Vanya Sulie (5): Postcards from the Purple Line

[turnberryknkn]

As always, click on thumbnails to expand images. :-)

Orange marbled slices of salmon. Ruby red slabs of fatty tuna. Spicy rolls, and butterflied shrimp pieces, and egg prepared Japanese style: all-you-can-eat Sushi is an excellent way to spend a lunch, especially when shared with an old friend like hoya99. :-)

Just as some beef is served as a Kobe-beef shabu-shabu extravaganza and others as merely good hamburgers, the sushi we had that afternoon in Bethesda was decent, rather than the stellar specimens one might find at Morimoto's of Philadelphia or the humble stalls that line the mighty central Tsukiji fish market that feeds Tokyo's hungry millions. But even decent sushi is still neato stuff --especially when you get to eat as much as you want for twelve bucks.

hoya99 has both the blood of Japanese samurai and Irish berzerkers in his veins, and an appetite to match. I've been told I have a decent sized appetite myself. And so the two of us merrily stacked up empty plate after empty plate, single-handedly keeping the poor sushi chef at the center of the bar hopping. Ignored salads and side dishes kept forlornly orbiting around the conveyor belt as the two of us inhaled wasabi-blanched soy sauce and round after round of fish-topped rice...

And as we powered through a fleet of dishes, we caught up, yet again, on old times. His younger brother was establishing a specialty recording studio. My younger brother was graduating from medical school. Mutual friends were working for the United Nations in Hyogo, the World Health Organization in Geneva, as an assistant district attorney in New York City. And so on and so forth, picking up a conversation that began some thirteen years before with, of all things, funnels and gerbils and hasn't stopped yet. :-)

It was understandable that they'd have a sign posted that repeated the meaning of the original sign in languages other than English. Even several signs in several languages. But viking runes? L33t? Sindarin? The last is what caught silmaril's eye first...

Some months before, bkleber had come up to Ann Arbor to visit Jesse, Terrapin-turned-Wolverine and Marklander-turned-Cynnabar dancer. It was at that time Jesse kindly invited me to join them for dinner at the Blue Nile and a long silly post-dinner playing an especially demented version of the card game Fluxx. (That's right --we found a way to make that game even more mind-bendingly insane than it usually is...) It was a great deal of fun and so, now that I was in his part of town, he had asked if we could swing by the Physics demonstration lab facility to say hello. :-)

Having completed our sushi-grazing, hoya99 then proceeded to graze bookstore shelves. Him being as much a bibilophile as I, we examined and discussed all manner of books of many genres in three different bookstores across the course of that afternoon. We didn't actually purchase any books, although I did get some chocolate treats for the lab and the cutest little fuzzy unicorn bookmark for a certain unicorn-adoring, ballroom dancing, Tengwar-calligraphing friend of ours (which she holds at left). :-) After some traffic fighting across the northern rim of DC, we met silmaril at her building on the UMD campus and then hiked on over to see bkleber at his place of work, which was where we discovered the multiplicity of signs hanging on the wall in the hallway outside of the physics demo prep room. I can't actually remember what the signs actually said --something I think to do with returning boxes, or carts, or trash, or something important-- but all appreciated the bemused geekiness of the multiple translations. silmaril helpfully added a Turkish variant just as bkleber arrived...

bkleber works on staff at UMD, helping, among many responsibilities, prepare physics demonstrations for the large lecture courses. Which means, of course, all kinds of cool and nifty physics toys. After placing a group phone call to see how poor Jesse was doing after having all of her wisdom teeth pulled (ouch), bkleber offered to show off one of his physics demo rigs. Instantly you could hear at least two sets of geek antennas *perk!* Especially when among the very first set of instructions was a warning against overloading and blowing out the rig... ;-)

(I am uncertain whether my friend hoya99 considers himself a hard-core geek. The verdict on silmaril and myself is somewhat less ambiguous. :-) )

bkleber or silmaril could explain the physical principles far better than I could --my Geek Card is issued by the Endocrine Society, rather than the American Physical Society or the IEEE-- and I missed many of the details while shooting photos. But essentially the gadget was a radio-wave version of a polarized lens demonstration, as I understood it. Polarized optical lenses are such that, of the mixture of light waves arriving at the front side of the lens in all different orientations, only those waves parallel to the orientation the polarized lens is polarized in pass through. Thus, most light waves are blocked and the strength of the overall light beam is lessened, hence the use of such lenses in sunglasses, for example.

In this case, in place of a light source and lenses, instead what you had was a pair of radio antennas. In the background of the picture at right, you see silmaril holding a t-shaped apparatus where two long transmitting antennas (if I recall correctly) extend from a central unit. In the foreground, you see the recieving unit, with two large antennas of it's own also extending far to the sides, as well as two light bulbs, here glowing fiercely. When the two sets of antennas are parallel, as they are here, the radio waves are of aligned polarizations, and the signal strength, as measured by the light bulbs, is high. In contrast, perpendicular antennas lead to the transmission of radio waves in an orientation completely opposite of the orientation the reciever is polarized in, and thus no transmission. A tremendously neat way of bringing something normally as invisible as polarized radio waves to tangible life. :-)

Ice-cold thick smoothies, quesadillas, comfy couches, good friends -- 'tis an excellent way to spend a few hours on on afternoon. :-)

We had decided to retire to College Perk, the funky little coffee-house down Baltimore Avenue from campus, to relax and shoot the breeze before Hoya99 had to leave for home and we went on to Three Left Feet, an evening of which a story by itself another day will be told. All kinds of wide-ranging conversation on a huge variety of topics we had for a comfortable few hours, from Hoya99's adventures working with professional editors on the novel he hopes to have published, to Silmaril's adventures in Tengwar, the elegant script of Tolkien's elves, to three different sets of thesis works torwards three different PhDs in three different fields...

One of the especially happy developments of these happy last five years has been the beginnings of interactions between the uniquely zany folks who previously occupied utterly separate circles of my life. For a long time, it almost seemed like I lived entirely different, non-interacting lives with mutually exclusive sets of companions depending on which hat I wore -- as trainee physican/scientist, activist, rasfwr-jian, Storyteller, or SCAdian. It is only in the last few years that I've had the merry opportunity to introduce dear friends from one sphere to friends from another: deor and malada from the Wolves Glen Pub to missysedai of the White Tower (Laughter in the Darkness); Jesse from SCAdian circles to Holly, my geekette younger cousin (Holly and Jesse; or, almost exactly two years before, my oldest friend from high school to my (elder) Sister Warder-in-arms, as told in The Rainbow at Storm's End. It's been a delight for people whom I find neat finding each other neat as well, and muchly fun it has been. :-)

And so it was at the end of a long lazy afternoon, silmaril pulled out her calligraphy pens and her reference notes, and swiftly, with careful, practiced strokes, penned out hoya99's full name in the longhand of the ancient Elder races of Arda as a parting gift between friends. It is with that which he poses in the photo, inadvertently looking like a featured subject on Nargothrond's Most Wanted... ;-)

Open came the sunroof and up on the roof of Hoya99's car did we spend the very last bits of the afternoon, as the sun began it's slow sink and the fighters of Markland began their battle practice on the lawn in front of the armory.

This particular day with my oldest friend had begun the early afternoon, in Bethesda, tracked across the city, and ended with a late afternoon in College Park, following the course of the fictitious DC Metro subway Purple line, the oft proposed but not yet constructed subway direct link between the Northwest and Northeast parts of the city that doesn't involve diving into the city's heart. Almost exactly three years before, from Bethesda to College Park had been the course of the very first afternoon silmaril had ever hosted me in her home city when I was on business, the story told in A Merrie Afternoon in Olde College Park. There is a certain symmetry in this, my final trip to DC on business as a medical student, following the same course as one of my first. :-)

Thirteen years, halfway around the world, and almost half our lives, I have been fortunate to share with hoya99; and the length and strength of our friendship is one I hope will hold true as well for the many other folks I've been priveleged enough to share paths with. Things do change, and times do change, but there is neither beginning nor end, merely roads that go on and on, and dear friends to share the road with. :-)

As merry afternoon ended, a glorious evening would begin: and that story is told in this next entry. Read on, my friend, read on...