Friday
Land at LAX. Arrive in Westwood on Flyaway. Get picked up by Kim. Talk until 3am at Westgate. Sleep.
Saturday
Print card prototypes at Kinkos. Eat lunch with Bino at Western Bagel. Attend Protospiel West with Bill and Jeff. Playtest Stones and Lords of Scotland. Playtest 7 Wanders and Suitcases. Catch a ride back with Matt. Revise games. Sleep.
Sunday
Breakfast with Michael at Western Bagel. Ride with Michael to Protospiel West. Playtest Darrin's game Corespace. Meet David and Marissa. Playtest revised Stones and Lords of Scotland. Playtest David's Villages and Virgins. Eat full rack of ribs at Cecil's. Get a ride back with Michael. Sleep.
Monday
Brainstorm revisions to Village and Virgins. Head to UCLA. Eat lunch. Return books to the library. Check out office. Walk to Westwood village. Cross paths with Adam and Io. Pick up journals at Flax. Study at ISO. Talk with Jeff. Get a ride back with Jeff. Talk with Shelby until 3am. Sleep.
Tuesday
Bus to campus. Meet Enid for lunch. Cross paths with Adam again. Talk with Scott. Meet with Andy. Write down notes. Get takeout from Gushi. Meet up with Joe and Christina. Head back to Westgate. Talk. Meet Michael at Literati. Play Stones. Retheme it to Pirates. Head back to Westgate. Talk with Shelby. Sleep.
Wednesday
Walk to the federal building. Run to Westwood. Catch the 761. Meet Trista in Van Nuys. Lunch at Ramen Nippon. Ride back to Westgate. Bus to campus. Work at office. Dinner with Fred at Ambala Dhaba. Head back to Kerckhoff. Work in office until 2am. Get a ride back with Fred. Sleep.
Thursday
Bus to UCLA. Stop by office. Talk to Brian. Lunch at Ackerman. Run into Jeff. Study at management library with Jeff. Video chat with Hye-Jee. Research call numbers. Check out books at YRL. Head back to Westgate. Dine with Kim and Shelby. Talk for a while. Sleep.
Friday
Head to UCLA. Grab coffee. Attend Andy's talk on leadership. Meet with Tamlyn. Research call numbers. Check out books at YRL and Powell. Ride with Trista to Monsoon. Eat dinner with Trista, Larry and permaculture folks. Bus back to Westgate. Goth up. Go out to Spaceland with Kim and David. Listen to Shiloe. Skip Ruin. Eat at Swinger in Beverly Hills. Return to Westgate. Take off makeup. Sleep.
Saturday
Pack. Clean up. Get Santouka with Bill. Cafe at Literati. Playtest Lords of Scotland. Chat with Joe and Lisa. Pick up baggage. Get dropped off at LAX. Catch my flight. Talk with Toni. Help Kate contact her ride. Picked up by dad. Drive home. Sleep.
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The most recent readings, complements of Barnes & Noble: Yesterday: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (2008) *Couldn't pass up the new ($4m advance) book by the guru to today's intelligentsia. November 20th-25th: Do Gentleman Really Prefer Blonds? by Jena Pincott (2008) *Abridged psychological explanations for common-sense sexual competition wisdom November 19th - : Histories, Book I, by Herodotus (425 BC) *The first book in the long bibliography for my dissertation - the great plunge into re-reading everything begins. November 18th: Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do by Cass Sunstein (2001) *A guide to deliberative democracy in light of academic studies of social/political behavior November 17th: 366 readings from Taoism And Confucianism by The Global Spirit Library (2000) *Just the right translation of the Tao Te Ching to speak to my ruminations on destiny November 16th: Aesop's Fables by Aesop (560 BC) *I wish I could write (and think in) fables. | |
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Of the major things in my life, here's what's going on:
Evertide Games - Straw is available in stores, Court of the Medici is going to the printers, Stacket and Stones are ready to be pitched to publishers and a new coin game is in the works.
My Dissertation - The central argument is finally sound, I figured out how to organize the paper to write it and I set up a wiki to compose my first draft. A link to the wiki will emerge in a week or two.
Philosophy - Two months ago, I started to think about the concept of destiny. What started off as a thought experiment then turned into a belief. Now, everything (particularly ethics) is completely turned upside down by my conviction that everything happens exactly as it has to happen and cannot happen any other way. Still working on it.
Part-Time Employment - Hours are good, pay is good, work environment is good, lunch is included and passion is missing.
Romance - Now single for the longest time since Freshman year of college and not looking like it will change anytime soon. On the upside, I'm very sure about what I want. On the downside, I'm very sure about what I want.
Life with Parents - Surprisingly rewarding. I have much to be thankful for.
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[... continued]
In order to make sure that at least one of us remains in the library, Ben and I split lunch time. Lunch time in the school begins soon after I arrive for work and goes until about 1pm. The students are broken up into three separate times to eat; 5th and 6th grade, 7th and 8th and then the entire high school over the course of the 100 or so minutes.
Usually Ben makes it to the cafeteria just at the beginning of lunch and is back before noon, while I try to make it before the high school rush. Once though, Ben said I should eat first (for some reason, I have since forgot). It was amazing to discover just how quiet the cafeteria gets during middle school lunch. Since the students rarely spend more than 15 minutes eating before they head outside or to the gym to play, most of cafeteria is empty except for the few middle school teachers.
High school lunch period is much more rancorous. The cafeteria is usually alive with noise when I arrive and most of the tables are full. When I don't make it early, I end up waiting in line outside the serving room along side the various different cliques that form there. Both the boys and the girls will not hesitate to jump forward in line to join their circle of friends while we all wait to be allowed into the food area by the teacher on duty (who regulates the flow of kids through the room).
The lunch crew puts together an entree each day, which seem to rotate through on about a monthly basis. Today it was gyros; yesterday it was chicken nuggets; before that meatball subs or spagetti and meatballs. There's been pizza, and chicken curry, meatloaf and turkey with mash potatoes. It's always a bit of a surprise to find out what's for lunch, but they typically offer the triffecta of a meat, a vegetable and a starch each day. There is also sandwich making meats, cookies, bagels, muffins, a fruit salad, yogurt, soup and a salad bar available every day. And, ice cream if you want to pay cash.
The school allows me to have lunch each day for free like the other faculty, so I consider myself lucky. It is nice to not have to worry about what to eat for my first meal, even if sometimes the food isn't quite on the top of the tasty chart. But, I make due with fruit, vegetables and meat each day. I have decided to add some other starches back into my diet recently not because I particularly like how they taste, but because I'm afraid that I might wither away otherwise.
After getting food, I sit down with the other faculty members around one of the four or so closest tables to the food. I've wondered what it would be like if I ventured into the back of the cafeteria further to sit down at one of the kids tables. But, I have yet to find a sufficient reason to experiment with such behavior. Seeing how I know certain students from all the time they spend in the library, I feel like I would fall into a bit of a dilemma when having to choose where to sit. Perhaps a random pattern of pre-determined tables would be the best way to solve that problem... but I still have yet to figure out what exactly I would hope to discover by doing so, so I have stuck with finding a place among the faculty.
By now, I've gotten a chance to meet a good deal of the faculty through lunch time, and I've developed my favorites. Some people are simply easier to talk to than others, and some are the kind you want to avoid getting into a conversation with altogether. But, I also like to listen if others are discussing something interesting. Unfortunately, school activities seem to take up a majority of conversation; it's much less common that I find myself stuck in between a conversation about politics and I don't think that anyone besides me actually consciously attempts to talk about philosophical things.
When I finish eating, I bus my tray and refill my drink before I head back to the library. There's usually two ways to get back from the cafeteria, depending upon whether I want to go up stairs first or last. These days, the lower floors seem to be a lot better heated than the top/entry level floor (the back of the school is built on the edge of a hill) so I have been walking through the science and language wings and past the locker room doors on my way back to the library recently.
As is the case with most of the other buildings around here as well, it's always hard to find a temperature suitably warm for my tastes. For a couple of days after they first turned the heat on in October, the library was sweltering. It was so warm, we had to open up the back (fire exit) doors and windows in order to keep the room cool enough so that Frank and Jerry (who teach in the ESS learning center on the second floor of the library) wouldn't pass out. I'm not sure the cause exactly, but they needed to spend a couple of days with a mobile lift car in the middle of the library adjusting the heat valves in the rafters to get the temperature under control. Now, it is a little too cold for my liking, along with the rest of the top floor of the building alas.
On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, Ben is ready to leave almost as soon as I get back from lunch. [to be continued... ] | |
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After starting my part-time work at St. Luke's School as their "Associate Library" on September 3, 2008, I have developed a fairly consistent routine: I wake up around 10am, get dressed in slacks, a collared shirt and tie and head off to work around 10:45am. It takes me roughly 13 minutes +/- 1 minute to drive to work from where my parents live. I park in one of the few remaining open spots in the parking lot and walk up the remaining part of the drop-off/pick-up area past the Athletic Center to the school's front entrance. After making my way down the main hallway past a dozen or so classrooms and offices, I round the corner and enter through the library's (impossible to lock) double doors. I check in with Ben (the head librarian) in our 'office' in the library, where one of the seniors invariably is also doing work. We have a small area that is separated from the rest of the library where we have our computers and other circulation related materials. It is not walled off from the rest of the library, nor is there a door, so almost every morning I arrive at work to find a student at my terminal. I put down my messenger bag, take off my coat and find something to keep me busy. We have a number of projects going on in the library which I have adopted for myself. Today I work on changing call numbers on some of the books that I pulled from the stacks over the past two weeks while I was trying to decide what books we should keep. We don't have as much shelf space as we have books, so we have had to start to 'prune' our collection. These books made the cut, but each one of them seemed out of place. So I put them aside to be relabeled and updated in the catalog. Of the 200 or so books that I pulled for re-cataloging, I will only get through a couple dozen or so in the day. But, I have long since abandoned any illusion of accomplishment in the library. The library has become my own personal Buddhist temple, where the futility of end-oriented thinking - what I like to call 'instrumentality - is abundantly clear. No matter how much I finish each day (or how fast I finish it), there will always be more to do. There is a backlog of tasks to make the library more organized; why I was brought in after all. But, even after these tasks are completed, the library will require other types of upkeep. It is living. Every day I put the new magazines on the rack and remove the previous ones; every day students come in, move the chairs around, and 'borrow' pens, paper, and markers and we restock and reorganize everything. Even the collection is living in a sense. We order books, we catalog them, we put them on the shelves and sometime in the future, someone will toss them away. Some books will be thrown out sooner than others, but all of them will be replaced or removed eventually, as I just finished 'pruning' the efforts of librarian's past recently myself. The library truly is my own personal Tower of Hanoi. No sooner than I arrive, Ben says "I'm going to get lunch." [to be continued...] | |
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Saturday 08.23.2008:
Arrive. Drop suitcase on patio. Go to campus. See Mike, Randy & Jun. Eat Panda Express. Play Magic. Hop in car with Kim. Meet Jesse. Go to Silverlake. Pay $20 to get into Sunset Junction Street Fair. Listen to music [band?]. Dance. Leave. Dine at Swingers. Sleep on couch.
Sunday 08.24.2008:
Eat lobster with Graydon, Jen and Riz. Dump coins at CoinMaster. Pick-up groceries. Carpool with Riz & Kim to Mitsuwa. Search in vain for CocoBall candies. Ask for special pork ramen at Santouka. Discover they ran out. Settle for normal salt broth ramen. Return to Westgate. Discuss irreliability of CoinMaster with Shelby. Taste wine, cheese and chocolate with David, Shelby, Kim and Riz. Sleep on couch.
Monday 08.25.2008:
Sort through 3 months of mail. Go to campus. Stop by office. Discuss my dissertation with Andy. Meet Tamlyn at condo. Pickup blank journal. Get Jamba Juice. Walk to California Pizza Kitchen. Dine with Tamlyn. Head back to condo. Talk with Tamlyn. Get Red Mango frozen yogurt shake. Dump shake. Say good-bye to Tamlyn. Walk back to Westgate. Sleep on couch.
Tuesday 08.26.2008:
Walk to campus. Replace Bruincard. Eat grilled chicken california salad. Return books. Research dissertation. Walk to Westwood. Meet Fred for dinner. Eat at Ambalah Dabah. Discuss dissertation at Coffee Bean. Return to Westgate. Watch episode 8 of Tudors. Sleep on couch.
Wednesday 08.27.2008:
Deposit checks at bank. Bus to campus. Eat Taco Bell. Order green tea at Kerckhoff. Work on dissertation outline. Meet with Omar. Walk back to Club Cal with Omar. See Julie. Meet Michael & Martin at Literati Cafe. Playtest Solaria Light. Return to Westgate. Sleep on couch.
Thursday 08.28.2008:
Wake up at 5:45am. Catch 10 bus to downtown. Report for jury duty. Talk with Trista. Break for lunch. Enjoy ramen with Trista at Daikoku-Ya. Return to jury pool room. Read Gordon Wood's history of America. Nap. Be dismissed. Walk to Edison bar with Trista. Sip 35cent martinis, eat appetizers, play stacket and explain stacket to others. Meet Jeff. Drop off Trista at parking lot. Find Honda-Ya in J-town. Enjoy yakatori with Jeff and Fred. Meet Kim at Cafe Movement at the Bordella. Listen to Sleepmask. Lose hearing. Return to Westgate. Sleep on couch.
Friday 08.29.2008:
Walk to Kerckhoff. Drink green tea. Work on dissertation bibliography. Check out books from YRL, Law and Powell. Eat dinner. Hop in car with Kim. Attend Getty's friday night music. Walk through Bernini exhibit. Discern Baroque style. Listen to music [band]. People watch. Return to Westgate. Taste wine & cheese with Shelby and Kim. Sleep on couch.
Saturday 08.30.2008:
Welcome Bill to LA. Drive to 3rd street. Walk the promenade. Eat at Corner Crepery. Walk the pier. Ride with Bill to campus. Say goodbye. Meet friends for Magic. Walk to In&Out with Warren. Enjoy a Double-Double with crispy fries. Return to Westgate. Talk with Kim. Sleep on couch.
Sunday 08.31.2008:
Pick-up groceries. Carpool to Irvine with Jun & Omar. Scope out Joe's new pad. Check on my cactus. Order pizzas. Eat snacks. Play Conquest of the Empire. Call the game early. Lose to Joe. Ride back to Westwood. Nap. Grab a whole chicken at Zankou Chicken. Eat dinner with Kim. Sleep on couch.
Monday 09.01.2008:
Walk to Westwood. Meet Tamlyn for coffee. Rendez-vous with Caroline. See Tropic Thunder. Eat nachos. Meet with Omar. Discuss Straw Online plans. Return to Westgate. Walk to Nook. Rendez-vous with Trista. Eat at En-Sushi. Return to Westgate. Talk to Kim. Pack. Sleep on couch.
Tuesday 09.02.2008:
Hug Kim goodbye. Go back to sleep. Pack. Bus to Flyaway. Go to LAX. Eat at Home Turf. Catch my flight. Arrive at JFK. Wait for parents. Ride home. Sleep in bed.
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