Whatever, Burp Castle

I am finding myself really missing Portland right now. I am working on this project for my professor where we are comparing cycling in several cities in the US. I just finished NYC and am now working on Portland and all of the data that I am poring over is bringing back myriad memories and feelings, reminding me how perfect Portland is for me. I really am not sure exactly how I will ever get back there, but it is on my mind.
I do not remember a lot of last week because my brain is kind of useless like that sometimes. I have been thinking a lot about memory and why I am able to easily recall intricate details of some very mundane events from long ago, yet I cannot remember the very existence of recent events that are extremely important to me. A couple weeks ago Brandy busted me for completely forgetting a very special experience we shared, the PREVIOUS week. I even did not believe her at first when she told me about it. Now, this was something that I clearly should have remembered as it meant a lot to me, but yet it was gone. Yet, when I took that memory test at NYU, I was told that I had amazing memory. Even when I try to remember things, they are often obliterated. Now, this may have something to do with some years of heavy drinking, but I had this problem before college and it seems to be an ingrained trait. Ugh.
So last week I probably did some cool stuff, but can't really remember. I know I didn't get enough work done. Ah yes, I knew something went down on Wed, and a review of my emails confirmed it. The L Magazine is showing free movies at McCarran Park for several Wednesdays over the summer and they were showing Evil Dead II, which I had yet to see. I've seen the third, which is the classic, Army of Darkness with Bruce Campbell. The second one is where he goes to this old cabin with his girl and she, and his hand, are taken by the evil. We set up a CS meeting and had a picnic in the park with delicious food and a few people, including Sal, J, Nelson, our CSer, Matthieu (a French guy who's been hitchhiking and urban camping all over the world and has some great stories from Mongolia), and a few other CSers. After some wine and food, we gathered some more guests and went to the ballfields to watch the show. The show was hilarious, of course, and watching a movie like that is always fun with 200 people in a ballfield. There is this scene at the end after he gets sent back in time where a huge flying gargoyle thing comes swooping down and he shoots it out of the sky to become a hero. Right at that moment this huge hawk or seagull or something came flying out of the trees about 20 feet above our heads. He made a circle around and passed over again before flying into the distance. It was so perfect and everyone was cheering and laughing, besides those on the other side who were probably wondering what they missed.
After the show I, and a few beers, came up with the idea to bring everyone back to the apartment and watch Army of Darkness. Several agreed and I ran off ahead to make it to the video store before any of the hipsters at the show got the same idea. I speed walked all the way past Greenpoint Ave to find a handwritten note explaining that the store would be closed until Friday! A came back with my head hung low, but we all hung out and had a great time anyway, despite the dopey CSer who was there who had "tried" heroin seven times and wouldn't stop letting the echoes in her empty head come out the mouth. We smoked a hookah and chattered late into the night, or so it seemed. When I went to bed I was amazed to see it was only 2.
Thu I just worked and then drove back so that I would have my van for the tournament. I left work early so that I could go to practice, but then found that my van battery was dead in the garage. After some douchebag in a Jaguar refused to jump me, some grizzled woman in her 50s with a cig and an old minivan stopped. She clearly would have rather gone home, but she was a sport and stayed much longer than should have been necessary because my van just wasn't starting. This was a real drag because I had recently replaced the battery and I really needed it to run for the weekend. I finally gave up and wandered around trying to figure out what to do. I looked in one more time and realized that the interior lights were on. After extinguishing them, I went outside to find someone else and found this German PhD student who had TAed my Stats class, Stefan. He had never jumped before, so I got to be an instructor to the instructor. In a moment Gina roared to life and I was off. Traffic was a miracle and I was only a few mins late to practice.
Over the weekend my team went to Ow My Knee, a tournament in Albany. Brandy stayed behind to have a girl's slumber party/pole dancing class, which is reported to have been a resounding success. As we drove up Fri night, it began to rain. My shitty wipers and the heavy traffic meant quite a harrowing drive, but we made it in one piece around 10:30. We got to our campsite to find that it was more of a quagmire of mud and standing water. We elected to grab a better one, and then have a beer before attempting the set up. We kept debating going to a hotel, but we are stubborn. We finally made our dash and began setting up when suddenly one of the poles on Brandy's tent snapped. This also snapped the last of our willpower and we drove off to the Belvidere Inn. It was a pretty nice place though, and Matteo, Kally, Cid and I sat in their little covered veranda drinking some beers and interacting with some members of a wedding party who were doing the same. This was, of course, after 28 year old Kally was regretfully rejected from buying because his license is expired. Man, US drinking laws can just blow me.
On Sat we played much worse than we should have since we seemed to have gotten into our heads. Nevertheless, we won our first three games and lost the last, which got us the four seed in the next day's bracket. At the end of the third game I jumped for a disc with lots of heat on me, and as I went up I knew there was a problem. My calf cramped up worse than any cramp I've ever had. I held the disc anyway and when I came down I was readying myself to first let it off because we were in a zone D and I had just popped the cup and needed to send it to break, but after a second I realized that, nope, not gonna happen, and I crumpled to the ground. I'm told it was rather humorous. This cramp was insane. My calf muscle was literally concave. I was out for the day, but was happy to be able to play on Sun. That night we went back to the campsite and had delicious grillin' a la Kara and drank more beers.
On Sunday we played three games. We won our first one and lost the last two, giving us 6th or 7th place in the tournament.
On Monday I tried to work but just did a lot of little shit that needed to get done. At about 5 I went into the City to meet up with Brandy to watch a movie between her work and pole class. We watched Up and Away or something like that. It was a chick flick, but I actually liked it quite a bit, especially because the guy reminded me of myself, except for when he's being a total toolbox. Afterwards I went on a fruitless shoe shopping mission at DSW. I've been passively looking for shoes for the last few months and I'm getting really damn sick of it. I finally today bought some online. Afterwards I went home and played ultimate at McCarran. I was too late and everyone was kind of tired and playing really shitty, poaching all over and hucking bullshit constantly, and fucking crossfield hammers every time. I have to get there earlier to play real ultimate.
Last night Brandy and I had a date. After work I met her near NYU and we went to this opening called Trashion, which was supposed to be all about waste and reusing "garbage" into art. It was pretty much the lamest lame that was ever lame. Most of the "trash" was obviously not rescued from the garbage, and what had been was pretty much total crap. They all had these really absurd little paragraphs from the artist where he had clearly gotten out his dictionary so he could sound totally profound. Man, I can only handle so much artist crap in my life and now I'll be good for a few months.
We then went wandering and found ourselves at this Spanish place on Houston that Brandy had wanted to go to for a long time. It is a nice little tapas place with live music. We got wine and some anchovies and ate the delicious bread, gratis. I had the seat facing outside. As I watched so many different and interesting people passing in buses and on the sidewalk I was thinking about how I will miss the incredible diversity of this city whenever I choose to leave.
We then went to Burp Castle, which seems to be taking a nose dive. First of all, there is the outdoor area. For some reason they got rid of the tables, ostensibly to hold more people, but they replaced them with the same amount of seating, in the form of these hideous chrome bar stools, and they screwed on this bright, shitty chrome bar around the outside that looks totally tacky. You can probably fit two more people out there, max. Then, it was filled with a bunch of total knuckleheads, although I'm hoping that this was some special group that was having a meeting there. Yikes, it was pretty terrible. I did get the chance to see this flyer about some bikes + good beer event where there seems to be a bike tour of beer bars in Williamsburg, EV & LES. This got me excited because it looks like there are several in Wbg that I do not yet know.
Today, I failing at getting work done, but I really really need to get my shit together because I leave for Europe in less than three weeks and I haven't done a damn thing on my independent study and still have quite a bit of work to do on the cycling project. Agh.