Adventures in Onionism

Why is it that two-thirds of the employees at the Apple store in Emeryville are please-kick-the-snot-out-of me snarky and smug? Is it just the Emeryville store, or are all others the same? I'm sure that my own arrogance doesn't really help the situation, and maybe I should just take this as a lesson that I should be a little nicer myself, because if talking to me is anywhere near as annoying as talking to any of the "geniuses" at the Apple store (excluding Tony, who was plenty nice), then it's amazing I have any friends at all. To add to my own culpability, despite the Apple techs having found nothing wrong with my computer at all, it apparently works just fine now. Now I just have to live down the shame of the fact that I accidentally got the black MacBook, which costs $125 more than the white one. (There's actually a $200 price difference, but I thought that was because of the 40 gig bigger hard drive. But you can just pay $75 to bump up the size of the...

I finished yo-yoing the CDT a month ago. It took me 10 days or so to get "home" to Emeryville, and since then, I've finished one book (Stegner's Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs ), seen 7 movies ( The Bourne Ultimatum, The Queen, 3:10 to Yuma, The Passenger, Cars, Pan's Labyrinth, The English Patient ), inquired about/applied for 6 jobs (of which I seem to have landed an indeterminate number between 0 and 3, inclusive), gone running a handful of times, decided that I should volunteer at the Oakland Public Library or the People's Grocery community garden that's across the street but not actually done much about it, started eating vegetables on a regular basis, got a new computer (thanks Dad!), discovered that it annoyingly doesn't work with the wireless network in my house (but does work with other wireless networks), I've been on hold with Apple for the last 15 minutes, and I can't tell whether the robot voice is telling me th...

Do you find yourself overcome by crippling doubt every time you go grocery shopping? Specifically, do you just buy Fuji apples because that's what you're used to, but wonder to yourself whether there isn't some sort of uber-apple out there that's better in every way and could improve the quality of your life immeasurably by instantly throwing a party in your mouth to which all sorts of good flavors were invited? Well, welcome to my world. Only now I've taken measures to solve this problem. It started when I challenged the food-snob status of my roommate Marcus. I asked him what types of apples he liked, and he could only name a couple. So he went out right then and bought one of every type they had at Pak-n-Save. The next day we invited three friends over for dinner, sliced up the fourteen apples, and had everyone rank each apple according to four characteristics: sweetness, juiciness, tartness, and crispness. We used a numeric scale from 0 to 10. 0 w...

You might be wondering what my plans are now that I have completed the hike and have been "home" for a week. Succinctly, I have no idea what I'm doing for the next two months, I'm giving grad school another shot next year, and I'm probably not doing anything cool again until 2009. While I was on the trail with all that time to think, I definitely made plans for the future. I planned to come home and immediately start attending classes until the end of the semester in December. I'd get a new computer and make DVD's of my trip, put all my photos on my website, and do a huge brain-dump with all my notes that I wrote on the trail maps for the benefit of future hikers, then I'd take off on a big bus/train tour of nearly every place where I have some friends: Truckee, Salt Lake, Iowa, Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, North Carolina, then hitch across the country with a big sign saying "Mom's house" to San Diego, then st...

I spent most of the day yesterday at LAX with my sister gossiping about the rest of our family, and now I'm "home" in Emeryville. (For the sake of 300-something dollars a month rent, I'm splitting a room with Marcus until I go insane and we try and kill each other and then never speak to each other again.) I've now watched all the episodes of The Office that are available online, and now I have no idea what to do with the rest of my day/life.

We spent a day in Vegas hiking around Red Rock Canyon and eating a ridiculous amount at Hash House, then drove to Indio and crashed at Marcus' cousin's house. Sunday we hiked around Joshua Tree NP--visited an oasis, camped in the backcountry , and climbed around on some big rocks (the latter is what Joshua Tree is famous for). Now I'm in San Diego to visit friends and the folks, or rather, to finally get myself a second set of clothing.

Thursday we drove through Sedona, nearly vomited after eating a Burger King sandwich with "warm buttery-tasting bread," and hiked the popular trail up the west fork of Oak Creek Canyon. The leaves were changing and the canyon was spectacular. We drove into Flagstaff and saw Into the Wild . I was very happy that Sean Penn didn't ruin it, and of course, I absolutely loved it; I totally identified with everything in it, including all the on-location scenery. Yesterday we visited Petrified Forest NP and Walnut Canyon NM and gave a sort of crazy hitch-hiker a ride to Vegas, where we're crashing at my buddy Nielsen's house. I say sort of crazy because when he told Marcus he just got back from 10 years as a marine in Iraq, Marcus asked him if he'd been to Kabul, Iraq or Islamabad, Iraq, and he said he'd been to both. I think his stories about ranching might've been at least partly true though. Probably headed to Joshua Tree next.

Apparently Marcus believes in flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants to the point of not reading car rental contracts before signing them, so we weren't allowed to take the car back to New Mexico. That meant no pie in Pie Town and no visiting the VLA (the Very Large Array, those big radio-telescopes) but no big deal, we just stayed in Arizona and did part of a canyon hike I heard of through Andrew Skurka--the Safford-Morenci trail. It's part of the Grand Enchantment Trail ( http://www.simblissity.net/grand_enchantment.shtml ) that connects Phoenix and Albuquerque. We may or may not have actually found the right trail, but whatever canyon we walked up was cool enough, so we kept going. Then we tried to camp at Saguaro National Park in order to check it out tomorrow, but they lock the gate at sundown, so we just kept on going north to Phoenix/Mesa, and are crashing at a friend's house. I'm enjoying returning to semi-normalcy in that I just watched "Stranger Than Fiction...