1. Small group trip to Jordan to see the city of Petra-- Jade, pweent, mochi, a couple of others along. The approach was just like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for sure: A long desert crossing, and in the distance we can see this vaguely crescent-moon-shaped canyon. We make our way down into it on a windy trail, and when we get to the bottom-- it's a museum and mall. They've turned fucking Petra into a shopping center. With skylight ceiling overhead and decorative planters down the middle and shops where you can buy genuine artifacts of the Middle East and t-shirts and there are displays with maps and historical information and collections of objects and lecture halls, and not only can you not really tell you're walking inside a natural sandstone canyon... you can't even find the damn building faces cut into the walls anymore. We wandered around for a while, trying to find even one of the temple faces, but it was all so built up that you pretty much had to be right at one of them to notice it, and even then there was a Natural Wonders sign hanging over it or something. It was a fucking mall masquerading as a museum, the whole thing was, and we were so pissed off that we'd traveled all the way to Jordan for this bullshit. We went into one of the temples and the interior was being used as a lecture hall. There was a slide show going on, something about nomadic migration routes, and we wanted to look around at the carving work inside and everything but we couldn't because of this lecture. So we left in disgust and mochi flipped the lights on as we left so that the slide show would be ruined. Most disappointing vacation ever.
2. Was hanging out with a bunch of people I don't really know very well. Each of them had "their hobby", something that was relatively small and benign but which had utterly taken over their life far more than it should. One of them was into EL wire-- he was covered with the stuff, while conversing he was making yet another little EL wire gadget of some sort, it was all he really wanted to talk about. Another was into juicing, blenderizing vegetables to make healthy smoothies. As we sat around, she had a portable battery-powered blender that would make 12oz of anything, and she was making some drink with carrots and celery and an egg, I think. "I remember back in '96," she says, "Everyone was saying juicing was on it's way out, but I'm so glad it hasn't. Juicing will never die!" And I found myself feeling vaguely disquieted, as I could not for the life of me think of what my "hobby" was, what the little benign pasttime was that had taken control of my life. I couldn't think of anything, and it made me aware that I didn't really fit in with this group (I can't remember what anyone else's hobbies were, sadly). Then I started to wonder if I really wanted to fit in, and about this point they started grilling me about my hobby. They apparently thought it was personal electronics: "Hey, I heard you got a new cell phone, Dan." - "Uh, only because my old one got stolen. And that was back in the spring, anyway." They kept trying to prompt me. "Any new programs for your Palm Pilot? Hey, don't you have a pocket Gameboy? I hear your new phone is totally waterproof so you can use it in the shower or pool. That's terrific, that you never have to stop using it!" And I couldn't even remember whether or not I actually own a Gameboy, much less whether or not my cell phone was actually waterproof.