the inception of the transistor. but frankly, the beta has been a bit of a let-down so far. i like the maps but there's only a few of them and the weapons are a bit difficult to get used to. the pistol is the only weapon you *really* need anyway. but the halo2 pistol seems to be quite useless. they have all these fancy covenant weapons that i don't like very much. hopefully we'll get to download and use some good maps sometime soon. fingers crossed.


i saw king arthur earlier today. my friends have officially stated that they don't want to watch a movie with me ever again. i can't help it - i laugh when the guy with the arrow sticking out of his rear does this heroic lunge, saves the maiden and kills the saxon. i laugh when the music reaches a cresendo and the hero flails his arms amidst a whirlwind of knives and bodies fall like sacks of laundry around him. i laugh when i see about 30 polite saxons attacking the brave knight. they're polite because they only ever attack one at a time.
it's like in martial arts movies, specifically kung-fu movies. they surround the hero but they only attack one at a time. it's like there's an unwritten code.

here's a fun fact, saxons plait their beards. that was a bit disturbing. here's a fierce saxon warrior with arms of steel and a ferocious expression and a pony-tail in his beard. next he'll be challenging me to a death-match and a game of house-house afterwards complete with a miniature tea-set and barbie dolls.

tired of all those cool movies and serials set in ny city? here's one for the seattle'ites. singles. it's a must watch. another great movie in the confused cinematography genre is go.


yawn, it's another week coming up. sometimes i get the feeling that life is passing me by and giving me the finger as it goes by. remember sometime ago when i said "bring it on"? can we please stop "bringing it on" now? i'm full, thank you.

more about the fremont fair

so i finally managed to lay my hands on the pics from the fremont fair (thanks to r's excellent photographic skills).

	believe me, this wasn't the craziest car there. there were cars with skulls on the hood, with barbie dolls pasted on the roof, striped like tigers and one entirely covered with oversized women's underwear
this guy was a complete character! he sat in the middle of the street challenging people to make him lose control of the 'space ship'. he'd move the ship (which was a bit of yellow foam) wildly and the pilot (the poor sucker who paid $2 to make a fool of himself) was supposed to try to regain control. the only thing that took away from the realism was that ever so often the ship would jump out of the screen and head towards the pilot's face. didn't he ever watch the last starfighter?

and in other news, i had my first game in the ultimate league. i'm in a team called the condors (go figure!). and to our utter astonishment, we won (and it wasn't even a close game). we played in the rain and the wind didn't make things any easier. you could always hear your mark sneak up on you because of the squishing sound (turf retains a lot of water ). my throwing under pressure sucked but i ran like a mad dog and helped the team some. at the end we had to come up with a cheer for the other team. the team was called jam. we spent about 5 minutes throwing ideas around ranging from free-style rap to throwing clumps of grass at them. we finally settled on spelling out jam and doing a cheerleading routine. passersby gawked at the sight of nine soaking wet men and a woman kicking their boots up in the air and screaming. we have a game every week, i need to work on my forehand throws in the meantime. i need to find some pick-up games around here.


to report some progress on my 'be-nice-to-people' movement. it's having some degree of success but it's an uphill battle . people who try to quit smoking stand around smokers just sucking up that second-hand smoke. in my case i hope and pray for someone to say something funny, just for a few second-hand wisecracks.

i know, it's an addiction. but i'm working on it.

pat on my back.

the 4th of july weekend and the 'be-nice-to-people' effort

so this was an amazing weekend. simply brilliant. i'm actually feeling good about going in to work; i usually end up being so knackered by the weekend that my first thought at work is 'coffee'. and my second thought, and the third and so on.


friday started off with a visit to comedy underground. they had daniel packard who turned out to be absolutely, knee-shaking funny. the way i rate comedy clubs - it's not about how funny the show was. the essence of a great comedy club is in how much fodder it gives you to use after you leave the club. and as far as this show went- it was a cornucopia of one-liners and concepts. to throw some out here -


- it's not really men who obsess about sex, it's the inner monkey inside each male. it's all the monkey's fault. a word to all the women out there - reach out to a man's inner monkey. make the monkey feel secure.

- "i don't have issues. no, i have subscriptions"


the rest of the acts were just about okay. pretty hard crowd, there was this one woman who couldn't stop talking to daniel in the middle of his act. half the audience wanted to walk over to her and hit her over the head. the other (monkey-controlled) half wanted to look down her top. i'd like to amend that. if you actually looked down her top you'd be looking at her belly-button.


we headed out to jillian's after to play pool. i officially suck at the game. the only thing i should play on a green surface is ultimate frizbee. but i could definitely charge money for allowing people to watch my game. some of those shots defined the laws of physics (and the laws of pool, to boot!).


saturday we grilled some stuff at a friend's place and played a bunch of x-box. i had my first taste of fifa 2004 (soccer). and i'm officially hooked. i like complex games with a bunch of variables and this is perfect. i also officially suck at topspin tennis. later that day we headed out to chopstix, a piano bar downtown seattle. the place was great! we sang along and got a bit tipsy. irrespective of alcohol level, i like places where i can be loud and this place had louder people!


in the midst of this great weekend i walked into a complete trap. friend of mine (the one with subscriptions about copying music) bet me 20 bucks that i couldn't be nice to her for 2 weeks. two whole weeks without wisecracks, snide remarks, long tripping sessions, intense leg-pulling and making up stories about her. i cannot discuss her intense crush on vin diesel, her fetish for arranging furniture at right angles, her inabilty to take a left turn when oncoming traffic is under five hundred yards away, her fixation about the number of speed bumps in her apartment complex, her noisy car, her belief that the cast of friends are actually friends in real life and live in three apartments somewhere in the city, and this is the worst - the bottles of nail polish in her refrigerator. and this is where it gets worse - i have to try to be reasonably nice to other people as well. to someone like me who lives for 'the right moment to say something funny' this is sheer torture. i don't see smiling faces at dinners, to me it's mostly bull's-eyes on necks and i'm loaded with wisecracks.


sunday was a bit healthier with some tennis and working out. my approach to working out is unique. first i head over to the stretching area and try to look more flexible than the octogenarian touching her toes backwards. i then dawdle around the bookrack trying to find something to read. i pick a magazine and then head to the water fountain for a quick sip. i then squint at all the machinery looking for something that looks cool but not too hard. once i find a machine i approach it rather warily. i then see how much weight the last person used on the machine. more often than not i find it's twice what i can possibly imagine doing (those health freaks with lowered life expectancies and names like 'carl', or 'brett'). i reach for the pin to adjust the weight and pull my hand back rapidly. i then look around to see if anyone's watching. if the coast's clear i adjust the weights quickly. i read the instructions and look at my knees in the mirror for a while. i have 'outy' knees. most people have 'innies'. i grunt and curse for the next few minutes on the machine. i head to the water fountain after that, all the while looking for the next instrument of absolute torture that i could subject to. you get the general idea.


we headed out to gasworks park for the 4th of july fireworks. it was awesome. i've always wondered what the big deal was but it was spectacular and quite moving. people need causes and rituals, i'm too cynical to feel strongly about most things but i see how the system needs more of these to keep the general fabric of society in reasonably good repair. parking was really bad around there. the 'boys' ended up having to walk a really long way to the car, navigate our way through crazy traffic to pick the 'girls' up. they really didn't seem properly appreciative. we men are very, very underappreciated. perhaps the spca can be interested in the inner monkey concept? new law to be passed - abusing the inner monkey is a crime.


and the biggest event in my life recently, i've found another set of self-involved-shallow-navel-gazing-narcissistic-peurile-twenty-somethings-who-need-to-get-a-life. these people are more thirty-somethings, have british accents and live on the sets of this show called coupling. the show is funny as hell. and i love their accents. especially the way they say 'bloody ell'.


looks like a long hard week coming up ahead. lots of work. lots of dreading the gym. lots of unread books sneering at me as i walk past them in the house. lots of having to be nice to people with funny stuff popping up in my head.


... bring it on :)

.