Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
This just popped into my head. Earlier this week, I described my level of computer experience as “somewhere between ‘power user’ and ‘geek’ — in other words, I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to get paid for it.”
It amused me at the time, and I meant to blog it, but I didn’t then. But now I remembered, so I did. Whee. I’m sure you’re all fascinated, just utterly fascinated.
I’m going away again now.
Much as I enjoy the Vogue, it does have one definite downside — there is very little ventilation in the club, so it gets incredibly hot on summer nights. Thankfully, the Vogue has a fairly relaxed dress code, so it’s not at all uncommon for people to lose articles of clothing as the night goes on (so maybe it’s not that much of a downside after all…). When this happens, it’s not at all uncommon to get some odd looks from the “straights” (non-regulars) that are at the club, as in many normal clubs, you’d get kicked out for doffing your shirt midway through the night, so getting the occasional surprised look or getting pointed at is something that I’m fairly used to.
Tonight, I’d taken my shirt off during one of the songs, and once the song was done went outside to get a breath of air. As I walked out, I noticed a couple girls out of the corner of my eye, one of whom was doing a fairly obvious “oh-there-he-is-look-wait-don’t-make-it-obvious” motion to her friend. Being used to this, and rather amused that I’d caught her, I turned around with a grin and told them, “Oh, go ahead and point, it’s okay.”
What I wasn’t expecting was to have the girl laugh, then say, “No, no, wait — you’re from Alaska, right?”
“Um…yeah…”
“You’re DJ Woody, aren’t you? From Gig’s? And that little place up above Chuck-E-Cheese?”
“Holy shit! Yes!”
“I knew it! I told you it was him! We used to go see you spin at Gig’s when we were 14 and 15!”
Just incredible. Shannon and (oh, lord, I hate being brainless…Jen?) had been club kids back in Anchorage when I was working at Gig’s, and then later at the Eclipse. They’d seen me dancing and thought they recognized me, but since I’ve shaved my head since they’d seen me last, they weren’t sure. It wasn’t until I went outside without my shirt and they saw my tattoo that they were fairly sure, and Jen tried to point me out to Shannon. Apparently they’re both fairly recent escapees (Jen’s been here for about five months, Shannon for about one), and are living down in Tacoma.
Too freaking cool. We spent a good amount of time talking outside the club and catching up, I met their friends Kate and (again…Beth?), and then once the club closed, they headed off for breakfast and I came home. They said they should be back at the Vogue at some point, though, so I should get a chance to run into them again. All sorts of cool.
I love it when stuff like this happens.
First off, a confession: I’m a trekkie (trekker? whatever). Have been practically since birth, and it’s all my Dad’s fault. ;) Two years old, sitting on my dad’s lap, watching the original series on television. As soon as the Enterprise zoomed across the screen and Captain Kirk started the famous lines, “Space…where no man has gone before…” I’d be excitedly saying “speesh!” and pointing off into space (which apparently was somewhere behind me and over my left shoulder).
I grew up with Star Trek. I never did get into sewing my own uniform, or donning rubber Vulcan ears or Klingon foreheads, and I’ve only been to one convention, but I’ve got a library of original series technical manuals that I’ve picked up over the years. One of the earlier ones (the Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual) had an alien alphabet printed out, which I dutifully memorized, characters and pronunciation both. Imagine my surprise when I later visited Greece, and discovered that the “alien alphabet” was nothing more than Greek, and I could read every sign around me in perfect Greek. I had no idea what I was saying, of course, but I could read it all, and it’s all thanks to Star Trek.
One summer I was at one of the CTY summer camps that I participated in, and much of the talk and gossip at the time was about this new Star Trek show that was being started. Some “new generation” or something. We were all highly skeptical — after all, we’d all grown up with the Holy Trinity of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and now someone wanted to try to recapture that? Not likely! Our skeptical opinions weren’t helped at all when one of the sunday papers printed a picture of the new crew. That kid from Stand By Me was there (a kid?). The dorky guy from that kid’s “Reading Rainbow” show was wearing a banana clip on his face. The captain…was old. And bald. To top it all off, their uniforms were one-piece jumpsuits, recalling bad memories of the horrid 70’s costuming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture — and they were hot pink! Obviously, the show was doomed from the start.
Needless to say, we were (thankfully) wrong. The kid, admittedly, suffered from some bad writing (but he’s since turned into a pretty damn cool guy). We got used to the banana clip, and it certainly helped that that “dorky guy” was also a well-respected actor in his own right. As far as old, bald captains go — if I can be half as cool (and sexy) as Patrick Stewart when I’m his age, I’ll be doing well! And, thankfully, those hot pink uniforms turned out to be nothing more than bad color in the newspaper.
Since then, while I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation has been my favorite Star Trek incarnation (at least, as far as the TV incarnations go — the Next Gen movies rarely approached the cinematic quality of either Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, imho).
However, towards the end of Next Gen’s run, I stopped watching TV. Less and less of what I saw on television appealed to me, and commercials were getting more and more annoying, so I just stopped. With three exceptions (the Y2K turnover, the 2000 presidential debates, and the first couple months of Enterprise), I’ve not seen any more television that what I may have wandered into while at friend’s houses. Because of this, I missed the last couple seasons of Next Gen, and have caught no more than the occasional episode of Deep Space Nine or Voyager. I watched the first few weeks of Enterprise, which seemed passable at the time, but then Paramount started releasing DVD sets of Next Gen, and I revised my opinion of Enterprise.
So throughout 2002, I revisited Captain Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D as each successive DVD set was released. It was a lot of fun — I hadn’t seen many of the earlier episodes in years (some of them probably not since they were originally broadcast), and many of the later episodes I hadn’t seen at all. Once that was done with, though, I faced a dilemma. I knew that I enjoyed the Next Generation series enough to buy it all, but Deep Space Nine was an unknown. I’d caught a few of the episodes from time to time, and generally enjoyed what I’d seen, but I didn’t have enough experience to really make a judgment. Fan opinion on DS9 always seemed to be somewhat divided, too, with fairly equal camps lauding it and decrying it.
However, as 2002 approached and I started reading more about DS9 as the DVD release came closer, I started reading more and more people recommending it. Eventually, I decided that I’d at least pick up the first season to see what I thought of it. After all, if it bored me, I wasn’t out too much money, and I’d know not to pick up the rest.
The blood of a trekkie runs deep and true, it seems.
As it turns out, DS9 has impressed me far more than I was expecting. The series, quite simply, kicks ass. A lot of potentially dangerous decisions were made when putting the show together (not least of which was setting it on a space station, rather than a ship), but they ended up working out incredibly well. They were able to create long-lasting story lines that run not just from show to show, but from season to season, political maneuvering and machinations galore, battle scenes that have had me wide-eyed with surprise, and many other touches that have made my introduction to DS9 incredibly enjoyable.
Today, I brought home the DVD set of season four of DS9, and just finished watching the season opening episode, “The Way of the Warrior“. Wow. There’s definitely a jaw-dropping aspect to watching a fleet of thirty-some Klingon ships, from the now familiar Bird of Prey to newer battleship designs — even a few of the old standard D7 class (yes, I’m a geek, I didn’t need to look at that up) — decloaking around the station. Too freaking cool.
The more I watch of this show, the more I like it. The long lasting story arcs have been handled incredibly well so far, and after reading bits and pieces here and there about the Dominion War for years, it’s a lot of fun finally being able to see it unfold in front of me, without knowing what’s going to come up next, or which directions the various players are going to take. The character arcs have been just as strong as the story arcs, too, and Garak (the Cardassian tailor) is quickly becoming my favorite character on the show. His questionable standing and constant banter with Dr. Bashir (“But which of the stories you told us were true?” “Oh, my good doctor, they’re all true!” “Even the lies?” “Especially the lies.”) are wonderful.
At this rate, DS9 may just end up supplanting Next Gen as my favorite Star Trek series.
(Next year, of course, comes the next question. Once DS9’s DVD run is complete, Voyager will start to hit the shelves. I’ve heard far more people decry Voyager as being the downfall of the Star Trek franchise than any other previous Trek creation [except possibly Star Trek V: The Final Frontier]. So, do I cross my fingers and give the first season a shot? I’ve still got about five months to decide, though, and until then, I’ve got just under four more seasons of DS9 to work my way through.)
I just got home from work to find a note taped to the front of my apartment building letting the tenants know that unless our leasing agency pays our water bill in the next thirty days, water will be shut off.
This just happened three months ago. Admittedly, the water was not shut off in that instance, but getting the same notice again doesn’t exactly do much to instill confidence in me.
Needless to say, if anyone happens to be apartment hunting in the lower First Hill/Downtown Seattle area, I can wholeheartedly recommend avoiding the Park Seneca (recently renamed Alfaretta) Apartments, and I’d be wary of any building controlled by Kauri Investments.
Filter Pad’s Ouyay Eelin’fay Eemay? post reminded me of a story from years ago.
Just after I graduated High School, I went on a trip with the Bartlett High School German Club to Germany for two months — one month living with a host family and going to school, and one month backpacking all over the country. While we were there, my friend Stiffy and I, being teenage boys, really wanted to be able to talk about girls, and point out choice bits of eye candy when we could. Unfortunately, at first we weren’t sure how. Our German was passable, but not fluent, and everyone around us spoke German also. English wouldn’t work either, as Europeans tend to start learning English in about third grade.
The solution? Pig Latin.
Even after we explained the concept to our German friends, they never could quite wrap their heads around it. Meanwhile, Stiffy and I kept using it, even for normal conversations so we could keep in practice. Eventually, we got to the point where we could speak Pig Latin not quite as fast as we could speak English, but certainly faster than we could speak German.
One night late in the trip, we were babbling in our room at the youth hostel we were at before we passed out, practicing our Pig Latin. Suddenly, one of the other guys in the room broke in to ask us what we were talking about. Turns out that though he could translate the Pig Latin okay, we still weren’t making any sense — our brains, faced with a mishmash of English, German, and Pig Latin, had started to play games with us. Without even realizing that we’d been doing it, we had been speaking Pig Latin, only using the German word order for our sentences. Even our friends couldn’t keep up with our conversations anymore, because in addition to having to translate from Pig Latin to English, they also had to re-order the words to fit English grammar, and by that time, Stiffy and I had moved on to some other subject.
It constantly amazes me what the human brain can do when you’re not paying much attention to it.
Evennay ownay, it’sway eallyray easyway orfay emay otay eakspay Igpay Atinlay ithoutway avinghay otay inkthay aboutway itway uchmay atway allway. Ypingtay itway isway away ittlelay oremay ifficutlday, utbay eakingspay itway? Easyway asway iepay.
mother do you think thy child is sick?
why are my walls built so very thick?
i hide myself so i can feel no pain
but you crack my walls again and again
bringing emotions, people who care
when all i can do is sit and stare
while the feelings i try so hard to suppress
escape, exerting so much stress
that the walls explode, and i feel the pain
of love, and i build my walls again
This drivel was written sometime in high school, while I was bored in my typing class, and it was (obviously) heavily inspired by Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”.
Today’s bit of nostalgiac tripe has been brought to you courtesy of this comment of Mark’s on his Apple //e post.
You may have noticed that I’ve put a surprising number of posts up for this early in the day. That’s simply because I’ve spent the past three hours watching Windows XP chew through security updates, software patches, and other sundry changes to the OS. Running a web browser was about as intense an activity as I wanted to tax the machine with during that process.
Now, three hours later I can finally get to work doing what they pay me for — but that’s only because I got sick of watching a stalled progress bar, force-quit the Windows Update program, and told it to sod off. My security updates were done anyway, it was just chewing on some less critical patches, so I’m not too worried.
Frustrated, and quite willing to toss the computer out a window, if only I had one.
But not worried.
Dori Smith mentioned today that her son Sean just returned from a session of CTY. CTY is a program for Jr. High “…students whose SAT I scores place them in the top one-half of one percent of their age mates.” I was accepted when I was in 7^th^ grade after taking the SAT, through the recommendation of my PACT (Program for the Academically and Creatively Talented) teacher, and went to summer CTY sessions for three years running.
The first year Royce and I both went to a session in Claremont, California (where the picture attached to this post was taken — thanks go to Royce for sending that particular little bit of embarassing history my way — I actually remember that shirt, too, those are little mother-of-pearl snaps instead of buttons…ugh…), and the following two years I went to sessions somewhere in Pennsylvania. They were a lot of fun, too. The CTY sessions are a few weeks long each, and are combinations of summer camp and summer school (summer camp for geeks, I guess). The first year I took Spanish (which I remember precisely nothing of), and the next two years were writing classes.
The best thing those summer sessions did for me, though, was to get me into an environment where I wasn’t ridiculed because I was smarter than your average bear. All of a sudden, I wasn’t the oddball — instead, I was surrounded by other people who had some of the same interests I did, who laughed at the same jokes I did, who knew as much Star Trek as I did (and were equally apprehensive about this new “Next Generation” of Star Trek that was being talked about — a blind pilot? A kid on the bridge? And a bald captain? Oh, come on!?!). Some of them even probably shared my impeccable fashion sense! And most importantly, they allowed me to start the long, long process of coming into my own, and discovering that I had a personality of my own. It was many years afterwards before I was fully able to realize that potential, but had it not been for the open and accepting atmosphere of the CTY program and the possibilities that it opened up to me, I may never have broken out of my shell at all.
It’s a great program, and if you ever have a child who has the chance to participate, it’s a wonderful experience that they really shouldn’t have to miss out on.
Huh. I may not be gay, but I think that in a sense, I just “came out.” Interesting.
Today as Prairie and I were wandering up Broadway to return a couple movies I’d rented (last week — I owe another firstborn child now), we noticed that the marquee for the Broadway Performance Hall at Seattle Central Community College was advertising the stage production of Footloose, the Musical. We figured that that’d be fun, and were both curious about just how the movie had been translated to stage, but didn’t think much more of it.
A little further down the street, however, we were stopped by a gentleman who asked us if we liked musical theatre. We allowed that we did, and he asked if we’d be interested in free tickets to the afternoon matinee of Footloose — which started in about twenty minutes. It turns out that the production was being put on by Broadway Bound, a local children’s theatre organization for children 5-18. I was a little hesitant at first (I’d been feeling a little under the weather this weekend), but the guy was a good sell (as any good parent of one of the performers should be!), and we decided that it’d be a fun way to spend the afternoon.
As it turns out, the show was a blast. These kids did an excellent job with the show, and the audience was really into it, cheering and clapping along with more than a few of the numbers. Having been involved with theatre and music (and sometimes both) for many years as a kid, I could really appreciate the work that went into the show. Very impressive, all the way around, especially Brendan Griffin as Willard (the country hick that Ren teaches to dance in the movie) and Ryah Nixon as Rusty (Willard’s love interest, and the best friend of Ariel, the female lead). All of the cast did quite well, but these two were the standouts, in my opinion.
The costuming was a real treat, too. As the story itself isn’t really tied to any one time, I wasn’t sure if they’d keep the 80’s feel of the original movie, but they did indeed. From off-the-shoulder sweaters and legwarmers to 80’s prom dresses that some thrift store must have been thrilled to finally sell, to the metallic shirt and skinny tie that Ren first shows up in, the outfits fit right in with the original mid-80’s setting of the movie.
What was really fascinating for me was just seeing how the story of the film was translated into a stage show. Overall it ended up working out really well — all the hit songs from the soundtrack of the film were incorporated into the show itself as musical numbers, most of them requiring just a little bit of lyrical re-wording in order to ensure that they moved the story along. The second half of the show does drag a little bit — all of the slow, introspective, “what am I doing?” numbers end up there, and the pacing suffers a bit for it — but when the big high-energy numbers kick in, they bring the house down.
Highlights for me included “Somebody’s Eyes”, which went from a song about a jealous ex-girlfriend to the paranoia of an entire town watching for someone to screw up; “Holding Out For a Hero”, as Ariel, Rusty, and their two girlfriends daydream about their perfect men; and what was probably the biggest showstopper, “Let’s Hear it For the Boy”, where the cast teaches Willard how to dance at a country dance club just out of town.
All in all, a great show, and many kudos to all the cast and crew — it was an entirely unexpected way to spend the afternoon, but both Prairie and I had an absolute blast.