BURNED! By the SUN!

I fried in the hot Portland sun for flügtag—but you should have seen the other guys.

The trip north took a small eternity, mostly because I had to run a few thousand errands while on the way. One of those errands saw me to Target in Albany, where Tammy (formerly of the OSU honors college) ran me down in the parking lot to say ‘hi.’ As a result I got to meet Tammy’s daughter, Emily, for the first time—she had these remarkably clear, beautiful blue eyes. Amazing. Also amazing was that Emily didn’t react to me the way most babies do—that is, she didn’t stare intently at me, and then tilt her head to one side as if to try and figure out what’s wrong with me. (I’m half-Japanese, and my town is overwhelmingly caucasian… so I really don’t look like most other people that babies see, and they seem to key in on that. At least, that’s my best guess as to what goes on in their heads.)

After this meeting, I got on my way again… and discovered that what Shawn, the guy behind the counter at 7-Eleven, said was true: everybody in the world (except Shawn) was heading out of town for the weekend. I-5 was quite busy every time I was on it. I hate traffic.

Arrived at Andy’s, and dug into some GameCube F-Zero with him, Kevin, and Joel. It seems the game starts dropping detail as more players start racing at the same time, and some of the levels suffered horribly for it—one, in particular, only drew upcoming obstacles an instant before you would run into them. It was courtesy of this poor game performance that Andy could declare that I got clown-blocked by running into a clown divider head-on and getting stopped cold.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate clowns?

Anyhoo, F-Zero soon devolved into Soul Calibur II, where my knowledge of how to battle using the GameCube controller gave me many a decisive victory. This was followed up by a preview of the first two episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Looks to be a good show, as many others have said before me. I even found the tachikoma to be endearing, in a way that Jar-Jar Binks never was.

On Saturday Andy and I visited Powell’s (I picked up more cheap Steven King books, per tradition) and then met up with Julie (Andy’s friend) to hit flügtag. [Since it’s late, and I need to get up early for work tomorrow, I’ll leave the details of flügtag to another post.] I then drove home, sporting a brand-new combination of farmer’s tan and sunburn.

Seems that Craig broke his femur (!!!) a few weeks ago, and so is now in Corvallis convalescing (I love that word). Yesterday evening Brian and Craig came over, and partook of The Wizard and more Soul Calibur II. Brian was mildly interested in the movie, as I enjoy quoting it (or adulterated-quoting-it, as in the case of “I love the glove; it’s so bad”) at inappropriate times. I was personally taken aback at how Corey could confuse games in a movie that amounted to a giant ad for Nintendo:

“It’s like the Adventures of Link. He has to find Zelda, you have to find a house. Same difference!”

Except that everybody knows that in the Adventures of Link, Zelda is sleeping in the castle you start at. The point of that game is to wake her up, not find her. gasp! This was redeemed, as is every other crime committed by the movie, by the scene where two adults took to ramming each others’ cars repeatedly, while an old man (the personification of the audience, we later determined) silently drank a beer on his porch. As for Soul Calibur II—Brian and Craig were both much more fierce competition than I had experienced Friday. We ended up playing far too late into the night.

So I once again end this weekend far more tired* and injured (in terms of my integumentary system**) than I began it. I’m also supposed to start working in the mornings tomorrow. Yay!

[*Yes, I titled this entry after I wrote it, and it’ll be the last thing I do before I go to sleep. I promise.]

[**Trivia: the integumentary system is the largest organ in the body. I’ve always thought that this is something of a cop-out; I mean, who cares about skin? Some organ—it just delineates us from not-us. And sweats.]

 

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