PAgent’s Progress

All the cool kids are running over to the Madmen Yourself avatar generator these days to make hip new avatars with a swanky and sophisticated ’50s aesthetic.

I am no exception.

Pretty cool, huh?

It’s hot.

I really shouldn’t complain about the heat, because my office is air-conditioned, as is my house. Even my car has air conditioning. I need only be exposed to the oven-like temperatures when dashing in and out of buildings.

But I still complain. I have a proud, and thoroughly blended, genetic heritage, but I sometimes think that the Scandinavian blood of my forefathers has bred true. I like mountains, and cool weather. I like to play in the snow. Back when I could cross-country ski, I found it exhilarating. In short, I’d much rather be cold than hot.

I’m pretty damn far from cold right now. This sucks.

One thing about working with attorneys is that after a few years you begin to really admire how well some of them can handle people. Whether it’s a client, another attorney, or some government employee, there are attorneys who can just very sweetly have them eating out of their hands in short order.

Of course, a few years after that, it occurs to you to wonder how often they’re manipulating YOU as well.

Our daughter is 13. She has managed to get herself grounded, with no screen time, the entire month of July. With the end finally in sight, she managed to get that grounding extended an additional two weeks. For a gifted child, she can be astonishingly dense.

I placed 3rd out of 11 entries in a text contest over at Worth1000. Hop on over and read my entry, if you want.

The night before I left for San Diego, I was running around like a Warner Brothers character, trying to get my ducks in a row before my flight. One of the errands I ran was to Costco.

At Costco, I grabbed all the prescriptions that were ready, some milk, some eggs, and some peaches, and headed for the checkout.

Weaving through all the chaos, I spotted a checker with only one cart waiting. I zipped over and got in line behind her. A few seconds later, I heard “Excuse me?”

I turned around to see a petite woman looking at me.

Yes? I said.

“Are you with her?” she asked, indicating the woman in front of me.

No. I said.

“You just cut in front of me.” She didn’t seem particularly angry, just put out.

I’m terribly sorry! I said, and hurriedly moved back so she could get in line in front of me. It was very embarrassing. I can’t believe I didn’t see her there. No harm, though, since she had even fewer items than I did.

Except, she waited until she got to the checker, and the checker had rung up all her items, before turning to look past me and say “Hey! Pablo!”

What the hell? She was making no move to pay. While the checker looked at her expectantly, she was waving languidly to someone over in electronics. It turns out her partner and little boy were over there watching TV. When they finally ambled over, the husband was apparently supposed to pay, but he didn’t have any idea how to do it. “Use the Amex card” she snapped. And then on top of that, they had to pick up a laptop, so someone had to go get it from the back of the store, and we waited.

I’m not saying I should have cut her off. I’m not even saying she shouldn’t have called me on it. I’m just saying that if you’re going to make a stink about someone with three items getting in front of you in line, you damn well better get your own ass through checkout with some kind of intention. And for God’s sake, be prepared to pay for your stuff once the checker actually checks it.

Jerk.

I hate to travel, so when I actually make myself get on one of those new-fangled aeroplanes to go somewhere, I feel obligated to at least TRY to do something while I’m there. In this case, I was in San Diego for a meeting (the annual meeting of the National Association of Patent Practitioners, in point of fact). Knowing that I would be in San Diego, my sister advised me to get some great Mexican food while I was there.

This is a great idea, in theory. In practice, I’m sitting in a hotel without a car and with little free time. Nevertheless, I did some web searching looking for an appropriately well-reviewed Mexican place within walking distance.

A little digging and I found Pokez. Pokez had an abundance of great reviews on Yelp, but frankly, it was quite a hike. I opted for something closer.

So, Sunday night I started walking. The combination of heat and humidity in San Diego triggered the kind of perspiration that is usually reserved for cartoons and bad comedies. Nonetheless I soldiered on. I passed a Hard Rock Cafe, I passed some excellent-looking Indian restaurants, I passed the “Bare Back Grill” (but not without a careful examination). Finally, I decided I was just going to press on until I got to where I really wanted to go, Pokez.

When I got there, soaking wet and looking like a tourist, I was a little intimidated. “Eclectic” is perhaps too kind a phrase. It looks like a horde of Latino-skateboarder-graffiti-writing-art-students exploded inside it. The servers are large, and heavily tattooed. My sensible side almost made me turn around and leave. But dammit, I’m in my forties. If I don’t start having adventures now, when will I have them?

So I stayed. The server brought me some chips and homemade salsa, thin and freshly made. When he asked me if I had decided, I asked him if he recommended the chimichanga or the mexican steak. He looked pained, and said “It depends on if you want something crunchy, or like a whole plate.”

Look, I said, I’m just looking for something really tasty. I don’t care if it’s crunchy or not.

“Well, the mexican steak is pretty tasty”. I’ll have that, I said.

What I got was a platter with a mound of chorizo sausage sauteed with chunks of carne asada, fresh tomatoes and onions. The sides were vegetarian refried beans topped with jack cheese, mexican rice, and some lightly cooked cabbage.

The cabbage was exquisite. It was barely blanched, so it still had just a tiny bit of crunch. The seasoning was so delicate that you could still taste the sweetness of the cabbage. The beans were perfectly ordinary, except that the cheese melted on top had a great flavor and really added to the flavor. The rice was, well, rice.

But the saute was incredible. The chorizo acted like a seasoning for the already flavorful carne asada, creating a mix of flavors and textures that were heavenly. Toss in the onions and the tomatoes, which exploded in your mouth in little bursts of hot tomatoey goodness, and this was something very special. Paired with the hot flour tortillas, it was an almost religious experience.

This was about as far as I could go from a chain restaurant like Chi-Chi’s, in nearly every sense of the word. The food was fresh and delicious, and staff was authentic (authentically what, I’m not quite sure) and I’m pretty sure I was the only tourist in the place. Awesome.

Like I said, I’m in my forties. I need to start taking more chances. If they keep turning out as well as this one did, it could be habit-forming.

Strange Trip continued…

My last day of travel remains a blur in my memory. I remember sitting in a car seat that seemed to have become welded to my frame. I was always soaked with sweat. There was a persistent itch between my shoulder blades that never seemed to go away. In fact, I seemed to have that itch for the better part of the next several years. I suspect some kind of interstate-travel-spawned fungus took up residence in my skin as it pressed up against the soggy upholstery for so many days.

I think I started cackling when I crossed into Wisconsin. I may or may not have started yelling “MOOOOOO!!!” out the window, while making unfair comparisons between Wisconsin dairy products and those from Tillamook, Oregon.

While planning my route through Illinois, I noticed several highways marked “Tollway”. What was this? A highway you had to PAY to use? I’d never seen such a thing. Toll bridges, sure, and the occasional state ferry, but a road that actually charged a toll for access? I was highly suspicious, and resolved to steer clear of these playgrounds of the devil.

Fortunately, I could turn south from Madison and run straight down to Bloomington, then skip east on I-74 to get to Champaign. This provided my first view of Illinois farmland, the giant rectangles of corn and soybeans that extended for mile after mile after mile. The highway occasionally zipped through some tiny little community, but mostly the population density was uniformly even and uniformly thin. The terrain was dead flat, the road was dead straight, and you could have drawn the horizon with a straight-edge. This was the precise opposite of a mountain range. No, the opposite of peaks and hills wasn’t some kind of deep chasm; it was this tabletop topography, this ironing board evenness, that was the antithesis of mountains. I looked at the flat miles speeding by and my soul died a little bit.

Finally, I pulled into Champaign, and kept going. I knew almost nothing about Champaign, except that it was the larger and more commercial of the two sister cities. So, I drove east to Urbana, and checked into a motel off the freeway for the night.

The next morning, local paper in hand, I started looking for a place to live. Time was of the essence, as I couldn’t keep paying for motel rooms, and also because I half-expected to see the rear window of my car smashed in every single morning, with all my earthly belongings missing. Looking at the apartments for rent, I considered my basic criteria for housing:

1. Affordable
2. Quiet
3. Near a grocery store
4. Convenient to campus

If you have spent any time at all on college campuses, you will immediately recognize that nos. 1, 2, and 3 are largely incompatible with no. 4. Knowing myself, especially after my last year of college, I knew that no. 2 would be the most critical for my mental health.

I quickly eliminated every apartment in Champaign. I liked smaller towns, and although the two cities had merged together like lumps of warm Play-Doh, Urbana clearly remained the country cousin of Champaign. I then drew a large circle around the University, and eliminated any apartments within that circle. This definitely limited my options, but that was the point, wasn’t it? I selected the most attractive-sounding apartment out of the remaining ads, and drove out to see it.

The apartment building was located in a residential area of established homes and tall trees. It was one block away from a supermarket, and just down the street from a shopping area with a K-Mart and a video store. The vacant one-bedroom unit was on the third and top floor of the building, on a corner (eliminating the noise from one entire neighbor). The layout was very spare and very cute, and it was furnished with some of the most astonishingly cheap press-board furniture I had ever seen.

And it was quiet. I was on the outskirts of southeast Urbana. It would have been hard to get any further from the University and still remain within the city limits. I’d have to commute to school, sure, but it would be well worth it if I could avoid the kind of noise-induced stress I had experienced while living in the dorms.

I went down to my little Mazda GLC, and pulled the wad of cash out from under the driver’s seat. Sitting down with the building manager, I filled out the paperwork, counted out first and last month’s rent, and a security deposit, and got a key.

It wasn’t a lot of fun carrying everything I owned up two flights of stairs, but my euphoria at being done travelling, my joy at having a place made it quick work. No more motels! No more long days on the highway! I sat on the ugly brown couch, surrounded by boxes of stuff, and sighed.

In nearly every possible way, my journey from Washington state had been a profound transition. I’d left my comfort zone, left every place I’d ever lived, and traveled 2,500 miles to an alien environment. I had a place to live, by myself. Soon, I’d be starting graduate school, in what I had been assured was one of the toughest graduate schools for chemistry in the country.

My long strange trip was just beginning.

To be continued….