The Year of Wanderlust

Like many people, I get reflective at the end of the year. This year, however, I did a little reflecting in a way I had never done before: blog-style. I started blogging back on Groundhog Day of 2008 and I've been pretty consistent about it over the year, so I just sat down and read my entire blog from the end back to the beginning and overall I think it captures the overall shape of my 2008.

It was an interesting way to look at my year - to see the things I felt like I just had to put up for the whole world to be able to see. Why, for instance, did I feel like the whole world should see the half-stache? Or that the end of Gilmore Girls left me an emotional wreck? Or that I am a humongous nerd?

There are a few things that I compulsively wrote about this year - my broken foot, Nintendo records, the Jazz, scoring free stuff - and there were some drafts that I never got around to finishing (my first and last Capoeira lesson, my guided tour of the best and worst of Detroit, spending the night in the Campinas bus terminal). But the entry that seems to represent my 2008 more than any other was a little post written on August 5th on the ancient computer in the public library of Cambridge, New York entitled Wanderlust.

When I think back on 2008 (and on this whole period of my life), I will think about think about all the crazy wandering I did and all the amazing places I got to see from Iguaçú Falls and the Amazon River to The Breakers and Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes. I visited four countries, fifteen U.S. states, nine Brazilian states, and some of the worlds great cities: Chicago, Seattle, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Paulo, New York City, Detroit (link missing, since I never finished it), Minneapolis.

This picture, taken at the Festa de São João in Salvador, Brazil, is probably my favorite picture from my wanderings this year.

I'm sure the next year will take me wandering to some interesting places, but I don't know if I can top last summer. But it's always more fun to travel with a buddy or two, so if anyone wants to head to the Upper Peninsula or Washington D.C. or New Orleans or anywhere else, lets team up. It's like Kim Novak says in Vertigo: "Only one is a wanderer. Two are always going somewhere."

¡Cumpleaños!

This year I wasn't able to make it back to Utah for Christmas and I didn't want to be family-less in Michigan, so I decided to split the difference and head to my sister Emily's house in Minnesota. One of the advantages of being with Emily around Christmas time is that you get to double up on the festivities since her birthday is on the 22nd (a.k.a. today). We had some grandiose birthday plans (Costco trip, Chuck E. Cheese dinner) that had to be scrapped when my nephew Braden came home sick from school (not fake-sick, it was throwing up-sick - trust me). So instead we just hung around the house all day, which is nice because I only get to see her and her family once every year or two.

When I was growing up, I always did the convenient birthday/Christmas gift cop-out, but this year I decided that I should get her genuine birthday-only present, since she was being nice enough to put me up for Christmas. After a great deal of soul-searching I decided to go with a piñata. You see, when I first mentioned that I might be coming for her birthday/Christmas, I asked if she had any big birthday plans, and she said she was thinking of making herself a paper-mâché piñata (there's a lot of accent marks in two words) because she's made a bunch for her kids and she decided that it's her party and she'll have a piñata if she wants to. But when I spoke with her just before leaving Ann Arbor, she said that she forgot all about it and never got around to it. But this is America and everyone should entitled to a birthday piñata, so there you go.

This couldn't quite make up for a lost trip to Chuck E. Cheese, but it was a reasonable facsimile:

When it broke open (at my own hands, I must admit) it was a pretty clean break, so Emily suggested that maybe we could reload and rechristen it as a Christmas Eve Piñata. ¡I'm down!

Happy birthday, Em! Love ya!

P.S. - Emily is doing this running series of Christmas memories on her blog, and she included this picture:

If you are trying to put a date on this picture, I think the flannel shirts are a pretty good place to start your investigation.

People Take Pictures of the Winter

Last night Ann Arbor got dumped on. By snow. Lots of it. Nevertheless, I still had to head over to school at 10:00 a.m. to take one last test (a placement test to waive my German diction requirement - I passed). I've lived in Ann Arbor for about a year and a half now and it seems to me that no one has ever told the city that if you plow the road, it will be driveable. I'm just sayin'. When I got to the music building the parking lot had not been plowed, and the snow on the ground came up to the bottom of the car door:

Let's just say I'm glad I'm not still in my walking boot (I just returned it to the Student Health Center -hooray!). I've taken other random pictures of winter stuff recently. It's like The Kinks once said: "People take pictures of the summer [or in this case, winter] just in case someone thought they had missed it, and to prove that it really existed." If you liked the picture above, here are some other winter pictures you might enjoy - but you don't have to take my word for it:

This is the pond outside the music building. I've been really fascinated by it this winter I've taken one picture of it each day to chart it's progress as it has frozen over. On this particular day, someone slid a picnic table out onto the ice.

As my friend Mike McMurtrey pointed out, aren't geese supposed to fly south? If you're favorite hangout has frozen over, I think that's a good time to think about migrating.

Sometimes when you've been shut up in the library for a long time and you're a little burned out, it's nice to look out and see a little Norman Rockwell-type scene.

I mentioned the ward mingle on Sunday in a previous post, and this handsome Yule Log cake was definitely the star of the show. It arrived at the mingle via Martha, who had gotten it from Phil, who had gotten it from a friend, who had gotten it from Zingerman's, a famous gourmet bakery in Ann Arbor. A bunch of people went straight for it, and as they started eating it (I won't name any names) they started making faces and noticed that it had a peculiar flavor to it. Long story short, it had a pretty good amount of rum in it. Elizabeth Downie quickly swooped in and took it back into the kitchen so no one would mistakenly (or not mistakenly) eat any more of it. A few days later I was at the institute and popped in the kitchen and it was still on the counter. I promptly threw it in the trash. I just hope Brother Elms hadn't grabbed a piece in the meantime.

My parents mailed me this fantastic Utah Jazz Santa hat a few weeks ago and I've been wearing it steadily ever since. However, tonight it will make it's most important appearance of all: at the Palace of Auburn Hills as the Jazz face the Detroit Pistons. The Jazz play in Detroit but once a year and believe me, I've had this date circled on my calendar since the day they first posted the NBA season schedule. I need to show my Jazz pride, but at the same time I need to be judicious about it, since I am going to the site of the worst brawl in the history of professional sports. Thankfully, Ron Artest isn't playing tonight and we're way up in the nosebleed section ($9 tickets, baby!) so if a riot breaks out I'll probably not be in the fray.

GO JAZZ!!!!!

Sabali

One of my favorite web sites is Metacritic.com. It's similar to Rottentomatoes.com, another site I refer to a lot, but in addition to movie reviews, Metacritic also gathers and compiles television, video game, and music reviews. Over the last few years I have found some of my favorite music by looking at the albums that get outstanding overall scores from music reviewers.

I just discovered a song yesterday via Metacritic that I've listened to it several dozen times already. It's called "Sabali" by Amadou & Mariam, a blind husband-wife duo from Mali. What piqued my interest was produced/co-written by the ever-fascinating Damon Albarn, whose diverse pedigree includes Blur, Gorillaz, and The Good, The Bad, and the Queen.

I always like to pass along a recommendation, so check out "Sabali":



Also, if you're looking for some off-beat Christmas music, check out "Christmas at the Zoo" by The Flaming Lips:



Have a nice day. If you're like me, your day will include several more playings of "Sabali."

P.S. - I've also been introduced to a lot of great music by the playlist on Jessica Allen's blog. Check it out.

Day of Rest

Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, but it seems like recently it's become one of the most exhausting days of the week. For example, yesterday I:

• Woke up at 7:00 a.m. to get to the Methodist church in downtown Ann Arbor for an 8:15 rehearsal. They were performing the first part of Handel's Messiah and they hired me to beef up the otherwise paltry tenor section. We did two services, at 9:30 and 11:15.

• Sprinted to my car and zoomed to my ward out in Ypsilanti, arriving five minutes before the meeting started at 1:00. It was the ward Christmas program, which got dropped in my lap even though I'm not the ward choir director, so I had to conduct two choir pieces for the first time, plus sing a solo number that I hadn't looked at until the day before (I guess I can't blame the Sunday time crunch for that little detail). For all its thrown-togetherness, the program came off quite well.

• Ran home at 4:30 to prepare foodstuffs for the ward mingle. The monthly mingle is under my committee's jurisdiction, so I arrived a little before 6:00 to help set up. The mingle started at 6:30 and I had my first meal of the day. The clean-up after the mingle lingered on until about 8:45.

At some point during the mingle, my foot was like, "Hey Brian, remember how I'm still broken? I've decided that I am done for the day." When I got home at the end of the day I just collapsed and needed to relax. One of the things that helps me relax the most is Mario 2, so I popped in the game and hit record on the VCR. Despite my fatigue, I (wait for it.... this is pretty much the whole reason why I wrote this post...) finally beat Mario 2 in UNDER 30 MINUTES! The 30 minute mark has been my white whale, and I finally harpooned it (sorry, lame metaphor). My previous world record time was 31:40, but I have now slashed it down to 29:54.

Speaking of world records, in November I mailed in another DVD with world record attempts for two other games, Maniac Mansion and A Boy and His Blob, to be evaluated by the game referee. Last week I got this email reply from him:

Brian,
I unfortunately have bad news. While your awesome Inaugural WR run for Maniac Mansion was fine [slight retweak in time but no biggie, my fault for poor wording] and I might add, quite awesome! [Never seen that twist with the film before] Unfortunately your Boy & His Blob runs started with the title screen and showed no bootup of the console or any dead air. As a result, they can regretfully not be verified, and to this, I apologize.

Sigh. This isn't the first time I've had problems with my record verification. However, it was nice to hear him gush about my Maniac Mansion run. I guess I'll have to re-record a few of the records, which is a pity because I don't know if I have another 8:00 minute complete run of A Boy and His Blob in me. But for now if you go to the video game world record site and search for my name, you'll get the following list:


You probably started reading this post thinking that there would be some kind of lesson or moral to it all. I'm sorry if that is the case - I got nothin'. If you can think of a moral to the story (besides the obvious one: Brian is a big nerd), feel free to comment below.

Merry moralizing to all, and to all a good night.

Free at Last

This picture was taken just after I put a shoe on my right foot for the first time since October 13th. Hallelujah, I'm out of the boot!

I went for one last round of x-rays on Friday and the fracture had healed so well that the doctor told me that staying in the boot was no longer necessary and would even be detrimental, since it limits the range of motion of my foot as it continues to heal. I was soooooo ready to get out of that boot for so many reasons. It's designers obviously didn't have a Michigan winter in mind when they crafted that open-toe look, and despite a wool sock, fleece booty, and plastic bag wrapped around it, my foot was still getting soaked everyday. And my foot was still aching at the end of the day, but it seemed like it more due to the boot that the fracture.

My unbooted foot made its debut at Maggie's flute recital on Friday night. It felt so strange and small to have a shoe on my right foot, and I had no feel for walking on it at all. You see, the boot has a rounded heel and to walk in it you step on the heel and it rolls forward to the toe. So at the recital I was stepping onto the heel and trying to roll my foot forward with marginally successful results. Plus the boot made my right leg an inch or so taller than my other leg, so I had gotten used to keeping my knee slightly bent at an odd angle and it took me a while to get used to straightening out my leg in stride. Needless to say I was getting plenty of weird looks from strangers and laughs from my (so-called) friends (it's okay, I'm over it now). It looked something like this:



But I've been out of the boot for three full days now and I'm walking normally again, and more importantly, pain-free. Even though I'm not in the boot, I've still got a fracture in my metatarsal, so I've got to take it easy for several weeks.

Nevertheless, I can't believe how well this whole broken bone experience has gone. When I first heard the doctor say the word "broken" I thought that my life would be completely upended and I would be out of commission for quite a while. Yet here I am less than two months later and I'm pretty much back to normal again. That's a tremendous blessing.

P.S. - I think it is no mere coincidence that Deron Williams looked like his old, pre-foot injury self on Friday night as the Jazz completely destroyed the Raptors on ESPN. Our foot injuries have somehow been cosmically linked, and I knew that D-Will would have a monster game on the day that I finally got my boot off. I hope that I don't have to suffer/recover from a quad injury so that we can finally get Boozer back.

Soirée Serenade

I performed a little number at my ward's Christmas dinner/party/dance (aka The Hill Street Soirée) this weekend. Feeling the Christmas Spirit, I thought that I would post it here. (Sorry the video is so dark, but it was really dark in person, too.)



This is the first Christmas, aside from my mission, for which I will not be home (I'm visiting my sister Emily in Minnesota), so I paid tribute to my Utah roots by wearing my new Utah Jazz Santa hat, courtesy of my mom and dad.

The real highlight of the entire evening, however, came later on. Elizabeth Downie bought one of our Nintendos, so Seth brought it to the Soirée to give it to her there. We took it into the church's media library just to make sure that it would work, and all of a sudden a Dr. Mario party broke out. This was great because (a) I don't like dancing (although I was already covered by the broken foot excuse) and (b) it gave me yet another chance to rematch Elizabeth. Head-to-head play consists of a best of five series, and in our first match I crushed her in the first two games, but then I suffered the worse collapse since the Yankees/Red Sox series in 2004 and Elizabeth won the next three. However, later on we played again and in front of a roomful of witnesses, including the bishop, I beat her 3-1. I probably got a little bit too excited/trash-talky about it, but I don't beat her very often so I gotta flaunt it when I got it.

Priceless

Check out this priceless clip from last night's Pushing Daisies. Let me set it up a little bit:

Ned and Olive have just won first place in a "Comfort Food" contest with one of their pies from their restaurant, The Pie Hole. Olive is in love with Ned, but he is oblivious because he is in love with a girl named Chuck. However, Olive still hold out hope that one day Ned will finally fall for her.



How can you not love a show with moments like that? Maybe if we all start become super-hardcore about watching the show and tell all of our friends, ABC will un-cancel it. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

You can watch all of the episodes that have aired so far from the second season for free at abc.com (click on "Full Episodes" and then "Pushing Daisies").

AN APOLOGY!!!!!... I mean, "an apology"

This morning I gave a presentation in one of my classes and it went really well. However, as I was leaving the classroom, the teacher asked me to stay for a moment to talk to her. No, I wasn't in trouble. What she told me went something like this:

"You have an incredibly loud speaking voice. It's really intense to deal with in a 15-minute presentation, and it will be even more so when you are teaching a full-length class. Has anyone ever told you that your voice is really loud?"

Yes, they have. Lots of times. I'm not very self-conscious by nature, but when people bring up my crazy loud voice, I feel really bad. I don't know what the deal with my voice is. I'm not trying to speak super-loud or project really well - it's just the natural volume of my voice (as Paris Geller always has to tell everyone). And you might expect that I would have a mega-huge singing voice to go along with it, but not really.

My voice hasn't always been this loud. I went to Seattle earlier this year and saw my aunt and uncle there for the first time in a few years, and my aunt asked me, "So what happened to your voice? It didn't used to be so big!"

I can't pinpoint an exact time when I suddenly started talking louder, but I think it has definitely been a gradual process since I returned home from my mission six years ago. In fact, I think my voice has gotten louder as my personality has gotten louder. I wasn't always the mega-spaz with whirlwind energy that I am now. I used to be pretty mellow and relatively subdued. But I think the turning point was when I befriended a young man named Anthony T. Buck. As anyone who knows Mr. Buck can attest, to say that he is "high energy" would be a gross understatement. I daresay he is quite boisterous, and is absolutely unashamed of how quirky (read: weird) he can be. I really admire how he always seems to be 100% himself, his personality undiluted by inhibition. As we started hanging out more and more, I felt like my personality was becoming less muted and more Technicolor-bright. At times it felt like the two of us had some kind of Persona-style personality meld going on, with lots of wondering, "Did I get that quirk from Anthony or did I give it to him?" And somewhere along the line, my speaking voice got wicked loud.

SO YES, I KNOW THAT I HAVE A REALLY LOUD... Sorry, let me try again. So yes, I know I have a really loud voice and I'm trying to keep it under control. I apologize to all those who have been assaulted by my excessive decibel levels over the years. At least there's a silver lining: my teacher did point out that "at least your audience won't fall asleep!"

(My roommate Seth just gave me a good idea - I could get a trumpet mute and put in over my mouth. Not only would that make me quieter, but it would make me sound like Charlie Brown's teacher. It's a win-win.)

Update: This morning I made a phone call in the lounge of the music building and when I said "Hi," this guy a few feet away from me jumped just a little bit. Guess I have more work to do than I thought.