Skeletor Stuck in Traffic

Barcelona

The first time I ever went there was ten years ago almost. It was my favorite city just about in all of Europe (that I saw), so it was great luck that my sis decided to marry a nutty Spaniard who wanted to get married in front of his almost-more-insane-than-our family in the hills above town. Most of the downtown is an old gothic city full of centuries-old streets, city walls, crazy churches, and laid-back people who party all night, have good taste in food, clothing (well, most of the time), coffee, and know how to mind their own damn business (ahem, Italy) but are still friendly and cool. All of this next to the gorgeous Mediterranean. What else could you ask for?

There's no love lost between the Catalans, who speak their own language filled with bizarre x's and z's and c's with that French squiggle under them, and the Castillian Spaniards who lisp their way through the "true" Spanish language, which is a far cry from the Latin American spanish most people speak here in the New World. Rebekah (Isis) tells me that Spanish isnt even one of the official languages of the city, which are actually Catalan and English by decree of the city government (meow, hissss). Nothing goes deeper than a bitter old European grudge.

The city is filled with crazy architecture by Antoni Gaudi, who became Barclona's darling by designing some really forward-thinking and visionary buildings in the early part of the 20th century that came to represent, at least to his patrons, a new and unique Catalunian architectural vision. His masterpiece stands unfinished in the middle of the city. It is a giant albatross of a cathedral that he died during the construction of, and which probably wont be finished for another twenty years. I went to go see it again on the last day of my spell in BCN. Mostly because my traveling companion had already left the night before, who is Muslim and had expressed a sort of vaguely concealed abject horror at first sight of the traditional Catholic depiction of Jesus on the Cross that hangs in perpetual agony above altars across the global Jesusphere (insert furrowed brow, puzzled half grin, and finally a "That's a brutal image").

It's funny because growing up Catholic, I never really saw it that way. I always just accepted the universal presence of Jesus of the Cross without question; a thing that just IS-- like air, water, puppies, and the wheel. We were in one of those old scary gothic churches (complete with scaly fanged creatures popping out of its side), and at that moment I looked up at this depiction and saw it, I mean really SAW Jesus' perpetual naked dying for the first time in my life.





So I didn't dare bring us to Gaudi's cathedral, which is beautiful yet bizarre; bordering on insanity. I waited and went by myself to see it again the day before leaving. The first time I saw it ten years ago I fell in love with its vision and grandiosity; its total sweeping iconic originality. My first lucid dream took place in one of its round towering spires one night many months after I had returned home, which contributed to a mysterious allure that has made me revere it all these years.

This time I approached on foot and saw its spires peeking out from behind apartment buildings that line the streets surrounding it. My heart beat with anticipation, kind of like seeing a long lost lover; wondering if it would be the same as you remembered or if it would change or somehow feel different. I approached from the north side of it this time which is the side that has the depiction the "La Sagrada Familia" for which the cathedral is named:



This time I actually read up a little about it and grinned when I saw that he built it as a "temple of atonement". No wonder my first lucid dream was set in the place. Gaudi was a deeply spiritual man and used to tell tenants of the buildings he worked on that they better have a good relationship with God if they wanted to dwell in his works peacefully. I stood in line and plunked down my euros to get in; it started to drizzle just a little as soon as I stepped foot on the city block that holds the cathedral, the first and only rain I saw on the whole trip. The drizzle turned into a full-on downpour which I narrowly escaped as soon as I was done admiring the wierd spectacle of the front of the church.

The whole inside of the cathedral was designed and constructed to feel as if you are actually inside the body of Christ. Its pillars and columns feel like bony protrusions when you stand beneath their enormity.



I dutifully got in line to ride the elevator up the spires on the side of the church where my dream had taken place. That's when it started to really pour outside. I took it as some wierd omen. A Japanese couple that looked like they were straight out of that show Bridezillas cut in front of me; the wife seemed angry when I sat down to rest my feet, let them go by and sat for a couple of minutes and then went to go try and recover my place in line which by now was about 4 feet from me in front of them. The wife angrily blocked my way in a way that was simultaneously obnoxious but polite and the husband avoided eye contact, but his bodily gestures seemed to plead with me to please just let her have her way. So I smiled in amusement and assumed my place in line behind them, every once in a while pretending like I was going to make a dash for it to get a rise out of the wife. It made the half-hour wait for the 5-person elevator pass much more quickly.

Finally it was my turn to go up into the spires.



Luckily my return to the setting of that bizarre dream hadn't torn a hole in the fabric of space and time (that I know of), so I began to relax a little at the top and enjoyed the view.



I don't know if you've ever had a lucid dream or not. Before it happened to me I had vaguely heard of them but didn't really get it. Ok, so they are dreams where you can kind of control what goes on, big whoop, i thought; why are astrally-chakra people always talking about them? But then when it happened to me a couple of months after returning from India a year later MY GOD, it was a mind-altering experience. I woke up feeling more energized and alive than ever and think I grinned my way through a good four or five days afterwards for no particular reason other than I felt really... good.

I've heard it said in some places that the old-school Catholics in Barcelona who violently disapproved of the building of La Sagrada Familia because of its overwhelmingly strange aesthetic thought that Gaudi's death at the hands of a bus driver in front of the cathedral was God's way of punishing Gaudi for creating such a monstrosity. I smiled when I re-read this off of a wall inside the cathedral museum and thought back to the "that's a brutal image" comment and my own newfound vision of Jesus' crucifiction. I finally felt at-peace with the scary Catholic version of God I grew up with, in the way that a grown up child can look at one's aging abusive parent and feel pity.

Can We Rid Ourselves Of These People Yet?

An article and video about vote rigging software commissioned by Florida's Republican Speaker of the House Tom Feeney in October of 2000 has (finally) surfaced on the internet. Follow the link and you'll see video of computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis testifying under oath in 2004 before the US House Judiciary Members in Ohio about his job writing software that would flip any vote, no matter how lopsided, to 51% - 49%. When the programmer went to turn over source code and reports to the congressman, he discovered that the congressman didn't actually want him to write software to make sure elections weren't rigged... he wanted him to write software that ~could~ rig elections.

The question is, why is this testimony just now surfacing anywhere? Go watch the video. Link

Barbie Ho

Yeah, I'm back from Barcelona, my new favorite city in the world. My sister's wedding was a blast, I had so much fun with everyone and I got to hang with my favorite person in the world in a beautiful, fun city... All in all, a 5-star vacation. The only snag was that my bag got delayed in Milan (word to the wise: never fly Alitalia airlines: link) and just arrived this morning, so I havent downloaded my pix yet from the digital camera, which means I'll hold off on Spain stories until I get that in order.

Just wanted to pop in real quick to share a really funny story from work. I'm probably not supposed to re-tell it, but its just too good to not share. So today my team had a marathon design-by-committee session this afternoon which quickly devolved into a total pissing contest between engineers, a developer (me), a designer, a product manager, and a vice-president of something or other. At the end of the long, catty meeting when all was said and done, the vice-president told us this great story about his days of working for Mattel, the company that makes Barbie.

It seems the designers of Barbie had gotten into a real tussle over Roller Skating Barbie. The original design called for Barbie to be on roller-skates, with a dog on a leash. But someone in the meeting had decided that Barbie's only having one dog would be percieved as anti-social. The result was a long argument during which Barbie went from having one dog all the way up to having six dogs and then back to having one dog again. It seems that Mattel keeps costs low by dressing Barbie in skimpy outfits, so every time they added a dog, her skirt had to get shorter. The meeting dragged on and on until eventually several Barbie designers fainted (apparently they are all anorexic and tend to faint in stressful situations). At the end of this ordeal, it came down to our vice-president guy having to cast the deciding vote and the resulting Barbie was forever known, internally only, as Barbie Ho.