Lots of updates, broad and overarching as well as specific and insignificant. In the broad and overarching category, I am in the process of applying to Seattle University and Golden Gate University Law Schools. Am still thinking about applying to Hastings as well. In January I’ll apply to the MLS program at UW.

Went to dinner at The King Fish on Saturday and ate mad fried chicken, collard greens and mashed potatoes, which resulted in heartburn, indigestion, and horrific smelling belches. We also went AA’s party for PW, and it was RAD. Lots of dancing and polaroid picture taking into the wee hours of the morning.

Sunday went to 826 Seattle to get trained to volunteer at the GSTS (Greenwood Space Travel Supply) once it opens this Friday. If you’ve thought about volunteering and just haven’t gotten around to it or were unsure, I’d encourage everyone to go and check it out, buy stuff or just visit the space. I’ll let you know when I’m working if you want to stop by sometime.

Lastly, I bought bike(s). More on that later, but I am pretty stoked. Family’s coming up Thursday, Critical Mass on Friday, and turkey, stuffing, and quite possibly Black Labels on the menu. Any holiday food suggestions? Great stuffing recipes? Drop knowledge.

Is there an alternative? I’m disappointed in the voters and the waning support the monorail received after the fallout of the admittedly very bad plan, but I’m indignant about the royal fuck-up the SMP managed to commit to kill the monorail. Now what do we have but a lose-lose situation – taxpayers stuck paying for property rights and town meetings, hand-holding and head-patting. That shit bugs me about Seattle, it’s always a nothing-or-everything approach to city planning; backhanded and contradictory development, its inherent need to become some urban center in the Pacific Northwest, yearning for some sort of respect that San Francisco and LA get but at the same time ignoring the necessities for true urbanization. I may be talking out of my ass here, but Portland seems to get the idea but just doesn’t have the money of Boeing or Microsoft driving the economy.

Los Angeles was built around the car and its development was based on the freeway. I’m guessing that’s partly because the sprawl was easy to expand – LA is relatively flat and not built on a bay like San Francisco or Seattle. The mass transit sucks there, too, but driving on a freeway doesn’t make it a better commute.

I suppose I’m rambling, but today I missed two buses going to work because they came early. My commute home was lengthened to an hour and a half because the bus I usually ride on was packed and not letting anyone else on. I live 6 miles from work. Parking downtown is not economically feasible nor does it make any sense to drive 6 miles if I had an alternative that would get me downtown on-time, in a reasonable amount of time. My bike is the fastest, healthiest and cheapest way to get me downtown, but I still would have voted for the monorail. Why? Because the best alternative is biking in the rain, and sometimes I don’t want to do that.

I got McSweeney’s 17 in the mail today. It looked like it came in the mail. There’s some pretty sweet stuff in there, also some very weird things. The bad thing about it looking like it came in the mail is that it looks like it came in the mail, and therefore looks like it should just get thrown away like the rest of the junkmail I get everyday.

Also: remember when I crashed a couple of weeks back? I hit a pothole later that night, and the next day missed my pedal riding and potato chipped my front wheel and bent the fork. It looks like this:

There’s a paint ripple right underneath the stem, too:

Yes, I’m in the market for a new frame, especially since I built a new wheel and everything before I found out how extensive the freaking damage was to the frame. I could get it fixed, but it’s probably not even worth it.

Some more pics I took from the last couple of weekends, just now getting around to posting them. A few are from the pumpkin farm we went to a couple weekends back, and the next weekend was Halloween weekend, which is why there’s lots of mustaches and Messman’s Messquerade pics.

Welcome to the Suck.

Thanks to Jonas, I got the chance to catch a preview of Jarhead before it came out as well as to attend the Q&A with Anthony Swofford afterwards, who appeared at the preview at UW.

Jake Gyllenhaal got absolutely ripped for this role. He is freaking huge. The pacing of the first half of the film is phenomenal, absolutely no dead spots, but then again, lots of similar looking scenes from other Marine films. Classic Full Metal Jacket beginning, and the irony in it all is not subtle whatsoever. I can attest to the fact that the film stuck pretty closely to the book, although a few liberties were taken, as you can imagine they would be. Sam Mendes did a good job with the wry military humor and a tone very much similar to that of American Beauty. But you can read about the film elsewhere, I’m sure everyone says pretty much the same thing.

I don’t know if Swofford did a lot of talks like this, but he was there and he had gotten a little soft in the last 12(!) years since the first Gulf War. He seemed a lot more at home with the literary and film geeks than with some of the ex- or present military/ROTC students there. In fact, it seemed as though one of them was itching for a fight when Swofford was asking questions; he kept pushing for answer to his question about whether or not he supported the current war. Swofford dodged the question adeptly, “I’m here to talk about a movie.” Another ex-Marine, who had also been in the desert read the book while he was still over there, I think the timing would have meant, when we were there for the second time, but he lauded it, and tried to convey that he had some special connection with the author, because of their shared experience. It flopped a little, it seemed like Swofford wanted to identify with the soldier a little more, but it also seemed as if he had been removed from that state of his life for too long.

I think the most interesting things Swofford had to say were about his actual experience upon coming back and those relating to writing the book and how it worked out with the producers of the film. I’m pretty sure he discussed this in the book, but he talked about how he probably never would have written it if he had taken the shot in the desert.

I recognize the fact that the irony in the film is terribly striking, but Swofford insisted that he felt no pressure to politicize the events and that if Mendes did so himself, it was transparent to him, primarily because he felt it was more a personal story than anything else.