Dinner with Frogs

Had dinner at a French guy's apartment last night. His name's Charles, I think. I have a hard time parsing French. Anyway, although some German girls were invited as well, only Amelie, Hugo and myself showed up. Aside from Charles' Spanish roommated, I was the only one there that didn't speak French. They all speak Spanish well enough, but with huge accents. If I don't know more-or-less what they are going to say before they say it, I have problems understanding them.

I called Hugo to get directions and I couldn't understand a damn thing.

Hugo: "Right on Jaime *gurgly sound*"
Me: "What? Jaime Vera?"
Hugo: "Yes. Jaime *ribbit, gurgle, gurgle*"

I got lost because there are two streets, one called Jaime Vera and the other called Jaime Tercero. I should have guessed it was Tercero, because Hugo made three ribbity sounds, which I imagine correspond to three syllables. Anyway, I eventually asked some guy in a bar for directions and he told me how to get to Charles' building.

The dinner itself was a good time. I had gone out with Amelie a few times before. But I didn't really know Charles and Hugo at all, and they seem to be alright. I was really hitting it off with his roommate until she had to go to her room to study or sleep or something.

I don't have much else to say. I suppose the point of this post is that I have met French people I don't dislike. This is a first for me (aside from the half-Spanish Bruno).

Photo Dump Go

Mine parents complained that I wasn't posting enough photos recently, and that is mostly due to the fact that I haven't been taking very many lately (I dont bring my camera everywhere and when I do, I don't really like being the obnoxious photo asshole). So here are some photos from the ancient (and recent) past:

Isa and her friends Benja (dickhead) and Erinson (funny and good natured).


A building in the computer science campus:


An abandoned car on a street close to my building. It slowly fell apart in the months it took a tow truck to come and take it away.


Isa and I:


An old man that walks around the block for at least an hour every day:


One of those European tiny cars:


Isa goofing around with this plastic light tube thing:


Okay, that's good for now. Stupid blogger.com is being slow on the uptake and this takes longer than it should.

Update Go

Wow. The 18th of March already. It seems just like yesterday that I thought there was something wrong with my cellphone when it told me it was March 1st.

So by now, Spring is in fullswing..doing its thing. Damn it, I dont want that sentence to rhyme. Spring is happening, and Madrid is beautiful. There are trees full of flowers and all that crap. The air smells like pollen instead of poison car exhaust, and my antihistamines are holding up, so I'm able to enjoy it. Last week was particularly nice in terms of weather. Been taking a lot of walks or when my feet hurt, reading in the park.

What else has happened between the last entry and now? Classes have been pretty slow. The only big thing has been a presentation for Software Engineering that I had to give. I'm not sure why my team decided I should be the one to represent us. Probably because I did the programming. Julio prepared an outline for speech I was to give. I had it pretty much memorized but when I got to the front of the class, I went in a completely different direction. I cracked a weak joke about people from Extremadura, and that had half the class giggling. I didn't know why that was, but it seemed to take attention off our mediocre work. So whenever I could, I hit that subject up again.

By the end, the whole class, including the professors, was laughing their asses off. Turns out the hard-ass professor is from Extremadura, and everyone thought I was making fun of that. He was so amused that the only question he asked me was how many functions we had written. My team was very impressed that I was able to think on my feet fast enough to use humor to distract from our shitty project and avoid the difficult, probing questions with which the hard-ass professor was grilling all other teams. I pulled the style over substance trick out of my ass. I was just as surprised.

So my team wants to start on the next phase of the project next week. Let's see if we've learned anything from last phase. One thing is for sure, I am not doing any crunchtime. That's against the rules now, fuckers.

Aside from the usual, there've been problems between Isa and I. So much so that we "broke up". That lasted a little more than 24 hours, and by the same time in the next day we were kissing and watching the sunset together. That's a significantly reduced, factual account, but I'll spare you the emotional details. It's enough to make you sick.

I think I just suggested that I have feelings. So let's change the subject. Something to make me seem like an invunerable intellectual. Yeah, that's a good image to cultivate. I am Shrimpbot. I enjoy computers and books; insert datadisk.

What have I been reading? Well, I just finished Kafka's The Trial and now I'm reading Sartre's Nausea. I REALLY like Nausea. I mostly picked it up to get a break from Kafka, but I think now I'm going to stick with Sartre for a while.

Also, I've been trying to make time for programming, but the days are just too short! It's been raining all day today. Although I had intended to go to Toledo today, I don't remember why. I don't much feel like it at the moment, anyway. So today would be a good day to do some programming. Yeah, I think I'll go do that now.

Recovering

I have used these past few days to relax and recover a bit from the past week, and I plan on doing the same for the next days. This includes sleeping a lot every night, reading, taking walks and spending time with Isa. I complain a lot to my friends* about her, but it's not all fighting and mood swings. We do fun things together, such as going to art expositions, sitting shivering in the park, watching indie films, walking around aimlessly, and picking out people in public places to hate. Good times.

*When I say "my friends", I realize that probably means almost everyone that reads this. There doesn't seem a way around this that doesn't sound awkward.


Going to art expositions thing is actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Madrid seems to have another one open somewhere every week or so. The best ones are "digital" art expos. The most recent one we went to was Condición Postmedia. I dont know a damn thing about art, so I cant really speak intelligently on the subject. But check this out: Light Corner. I dont think you need a degree in fine art to appreciate a painting of cubes that look like they're floating in 3D. Or a flashing light that spells words, but only while your eyes are moving away from it. Besides optical illusions, there were also hardware sculptures and computer graphics animations.

These digital art things are not only neat to look at, but they're also inspiring somehow. When I get done being incredibly lazy, I'll go back to work at Tankgame with renewed vigor. I've got lots of creative energy all stopped up. I dont mean that in the way it sounds. Creative, you know, to create, to build. It doesn't have to mean a fucking poem when someone uses that word, damn it!