In the Midst of the Convention

Weather: Back to what it should be. Cold and super windy. I guess it's nice, as long as I only have to deal with it for a week.
Sports Thought: I don't want to talk about it.
Accomplishment: Finally met my first people who go to the University of Maryland. They just sort of stared at me when I told them how awesome they are and how cool the Terp is, but eventually they gave us donuts.
Currently: There's a poker night going on up stairs. We'll see if I can fight through the fatigue to play some hold 'em and, unfortunately, socialize with some of the strangest people I've ever been around.

So the past two days have been a healthy mix of APO conventioning, Boston sightseeing, and fatigue.
As far as the Boston portion of the trip, we're doing a pretty good job of covering as many tourist spots that are stops on the T. Sunday was somewhat of an anomaly. The weather running about sixty degrees, we were practically dying after a couple of hours of wandering around. We took the T to Newbury Street, which is a swanky and scenic shopping center. We saw a number of ornate and imposing churches, each of which I can only assume was "America's First [denomination] Church," seeing as everyone has some sort of dubious achievement like that here. We stumbled upon the Boston Public Library, which was absolutely stunning. It was more like an empty art museum or church, with huge stair cases and painted ceilings and the like. Wikipedia tells me it was "the first publicly supported municipal library in the United States, the first large library open to the public in the United States, and the first public library to allow people to borrow books and other materials and take them home to read and use." Naturally.
From there we semi-navigated our way to Boston Common, which of course advertises itself as America's first park. Probably the coolest thing was that the big lake throughout the park was semi frozen (especially impressive given the fact that we were sweating at this point).
From there, we took the T to the Museum of Fine Arts, mostly because it was free starting after 4 pm (but closing at 4:45...). Although 45 minutes is more than enough time for two guys to crank through an art museum, and we hit Egypt, Greece and Rome, Impressionist France, and Contemporary American quite expediently.
Last night at around eleven, our fellow Southern Californians (Rho Gamma at Cal State Long Beach and Chi at UCLA) invited us on an expedition with them to find the river. So most of this consisted of weaving through lots of picturesque streets (complete with apartments with stoops!) and fighting the cold weather. Something we've noticed (esp. from the view in the room) is that Boston is a city much better suited for nighttime. All the buildings do a great job of illuminating (although maybe some of this is just Christmas leftovers) and it's definitely a cool place to wander around after dark (which happens around five pm......).
Today the convention paid for us to take the T to Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, which I can only assume was America's first food court and shopping center. The whole area was really nice--more classic looking buildings and brick streets. Although I got a pretty disappointing seafood roll (80% mayonnaise, 20% crab and shrimp), still another cool place to knock off of our to-do.
As far as in the Sheraton, most of what's slated for the four days of the convention are various workshops, each trying to focus on areas to improve each individual chapter. Yesterday, I went to Retention, while Eman went to Pledging and one on successful chapters in general. Pretty informative on the whole, but nothing spectacular. We've also got daily meetings with all of the California schools, where they talk about the state of our region. Perhaps the highlight of today's was a discussion involving changing the date of regionals (a biennial convention for the California schools) from in late December to November. They region director ran down the list of various reasons as to why the change was needed, one being "Alpha Kappa (our chapter) has a history of playing the Rose Bowl." Again, USC football has repercussions felt everywhere.
Today from eight am to four pm (with our two hour lunch break) was the legislation session. Essentially, there are ten or so committees, and each propose amendments to the bylaws and national legislations for the chapters to follow, and then two members from each chapter votes on it. Sounds pretty simple. Unfortunately, the combination of a strict following of Robert's Rules of Order and a pretty verbose nerd population results in rambling discussion on endless topics. Some of the 'highlights' from today were whether or not we should formally celebrate the Boy Scouts of America's 100th anniversary (since they discriminate against homosexuals), whether chapters should be encouraged to celebrate Veteran's Day (which may offend some Muslim students who feel that veterans are directly in conflict with their home country and beliefs) (this debate really impressed me; I was unaware that people were capable of being against veterans), whether or not outside auditors should "review" or "inspect" financial reports, and various motions to end debate on motions to end debate.
But luckily, we could find ways to fight through the tedium. Apart from my standard fare (crossword puzzles), there's an elaborate 'messaging' system set up. Since we're not allowed cell phones and talking is to be kept to a minimum, we can write notes, which are then picked up by floor messengers, and then delivered to their target. While we started off using this semi-practically (asking our Section representative to grab us some breakfast) the system corrupts pretty easily. So we ended up having the messengers deliver notes to Chi (sitting directly in front of us), swap donuts for sudoku books with Epsilon Mu (University of Maryland), Rose Bowl smack talk Alpha Beta (Penn State), and carry on a conversation with Gamma Zeta (Georgia Tech), probably the biggest USC football fans I've met outside of the greater LA area. In between, we also got a really cryptic message from Sigma Zeta (RPI) asking us to reveal our identities, and I sent probably an equally odd one to Xi Delta (Texas A&M) telling them how awesome they were. Hopefully we can keep up the mass messaging tomorrow, which'll get us through whatever else voting we have to do.

First Day in Boston

Weather: wet, but not punishingly cold. Reminds me
Sports thought: Cal won the Emerald Bowl, so the Pac-10 is 2-0 in postseason. I can't help but think that because of its 'off year,' the Pac-10 had the ability to pull easier bowl pairings, and is thus going to win a lot more than people would expect from the conference as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised if the teams go 4-1, with Oregon dropping their game to Okst.
Accomplishment: For the second time this break, I read an entire book in one day. Today it was "Game Boys" by Michael Kane, about the explosion of professional video gaming in the past three or so years. Pretty interesting read, but I don't think it would go over well with someone who doesn't have a rudimentary grasp of Counter-Strike.
Currently: Three Jamaicans are sitting next to me arguing about faith pretty intensely. It's probably really philosophical, but I just keep hearing Sebastian the Crab.

Today has been a pretty long day (although thanks to the power of time zones, my brain thinks it's eleven when it's actually twelve), but I'll see if I can't run down some of the highlights.

Got up around seven am to make the trek out to the Houston airport. Thanks to the wonderful geography of College Station, you can either fly out of the podunk airport (baggage, boarding, waiting = 30 minutes, flight = 45 minutes) to Houston, or just go ahead and drive there in an hour and a half. But of course this adds about two hours to your travel time, so we were gone as the sun was coming up. IAH was pretty standard, airport stuff was really only highlighted by my dad showing me how to bypass all of the security lines(Continental people flying out of Houston--terminal E! Use it! There's nobody there!), so I avoided a 30 or so minute wait in favor of a zero minute one.

The flight was three hours and some change, with no movie (I didn't think they still did flights that long without some sort of tv...), although it would've been "Ghost Town," so maybe it was for the better. Did the crossword. Slept. Woke up after the beverage cart passed me by. Slept. Woke up after the meal cart passed me by. Slept some more.

Got into The Cradle of Modern America around 4 Eastern (noon Hawaii), and got to do my best impression of a big city expert, taking the Silver Bus to the Red Subway to the Green Subway, without having to ask anyone for help or making eye contact with anyone. The subway system was really easy to navigate; reminded me a lot of the London one, which was a cinch to use, but a little grimy. The street performers were pretty disappointing; the only one that stands out was a dude playing a two stringed violin poorly.

Met up with my other half for the convention, Eman. He had been here since five am and, having at that point gone 28 hours without sleep, was the definition of running on fumes. But, since the room at this super swanky Sheraton was in my name, he was forced to bum around for twelve hours. Although they promised us a double, they super overbooked, and we got bumped up to this way-too-glitzy-for-us corner king, with a roll out bed. It being a corner, we've got an amazing view (from the nineteenth floor), with the capital building on one side, and some sort of Christmas-y lit place on the other. Plus a flat screen tv. But the Sheraton seems to think that once we're in the doors, we're gonna drain our wallets for them, offering 30 minutes of internet for $5, and a full breakfast for $20.

We killed some time at the Prudential Center, an opulent mall attached to the hotel. Eman, being the child of the West Coast that he was, remarked how strange it was to see a mall entirely indoors.

Then we had the opening ceremonies for this whole APO business. I'm not really sure how to describe our fellow brothers in a way to properly convey them, but I really feel like I'm at some hybrid of a Renaissance Festival and Comic-Con minus all the costumes. The people surrounding us are...well...strange. I'm sure there are normal ones out there (it's my mission to go find the larger universities--I know Georgia, WashU St. Louis, etc. are here--because I bet these delegates are a bit more...socially adept) (although I absolutely refuse to go talk to the people from Tech), but for the most part this is a convention of people from obscure liberal arts universities, state colleges, and Alaska.

The ceremony mostly consisted of the pretty obnoxious and self-promoting national president cracking obnoxious jokes and self-promoting. The president of the Philippines APO (which he calls ah-poh)gave a pretty amusing speech, complete with an 'authentic Muslim sword' that he gifted to the American prez.

We're not quite sure what else we'll be doing for the next few days. There are workshops and meetings scheduled, some of which I'm sure we're supposed to go to. And we're voting delegates, which I guess means some time we'll have to vote. Plus, we're going to try and do some touristy things. And turns out the world's largest globe is two blocks away. Can't pass that up!!

Again?!?

So, thinking back on my somewhat short (in relative geologic terms) awareness/existence on the internet, I have been part of lots of failed blogs. There was my middle school Xanga (mostly attempts at me being funny) (the more things change the more they stay the same...), my high school Blogspot (where I just complained about all my teachers), my tandem blog about working at a summer camp, a super ill-fated blog where I thought I would write every day about the Houston Astros (somewhere down the line in this fantasy, I became the preeminent Astros blogger and was showered with money and Hunter Pences), and probably various others in between. All of these blogs have failed, as you no doubt can guess,in the sense that I'm no longer writing them.

But, inexplicably, I seem to think that I can keep up continuous blogging in the near future. Or part of me feels that I'm about to do a lot of interesting things in the upcoming months, and should grant myself some sort of venue to write it down. And of course, there's the part of me that thinks people should just be so enamored by anything and everything I do, that I've been doing them a massive disservice by not providing daily updates on my whereabouts and exploits.

So, to pique your (you being....me right now) interest (and hopefully keep me tethered to this blog out of obligation), here's a rough itinerary of months to come: the various cities I should be visiting and what I imagine doing there in my head.

-Boston, MA--APO National Convention, complaining about cold weather to anyone who will listen
-Cambridge, MA--Harvard gallivanting
-Newark, NJ--plane stopover--will finally determine if this state is as punchline-worthy as Jon Stewart leads me to believe
-San Francisco, CA--visiting all the tourist locations I go to every three or so years I'm there
-Davis, CA--maybe I'll go there!?
-Cupertino, CA--did you know some argue that this city should be pronounced Q-pertino, rather than Cue-pertino? I will get to the bottom of this, believe you me.
-College Station, TX--for the first time in my life, I will be out of school and out of work for about a month. Good thing I'm doing it in one of our nation's major metropolitan areas (when considering only cities in Brazos County).
-Austin, TX--a city boasting nearly half a dozen floors where I am more than welcome to sleep
-Houston, TX--maybe I'll go there!?
-Auckland, NZ--two days to discover all the words that they spell with an -ou before it actually matters scholastically.
-Dunedin, NZ--ever wondered if Rat Kings (made famous (in the MacKenzie household) on 30 Rock) actually exist? Well, I promise to you I will get to the bottom of it, since "A rat king found in 1930 in New Zealand, displayed in the Museum in, was composed of immature Rattus rattus whose tails were entangled by horse hair." -- Wiki
-Christchurch, NZ--will attempt to uncover the predominant religion in this city. Expectations of success are low.
-Nadi, FJ--I don't actually know anything about Fiji, and yet I've got 3 or so days to kill there on my way back home. I could either learn their culture beforehand, or just wing it. As an American, I think we all know what I'm going to do.
-Denver, CO--will take in the beautiful air via an airport stopover.

So that's fourteen (possible) cities, three countries, and thousands of dollars of spending waiting for me. Let's see what happens.