not falling down

I used to walk around London and marvel at the Evening Standard posters at every newsstand, which demonstrated headlines from a more pure and purposeful dimension. They all seemed to be of the form “BUZZWORD BUZZWORD EXCITINGVERBS BUZZWORD” and I commented repeatedly that you could rearrange said buzzwords in almost any order and get an equally plausible (and, probably, accurate) sentence.

Now Holly, who is much more committed about this kind of thing than I am, has created an Evening Standard Dada Generator or whatever they’re called these days. Except it’s not really Dada–as predicted, they mostly make sense, or at least interesting nonsense. No more coming up with original story ideas for me!

I read the arrival time on my ticket as the departure time. That is what I did. That is the stupidest and most expensive mistake I have ever made.

My housemates kindly refused to let me heave all my luggage to Heathrow myself, and so we set out together with a bag apiece at a little after 10 am. We took the express and I was at the check-in counter by 11:15, smirking at the former self who had worried about transportation time and long lines. There was no line! There was only a brusque man explaining that my flight was not at 1:00, it had been at 10:30.

I explained that I had still been on the first of several public transportation routes at 10:30.

The brusque man directed me to the ticketing counter.

I got on standby for the next flight for 200 bucks, and I did end up on it, and my seat was actually one of the best on the plane. I completely missed the last plane to Louisville from O’Hare, of course, but got on a different standby flight to Lexington and Saint Maria drove out to those hinterlands in the middle of the night to pick me up.

It should be noted that my seat on the Lexington flight was also impossibly good. Here’s what I have learned about American Airlines: reserve a seat and get firmly rogered, or get on standby for infinite leg room and an unobstructed window view. I’m never flying on a reserved ticket again! Wait, no, I said “on a reserved ticket” when I meant “anywhere.”

My original mistake almost ended up much more costly than I anticipated. The somewhat hilarious coda is that, during my panicky evening in O’Hare, I had to make a number of pay phone calls to David Flora and Maria, trying to figure out whether I would have to stay overnight in Chicago in order to get a morning flight to Louisville. I had forgotten that trying to call a nonlocal number (like, say, any cell phone ever) from a pay phone requires more quarters than I could have held in my cupped hands, so I had to charge all these to my credit card. This meant swiping the card directly on the phone, punching in the number on the keypad, and reading it aloud to the operator before I could connect.

Apparently someone wandered by and listened to me obligingly reading out the number, expiration date, CV2, et cetera, and proceeded to charge an amount greater than my entire credit limit to the card. Capital One actually noticed and denied it; their overenthusiastic fraud department often made things inconvenient in London, but my attitude toward them is much warmer now. I’ll miss my old card number, though, which I’ve had memorized for almost ten years. Farewell, 5291071505966037! May you serve Internet in poor decision-making as well as you did me.

There is a subtext to this story: I had three friends in London to help take my luggage all the way to Heathrow, buy me yogurt and let me send emergency emails from their phones. Those emails went to more friends, one of whom was willing to put me up in Chicago, another of whom was willing to drive to tiny airports late at night just so I could get home when I wanted. I traveled across seven time zones and I had people offering me help at every step. Who cares how much ticket changes or credit card scammers might cost me? I’m rich.

Fourteen hours ago I was on top of an Alp. Three hours ago I was getting lengthily hassled by Immigration about my months-long residence in the United Kingdom with no visible means of support. Eventually they decided they couldn’t really deport me and grumpily let me back in, but not without permanently detaining–get ready for it–my London library card. That is the pettiest thing I can imagine! I am going to write a book about petty people just so I can use that as an epitome!

But the hassling and bag search and back rooms and subsequent two-hour night bus ride don’t really take away from the experience of looking down on Innsbruck from four miles up (a good quarter of which we hiked) with a really good song on my headphones, learning the secret of Hafelekar summit. The secret is this: it’s fucking covered in poop and bugs. I guess the mountain goats and snow rabbits just love to use the lookout point as their special private time space, but man. They grow the flies big on Hafelekar summit.

My interaction with the world has always been, and remains, mostly text-based; maybe this is why not being able to read holds a particular terror for me. Seeing the shapes of a familiar alphabet in configurations I can’t parse is a constant reinforcement. That would explain why I’ve handled London better than I did Rio, and why (cognitocultural dissonance ahead) I am now, in Innsbruck, missing London.

I like Battersea, man! I like the little library and the big park and fresh bread every day for lunch. I like living too far away from the bookstore or the electronics shop to spend money easily. I like my housemates most of all, and I’ve only got forty days left there, and it will be very hard to leave.

Aha, Kevan points out that all the Shoot London photos are up, better illustrating the original-groupthink phenomenon Holly articulated and I repeated. It took me three tries to find our own picture on the Clue A page.

On Saturday, Kevan, Holly, their friend Ramesh and I shot London in an event put together by Shoot Experience. As with Hide and Seek Fest the weekend before (only a week? Gosh), this was something that one of my housemates discovered through arcane metainternet means. This used to say that the discoverer was Kevan, but I am hereby correcting it: it was Holly. I was a liar before! I will burn.

We got ten “clues” related to London, water and the area around the Tate Modern; these were pretty obscure to me but much, much less so to my teammates. Our memory card was due in at 5:00, and they sent us out at around noon. That seems like a lot of time, but we were one of 66 teams, all of whom were trying to come up with unusual ideas for the same ten things and get to them on foot. The walking took longer than any clue, and our best shots took almost an hour apiece.

We spent the last hour in increasingly desperate attempts to get anything at all for the last four clues, and ended up frantically paring 232 shots down to the required 10 on-camera, while speedwalking back to the venue. We were lucky to have time to back up some of the better extraneous shots onto my iPod before the culling was complete, which is why there are 24 pictures in the Flickr set (half mine, half Holly’s or Kevan’s). If we did it again, we agreed, we’d concentrate on getting really good shots for half the clues and not bother with those that didn’t strike us–there was no completion requirement, as long as you didn’t have more than one shot per clue. (Nobody else knew that either, which is why there were fifty hasty pictures of toilets for Waterloo.)

Those striking clues really did yield the best results. We won the category prize for clue A, about the Tower-Bridge-leaping bus, for which I think everybody did exactly the same thing–but ours was the prettiest.

We got some Norton software we didn’t actually need as a prize, but the peer recognition was nicer; there were only thirteen prizes awarded, and Tiny Richard Dawkins and His Komodo Dragon Band got one of them. (Holly will be glad to explain our team name.) There’s an multiple-city Shoot Experience gallery show in August, so I won’t be here for it, but I’ll make my housemates blog about whether we make it into that too.

Speaking of Flickr, Maria wants me to mention that I’ve been slowly, disjointedly editing and posting some of the twelve mojillion pictures I’ve taken this year; recent additions include touristy ventures to the Tower of London, Kent and the British Museum.

Last Friday, Kevan, Holly, Josh and I journeyed to the end of the night as part of the 2007 Hide and Seek Fest, a city-spanning pervasive game, free to all 100+ participants because it was sponsored by a charitable foundation and Gideon Reeling, who may or may not exist.

We showed up at a condemned warehouse in Wapping at 7:30 pm, carrying cones of fried potato, with very little idea of how the game was going to be structured. There were ostensibly 100 of us, the “runners,” and 10 of the organizers, or “chasers,” to begin with. Runners got a red-and-white striped safety-tape band tied to one arm, and a red ribbon to put in their pockets; chasers started out with the red ribbons already on. One of the chasers was on spring legs with robot grabber arms. We were not entirely convinced they were playing fair.

We also got maps of central London with instructions on where to meet our contacts; those getting all six signatures would, at the end, get a handmade t-shirt. Each of the contacts was within a specific safe zone. Outside such zones, getting tagged meant you switched out your runner tape for a chaser ribbon and became one of the enemy. Josh spoke openly of his desire to make such a switch from the first five minutes of the game. It is perhaps difficult to explain why this landed him the de facto leadership of our little group. Mostly it has to do with decisiveness.

We split off from the other ninety-six humans and walked from the starting point to the first checkpoint (in an alley amidst curry restaurants) and the second (buskers playing Bob Dylan next to St. Paul’s); despite lots of eye-darting, walking backwards and mild panic at the sight of anything red, we didn’t actually see any chasers until we were nearing the third. The contact was in the basement of a pub in an alley, and the alley was the safe zone. Our acquired paranoia served us well here, as we assumed chasers would be lurking near both mouths of said alley. Josh wandered up to check while the other three of us hid in a bus shelter across the street. He disappeared behind traffic.

“Hey, is that Josh?” I said, just as a figure in a dark sweater came pelting back down the street. Four red ribbons followed hotly. Kevan, Holly and I slipped into the alley behind them. Josh would later inform us that the chasers’ faces when they glanced back at us were worth the effort.

He got away from them and met us downstairs, where a blind poet was stamping our signature sheets with green thumbprints (it was crowded and he took forever, so I tried to sneak my own thumb onto the inkpad, but it turned out he was not really blind). Having seen chasers in action, we were now even more paranoid, and ran from the alley exit to a bus stop (public transport waiting-places were also mini safe zones). I was the only one to see the ambush sprung on the man who walked out just after us. It was like one of those documentaries where the springbok does not get away.

The fourth checkpoint was a matter of walking into a phone box and having it suddenly start ringing; it was the last one we would all make together. We had passed the Zombie Inflection Point (ZIP). Despite all our watchfulness and circuitous routes, the available chasers had simply begun to outnumber the runners.

Have I mentioned how BIG this game was? The walk from the start point to the curry zone was 1.4 miles, and by the time we were approaching the fifth checkpoint in Hyde Park, we’d gone over ten; we’d taken a couple buses but were too paranoid to try the Tube. It was also after 2300 hours, and rainy. Holly had been running errands all day and had not sat down since around noon. This is probably why they got her first.

Jogging away, grieving for the loss of Code Name Cakebaker and knowing that she had already become one of them, we remaining three decided that stealth would no longer avail us: we had to make a frontal assault on the main park gate. Josh entered first and was immediately savaged. Kevan and I got in on the ruse that I was a chaser on his tail, but that didn’t last, and before long we had a pack behind us. We split up in the darkness, and I escaped my pursuers by simply running the wrong way until they got tired and gave up. I would later learn that Kevan had almost successfully peeled off and hidden behind a tree, until Josh turned back and found him.

I was now alone in a huge and very dark urban area at 11:30 pm. I had made it into the inner-park safe zone, but I had little idea where the remaining checkpoints were, and less of how to navigate to them. I was definitely the worst choice for lone-survivor status.

Clinging to the idea that the contact people were somewhere on the south bank of the Serpentine, I wandered back and forth until I ran into Paddy and Nora, who had survived entrance to the park by the considerably smarter avenue of hopping the fence. They had also rolled up their armbands into little strips and linked elbows to further conceal them. All about subtlety, Paddy and Nora.

Despite initial wariness until I had demonstrated my survivor armband from a safe distance, they let me tag along with them to the contacts (Russian dancers), who informed us that there was no safe zone around the final checkpoint. It was after midnight; we had to hop the fence again to get out of the park. I was lucky that they let me follow them again, this time onto the subway to Waterloo Bridge.

We left the Waterloo Tube station, our last vestige of safety, and climbed the entrance to the bridge; we descended to the semi-flooded beach. We could see the organizers who had sent us off from the warehouse standing amidst cameras and floodlights next to a moored party boat. Between them and us, red-beribboned, wearing an evil grin: Josh.

I swear I am not making this up.

The footrace away from the checkpoint, and the subsequent double-back, took just about everything I had left in me; the organizers were shouting “ah, let him go” by the time I started my final sprint, but only Josh knows whether he did or not. Either way, I made it there untagged and got a handshake for my trouble. Paddy and Nora, happily, had slipped in while I led the sentry away.

That is pretty much the whole story; I didn’t get a t-shirt (either the announcement was a joke or they ran out before we straggled in) but I don’t really care. We’ve all been sore and stiff-legged for two days.

If anyone ever asks me again why I wanted to move to London, I now have a very succinct answer.

Update 5.14.2007 1141 hrs: Kevan has made a mental leap farther than me and worked out that Gideon Reeling (or “giddy and reeling”) is a pun on the name of Punchdrunk, an avant-garde interactive theater company that is apparently quite good anyway.

I spent three years working at Trover and bringing my lunch in a plastic bag. These lunches invariably contained sandwiches on whole-wheat bread, and though I went through phases regarding the filling (tuna, peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and pickle), I generally came back to slices of turkey, on romaine lettuce or “spring mix,” with mayonnaise.

Now, I started working from home every day nine months ago, leaving me a bit at a loss. The constraints on my lunch (must tolerate refrigeration, must fit into reusable containers, must be edible on a half-hour break) were suddenly removed, but I continued to act as if they were still in place. I put things on a plate and I sliced up the apple.

Then I moved to London and found analogs to the American lunch ingredients, and still kept eating the same lunch. Admittedly, some of this was a comfort-familiarity ritual, but I’m past that now and it’s about time lunch and I started mixing it up.

To wit: this week I bought some French bread, and salami, and a tomato. I have blown my own mind. I am tossed amidst the shattering waves like driftwood in the brainstorms this has unleashed! On the ocean, I guess! In the metaphor!

So salami and turkey taste good together, especially on crusty bread. Would you like me to share with you some of the other revolutionary sandwich innovations/relevations? Innelvations? Revolevinnotrons.

• Using pepperoni instead of salami
• Toasting the bread
• Cutting it in half, for greater ease of gripping
• Cutting it in half diagonally
• Maybe get that lettuce with shredded carrots
• Shit, I know this is crazy
• Just hang on
• We are going into flavor hyperspace

Of course these sandwiches are not as healthy as the more fibrous, less-sausaged original version. There is a price to pay for joy, my friends, and that price is paid in belt loops. I’m never going back. Those who say you can enjoy food and lose weight are chasing a fool’s dream, and anyone who acts like they aren’t is profiting by it.

I never remember that when I need to apply a style to a server-side generated element, I don’t have to dig ten stupid lib files deep into the PHP or whatever and add a class attribute, I can just put it in a span (or div) and style all the elements of type x within that. So in case you forget the easy way to style server-side generated elements: put them in a span or div and style all the elements of type x within that!

Okay, hi. Working a lot.

Maria visited last week, and alleviated any potential self-absorbed silliness just by being here. But we also went to Brighton and the Tower of London (pictures soon), and played lots of games, including some with Leonard and Sumana. London had changed its mind and decided to be cold, but at least it didn’t start snowing until she was on her way home. I am still not doing my fair share of the cooking.

I’ve been here for a week! This morning Holly made baby pancakes (which she called something much nicer that I can’t remember) and we ate them on the back porch, and the rest of the house failed to vote me out. I’m glad. This is a pretty great house!

I’ve been to Battersea Park repeatedly, and to the Science and Natural History Museums, and on a Tube Walk (pictures), and today I tried to go to a scheduled pickup Frisbee game at Hyde Park but it turned out not to exist. But still! I navigated to Hyde Park and back all by myself! I also managed to get to Victoria Station and back, twice, to pick up and drop off Caitlan when she visited.

Keen-eyed readers of this blog will note that normally I don’t go outside that much in a month, and will probably guess further that I am deliberately overcompensating to fight culture shock / homesickness / loneliness et cetera. Good guess, keen readers. But it’s working! And given my only other experience outside the country, I think overcompensation is entirely in order.

London is awfully big, but awfully neat too.

Update 03.07.2007 1243 hrs: Pikelets! They were called pikelets.