Yet another blog. It's the story of a guy named Vlad, and hopefully a round the world journey
the other day i saw the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. i *highly* recommend it. it’s by kauffman and has the weird feel to it like Adaptation or Being John Malkovich, but at the same time is really intensely emotional and deeply sad. at first i was worried about Jim Carrey being the main character, but surprisingly, he played a really dark and interesting character… very different than anything else i’ve seen him in.
-v
friday: saw the movie “City of God”. that movie was so fucking awesome. the whole movie is really intense and extremely well done. one of the better movies i’ve seen in a while.
saturday: went to the dentist (ouch!), tried unsuccessfuly to by a new backpack for the trip, saw Franz Ferdinand play at Slims (they were fucking DOPE), and stopped by johnny’s bday.
sunday: went to the first sunset of this summer, and then chilled w/ caryn while eating thai food and watching tv.
i keep forgetting to mention… 2 weeks ago i went down to SJ to see elena and patrick’s puppy. it’s super tiny, full of energy, and incredibly adorable..
-v
Caryn and i finally sat down and planned out a rough itinerary for our RTW trip this year. i’m sure we’ll still make tons of changes to it, but it was nice to have at least sort of an idea as to where we will be going. it was so hard to choose which countries we wanted to see. the world is huge. we want to see everything…. but that’s not possible.
anyways, here’s where we will probably go:
-v
to celebrate our anniversary, caryn and i went up to tahoe for the weekend. we stayed up at the strawberry lodge for both nights of the weekend. unfortunately, the strawberry lodge kinda sucked, but at least it was only 10 minutes from Sierra where we went boarding.
saturday i had hellza fun boarding. i’ve never been very good at it, because i usually only go once or twice a season. just when i’m getting used to it, i’ll usually have to wait a whole year before i go again. anyways, this time i was totally getting the hang of it. i was going down pretty fast and was able to have pretty good control. at the end of the day, i even tried my first jump! it was so fun! i totally wanted to keep trying it, but unfortunately the resort was closing so i had to leave.
sunday, after checking out, caryn and i hung out in the snow a bit. we built some tiny snowmen…
all in all it was a really fun weekend…
-v
tonight, joey and i went to go see the torture king. he is a guy who does a circus sideshow type of performance. the performance was really really cool. he did some seriously crazy shit. it was especially cool because it was in a *tiny* theater… one that was only big enough for like 20 people max. so that way all the tricks were performed right in front of your face, and a lot of the time he even walked up and down the isles doing it right next to you. that way you could tell he wasn’t just faking it from far away.
some of the stuff he did was:
breathe/eat fire
eat glass light bulb shards
lay on a bed of broken bottle shards while having someone jump up and down on his chest
lay on a bed of nails while 4 large guys stood on him
have someone use a sledgehammer to break a cinder block on his chest while he is laying on nails
lick red hot iron
and for his final trick, he put three metal skewers through himself. one through his forearm, one through his bicep, and one through his chin. it was fucking nuts!!!
wow. as of today, caryn and i have been together for a year. so crazy. it really seems like it was just the other day that we first got together.
there’s plenty of cheezy sappy shite i could insert here, but i’ve never been big on being like that in journals, and caryn knows how awesome i think she is…
the other day, i was listening to the radio, and they were talking about this boxer who got inducted to the boxer hall of fame. i can’t remember who it was since i dont really give a shit about boxing. anyways, they were talking about how he was supposed to get this award, but no one knew where he was, and eventually they found him homeless and living on the streets somewhere. it turned out that he had been broke and living on the streets for quite a while.
the program then went on to say that he would now receive his award, and be reunited w/ his 4 children and 10 grandchildren. 4 children?!! dude, what the fuck!! how does this kind of shit happen? when i think of people who are homeless, i think of people who somehow fell through the cracks. i think of someone who, when they were broke, had *no one* to turn to for help. someone w/ no family or friends to help them out. how the fuck does someone w/ 4 kids go homeless?? not a single one of his own children could help out their dad and give him a place to live?? i just dont get how people can be so selfish as to not help their own father out.
-v
the other day i went shopping at Albertson’s. it was just an ordinary trip to the grocery store… until i got to the check out lanes and noticed that in addition to the regular lanes, they now had this new self-checkout stuff. you basically go up to your own little station, scan all of your own items, bag them yourself, pay then machine, and then you’re done. you don’t have to deal w/ a human at all!! i was *so* impressed!! how tech, how futuristic, how modern! this means that we won’t have long ass lines at grocery stores due to there only being a few checkers on hand. nothing could be better…
… or so i thought, until this morning i read this post from steph: http://www.xtrinity.com/yosoy/archives/000052.html
wtf?! how can they automate starbucks like that!! it makes making coffee so impersonal. it made me think: if they took automation this far, they could very easily get rid of baristas entirely. why not just have the machine mechanically make your coffee from start to finish? grab a cup, pour espresso, add milk, etc etc. the sad thing about that… is that there will be no human interaction left. it seems so empty and sad. and that… is the same issue i have with self-checkout. there’s no more real people to talk to. no human contact. just you and the computer and your cheese.
as we advance, society becomes more and more fragmented. everyone walking the streets has a cellphone to their ear and is in their own little headspace. when calling 411 or other phone services, we are greeted by recorded computer voices that respond to us using voice recognition. bank tellers are replaced by atms. more and more places will automate like this, until you can go through your whole day w/out any interacting with a single live human. soon we’ll be stuck in our own private bubbles… only seeing strangers from behind the panes of glass of their cars during our commutes.
-v
when i was a kid in elementary school, i rarely ever got to eat lunch at school. most of the time my parents made me a lunch and i ate whatever the contents of the brown bag were. i was never particularly excited about the brown bag lunches, and always wished for the hamburgers/pizza/tacos/whatnot that the kids got served at school. once in a great while though, i would actually get to eat lunch at school and was always extremely excited about it. one of the meals that i would always get psyched on was enchiladas.
i remember one day in particular when i was eating enchiladas in the school cafeteria, and savoring every bite, i overheard one of the other kids say something to the effect of “the enchiladas suck compared to my mom’s… she makes really good enchiladas!” what??! people could *make* enchiladas at home?! the thought had never even crossed my mind! to me enchiladas were just these crazy things that could only be eaten at school and (i assumed) at restaurants. unfortunately, i was never really able to ask my parents for things, and they weren’t really able to read my mind so eating enchiladas outside of school never came to be.
last week, caryn got to stay home from work an extra day, and when i got home from work, she had made enchiladas for dinner. i was totally psyched. and they were *hellza* good too. it’s weird how so often it’s the little things that can make everything so good. i know logically that enchiladas are just another type of food, and plenty of people cook them at home, and they’re probably no big deal… but somehow it still felt like a childhood wish was finally fulfilled.
-v