Doug: Seattle and other Insanities.

Dear Reader,

Okay, as the last post rather dramatically demonstrates, uprooting your entire life and plopping it down somewhere else can strain the mind a bit. It'll make you say the things you actually mean, as opposed to putting on a face and telling the world that you'll be fine with a few years of therapy. When really you won't. You'll either HTFU, or become a black hole of emotional turmoil and misery that not even trained shrinks can penetrate. You'll start off small, puppies or squirrels or some other cute, helpless animal, and it will eventually escalate until you've become what the rest of us only contemplate in our deepest, darkest nightmares. Yes, you will be... an emo kid.

Incidentally, if you're an emo kid and you're reading this, I'd like to take this moment to say, Fuck You. Your father really does love you, your hair really does make you look gay, you're wearing girl pants and everyone knows it, and your life isn't nearly as hard as you'd like to think it is. You want to see hard? Try living in a third world country you candy ass terdlicker.

Now that that's out of the way, we're going to move on to Seattle.

It's a nice city. The thing I'm most impressed with is the public transportation system, which as a well traveled individual, I believe to be one of the top five in the world. Buses turn a largely spread out metropolitan area into a place that's easily navigated. Ferries provide fun and timely transport to local islands, and a monorail system is currently under construction that would allow speedy public transit 40 miles to the nearest international airport. Coming from Albuquerque, where the bus system closely resembles a 90 car smash up and monorail systems are still viewed as somewhat science fiction, this is a huge step up.

The weather so far is sunny and warm, except at night, where temperatures drop to not too cold, but certainly uncomfortable for someone as used to a warm climate as I am. I'm told the rain is coming, which I'm excited for, but also told will get dreary after a while. They say that, but what they don't know is that Doug Wood loves the rain enough to dance outside naked in it.

On a completely unrelated note, aren't people that talk in the third person creepy? "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's".

Anywho. Seattle is cool. But the people who populate it seem to be... eh, well, a lot of them are jerks. I don't know if it's my personal aversion to really long hair, and the combination of short hair with facial hair, or how all the women seem to be angry brunettes, or if it's just the stress of moving into college, but no one here seems to be a genuinely nice person. That depresses me a little. Maybe they're too into their eco-friendly liberal self-righteousness to be friendly. Maybe I'm just less than excited to be here and looking for stuff to whinge about.

Quick rundown of my last few days:

Last Morning in ABQ:

Get woken up by dad. Eat breakfast, fight with parents for no good reason, leave on jetplane. Sleep through jetride, arrive Seattle fresh and ready to kick ass.

I'm bitchin awesome at this point, I just woke up, I've arrived, and I feel like I could take on Mt Rainer. I find out a good friend of mine is actually in Seattle, and we make plans for lunch.

We eat lunch at a place called Tutta Bella's. I personally am not particularly fond of Tutta Bella's, I find their pizza to be too fancy, too frou frou. That being said, if you're in the mood for an overpriced very veggie focused set of personal pizza's, Tutta's is the way to go. My brother swears by it though, and he makes eating good food a personal habit. The conversation is mostly directed by my mother who has accompanied me on my odyssey. This is good and bad, good because I'm too zoned out to concentrate on a real conversation, and bad because I don't really participate in the conversation at all, and just stare off into space most of the time.

After that we return to my brother's house. We had been there, and I almost forewent lunch in favor of the activity I'm about to describe. However, it is unlikely that I'll be able to see my friend up here all that often, so it was a good idea of me to spend time with her while I could. That being said, when I arrived, my brother was engaging in an activity that will never get old for me.

Demolition.

I like to wreck shit, and when I saw my brother taking a sawzal to the bushes in front of his house, I almost wet myself with excitement.

I"m know, I'm like a puppy. But really, nothing appealed to me more than tearing out a bunch of bushes. It worked like a charm to cure my zoning out problem, and provided me with some much needed exercise.

For dinner we went to Taste of India, which is a restaurant kind of out of the way, but well worth the trip to get to. It always surprises me exactly how good the food there really is, as somehow I expect my mind to have over hyped it for me. Anyone who visits me is getting a trip to there, as well as an introduction to Arfan.

Arfan owns Taste of India, he is a short Indian male, who is unexpectedly young. He greets my brother and mother by name as we walk in the door. I'm not offended by being forgotten, I'm rather shocked he remembers my mother's name. Taste of India is always packed, and to remember one patron's name is impressive.

One of the benefits of being related to Jordan is that when you're with him you get to bask in his aura of notability. Doors open, free things are given to him, and by association, you. Women notice him, and by association, you as well. Men look up to him, and almost always find instant camaraderie. In other words, men like him, women like him, I like him. What it boils down to is that we got two appetizers and one dessert from Arfan free, just because he knows him. It's a nice thing.

I spent all of the next day moving in, and buying shit for my dorm room. I say shit and not stuff because that's what it is. Shit. Mostly it's shit I would have at home, or would be able to bring from home, but space is a premium when locking yourself in a flying cigar tube, so I was unable to bring a lot of my shit. Things like trash cans, cork boards, hangers, kitchenware, all shit I have plenty of at home, if home weren't about a thousand miles away.

I feel like Edward Norton's character in Fight Club. Which dining set defines me as a person?

But I'm mostly moved in. there's just a last few things I need before I'm all set. Like stuff to spruce up the room itself. It looks like prison cell in here.

That's about it. I know this one wasn't all deep and stuff, but Meghan wanted one that wasn't, so she got it, it reads like a mission report, and I promise the next one will be about something inflammatory. Like abortion, or aids, or autism... isn't it weird how so many nasty things start with a's?

-Doug

"I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone,
Sweep the streets I used to own."
-Coldplay, "Viva la Vida"

P.S. There was a whole bunt cake, sliced, sitting in the bed bath and beyond parking lot. All by itself. Seattle is fucking insane.