Journaling on the Lake Tahoe Trip
Jan. 20th, 2004 01:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexr_rwxThu Jan 15 19:58:36 EST 2004
So I'm on the plane from Atlanta to SLC...
I just finished reading SMBM, which is a good thing. It's really quite short -- small for a novela, even. It's much easier to read when you're three years older and have had that much more practical Spanish -- that's a pretty good metric for showing that I've improved since highschool. Heh. Good. There were a bunch of words that I need to look up, but it wasn't just little flashes of understanding, like the first time.
I can translate it. I won't be able to get the feeling right. Unamuno puts together the most beautiful words, and my English isn't nearly as powerful as his Spanish. Well. I guess that's not unexcusable, considering that I am, in fact, not a philologist, philosopher, and novelist. And I am not Miguel de Unamuno.
I've been crying. You know why? It's the scene, towards the end, where Lázaro is dying. And he's unconcerned about his own death, as far as his own life itself. That's a spoiler, I suppose. Yeah, Lázaro dies. I think the bit that resonated with me, though ... perhaps wasn't what Unamuno was getting at. It's the brother-sister relationship. Lazaro can't protect Ángela anymore... one of them has to die first. At the root of everything, irrespective of whether or not reality is made of nothingness, or whether you can write really good LISP code, or you can run the 100 in 9.86 seconds, or whether you're bringing about a perfect anarcho-sindicalist society... deep down inside, you cannot protect your younger sister because you're going to die. You will be separated from your family.
And that's the scary thing about death. Lloyd has hit on this before. I don't know if I understood it, to this extent; I'm trying to remember. You think, "Oh, well, you know, I just won't exist anymore, and how bad could that possibly be?" But your sister will be alone. And you might go like weeks without talking to her. But once you die, you're not going to talk to her anymore. At all.
And I wonder to myself, do I really feel this way about Natalie particularly, or just like the idea of sister-ness? Kierkegaard echoes in my ears. And Nietzsche. If you're happy when you think about yourself, you're not really thinking about yourself, but about your ideal... does this extend to being sad about the idea of being lost for those you care about? Is it really that disconcerting, in the specific? Yes. I think it is. The general-ideal-abstract fails here, bleeds into the realm of statistics and words. I know "to die". I don't know death.
And you can extend this idea out to every living thing. Do other species care about this? Just that moment of death... when it comes to you personally, you're like, "eh, whatever. I'm just me; it doesn't really matter. I can deal with discomfort, and when the trembling subsides, that's that." But as soon as you put somebody else into the picture...
Marty understands this. This is why the hero has no family and keeps himself separated.
But any individual human is just as potentially interesting and important and wise and spiritually deep as any other. We walk by thousands of people in an airport, don't bother to learn the name of the woman sitting next to you on the plane. And you'll never, ever see these people again, most of them. And they'll die, without so much as having traded AIM screennames with you. And you'll die.
I'm remembering that I don't remember much about my father's father. And what's weird is that this doesn't upset me all that much. The next sentence I was about to type was "we were never that close because he passed on when I was like nine, and he had had a stroke years earlier, so I never got to really know him." ... but that seems inappropriate. I know him through my father... and it feels like I have inherited some of Bernard Rudnick's personality traits through James Rudnick, or maybe it feels like that because I've been told that.
Amber cares about family. She cares about geneology and identity and about knowing all the stories about an ancestor that she never met, her "cowardly grandfather" of familial legend. And she'll tell the stories to you like they were something that happened like last week, because they're both real and present to her. The idea that they've been misremembered or distorted over time either doesn't occur or matter.
I remember she got upset at me, once, when we were in Tallahassee, because I was pointing out places that had been important (like with memories attached to them)... and it was unfair to her, she thought, because I was pointing out buildings that were Just Buildings, and maybe I hadn't been as open to listening to her tell me about all of her people, who are Her People...
We never really understood each other. Our value-systems were and are wildly different, and I think there was a fundamental different-ness...
Thu Jan 15 21:40:29 EST 2004
I'm now in the SLC airport, hanging out and waiting for the next flight, out to the lovely RNO.
While I never learned the name of the woman sitting next to me on that last plane, and likely won't see her again (or even remember her face, if I did), we ended up talking about stuff for a while... she came across as really intelligent, and she speaks fluent Italian, having lived in Florence for six years... and now she listens to Internet Radio to keep up her Italian. It's interesting, chatting with people that you don't know, on an airplane -- just from "where're you going?" and "where are you from?", we got into discussing working environments and concentration (and under what circumstances one can concentrate, and how many things you can look at on a computer screen at once) and language (her Italian and my Spanish, particularly) and translation and computers (she used to be able to use Macs, but she finds peecees perplexing, and her husband bought a windows box recently, and she's baffled by her daughter's use of AIM) and culture and living places and trying to make jokes in languages that you don't speak natively and raising kids and going to school... her son, she told me, is a freshman at UCF, and doesn't enjoy it. But now he knows that he wants to transfer somewhere else and become an architect, having found out more about himself in his first year. And one of her nephews is quick on the path to becoming a professor of something-or-another, and she guessed that I was on my way to gradschool without me saying, "Yeah, I'm probably going to gradschool soon..."
She's going to Deer Valley, near SLC, to do some snowshoeing. She used to ski, but both of her knees got hurt. Her daughter (maybe 10-ish and alternately somewhat precocious and asleep) skis, but only on the Greens and medium Blues.
It's amazing how much information you can pick up about a person on a flight from Atlanta to Utah. I think that was at least as enjoyable, talking with her, than it would have been had I been seated next to one of the cute 20-somethings on the plane.
And all the places where I could snag a snack are closed. This is somewhat upsetting... should've brought some granola bars or something.
Maybe they'll have snacks on this plane, maybe. Surely there's something to eat at Lake Tahoe, at the very least.
Sat Jan 17 23:35:44 EST 2004
The timestamp on this entry is incorrect. For whatever reason, eowyn's clock gets off really quickly.
But I'm in the hotel room, having been here for two days now... and you might ask, well, what've you been up to? And I'd tell you: skiing, mostly.
The conditions... are interesting. It's the dead of winter, ya know, only for some other inscrutinable reason, it's quite warm here. The snow's still up on the mountains, though (if it's kinda slushy and icy in some places), and yesterday, we skied at the mountain right near the hotel, which is called Heavenly... and it's pretty entertaining. Heavenly's a good place to ski, yes.
It's kinda weird, having been on effectively this same trip at least twice before (although Lloyd came with us, two years ago)... it brings about more or less the same discomforts, being in this big hotel/casino place. Dad likes to go to the same places, when he goes places... when we visit his brother in San Diego, say, we stay at the same hotel and end up doing a lot of the same things.
But yeah, casinos are weird places. I think I find it less disconcerting now than I did earlier, but maybe that's just me getting old and jaded and losing idealism.
What's cool about -- well, life, really -- is the little interesting chunks of human interaction that you get while you're doing it.
We (my father and I) were sitting and having coffee, and this older fellow came up and was telling us about how he comes to this hotel like every year, and has, since 1976. He also said that he built the wireless network that plugs all the webtv doohickies together, and at that point, I was considering the possibility that maybe he knew what he was talking about and turned out to be a bit drunk (now that I think about it, I don't see why the teevees would have any wirelessness about them), but he ended up sharing the muffin-top dad was eating.
And I conversed briefly about photography (not that I know anything about it) with a pair of youngish snowboarders on a ski lift (they were talking about SLR cameras and manual-focus and cleaning the little mechanical bits on the inside), and one guy was telling me about how his wife's aunt is a dealer in a casino (this one, in fact) and how she hates it. And one young lady working at a cafeteria near the Kirkwood ski slope is from Australia, and her nametag claims she's from a town called "Wombat Hollow", which apparently does not exist. She's really from Brisbane. Which is a shame, because Wombat Hollow sounds like a great place to live.
There are so many people here... and I wish that I could be here without really being here, just like follow people around, fly-on-the-wall... I think it would be a very interesting study of what people are really like. Because they're bizarre, and I think about this, and I realize that my contact with Real People is so very limited.
But where are these so-called Real People? That's another problem I've been mulling over -- where could you go to watch people to get the broadest slice of life (say for a particular city)... where does Everybody have to go, sometimes? To a mall, perhaps? That's still a biased sampling, because certain sorts of people go to the mall much more often than others. I would not find me at a mall, for example (unless I found me doing amateur sociology)... and surely I'm a Real People too.
My father's mathematical might is very strong; we were crunching numbers on what you would have to do to make a living by playing blackjack, and apparently, if you do the whole double-bets-until-you-win-once-then-reset bit at blackjack, you only need a starting investment of a few thousand dollars and play blackjack for like a half hour a day to pull down $200... assuming that you never lose 10 hands consecutively. But the probability of that happening, if you know the game, is super-slim, and the expected number of days before that happens (we calculated) is much longer than a lifetime. But it could happen, I suppose. Law of large numbers, it's gotta happen sometime, to somebody.
There are some activities that I really enjoy, here. You know what they are? Skiing and karaoke.
Apparently the longest-running show of any sort here in Tahoe is a karaoke night at this Mexican restaurant in the hotel/casino across the street. And last night and tonight, I made my way over there (with a crowd of relatives and friends, the first time)...
Setlist? Last night: I Love the Night Life (... you know, I forget who originally sang that one), Killing Me Softly (Roberta Flack, with undertones of The Fugees), Losing My Religion (REM). And tonight: With Or Without You (U2), Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin).
Sadly, I neglected to do the extended version of "Sunday Bloody Sunday". There were a few Really Good singers in there... these two guys are apparently there All The Time (like karaoke champions) and they do a lot of country songs, even though they don't look or sound particularly country until they start singing. Both nights, young women got up and sang spirited versions of "I Will Survive" (although the first one, she was cuter, with horn-rim glasses and short spiky blonde hair, and she used the Cake lyrics :) )...
My karaoke is weak... I need more practice, and we need a good karaoke bar in Atlanta. And I need to quit getting the urge to sing slow, depressing songs -- I almost did "Number One Crush" tonight, but thought better of it, and I've been known to bust out "Everybody Hurts"...
Today's skiing... was absolutely incredible. I was up early to get on the bus out to Kirkwood, which is a less-well-known ski mountain around here... and it was well worth it. Also headed out that way were Richie (my uncle), Avery (his son), Mike (I described Mike with a good deal of detail almost exactly a year ago), and their friend Gary.
Kirkwood is freaking crazy. The snow was much nicer -- at Heavenly, it was kinda icy ("Spring Conditions", that's called) -- but at Kirkwood, it was fluffy and only slightly slushy, which was lovely. Apparently it's always fluffier, ineffably. And there were fewer people there (lift lines were uniformly pretty short), and they had the most beautiful areas to ski... big, sweeping, steep mountainsides covered with moguls, topped with a cliffside-lip. You would ski along the trail at the top, find a place that looked good to jump in, and then hop over the edge, into the shadow of the mountain... absolutely beautiful. I can honestly say that's my favourite place to ski I've ever been. And there were big chutes with high walls (curved-ish, so you could ski up the sides) that were like natural half-pipes, and runs with moguls, and runs without moguls, and bumps for jumping, and ...
Oh, it was amazing. It was worth the hour bus-ride, easily. I slept on the bus, both ways, anyway. Skiing is so much nicer when you do it by yourself and don't try to stick with a group (although skiing with one or maybe two other people is pretty good too, but beyond that, it's a pain keeping everybody together). Towards the end of the day, I went with Avery, and that was pretty cool.
I have the makings of an entry about how "you know what? Other people have a completely different idea of fun than I do, and that's weird" sort of entry, but I think I'll avoid that. I'm sure I talk about that enough as it is.
And I was thinking about the JUMBLE-solver program, and I'm pretty sure I'm doing the "don't-do-the-same-search-twice" thing entirely Wrong. It's Way Too Slow, because it ends up resulting in a linear search over like n! nodes for n-letter words, which is ... in fact, disgustingly slow. That'll be fixed right quick, at the very latest on the plane trip back.
Now, I go to sleep.
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writing as you read, a tutorial
Date: 2004-01-19 11:17 pm (UTC)This is why the hero has no family and keeps himself separated. Yes.
because I was pointing out buildings that were Just Buildings, I'm sorry that that happened. Reading such actually upset me a silly small amount.
But where are these so-called Real People? I believe that facilities of mandatory education such as elementary and high schools will probably be the only place you will find an even sampling of all sorts of people. After that, they go to different jobs, or college, etc... and you are very right in thinking that the mall is an uneven sampling. I can't think of any place every one goes. Maybe the doctor's or such, but my family is so anti-hospital that we almost never go there. Still, we must attend at some time.
(although skiing with one or maybe two other people is pretty good too, but beyond that, it's a pain keeping everybody together). Do you find the same thing to be true for swimming? I rather do. I much prefer to swim alone. (danger!)
date: Tue Jan 20 02:16:32 EST 2004. status: done with entry. *dance*
Re: writing as you read, a tutorial
Date: 2004-01-20 07:45 am (UTC)What of those people that attend private schools? What of children in places where the schools remain burnt-out husks of buildings? No, this is part of the reason why Americans have no conception of what it is to be bombed.
writing as you rewrite, a tutorial
Date: 2004-01-20 08:28 am (UTC)Re: writing as you read, a tutorial
Date: 2004-01-20 09:03 am (UTC)Re: writing as you read, a tutorial
Date: 2004-01-20 10:33 am (UTC)