It's a magical world

My sister and I went up (out) to Portland this weekend to see Trek in the Park, which is concluding its five-year mission this summer with The Trouble with Tribbles.  We had a really good time! I have missed her. 

Of course we went to Powell's on Friday night, and I was proud of myself for exercising restraint (I still have books from my first trip to Powell's four years ago that I haven't read) and only buying one book. We saw Only God Forgives at the theater across the street, which was…interesting. The colors were beautiful, and the story was interesting too. My sister loved it, and though I was not as enthusiastic, it was still cool. 

On Saturday we went to the coast, specifically Astoria at the point of the state, where we saw the Goonies house, and heard seals in the harbor but did not see them, and then down to Cannon Beach, where One-Eyed Willy's treasure is, somewhere. It got sunny by the time we got there, and we walked on the beach to see the famous rock, which was cool. We also had the Oregon version of salt water taffy, which is just sad, and tried the sea salt chocolate caramel apples. Too much sea salt. We also found a coffee shop with very tasty Aztec Mochas, and had a chestnut cream/banana crepe. If there's one thing I've learned about shore towns the world over, it's that they're all fundamentally the same, and it was fun. We also finally got to Lemongrass, a Thai restaurant in a house, and it was delicious. We drove around the fancy houses in the west hills before winding up at a fancy cocktail bar downtown, because what else was there to do.

Yesterday we got up and went to Slappy Cakes, and it was delicious, as usual. (Think Benihana except you're cooking the food yourself and it's breakfast.) We had to eat at the bar because it was so busy, so we were not able to cook our own pancakes, but it was still delicious. We went to Extracto Coffee both days. Our consensus is that it is probably the best coffee in Portland. 

Then we went to Pencil Test, which is a bra shop Spike had heard about at Reed, and got fitted for bras. Bras that fit! What a miracle! It really is true that Victoria's Secret bras do not actually fit most women well. So now we know what sizes we are in various brands, and can begin the slow process of replacing our VS bras with ones that fit. 

It has become something of a tradition for us to drive out to The Bird Hut to see the birds, so we did that (Spikeo was making friends with a rose cockatoo, unsurprisingly; they were both pink) and then drove way the hell out to Cathedral Park in North Portland. We got there at two for a five o'clock show to get good seats, because as I said, I didn't come all this way to get bad seats. One of Spike's friends showed up at about quarter to three and we sat around and hang out and drank his homebrewed beer before the show started. 

Trek in the Park! It was so great. The cast was good, and we could hear decently well, and the costumes and effects and music were very well done. A very minor thing that I enjoyed a lot was that Admiral Fitzpatrick was played by a woman, and that one of the security officers was female too, although I was sad that the helmsman (who apparently has no lines in The Trouble with Tribbles) was played by a white dude. I thought that Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov were the best among the lead cast members, although Uhura was awesome too; she just has too few lines in general. Spock was also good, though it seems clear that Gerrold was writing specifically for Nimoy's very arch delivery style, which this guy didn't quite achieve. But the scene with the tribbles in the storage compartments was amazing and hilarious (they just kept falling on Kirk's head!), and it had been long enough that I'd forgotten the denouement with the Klingon spy at the end, and it was really great, and I got a very nice T-shirt to commemorate the whole thing afterward. Long live Trek. Go boldly. 

And finally last night after eating Japanese food and going back to Powell's we wound up at Ruby Jewel Scoops, which is very tasty artisan Portland ice cream. This morning we got up very early (especially considering that my flight has been delayed an hour) and went to the airport, and so a good time was had by all. 

I didn't buy the shoes, because I decided if I was going to spend $200+ on shoes I should just put it to a pair of Fluevogs. I did buy the handbag. It's a really nice handbag.

I don't know how to reconcile the ignoble lines my hand was writing with the thoughts of the dazzling light I'd just seen. I had wanted to say to my friend that, since we didn't come from Buenos Aires, he and I were perhaps more sensitive than natives to its beauty. The city had been raised at the limits of an unvarying plain, among scrubland as useless for nourishment as it was for basket-making, on the edge of a river whose single redeeming feature was its enormous width. Although Borges tried to ascribe it a past, the one it now has is also smooth, without any heroic feats other than those improvised by its poets and painters, and each time one took any fragment of the past in hand, it was only to watch it dissolve, into a monotonous present. It's always been a city where the poor were plentiful and where one had to walk with occasional jumps to dodge the piles of dog shit. Its only beauty is what the human imagination attributes to it. It's not surrounded by sea and hills, like Hong Kong and Nagasaki, nor does it lie on a trade route along which civilization has navigated for centuries, like London, Paris, Florence, Geneva, Prague and Vienna. No traveler arrives in Buenos Aires en route to somewhere else. Beyond the city there is no somewhere else: the spaces of nothing that open up to the south were called, on sixteenth-century maps, Land of Unknown Sea, Land of the Circle and Land of Giants, the allegorical names of non-existence. Only a city that had denied so much beauty can have, even in adversity, such an affecting beauty.

     --Tomás Eloy Martínez, The Tango Singer, trans. Anne McLean (136-37)

Partly this entry is an excuse to use my new David 8 icon, I'm not gonna lie. 

So, I am in Buenos Aires until next Tuesday night. It is pretty great so far! Between the buses and the subte it is fairly easy to get around and despite the fact that at this point my Spanish knowledge is basically second-hand Latin and Italian I have not had any truly horrible communications failures thus far. Partly this is because I have shamelessly let via_ostiense take almost every opportunity to practice her castellano. 

Today C and I lazed around until 11 am (v_o had to head out early for her classes) and then we went down the street to a cafe and drank coffee and ate things (medialunas and empanadas, mostly) and then v_o and I went to MALBA, which is pretty awesome and which packs quite a punch with its very well curated permanent collection, though they are between special exhibits right now so the third floor was closed. Still worth the AR $12 student rate I paid, though, despite the "we don't have change" brinksmanship the ticket takers put me through. (Change is worth more than its actual value in some ways because the buses only take change.) We then had ice cream at the deservedly famous Persicco and wandered through Palermo, including to Chicco Ruiz to try on some gorgeous but slightly too quirky boots (the actual buttons are a mixture of circles and squares; v_o had to help me button them), before heading to the only Cameroonian restaurant in South America. It was delicious. 

I really want to get a pair of shoes here, actually. I may well go back to Chicco Ruiz before I leave and buy either those shoes or a different pair if I don't find a different pair somewhere else that I love. 

In the event, I never got anywhere near LAX. My bag changed planes there, though! 

Let's back up. I checked in Sunday morning for my flight, but on impulse Sunday night I rechecked my flight status and saw that my PHL-MSP flight had been cancelled and that Delta had rebooked me for the same flight on Wednesday (I still have not received any communication about this from them; if I hadn't checked my flight status I'd have been totally screwed). Given that it's snowing in Philly now and will be snowing tomorrow, I decided to rebook myself on a 6:15 flight from Philly to SJC via MSP on Monday morning. Having gotten up at 3:30 and gotten to the airport at 5:00, we were sitting on the plane waiting to push back when the captain informed us that there was something wrong with the aft door. Forty minutes later, it transpired that the emergency chute was broken, there was no replacement in PHL, and the plane wasn't going anywhere. I stood in the rebooking line for 90 minutes and the woman in front of me got the last seat on the PHL-SFO nonstop flight that afternoon, so I decided to take the seat Delta offered me on the other plane they'd found that was going to MSP and, rather than be sixth on the standby list for that evening's flight to SJC, get a guaranteed seat on the Tuesday morning flight. I spent yesterday and last night hanging out with friends in Minneapolis, it was great except for the fact that I didn't have my checked bag (it went to SJC last night). It snowed the entire time I was there and no one flipped out, it's almost like snow is a normal thing that is possible to deal with! Are you listening, Atlanta!?

Ahem. When I got to the gate in MSP after booking it through the terminal due to delays in security, there was no plane to be seen; eventually they got it out of the hangar and we de-iced and left and got to SJC about 40 minutes late. I wasn't actually angry about any of this until I walked into the Delta baggage office and it turned out that for some reason my bag had gone out on American and the Delta people were too fucking lazy to get it, with the result that I had to take the shuttle to the other terminal to claim it myself and consequently missed the only CalTrain of the hour, so I sat in the rain at Santa Clara for 45 minutes. Eventually, though, I got back to the east bay and my roommate kindly picked me up from the BART station and when I sat down at the dining room table the chair broke under me and I fell on my ass on the floor and I laughed and laughed. It's good to be home, which is what I said when I got into Minneapolis, and it's still true. 

Unfortunately, since there was no four hour layover in LAX, many things I had intended to accomplish are still unfinished. I am going to tackle some of them after dinner. 

All in all, this was one for the record books, even in my jaded accounting. 

Waiting for the clock to tick down so I can check in for my flight tomorrow (why oh why did I book the absolute last flight out Sunday night? oh wait my alternative was the 6 am redeye. Just watch, next week I will post on here reiterating "never book the last flight out on a Sunday, and that goes triple for Thanksgiving" to myself). 

There's been a lot of talk about the new TSA regulations and procedures; I point you to umadoshi's link post about the TSA and what you can do, and I also point you to this petition demanding that the TSA allow flyers the privacy to which we are entitled, organized by Flyers Rights, an organization that's been doing some useful things for the past year or so.  

Good luck and good travel, everyone who's traveling!

ETA: It turns out tomorrow is National Opt-Out Day. I'm certainly never going to argue that people should voluntarily submit to being molested, but you deserve to know why people around you are doing it in droves on the busiest travel day of the year. I'll be flying out of a fairly small airport; I'm not sure it even has the virtual strip search machines yet, so I'll be making my own decision about this when I get there (two hours early, I'm aiming for). /eta

My dad only today figured out that the bird and I are allied against him.

This post is three months old, but whatever, I wanted to write it. And then in half an hour I am going running and getting off the internet, I am trying to be better about that.

( The Bay Area. With pictures.  )

Or, how I spent last weekend with my friend K.

( At Peachtree & Peachtree )

Friends, readers--

What have I been doing again? What haven't I been doing? I seriously have not been this busy, except for one notable week in June 2008, since I graduated from college. Before I forget, holiday card exchange post! 

# Getting my hair chopped! Yup, went to The Chop Shop in Philly last Wednesday and got it bobbed, since I realized a) that this was probably my last chance before Christmas and b) my first haircut since the middle of June. Which is too long. It was slightly too short immediately afterwards, but now is just perfect, and quite cute. And at $43 with tax and tip, it's the least I've paid for a haircut in at least eight years. Yes, I know.

# Applying to graduate school! I just turned in another app tonight, as well as finished up the last fiddly bits for one of last week's schools (again), and am probably going to do next Tuesday's this weekend, then finish up two of the final three after my credit card statement closes but before the actual deadline. Leaving only a certain Canadian university, of course.

# Christmas shopping! I am now essentially finished. And I only paid full price for two items! How did this happen, again? 

# Going to Minnesota! Yup, I cashed in some frequent flyer miles and had a weekend with friends for $5 roundtrip. Hah. Restaurant shout-outs for this trip are Zumbro in Linden Hills, and Blackbird in south Minneapolis. I really, really love Blackbird (I've been there before)--it's simple but not simplistic, and the food and atmosphere are equally perfect. I actually went for my alma mater's Christmas Fest, which as usual is an orgy of Christmas and top-notch musical performances, though I don't think this year's version was quite as awesome, program-wise, as some of the other four I've seen. But I did get to Goodbye Blue Monday, one of my favorite coffee shops, and get some of my favorite coffee. Yay. Going to Minneapolis always feels like a homecoming, probably because it is my home away from home.

# Watching the Twilight movie, against my will (forced by my friends, which shows that they really are friends). The only scene with any sexual tension is when Dr. Carlisle Cullen bites human!Edward on his pale white neck. Who says dying of influenza isn't sexy? 

# Writing! I finished a draft of my Yuletide story on the plane home last night. Now I just have to revise.

# Working! Started a different temp job today. I can wear jeans and it's full-time, so really, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

And now that I'm done those grad school apps, I can get back to my to-do list, at the top of which is translating DTB 12. Among other things. On that note...