magratheazaphod

This is the first in a new genre of puzzles, similar to a helpmate in chess, in which the goal is to find a way to lose the game. I'm still trying to figure out the exact rules, but in general all plays must be real words and must be legal plays. It's no Kramer puzzle, and I make no guarantees that it's even right, but I hope you get some entertainment value out of it.

evwhore

I don't know enough about NoSQL vs. SQL to have an informed opinion, but this comment made me lol:

astroboy12

• Tue, 15:04: RT @goraina: How a book is born: http://t.co/9WdbuGhD (via @Scholastic)

evwhore

While reading EW over lunch, I read about the surprise musical revival of Newsies, which had already surpassed the famously awful movie that spawned it (I never saw it myself) in box office receipts in less than four weeks.

captaino

evwhore

I didn't 100% understand all the QM stuff, but this is pretty damned cool  just for the "10 attoseconds" part.

evwhore

More mind-blowingly phenomenal solar photography from Thierry Legault, via Phil Plait.  Includes the silhouette of the fledgling Chinese space station, plus a sunspot ~7x the size of the earth.

mistborn

There's a new ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE EVIL LIBRARIANS annotation up. This one talks about chapter thirteen, when Alcatraz breaks out of the Librarians' holding cell.

This week's Writing Excuses episode is another one that was recorded at Life, the Universe & Everything in front of a live audience. It's about writing carthartic horror and features Michael R. Collings and Michaelbrent Collings.

Richard Allred sent me a recording of a Mistborn Adventure Game session that he did at Epic Puzzles & Games at the end of March. It's almost three hours long, but if you're curious about the gameplay, you might want to give some of it a listen.

That leads me to today's big announcement. You know that I play Magic: the Gathering with readers a lot, but have you ever wanted to play an RPG with me? At Gen Con in August, Crafty Games will host a special session of the Mistborn Adventure Game with me as a player. This is going to be a five-hour session, and six seats will be raffled off at the Crafty Games booth during the con. For more details, see the Crafty Games site. You can also find out more about the Mistborn Adventure Game there.

Scott Ashton has uploaded another of my creative writing class lectures. This one covers plotting, with a short introduction by my former student Peggy Eddleman talking about her experience getting a publishing deal. Her novel THROUGH THE BOMB'S BREATH will be published by Random House next year. (Part 3 of the video is currently not working, but I assume Scott will fix that soon.)

magratheazaphod

I told myself that this evening, I would write a full post about the last couple of weeks of my life and go through my games from today's berkeley tourney. Unfortunately, the internet ate my first attempt at doing the former. Screw it. Here we go again. This time it will be twice as funny.

I spent the last two months of my life prior to the SDO DOS preparing for my qualifying exam and rehabbing my knee. After my surgery in early March I was holed up in bed for about a week, more or less static. I really owe everyone who came in visited big-time. I'm still finding ways to thank people. After I could move around, I was basically constantly studying (at least, as much as my procrastinatory self is capable of) or doing the 2-3 hours of physical therapy I had to do on a daily basis. It was kind of fun in a way. I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing at any given time. The whole time I had visions of the beach in San Diego as my go-to daydream. It was an intense couple of months. Even after it was all done I still found myself waking up thinking that I needed to go study for the first week or so after the exam was over.

In the end my qualifying exam went better than I had imagined. Many pints of beer were consumed that evening in celebration (another thing I hadn't done in a few months). The next morning, slightly groggy, I woke up and trekked over to the Mission with Kenji and we began the first leg of our adventure. After a quick pitstop at the cool cafe OX for coffee substances, we took off and had a nice easy trip down to SoCal, complete with traditional stop at the Cracked Crab for delicious po'boys. We made it to SD at about 10, and found everyone being their usual carousing selves. Life was good.

It has to be emphasized that Scrabble had been pretty low on my list of priorities for the past couple of months. My feeling going into San Diego was that I would be happy going 0-20 as long as I passed my exam and got to see everyone. Instead, it turned out that I was about to embark on probably the best stretch of Scrabble I've had to date, right up there with 2011 Nationals. Friday morning opened up with a nice 4-0 start, including comfortable wins against the ever-dangerous Elizabeth Ralston and Mike Frentz (it's about time Mike starts beating me). I was sad that I didn't get to go have lunch with everyone, but it ended up being a good thing since I had time to go to the gym and do my physical therapy every day.

My doppelganger redessence was there! yay!!

In the afternoon, my biggest challenge by far was against David Slavin, who I had never played before. With an opening rack of AEMNSZ?, he tried MANSIZE. I challenged it off and then paused for a bit with my rack of AGATOID. I didn't want to set him up for an easy bailout ZA play. at the same time, I also didn't want to slot the I since he might see MAZINESS. I ended up moving AGATOID all the way to the right, maybe hoping to bait him into hooking the S. I guess it looked pretty fishy. In any case, I totally didn't expect him to try MANSIZED to the D for 120-some. After challenging that off, I exchanged and ended up with a rack of SQUIRED. Having the choice between QUERIDAS for 90 and SQUIRED/AGATOIDS for 150, I chickened out of the latter and watched in horror as David chased me down with a series of quacklesque plays, in which he would combine multiple overlaps with plays that I had just made, scoring like a banshee in the process. I felt extremely lucky to eke out a 7-point win. For the rest of the afternoon I drew well and ended up as one of a few 8-0s.

For dinner we went to Hash House, famous for its obscenely large portions. I loved it. The surreality of it felt perfect for my current mindset about life. After I ordered a burger the size of my face and stole other people's food and still had at least 3 pounds-worth of leftovers,   esdscrabbleand I snuck off for a few beers and ended up wandering around the gay district of San Diego and doing unspeakable things that were later speculated about in a game of Things (best guess: "bear hunting"). Later we came back and played liars' dice, which is an awesome game.

On Day 2, I had the pleasure of being on the live videostream for a lot of the day, which was totally awesome. Major props to bbstenniz for running a great tournament - it was awesome to play in front of 30some people (I think that was the max) and I hope they enjoyed the show. I started the day with a potentially scary matchup with chaithedog, except that he scored under 300 points. Then somehow after I phonied Rafi early with HOOKIE*, which looked worse and worse the longer I was on hold, he also only barely cleared 300 in spite of his beautiful phony 9 of STO(NE)YARD which I probably should've challenged. Next I put up a 552 on Chris Cree at Board 1, and before you know it I was playing Karris, who had also started 10-0. After a nice start I held on with a bad rack at the end and found myself at a baffling 12-0. In that span of games, I had outbingoed my opponents 36-12. It was clear that I was going to have to work a lot harder for the rest of the tournament.

Fuck you livejournal. Fuck you. you can eat my next two paragraphs for the second time but you can't break my soul. I hate computers. Rant over. For lunch, five or six of us scavenged the vast amounts of food left over from the hash house food orgy. We would heat boxes up in the microwave and then immediately devour them while waiting for the next batch to heat up. It was pretty tasty. XP's leftovers were an unfortunate casualty in the process. Sorry XP.

The rest of the day saw me on the livefeed at table 1. yay! My first opponent was Doug "Eurobiker McDougie" Brockmeier, who is a swell guy. I promptly drew all the good tiles on him, except that at the end, when I was pretty sure my cheap SATINE bingo would seal the deal, he came up with SUNDROP* in an improbable spot on a dead board. SUNDROP?! I was low on time and started to consider the possibility that I might be able to outrun him, and let it stay on. Oops. I lose by 6. Next up was the Young Assassin a.k.a. Luke Skywalker a.k.a. Amadeus the Deus himself, the ever-terrifying Noah Walton. Noah and I played our usual close game, but a sequence of nice plays on a very closed board allowed me to build a twenty point cushion to eke out a win. Then came the equally intimidating Larry Jerman. We proceeded to have one of our usual awesome neck-and-neck games. After getting down AROYNTED late I felt good about my chances, but when it came to the endgame I made what I thought was a clever, non-intuitive play, only to realize in horror a half-minute later that the obvious play probably won and my play was a loser. Later analysis by others suggested that Jerry had a win either way, but in any case I shot myself in the foot and lost by 3. Finally, William Samuel S. Jackson made his typical undercover appearance, and beat me fairly handily in spite of accepting my early phony and then playing a phony of his own. I finished the day at 13-3 feeling pretty good in spite of the tough losses.

For dinner we went to the wrong Roberto's in spite of repeatedly asking Conrad which one he was going to, and ate delicious carne asada fries. Then we went back to the playing room and played liars' dice a bunch while XP and KC took down the trash-talking tournament as usual. It was a chill evening.

I woke up the next day feeling good. Chris Cree went ahead and absolutely whooped me to start the day off, although I was happy that I didn't miss SURICATE as a tricky find. Then Rafi and I had a really important game (the winner would have a shot at chasing down Chris). With an opening rack of EEENORY, I passed up the short opening I would usually go with (ENOR looked unappealing) and went with ONERY instead. Kaboom! Rafi immediately double-doubles with OVERWORK for 102 and I’m now chasing him the rest of the way. I stayed in striking distance, but his LANDSIDE happened to block my only spot for my bingo, and he took the win. In four games I had gone from leader to on the edge of the prize money. Opens are tough mistresses. Next up I beat Jan comfortably and then faced a rematch with Samuel William S. Jackson himself for second place. It was a fantastic, hotly-contested game in which neither of us ever led by much more than 20 or so. With 1 in the bag and a rack of EFHIJL? down 20, I played FEH for 13 hoping for an A or a T for an out play of JAILED/JILTED. Luckily, I drew the T and he didn’t see my out, and I snuck away with a 12 point win and $900 dollars for second in one of the most exhilarating games I’ve played (although Oregon TILE was yet to come).

That night we went with the ever-brilliant, crazy and fun Rich Stein to a cool Azerbaijani restaurant in the Gaslamp district and ate really tasty food and drank sangria (the national drink of Azerbaijan, they assured us). Then we went back and played one of my favorite rounds of Things that I’ve been a part of. I woke up at 5:30 the next morning to drive the one and only Gab Wong to the airport (we’ll miss you! Don’t be surprised when I show up in HK looking for somewhere to stay), went back to sleep, and then cruised back to the Bay with the XP, KC and Kenji quadrumvir. The highlight was randomly finding a sweet Mexican joint in the mall in back of a gas station in Goleta. Yummmm.

Back in the Bay with more madness to come! That Tuesday I did my own thing, participating in a study of people with large hands for $100 (no, really). Then I went over to the new club site at One Rincon Center for the first time – not as cozy as the YMCA, but we’ll get by. Then we went to the traditional post-club everyone-is-a-winner Taqueria Cancun, where Eric decided to eat brain. Coincidentally, the world’s biggest Pitbull fan was also in the establishment, and made sure to keep the jukebox continually cued with Pitbull’s greatest and not-so-greatest hits, providing inspiration for the week to come.

The next day we were all moving pretty slow, so we (me Eric Kenji and Konrad) went to late dim sum in Oakland Chinatown. There were many visits to Oakland Chinatown in the week to come – it is truly an awesome place. We went to the same dim sum place we went for my birthday, Gourmet Delight Seafood, and they were super-nice to us even though they were almost closed, even steaming up some delicious cha siu bao for us. Then we went for obligatory bao at Napoleon Super Bakery, which is an equally amazing place, and then cruised over to Lake Merritt and played Fry your brain lakeside. It was great. Then we went to club, at which point Eric and Kenji decided they would play a Collins tournament in Malta, and so Eric played his inaugural Collins game against me.

Post-club we hit up a great Indian place downtown called Zaika (likely the best Indian food in Berkeley not named Vik’s Chaat) and then went and played pool at Thalassa, which was fuckin’ excellent. It turns out that Kenji is a pool shark – no joke, he was ridiculously good. There was beer and tubesteak, and we were all happy.

Thursday morning Eric and I headed to the rental car place next to UC campus, and after getting slightly hustled (I stupidly mentioned that we were going to Oregon, at which point they decided to tack on an extra fee) we swung by Piedmont to get Conrad and headed out of town at around 10ish. I thought I would have to let them drive for a bit but I ended up feeling great on the way up. We made it first to Willows, where I inexplicably bought a six-pack of Victoria, and then to lunch in Redding, where we ate tasty barbecue and got the jukebox going. Our song choices:

Conrad: Rain over me by Pitbull featuring Marc Anthony

Me: Paint it Black by the Stones

Eric: TATu

Eric may have won that exchange. We made it to pretty little Ashland and drank extremely odd lithia water and walked around a gorgeous park, and finally rolled into Portland after only a slight detour at 10 pm. Along the way, we booked the tourney hotel on hotwire.com for half the tourney price, and bought a knockoff slurpee that left eric disappointed.  We looked for a late night food place and stumbled across Fifth Quadrant, only to find out that it was happy hour and plates of food were five bucks and pints were three bucks. We shared a pitcher of red ale, a salad and burgers. I could already tell that I was going to love this city.

Friday we woke up not too early but not too late and headed south-east, following Conrad’s advice since he’s the closest thing we have to a native. After opening the day by going to a waffle stand and getting awesome waffles (although Eric was highly upset at this point, worried that we would eat no more food and that waffles wouldn’t be enough) we wandered around and ended up in a really nifty but slightly overpriced teashop, where we sat down and drank tea Chinese-style with the little cups, at which point poof! Michael Perl appeared! Yay! We next wandered on to a Thai place and ate good tasty stuff there, went back to his place and played Wii Smash for a while and admired his horticultural abilities, and then cruised to northside to get closer to the playing room. I swung by the airport at some point in the middle of this to pick up Sclinchy and Slipe and then took them to a brewpub to sample some of Portland’s fine local offerings, for the first of many times in the weekend.

I am not used to playing Scrabble at night East Coast-style, though I am a nightowl by nature. I was therefore a little confused when I sat down across from Keith Valentine for Rd 1, but fortunately I pulled my usual Jesse trick of drawing all the good letters, although he had a nice bingo of MISFILE. Next up was Paula “Spaghetti” Catanese, who had unbeknownst to us been hiding in the trunk of our rented Dodge Avenger on the way up and therefore was playing in the tournament. Paula had a nice lead on me, and I ended up having to play a mostly intentional phony of ARKED# and getting lucky again to pull out a win. Joe Gaspard revealed to me that he is friends with people who are significantly better at ultimate Frisbee than I am, and then went on to initiate a pretty epic shootout by opening with WETSUIT as a natural. We each had 10 turns and the final score was 504-414 in my favor. It took until my last play, when I bingoed out with DARTLES, to outrun him for good even though he only bingoed once. Lastly, I had to play E.T. himself. We knew coming into the tourney that the quadro (yes, I know it’s not a word) of me, Eric, Conrad and Nigel had a great chance of making the finals, and so any matchups between each other were going to be really important. Unfortunately for Eric, he happened to be coming off of a pretty crushing blown game against Dave Johnson, and didn’t really generate any momentum. Oddly enough, as Eric was staring at a rack of BELNSTU, Nigel’s opponent challenged SUNBELT and they walked up to the computer and then evidently started discussing what 8s it made – luckily neither of us paid attention to them. I wound up the evening 4-0. I felt bad for Conrad because it seemed like he kept having to pull out improbable wins in all of his games, whereas I had mostly just drawn lots of bingos.

I have not stated emphatically enough that Eric is awesome. Eric is one of the baddest cats I know. It was a major pleasure to hang out with him for as long as I got to. I expect him and Kenji to take Europe by storm. Did I mention that Kenji is also awesome?

We took it easy Friday night. Saturday I started an awesome tradition of waking up early and picking up breakfast and coffee for everyone at Cameo Steak & Pancakes. Seriously, how is that not the ultimate Portland name?! The owner was actually a Korean, so they do a mix of standard breakfast and Korean stuff. The highlight was definitely their hash, as well as their comically oversized pancakes. It was fun zipping around town. Unfortunately I also picked up some kind of weird swollen eyelid thing that I would later find out was a stye (a.k.a. hordeolum…thanks, scrabble). My vision was slightly off for most of the day and unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to get antibiotics until the next day, but it wasn’t a big deal.

Round 5 saw me and Kolton Koehler duke it out. Kolton is a kool dude who is getting better in a hurry.  We had a really close game that I won by drawing the X late. Portland looks like they have a lot of up-and-comers. Hopefully they can make it to some tournaments down here and show off their stuff. Next I played my now ex-Scrabble daddy, Ken Kasney. Ken and I are both alums of the surprisingly prolific Reno 2005 NSC Div. 5 (me, Ken, Nigel Peltier, Elizabeth Ralston, Michael Thelen…we’re all still at it). In the last game before lunch, Conrad beat me, which he does rather often. This time we were pretty close, but my blank at the end didn’t help me much due to an _c_t_ v_w_l sh_rt_g_.

Foooooood! I didn’t quite understand how awesome food trucks were until we all went to one of the pods (pre-assigned agglomerations of food trucks) and each got completely different, awesome, tasty meals, including poutine, pizza, jambalaya and burritos. It’s such a great concept – every cart has different, often totally oddball items (I tried salted caramel soda) and you can totally find stuff no matter what you’re in the mood for. Mm!!!! I was so excited about food this trip that I think the games blurred together a lot more than they did for San Diego.

After lunch, I came back and played Nigel, something I would go on to do 6 (!) times. In this one my early phony of SANATORY# (it sounded pretty good to me, not sure where I came up with it, definitely not from studying CSW) kept me abreast early, and then I hit both of the blanks down the stretch while dropping spread since I didn’t know SONICS was a word.  In round 9 I got to match up with Ron Gideons, who was definitely the story of the first two-thirds of the tournament. I wasn’t familiar with him before, but he can totally play – he threw down a bingo against me with AFNPSY? and also played HAFTOROS in another game. I like playing new people. In this case, I thought that I was in good shape when I drew a blank but I ended up not even really being close. Then, in the last game before the short break, I played Daniel Goodwin, who was impersonating a squid at times during our game. My two bingoes early were ORGASMIC SAUSAGE, which says everything that needs to be said.

I haven’t yet given Dave props for what a good tournament the Oregon Tile is…the hospitality suite is a great idea that I didn’t take advantage of, in part because I didn’t actually know where it was until the end of Saturday, and also because I am slow. Mercifully, they had coffee available, which provided a much-needed boost. Not that it did me any good, because to my surprise, I was already scheduled to play Conrad again, and this time he throttled me into a sub-300 game, combining for a paltry 715. Undaunted, I promptly went and played one of the ugliest games in the history of Scrabble, beating Ron Gideons 342-242 in a game in which the longest word on the board was a phony 6 (HARPIE*). What the hell, a win is a win, and I was now at 9-3 with a reasonable shot at the final.

For dinner we went with Chris Lennon (thanks for directing!) and the Wiegand clan to Tuk Tuk Thai, where we had the world’s nicest waitress who was fascinated by Evans’ unnaturally smooth hands. It was a good night. Eric shared some of the best Mindtrap stumpers (we went through at least half a deck on the way up), changing the names for added comedic value and thus explaining the title of this post…wait, you’re not reading anymore? Oh well. Dave’s oldest daughter was really good at them, which we were all impressed by. Also, I drew the biggest laugh of the night when I totally non-sequitured and yelled “SMILES!” when I thought Chris Lennon was asking for the longest word in the English language (because there’s a mile in between!). In actuality he was trying to ask what state becomes a word if you add a letter front and back….see if you can figure that one out. Rather than having a crazy night out, we went back, drank beer and played Things. Lights out.

After hitting up Cameo Steak & Pancake again for more tasty deliciousness, back to the Scrabble action. Going into the last day we had me and Nigel at 8-3, and Conrad and Eric (SWISS GAMBIT!!!) at 7-4 along with Ken Kasney and Ron Gideons, with top 2 making the finals. I played Nigel right away in the first game in a game that was probably going to determine one of the finalists. Credit to Nigel – he came out ready to challenge my BS and took off OVERTOLD* in the key move of the game (I thought it was likely to be good). Late in the game, with a rack of EHIORW? that didn’t play, I had to try the crazy phony and played HOTWIRE for 93 (later in the day I would book another night at the hotel through hotwire.com). Nigel let it stay on and the endgame was extremely tight, but my pick wasn’t quite good enough to outrun him.

Ken beat Ron Gideons and Conrad beat Eric, so going into the second-to-last round, the standings looked as follows:

Nigul 10-3 +621

Ken Kasney 9-4 +762

Conrad 9-4 +600

Me 9-4 +339

Eric 8-5 +711

Jan 8-5 -230 (out of it)

They paired it 1-3 2-4 5-7 6-8 such that Nigel had to play Conrad for the third time, I had to play Ken, and Eric played Joe Gaspard. Frankly, I felt lucky to dodge Conrad, because he’s an incredible player and as of late I seemed to be unable to touch him with a telephone pole.  Not that the rest of the field was any easier. Against Ken I got up really big and picked up a lot of spread, which might be really important for my chances of making it to the final depending on how things shook out. Conrad beat Nigel and Eric beat Joe, leading to this as the penultimate configuration:

Conrad 10-4 +694

Nigel 10-4 +525

JD 10-4 +483

Eric 9-5 +754

Ken Kasney 9-5 +616

Incredibly, there were five different people with a shot at making it to the final. I thought that they might do something crazy like pairing 1-4 2-5 3-6 since Oregon TILE pairings are supposed to match the number of people in contention, but instead they went straight up KOTH, effectively closing Ken out of the final unless Eric beat me and Ken won by 139 more than Eric did (not totally impossible).

The last round was pretty awesome. It was kind of exactly what we thought it was going to be: The four of us, two-on-two, winner gets to move on. I wonder if it was totally fair that Conrad had to play Nigel for the 4^th time – that said, any configuration would lead to some tough matchups. In our game, unfortunately for Eric, he took a gamble on hanging an H in the triple lane that he thought I might not be able to use (he had read me as having a good rack) and instead I 3x3ed through it for 167. Game basically over. Meanwhile, at the board next to me Nigel pulled off a major comeback to beat Conrad, as well as challenging off CALIBERED* (an extremely tough call since CALIBRED) is good. I had had serious doubts that I was going to make my way to the final, but to my continued surprise I was still in it.

First things first. At lunch I sped over to a clinic to get my eye checked out and finally picked up some antibiotics as well as much needed ambrosia (a.k.a. coffee). I was wearing my gold hat around on the last day for luck. Squinchy brought back a delicious sandwich after going with Winter to a Cuban place (thanks guys!) and me and Nigel got ready for our showdown, while Squinchy got set to play his own final with Dave Wiegand (congrats dude! Now there’s a reward for coming all the way out to Portland).

Getting to play games that matter late in a tournament is a privilege. It’s not a question of finance so much as the experience of significance and pressure that comes along. I’ve been fortunate to be in that position a few times now (I doubt anything will ever be as nerve-wracking as being in the lead of Nationals going into the last day). Every time is a privilege. The feeling doesn’t go away. For many of us, that’s what keeps us playing. Kudos to Dave for creating such an exciting format particularly likely to induce such drama. I haven’t looked over the games yet, so I have nothing strategic or tactical to say – but on the whole, it was one of my favorite series of games I’ve ever played for the sheer competitiveness. Nigel is an awesome player. I remember being in awe of his strategic abilities while I was trying to work my way up the ranks. It was extremely fun to see us both doing well at last year’s Nationals right up until the late stages. He’s only going to keep getting better and better. I also appreciated that Eric and Conrad were watching the final right outside the playing room – it was really nice to be able to come outside and get a sanity check on the games, since during the series itself it’s just you and Nigel and a couple of annotators making things up as you go along. Thanks a lot to Chris Wiegand and Jan – although Jan would start talking about strategy after the games when both Nigel and I were so exhausted that the last thing we wanted to do was discuss what had just happened.

The end was pretty unbelievable. After he bingoed for 100 I knew the magic number was something like 114 and that it would be extremely close given my rack of BOOOLUU. After taking the scoring spot, I saw TOLU and a few spots for the last U. With 7 seconds on my clock, I slapped down TOLU immediately after his play, only to realize to my horror that only one spot for the U remained, and that he would see this and almost certainly block. All of a sudden, the magic number was 38 with his four tiles of AINR. I was convinced I had just blown the tournament. However, as I looked I realized that it would be tough for him to score enough while also blocking my spot. He went for a creative sequence, playing RASHIEST*/REVER* and hoping that, time-crunched, I would either go over or fail to challenge. But I had enough time that he wasn’t going to get me to go over, and I eked out the 20 point win (would’ve been 10 points if he hadn’t gone over a minute). Unbelievable. In several previous games I had gotten myself all the way down to 00:00. One second one way or the other could’ve changed the whole series. I was pretty ecstatic. I also came away with a beautiful commemorative board, to add to my haul of $2k from the last couple of weekends. It was a magical stretch.

Afterwards we went and ate more pub food and drank copious amounts of extremely good local Portland brew with the Wiegands and, and then headed off to Voodoo Donuts! Unfortunately, our attempts to mess with Carl failed when it became clear that we had been following the wrong car and had made it all the way to downtown (the sobriety of my other two passengers was in question). We picked up a dozen that would last us all the way back to San Francisco on our road trip the next day, and then headed back hotelward. Along the way we happened to stumble across the Ambassador Karaoke Lounge & Bar. Karaoke?!? I pulled a U-turn into a KFC and we parked the car, and karaoke was on.

The karaoke bar was a cool joint, with dim, sultry lighting, a clear crew of regulars and a decent crowd for a Sunday night. All the people who worked there were karaoke all-stars, including one Christina Aguilera impersonator. I bought Eric and Conrad a round of tequila shots to steel themselves for their upcoming performance of 500 Miles while also signing myself up for my traditional go-to number, It’s My Life by Bon Jovi. The crowd seemed a little sparse and bored, but we still both put in rousing renditions and then hightailed it out of there. Where next? Vancouver, Washington of course! It must be cool since the one in Canada is cool, right? Wrong, Vancouver turned out to be as dead as a doornail. Fortunately, Eric, Conrad and I were able to make our entertainment by ghost-riding the whip (ask urbandictionary if you have no idea what I’m talking about). It was one of the best post-tourney nights I’ve been a part of.

Eric and I got up Monday morning and drove Conrad to the airport for his rendezvous with ex-president G. W. Bush in San Antonio, and then took at least another hour to leave the city, being seduced by the prospect of Vietnamese coffee (which took at least half an hour to materialize but was still lovely) and then another food truck pod. It turns out that most trucks close on Monday, but we still picked up a couple of bulgogi sandwiches for the road and hit it at about 11:00. From there we made extraordinary time, pausing only briefly along the way, and rolled into the Bay Area before 9, stopping momentarily to search for good eats. Unfortunately, most places were closed, so instead we decided to drive around Oakland Chinatown for signs of life. Problem solved!! We found a late-night eatery called New Gold Medal that was absolutely hopping and full of young and old Chinese folks and other hungry gwailos like ourselves and chowed down. Then, on the way home I drove up Telegraph so we could hit up CREAM, home of incredible cheap ice cream sandwiches. Somewhere along the way, we saw that Death Cab for Cutie was having a concert at the Fox in Oakland that Tuesday night – and by the next morning, we suddenly had discounted fourth-row tickets. It was a magical night.

Eric and Kenji were leaving for Europe on Tuesday, so Tuesday was a big planning day for them. Eric and I went downtown and returned the rental car, and then suddenly realized that having a rental car for another day would be a really good idea, so we ended up going to a different Enterprise branch (I kid you not) and renting a car for a day so I could drive them to the airport. Kenji and Eric took a break from their last-minute strategizing and we went along with my housemate Ian to the extremely delicious Vik’s Chaat, Berkeley’s finest Indian eatery, and sampled a delicious palette of refreshing Southern Indian snacks. After doing some critical laundering we drove over to club for a bit and walked along the Embarcadero, and then Eric and I took off and headed over to Oakland. He bought us a couple of Long Island Ice Teas, unaware that they are possibly the most alcoholated beverage out there (in Canada we make them with two shots of alcohol!) and for the rest of the evening we basked happily in the glow of Death Cab as they rocked on stage. They had a little orchestra with them that added to the experience considerably. I didn’t know too much about Death Cab but I ended up being a big fan of their two frontmen, one of whom looks a lot like XP and the other of whom resembles an overgrown Michael Cera. We had possibly the best seats in the house, and the Fox is an amazing venue. At the tail end of a wonderful evening Eric and I cruised back to New Gold Medal and scarfed down more late night Chinese, and finally we rode home and Eric took care of the last of his preparations.

That’s really it for the adventures. Kenji swung by early, and we hopped in the rental car and I drove them to SFO. On the way back, taking advantage of my temporary wheels and newfound liquidity, I drove by Emeryville and purchased pants without holes in them (I had spent the last week of my life in jeans that had a giant hole in the crotch, no joke). And that was that. All of a sudden, I was back to my real life.

Ironically, something that they don’t tell you about before you take your qualifying exam is that the months afterward are often some of the hardest in grad school – sure, you’re not expected to do much, but a lot of people feel a great deal of existential angst about their place in school and/or life (three more years?!?). I’ve been feeling a little bit of this myself – fortunately, I’ve also been lucky to have a couple of extremely fun evenings, including a celebratory karaoke session for my first-year officemate Shuo and a barbecue/musical jam/dance party at my friend Carolina’s place. Now all of a sudden I find myself staring at a mound of unfinished work, thanks to leaving town and doing nothing for two weeks – and so the cycle continues on…

More than anything, I want to thank anyone who has been a part of the last couple of weeks. Anyone who continued reading to this point gets a gold star. The last few weeks have been special. I am happy that I wrote about them instead of letting them drift away entirely. Next big adventure: summer roadtrip to the northwest? We’ll see!