Wedding Weekend (02/18/2008)
I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.
- Lord Byron
Is the marathon over yet? Why yes. Yes, it is finally over. Well almost. I'm sitting in the Redmond Airport and my flight is currently delayed by three hours. That's longer than the entire flight will be.
When I showed up on day one, I was warned. "You are in the wedding party house and there will be parties going on twenty-four hours a day for the next four days." I chuckled at the warning and brushed it off. Could people really party that much? The answer to that is yes. Yes it is possible.
There were kids. There were teenagers. There were young adults. There were standard adults. There were elderly. Everyone runs on a different clock and the shuttle driver was kept busy around the clock bringing well-rested and happy people to our house and taking exhausted and happy people back to their own cabins.
The first night (Friday) was the combine bachelor and bachelorette party. I've been to a couple of these for my friends over they years and I'm not positive I enjoy the combine party side of things. It's not that I mind the ladies, it's just that the groom's behavior tends to be a little different when the bride is around, and I'm sure that the bride has similar best-behavior differences. I think my favorite bachelor parties that started with separate parties, but then combined it up at the end so that the drunk wedding guests can hit on each other.
Only a few hours of sleep later and the party was starting up for the next morning. The breakfast parties were some of my favorites as we prepared Frosted Mini-Wheats, coffee (my job), peanut butter and banana sandwiches and Bud Light.
The bridal party abandon the house on the day of the wedding and left the three good looking bachelors to party alone at the house. So we got hard to work playing video games.
Than a call came in from the wedding photographer. "Kids! I hear you aren't doing anything right now. We need two snowmen. Stat!" We lacked a shovel. We lacked gloves. We lacked tools of any type, but we were ready to serve. We drove over to the bridal suite and got to work caveman-style with our freezing cold hands. What we lacked in tools we made up for in enthusiasm and perseverance.
I have few pictures of the ceremony at this point. While I took around five hundred snaps, I set down my camera for the wedding and reception to dance it up. It's not a party until I start dancing. Towards the end of the evening Leslie grabbed the mic, "Okay everyone. We're leaving, but we've paid for the DJ to stay another hour so don't let him get away." We made him work for his money.
I finally got back to the cabin at around 2am to discover that all the bridesmaids who had left early we're at home in their pajamas trying to finish off the cranberry vodka. So I changed and then joined the party. There were a group of people leaving on a 6am flight and there was no way they were going to sleep. Somewhere around 4am the hot tub, though surrounded by snow, was used.
The final day was relaxing. I had my alarm set early so I could help with the cleaning crew. As I wandered down the stairs some of the girls yelled up, "we switched to late checkout!" "Sweet! I'm going back to bed."
After lunch and the quick drive out to the airport I found out my plane was delayed. Many many hours. There goes my plan to work tonight!
Little Sisters (02/16/2008)
Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
- Plato
Sister? Brother? It's strange, sweet and confusing in my family, but isn't that the way of the modern American life. I'm out in Oregon over the long weekend for my sister's wedding. When it was first announced, I told my older brother about it, "Hey! Did you hear Leslie is engaged?" He asked, "No! Who told you?" I paused for a moment, "Umm, she did." "What, she just called you up and told you?" "Yes. We, um, talk on the phone and stuff."
My little sister wasn't in my life for the first twenty years, I just had one older brother during that formative time. My friends tell me, "You don't act like a middle child. You've got the warm loving glow of the youngest sibling." I wasn't a part of her life for the first fifteen years and she doesn't act like a middle child either, she's got the self-important halo of the oldest sibling (I kid because I love). If you want to get technical for the two of us, you would use some strange prefix like "step" sister. Family is family. You know? She'll be a sister for far more of my life than she wasn't one. When we were splitting up between the "cool kids" for the rehearsal dinner and the "other cool kids" for the bar at the lodge, I asked "I'm not in the wedding party so do I go to the rehearsal dinner?" She gave me a puzzled looked, "It's wedding party and immediate family. I think brother counts as immediate family." Sweet.
So here at the wedding I'm meeting a third of the family from the Boise that I haven't seen much of and have come to the conclusion that when I don't know who someone is, they are probably a cousin. With huge families on both sides we are just full of cousins. I have been discouraged from hitting on the cousins. "Jordan, there are plenty of cute friends, leave the family out of it." Done.
10 Days (02/10/2008)
Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.
- Mohandas Gandhi
A got back late on Friday after having my belongings abused by immigration. We poured out a few death in the afternoons and then I collapsed.
I had this premise during my two weeks in India that I would have lots of wonderful stories and lots of free time to write about the salubrious climate and majestic history of the Bangalore, but those days were not to happen. Overall it was a good trip, a happy trip, but it took a toll on me, bled out bits of me, and though happy I am also hurt.
The first few breaths stepping off the plane were the hardest as the dust and pollen and smog and foreign particles filled my lungs. In all honesty, the harshness of the air was the only unexpected bit for me. While I wasn't expecting the glorious utopia of the bay area I was not prepared for an AQI that ranged in two-hundreds to low three-hundreds. I had my short-acting inhalers and was prepared for bronchospasm but not the for the chronic problems I would face for the next two weeks. That being said, ignoring the coughing and the wheezing, the trip was uneventful from a medical perspective.
I showed up at the apartment late on the first night and met the houseboy Ravi. His job is to keep me happy, healthy and productive for the office. It is a weird sensation for me to have someone hanging around and attending to me. In all the ways I wanted to be self-sufficient, he would take it away from me. I would start to make cereal for breakfast and he would stop me and send me away so that he could pour the cornflakes and the milk for me. While he did a fine job making my cornflakes, I heard the first time he made them for one of my colleagues he poured the milk into the bowl, microwaved it for two minutes, and then added the cornflakes. Quite a unique process.
There were a few interesting moments of note between myself and Ravi during my stay. I once went to make Cup O' Noodle and as he would always do when I tried to do things myself, he stopped me and took over the cooking process. He boiled water, poured it into the cup, let it sit for two minutes and finally drained the water and brought me the cup of soggy noodles. For the record, this is not a delicious way to enjoy noodles.
On Friday, as I was coughing beyond belief and running a mild fever I left the office around 10am and returned to the apartment much to Ravi's surprise. I said I wasn't feeling well and was going to sleep. "Sir, I'll call a taxi for the hospital." "No, no" I said, "I just need to rest." "Yes sir. I will have the doctor come." "No, no" I said, "I just need to rest." "Yes sir. You can rest. I will have the doctor come." "No, please, don't call a doctor, just let me sleep." While I lay in bed that day, I was quite worried he was still going to call a doctor. He didn't. Thirty glorious hours of sleep later, I was doing quite well.
India has no black coffee. The barista process of making coffee is that immediately after dripping cream and sugar is added before it is brought out in a thermos for serving. Coffee machines will automatically add cream and sugar during dispensing. Try as you might to find it, there is no black coffee in India. The coffee service at the apartment would show up with cream already added and I lamented to Ravi how much I could use a true cup of black coffee. Ravi said, "Sir I will have black coffee for you tomorrow." Sure enough, he did. He had gone out during the day and acquired a jar of Folgers Crystals for me to enjoy. I did my best to force down the tar and compliment Ravi's ingenuity, but it was too much. "Sorry Ravi. This isn't very good as black coffee. I think I need to add cream and sugar to it." Ravi laughed, as I had just proven what he already knew: black coffee is not very delicious.
Over the last five years, land in Bangalore has gained more value than Google stock. You have many natives in the middle age or old age who have made more money in land value over the last half-decade than they have earned in their entire lives leading up to it. The foreign technology market is shoveling money into the city. One of the older people in the India office at my company mentioned to me during a lunch out, "the spending power of these kids is amazing."
I had breakfast and lunch at the office every day. In general it consisted of various colors of glop and bread with which to pickup the glop. No one had beverages during mealtime. If I asked one of my colleagues what we were eating the entire rest of mealtime would be taken up by people debating what was actually in the food. It was not necessarily an inspiring event.
Every night for dinner was a night out and they would take me to continental food. I always said I was happy to eat Indian, but they were more excited about going to more continental places. My team has eight people in India, about half are vegetarian and about half don't drink. Those two groups overlap slightly. Dancing is illegal in Bangalore. It has been illegal for nearly a year, but only in the last few weeks was there an actual move to clamp down. Many of the places we went to had a dance floor that had been covered with tables. Many places still had DJs spinning music and therefore, many places had people dancing in between tables to which we would heckle "that's illegal!" At eleven thirty PM the music stopped, the lights came on, and people were asked to leave.
American friends who have made the journey would tell me, "King Fisher is the same price as a bottle of water and safer to drink." I don't like beer, so I would order the hard liquor and do my best not to get ice. Only drinks surprised me. I ordered a Mojito that turned out to be vile. I asked one of my colleagues to try it and he grimaced and said "they put [name of India spice] in that. That is horrible." I ordered a black russian and milky white drink showed up in front of me. "Is that what a black russian looks like?" they asked me. "No" I said, taking a sip. Than I laughed heartily. "This is a white russian. Much like coffee, you cannot serve things without cream."
Over the weekend, one of my christian coworkers asked if I wanted to go to his church. I agreed and he picked me up. On the drive there he turned down some side streets and then paused. There was a huge pile of stones blocking the road. He chuckled, "this is how I commute to my house. I guess I need to find another way." The church was very familiar, though the statue of Mary had a gorgeous sari on. He smiled and said they changed the sari every week. The service was mostly in English, though there was some Hindi and Kannada intermixed.
On my return into San Francisco I was selected for a "random" deep screening. Considering some of the struggles I faced getting the visa to begin with, I found the idea of a "random" screen by the DHS on my return to be little disingenuous. They took great interest in the six bottles of prescription drugs I had in my bag carefully writing down the names of all the prescriptions, asking me questions about my medical conditions, and then sending someone off with the list. I assume to research they weren't highly profitable narcotics? I'm not sure. They also had me unlock my laptop for them and spent quite some time digging through my files going so far as to run some forensic program on it. At one point she looked at me and said, "Do you have any illegal pictures on this computer?" "No." "Do you know what I mean by illegal?" "I assume I do." "Where do you keep your porn?" "Umm, there's no porn on that laptop." "Tell me where it is and I'll look. There's nothing illegal about porn. You can have all you want, but I'm looking for kiddie porn." "Umm, there's no porn on my laptop." While in my mind I thought, "And if there were, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to find it. My government training in how to securely and secretly transport digital data far outweighs yours."
Overall in my memory I was struck with what is the iconic scene of a developing nation. Such glorious pockets of wealth and prosperity surrounded by poverty and simplicity. I think it's best illustrated by each morning when Ravi would walk me through the apartment complex, past the green grass, the playground and the swimming pools through the front gates to the dirt road. I would climb into the corporate car and we would drive down the muddy road, past the cows tied to rocks, past the wall where every morning I would count two to six men urinating on it, past the stack of rocks and the open sewer ditch that ran along the road. Then we would turn through a guarded gate into the office complex where a glorious high rise towered up straight out of Soma.
