The Robot Co-op

A good friend was in town yesterday and had lunch with us at Ballet. He spoke of recent travels to India, Thailand, Providence, and Ballard. Along with the Pork Special, I was still digesting the madness of Foo Camp from this last weekend.

Todd decided to reward my hard work on some last minute performance improvements with the daily blog entry. At least I didn’t have to pay for lunch. I fully expected that the fates would align in such a way that I would very nonrandomly end my time in Seattle with a massive losing streak.

We tried to have a discussion of the nature of planets and why it was necessary to call for a conference to define what a planet was, but there wasn’t a lot of interest among the earthbound gang. But just for the record, Pluto is a planet, Charon is not, and the Moon will only become a planet once sharks with laser beams blast it out of its orbit.

A review of Snakes On A Plane was a little more interesting although only two of the five of us had actually seen the movie. So much for the target demographic.

Wouldn’t it be great if those hypercolor t-shirts from the 70s and 80s came back in style, but instead of merely recording the locations of your arm pits and other sweat glands in bright colors for all to see they instead displayed your morale via some kind of turquoisetooth connection to the interweb or maybe just by tapping your right shoulder for warmer happier colors and your left shoulder for the cooler sadder colors? At night you could drape your t-shirt over your computer and upload your mood swings to your blog, or something super futuristic like that.

Further research after lunch into the technological advancements of mood-displaying clothing garments led us to biofeedback rings and eventually back full circle to realizing that the classic mood ring is most likely still the most pure incarnation of this particularly wacky human desire.

I smell a shipment arriving at the co-op shortly.

While setting us up for better and more-reliable emails (which will fix a few bugs with questions, for example) I goofed and caused about 8000 reminders to go out backwards. If you’re one of those lucky few you’ll get a strange bounce message saying “mail loops back to myself”.

Don’t worry, I’ve already caught and fixed the bug, so no more will go out this way.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

My mind is a bit of a jumble after being tossed around in whirlpools, waves, and the San Francisco social scene for the last 16 days. I feel like I’ve been dunked and am just now able to take my first whole breaths. Our lunch conversation at Ballet today seemed to be similarly swirly and lightheaded as everyone was either newly returned from adventures or planning new adventures in the near future. This is one of the signs that this company is working… we’re all gaining momentum in some way or another towards something weird and unknown.

It’s going to take me another day or two to confabulate all of my recent experiences and conversations into something entry-worthy, so for now I’m just going to drop various tasty morsels into this blog entry box and see how they get digested over time.

In the short braindump session, we talked about everything from Eric Hodel rescuing dead cats (do you have a picture, Hodel?), to Todd and Bob ’s scuba diving, to Daniel and his highschool reunion, to my own SF Rock Paper Scissors tournament and river kayaking, to Todd’s Landmark Forum experience, to Bob’s migration to Scotland, and Josh’s yearly escape to Manzanita.

I need a chaser.

During today’s lunch at Ballet, Bob lost again at CCR. Whereas last night, at our first SCUBA class, he won second place in the six-lap pool snorkeling exercise. I hadn’t noticed this achievement, but he informed us of it over lunch. Go Bob! Thing is, it wasn’t actually a competition. So I informed him of that over lunch as well. I’m hoping Bob doesn’t invent another race tomorrow, because I’ll be his novice diving buddy in the cold, vast waters of the Puget Sound. Did you know that I coined my standard username to combine “Puget” with “fugitive” and refer to being a solitary transplant to Seattle? This was circa 1994, but I’ve still never been in the Sound. Did you know that it was Jacques Cousteau’s second favorite place in the world to dive? True story. I hope Jacques knew what he was talking about, because it’s going to be cold as hell down there, and damn lonesome if I can’t keep up with Speedy McScotlandbound.

Hey Seattle peeps—if you’re looking for a great little authentic Mexican restaurant in Seattle I suggest heading over to El Quetzal on Beacon Hill. It’s not crowded (yet) and the food was simple and great.

Lunch topics today revolved around many things (some unmentionable) including the benefits and challenges of marriage. But mostly the benefits and ill-conceived challenges of freedom and variety. Anyhoo … everyone should get married. At least twice.

Fresh back from Alaska attending my 20 year high school reunion and fishing with my brother Conrad I find myself reflecting on crazy social dynamics and the book Status Anxiety which I finished reading in AK. The good news is that the reunion was a total blast—but it wasn’t without a fair amount of self-reflection about the state of my life. My fellow classmates likely had a similar state-of-the-union speech being composed and revised in their own heads.

I chalk a lot of this up to the question “what will people think about me?”. Which is kind of a crazy question in retrospect as everyone was simply happy to see one another. But somewhere between reuniting with old friends, fishing on the Kenai River (do this before you die, by the way) and finshing off the stellar Status Anxiety, I came to a new view of how much energy people waste on thinking about what other people think about them. Myself included. In the end, though, the fishing and friendships are most important. A special shout out to Xavier for some unexpected late night reunion chats about the state of our past and present lives and moving beyond past perceptions of ourselves into a brighter future.

While I was reuniting, Todd was busy Landmarking. I believe that we had parallel experiences using different methods. Todd?

Hello, Daniel. Thank you for quoting Peaches & Herb. See how open and communicative I am being by answering you via this blog post? Chalk it up to my $425 journey over the weekend. While you attended your reunion, I attended a nonlinear, authoritarian-driven weekend of intensive introspection. The Landmark Forum did have a lot to do with the absurdity of social anxieties, how strongly they dictate our lives yet how baseless they are, being universal. (Why feel judged by everyone if everyone is feeling equally judged by me?) And, although they never use these terms, the Forum has a lot to do with living life from an existential perspective, not worrying so much about where you come from or how you’ve been or what stories you’ve carried with you since high school, but deciding how to be right now and where you want to go from here. Personally, I want to be open to the idea of lunch, and then I want to create a future where we go and eat some.

Hodel lost the lunch gamble and purchased Korean food for us yesterday. We explored how dual-government taxation works when a U.S. citizen is working overseas for an extended period, as Bob will be doing when he skirts off to Scotland. We dreamed of a world in which everyone who wants one can have a network-hosted music collection. We covered the latest developments in Rails. We also celebrated our half millionth 43 Things user, who created his account on Tuesday to notify the world that he endeavors to watch every single episode of Law & Order. To which we can only respond a) to each their own and b) best of luck.

Without gambling a penny on advertising, we are halfway to Leroy’s folks.