Dear god
There really isn't much to update or think about aside from relating work tales. I don't really like that feeling. Still, I'd like to let it out.
My life has been very narrow lately. I've had something of a one-track mind, which goes something like workworkworkworkwork. See, the last four days were the San Jose Grand Prix, which I would have had a lot more patience for if I didn't think that professional automobile racings is one of the biggest wastes of time, natural resources, and brain power ever conceived of, not to mention that this grand prix itself is a huge fuck up the ass. Basically, all of downtown San Jose gets shut down and my hotel enclosed by giant concrete walls so that people (yes, people who conform to every stereotype about auto racing fans imaginable) can pay $90 a day to watch automobiles drive between said concrete walls and hope that at least one of them crashes (the highlight of the weekend, according to observers, was when two drivers collided in the middle of the main event and proceeded to engage in puglisim. The crowd went wild--more so than they did for the winner of said main event.) The days leading up to this little shindig consisted mostly of writing letters, making xeroxes, scheduling and rescheduling, and apologizing to multiple strangers multiple times for multiple inconveniences over which I had no control, and listening to phrases such as "this is bullshit" vehemently vocalized at various volumes.
Then Thursday came; I was at work at my usual time, at about 7:35. Thursday was the day when the giant concrete walls--which until Thursday had only been a nuisance, albeit a palpable one--officially walled us in completely. "Going black," our director of room operations called it. Our entire operation had to be shifted four and a half blocks away (from here to here), to a garage we rented out from San Jose State University. It doesn't look like much, but to some-ought thousand number of automobile racing enthusiasts/hotel patrons, it makes a world of difference, enough to raise bloody hell about whenever things aren't the way they want them to be. Wonderful skullduggery and misadventures followed. I left at about 8:00 that evening.
I should interrupt, and say that the best part of these collective misadventures was the golf cart with which we were entrusted. It made a lot of things a lot easier, and we did spoil ourselves with it a bit. There's a great mental image I have (which I later discovered was captured on film; sad to say I don't have it) of myself on Thursday wearing my suit and sunglasses, driving the cart down San Salvadore with one hand, yelling into my cell phone about some thing or another with the other, navigating through barriers and traffic cones and the occasional traffic, with my boss sitting next to me hunkered down, holding onto the golf cart's oh-shit handle for all he's worth. It was great.
Friday the prelimaries started. We were set up at Fourth St., but David and I had to go back and forth to the hotel on several occasions (which meant more shennanigans on the golf cart), one of which was the morning meeting at 6:30. You can imagine how that went. We collectively spent most of the day posted up handing out passes while I waited for something to go wrong that I'd have to fix. I really, really, really do not like that feeling. When I'm at work, I expect to be working at something. In a sense I was, but once the training and explaining was more or less finished, I was just putting out fires, so to speak. Still, I managed to last until 7ish. Saturday was pretty tame. More races, more noise, more 6:30 start times, and more late hours. We had to take a woman to the hospital in Santa Clara two towns over when her water broke and she refused to go with paramedics because of a lack of medical insurance and her insistance upon her doctor. It was lovely.
Yesterday was the coup de gras. The 6:30 start time may as well have been 4:30; it was that much of a pain to wake up. It was busier, of course, being the day of the Main Event, which of course meant more annoyed race freaks and more fires to put out and fewer shennanigans. The most interesting time was when it was all more or less over at about 5:15 that afternoon, and the shuttles which we were pressed into driving from Day One after our higher-ups denied all claim to doing three weeks prior were in the highest demand you could imagine. Naturally, they both ran out of gas, and one of our drivers managed to leave with the keys when his shift was over. I ended up driving the golf cart back and forth as a substitute for the shuttle vans and to pick up the slack. Good times.
Then of course, waiting for the giant concrete walls to come up and shifting eveything back over to the hotel; we were told we'd have access at about 8, but as an eyewitness I can personally attest that they were wrong. Guests who couldn't see the fourteen hours I'd spent working raised more hell and provided more fires to put out. Crunched the numbers for the past four days and finished breaking everything down at our alternate garage, gave some pass-on orders to our night managers, and I was off at about 9:52 that night. I can safely say that we outlasted everyone else in the hotel for time served.
And to think that this week was supposed to be my vacation. I miss my friend. I miss you all. I miss you.
The good thing about spending more than half your waking hours in a week at work is that you're too exhausted for any semblence of a social life, and that I've been able to get back to my reading. Finished American Vertigo a while back, as well as Autumn of the Patriarch and a collection of Marquez's short stories. I enjoyed both, but I think he makes a better novelist, and I still feel that Love in the Time of Cholera is his greatest book--even more so than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don't ask me why, but I feel a much closer affection for Florentino Ariza. I just do. Also finally read A River Runs Through It instead of watching the movie again, and after a good three and a half years of stalling, I cracked Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Doug Hafstedter, which was recommended to me by Vladi Chaloupka when I took his class on the physics of music in spring of my freshman year. The preface alone blew me away, and the first three chapters have delighted and bamboozled and confused me and made me think, which is good.
There isn't much else to describe. I think a lot about this place as home, compared to home, contrasted to Seattle. I still miss real city life. What's strange and at the same time slightly unsettling and slightly relieving is how much people with whom I share my observations who have lived here for far longer periods than I have agree with said observations. I miss Seattle weather. It's finally cooled here, enough that it reminds me of Seattle in June, and what surprised me was how annoyed I was that I liked the weather. It's a strange feeling to suddenly realize that your world is a lot larger than the tiny corner of it you've occupied almost exclusively for twenty-two years--to realize that you don't know anything about anywhere outside of your metaphysical comfort zone, and to realize even further that you ain't seen nothin' yet. Culture shock at the very least. But when the place that you've relocated to reminds you of the place you grew up in, when the place you miss so much suddenly doesn't seem as unique as you would like to believe--well, that throws everything into perspective, doesn't it.
Today is my day off, and I'm going to read some more and see about test driving a few automobiles I'm interested in purchasing. Today is my day off.
My life has been very narrow lately. I've had something of a one-track mind, which goes something like workworkworkworkwork. See, the last four days were the San Jose Grand Prix, which I would have had a lot more patience for if I didn't think that professional automobile racings is one of the biggest wastes of time, natural resources, and brain power ever conceived of, not to mention that this grand prix itself is a huge fuck up the ass. Basically, all of downtown San Jose gets shut down and my hotel enclosed by giant concrete walls so that people (yes, people who conform to every stereotype about auto racing fans imaginable) can pay $90 a day to watch automobiles drive between said concrete walls and hope that at least one of them crashes (the highlight of the weekend, according to observers, was when two drivers collided in the middle of the main event and proceeded to engage in puglisim. The crowd went wild--more so than they did for the winner of said main event.) The days leading up to this little shindig consisted mostly of writing letters, making xeroxes, scheduling and rescheduling, and apologizing to multiple strangers multiple times for multiple inconveniences over which I had no control, and listening to phrases such as "this is bullshit" vehemently vocalized at various volumes.
Then Thursday came; I was at work at my usual time, at about 7:35. Thursday was the day when the giant concrete walls--which until Thursday had only been a nuisance, albeit a palpable one--officially walled us in completely. "Going black," our director of room operations called it. Our entire operation had to be shifted four and a half blocks away (from here to here), to a garage we rented out from San Jose State University. It doesn't look like much, but to some-ought thousand number of automobile racing enthusiasts/hotel patrons, it makes a world of difference, enough to raise bloody hell about whenever things aren't the way they want them to be. Wonderful skullduggery and misadventures followed. I left at about 8:00 that evening.
I should interrupt, and say that the best part of these collective misadventures was the golf cart with which we were entrusted. It made a lot of things a lot easier, and we did spoil ourselves with it a bit. There's a great mental image I have (which I later discovered was captured on film; sad to say I don't have it) of myself on Thursday wearing my suit and sunglasses, driving the cart down San Salvadore with one hand, yelling into my cell phone about some thing or another with the other, navigating through barriers and traffic cones and the occasional traffic, with my boss sitting next to me hunkered down, holding onto the golf cart's oh-shit handle for all he's worth. It was great.
Friday the prelimaries started. We were set up at Fourth St., but David and I had to go back and forth to the hotel on several occasions (which meant more shennanigans on the golf cart), one of which was the morning meeting at 6:30. You can imagine how that went. We collectively spent most of the day posted up handing out passes while I waited for something to go wrong that I'd have to fix. I really, really, really do not like that feeling. When I'm at work, I expect to be working at something. In a sense I was, but once the training and explaining was more or less finished, I was just putting out fires, so to speak. Still, I managed to last until 7ish. Saturday was pretty tame. More races, more noise, more 6:30 start times, and more late hours. We had to take a woman to the hospital in Santa Clara two towns over when her water broke and she refused to go with paramedics because of a lack of medical insurance and her insistance upon her doctor. It was lovely.
Yesterday was the coup de gras. The 6:30 start time may as well have been 4:30; it was that much of a pain to wake up. It was busier, of course, being the day of the Main Event, which of course meant more annoyed race freaks and more fires to put out and fewer shennanigans. The most interesting time was when it was all more or less over at about 5:15 that afternoon, and the shuttles which we were pressed into driving from Day One after our higher-ups denied all claim to doing three weeks prior were in the highest demand you could imagine. Naturally, they both ran out of gas, and one of our drivers managed to leave with the keys when his shift was over. I ended up driving the golf cart back and forth as a substitute for the shuttle vans and to pick up the slack. Good times.
Then of course, waiting for the giant concrete walls to come up and shifting eveything back over to the hotel; we were told we'd have access at about 8, but as an eyewitness I can personally attest that they were wrong. Guests who couldn't see the fourteen hours I'd spent working raised more hell and provided more fires to put out. Crunched the numbers for the past four days and finished breaking everything down at our alternate garage, gave some pass-on orders to our night managers, and I was off at about 9:52 that night. I can safely say that we outlasted everyone else in the hotel for time served.
And to think that this week was supposed to be my vacation. I miss my friend. I miss you all. I miss you.
The good thing about spending more than half your waking hours in a week at work is that you're too exhausted for any semblence of a social life, and that I've been able to get back to my reading. Finished American Vertigo a while back, as well as Autumn of the Patriarch and a collection of Marquez's short stories. I enjoyed both, but I think he makes a better novelist, and I still feel that Love in the Time of Cholera is his greatest book--even more so than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don't ask me why, but I feel a much closer affection for Florentino Ariza. I just do. Also finally read A River Runs Through It instead of watching the movie again, and after a good three and a half years of stalling, I cracked Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Doug Hafstedter, which was recommended to me by Vladi Chaloupka when I took his class on the physics of music in spring of my freshman year. The preface alone blew me away, and the first three chapters have delighted and bamboozled and confused me and made me think, which is good.
There isn't much else to describe. I think a lot about this place as home, compared to home, contrasted to Seattle. I still miss real city life. What's strange and at the same time slightly unsettling and slightly relieving is how much people with whom I share my observations who have lived here for far longer periods than I have agree with said observations. I miss Seattle weather. It's finally cooled here, enough that it reminds me of Seattle in June, and what surprised me was how annoyed I was that I liked the weather. It's a strange feeling to suddenly realize that your world is a lot larger than the tiny corner of it you've occupied almost exclusively for twenty-two years--to realize that you don't know anything about anywhere outside of your metaphysical comfort zone, and to realize even further that you ain't seen nothin' yet. Culture shock at the very least. But when the place that you've relocated to reminds you of the place you grew up in, when the place you miss so much suddenly doesn't seem as unique as you would like to believe--well, that throws everything into perspective, doesn't it.
Today is my day off, and I'm going to read some more and see about test driving a few automobiles I'm interested in purchasing. Today is my day off.