the ocean

Ugh.

Today has been a day of foolish choices. To start with, I went to two fitness classes and ran a mile and a half this morning, and now I can barely move my legs. Making this doubly foolish is the fact that the classes were named "Fit Kick" and "Fit Core." One should never trust any workout with a cutesy name. Making it triply foolish is the fact that I have not been to any sort of fitness class for probably two years, not being much of a joiner. I'll probably go back, though, assuming I ever walk again. By tomorrow I may have to manage my life entirely though a series of blinks like that guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Oddly enough, my other bad choices more or less negate that first one. I had a huge Mexican dinner tonight followed by frozen yogurt with toppings. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now my stomach feels as though I am about to replicate that scene from Alien. Why must dairy products be so delicious and yet so deadly? I blame Wisconsin for all of this, frankly.

Excitement

Are you so excited for the royal wedding? I always get really pumped for the unions of people I don't know, so obviously I am beyond enthused. I couldn't be happier if that guy who passes out Red Eyes by the el were getting married to that lady from the Education Connection commercials. I don't know much about the relationship between Kate and William, but I do know that she sort of has bitch face and he's losing his hair at an alarming pace. Plus there is the pomp and circumstance to look forward to! I'm betting Kate is brought in by zeppelin and William wears a solid gold jockstrap.

Did the Lifetime movie already happen? I enjoy when actors play real life people who they fail to resemble. Nicole Kidman got an Oscar that way, for heaven's sake.

You should also know, in the interest of full disclosure, that I just watched half an episode of 227. It centered around a biker gang that was trying to get Marla and Jackee to join, not kidding. Half of the dialogue was growling. The other half I think was lifted from Ibsen.

Risen, Indeed

Apparently, Jesus decided to celebrate his resurrection by making the Lakers lose last night, which frankly couldn't have been a better choice. I heard that, when he first encountered Kobe, Jesus said, "well, I didn't mean you have to love EVERYONE everyone." What people don't understand is that the Sermon on the Mount was very heavily footnoted.

Our good lord has also put Bride Wars on HBO this evening, which is of course his favorite movie. He totally roots for Anne Hathaway over Kate Hudson, mainly because he sort of has a thing for brunettes, but also because Kate Hudson is no longer recognizable as the delightful spitfire we all fell in love with during Almost Famous.

Jesus also apparently ate all of the Little Debbie's Snack Cakes in my cabinet. Or that may have been me, I'm not totally sure. It was a long weekend.

Cross Country

I'm back at my parents' house in Quincy for the Easter weekend. It's fairly uneventful. My parents have DirectTV now which vexes me greatly because there's like ten million channels and I can't tell which ones they get and which ones they don't and I can't find Oxygen anywhere. Also they have like five remotes (which I know is true of like 95% of American households) and I can't figure out which one does what. I tried to turn up the volume on the TV and I ended up opening the garage door. Anyway, now it's securely lodged on The Cosby Show due to my sister's intervention. She just can't get enough of early Rudy.

We had lunch with my 99-year-old grandmother today and I showed her my Geneva pictures on my laptop. It turns out that the outlets in her house are so old that they don't even accept three-prong plugs. It also turns out that my laptop is so crappy it only lasts on battery for about twenty minutes. So it was a race against time to go through the pictures, especially since each one oddly enough brought to mind stories for my grandmother, who has of course never been to any of the places pictured in the photos.

The drive back last night was kind of a nightmare. There were really strong storms for about half an hour which led us to scan the horizons worriedly for secret tornadoes, though none were forthcoming. This also led us to pull over at a truck stop for a little while, where my sister was sexually harassed no fewer than six times. And due to Good Friday, I couldn't even indulge in some beef jerky for quick energy. The good news is that now I feel like I truly understand the sufferings of Christ.

Agony/Ecstasy

So I went back to trivia last night and we won first prize. And not just because only three teams showed up like the last time we won; there were easily fifteen to twenty teams there. Also not because the categories were super easy; there were honest to god sports questions on there. Actually, I'm not really sure how we ended up winning. Part of it was being really good at recognizing song lyrics, which I've always thought should somehow be a marketable skill. In the end, though, it all came down to knowing that the California condor is the largest flighted bird in the United States. Which I'm pretty sure I learned in fifth grade. Thanks, Quincy Public Schools. I owe you a $100 gift certificate to a douchebag bar.

After the high of last night's victory, though, there has been pain. For instance, Top Model was a clip show tonight. And the seat belt wouldn't work in the cab on the way home, so instead I just had to pray that there we wouldn't get into a horrific wreck on Lakeshore. Thankfully, the cab driver provided some truly generic Christian music to help me on my way. Oh, and the weather has been shitty for like a week and a half now and my natural light lamp is broken. Or the battery is dead; I'm way too lazy to find out.

St. Louis Blues

So I saw "Meet Me In St. Louis" on Saturday. Man, was it boring. And this is coming from a person who actually enjoys boring things. I made it through several volumes of Balzac, but this really put me to the test. I sat through three separate semesters of constitutional law, but Judy Garland warbling on a trolley almost knocked me out. I mean, I understand that musicals are frequently short on plot, but this one had about three events take place in two full hours. I kept hoping for one of the characters to die just to add a little bit of interest. Preferably one of the two annoying child actors. I know they were generally orphans owned by the studio back in that era, but man, that studio could have made better choices. I haven't seen this much mugging and screaming since Seventh Heaven went off the air.

I know that I'm being unkind. I realize that Judy Garland was a national treasure pickled with diet pills and alcohol and that this is one of those films that everyone picks as one of the best ever made, but I am telling you that those people cannot ever have seen it. Some of the songs were all right, but there was so much nothing in between. And the old timey values just killed me. One of the characters declared that "no respectable girl kisses a man before she's engaged," which admittedly does leave room for hand jobs, but those must have ended up on the cutting room floor. New York City was presented as some sort of horrific nightmare (which I sort of agree with) in contrast to the genteel existence offered by St. Louis. Clearly these people never took a third grade field trip to the St. Louis Zoo before it banned Big Johnson t-shirts. Or scanned the national statistics on rickets prevention.

Anyway, I made it all the way through, so I'm cultural now. How many episodes of the Kardashians does that buy me?

The Amazing Race

Is it weird that I was involved in about a 20 minute conversation about Miranda Cosgrove's race today? No need to answer that, actually. It's weird that I even had occasion to type the words Miranda Cosgrove just now. But anyway, the subject came up not because I'm a child molester but because I was flipping channels and iCarly went by, which I had always assumed was Carly Simon's bid for the youth vote, but turned out to be a show starring the little girl from School of Rock who everyone assumed would never work again and would end up cracked out and pregnant at 19. Anyway, that's Miranda Cosgrove. And no one seems to know if she's part Asian. The internet has a lot to say about the subject, but nothing conclusive. Although her father is a dry cleaner, which seems suspicious. There's also an epic rant by someone who is outraged that she WON'T JUST ADMIT SHE'S NOT WHITE! I wonder if there's speculation about my ethnicity out there on the internet. I am part Inuit, in case you care.

Things Fall Apart

Two weekends ago, the fan in my guest bathroom suddenly started dripping water. I know this because I was experiencing a bout of nausea in there at the time, and took a drop right to the back of my head. Several old issues of Vanity Fair were also harmed in the process.

Then last weekend my phone suddenly went crazy. The touchpad realigned itself such that whichever button you hit, it reads it as some other button. This made for some really fascinating text messages, but also meant that I could no longer access my contacts. (The "contacts" button apparently realigned as nothing.)

Oh, and the plants in the front yard have died again. That makes nine dead plants in two years. I'm a botanical serial killer.

On a Roll

I went to the roller derby last night. It was all right. There was no blood or anything. Nobody even seemed to get injured, really. There were some fun body slams, though. And they did that whip maneuver from the Drew Barrymore movie I've watched fifteen non-consecutive minutes of on HBO. I don't know, I guess I was expecting it to be a lot more intense. There were lots of breaks in the action, including a halftime show with a ridiculously low-key juggler and some balloon-related games for children, which I feared would result in suffocation. Oh, and there were mascots, some of whom I could not discern as mascots until it was announced that they were such.

The derby names varied in quality as well. For every Beth Amphetamine there was a Bork Bork Bork, which I frankly don't even understand what it means, unless it's a reference to the controversial confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. I have to give some credit to T.S. Helliot for the literary aspirations, though.

In Which I Finally Get My Fill Of Pictures of Switzerland

This is it, I swear. Back to normal content soon. I use both the terms "normal" and "content" loosely, obviously.



This is the "peace clock." They list it as some kind of major attraction in Geneva, and when you get there it's just a flower bed with clock hands on it. I actually think my mom has bigger flower beds. None with clock hands, admittedly.

They have these really funky trees in Geneva. They kind of look like they're dead, but I am assured they are not.

This is their art museum. Actually, they call it an art and history museum, but I must have missed the history. Which means I will be doomed to repeat it, I guess.

This is a big park near the old part of the city. It's got a big sculpture dedicated to the Reformation in it. And a Reformation Museum. They really, really like the Reformation.

This is actually kind of hard to explain. But they have this archaeological site under the cathedral where they've dug up parts of all of the other buildings that were there before the current cathedral. This was the floor of some other cathedral. Meanwhile, I can't even get ONE cathedral to call my own. Life is so unfair.

Photos of Geneva Until You Beg for Mercy

Here are a few more. These deal largely with the Cathedral, but also with some other things that I don't really know what they are.



This is the front of the cathedral. I guess they remodeled it like ten or fifteen times as different religious movements came into vogue, so it's not the original facade. Still, it's kind of cute, though.

Here's a view from the cathedral tower. Doesn't the railing seem like crazy low, such that one could easily fall over it? That's sure how it seemed when I was up there.

This is the fanciest part of the cathedral. I mean, it's a cathedral, so it's all fairly fancy, but like Reformation fancy, not like Rococo fancy. A lot of gray stone.

As I was walking through the Old Town, I went through a phase where I was taking pictures of pretty much every street I saw. They're just so much more picturesque than in the US! Eventually I started to feel stupid, though.

This was a cute tower in the Old Town area. I want my own tower. I could put stuff in it, like gold doubloons or something.

Postcards from the Edge

Here are some photos of Geneva, where I lost but then relocated my mind.



This is the view from our conference room of Mont Blanc. When it was clear out, you could see it, but some days it didn't look like it was there at all. I'm pretty sure it was, though.

This is the central atrium of our hotel. It was kind of pretty. I only thought of casting myself over the railing once or twice.

This is a view of the city from our conference room, including the cathedral up there on the hill. I climbed up to the top of the cathedral (via stairs, not like Spider Man) at a cost of 2 Swiss francs.

This is the hallway outside my room. I think I should become an architectural photographer.

Here is the view of the aqua jet from our conference room. It's like twenty stories high or something. You are not allowed to play in it like a lawn sprinkler; I asked.