Sunday, January 19, 2014

Top of the World

So it's been over a week since my last update, but I've told myself that I'll start doing this regularly from now on.  The nice part about living alone is that you have your privacy, which is nice when you want some quiet time or have a full-on air guitar rock concert in your living room without explaining yourself to anyone.  The unfortunate part is that nothing too exciting happens until you self-initiate something, usually involving other people.  To ensure a healthy supply of blogging material each week, it looks like I'll be going out and having more adventures from now on.

Us Air Guitar Championships Tickets
Time to put one dream on hold.  For now.

Last Saturday, recent graduate Kyle Manis '12 came down to visit us and show us around some local breweries.  One of these places offered tours, which sounded like a great idea until we got there and realized the entire venue was completely visible from the bar.  Unless the tour brought you into the basement where they keep a tree full of magical Beer Elves, we couldn't imagine anything that would make it worth the time and money. 
Keebler Elves, Keebler Hollow Tree
"It's a sweatshop down there. Send help."
The night was topped off with a relaxing dip in our hot tub, a sentence I'm pretty sure most other Webb interns, let alone most residents of the United States, aren't able to say right now.

The morning saw me off on an adventure as I tried to find a nearby comic store, which was only a few minutes away by car.  Luckily, the car2go service I signed up for last year never expires, so I only had to walk a few blocks to find one.  Unluckily, I picked the one car that decided it had engine problems about four seconds after I started driving.  Since the only symptoms I noticed were a flashing light and a constant alarm noise, I decided to continue my trip and use the experience as a chance to live out some childhood fighter pilot fantasies.
Some people break the sound barrier, I can't even break the speed limit.
 To my agonizing disappointment, I discovered that the little handle next to my seat was in fact the emergency brake and not an ejector seat control.  Nevertheless, I managed to park safely at my destination without the car exploding into an environmentally-friendly ball of flames.  I wasn't particularly thrilled with the idea of driving back home in a car that just spent the past ten minutes telling me how broken it was, so I was met with a degree of relief when I came back later to find out the car was already reserved by somebody else.  With that hot mess officially someone else's problem and nary a trolley station in sight, I steeled my will and began the long walk home.  About an hour later, I managed to drag my lazy carcass back to civilization where I was able to get home relatively easily.

On Wednesday, Connor and Andrew brought me along with them to go rock climbing.  I was pretty thrilled to go out and do something physical for a change, especially if it let me pretend to be Spider-Man for an hour.  Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that my abilities and physical condition gave me more in common with Peter Parker than his alter-ego.

spiderman stunt gone wrong
Nailed it.
After flailing around as a human bait-and-tackle for a couple hours, I dragged myself to the couch and promptly passed out.  The next morning, I woke to find out my hands were so exhausted from desperately clinging on to the wall for dear life that I could barely use them, especially for things that involved any sort of grip.  While this normally would only be an inconvenience, society has dictated that zippered and buttoned pants are part of proper workplace attire almost everywhere.

spiderman-desk
Unless this guy is your boss. He doesn't believe in zippers either.

Come Friday, Connor asked me if I wanted to go to a different place for what they call bouldering.  To my layman's understanding, the main difference between rock climbing and bouldering is that in the former you (ideally) climb high up with a harness attached, while in the latter you stay relatively close to the ground and go up on your own.  This allowed for a lot more actual climbing in the same amount of time, and is apparently really good practice.  The unfortunate side effect was the constant friction of the rocks made my hands look like I high-fived a belt sander.  But it was a great way to spend the night, and I got some work on my much-lacking skills as a climber.
http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5etd5kDIY1qaqps8o1_500.png
It's all about the finger strength.

The next day, Connor, Zach, Dave and I drove out into the middle of nowhere to go hiking up a mountain.  After deciding that our slowest runner was designated mountain lion bait, we set out on our journey to climb Mt. Whatchamacallit.  The trail itself vacillated between a sparse desert complete with cacti and tumbleweeds and areas covered in sun-bleached dead trees, lending to a scene not unlike the forests from The Wizard of Oz.  After a few minutes of walking through these trees, our wildlife concerns made an appropriate switch from mountain lions to flying monkeys.

http://www.leslisstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Moon-flying-monkeys1.jpg
The whole place gets so much worse after sundown.


That night was spent watching V/H/S 2, a "horror" movie that was pretty well done but hard to take seriously.  So we're on the same page here, one section was shot entirely as a zombie with a Go-Pro on his head.  While this movie was no Paranormal Activity, I learned quickly enough that the quality of a movie's thrills don't matter much at all when you're faced with a walk home in the dark to an empty apartment.
Even this can be freaking terrifying with the right environment.
After coming home to a fresh pair of pants, I had a relaxing night's sleep with every light in the apartment on and all my furniture barricading the door. 

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