Last weekend Sarah and I zipped down to LA to spend two days at Disneyland. Last time I was there, the Indiana Jones ride was brand new. My, how time flies…

• People complain about the ticket prices, but honestly, they’re not bad. A single day ticket is $69, which is comparable to Great America at $55, and I think we can all stipulate that Disneyland is easily more than 25.4% cooler than Great America.
• On the other hand, the food isn’t very good. And the Blue Bayou is up to $30 at lunch, and $50 at dinner, which is insane.
• The best time of year to go to Disneyland is probably October. The weather’s cooler (but still warm), rain is still pretty unlikely, and the crowds are smaller.
• The best time of day to be at Disneyland is 11pm-midnight.
• Sign #1 that I’m no longer a teenager: It is now impossible to do Disneyland without taking a nap in the early afternoon.
• Somehow in all my previous visits, I had missed the Tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki Room. I’ll have to ask my folks whether this was intentional.
• Sarah: “This is how Buzz Lightyear works. First, you sit down in the car. Then, you try to shoot all the targets. Then, I kick your ass.” Final score: Evan – 14,000, Sarah, 450,000.
• Little kids at Disneyland are even cuter than you would think they would be.
• The “wildlife” that you see during the Mark Twain riverboat ride are looking a little dilapidated. Also, if you want to force the nap issue, there’s nothing like sitting on the front deck of the riverboat in full sun.
• Space Mountain is nearly the same, but the beginning part (the space warp) is a little more 21st century. Well done.
• I totally did not look at the Eye in the Indiana Jones ride, but we ended up flying through the cursed temple anyway. Man, I hate when people do that.
• While we’re on the subject of Indiana Jones, a Public Service Announcement. Tickling the back of your boyfriend’s neck when the car is going through the tunnel of creepy-crawlies: NOT FUNNY.
• The Haunted Mansion is all tricked out with Nightmare Before Christmas decorations. I like Nightmare Before Christmas, but the Haunted Mansion is definitely less scary.
• Pirates of the Caribbean is not improved with multiple Johnny Depps.
• Park employee: “So what ride did you all just come from?” Sarah: “The bathroom ride.” Park employee: “Ah, that’s one of our most popular rides.”
• California Adventure is… actually pretty good!
• But the main entrance is all decked out with candy corn and … there was no candy corn for sale. I don’t get it.
• Sign #2 that I’m no longer a teenager: The California Screamin’ roller coaster looked too damn big and fast to ride. I haven’t actually been afraid of any roller coaster in over twenty years. This was a sad epiphany for me.
• Nonetheless, one can admire California Screamin’ from afar — it’s pretty impressive how it can launch people almost immediately up to 55 mph. I hear it’s some kind of super-advanced maglev system. No word on whether the super-advanced brain-upload + clone backup facilities are up and running too, which frankly is the only way I’m ever getting on this thing.
• Toy Story is better than Buzz Lightyear, and not just because I almost beat Sarah.
• You’re much better off buying wine in Real California than Fake California.
• Hidden gem of the park: Turtle Talk with Crush the Turtle.
• Characters seen: not too many. Aladdin, Harvest Goofy, and Harvest Minnie (cute). But the best was saved for last: the Wicked Queen from Snow White! She’s no Maleficent, but she’ll do.

Here are your rules. (You’ve seen this one before, this is just a ‘recursive’ version)

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to Garunya‘s blog (your tagees will post to mine, etc.) once you’ve posted your three sentences.

The Five Chosen are:

• Auros
• Jay
• Adiv
• Dru
• Zak

And my three sentences:

“The tale of Gawaine’s journey through the Wirral in dead winter, at
the end of the year, to keep his vow; his adventures at the castle of
Sir Bertilak, a genial and generous host of handsome appearance and
normal colouring in whom Gawaine does not recognize the Green
Knight, have nothing to do with Arthur. It is a tale of old magic whose
meanings are disputed but related with such visual brilliance and
emotional force, reading it is like experiencing some thrilling nightmare.
Its leading feature is description.”

From The Mystery of King Arthur, long ago borrowed from my friend Wendy’s parents. (Okay, technically speaking, the closest book was the manual for FrameMaker / Mac OS 9, but that’s all sealed up in the box, and seemed like a pain to get at.)

Welcome, Nesya!

There are a bunch of pictures of my adorable, bright, active little baby niece. But this one is my favorite.

Note that the picture is distorted by perspective; Nesya is actually noticeably smaller than the cat.

For now.

As any Texas Hold’em pro will tell you, it’s a very bad feeling when you say the magic words “all in”… and your opponent flips over his pocket aces to make four-of-a-kind.

Or at least, so I hear.

I wouldn’t know from personal experience, because on this particular instance, I was the guy holding the royal flush.

In any given seven-card hand, the probability of a four of a kind is 0.17%, of a straight flush, .027%. As for the probability of four aces versus a royal flush, this is left as an exercise for the writer, when he is not as sleepy as he is right now.

I was having a pretty good New Year’s Eve day.

Got a lot of the house cleaned up. Got some papers in order. Sent email thank-yous for various Christmas cards. (Unmarried Jewish guy = email response to Christmas cards is the best I can realistically manage.)

Read the news at a leisurely pace. Bid a last goodbye to a number of entertaining but ultimately pointless political blogs, and their legions of time-wasting commenters. This is one of my New Year’s Resolutions. If I can quit Slashdot, I can quit you too.

Walked down to Satan’s Santana Row and stopped at one of the bistros. Enjoyed a glass of red wine on a cool, sunny day with a bright blue sky. Read most of Life in a Medieval City by the Gies-es-es.

Continued on my way to a small art gallery to look at my two tree paintings again. Actually, prints. They cost $3400 each. The last time I’ve been so affected by artwork was in the Prado looking at The Dwarf Sebastian de Mora. Wished that I had the kind of disposable income that I could just snap my fingers and take them both.

Then back home to do a little more noodling on the computer. And in the process of writing a friend an email, I came to a horrible realization: We are going to be stuck with Carson Daly doing the Rockin’ New Year’s Eve for the next fifty years.

Fuuuck.

This evening, I just noticed that the light sweater I had been wearing all day happens to be inside-out. Now I’m wondering why no one mentioned anything.

Theory 1: Nobody noticed or cared, kind of like nobody notices or cares about your bad hair days either. On even a casual inspection, it’s obvious: the seams on the sides are showing, there’s a little tag on the side, the buttons aren’t visible, and so on. But on the other hand, people really don’t look that closely at these things, the sweater is a basic dark grey all around and so who else would ever notice? Particularly since I work with engineers. God bless engineers.

Theory 2: People did notice and decided that I was going crazy, since I’m really too young even for early-onset dementia. Just smile and nod and back away from the crazy writer guy and hope you don’t need to flee the building later that afternoon.

I’m leaning towards Theory 2, since I haven’t shaved since Monday. Plus I was having a bad hair day. My job depends on establishing relationships with my engineering colleagues based on mutual respect… but failing that, fear works too.

My cousin just turned 30. Happy birthday, Auros!

Some people hit thirty and begin if it’s time for a mid-life crisis. Not my cousin, though, he’s made of sterner stuff:

I dunno. Isn’t the midlife crisis thing, where you go out and get a car and a girlfriend inappropriate for someone your age, supposed to happen around 50?

I’m not particularly planning to have one of those, though. Nobody in my family seems to have done that…

As far as I know, he’s right, nobody in the family has a ridiculous mid-life crisis car at the moment. Frankly, our extended family is mostly not that into cars. Cars are boxes that take us from point A to point B.

That said, Grandpa Bert’s fast-car genes must still be lurking somewhere in Auros’s genome. Waiting to be exposed to the right trigger, waiting to be expressed…

Maybe we should expose him to radiation or something.

Over at Mris’s journal, there’s a great post about social skills and Asperger’s. People with Asperger’s are often told that they need to “learn social skills,” but M’ris asks:

I’m curious, though, about what you all think this “learn social skills” thing
actually means, or should mean. What are we taking for granted that “of course
everyone knows” that may well be learned behavior on the part of neurotypicals?
If you’ve got Asperger’s yourself, what social skills have you learned the hard way,
or what did you wish someone had explained to you in your late teens and
early twenties?

I commented briefly at M’ris’s place, but here are my thoughts in more detail.

I don’t have Asperger’s, but I am an introvert. When I was younger I was so awkward that I was basically unable to deal with anyone other than close friends and family. Often not even them.

At college I was suddenly cut off from the friends that I had (somehow) made in elementary school, and it soon became clear that I was hopelessly at sea. My classmates were generally very nice, but I had no idea how to chat with strangers and make new friends, even surrounded by fellow geeky engineering types. Social circles gelled far too quickly.

During college, particularly my miserable sophomore year, I did a lot of re-thinking. It was clear I couldn’t exactly count on Eric and Pat and Sam and Mike and Byron and Nancy to parachute in whenever I wanted company. I needed to learn to make new friends. But that required talking to strangers, for extended periods of time, without wanting to run away. Impossible.

I would have been in even bigger trouble if I’d had Asperger’s. But I didn’t, which meant I already had the skill set of reading and processing facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language without having to consciously think about what I was doing. So what I needed to do was start putting things together. Is this clump of people at the party interested in welcoming a stranger? Was that an opportune moment to join the conversation? Or am I just going to tick them off? Solving this kind of problem requires processing countless tiny cues very quickly in parallel. If “social skills” are analogous to “math skills”, then understanding nonverbal cues is the equivalent of arithmetic. Meanwhile, we neurotypicals are yelling at these kids to go run off and learn Algebra I.

Fortunately for me and my particular goals, I did know arithmetic. A decade later, I’m still introverted, and proudly so. But I have gotten better at schmoozing. I can talk to strangers at parties. I can speak extemporaneously. I can give presentations to groups — badly, but I’m getting better. I can make new friends. The reason I’ve worked on these skills is that to me, these skills are important and worth exercising. I actually like talking to strangers now, up to a point. I’ve also chosen a career that requires a fair bit of socializing. If you’re an engineer and the other engineers don’t like you, you can still be successful if you’re really, really good at the technical stuff. But if you’re a tech writer and the engineers don’t like you, it doesn’t matter how good a writer you are: you’re screwed.

These skills are important to me for various reasons, but to others, not so much. That’s why the injunction to “learn social skills” is so pernicious, particularly when directed towards people with Asperger’s. First, you haven’t given any specifics about what skills you should be learning. And second, you haven’t stated what the end goal should be. Being able to politely convey information to another human being? Running for Mayor? What, exactly?

Anyway, the weird thing about this shift is that I’ve made friends in my late 20s and early 30s who never knew me in my younger days. They think I’m an extrovert.

But they’re wrong, and the reason I know they’re wrong is that even though I enjoy socializing, it’s draining. I get my energy from being alone, and I burn it up by being around people. I do have friends who are real extroverts, and they actually gain energy from being around a whirlwind of people. I’m thinking, “I’ve been enjoying this party for three hours, but now I just need to crawl away and hide.” My extrovert friends find this baffling. “As long you’re still enjoying the party, why would you ever leave?”

When I first moved into my condo, one of the many minor little issues was that several of the window screens had holes and tears, particularly the big screen door to the balcony. The seller’s agent explained that at some point, the association had had the windows power washed, and the tenants hadn’t bothered to take down the screens. Oh well. “One of those things I’ll get to someday,” I said to myself.

Fast forward about four years later, and I finally took a Sunday out to replace the screens and splines. I can see why one would want to put the job off — in theory it’s fairly simple, but in practice it’s bitchy hard work to get the tension of the screens right. This is just one of those many home repair jobs that would be a lot easier with a third or fourth arm. Boy oh boy I just can’t wait for the nanobot revolution or whatever to show up so we can all get extra limbs and super-brains and stuff.

Anyway, now that the job is done, my home is totally impervious to flying insects! Hahaha at you flying insects! I am mocking you right this minute.

I have so much to do this weekend. It would be really great to be able to do things in montage time.

As Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and other thinkers have pointed out, there’s really nothing you can’t do in a montage. You can build a house. Tear down a house. Fall in love. Train to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. Take control of all cocaine distribution in Miami. Save New York City from a plague of ghosts. You might be tired at the end, but you’ll be all done in two minutes and thirty seconds, three minutes tops.

The only tricky part about montages is picking the right song for the job. For example, You’re the Best Around by Joe Esposito is a really excellent song for making it to the semi-finals of the All Valley Karate Tournament, but a really lousy song for… well, hmmm. Actually, You’re the Best Around is pretty good for any montage scene, with the possibile exception of falling in love.

Oh, and speaking of tearing down houses: isn’t it amazing what you can do to residential construction with just a small hammer and an eight inch prybar? I could take apart my entire building with these things!

Not that I would.

Unless I really ran out of things to do.