christmas eve in canary wharf

I stopped in to work today for a quick meeting with Ashish, and to catch up on email. I recently synced my ipod (becoming more laborious as time goes by and I get more music) and was listening to billy no mates on the tube, bless those guys for still doing it right. I switched to J-church as I walked up out of the tube station into a nearly silent canary wharf. This took me right back to that day I spent walking around cambridge...

"I walked around in a self imposed headphones isolation but with the whole gang and felt really weirdly close to them."

 

I went straight through "one mississippi" that day, and on to "69 love songs". I'd been really relating to Jchurch that year, because it took me back home a bit when walking in the foreign streets. So on that day, the glowy feeling of the beer, twilight, colleges, the disconnected connection with my fellow students and music mixed in with the melancholy of knowing that it would all be over soon. White noise filtered in from the edges of vision and hearing, and I felt something really beautiful. 10 months later Lance died on a table having his blood cleaned. I found out 3 months after that.

Stepping up into the silent wharf, listening to one mississippi and feeling a bit alone, I suddenly felt really sad. Tears are no good at work, even on christmas eve, so I turned poor Lance off, wiped my eyes and walked through the front doors.

I'm really, really sorry, Lance.

my first Hanukah

I went up to oxford yesterday to visit with my friends Sasha and Orly.  Sasha was the 2nd MBA that I met way back in September of 2006.  He and Orly have two boys, Nir (4) and Dan (1).  Sasha works for a small investment bank that focuses mainly on Russia and eastern Europe.  He's also Belarusian and speaks Hebrew, Russian and English.  They invited me to come up to have dinner, get drunk on vodka and stay over the night.  Russian style vodka drinking consists mainly of downing ice cold vodka shots in a single gulp.  It's great fun, and went along very nicely with the lamb Sasha cooked.  The boys were already asleep by the time I got there, and Orly went to bed after dinner, but Sasha and I stayed up late drinking plain vodka, chili pepper vodka, Irish whiskey, and even some red wine.  More accurately, you could say that Sasha and I stayed up late drinking ALL THE plain vodka, ALL THE chili pepper vodka, ALL THE Irish whiskey, and even ALL THE red wine. 

Sasha was predictably a bit rough the next morning, but I was totally hung over!  He suggested drinking a beer, "hair of the the dog" style... and while this seemed to sort him out, it just made me more sick.  So, I slept it off at their house while they took the boys to the park.  I was only feeling something like 30% human again by dinner time, so they had me stay for dinner as well, and Sasha made Moroccan style couscous, which is really good stuff, though I obviously couldn't eat too much of it.  Then, they lit the Menorah candle because this is the first day of Hanukah.  This was also my first Hanukah, so it was very interesting to watch.  They dimmed the lights, lit one candle, and then used it to light another one, while singing a song in Hebrew.  Just as the the song finished up, Sasha said, "Ok Orly, now bring in the Christian babies' blood..." and we all cracked up laughing.  We finished up the process with some home made doughnuts, and presents for the boys: Dreidels of course.  I rode the train back down late today, and capped the night off with chicken soup and the unbelievably horrible "National Treasure 2". 

my wife rules

the mighty teisco del ray

 

My wife bought me a teisco del ray guitar for Christmas.  She's going back to Seattle for the holidays but for various reasons I am staying here.  So, she gave me the guitar before she left, hoping that it would keep me busy.  It probably will!  These things are really cool old Japanese "surf" guitars modeled after the more famous US surf guitars like mosrites, and have a special appeal for sarcastic guitar collectors like me.  What a wonderful wife, that's the 2nd guitar she's bought for me!  I'm a very lucky guy.

Oxcam Revisited

Now I am a member of the Oxford and Cambridge club.  For the price of an Oxford MBA, a new members' night spent chit chatting and wrangling for two signatures, and 90 quid/month, I am now a member.  Is this a good thing?  Would they let in anybody with an oxcam degree and a pulse?  I don't want to consider these points.  I stopped by the night before last and had a glass of port while I read a weird old book on the Celts of England sitting in a red leather chair by the fire in the library.  It was peaceful in there, and I daydreamed that a few old members were looking at me, saying, "well at least this yank is interested in weird old books, even if he is just an MBA... what the hell, let's give him a chance".  This club isn't posh like the RAC, and it isn't political like some others, and it certainly isn't hip, it's simply a place where old geeks like to geek on old books in silence with their drink by the fire.  Or at least that's the way that I like to think of it.  I've come to accept that Oxford people are going to always be intimidating to me, and that's fine, I'm happy being the little fish.  

Why do I like these old books?  They reflect back to me in waves with the aggregate glow of every eye that ever looked down into them.  I like this, it makes the fire seem very simple.

Various

I feel like blogging today, but have nothing super interesting to write about.  Since that's never stopped me before...

Cold

I have a cold.  I hate having a cold.  I hate if for two reasons: 1) it sucks.  2) Because I had pneumonia several years ago, and ever since, every little cold I get turns into a chest cold.  A chest cold that hopes and dreams of growing up into pneumonia.  My guess is this is how I will die someday: I'll be old, I'll get my usual winter cold/chest-cold/wannabe-pneumonia and the pneumonia will finally get it's wish, taking out yet another old guy.

Polish Maid

Nothing in London is cheap, except for house cleaners.  I have a house cleaner from a maid service, and for £7 per hour, she cleans, does washing, irons, sews, etc.  I have no idea if she's a legal immigrant or not, though she did bring a very shitty photocopy of of her passport once.  She's probably 19, and doesn't speak English too well.  She's polite, but a skittish.  I was home sick on Friday (normal cleaning day) taking all these calls from work, and I think she was kind of freaked out by me being in the house when she was there.  I think that maybe she's afraid that I'm going to try to get her to sleep with me or something, she has that sort of wary-eye look that says a girl thinks "this foreign pig is a molester and he'll try to get me if I turn my back to him, then I'll be stuck with half-pig half-polish baby on this Gold forsaken island in the sea... must remain vigilant!"  Maybe that's an exaggeration, but in any case I try to just leave her alone which I think makes her like 3% more comfortable. 

Christmas Plans

Reba is going to Seattle for Christmas and I am not.  There are several reasons for this:

1) she works in a research institution where everybody would flake out over the Christmas week anyway, so the administrators just say "what the f---" and let everybody go.  I don't work in this kind of a company, so I don't have the week off.

2) I used all my vacation up already this year, with trips to Spain, Greece, the Yorkshire Dales, Scotland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Bruges, etc.

3) I wanted to make a point to my wife that maybe it's not really necessary to travel to Seattle 4 times a year.

4) Holiday travel is a nightmare.

5) Reba wants to visit Seattle one last time before the baby comes, it might be a while before she can travel again.

6) I'm going to be a father in a few months, and this will be my last chance to have some extended Ean time for a while.

7) Reba and I have often taken separate vacations, after 11 years it's sort of a nice break, and we're always eager to see one another at the end.

Despite the nice long list above, I'm regretting the decision.  I want to see my family and friends, have baby brother lunch, go to dim sum with my mom, do the Nochebuena, have a mango chutney shochu eggnogg (or whatever it is they're serving) at Tiger Tail, hang out at the Javabean, see the nieces and nephews, etc.  I'm always afraid that there may be a shorter time frame for seeing my mom than previously assumed.  There's nothing specific behind this last bit, it's just a fear I have.  Also, I have found that if Reba is gone for 2 to 3 nights, I enjoy my personal time, spend time with friends, and have the pleasant experience of finding things just where I put them last.  However, I have also noticed that if she's gone for any longer than 4 nights, I inevitably find myself huddled in the eye of some sort of psychological/existential crisis which I am ill equipped to handle on my own.

On the positive side, I will have a lot of time to do the extended Ean fantastic: read weird books and magazines at cafes, buy comic books, find new hardcore bands at All Ages Records, shop for the perfect reverb pedal, admire guitars I don't need, take naps on our giant DFS (think English JC Penny) couch and watch movies that would lead my wife to suspect that I'm an idiot.  I will also be going back to Oxford for a quiet Christmas eve with my good pal Andy, who is just about to finish his thesis for his DPhil (that's Oxford for PhD).  This is a big deal, because the thesis is really a book of about 100,000 words and he has to get it done by the end of January or the whole thing is canceled.  I guess he's got a couple of chapters left.  Stressy!  Plus, Ginny and Kaysa are going to be around, so they'll probably adopt me for a bit out of sheer pity.

Baby

I'm going to be a father.  Leaving aside the recent dramatic and sudden death of my own father, my present absence from my family's home, financial crises and scarcity of jobs in the finance sector, it's still a complex and scary proposition.  Put those ingredients back in, and a guy could get really worked up about this.  I am, however, determined to NOT be a freaked out first time parent, and thus am committing to being cool about this whole thing.  It's a bit early to tell how it will all work out, but I can say that my wife is cute with a little belly, we've found a nice new neighborhood to live in and push a stroller around, and the names are set: Ernest Robert Hernandez (boy) and Isabel(le) Josephine Hernandez (girl).  Ernest comes from lots of things Reba and I hold dear: my family often names boys with an E (brothers Ethan and Eban, father Ernest, grandfather Ernesto, great uncle Evelio, great grandfather Efigenio, etc.), memorial to my dad and granddad, Shackleton, Hemingway, and reba's great uncle Ern.  Robert is Reba's dad's name, and this just seems fair given the boy's first name.  The genesis of the Isabel(le) name is a bit more vague, we both like it and it's Spanish enough to fit with Hernandez, and English enough to be genuine.  By genuine I mean that I feel a bit disingenuous giving my child a strongly Spanish first name when the kid would be less that 1/4 Spanish... a pale blonde haired blue eyed 6th generation American boy named Juan Hernandez is a bit ridiculous, and certainly not named with any sense of accuracy regarding his genealogy.  So, Isabel(le) works because it's not a purely Spanish name, but still sounds good with Hernandez.  This last bit can be difficult... Beth Hernandez?  Jane Hernandez?  Sally Hernandez?  To me, these names sound great with English last names, but with Hernandez it's just awkward.  So, finding the right English first name to go with the Spanish last name is tricky.  The (le) part is included here because I sort of like the look of the French spelling a bit better than the Spanish version, but Reba feels the opposite way and we haven't come to an agreement yet.  The name will sound the same anyway.  My secret agenda is to employ the Barclays bank principle through which simply writing something enough times makes it true.

 

that's not beer!

CV

At Shelby's urging, I have updated my resume from the current 2 page version to a new 1 page version with a separate list of key achievements.  The idea is that by having a more succinct resume it will look more professional and more effectively convey my fundamental fabulousness by not losing the reader's attention halfway through the 2nd page.  If a potential employer is really interested, they will request the key achievements list.  Economical writing is something you work on a lot in business school, and I managed to reduce 18 years of education, jobs,  personal achievements, training, methodologies and memberships to 1 A4 sheet of paper.  One nice thing about living in the UK is that you get an extra .67 of an inch per resume page over the standard US 8.5x11.

Moving

We are moving to St John's wood.  If you live London, that might be a bit funny, if not you're probably wondering what/where that is.  Right now, we live in the edgy, punky, wild night out part of the city called Camden Town.  This neighborhood is accessed by the Northern Line subway, and is popular with young waify edgy looking people, as well as throngs of tourists that come from all over the UK and Europe to shop for bongs, tie dyed wall hangings, 27 buckle high heeled S&M boots, etc.  If you were shooting a low budget version of the Matrix, you could buy all your wardrobe here.  We are abandoning this gem for St John's wood, which is only about a 20 minute's walk from our current house, but is really a world away. 

Why this is funny:

1) it's on the Jubilee Line subway, which means that it's a straight shot to Canary Wharf,where bankers (like me) work. 

2) The neighborhood is very popular with American expatriates, again because of the ease of commuting to the financial center where they all work. 

3) St John's is also full of young, fashionably dressed mothers pushing expensive "prams" while their banker husbands work in Canary Wharf. 

4) Finally, the neighborhood is quiet and cute. 

...which means that there are 4 reasons that our friends here are thinking "oh yeah, now that Ean and Reba are having a baby they're getting conservative and moving to St John's Wood...   hahahahha!"  I suppose this is like living in Capitol Hill and the moving to Kirkland as soon as you decide to have kids.  I can't deny it! 

A is the old apt, B is the new one

Ok, that's more than enough for today, next time: Practice Spaces, Charles Darwin, Books, Magazines, and Dim Sum.

Bruxelles

This past weekend, Reba and I went down to Brussels (Bruxelles in some languages) to visit Shelby, my pal from business school.  We hadn't been on a weekend trip for quite a while, so it felt good to top up on travel.  I always feel like I'm wasting my time over here to some extent by not traveling at every chance.  Europe is so close to our little island home, and though it's easy to just chill at the apartment and go out to dinner in the neighborhood on the weekends, I won't have this proximity forever. 

Brussels is in Belgium, which seems to be a sort of German-ish France.  Apparently there is a big cultural/geographical divide between the French speaking Belgians and the Flemish (a kind of Dutch, which makes it a kind of German) speaking Belgians, with all the tension, rivalry and distrust that naturally builds up between two groups of white people living a country the size of Massachusetts.  Actually that doesn't make any sense to me, but if you figure (a) one half of this country is Germanic, and there's plenty to pick on Germans about if you're looking for a fight and happen to have had grandparents in northern Europe during the last century, and (b) the other half of the country is French.  Let's face it, other than my French teacher back in Seattle and a few francophilic femmes from said French class, nobody likes the French.  I'm not saying that it's right, just that it's true.  So, maybe this big divide in a tennis court sized state isn't such a shock after all.  Whatever.  After a while you realize that when you live over here, it's a lot better use of your time to not worry about why these 14 white people in one tiny corner of Europe hate those 23 other white people in the next tiny corner, even though they're probably all 3rd cousins anyway.

Shelby lives in London and works for BT, but she's been assigned to some project in BT's Brussels office, so they're putting her up in a fabulous apartment while she's there.  It was really good to see her, she's been away for a while now and I likes my Shelby time.  She's moving back to London in a few weeks.  Good!  She organized a pretty cool tour for us: visit to a Christmas market, nice dinner out, seeing all the wacky Belgian Christmas pageantry (more on this later) and best of all: a trip to Delirium.  Delirium is a bar just off the main square in Brussels where they have 2004 different beers for sale, mostly Belgians.  While the actual space is a shithole, the beer makes up for it and I was in that most lofty of heavens, beer heaven.  I drank a lot of Belgian weird beer (more on this later), and was very happy about it.  Shelby and Reba were very good sports and sat with me and watched me go through the various delicious options.  Thanks girls!

Belgian Christmas Pageantry

Adding to the long list of Euro stuff I don't get, there are apparently 2 key non-Jesus Christmas figures in the Belgian Christmas tradition.  There is a Belgian Santa Claus who is roughly analogous to the Santa Claus we all know and love back in the states.  Belgian Santa does his thing on December 25th just like everywhere else, but he's also in a sort of medieval parade on December 6th where he rides around Brussels in a horse drawn cart followed by guys on striped stilts, but what the hell, it's cool, I like stilts.  What's not cool is dude #2.  This is "black peter" or something like that.  This dude is Santa's helper or slave or something, and his face is supposed to be all black from chimney soot.  So, of course this means that there has to be a white dude in blackface walking behind Santa in the parade.  Oh yeah, and instead of giving presents, this guys beats up bad little kids and takes them back to Spain.  I am not making this up.

We had a lovely, culturally enriching trip to the continent this weekend, and I even got to use my French.  Au-bon.

Belgian Weirdbeer

I like weird beer.  Ok, scratch that, I like beer.  Even an ice cold lager is all good with me, but in colder months, complicated weird beer makes me very happy.  Seattle is famous/notorious for this stuff, and I quaffed my share of the weird before I left.  LoFiBri and I used to do the occasional weridbeer outing, and thinking back on those trips makes me happy and thirsty.  The Belgians however, take this art-form to a whole new level.  There are thousands of little breweries in this little country, all with their particular take on what a tasty little weirdbeer is.  I guess the best way to put it is: the Belgians are as diverse and serious about making beer as the French are about making wine, so get out there and drink some.  A Belgian focused recommendation I gave to my Austin pal Gabe just yesterday follows:

"good solid belgian beers that I like are chimay and duvel, nothing too wild but reliable. NOT for consumption on hot summer days tho, way too thick. for something a bit more interesting try westmalle. for something super kickass and weird try the Abbaye des Rocs by Brasserie de l'Abbaye des Rocs. This shit is the bizomb dizzle. I also drank one called "satan red", which is just a good idea generally. I think you can get all of these (except maybe that last) at any good hipster grocery. definitely at any beer store."

Special to Carl: we're pouring one out for Tiki this week, though I suspect he would have preferred some dropped bbq instead.  Take care my brother, you're in our hearts and in our thoughts.