Thursday, May 26, 2005
Once again, as I trod the shallow waters of life, I stumbled into deeper waters and descended to the depths and have now floated back to the surface to breathe out the happenings of the deep.
My disappearance from the online world can be noted as commencing sometime last Wednesday evening. I gathered together my little friends and we hit the road bound for Peachtree City. We made good time so I had time to establish a place for my little friends before my larger friends showed up to drag me off to the first public showing of Star Wars Episode III. The behaviour of Matt, Andrew, and I convinced Emily that we'd regressed and that she was caring for children. One such episode was when Andrew demanded that Matt go to fetch him a spoon and Matt, failing to see that Andrew should go himself, complied. During his absence, some unseen force guided my hand to the popcorn bucket and then to Matt's slushed ice drink a number of times leaving a thin layer of popcorn resting upon the ice. Perhaps it was the dark side of the force embracing me and my putting up less resistance to it than Anakin in the movie. I did like how in the movie, they showed him as fighting the temptation and trying to be good for some time, however, I feel like once he did make the decision, his conversion happened a bit too rapidly.
The following day, Thursday, after sleeping in on the makeshift bed that I prepared after arriving home from the movie (no bed had been provided me), I arose and was quickly co-opted to join two of my sisters and the fiancé of the older of the two in a trip to the swimming pool. We piled on to the golf cart and plodded along a route that I could have done almost with my eyes closed in high school since I took that path to work at the job I held for a few months at that time, however, time has reduced my memory. We eventually made it and my instincts in protest to some of the decisions that the others made at forks in the road turned out to be right more often than not.
In order to alleviate any mental stress from meeting Tara's fiancé, I chose to represent him in my mind as just another boyfriend of hers and to shun from my mind the thoughts of the sexual intimacy which will come to them in a few months. Using this technique and following the emerging standard that things are never as bad as I intellectualize them to be, my relations with him were not hampered.
On Friday morning, it was necessary to arise at around 4AM in order to get to the airport to fly off towards the west. Despite our fatigue, we arose and made it to our flights incurring only the normal incidentals that are inherent when traveling in my mother's style. Leaving from Killeen in a car which was, as usual, much too small and cramped for our family, I was reminded yet again of how the landscape of Texas reminds me of Africa without the starving children. It has a beauty in its own right, but I do not think I'd like to live there. One of the prevailing reasons to avoid it is, of course, the heat. Most of us huddled in-doors keeping the air conditioning on. Of all of the rooms in the house, Erik and I ended up in the one room that was to actually get cold at night and we had insufficient bedding to cover us even when squished together.
The following day, when the heat returned, we piled into the vehicles, with my mother, Erik, and I ending up on a mattress in the back of the pickup truck (there was a lid). On the long drive to San Antonio, we roasted in the heat and listened to music coming from our laptops. There was one moment of synchronicity when I removed one of my headphones at a loud part in the song and realized that I could still hear the song in other areas of the truck. I was convinced that my headphones were not that loud and then I realized that of all of the gigabytes of music we have, Erik was playing the same song at nearly the same line of the chorus but only a verse or two earlier than mine.
On the way to the city, the drivers pulled over to appease the predominantly mormon group that my family is (along with my nuclear family, there was present my mother's fiancé, my sister's fiancé, my grandmother, and two of my aunts. The simply had to view the new mormon temple in San Antonio. Despite the area being closed off to prepare for the dedication the next day, my family convinced the guards to let us into the parking lot for a few minutes.
While being coerced to participate in any number of group photographs in front of the edifice, I had a recurrence of what I call the sparklies. I've described them here before but not by that name. It happens most often when I am in bright light. I will be looking and then see tiny sparkling dots appear and disappear across my field of vision as if looking at a sparkling crystal. There is another variation which happened a few times on the trip as well as at other times while home where I would see tiny white dots which move around unlike the stationary sparklies. In addition to these two phenomena, there has been a slight increase in floaters, which are many times larger than the previous two phenomena, however still fairly small and look like dim fingerprints which float across and disappear. With the possible exception of the floaters, the effects are actually kind of neat looking, but my worry about what could be causing them and the possibility of them randomly occurring while driving prevails. I'm going to try to schedule an eye doctor appointment to make sure I'm not suffering from beginning retinal detachment or anything serious and to do something about it if I am.
When we arrived in the city, we proceeded to the mall, where we viewed the film Alamo: The Price of Freedom. Billed as the most accurate film of the events that transpired that fateful day, I had hoped for a good film, but upon watching it, the acting was bad, the script was bad, and it played on clichés. It did, however, serve to provide us with background on the events. After the film, we proceeded to walk a few blocks to the Alamo site itself. The site is pretty like a walled garden in the middle of the city. Inside the church on the site, however, there was a powertripping policewoman. Shannon and I got in trouble for playing quietly off to the side away from people. Erik got in trouble for sitting on the floor. A 2 year old child got in trouble for spitting a chew toy onto the floor.
As we walked back towards the mall to go to the famed San Antonio river walk, another spectre that had been following us the entire day began to grow. Because the mormon temple was to be dedicated the next day, the temple district was holding a jubilee to celebrate it which was to include the mormon prophet and a mormon apostle speaking followed by a dance show. All of our other activities were scheduled and timed such that we would make it to the jubilee on time.
When we arrived at the river walk, we were down to only about 15-20 minutes to explore it before we had to leave for the jubilee. As we looked around, we all became quite aware that it would require much more time to see and it was decided that we would probably return after the jubilee to see more of it. Seeing this as a possible escape, Erik and I tried to convince my mother to leave us at the river walk while they went to the jubilee, however, she could not be convinced. At the jubilee, I took in the book, DMT : The Spirit Molecule, so that I would not be bored. Just as I pulled it out to read, the lights dimmed to a level that I could not read at and so, feeling defeated, I put the book away, attempted in vain to find a comfortable position in the hard auditorium chairs, and went to sleep. I was awoken a few times with announcements such as "President Hinckley is going to speak now" and "Did you hear what he said?" (which of course I had not). At the end of the speakers, Erik, who had chosen to escape to the lobby rather than sleep on the seats, re-entered and told me he had discovered much more comfortable seats in the lobby and I was permitted to escape with him to these seats rather than being compelled to watch the dance show. We sat out there for the intermission and first few minutes of the dance show. Erik then meandered over to get a glance of the show and rushed back to me to tell me that the entire floor was covered in children. From that point on with only a few breaks, we stood at the entry way and watched the show. At one point, we hopped over a small wall and sat in padded seats in a boxed area before being chased out of it by security. Some of the scenes were memorable or stuck out in our minds. Despite it being a church jubilee, there was a lot of patriotic and Texas pride songs mixed in. At one point they had all of the children marching in file like a military parade and had people dressed as soldiers from various eras standing in the middle. While it inspired patriotism in many, it was creepy to me. In another scene, the had a few individuals on a stage in the back, but the bulk of the group was in the pattern of the Texas flag with most forming the border, a few forming a star, and a few more forming a large circle around the star. During this song, they played line dance music, so the border of the flag would quiver back and forth in small rotations, the circle would expand and contract, and the star in the middle would rotate back and forth. Though skilled and doing flips on the stage, the individuals did not impress me but the organic mass of the whole was quite impressive. The most impressive but flawed scene to me was one that Erik and I quickly termed the rave scene. The floor was illuminated with purple and other darkly hued lights and the children poured out in almost never ending streams each holding glow sticks. One group went to the middle where they unfurled a huge cloth circle. Erik and I thought they were going to put the glow sticks onto it and hurl them into the air, but that did not happen. When all of the children were out, they began to rotate the cloth circle following around it like a rotating galaxy complete with a bulk on one side to disrupt the symmetry. They then folded the cloth back up and began to flow in an almost chaotic but slow movement around the floor. In the background was playing church children's songs such as "I am a child of God" and occasional religious narration about how they are the light of the future. As I watched I lamented that they had such potential and blew it. If they had just played energetic techno or instrumental rock like in the party in the cave in the Matrix Reloaded movie then the scene would have been absolutely surreal and more spiritual than anything in the rest of the presentation. Oh, and just to give you a sense of the magnitude, I learned afterwards that in these large displays, there were 4500 children on the floor at the same time.
After the jubilee, we did return to the river walk. The group split and most of them got lost which caused Erik and I to run through large portions of it trying to figure out which entrance the others had come in at. The area is absolutely gorgeous. I love how it has the little river with all of the shops and restaurants next to it. Even as you progress away from the river and closer to the Alamo, the downtown area of the city had the feel that you could just walk around it and feel culture rather than business. I really like that when cities have that feel. I'd like to be able to go back and spend more time to just relax on the river walk and perhaps take the boat ride on it to see more of it than we did by running. If only it weren't so god damn hot during the day there...
On Sunday, because we were not in favour with the Lord (ha!), Erik and I were permitted to sleep in while the rest of the group went to the broadcast of the temple dedication. Most of them ended up falling asleep during it anyway so I definitely got a better end of the bargain. We were scheduled to fly out that day but the flights became too full so Erik and I lounged around watching movies and television programs on DVDs.
Awakening at 3AM Monday morning, we traveled to Killeen and then without problem, arrived in Houston. It was there that our next series of problems evolved. The computer network in Killeen had been down so we were not given paper boarding passes for the next flight and thus did not know the gate to catch it at. Consulting the television screens noted only flights to Salt Lake (for Tara and Matt) and Atlanta (for Erik, Shannon, and I) which possessed what we interpreted as both Delta and Continental flight numbers. Proceeding to the gate listed on the screen, we discovered that the Houston airport has what we termed "magic portals". The gate is not really a gate but a staircase that leads down to a door that leads to a bus. Out of confusion, we boarded the bus and blew off the driver's verification questions. He proceeded to take us to the terminal from which only Delta flights leave. Thinking that perhaps the TV screens had just not updated earlier, we found more and they listed what we thought were the same flights that had been on the list before but with a different gate, which was enough to convince our tired minds that they must be different flights. When we arrived at the gate listed we discovered it was just the same magic portal that we had come out of when the bus dropped us off earlier. We called and woke up my mother hoping she had more information, but she only advised what we had been trying to avoid by calling her... going all the way across the airport to consult a Continental agent. Eventually Tara and Matt made it out without a hitch and Erik, Shannon, and I missed one flight because it filled up, went across the airport (again), and caught the next one out.
I rested the rest of that day, packed up my things, and started the drive back the following day. I got stuck in traffic and the still lingering fatigue caused my reaction rates to be slower giving me some close scares, but I did eventually arrive back in Athens and that brings me to where I am now.
And oh yeah, I watched Easy Rider last night and I loved it.