17 April 2010: Vancouver, Bolting

Mike, Gordon's roommate.  Frequently has dinner with his exes and drunk dials his recent ex Lor(r)i(e), who has a 4-year-old and lives in Portland.  Looks completely different with glasses on.

On my last night, I was dead tired from walking everywhere, and was tipsy on a couple of drinks.  Gordon, Natasha, and Matt (the other roommate, geography grad student, didn't talk with him much) wanted to go to the Treehouse, where there was a party.  I did not.  We cabbed it there, anyway.

I mentioned this to a couple of people before, but if there's anything worse than a hipster party, it's a hipster party with a treehouse, where hipsters can perch and literally look down at you as you enter through the yard gate.  My awkwardness meter went off the charts as I sensed the hipster density and bolted the first opportunity I got, which presented itself within 2 minutes.  I was disoriented, as I had no maps and had no clue in which part of the city we were, and asked a bicyclist where Main St was.  A newcomer herself, she seemingly flagged down a taxivan for me, and I lightly jogged after it.  Turns out the cabdriver was off-duty, but he pointed me in the general direction and said I could catch a cab on my walk there.  I expressed my thanks and started on my way.  1 minute later, the cabbie pulls up in his regular car and offers to give me a ride there, since he's heading back to Surrey anyway (apparently there's a huge Indian/Pakistani/Bengali population there).  Ever so grateful, I got in, and we chatted about Vancouver.  His Anglicized name is "Harry".  He didn't take the 8 CAD I tried giving him.  I gave him a strange shoulder-pat-hug because Harry's the best.

I got pie and headed back to the house, where I was alone and just made my sofa bed up.  An hour later, people crashed in, and this girl named Molly was nearly sitting on my lap, asking me if I wanted to party because she wanted to party.  She had that glassy-eyed look on her face, and I'm sure I looked like a doe in headlights. 

Mike led me down the stairs to the other sofa.  He was trying to avoid the after-party party himself, and closed the door and ignored all summons for him to re-emerge.  At some point in the night, he came out and put an extra blanket on me.  At this point I'm thinking, "Canadians (minus this 'Molly' broad) are the nicest!"

The next morning, I got pastries for the house and ate one slowly while spacing out because I did not sleep well.  Mike came up and had two cups of coffee and a scone, and we chatted.  He's a high school teacher in a Vancouver public school, teaching history and special needs kids.  There's a wheelchair-bound kid who causes a scene sometimes, and Mike has to kick him out by telling him to leave the room.  So the kid frowns, scowls, sighs, and huffs, and then you hear his wheelchair whirring as his motor helps move him out.  We laughed.

Mike used to be a History grad student, but, like me, he dropped out after his Master's, which we agreed was upsetting because we thought we had the next 6 years of our lives planned out.  He taught in Japan for 2 years, as well, and London, ON, is his hometown.  We talked about language extinction, US vs. Canada, and bossa nova, among other things.  He gave me a ride to the Canada Line to get to the airport before taking off for Washington state in his rental car to find trails with some naturalist girl he met at the party the night before.  She'll probably wind up another ex with whom he'll be having dinner.

15 april 2010: Vancouver, Couching

Bill hooked me up with a place to stay on Thursday & Friday nights in Vancouver, without my asking.  Super-sweet.

So, Gordon.  Bill's friend.  German, studied in Weimar, UBC grad student in computer graphics, wants a career in research.  Smaller guy with reddish hair and a sporadic beard.  Loves electronica.  29.

Girlfriend: Natasha, in Interior Architecture (a cross between Interior Design and Architecture), taking a break from ennui & studies outside Hamburg, originally from München.  Wavy blonde hair and confrontational boobs.  24.

Gordon & Natasha are two of the friendliest people ever.  Gordon spoke with a Canadian-German accent, and we ate sushi at a nice place in South Vancouver (the tuna felt like it melted in my mouth!).  Vancouver already feels like home for him, and he can't see himself moving back.  He and his roommates of 2.5 years (Matt & Mike) take trips to Central America (at least two I recall: Guatemala and Honduras) as well as Washington state, where they met a guy in a bar who invited them over to shoot clay pigeons.  We discussed whether it's reasonable to expect immigrants to learn the language of their new home, which, unsurprisingly, was a topic left unresolved.

Gordon gets random documentaries from the public library.  He told me about 3-meter tall beavers that once existed around the Great Lakes; this freaks me out a bit.

Natasha is in Vancouver for 3 months and found some temp work at beauty salon, where she's like errand bitch girl.  She likes chick flicks and Gilmore Girls.  In June, she plans to make her way from NYC to SF in 90 days, whether by public transit or through hitchhiking.  She wants to make sweet sushi with licorice, which sounds gross to me.

12 April 2010: Seattle, Jack's Friend/Coworker

Joe.

He sure loves nonparametric modeling.

And Boddingtons.

11 April 2010: Seattle, Bill's Brunch

AJ: went on a roadtrip with Bill down to Mexico, and continued down Central America to Costa Rica, where he helped his friends set up an organic farm.  Out of work architect, thinking about starting a dog toy business.

Matt: drunk from the party the night before, got on a bike and decided that he didn't want to go home but wanted to get laid.  Rode around looking for a party (bound to have girls, right?), heard commotion coming from a house with a 50-something year old man sitting outside it.  Asked, "Can I come in?  I have a beer."  Presented the beer.  Man nodded approvingly.  Walked in, everyone was middle-aged.  Sat down and played the bongos for them.

Spike: works for Amazon.com.  His girlfriend Sara looks a bit like Mel from Flight of the Conchords.   Used to work in cloud computing but now works on discussion boards, trying to write programs to automatically remove bad posts.  I asked him about any interesting books or discussion boards, and he brought up Anita Blake, this character who has to have sex with as many werewolves and vampires as she can or else she'll die.  People can discuss all the details of the books, but he has to remove all posts about the author's personal life, apparently.  Apparently, Spike's dad was way into mushrooms and believes that some of the hallucinations he saw while high were signs from divinity.  Spike is atheist.

Brad: tall, friendly, boisterous Navy guy.  I wanted to high five him the entire time.  Kept forgetting pear-shaped girl's and Jim's names, to their chagrin.  I chortled in my head.

That one girl who kept playing crappy techno music and dancing with no shoes on.  That's all I remember about her.

10 April 2010: Seattle, Bill's Friend's Party

Note to self: Missoula, MT is supposed to be cool?

So said the pear-shaped softball coach with stringy & wavy, black-dyed hair (she grew up there).

And so agreed Jim (?), the hobbit-like former Microsoft employee (hard times!) now considering returning to school for medicine or the culinary arts.

Which was enthusiastically confirmed by Justin (?), the political campaigner from Syracuse who once worked on Capitol Hill but made his way through Montana and now lives in Seattle.  He bought an outdoorsy vest to fit in with the Pacific Northwesterners.