Ready to go!

I am officially... ready to go!!

My backpack is all full of stuff now, weighs 21 pounds, and is just waiting for me to put my laptop in it, put it on my shoulders, and begin my trip!! RoundTrip baby!!

Marcos has been telling me to go to sleep, but I think there's not that much time left to rest. I'm still undecisive about whether I should sleep for a few hours or not. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, just a few more updates today. I bought several electric adapters for the trip and packed them up, I bought two bottles of wine as farewell gifts and spent some time with Emily and Andy at their apartment, talking about my upcoming trip and their plans to buy a condo sometime this summer. They were very good friends here in Austin. I hope they like the wine.

Then I came back to my apartment and organized my stuff a little bit more. I copied some useful installers (Windows XP, Office XP, Alcohol 120%) from my main hard drive to my USB-powered hard drive, charged my new used and cracked iPod Touch, oh and yeah! I don't think I said this in my last blog entry... I found a great little plastic case for the iPod! And I have pictures! Look!

 

I think the plastic casing will do a pretty good job at keeping the cracked iPod screen safe and dry. Good thing I held on to that brass cross that it contained before since February of last year.

I think it is time now for me to write down my itinerary details, pack my laptop, and sleep for a few hours. Cya blog!

Ponderance

I don't think "ponderance" is a dictionary-approved word, but I decided to attach to it the same meaning as "ponderation", so it's at least a me-approved word.

The title describes my current state. I sit in front on my desk at 3:11AM, probably the last night I will do this in my apartment #1309 in Austin, TX. And I find the thought of this to slow down my thoughts and actions. And I wonder "Why does this happen?" I hypothesize that, when imminently facing change, people may react with careful consideration, evaluating their situation and alternatives frequently, trying to optimize the results of their decisions. Which is very understandable, since a changing environment is naturally prone to producing drastic changes, either positive or negative, and thus the stakes are much higher for any entity involved in said environment. Anyway, I now feel like that. Thoughtful, careful, but in low-energy orbit.

I wait for the dryer to finish its drying cycle. My recently-washed clothes are now inside it, rotating and falling, rotating and falling, drying off with a steady flow of hot air. I imagine being inside an activated dryer would be like going into a sealed sauna in the shape of a moving hamster-wheel with fans. The said batch of laundry is probably the last batch I will do laundry in here in Austin, TX in at least 3 months. I slightly mentally shudder with the thought. Though I'm a solid advocate of change, I am nevertheless slightly shaken with anxiety when I am faced with it myself. I guess it's part of the fun of it all. :)

Tomorrow Tuesday 21st of April, 2009, at around 6AM, I will be inside the airplane that will lift me up and take me to Chicago, IL, where I will visit my family for several hours before riding back to the aiport and taking another plane that will safely land me on Dublin, Ireland on the 22nd of April at 8AM.

Oh, the dryer's done. I better go there and fold my clothes then...

And now they are folded. And I ask myself "why don't you go to bed yet then?" And I answer myself: "Because your blog entry isn't finished yet!" How expected of a blogger to have a monologue with himself about his blog, and then to blog about his monologue, and then comment upon his blogging of his monologue, usw (und so weiter) until meta^N-blogging level, where the limit of N is positive infinity. (Guess who's been reading calculus derivations lately?)

So here is my current status: I have about 24 hours before my trip begins (including car ride and airport wait). I have my new used Patagonia MLC backpack I bought from Mr. Trevor Wright, apparently a very experienced traveler whom I contacted through a Craigslist posting, for $70 ready to pack up my recently-folded-and-even-still-warm clothes and the other things I intend to take on my trip, such as my red scissors, my swimming goggles, my recently-bought-for-$0.97-plus-tax-at-Target 70-page spiral-held blue-cover notebook, two combination locks, a bandage for my ankle, a toothbrush, a deodorant, a comb, those little scissors useful for nipping nose hair, a Canon A590 camera, a Duracell AA/AAA battery charger, the case for my glasses (would that be a glasscase or a glasses-case?), my recently-bought-for-$130-because-its-screen-is-cracked-but-still-very-functional 8GB 2nd Gen iPod Touch, my USB-powered hard drive, a power outlet, lots of useful cables (USB, Ethernet, etc), a portable computer, and of course my visa-ready passport and the proof that I am a legal resident alien in the USA.

I'm thinking of taking a blanket with me if it fits in both volume and weight (weight restrictions in Ryan Air (the airline I'll probably be using in intra-european flights) limit carry-on bags to 10kg (22 pounds)). I don't want to overpack, but if I have to sleep somewhere cold, I'd rather have something to wrap around me and keep me warm all night.

But hopefully, I won't need to spend nights in cold, dark, unfriendly-looking alleyways in Europe. There's this wonderful site called Couchsurfing that allows you to contact people all around the world and ask them whether you can surf on their couch! It's a great site! It fosters international interaction, friendship, and travel by allowing people from all over the world to meet while traveling, and at the same time reducing lodging costs! It's AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!! I like it. :) Can you tell I like it? :) Yay.

I have already successfully contacted people in Dublin and Madrid, and am now aiming for Barcelona! They all seem like happy, energetic, willful people, and I like that! I hope they like electronic music too - then we'd be all set! :D

But now I should go to sleep. My brother's sleeping less than 2m from me and he needs to go to work tomorrow. Good night! Will try to post again soon.

Aaaand... we're back on the air! Live, from Austin, TX, I give you... Antonio!!!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much, wow, what a crowd we have here tonight! Let's hear it for Austin! WOOO!!! Let's hear it again!! WOOO!!! One more time!! WOOO!!! All right, all right, that's enough for now.

So it is now Monday April the 20th, 11:53AM, and for some reason I am still blogging instead of packing up. I don't know what keeps me... maybe because I do stuff quicker under pressure. As if I like to wait until it feels that I would just have a little bit of extra time margin left to do everything I have to do before the "deadline" (in this case my flight time), and then I suddenly just jump up and do everything hurriedly, feeling that the reward of doing it all is the satisfaction of having finished everything in much less time than you would usually expect someone to take to do it. It feels the same as when I did school homework and college projects... "like in ye olde days...".

But this is a very important trip and I really don't want to screw it up. Hence, I'll start packing right after this blog entry. Most importantly, I'll end this blog entry very, very soon.

And now I start. GO!

Haven't spoken my mind in a while

But how can I be transparent and keep a secret at the same time? It's frustrating, to say the truth. It's frustrating to know that I have so many things to say and am not saying them all for fear of spilling out the hidden fact that has been the centerpiece of my life for many months now. And it seems that it would be so easy to simply delete the non-disclosable facts from an initial furious draft, but that just... wouldn't be the same.

I trust, however, that Time will lessen the importance of my hidden facts, and eventually make these hidden facts of mine publishable. Not that I'm planning in putting them in a book, but I would like to return to a transparent state of balance...................... ........ ..... but I won't just yet.

I'm spending these days one by one, not really planning each one of them, but just figuring out what to do with each one as they come by. As I blogged on recent entries, I've spent most of these past few weekends engaged in quite interesting activities, each of which I could easily identify with at most three words (some of these namings are actually the titles of the photo albums that I uploaded to my picasaweb.google account). At-most-three-word namings... they would be:

• CMU Open House
• RW Disney World
• Toronto Trip
• Aggie Camp
• Seaworld
• THIS weekend! :D (Does a smiley count as a word?)

The weekend that started 136 minutes ago for me is the last weekend I will spend here in Austin, TX this spring 2009. My feelings about it are kinda mixed up. I like Austin very much, and feel like I'm leaving one gem of a city. I mean, the city has these great places: the Barton Creek Greenbelt, Barton Springs, Deep Eddy Pool, Ladybird Lake (aka Town Lake), lots of sport practitioners, lots of young people, lots of hippie-style people, a lot of friendliness all around, and just a general sense of well-being throughout the city. But then I think that, for someone who sounds so nostalgic about these things, I didn't really use them too much. In all my time here, I visited the Greenbelt about 5 times, visited Barton Springs less than 10 times, Deep Eddy Pool 3 times, averaged Town Lake visits to less than twice a month, only engaged in sports with a partner thrice, and met relatively few friends in the city (aside from coworkers). I don't think I really squeezed the juice out of Austin. So... I shouldn't really feel too nostalgic about it.

I did make some great friendships while I lived here, though. Did I! Yes, I did. People say first-time sex is always remembered. We'll see about that. What I learned is that, when sincere and mutual, sex allows a friendship to deepen and strengthen. But otherwise, sex can be not-so-good and cause some awkward moments. I experienced the heart-warming that occurs when your partner says "I love you", and you look at her eyes and see that she totally means it. I experienced disarming close-up smiles, arousing sensual touches, and soul-warming skin embraces. A total skin embrace is amazingly tender and warm... one of the best feelings was when our limbs rubbed against each other, endowing each other with inner warmth, expressing sentiments all by themselves - an amazing tactile form of expression. I loved you too.

Her kids gave me the second-most pleasant social experience of my stay here in Austin. I have talked and played with children before, of course, but never as closely as with them. I played "the male adult role" in her family, and the children took a liking to me that I remember with a most grateful smile. They are playful, intelligent, mindful, and childishly innocent, much more than I would expect an average US child to be. They trusted me, liked me, and missed me when I was gone, and likewise did I with them. I really do feel a twinge of guilt when I think that I'm leaving them for a long run... :(... I love you all - I hope you learn as much as you possibly can, I hope you continue being as intelligent, playful, mindful, and beautiful as you all are now, and I hope you grow up happy, successful, and aware of the joy and wonder that is this World. :) I also hope that you don't forget me, that I won't forget you, and if possible, I hope we can keep in touch.

And I've said before, I loved my job.... I really did like it very very much. Through it, I traveled to various cities across the USA, stayed in nice hotels, got free food during trips, obtained a lot of on-site deployment experience, learned Java, met talented engineers and managers, made great friendships, got flexible hours, and was in general very happy with what I did. Man, those days were really fun. :) I miss them sometimes.

And then there was Emily Rose. Met through electronic music, one of the friendliest, sincerest, and happiest people I know, I rapidly grew a strong crush on her when I realized she was almost perfectly equal to everything I wanted in a girl. Except that her boyfriend was not me. Both of them are great people, though, and are very happy together, so I really, truly, sincerely hope that they be completely happy with each other. Or in general, I wish for both of them to be very happy. They both showed me friendship, trust, and generosity in all situations, and for that I am very grateful to them. :) Thanks Emily and Andy.

And my roommate during all my time here in Austin, my brother Marcos... I really have much to thank him. He got me this great job, brought me to this great city, drove me all around before I got a car, helped me achieve all these great experiences, shared his apartment with me, tried to help me and advise me with the plans I sometimes had, regularly inquired about my mysterious where-abouts, and always tried not to invade my privacy. I am very, very, very, very, very grateful for everything he did for me. I don't express this very much, but I AM very grateful to you. Thank you Marcos.

And now here I am, in one of my last days in Austin, thinking of what to do. I bought a Patagonia MLC backpack for $70, I'm trying to obtain an iPod Touch 2nd Gen I could use as a WiFi phone while traveling, and though I think I should be tremendously excited about the Europe trip that's coming up very soon, I think my nostalgia for Austin balances my neurons out and keeps me in a meditative, calm state.

No zip-lining?!? :(

Aggie Camp was fun! Tiring, though. Years of cozy indoors office and apartment living have softened up my body into jello, as some people say.

So I got up from bed at 5:55AM (5 minutes before my alarm clock rung), I comfortably went back to bed knowing that my alarm would get me up soon enough, 5 minutes later it did, I snoozed it, and before it rung again, I'm happy to say I got up and began getting ready.

I took a long time shaving while trying not to wake up the girls in the apartment, then I took a hot shower, we left at around 7:12AM to go to the camp trip meeting place, we got there at around 7:33AM, waited for about 45 minutes, got into a bunch of cars driven by Baptist student volunteers and organizers, I slept most of the way, @ngelic woke me up when we arrived, we went to the bathrooms, I met a girl from Colombia called Jennifer and a guy and a girl from China called Xin and Chao (or something), a park guide gave us a speech about the park activities, prayed, and then let us go and do any activities we wanted to do.

I started with the horse ride. My horse's name was For{1,2}est, and it slowly walked most of the way around the main points of the park. I then started playing frisbee with a couple of guys in the soccer field, then more people joined us until we were about 10 of us in a big circle, then one of the student organizers ruined our cool frisbee circle and rallied everyone into playing kickball (which was cool too). I got to score several runs before I got bored and began to volley a volleyball with a girl called Kim who was volleying by herself not too far away from where I was. A guy and a girl joined us and then Kim went back to kickball, so then there were only three of us playing volleyball. The guy said he was mexican and the girl said she was from Brazil, and when I saw them kissing I inferred they were b/f & g/f.

And then it was 12:30PM and one of the camp persons rang the lunch bell and everyone attended to it. I ate a hamless hamburger with cheese, lettuce, and ketchup, I drank quite a few cups of lemonade and apple juice, and I ate two brownies. Energized with the food, I then walked down to the nearby lake, and saw @ngelic and some other guy throwing tomahawks at two wooden targets. I wanted to stick a tomahawk into the wood, so I got in line, took my turn at throwing, and finally succeeded. Once satisfied with the tomahawks, my attention easily diverted to the other activities. I saw some people canoeing on the lake, so I told Jennifer to accompany me to a boat. So we went down there, got on a paddle boat, and paddled all around the little piece of lake we were allowed to paddle around on. We did the same thing with a canoe afterwards, and I found a dead fish in the water and brought it to shore.

After being done with the lakeside activities, we went up to the "giant swing area", and waited our turn to get on the giant swing. We all tried the giant swing and screamed as we were swung through the trees. We then went to the rifle range, where I shot better than I had expected to, and @ngelic managed to get the best shooting score of the day.

By that time my body felt tired. I slowly walked up back to the main meeting area, I got a few more cups of lemonade and apple juice, exchanged email addresses and phone numbers with a few guys/girls from the camp, posed for a group picture, watched @ngelic get called first prize on the shooting contest, got back on the car to go back, and fell asleep again. I woke back up at an ice cream store called Dairy Queen mid-way, in a town called Madisonville. I bought a plain ice cream cone and @ngelic bought nothing. We then got back on the car, I fell asleep again, was woken up when we were nearly there, walked with @ngelic to the car, found a Little Caesar's pizza on the way back to her apartment, bought a special circa-$9 special for a hot'n ready pizza, a 2L soda, and some crazy bread, drove back to her apartment, ate the pizza and crazy bread, drank the soda, worked on her homework involving transcribing a program she had in Matlab to a program in C, managed to get the program working, ran out of ideas for socially polite and platonic activities to do, and then we said good night and I haven't seen her since.

I should be asleep now - it's 1:33AM and I'm driving early tomorrow morning back to Austin. I think coffee will be my ally in the morning.

Yeah, yeah, entry's dull and boring. But I don't care too much :D. Night!

P.S: Oh yeah, and the zip-lining activity was closed :(.

Aggieland

Today I drove the path you see on the picture. I do believe it's one of the longest trips I've driven in my life so far. Isn't that neat?

I came to College Station, TX to meet up with @ngelic after not having seen her since 2002. She's studying in Texas A&M, doing pretty well, and she invited me over this weekend to go to an outdoors activity that contains caneoing, zip-lining, horseback riding, and free lunch, all for $15. She had me at zip-lining. So now I'm here in College Station, TX, staying at a free bedroom in her apartment, and I'm expectant about tomorrow's activities.

Now I gotta sleep. (S)!

Want versus Mood

I want to write a nice blog entry, but I'm not in a writing mood. My desire of expression is being superseded by a temporary lack of focus, which is perhaps caused by a desire of wanting do something else - by the feeling that there are activities of higher priority to attend to.

But by expressing and clarifying these thoughts, I now understand the conflict: last night I wrote a checklist of important things to do, and I marked several of these with an "H", representing the word "Hoy", which for you spanish-ignorants (no offense meant, it's just a precise term), means "Today", which itself meant "Must be finished today".

However, the next morning (last morning), I woke up and realized that I did not have the keys to my car, and hence could not drive out and do some of the tasks that I had meant to do, such as deposit money at the bank or mail my CMU acceptance forms. I felt impotent (not sexually), and even though I achieved significant progress on many other important tasks, the feeling that I still had important tasks to finish by the end of the day still lingered. And it still does. Which is probably why even now I have this nagging feeling that I should be doing something else. But at least now I understand the feeling and am able to mentally circumvent it. Besides, just writing about it got me a little bit more in the writing mood and I'm already at the end of my third paragraph and counting.

Yep, confirmed, just looking at that "H" on the first task on my checklist just made me stress out a little bit. My brain has a pretty good alarm system going on inside. I don't think I know how to precisely configure all the settings, though.

I brought a box of crayons from Toronto!!! I think I blogged about these crayons on my previous blog entry. It's the same box, and now I wonder what to draw with them. Crayons can be fun.

So last weekend I visited Niagara Falls! Yay! I finally witnessed those HUGE amounts of water continuously falling down that HUGE cliff, and took pictures too! Pics here: CLICK HERE FOR PICS TO NIAGARA FALLS AND TORONTO. It was quite satisfactory to finally witness that famous landmark (or is it a watermark?)

Anyway, my brother wants to go to sleep and it is already pretty "late". Gotta go to sleep. Bye!