Weekend Recap

This year Halloween fell on a weekend
Me and Geto Boys are trick-or-treatin'
Robbin' little kids for bags

Alright, so that Geto Boys quote is really a stretch, but I had to get Halloween in there somehow.

Here's a recap of my weekend:

Thursday night I flew from San Jose to Phoenix. My plane was delayed by 2 1/2 hours, so I got to sit around the airport for more than 3 hours. This was a real joy since I hadn't brought a book with me, as I thought I was short on time. To add insult to injury, the only food place near my gate that I could stomach did not have the tortilla soup that I wanted, and instead I had to settle for split pea and ham - yuck - I hate peas and don't like ham in soup.

Friday Ladan and I drove to Santa Monica and stayed with friends, a couple who have a 15-month old daughter. I've always liked the SM (B, made it out there yet?) as it has a distinctly southern California laid-back feel to it. We had fun with them and the kid is just incredibly cute. As usual, I enjoyed playing with her but felt zero need to have one of my own any time in the foreseeable future. Thank the almighty FSM, Ladan feels the same way.

Saturday we drove down to San Diego but stopped in Rancho Santa Margarita to see Bharath for a while. We discussed Halloween plans, with B explaining that he'd really hoped to play some sort of prank in his office rather than do the whole traditional costume thing. I helpfully suggested he buy some bloody severed hands and feet from a costume store, put them in a plastic bag, and then place the bag in the office freezer, with the hope that somebody during the day would go for ice and instead be greeted with a terrifying discovery.

We then headed to San Diego and attended a party thrown by a friend's aunt in the posh Rancho Sante Fe area. There were about fifty guests and most were in costume - lots of witches, Greeks/Romans, pirates, the usual, for the most part. I went in a simple Catholic priest garb - a pun of a costume, of sorts, as those who know me are very aware of my extreme distaste for religion in general; but as more than one person has in the past commented on how I actually look like a priest or preacher, the choice of costume was clear. And as I'd expected, it was a hit precisely because of the latter. As I wanted to fully role-play the costume, I made sure to always have a beer in my hand, as well as spend an inordinate amount of time talking to two young boys whose parents were at the party but off talking to other guests.

Sunday we had a late brunch and then got back on the road to drive back to Phoenix. I was supposed to fly back to San Jose Monday, but then felt like staying another day, and so suddenly came down with a vague "sickness" and took the day off. Tuesday morning I finally returned.

Halloween itself, last night, was pretty uneventful, with the notable exception that I finally got some time with Dark Messiah Might and Magic, a game I picked up last week after having followed it's development for the past year or so. I've got some screenshots up here.

Neverwinter Night 2 comes out today, and so between that and Dark Messiah, I foresee an entire blissful weekend of gaming this week, my first in a long, long time.

India Calling

Months ago, I found a little south Indian restaurant in Sunnyvale that for the first time in a long time, whisked me right back to India: the smell of the food, the heat, the music playing, all combined to trick my senses into believing I was walking around Chennai. The feeling was overwhelmingly powerful, and something very deep inside started to pull me [even harder] back to India.

Since then I've cruised up and down El Camino Real probably twenty times, trying in vain to find this portal to India. The name of the place escaped me, as it was four words long and not a typical restaurant name. It would drive me nuts that I knew the place was right here somewhere, but I just could not find it.

A few weeks ago I found a place called Annapoorna which seemed to be roughly where I remembered the other place being, but this was certainly not the name. I stopped in front of it and it was closed. Not sure it was the same place, the search continued.

Last night I drove down to the incredible King library on the San Jose State University campus. I was there for a few reasons: one, I just needed to get out of my room, which as I mentioned below, has become a de facto cage for me; two, I'm tossing around the idea of finding an apartment in downtown San Jose, if I decide to hold off on the D.C. thing; and three, I wanted to look for a book that a friend of a friend is crazy about, and the curiousity has gotten the better of me to the point that I decided to invest the almost two months I calculated it would take me to read it if I do 25 pages a day - it's a behemoth. After finding the book, I sat on the top floor of the library for two hours and got completely sucked into the story.

Tonight I went to a park close by my house and sat outside for awhile reading, as it was wonderfully warm today, low 80's. The book is set in India, and as I continued reading I started wishing for Indian food ... and within a half hour I was once again prowling Sunnyvale looking for the elusive restaurant. And once again I couldn't find it, but again passed Annapoorna. After one final lap around the area, I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, when I walked in the almost full restaurant, I recognized it immediately - this was indeed the place! but ... different. It had been taken over, changed, cleansed of it's south Indian-ness somehow, and as a result was less nostalgia-inducing for me. That was kinda disappointing, but once I smelled the food cooking, I was all smiles again.

A quick glance around confirmed my feeling that I was the only white guy here - just the way I like it. This has less to do with my enjoying possibly being the center of attention (which I don't enjoy, other than the occasional surprised looks I get when people realize I know what I'm ordering and favor using my right hand over utensils) as my preference to be around Indians when I'm eating Indian food. Throwing a bunch of white people in there always degrades the experience for me.

I giddily ordered onion and chili utthapam and chana masala - oh and a Coke please, as I long ago formed an absolutely necessary relationship between Indian food and Coke. As I sat waiting for my food, I got a few looks from the crowd but nothing incredulous. I couldn't help but smile at the fact that the single waitress and bus boy were both Latino. Yep, that's how even the Indians do in America.

My food arrived, I dug in, savored the ecstasy of flavors, and felt content. Maria walked by with a basket of delicious-smelling steaming bread sprinkled with cilantro - d'oh! I forgot to get garlic naan, my favorite. By that point it was too late, I'd have to live without it.

As I ate, looked around, listened, watched the families and kids and guys and girls my age, I again started to feel the pull of India, at first subtly but eventually raucously calling me back. I've felt this for three years, since I returned from my first trip there for a friend's wedding. I've joked about going back a lot, even looked for aero engineering jobs there at one point.

But this time may be different. I may be on the crest of a major change in my life, one that frees me from a lot of what's keeping me here. It wouldn't be permanent, but the idea of quitting my job, selling off my car, and joining some kind of humanitarian organization for a year or two or so, and just packing up and going to India .... man, that really, really appeals to me.

[Update: heh, Google is god - I just found a blog of a local Tamil guy who reviewed Annapoorna and mentioned the name of the previous restaurant: Madras Sri Krishna Vilas! Thanks man!]

Stress: The Extinction Agenda

Pain, stress
My brain, can't even rest
It's hard to maintain the pressure on my chest
Excess frustration strikes!

Ever have a day where you just feel like crap, overloaded with stress? Sure, everyone has. Well that was my day today. Again.

I can't identify a single thing, not a single one, in my life that I feel good about right now. I work a job I have no interest in, and which furthermore conflicts deeply with my principles; since moving to Sunnyvale in July I have saved zero, ZERO, money even though I'm paying less than half the rent I was paying in San Francisco; simply for the enjoyment of living in a city, I'm considering a move to D.C. where not only would I do the same job I do now, I'd actually have to work much harder and also be locked into this industry for at least another year; I have no concrete plan, or even real idea, of how to move toward a job/career that I am interested in; I've let my relationships with my entire family continue to be mostly superficial, which has become an even bigger problem as there's currently some drama playing out that I need to get involved in; Ladan and I have been living apart for four months now and our problems are continually exacerbated by the distance; I hate, frickin' hate the room I am prisoner in/renting in a house in Sunnyvale, but can't move right now because I may move to D.C. soon; I had to spend six hundred frickin' dollars on my car last week for service, more than two-thirds of which was for the damn labor; and other similarly frustrating issues that I don't want to delve into here.

My mind is scattered in a hundred directions and as a result I can't concentrate on any single one. I try to read a book, I get distracted. Watch some TV, I feel restless. Play a computer game, lose interest in ten minutes. I sit in this room, and I feel trapped, caged, with nowhere to go.

I need to break out of this house/job/situation/life, and I need to do it like, right now. Each day that goes by with no resolution, I almost feel as if I'm losing a bit of my sanity.

The Disappointment That Was Prey

Last night I slogged through the remainder of Prey and finished the game. I hadn't played much in the past two months, after completing about three-quarters of it in the few weeks after it was released in July. Overall I have to say I was disappointed by Prey; the long saga of its conception and development built up expectations that were probably too lofty for its actual potential.

Prey was conceived by well-known game industry guys like Tom Hall and George Broussard at Apogee/3D Realms in 1995. In what would become a 10-year struggle, the game kept switching developers, getting delayed, cancelled, and resurrected until 2005 when Human Head Studios confirmed that they'd picked the game back up and really did intend to finish it.

The majority of the hype surrounding the game in the months before it was released centered around the new gameplay features they were introducing, namely 'portals' and 'local gravity' toggling (and yes, the 'spirit mode' effect too, although this was less innovative). The former involved placing portals into levels which provided passage into an entirely different level, a very cool graphical trick that to my knowledge had only been done before in a user-made Unreal Tournament deathmatch map called Escher a few years back; the latter worked by placing local gravity pathways along walls and the ceiling that, when activated, allowed the player (and bad guys) to walk anywhere. Some rooms also had local gravity 'targets' that when shot would switch the room's gravity to lie along the same direction, causing the room to flip around or over. These two tricks seemed revolutionary when revealed, initially disorienting and then unbearably cool when actually played, and old hat by the end of the game.

While the new technology added innovative new gameplay mechanics, and the environments were absolutely stunningly gorgeous, for me it was the story itself that fell far short of the high standard set by the rest of the game. For a large portion of the game, there is almost zero advancement of the story. You're simply a mouse in a maze, following a thoroughly linear slog through amazing room after amazing room. It just starts to feel pointless. The reason it took me so long to finish the game was because I'd frankly lost interest. Not until the last few levels does any of the story come together, and even then it's a corny letdown.

You definitely get the feeling that, as is so common these days with games that rely far too heavily on new technology alone (Doom 3, anyone?), this game had so much potential, if only the story had been better. Which of course leaves the door open for an improved sequel, or some great mod work, but none of that can change the fact that the original game was a disappointment.

Aw well, I'm still holding on for Bioshock to blow me away, which it gives every indication of doing when it's released next year.

[I've got a bunch of screenshots from Prey here if anyone's interested.]

Metal Therapy

In the early 90's, before I moved to Maryland for college, I started to get into metal - heavy metal, that is. The local college radio stations around Albany, from RPI and SUNY Albany, played lots of good hip-hop and metal, and it was primarily through these shows that I found new music.

In 1995 I came across a local band called Cutthroat when I heard one of their songs played on WRPI. It was my first contact with "hardcore", a style of metal that typically emphasizes short, brutal guitar riffs over solos, quick (three minutes or less) songs over long, drawn-out, tempo-changing opuses, and pretty consistent lyrical content - anger. Cutthroat was signed to Ruffneck Records, an independent label based out of Clifton Park. One day I went down to a music store deep in Albany and found their first CD called Hatebreedsrage. It was the first non-hip-hop album I'd bought in probably five years, and I loved every second of it: it was creative, fresh, catchy, and just downright brutal. You could sing, err, scream and growl along with the choruses and you felt like you could smash your way through a brick wall.

For years afterward, as my metal album collection grew, I'd periodically try to find out whatever happened to Cutthroat. I'm still searching; it seems like a few years later they just sort of disappeared. Apparently they put out two more albums, one in 1998 and another in 2000, but I've never been able to find them anywhere, nor find out what became of the band itself.

I pulled the album out last night and again, I'm just loving it. It's still one of my favorite metal albums of all time. Metal for me is intensely therapeutic - a better term might be calming though, as it serves to diffuse my pent-up frustration, rather than do anything to actually remove the source. I crank up the volume, bang my head a bit, sometimes try (mostly pathetically poorly) to yell along, get myself into a semi-hyper invincibility mood, look around for somebody to rip to shreds, and by the end of the album I feel better.

It's probably not the heathiest way to deal with anger and frustration, but certainly there are unhealthier ways, and what the hell, it works for me.

Skatepark Debut

Having brought my bike helmet back from Arizona this weekend, I headed over to the Sunnyvale skatepark for the first time today after work. I hadn't visited the park since buying my skateboard two months ago, determined that I should at least become stable on the board before presenting myself as prime laughing stock to all the kids half my age at the park. In the past few weeks I've got my balance back and been working on my ollie. Frustratingly, my progression has hit a brick wall because for some reason I just cannot land a moving ollie correctly - the back of the board invariably kicks out to the left, forcing the board to land sideways, which doesn't quite jive well with my forward motion.

Today I wanted to go over to the park, check it out, maybe find somebody to ask what it appeared that I was doing wrong, and maybe, just maybe, actually try some skating. From reading online I found that the park's got a nice assortment of bowls, stairs, ramps, railings, etc. Cool.

I got there at 6:45, with about 20 minutes of sun left before the park would be plunged into darkness. Finding helmets were not even required (d'oh!), I strutted hopefully convincingly confident-looking into the park, took a seat on the edge of one of the bowls, as many others were doing, and just checked the scene out.

First observation: yeeeeeah, everybody's pretty much 17 and younger here. Oookay. Old man on deck!

Second observation: holy crap these kids are good! I had expected to see a few guys who knew what they were doing, but this was insane. Most of the 30+ kids were flying around and up and over the lips of these bowls, up sheer vertical walls of full-size quarterpipes, jumping between ramps, popping kickflips off of steps. I was clearly way outclassed here, much more than I'd thought I would be.

Friendly bunch, though: within a minute a kid who looked about 15 came up and asked me what kind of board I had. Embarassed to find I couldn't even remember, I joked "uh, cheap." We talked for a few minutes, he offered to let me try his plastic board, but I decided not to. What am I gonna do, kick/push a few feet then hand it back to him? I think he expected me to try an ollie over something, or a kickflip of some sort.

Intimidated, I sat and watched for about ten full minutes before even getting up. Walking slowly, I crept over to a flat section of concrete above a small ramp, rolled around a bit, tried a few ollies, and that was about it. I couldn't be sure that I wouldn't end up right on my ass just by trying to go down the wimpy little ramp, not to mention possibly going out of control and colliding with somebody else.

And then before I knew it, it was dark and I couldn't see anything clearly anymore. Kids were leaving and it was getting quieter. There was no point in trying to tempt fate by skating in the dark, so I left. And that was my first skatepark experience.

Pretty anti-climactic, huh? What I really need is to find a time when these kids won't be around, so I can relax a bit and feel free to try riding around without worrying about smacking into somebody else whizzing by me. Or being laughed at, of course.

Maybe I could go over one day before work? Or during lunch?

Things Are Changing?

After discussing with Ladan over the weekend my new infatuation with D.C. since being there two weeks ago, combined with our agreement that Arizona is just most definitely not where we want to live, we agreed to check out jobs in the city and see what it would take to move back there - you know, just out of curiousity. I had one company in mind in Rosslyn, where I know a few people that I see whenever I attend a periodic meeting there, in fact the same meeting that brought me out there two weeks ago.

As luck would have it, I did a quick Monster job search and the first position to pop up was with this company, doing almost exactly the work I do now. Combined with the fact that I'm sure I'd get a recommendation from the people I know who work there, I'm all but completely certain that I could interview for and have this job within a few weeks, if I so choose.

Woah! So, like, just like that, I've already got a way out to D.C.? Ladan would most likely stay in Arizona until around February - gotta work off some of that relocation cash - but it looks like she's found a few positions she feels she could get with consulting companies, also in D.C.

But there's nothing in particular holding me back; concievably, I could move out to D.C. and start this new job by December 1. The speed with which this possibility popped up is almost jarring. I typed an e-mail to the guy I know at the company today, but decided not to send it at the last minute. Somehow I feel like I need to step back and analyze this a bit more before I commit myself to jumping in. As early as tomorrow, though, I could send it off.

Hmmm .... lots to consider here. I had no idea it might be this easy. :)

Don't Feel Right

My eyes are open cuz I'm really a watchman
And when I'm writin' my thoughts out
Really I'm boxing
My main adversary: any silly concoction

The more I listen to this Roots album, the better I like it. It's nice to have the real Black Thought back, even if he still relies too much on changing word pronunciations to make them rhyme.

Beyond being a hypnotic track musically, this song's been resonating with me over the past few weeks as I've been plowing through some personal issues of my own. This latest round has again left me with the inescapable fact that I just don't feel right. True, undistracted, no-holds-barred introspection is generally pretty painful for me, as I'm often forced to acknowledge things I wish weren't there. The unavoidable question then writes itself: so what am I going to do about it?

And the answer is, I don't know. I don't frickin' know. Today I've felt like I'm a haze. Partially that's due to the fact that I woke up at 2AM this morning to drive from Santa Fe to Albuqerque to catch a 5AM flight back to San Jose. But it's more than that. I spend a lot of time these days just sitting, staring, thinking. Going through all my thoughts, trying to fill in the gaps in my consciousness, wrestling with my wants / desires / needs / motivations. Trying to reconcile often conflicting interests.

Would life be more enjoyable or not worth living, if the 20/20 vision of hindsight could instead be foresight? What if there were no regrets? How can regrets be turned into something positive?