Seven of Books

Tuesday:
from the Nunnery
to the Famous Carroll Street Cafe *
to the airport **
to Philadelphia ***
to Boston
to a shuttle
to my father's car
to my parents' home

* I was spotted at the cafe by Cara, whom you'll remember from earlier. Coincidentally, this was her last day in Atlanta - she was moving to Boston the following morning. We exchanged numbers.

** Moments before takeoff, the gentleman in the seat next to mine wordlessly took hold of my seatbelt and ever-so-gently tightened it for me. This, it turns out, was a mistake; he thought it was his seatbelt, not mine.

*** As I was boarding, I asked the flight attendant where I could hang my suit:

Flight Attendant: You can hang it right here.
Sabitathica: Oh, thanks.
FA: Just make sure you don't forget it when you deplane.
Sabitathica: (looks at him)
FA: I know what you're going to say next: "I won't."
Sabitathica: I won't.
FA: Ha! Famous last words...

And so I would like to suggest that flight attendants (or anybody who is even remotely associated with air-travel) be banned from saying such things as "famous last words," or from using any similar phrases which effectively amount to prophesying my imminent doom.

~~~~~~~

Wednesday:
awake at 06:45
to my grandmother's wake *
to the funeral mass
to the burial
to my parents' home
to the reception
to my parents' home
to my father's car (with my wonderniece)
to Logan airport
to Philadelphia
to Atlanta **
to my car
to the Nunnery
to wine and reacclimatization with L.

* On Monday the hospice called my uncle to update him on my grandmother's condition. They (lied and) said they'd just checked on her, that she was fine - alive and well - looking good, etc. Of course, she'd passed away two days prior. Apparently they hadn't gotten the memo.

** Making four planes in under 36 hours. As of today I've been on 15 planes so far in 2008. Have I mentioned how much I dislike air travel?

Fun facts I learned from the in-flight edutainment movie-mercial:
1. Ninety percent of the country's lobsters come from New England;
2. Fenway Park opened in 1912, the same week the Titanic went down;
3. Paul Revere's house is the oldest wooden building in Boston.


The moon was out, nearly full (actually waxing slightly gibbous), and kept me company on the final leg of my travels:

~~~~~~~

Love is all you need

My mother's mother passed away on Saturday.

I'm flying to Boston today, returning tomorrow.

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This morning I dropped L off at the airport before heading to the famous Carroll Street Cafe for breakfast.

Strangely, Rashid was there - the cafe was empty except for the two of us so I sat and we talked and ate together.

Charleston: part 2

Sunday morning we breakfasted and brushed our teeth and rode around town on the complementary bikes provided by the Inn. Bike riding is so much more fun than walking...

My sweet ride:


L's ride had a comely basket between her handlebars.

Wardrobe shopping for L at Urban Outfitters where I planted myself in the changing room and offered fashion opinions before heading back to the beautiful beach at Sullivan's Island.

The beach was a total stunner in the daytime and again relatively deserted. We played in water and laid on sand.


As a mathematician I'd feel remiss if I neglected to point out that, in the grand calculus of vacations, beaches=good times. Squared, yo.

And there was a sweet lighthouse which is always good to see.


The previous night the lighthouse was like the Eye of Sauron, sinister and majestic, sweeping the land for trespassers and Shirelings. In the naked light of day it was somewhat less sinister - in fact it looked as though it might have been made of Legos. And in the hierarchy of sinisterness, Sauron trumps Legos...


Now playing, Love is a Losing Game by the tragic Amy Winehouse.

Charleston: part 1

On Friday L and I drove to Charleston, South Carolina for a fourth of July getaway. We prepared for the 5 1/2 hour car ride with some creative reading material and a bulging iPod.

Along the way we stopped for dinner at a chain restaurant and found ourselves caught up in a sad comedy of errors. Our waitress was weeded and overwhelmed (even though the restaurant wasn't particularly busy), and her manager's apology was socially awkward.

Restaurant Manager: How's everything tonight?
Sabitathica and L: (lying) Fine thanks.
RM: Good, good... (he grows quiet)
Sabitathica & L: (waiting)
RM: So, are you, um...
Sabitathica & L: (waiting)
RM: (falls silent and stares distantly into the space between Sabitathica & L)
Sabitathica & L: (look at each other)
RM: Is your... um.
Sabitathica & L: (look back at RM)
RM: Are you the people who haven't received their appetizer yet?
Sabitathica: Yes.
RM: Because I didn't know if it was maybe that other table.
Sabitathica: No, it's us.
RM: Oh, okay, because I wasn't sure.
Sabitathica & L: (look at each other again)
RM: Heh, well, what happened was, um, apparently the kitchen dropped it on the floor...
Sabitathica: Oh.
RM: And, heh, yeah, well we didn't think you'd want to eat it after that...
Sabitathica: (looks at RM)
RM: Heh... so, yeah...

In the alternate ending to this dialog, this is the moment when I stood up and half-nelsoned the manager into promising to attend a customer relations training seminar.

We changed hotel rooms three (3) times on Friday night before we finally settled on one. Does this make us high-maintenance? Aaron, the desk clerk, assured us it did not. But then, his nametag boldly claimed he was the Kwisatz Haderach, so I'm not sure how much weigh to give to his opinion.

We took photographs and drank EVIL wine. A very fun night.

~~~~~~~

Next morning we left the hotel and moved to the Cannonboro Inn, a carefully furnished bed and breakfast L found for us on Ashley Ave.

~~~~~~~

Having settled in, we explored Charleston:

~~~~~~~

Episode 12b: How to recognize different trees from quite a long way away. Number 1, the Larch...

It began to rain, so we lounged in the b & b until the weather passed, then headed to E. Bay Street and walked the pier:

Dinner at Social, which has a good wine selection (I had the 2005 Domaine Montpertuis Cuvée Counoise from southern France) and a tasty crème brûlée.

After dinner we drove to the beach on Sullivan's Island. It was late - approaching midnight - and the shore was deserted except for a group of girls hunting for hermit crabs.

Metaltainment

Daniel Johnston was excellent. He played the most convincing version of I Saw Her Standing There I've ever heard (or, more convincing than I've heard from any band which doesn't already happen to be the Beatles. The Beatles were fucking amazing.). And he encored with True Love Will Find You In the End, which was beautiful. I love that song. It channels his innocence and frames his naiveté.

He was more competent than I expected, and funny, too. He told the audience about a dream he'd had where he was arrested for attempting to commit suicide, a crime for which he was sentenced to death.

With archetypal depth and irony, he didn't want to meet death against his will and he mimicked his dream-self for us, crying out "no! nooooo!"

~~~~~~~

Rashid texted me over the weekend that I had to see Wall-E so after LBC Monday I went to the theater with him and J.

Wall-E is a ton of fun and, believe it or not, 2001-esque. Kubrick references were made throughout, some of them explicit, some more subtle. Very fun. I never met a Pixar film I didn't like.

Sabitathica's official assestimate: A film you can feel good about feeling good about.

In front of Wall-E was my new least-favorite trailer - for a movie called Beverly Hills Chihuahua. You can watch it here if you're so inclined. Which you shouldn't be. I'm not kidding. You've been warned...

You: But, Sabitathica. It doesn't have to be of high quality: it's for kids. It's not for adults.
Sabitathica: Shut up.

~~~~~~~

Wednesday night was Iron Man with Jennifer, where Robert Downey Jr. flexed his hella-charisma. And as usual, there was post-film debriefing time next door at the Righteous Room with several Highland Gaelic Ales.

Strangely, I have endured no small amount of grief concerning Wall-E and Iron Man. I've talked with several people who would have me believe that seeing these films is proof that I have terrible taste and fail at life.

It's true that most comic-book movies are insulting and sloppily made (cf, the ridiculous X-Men and the retarded and disastrous Spiderman), but they're not all going to be that way. Patterns evolve, and the good times, hopefully, aren't genre-specific.

Opeth are playing a song about that very thing right now.

~~~~~~~

Margaritas last night with Cassandra, who looked at me like I was retarded and sloppily-made when I mentioned I'd seen Wall-E and Iron Man.

La Fonda is good.

Missed it by that much...

I may or may not have sneaked out of work today to see Get Smart with L in the theater - that's for me to know and you to find out. But I will tell you that if I did play hooky and see Get Smart today, it was tons of fun, even when it wasn't quite fun-ny.

~~~~~~~

My favorite line from an email I received from the chair of a committee I'm on:

"... and then forward the policy to the [...] Council and the university president for their review and (hopefully) approval, as outlined in the policy approval procedure per the recently approved university Policy on Policies."

Wow. The policy approval procedure per the recently approved university Policy on Policies? Seriously? I'm... wow.

~~~~~~~

In other news, I'm going tonight with Mark to see Daniel Johnston at the Variety Playhouse. I've never seen Daniel Johnston. There's an excellent documentary about him which I can recommend, called The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It won the Director Award at Sundance a few years back.

The Fenway

You: Hey Sabitathica, tell me about the baseball game you went to.
Sabitathica: Alright.

I went to Fenway Park on Sunday with my father, sister, and my wonder-niece Sarah to see the Red Sox play the Cardinals. We took the T.


If Rashid were here and you got him talking about baseball (not difficult), he might tell you that there's three possible outcomes to any game:

1. Sometimes you win
2. Sometimes you lose
3. Sometimes it rains

In the present case the BoSox chose option 1, though not without first flirting with option 3.

After the National Anthem (sung by a New Hampshire girls' choir) but before the first pitch, the rains began to fall.

We waited 45ish minutes while the weather stabilized.


There were many quintessentially baseball-ish events:

The rain delay itself,
two home runs,
eating peanuts and "accidentally" throwing the empty shells at my niece,
several ground rule doubles,
a broken bat (a la The Natural),
myriad double plays.

The game went long. After failing to capitalize on several opportunities, Boston finally cinched it in the 13th inning. Hooray!


This was my wonder-niece's first professional baseball game. Good times.

Later that night, I dreamt I was on a plane in freefall.

~~~~~~~

Next morning - Monday - the wonder-niece and I went to Borders, one of my favorite traditions. We picked up some books which the educational system in its wisdom has decided she must read before she begins middle school in the Fall, and we ate pastries at the cafe.

To Logan in the afternoon to catch my flight.

Logan...

Logan...


Mine was a connecting flight back to Bedlam and the first leg was delayed due to weather in LaGuardia. If I ever rewrite that song from the Sound of Music, it might contain the line:

Raindrops on windows while waiting at airports,
this is one of my least favorite things.

Bad weather and air travel don't go.


When we did finally get into the air there was less turbulence than I'd been bracing for.


By the skin of my teeth did I make my connecting flight out of LaGuardia. A situation not made easier by the fact that the layout of this airport requires you to pass through a security checkpoint when you go from one concourse to another.

On the flight back I found myself sitting next to Jim, a good guy returning to Bedlam from an interview with Google in nyc. We exchanged cards.

I guess it was a weekend of baseball. The plane banked steeply starboard after takeoff and I was able to look across the aisle into Shea Stadium and watch for half a minute the Mets and the Mariners play below us.

Pining for the fjords

I'm in Boston visiting family and friends. Here's how I traveled:

From little sleep (less than 3 hours)
to L's car
to two airplanes
to a shuttle
to another car
to my parents' house.

~~~~~~~

I remembered to bring my toothbrush.

The recent theme of meeting people I know while traveling continues. I was on the shuttle from the airport when a girl stood by the empty seat in front of me. She didn't sit down, just stood there staring at me.

Turns out it was my second cousin, on leave from Iraq. We talked about many things, including the vibe in Tikrit post-surge, the different qualities of sandstorm, and birthdays (hers is the day before mine).

And yeah, my wonder-niece kicked my sorry butt at Guitar Hero. Looks like all my time spent shredding in Berklee practice rooms doesn't come to much when rubber meets road.

~~~~~~~

There was a pitch-perfect dinner party tonight at Vlindinhauer's in celebration of my recent thirty somethingth birthday.


The cast:
Vlindinhauer Haverhast
Vlindinhauer's wife, M
Mr. Why
Sabitathica


The fare:
The best crab cakes I've ever tasted, potatoes (roasted & seasoned), perfect asparagus, and delicious cherry tomatoes
A wine called EVIL
A delicious, decadent, deliriously pink, strawberry cake for dessert (pictured)
Turkish coffee (also pictured)
Sliced baguette & olive oil pre-dinner
Several other fine wines
Armagnac


The conversation:
Many improbable thoughts were articulated this night, and several phrases never before given voice in the English language were uttered. A few that come to mind:

Apes on dulcimers
Trouble on the poop-deck (more on this below)
"I feel like Susan Dey"

You're familiar, I assume, with the dinner party tradition where you foretell your future by interpreting, Rorschach-style, the patterns in the grounds of your Turkish coffee? Well, M suggested that as we were all gathered in celebration of, among other things, the anniversary of my birth, it would be my future which would be prophesied by those present.


The auguries:
M: A griffin standing above a Klu Klux Klan member; Sardinia; a fish in a tree.

Vlindinhauer: Three strings of lime-flesh toppelmoore gwerding the tops of the Totten trees. A cloudful flocking of grimgraff is seeping along the Z-way towards Hollywotton Manor. (You'll have to forgive me. I may have gotten a few of the words wrong with this one.)

Sabitathica: A forest stands between two alien beings who are almost facing each other. Behind one is an unfamiliar cityscape, the other holds two living, squirming creatures - one in each of its two upraised hands.

Mr. Why: Mr. Why said that it would be, if I understood correctly, improper for him to answer as long as we were all still sitting in the dining room...


The music:
The idea arose to create enough music to fill an eight record - 16 sides of vinyl - box set. A bold move for a group which has never in fact played together before. And we got pretty close too, except that almost none of it was actually recorded. The blueprint goes something like this:

Side one - tuning and improvisation
Sides two through five - several versions of In the Court of the Crimson King, all unspeakably brilliant
Side six - a song by and/or about Shakespeare, Browning, Marlow, Crowley and Kilimanjaro
Side seven - improvisation and intermission
Side eight - second intermission and improvisation
Side nine - an avant-garde reconstruction of the blues piece "The poop-deck"
Side ten - poop-deck improvisation
Sides eleven and twelve - a song about and/or to the rising red moon
Sides thirteen through sixteen - acknowledgment, repentance, and absolution.


The ensemble:
Vlindinhauer Haverhast: acoustic bass guitar
Mr. Why: acoustic guitar
Sabitathica: acoustic guitar
M: percussion, sampled animal sounds, and things that go bump in the night

There was also some live solo music from Mr Why, along with some archived favorites from Vlindinhauer and myself.

And yes, there was Opeth.


The ablution:
This being Summer Solstice, there was the obligatory midnight ablution in the sweet Atlantic, which in case you're wondering, was ridiculously cold.

~~~~~~~

Red Sox at Fenway tomorrow.

You say it's your birthday...

The rest of the birthday weekend:

Friday I took off from work. Visited Dr. Bombay's in the morning for iced espresso and conversationalizing with L, then I got the Camry's emissions tested while she went shopping for clothes (for her) for Saturday.

Later in the afternoon I got some writing done while L began reading Solaris in the next room.

And I met my new neighbor! A 28 year old nanny, she officially moves into the back of the Nunnery July 1, but will begin bringing her things over in the next few days.

L: Is she cute...?
Sabitathica: Yeah, sort of.
L: How cute?
Sabitathica: On what are we talking about, like a scale of 1 to 10?
L: Yeah.
Sabitathica: I don't know, like a fourteen?
L: (groan) Oh great, thanks. (pause) So, where am I on that scale?
Sabitathica: Hey, are you hungry? Let's go to R. Thomas. I'm dying for their french toast.

And so we did. I apparently went one Banana Boy Toy too far and my stomach was mad at me for the rest of the night. Back to the Nunnery to watch The Ten before sleep. Good, lighthearted fun.

~~~~~~~

Saturday, the birthday proper, began with a balloon ride, which you already know about.

There was a fun photo session in the afternoon following a powernap and some phone call birthday wishes. There were lots and lots of happy birthday wishes: email, phone, personal, etc. Good times.

Dinner at the famous Carroll Street Cafe where I had the duck special and L and I shared a very fine bottle of cherry wine.

And we stopped at the corner store to buy some champagne, which we drank on the porch overlooking the back yard at dusk.

A great, great birthday.

~~~~~~~

Sunday we walked to Gato Bizco for a breakfast which was just okay. The food was too heavy, and plus there was a screaming child in the house, screaming louder than you're even picturing right now. Oh, and Dr. Bombay's espresso machine was out of order. Which might all make the morning sound worse than it really was. But redemption is a real event and things quickly became more pleasant when we walked to the Frazer Center and hung out in the garden, which was beautiful as usual.

Up, up, and away!

Saturday, my birthday morning:

Awake ridiculously early, L and I brushed our teeth and sped unshowered in her car to Williamson, Georgia, a rural community (population ~300) about an hour south of the Nunnery (33.179743, -84.362976).

You're aware that recent traveling has been fraught with difficulties (cf. my trip last month) and this deceptively simple excursion was no exception. Several obstacles to smooth travel arose, including a roadblock & detour, a surprising amount of traffic for a Saturday morning at 06:00, and what L referred to as "two-minute traffic lights" of which there were seemingly several dozen, but we did manage to arrive (safe, late) at the HQ of SkyBlue Balloons:


We helped our pilot Kyle, his wife Janet, and two friends inflate our balloon...


and then we floated off into the sweetest blue yonder.


It was quiet except for the white-noise of the flame as it was released into the balloon, the crackle from Kyle's two-way radio, and all of our oohs and OMGs as we processed the reality of our situation...


We flew fairly low, at maybe 150-200 feet, just high enough to sail above treetops:


There was much beauty.

We soared above neighborhoods and fields, above dense woods and roads - all without getting tangled up in powerlines, which is apparently something that happens. People would look up and wave at us and we would smile and wave back. Good times.

There was a particularly gorgeous man-made pond:


Here's a picture looking up at the inside of the balloon. I think I've converted (um, corrupted?) L because she's mentioned several times now how this reminds her of the part in Solaris when the Athena is docking with Prometheus. Heh. Awesome...


And here's the view looking down:


After an hour of blissful buoyancy... we landed at Ingles! Hooray! Ingles! Or more properly, we landed in a small field of bush and bramble next to Ingles.


Kyle and Janet put us to work deflating the balloon, folding it, and packing it into the trailer hitched to the van which had tracked and followed us via the magic of GPS and met us, yes it's true, at Ingles.

Our timing couldn't have been better - not five minutes into the ride back to L's car, it began to rain...


There was much celebration.

Apparently there is a ballooning tradition which involves champagne, but this conflicted with my own personal tradition of not drinking alcohol at 08:00 on my birthday (or any other day). So L convinced Janet (not without encountering resistance, I've been told) to allow us to drink sparkling grape juice from champagne flutes:


Sabitathica's official assesstimate: A fine way to spend the morning of your thirty-somethingth birthday... five stars.

Cupcakes in the Rye

Thursday morning, a package was delivered to me in my office. I immediately began to wonder what could be inside:


What could it be? Some books? A cake? The office supplies I ordered? I had no idea. Oh how I love a good mystery...

Upon closer inspection and various detailed investigations, I was able to determine that the box contained flowers. Huzzah! Roses and Lilies from L!

Aww...


And wonder-secretary Pam baked me vanilla-frosted cupcakes with sprinkles:


Later L and I went to Aprés Diem for dinner where, over my first-ever martini (two, actually, and dirty) and throughout the entirety of a conversation about various infamous Smarts (Elizabeth, Pamela), I endured to the extent I am able the tedious manifestations of extroverts...

Extroverts of a certain ilk are like Pigpen, the Peanuts character: forever wallowing in the cloud of their own unprocessed psychology. Despite appearances, they aren't interacting with the outside world, they're unconsciously acting out their unfinished business as if on stage in front of the outside world. There's a difference.

After dinner we went for a walk in Piedmont Park...


where, like Paul, Mother Nature's son, we could be found in a field of grass...


and we talked about Holden Caulfield, Roman Polanski, and the Beatles.


The park offers a nice view of Bedlam's skyline.


Some menacing clouds rolled in...


and then my camera went suddenly on strike. It gave me error message E18 which, seriously? is not helpful unless you're the sort of person who carries the user manual around with you.

Back to the Nunnery for an evening of Heineken & Joni before sleep. Heineken is a different (and lesser) experience here than it is in the Netherlands.

Everything you need to know about Joni Mitchell you can find in Blue.

A good idea at the time.

Borges was my author of choice for traveling around the Netherlands. I carried Ficciones with me for days, but only actually read from it during the flights over. Borges is a monster, a master of labyrinths, and I can't get my mind around him yet.

~~~~~~~

There are three types of being in Solaris:

1. Solaris itself
2. the humans
3. the visitors

The visitors bridge the otherwise unbreachable gap between Solaris and the humans. The visitors are not "half-human + half-Solaris", which would maybe feel a little cheap: they are something altogether else, a third thing, the offspring of the other two, with their own perspectives and acting from their own beliefs.

Solaris these days often seems like a meditation on threeness, e.g.:

1. Chris
2. Rheya
3. Ryeha's double

Reconciliation more than once arises out of longstanding dichotomies. The existential situation itself is no longer the simple yes or no of life v. death. For a limited time, if you act now, there is a third option, but only if you want it badly enough. Or if you happen to be George Clooney. Operators are standing by...

Markandwanda have recently read the book by Lem, so that may be next.

Something I found amusing, the 20th Century Fox online store suggests that if you enjoyed Solaris, you may want to consider purchasing Daredevil or possibly The Day After Tomorrow, which are apparently similar to Solaris in some way which is currently obscure to me. Maybe for those of us who enjoy watching movies with the letter "R" in the title?

~~~~~~~

Catching up at La Fonda and making music with Mark last night. LBC tonight.