I've spent most of january and february in a car going somewhere very fast. Sometimes it was my own car, some times not. The destination was less important than the trip most of the time. I've spent many nights finding small, windy mountain roads to drive on.. we've had some snippets of good weather recently, where the air is clear and the stars are shining, and I've tried to use them to the fullest. Zooming along Skyline Drive late at night when rational people are in bed, windows open, sunroof down, dodging deer and potholes, frightening small furry creatures.. heaven. I am searching for a wonderful view of the bay that I know exists somewhere along that road.. I have been to the place twice with (two different) ex-girlfriends and have a pretty good idea of what the place looks like, but I wasn't driving and now I can't remember where it was. So I guess I'm doomed to wander up and down that road until I discover the shoulder that looked so pretty.

Around the beginning of the month we rented a van and went up to Berkeley to see the Stomp show. Actually, the van rental was for something else, but it turned out to be convenient. Stomp is an incredible show, but hard to describe. It's 8 people doing percussion, on brooms, boxes, sticks, jars, hubcaps, hands, even on kitchen sinks. It comes pretty close to Taiko drumming in the complexity of the rhythm and the interactions of the performers.. Taiko seems improvised, but did you know that most of it is actually written down? There are distinct songs, traditional Taiko songs, that they must have some kind of mystic notation to record. Wacky.

The van was really rented for the Game that we played the following day. For those of you who don't know what the Game is, I'l leave it a secret (part of the mystique is that few people are familiar with them). For those who do, let me just say that this one could have been better. It rained the entire weekend, which soured most hopes of enjoying even the most cleverly designed clue. Not that there were many cleverly designed clues. Game Control was pretty clue-less and did a bad job of estimating how much time was necessary for everything, and a number of clues were just badly set up to begin with. I've got a picture of Phil sacrificing his lungs for the team's sake, as he learned to smoke a cigar, to provide the ash to bring out the hidden writing on an index card we had received.. look for the scanned version here.

Then there was my roadtrip to LA last weekend. I have been planning a trip there for about a year now, ever since I got a free voucher for getting bumped off a Reno Air flight last March. Since Reno Air only seems to fly to Las Vegas (where I got bumped), and Seattle (which is even colder than here), and LA, I had to go to LA. But I kept forgetting that I was planning this trip, and consequently I didn't put the voucher in as safe a place as I should have, and when I remembered on the 11th that I was planning to fly to LA for the long weekend on the 16th, I couldn't find the thing. Still can't, and it expires in a couple weeks. So then I realized that I could do a road trip, but first I needed a better car stereo. Oh, and a cellphone. It was an expensive week. But I've been meaning to get a decent stereo ever since I got the car, and just kept putting it off. So I got my CD player installed wednesday night, just had to try it out so I drove to Half Moon Bay to have dinner at the McDonald's there (it turns out that Sunnyvale to Half Moon Bay and back is almost exactly 2 CDs long). Then Friday I got a nice nokia cellphone during lunch (is this another "feature" of the bay area? That I could walk from Sweet Tomatoes [a Fresh-Choice-like salad buffet for those who don't know it] into NCA and walk out 20 minutes later with a fully functional cellular phone?), and left work at 6 to drive south. I stayed with my friend Matt who is finishing up film school, and will probably be the next James Cameron. Since he was out all weekend shooting a 12-minute $70,000 film (his final project.. and I thought that my hobbies were expensive..), I spent most of it with his roommate Andrew who, like about 50% of my friends from school, is VP of a small company doing Web page design. Got to see my ex-girlfriend Suzy (and her brother) too, as well as the woman who put on the single most beautiful theatrical production I've ever seen in my life (Into The Woods, as done by Ram's Head 1991), my pal Monica (seen here with her beau). She is actually making a living in the theater business, a rare feat. I also meant to go rollerblading on the Santa Monica beach, but it rained too much, so I had to content myself with a late-night walk from Matt's place to the beach, which turned out to be about 3 miles each way. But they were 3 miles of movie studios and celebrity houses. Well, movie studios at least. So mostly the weekend consisted of driving around and playing with the phone.
I have a cellphone now: does that make me a yuppie?

And then this weekend will be spent in New Mexico at a place called Ghost Ranch.. my parents are really fond of it, but I'm starting to wonder if it's really a front for some kind of cult. If I get back next week and start telling everybody how great it was and that they all simply must go there.. well, do a Yahoo search for "deprogramming services" for me, would you?

Musical discoveries of the month:

• No Doubt: energetic and harsh. I love it.
• Jill Sobule: really really biting. And a really clean recording: sounds incredible under a starry sky with the scent of blue-shifted pine trees in the background..
• For Squirrels: Their song Mighty K.C. has the line "..in the grace of God go I..", which just works for me somehow. Not sure why.

Literary enjoyments:

• The Road To Wellsville, by T. Coraghessan Boyle, lent to me by Alyssa, who will be getting it back really soon, I promise.

• Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion, also borrowed from Alyssa. An interesting biography of Douglas Adams and the whole HHGTTG phenomema, at least the whole of it up to around 1988. It is written by Neil Gaiman, the author of the Sandman comic series. Interesting factoid that I keep forgetting so I'll record it here where everyone can get to it: according to Douglas Adams himself, in a sort of HHGTTG FAQ:
  • Q: What was the Dire Straits song from 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish'?
  • A: The Dire Straits song is Tunnel of Love and it's on the Making Movies album.
  Which kind of bothers me, because I think Romeo and Juliet, the song right after that one on the same album, is much more heart-wrenching. But who am I to argue with the man himself?

• Lost in the Funhouse, by John Barth. I actually have known this one for a while, having done a paper on it in high school. But it came up in conversation last weekend so I'm rereading it. Barth is a great trickster of language, sneaking a lot into just a few well-chosen words. There is a lovely piece of work called Menelaiad, which I'm holding off from actually reading because I do not yet have the necessary background. It is a story that, towards the middle, becomes layered 8 levels deep in nested quotations (somebody reciting a story in which someone was talking about someone else saying something about someone else quoting etc etc), and the very middle sentence (according to Andy, Alyssa's boyfriend, a very literate man who can also perform sound tricks like no other, creating words out of a bad tape-recording of the voice-actor grunting.. one of these days he'll find out how to do away with the voice actor entirely and his life will become much easier), is as follows:
  "`"`"`"   "'"'"'"

  Which is to say, a person quoting a person quoting a person quoting a person quoting a person quoting a person quoting a person who is taking a rather dramatic pause in their speech. He also has assorted levels of the nested storytelling exclaiming "What?!?" in response to some element several layers deeper, making the whole thing frighteningly non-linear and almost requiring a stage performance to sort out who is talking and when. The reason that I'm holding off on reading it properly is because it follows the Iliad and the Odyssey, and since I haven't read them since Frosh culture (and barely read them even then), I'm told myself that I'm going to re-read those first so that at least I'll catch the allusions.

• The 1995 edition of Form 1040, by the Internal Revenue Service. Not the most exciting of tomes, but strongly recommended nevertheless, especially to those unlucky enough to have had an income this year. Enjoy such epic sentences and memorable mono-entendres as:
  • You will not owe the penalty if your 1994 tax return was for a tax year of 12 full months AND either of the following applies:
    1. You had no tax liability for 1994 and you were a U.S. citizen or resident for all of 1994, or
    2. The total of lines 55, 56, and 59 on your 1995 return is at least as much as your 1994 tax liability. Your estimated tax payments for 1995 must have been made on time and for the required amount.
    
    and...

  • The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: Learning about the law or the form, 3 min.; Preparing the form, 8 min.; and Copying, assembling, and sending the form to the IRS, 10 min.
    If you have comments concerning the accuracy of this time estimate or suggestions for making this form simpler, we would be happy to hear from you. See the instructions for the tax return with which this form is filed.

  I'm for the flat tax. How about you?