Okay, so maybe I won’t be too precise about what I do where, but nothing says I can’t talk about what I do on my way there.
I’m in Buenos Aires at the moment. Interesting city. Wonderful, wonderful food. I stopped by Santiago, Chile, earlier today. It’s interesting – it’s right by the Andes, yet you can’t see them because of the smog.
I just spent $470 on malaria pills.
…and that just covers this one trip.
So the new job is going well, so far (I’m a field geophysicist.) In a week or so, I’m getting shipped off out of the country. I’ll be gone for a long while. This ambiguity brings me to a realization I made: secrecy is everything in this business.
This is a cut throat industry. These few talented companies are competing for some serious business. And what these corporations do to get the edge over each other is incredible. The R&D alone is unbelievable. They’re single handedly pushing the barriers of human technology. It’s like AMD vs. Intel: IP means a lot. It’s really cool stuff. Unfortunately again, I can’t talk about it here (I imagine Intel employees are in the same boat.)
To that same extent, I won’t be posting pictures of what I do or where I go. It sucks, but if I do it right you won’t ever get the feeling that I’m withholding information from you. This is the only time that I’ll broach the subject anyways.
Well the test print for the Rice Tea hardcover came through the mail today. It took about twenty days to get, and it was well worth it. It looks fantastic – I couldn’t of asked for a better result!
Rice Tea is currently at 70 pages. Progress is happening. That said, expect a week long absence next week as I do some geological field work.
So I got a call tonight. When I answered, the person on the other end was immediately shouting a bunch of obscenities my way. Thinking it was some buddies pulling my leg, I answered “Andrew”?
Then I found out that the guy on the other end was serious. It wasn’t Andrew, but my roommate. To set the stage: two days ago, he comes home drunk out of his mind from a Kegger. He falls asleep on his couch. So what do I, a responsible roommate do? Why I get another partier to draw cocks on his body as I film of course! We then come up with the idea of writing the names of people down that attended the party to make it seem like that all happened while he was over there. Didn’t quite work.
Fastforward to two days later, and my roommate figures out the culprit. After the initial one-sided shouting match, and me hanging up on him twice for throwing swear words my way, he calmed down. By this point, he was expressing his very serious will to punch me in the face. Being a glutton for punishment, I let this go on for half-an-hour, patiently trying to soothe him. It didn’t work. He accused me of all sorts of things, over analyzing what I thought to be a very simple situation with no intended malice.
If there’s another bit of humour to extract from this, its this nugget during the emo phase of the conversation:
Him: I never want to see your face again.
Me: (Tired) Okay, fine. Can we get off the phone now?
Him: I mean what would your mother think?
Me: I told her. She laughed. (She did!)
Him: (Serious) I never want to see you or her again.