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May 17th, 2012
04:25 pm - The story of how my room was taken over by horrible machines; also, more videos
This all started a month ago, and I've been meaning to write about it since about a week later, so here I am finally doing it even though now I don't remember everything.
Four Wednesdays ago I heard a noise. It sounded like tapping or rustling. I investigated and it turned out that there was water dripping from the ceiling of my closet and landing on the trash bags I had in there that are full of torn clothes that I don't want to throw away, because that seems like a sin, even though they're not of use to anyone where they are. Tangent! Gradually the dripping increased and moved to the doorway. I made a video documenting the drippery. After an hour or so it had decreased in speed so I figured it was going to stop and then I would get to forget about it. I was really hoping for this because of all the anxiety involved with people coming over, especially since our apartment was in terrible condition since neither of us really care a lot about cleaning because we're horrible monsters and/or bachelors. I clean the kitchen and the bathroom somewhat regularly but beyond that, like, whatever, man.
Unfortunately, it was not going to go away on its own. Thursday it was still dripping, so we were going to call the manager... rather, kotra was going to call the manager because of my severe-ish anxiety around people I don't know (or, if you're one of those people who thinks disorders are an excuse for the lazy, it was because I'm lazy). It turned out that we didn't have the manager's number, since she was somewhat new. We seem to get a new manager every year. I should have just walked over there and talked to her myself, which kotra was going to do, but he had stuff to do or something and then we figured it was too late in the day. That night just after I finished showering there was some frantic knocking on the door. I answered the door in my robe; it seems inappropriate for people I don't know to see me in my robe but that's probably just me being silly. There was a maintenance guy who said, "You've got a leak!" I told him that it was coming from above, so he went to talk to the people in the apartment above.
Well, here's what had happened: The people above us had an explosion of some sort in the pipe connected to their washing machine. Apparently the most damage was done to the people below us. I feel like a jerk for not bringing this up earlier because then the neighbors below probably wouldn't have had as much damage. I didn't see it but I was told it was like mine but much worse.
The next day was Friday and some guys came over and tore up my room. They put in two really loud fans that were pointed at a dehumidifier, also loud. There were also some sort of weird tubes stuck into the ceiling and wall and they were connected to some sort of contraption that, coincidentally, was loud. What I'm trying to say is that it was very loud. Also hot. We have a little thermometer that goes up to 120°F; kotra put it in my room and it was inadequate to measure how hot it was. Here is a video of all that stuff going on.
They came back on Monday to look at it. Nope, it wasn't done yet. Then it was Tuesday and... well, I think they partially removed things and finished up on Wednesday, but my memory isn't memorying very well. During this time I of course couldn't use my room. The couch in the living room folds out into a bed so I was sleeping on that. I was unhappy about this but the cat was glad that she could sit on me all the time.
A few days later there was another maintenance person: a middle-aged Asian man (probably Vietnamese but I can't be sure) who talked with an accent that I had a hard time understanding, which made me feel bad. He fixed the damage to my room and also killed all the mold that had developed. I don't know if it's this apartment complex or the moist Pacific Northwest in general, but we get mold in our corners if we're not super goddamned careful. The guy spent two days here and when he was done my room looked better than it ever had. Hooray for that guy! Unhooray for how anxious I was when he was (and all the other people were) around.
After that we did some major cleaning. The manager had come in and looked around in general and taken pictures of everything. She determined that our apartment was so cluttered that it violated our contract. She gave us two weeks to clean up, which was later extended to three. Kotra was angry about this. In the days before the inspection he cleaned everything with a fervor, apparently thinking that if the apartment wasn't pristine we'd be kicked out. Kotra is silly sometimes. Anyway, now the apartment is in such a state that I would not be embarrassed if someone came over, and that's kind of weird.
In conclusion, that sucked.
In more recent news: I made pizza and I kept eating it even though it was too hot so now the roof of my mouth hurts because I'm dumb.
Well, enough journaling in my journal. Here are some more bass videos.
I played a lot of Holst in high school and college bands, so it seemed natural that I'd learn how to play his music as I learned bass guitar, even though that's the "wrong" instrument—although many metal bands have had homages to Mars, which is why I use distortion when playing that part.
I don't remember if I finally learned to tie a tie for this video, or if I happened to be learning it and decided to use it in the video. I think a necktie is one of the stupidest things ever but it's good to know what to do with one if you're a 29-year-old male.
Kotra's sister made me that hat a few years ago. I put it on when baking so that I don't end up with hair scones.
This is in the middle of a project I started 6 months ago. I want to make 13 bass videos for each of the songs on the latest Gogol Bordello album. What will separate these from the others, aside being the whole album, is that I'm making them in various locales, mostly parks, so that they're not as visually bland as these things usually are. I've done 5 so far. I'm frustrated at how long this is taking. Mostly I'm afraid of looking like an idiot in public. I should get over that so that people will heap scorn upon me and call me a hipster for not being normal, which I think is the point of the anti-hipster movement.
Current Music: They Might Be Giants - Now Is Strange
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April 3rd, 2012
07:04 am - War And Peace And Addicts
I don't want my journal to be just a bunch of videos, so I will write about the books I've been reading.
I've been trying to get through Tolstoy's War And Peace for nine months. It's 1215 pages long and I'm on page 830 now. It's tedious and unsatisfying and I should just give up but I'm not smart enough. It's about Russia's one-percenters in the early 1800s. I'm at least learning about the culture of Russia at that period, which is surely useful. Apparently the nobility mostly spoke in French: when everyone got fed up with Napoleon after he went to war with them a second time, speaking French became less fashionable, but some of the Russian aristocrats had a hard time speaking Russian. There are long passages of dialog in French, which in my version have been left as they were with translations in footnotes. I wonder if these passages were left untranslated in Tolstoy's original, which would have made much of the book impenetrable to the Russians of the time.
The characters often act in ways that make no sense to me. I don't know if this is because things are hard to translate or Tolstoy is making some sort of point that's going over my head or everyone just acted crazy then because of lax health care. In one scene, soldiers at war make jokes and laugh as cannonballs land around them. In another, Natasha wanders around her family's mansion saying "Madagascar!" to everyone. There's one occurrence that I'm really curious about: when an officer is sick (or perhaps injured, I can't remember) he's taken to a doctor who performs bloodletting, and then he feels much better. Did bloodletting really work that way? They may have thought so in 1812 but the novel was published in 1869, so maybe Tolstoy thought that it worked that way, but I thought we knew it didn't really do much by then. Maybe it actually does have benefits. I know bleeding has therapeutic value, though most modern people are unaware of this and misconstrue self-injury as attention-seeking behavior.
One reason it's taking me so long to read this is that I've been taking breaks to read other books that come along. Most of them have been memoirs by mentally ill entertainers, which wasn't really a choice but a lot of people I'm interested in have been releasing memoirs lately.
There's The Book Of Drugs by Mike Doughty, the guy from Soul Coughing who doesn't like to be known as the guy from Soul Coughing. Much of the book is dedicated to explaining why: the guys in his band were crazy and manipulative and he was pretty much miserable the whole time. There are also details of how he almost died from his drug addiction, which explains the title. He says he saw John Frusciante, frequent guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Mars Volta, on TV talking about how much he loved destroying his life with heroin. This made Doughty jealous, because at that point he could barely get any pleasure from heroin.
There's The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Chronicle, I mean Stephen Fry. It's kind of a sequel to Moab Is My Washpot, his first memoir which mostly dealt with his childhood. This one involves his growing up and getting a fancy-pants education and becoming successful almost immediately, the bastard. I remember I was following him on Twitter when he took a month off to write this. It really seems hurried, but not in a bad way. It's somewhat stream-of-consciousness but very easy to read. Something about it that really surprised me: When he came out to his parents in around 1980, they were thrilled. I guess Britain's attitudes towards homosexuality then were different from those in the US, but still, I wouldn't expect anyone's parents to be happy about it. I'd think the most you could hope for, even now, would be a sort of indifferent "we love you no matter what" reaction, unless your parents are gay already. There's not much drug use in this book, but he promises there will be plenty in the next one.
There's God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked by Darrell Hammond. It's a pretty stupid name, because if you can't have "fuck" in your title then you should just not bother. Anyway, Saturday Night Live is mostly awful but I'm interested in the people involved with it. My take on the show is that it comes with a built-in energy that's exciting, at least when you first see it; after you've watched it for a few years you're used to it so what's left is performances and sketches that were written so hastily that they can't help but suck. Darrell Hammond, despite seeming bland, is absolutely fascinating in his intense mental turmoil. Again with the self-injury: he would have to cut himself in order to stop having hallucinations long enough to go out and imitate Bill Clinton. Of course there were also lots of drugs involved, which is boringly common with New York entertainers of the previous two decades. It seems like being successful as an actor or musician requires being almost dead from substance abuse. Glamor!
There was also Here Comes Trouble by Michael Moore. He's not exactly mentally ill from what I gather, but I suppose he's a different kind of entertainer than the others. This book is composed of true-ish stories, mostly about his childhood and youth. It's obvious that there's fiction involved here, particularly in the unnatural dialog. He does have a short introduction where he admits as much. The most interesting story to me was the only one that takes place after he's become famous. It involves the fallout from his Oscar speech. He had to hire a bunch of bodyguards to follow him around because he was getting almost as many death threats as George W. Bush. I have to say that the picture of him as a small child on the cover of the book is so cute that I can barely stand it.
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March 20th, 2012
05:28 pm - another damn video
There's a contest put on by The Mars Volta (or at least their management) to make a video for their song, so I made a video for their song. It's meant to portray mental derangement but I'm worried I just look silly.
I used some of the puppets ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) deana_in_texas made me a while ago. I've been meaning to use them more often.
I was planning on not bothering with this: for one thing, I already have a video with that song, and for another, there are already tons of entries. Plus my video editing skills don't really go beyond... well, the thing I made. At first I was thinking of making something involving public domain footage of rats and birds, but I didn't know how I would put it together. Then I realized I had a bird puppet, and a rabbit which is a rodent and that's close enough, so I went and had my freakout. Note that I hardly ever have this much energy and I was on a lot of caffeine at the time.
They Might Be Giants had a similar contest a few months ago, but it had a judge in the form of John Hodgman. This contest is much less fair, because the winner will be whoever has garnered the most likes by March 26. The contest winner will get $500 in the form of a certificate for Best Buy. I'm of course not going to win but still, why don't you go to the video page and give it a like if somehow you like this. I have no idea if people will like this or if they'll yell at me for making something so cheap-looking or if they'll just worry about my sanity.
The way this works, people who made their videos immediately have a better shot at winning. So far the leader is the first one that was uploaded... and it's just a video of someone's colonoscopy. I'm mostly against this because it took almost no effort to put together, although I guess it's kind of a cool idea. So far this is my favorite, and I also like this. I've actually been watching all of these because I'm interested in the creativity of people who like things I like, and also I'm unemployed. I felt like they were mostly going for the same sort of thing, and also most of them didn't really move with the music. I think music videos should be directly related to, y'know, the music.
Even though most of the visuals took 5 minutes, putting the video together was extremely frustrating and slow. Probably no one is interested in all the boring stuff I did, but here it is anyway. The video editor I used to use was Virtual Dub and it was nice. Unfortunately when I got my high-definition camera I couldn't use it anymore because it sort of loses its mind with high-definition videos. Now I use the default Windows video editor which suits most of my needs but it's not good with effects. I knew what effects I wanted (nothing exciting, just motion blur and desaturation) but I couldn't figure out a way to get those going on. I kept downloading things but they didn't work out. I only like to bother with free software but maybe I should save myself some headaches and just download something illegally. Well, eventually I realized I could sort of use Virtual Dub: I could apply filters but not really see anything. Here is the path I took: First I opened the video file in Windows Live Movie Maker and trimmed it and saved it as a .wmv file. Vdub only works with .avi files, so I used a converter to make an additional file. I opened that in Vdub, applied filters, and saved it. (Oddly, saving it uncompressed resulted in a jumbled mess, but if I used compression the video came out fine.) Then I opened it in Windows Blahblah again and added the images and the music and then I saved the final version. Of course all that doesn't take into account all the various things I tried that didn't work. Every time I tried something it took like half an hour for the video file to be compressed or saved or whatever, because the files are huge because of the high quality... but after going through all that saving the quality wasn't really very good anymore. Ah well.
Current Mood: lethargic
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February 15th, 2012
01:38 am - another video
The Mars Volta just put a song out and I loved it immediately, so I figured out how to play the bass part. At least, I came close. I got some notes wrong in the middle part and I have no idea what the bass is doing at the end so I repeated what happened at the beginning, which could be what happens. Also, my face is gone.
Current Mood: so tired
Current Music: yeah, you
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February 9th, 2012
08:10 pm - I got a new phone.
Current Mood: phoney
Current Music: Holst - 1st Suite in Eb - Chaconne, Allegro moderato
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February 1st, 2012
11:00 pm - bloggery
I've started a blog where I complain about commercials! Check out my blog where I complain about commercials! http://mandaliet.com/cat/
I suppose I should care enough about the layout to not use the default theme, but whatever. The only thing I really want to add is a picture of a broken television, like this, but the site charges way too much for their images unless I pay for like a thousand at once. I've found a whole lot of free images of broken televisions but none of them look like I want them to. Oh well.
Current Music: Gogol Bordello - Rebellious Love
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January 18th, 2012
12:12 pm - another mix CD
I made another of those mix CD things that I make. This sprang forth much earlier than it was supposed to, but I don't remember why I think I should only make these every 6 months.
I'm including links to YouTube videos of each song (fortunately they all happen to be available there, although for the first one I could only find the shorter version) so if you want to listen to something for 80 minutes you can keep clicking on the links. Should I mention that some of these songs have a lot of swearing? I don't know how people feel about that anymore.
1. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Do You Love Me
2. Einstürzende Neubauten - Z.N.S.
3. Tom Waits - Hell Broke Luce
4. The Mars Volta - Cotopaxi
5. Mutemath - Prytania
6. Mike Doughty - Na Na Nothing
7. Steve Earle - Jericho Road
8. Phil Ochs - Pretty Smart On My Part
9. Gogol Bordello - Pala Tute
10. Primus - Lee Van Cleef
11. The Residents - The Coming Of The Crow
12. They Might Be Giants - Marty Beller Mask
13. Mutemath - Walking Paranoia
14. Die Antwoord - Evil Boy
15. Sufjan Stevens - I Want To Be Well
16. OOMPH! - Das Letzte Streichholz
17. Jack Parow - Dans Dans Dans
18. John Vanderslice - Overcoat
19. Peter Gabriel - Red Rain (orchestral version)
20. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Do You Love Me? (Part 2)
I'm also breaking the "rules" by including multiple songs by the same artist. This is because I recently fell in love with two albums. A few months ago I got Nick Cave's 1994 album Let Love In, because I thought I should listen to him more and that was the one with Red Right Hand on it. The "Do You Love Me?" songs that open and close the album (as well as my CD!) are phenomenal, especially part 2, which seems to get better every time I listen to it, though I'm sure there will be a plateau. I wish I hadn't found out what the song is about because now I feel very disturbed whenever I listen to it, but I still love it anyway.
The other album is Odd Soul by Mutemath, a group I hadn't heard of before I was listening to a year-in-review episode of Sound Opinions where a listener called in and said that it was one of their favorite albums of 2011. There are some albums where when I listen to them for the first time I can't really hear them because I have no idea what's going on. When this happens I know that if I listen to it again several more times it will slowly fall together and I will like it a lot. (This is usually what happens with albums by The Mars Volta.) At first Prytania was the only thing I could really comprehend on Odd Soul, but eventually I was in love with the whole thing.
It seems that I like rap when it's done by obnoxious South Africans. I have no idea why I like Die Antwoord and Jack Parow, who by themselves comprise a genre of rap called Zef. Somehow I enjoy the noises they make. It started when my Dutch friend Tan Loc randomly showed me the video for Evil Boy (warning: there are a lot of fake penises in this video, as well as general confusing madness... also apparently I have to mention that it's not meant to be homophobic and they're mostly just joking around) (also the song there is different from the album version which I used in my mix CD so my link above is for a different video). I watched the video a few times and was surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed it, and in fact I liked their whole album. Normally rap doesn't do anything for me, though there is more in this than just rap.
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January 5th, 2012
December 28th, 2011
03:08 pm - Borges
I watched the first season of The Borgias, a 9-episode affair that aired on Showtime a few months ago. It was a good-but-not-great sort of deal, yet somehow I'm compelled more than usual to write about it.
I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that there were actually two series about the Borgias this year. The other is just called Borgia, and it's created by Tom Fontana, who also created Oz and co-created Homicide: Life On The Street. It stars John Doman, best known as the oft-promoted William Rawls on The Wire, but he also had a small part in Oz too. Borgia is, as far as I know, not going to be shown in the US, which is odd because it was made by Americans and Czechs; while The Borgias, created by Irish and Canadians and Hungarians, is being shown in the US. They're both going to be shown in Europe, though, which must be awfully confusing.
The one I watched was created and written by Neil Jordan, an Irish guy who's directed lots of acclaimed movies. The pope is played by Jeremy Irons, who has also done a whole lot of acclaimed movies but is probably best known by people who would read this as the voice of Scar in The Lion King. Well, the only other thing I've seen him in is a TV movie based on books by Terry Pratchett. He played the Patrician, which seems like the most obvious casting this side of Tom Waits as the devil in The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus.
The series involve(s) Pope Alexander VI (AKA Alexander Sextus, teehee) and his family. I didn't know a thing about them when I started watching it, but now I've been reading about them to compare the fiction to the fact out of curiosity. Somehow popes are interesting to me. Also, anti-popes. Alexander Sextus, originally Rodrigo Borgia of Spain, the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II (John Paul I was the first albino pope—I'm making an obscure and dumb joke), was a cardinal in 1492. I guess a cardinal was like a senator of the Vatican. He pretty much bought the papacy by bribing most of the other cardinals. He was also the first pope to openly have a family, though at that time a lot of the cardinals had semi-secret offspring. There was also lots of murder going on (though that was of course greatly exaggerated in the series) so that makes for a very interesting story.
Of course, as any American is required to know, 1492 is when Christopher Columbus did that thing he did. There is a short scene (I think I once saw a painting of the actual event) where a captured Native American (but is that what we call the natives of the Caribbean?) is presented to the pope and forced to mutter something Christian. There were several examples of various popey things Alexander VI did sprinkled throughout, and while they didn't have much to do with the main plots, they provided welcome context. I wish they had done that for his son Cesare (pronounced "Jez-array") who became a bishop at a young age and then a cardinal when his father wanted to nullify his dissenters by elevating a bunch of new cardinals. The series wasn't really interested in what exactly Cesare's cardinal duties were; he was only show in the main things. I wanted to know what exactly Cesare did during the day when he wasn't plotting to murder people. Perhaps if they had more than a paltry 9 episodes there would be time for that kind of thing, but I bet there wasn't enough of a budget for that.
I found it a little annoying that they had to reference everyone we might recognize from the Renaissance whom the pope would also be aware of: there was the Columbus thing, mentions of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and even several appearances by Machiavelli. However, I found out later that Machiavelli showing up was quite appropriate, because he did know the Borgias somewhat well and even used Cesare as an example in his famous work The Prince. Something of interest to only me: He was played by Julian Bleach. Bleach spent several years in the "junk opera" Shockheaded Peter, a CD of which my uncle gave to me several years ago, which in turn spurred an interest in The Tiger Lillies, who provided the music for the piece. Later I watched Terry Gilliam's movie The Brothers Grimm and then listened to the DVD commentary, and Gilliam mentioned that he gave Bleach a small part in that movie after having seen him in Shockheaded Peter. From IMDB I glean that this jump-started his screen-acting career, so he has Terry Gilliam to thank for being in stuff, as well as The Tiger Lillies to some degree.
It's interesting, or perhaps boring, that they decided that all the Borgias and Italians would sound like they were from England (I imagine most of the Borgias grew up in Rome so they would have talked like the other Italians) while, for example, French people spoke English with a French accent and Spanish people spoke English with a Spanish accent. I suppose this makes a kind of sense, but I think I'd like it more if they all talked in old Italian with subtitles. I'm sure most people wouldn't want it to be like that, especially the actors and writers. I kind of want to see Apocalyptica... wait, that's not what it's called... oh, it's Apocalypto. Anyway, I'd want to see that if only to be immersed in a language that no one speaks anymore. This does not, however, make me want to see The Passion Of The Christ.
Here's a preview thing so you can get a better idea of what I'm talking about:
Current Mood: apocalyptic
Current Music: Mutemath - Prytania
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December 4th, 2011
09:47 am - my trip to California
For Thanksgiving, as well as my grandmother's 95th birthday, I went to California and visited a bunch of relatives who have or had or could have the same last name as me. I hadn't seen most of them for at least 11 years, and some I hadn't seen before at all. It would be hard to list them all in text, so I made a little tree:
Most of them live in the same general area of California, but the Russells and the girls flew in from New Jersey. There was also Sara or Sarah, a friend of Doug and/or Mary. She was away most of the time so she let us borrow her trailer, which was the biggest trailer I've ever been in; it was more like a house that happened to have wheels. The original plan was for Uncle Russ and his friend to stay there, but his friend canceled so I stayed there instead. We had our own rooms; it was pretty nice.
While planning, it was determined that I would stay on Doug's couch, which was one reason I was only going to stay for two days. Sleeping on a couch in someone's living room is awfully uncomfortable, especially since I was expecting to have some degree of insomnia, but two nights would have been manageable. The night before I was set to leave, they convinced me to stay longer, which was easier now that I had a bed. I ended up being gone almost exactly a week; it would have been a week and an hour had a semi not fallen on the tracks on the return trip (the official rumor was that a trucker fell asleep at the wheel but he survived) which caused us to stop for 2 hours.
Trains are slow. It took about 24 hours to travel the 850 miles from Portland to San Luis Obispo. Google Maps tells me it would take 14 hours to drive there. At least it was cheaper and more comfortable than an airplane, and I didn't get groped, as far as I could tell. I only managed to sleep approximately 4 non-consecutive hours. The train was at capacity—it was one of their busiest days—so a young woman was seated next to me. I don't like sitting next to people I don't know, so I went off to the lounge car and napped a little and played Civlization IV because Steam wouldn't let me play Civilization V because Steam is dumb.
Anyway, once the sun came up I got to see some great views of California's nature so I took my camera out and made some videos. Here is a video of the videos, along with a long song by Phil Ochs which used to be longer but I edited it all up:
When we went to Norm's house for Thanksgiving I asked him if there was a way to connect my computer to his big TV so I could show some of the videos. He had something better: a home theater. It's amazing. Just look at it. I didn't know I was related to people who had such things. We went to his computer room and quickly edited together what you see above (when I got home I added the music and trimmed it a bit) and everyone got together and we watched it, along with some other home videos. He makes a lot of home videos. One involved Doug playing piano at the rest home my grandmother used to live in, while the residents (but not The Residents, I assume) sang along to the lyrics sheets that were passed around; another showed Norm hanging out with polar bears in northern Canada. A few days later I showed my duck video (I wish that had made the view count go up by 10) and he downloaded Super 8 from Netflix for $5. The movie contained pretty much the only swearing I heard on my trip, and most of the swearing came from kids, which may or may not be ironic. The movie showed off the theater's amazing sound system, although it did make the sound effects seem more fake. I was reminded of a line from the They Might Be Giants song Sensurround: "the sound effects came right up through the floor". It felt that way, but when I asked, Norm pointed out the subwoofers that were on the floor, not below it.
Thanksgiving dinner was good. I sat next to my grandmother and Garrett, who is in the Army, which made me feel particularly longhaired. After dinner I became engrossed in a family history book put together by Norm and Doug and my grandmother 6 years ago. I learned a whole lot about my family. Here is a picture that makes the previous two sentences unnecessary. Oh well.
My cousin Russ is a genuine rock musician and he played for us a great version of Sweet Home Alabama and also other songs I can't remember. Later I somewhat sheepishly showed him my Seven Nation Army video, which he seemed impressed by. Then I began to play my Avenged Sevenfold video but other people came into the room, including children, so I put on the one by The Smiths and we laughed at kotra's antics. Plus more of the adult relatives said they were impressed by my playing, which was kind of a surprise. I'm not used to getting such a reaction, though of course family is the easiest audience. In fact they seemed generally impressed by me, which I wasn't expecting at all. I thought they would be a little disappointed that I haven't done much since college, though perhaps that was tempered by the fact that I had just been slightly employed for six months. I guess I'm doing well compared to my father... which doesn't seem right at all, but that seems to be the consensus. Another thing that surprised me was how much better off his three brothers are than him. I've always thought of myself as lower class, but most of my family is middle class. I was also surprised by how well-adjusted and nice everyone was. I'm more familiar with my relatives on my mom's side, who tend to be grumpy.
We went various places, like the beach; here is a video of the beach and here's another and here's another. The next day we climbed to the top of Bishop Peak, which wasn't easy. Doug thought it would take us 45 minutes to get to the top but we were on it for four hours, probably going up for 3 hours and coming down for 1. It's a nice mountain and there were some great views but I got tired of it after a while. I don't really care about mountains anymore. Maybe when George Mallory said he climbed Mt. Everest "because it's there", he really meant "because now it's not so impressive". Well, here's a video I made of the great views from various points of the mountain and you can watch it, yay.
My grandmother is doing very well for her age, which is great because she's great. Mentally everything is fine, but she has no feeling in her feet so she needs help walking. She lives in an assisted care facility with five other nonagenarians. (One of the others was amazed by my long hair. He surmised that I must live in a cold place, which I guess is relatively true.) We took her to the Thanksgiving dinner but otherwise we went there to see her. Most of the time, four generations of us tried to figure out a difficult jigsaw puzzle, which was surprisingly fun. Here is a picture of my grandmother and me.
It was a great trip. I did feel a lot of anxiety but that was mostly when I was alone. When I was around everyone else I was just absorbed into the group. I'm not used to being part of a group, which is actually the way I prefer it because I feel like it's easy to lose something important about yourself when you give yourself up to a group. With my family, though, I didn't feel like I was losing much.
Current Music: Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Do You Love Me? (Part 2)
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