The list of presents: a USB LED light from my older brother.
That's it.
I don't mind, though. It's all about spending time with loved ones, anyway! (Or at least it really ought to be.) And between fixing HD OTA reception for my parents, sharing soup dumplings (小籠包 in centerspeak) with my brother, and helping fix up a big and totally untraditional Christmas dinner for my family, I can't say I feel the need for presents anyway.
While half the city was freezing outside at Boxing Day sales, my little brother and I were freezing outside on the way around Buntzen Lake again.
one of the interesting side effects of living in a city with a strong food culture is that it makes me eat less when i'm in a location where food isn't as important because food that pretends to be good just isn't as appetizing.
this doesn't diminish the value of flat-out *bad* food. I can eat bad food that I know is bad food with less issue than bad food pretending to be good food.
anyway. a more real update tomorrow maybe; about to get on a plane and then crash since I was at the casino last night/this morning until roughly 06:00.
about a month ago, i hadn't planned on coming back to philly, but i opted to do it this year because my brother was coming back to philly also. the last time that my immediately family were all housed in one room in the PA area was probably 1995.
last year over the holidays, i ended up getting into a discussion with eric and jed during a drive home about change in people's lives. I brought it up because when i was hanging out with all of those people at liz's and kevin's, it didn't seem like a whole lot had changed in their personalities since the 15 years that i had last seen them, and that was very counterintuitive for me given how much i had known that i had changed a great deal. So i asked very directly what had changed and what it brought out was that although both of them had gone through some very significant life changes, some of the fundamental personality and how they portray them on the surface hasn't changed that much.
that conversation came back to me during this trip as it regards my family because when i think about the individual experiences that we had, it didn't seem like anything had changed at all. My dad is still very quiet, my mom is still very talkative and somewhat fussy, my brother and i talked and shared a lot about interesting video games or interesting Things in general. Same old same old, as if no time had gone by.
But beneath the surface of it all, i think a lot *has* changed for all of us as individuals and as a family, and it's pretty... neat? it's hard to describe because i think our family dynamic is pretty unique. given how little we've seen each other and how little we talk to each other about anything Important, you wouldn't think that we're a close family, but if you go beneath the surface, i think we are. I care pretty deeply about my family and i'm certain that the same is true all around.
i think a lot of it has to do with acceptance, something that i give my parents a lot of credit for. Forget the fact that my parents didn't like it when i had said i wanted to go into music or are very skeptical about poker and let me find my own path anyway; they went above and beyond expectation by not batting an eye when my brother came out when i was in high school, and just a few days ago knowing that he is in a poly relationship with three (and soon to be four) guys, they said 'why don't you bring them around next christmas?'. That's the sort of parents they are and the sort of family that we are.
the sentimental side of me thus places a special sort of significance to us all being here this past week even though it didn't seem like anything in particular happened, especially since it's questionable whether or not something like this will happen again in the next couple of years. and resultingly, as i was uploading pictures of my trip to philly so far onto fb, one particular picture became my clear favorite, one that captures that sort of sentimentality in my mind and something that i'll always associate with the odd but close relationship that i feel we all have.
1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before? -i visited hawaii, making my "set foot in x states" count to 49. just alaska to go. -i visited the LA area for the first time, which also thus includes playing DJ Max Techina and jubeat ripples for the first time. -i placed in the final table of two WSOP satellite events. -my family got together for christmas for the first time in probably over 16 years. -i visited hannah for the first time since she got married. this hasn't actually happened yet, but will happen on wednesday. -mardi gras and jazz fest. -started an electronica/rock band.
2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year? i don't believe in new year's resolutions, so no because i didn't have any to keep and no because even if i made any, it wouldn't be 'more'.
3. How will you be spending New Year's Eve? haven't planned that far ahead yet.
4. Did anyone close to you die? not someone particularly close, but one of my former students died fairly recently, and it still fucks me up a little, especially since every now and again facebook tries to tell me to reconnect with him.
5. What countries did you visit? nothing outside of the US.
6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009? this is too complex of a question to answer in a meme.
7. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? i don't really associate dates with big events, so this question is oddly unanswerable because of the way that it's worded. recently i went back through my lj and discovered a date that i had forgotten, so that gives it more emphasis than it had before, so that may etch itself into my head more successfully.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? i feel pretty proud that i placed in two final tables of the WSOP satellite event here. i also completed my first year at Tulane, which felt like a significant achievement.
9. What was your biggest failure? november was a horrible poker month - that sort of counts.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? my wrist was all pissed off from carrying around heavy luggage, i had to get a brace for a little while.
11. What was the best thing you bought? my 24-hour pocket watch.
12. Where did most of your money go? most of my money was shuffled around the poker table, but i'm still in the black, so i'm not sure if that counts as money "going" anywhere. i made some big purchases towards the band, and i spent a lot of money on planes and hotels for the two weddings i went to this year.
13. What song will always remind you of 2009? Pinball Wizard.
14. What do you wish you'd done more of? 15. What do you wish you'd done less of? these two questions fall into a philosophical debate about regrets and wishing &c. there are certainly things that i would have liked to go differently and things that i could have done to make either a small or large path be different than it currently is, but reflection of that is only useful in the context of how it helps me progress ahead as opposed to get caught up in the past. most of what i wish are things that were out of my control in any case.
16. What was your favorite TV program? Qi
17. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? it's rare that i hate anyone; there's still only two people on that particular shit list.
18. What was the best book you read? I discovered the Dresden Files over this past year; i had read one or two of them before, but i read about nine or ten of them this past year and am almost caught up.
19. What was your greatest musical discovery? i didn't really discover any new artists this past year. The newest albums by Clark are on constant rotation, as is Plaid's soundtrack to "Heaven's Door".
20. What was your favorite film of this year? Green Lantern: First Flight
21. What did you do on your birthday? i was in ohio for WGI Finals. Didn't really do anything other than watch drumlines, get a little drunk in the after party.
22. What kept you sane? the knowledge that i have many friends who care about me.
23. Who did you miss? i miss everyone all of the time and none of the time. it's the nature of who i am and the reltaionships i have with people.
24. Who was the best new person you met? it's hard to quantify people experiences. It's always a pleasure to meet anyone new.
25. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009: it's similar to taren's: perserverence is really the key to getting anywhere.
26. What things are you looking forward to in 2010? i take life as it comes. no matter what bad shit or what good shit happens in my life, life is always wonderful. to think as such is a personal choice, and one that i wouldn't change for anything.
it will be neat to be the one that marries mark and amanda. i'm very much looking forward to that.
so when you generate a game in prolific, the 'name' of the game defaults as a random word from the SOWPODS dictionary. you can customize the name of the game too if you like.
i had this strange idea to create a random set of games with titles that aren't in SOWPODS but seem like they could be as a means of throwing off people and adding false positives to their word list. words like "bolded" or maybe other random things from RALPHPODS.
which just goes to show how strangely my brain can work sometimes because i don't want to do that in a malicious way. i just think it would be funny.
“Hi ___ Jerald, bore boring voice post number one. I'll make it short. I'm just leaving Reding. I actually end up leaving around 9:15 which is about 15 minutes late but I guess not previously late. They were sunny when I left but just like had 84. It's pretty much clouded over and except for a little tiny bit ___ Creek just to know over Cast ever since. I'm guessing that it's probably gonna continue and so until then end of the day. See I guess 419mi have been sense(?) 70mi now at 6 hours but I bet you which ever side”
if i was in a different sort of space, i'd start putting together charts for a majority of tracks off of drukqs. i already have either feet or finger charts for cock/ver10, vordhosbn, onafjirajewha switch, and now this.
Weekend plans! I suspect most everyone who cares knows, but just in case...
I'm heading up to BC to spend the holidays with my folks. I leave here on Saturday (ideally before 9am, but we'll see if I even am awake at that point) and plan to crash in Portland for the night. c_wraith generously volunteered sleeplessone's place for a meetup, so if you don't already know, and want to wander out to, say, throw pies at me or something, there you go.
I intend to proceed up to Seattle on Sunday afternoon. For now, I've proposed meeting up at Acme Bowl late afternoon to early evening, less so for what it's got and more so because I know where it is and it's kind of between Seattle and Tacoma. This is a bit of a question mark; I realize some people (firesplace comes to mind) may not want to wander down, so I'm open to doing something totally different, or stopping in multiple places. But then I realize most people probably have work during the week. (I don't have much of a time limit, myself; I want to be at my parents' place by Tuesday afternoon, but that's it.)
I'll probably blow right through both places and stop in Corvallis on the way home.
So, besides the people who responded on Facebook: is anyone else interested in meeting up?
for a very long time i sported a half-and-half cut where the right side of my hair was longer than the left side. There are a lot of psychological reasons for this which are tangental to this post, but when edrake cut my hair this past time, i opted not to do the half-and-half cut, instead going for an even cut that was somewhat close to my chin line.
since then my hair has grown out and is now long enough to put back into a small ponytail, and for some reason, even though the ponytail will stay intact, some of my hair will fall out, but only on the right side, which ends up putting out a pseudo half-and-half look to it. It looks odd to me because it's been a while since i've had a look like that, and maybe it's nostalgia, but i really like it.
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Livejournal just rolled out a major release that has everything to do with data reporting and trending, and it's not as strong as youtube's Insight feature, it's still pretty fucking cool. It does make anonymous snooping of other people's LJ's more difficult unless you decide to change your privacy settings altogether, but i don't care if someone knows that i'm reading their journal or vice versa, so it's all good.
Lots of crap to do before i leave for PA. Maybe i'll go to sleep early and get up early for it.
I basically slept in shifts today. I woke up fairly early so I could ready myself for an early lunch with my mom, and as a result, I basically just slept for another four hours after that lunch. As a result, I wasn't ready to go to sleep until, well, now.
So around midnight, I'm on Facebook, and I notice that an old friend from middle school is back in town for winter break (he goes to college in Austin, TX.) He and I were just bitching about insomnia a few weeks ago, so I made a joke post to his wall that was something like "Hey, you want to come over and not sleep with me? It'll be just like middle school all over again!" (We talk to each other that way.)
He actually took me up on the offer! XD So we got to catch up, play a 2 AM game of Catan with Tony, and go to Denny's. Pretty random - and we're probably doing it again at least once before he goes back to Texas (around New Years.)
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