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urinal material
Thursday, September 29 2016
location: Cabin 11, Camp Hollywoodland, Los Angeles, California
This morning I joined a group of us who hiked up a side ravine to a number of places that gave us good views of the east end of the HOLLYWOOD sign. The trails of Griffith Park were open to the public at the time, so there were a good many random joggers and dog walkers along the way. At the hillcrest where we turned around, a very friendly Asian woman enthusiastically captured our group picture with multiple cameras, to the delight of all. On the hike back to the mess hall, Da, my supervisor, told me the tale of how he came to work at a motorcycle parts place, became an autodidact expert in the field, bought himself a motorcycle, and then wrecked it. Due to the poor medical care he received (doctors, it turns out, have little sympathy for the victims of motorcycle accidents), his knee has never been the same since.
For breakfast (oatmeal; not my thing), I sat at a table with strangers since the table with all my peeps was had no room left. I tried to be outgoing, but it's it's not easy for me. Inevitably, I turned the conversation with my new friends to the subject of vascular plant systematics.
Today was an uncommonly weird one, when all the things one fears will happen at a company retreat actually do happen. There were no sweat lodges or trust falls, but the woman who led the mindfulness exercises yesterday, took things in an intense direction, in hopes of getting us all to reveal our deepest neuroses and injuries to each other. This culminated when the founder of The Organization told a traumatic story that had many of us in tears. With that example out of the way, we all broke into our departmental groups and individually did the same with each other. It was all very intense and not at all the sort of thing that we in the IT department are in the slightest bit comfortable with. I kept an open mind and played along about as much as anyone. [REDACTED]
Interspersed with such seriousness, the various departments kept giving their presentations about the things they'd done and the plans they had for the future. All the departments had been told to keep things light, that is, to turn parts of the presentation into a skit or some other sort of performance. Yesterday, for example, the legal team had all appeared in huge inflatable Tyrannosaur costumes, the gag being that they were hoping to make a certain practice "extinct." Everybody on the IT team had been apathetic (if not somewhat contemptuous) of the idea of putting on a performance, so Da, our fearless leader, did all the work of scripting it out. We'd decided to give our performance with sock puppets, which would help with any stage fright we might experience. Nobody had even thought of this, but it would also give a nod to the idea that the work we do is mostly behind the scenes. I'd put together a half-assed puppet from an old sock with a hole in the heel, but my colleague Ca had made a beautiful representation of himself, complete with nose, eyeglasses, and a beard. I'd wondered how he'd gotten such definition in his mouth, and he said he'd used cardboard. Cardboard (a folded-up paper plate) definitely helped my puppet, as did some black plastic from a bag of coffee to represent the darkness inside his mouth. For eyes, I had a couple beer bottle caps held in place by rare earth magnets. During the most intense part of the day, when people were confessing their darkest secrets and openly sobbing, it seemed that there would never again be an appropriate time for a performance of sock puppets. But after a long, dull (and somewhat scientifically-suspect) presentation on the neuroscience of mindfulness, the crowd was in the perfect mood.
We got up in the front of the room behind a half-raised projection screen and proceeded with our little skit. We hadn't rehearsed and had barely even looked at our lines, so we did a pretty incompetent job of it, but that just made it even more hilarious. The light behind the screen was poor, and I couldn't focus my [REDACTED]
eyes on the paper where my lines had been written. At one point I said, "Uhhhhhh, my glasses! I can't read this! Line!" The crowd went nuts.
Part of our presentation was for each of us to say something unusual about ourselves. Originally I was going to talk about my paintings, but Ni, upon learning about it, strongly urged me to talk about the flushless urinal I'd built in my laboratory. So that's what I did, which was just as well since I couldn't read what I'd written about "retro-symbolist paintings" in the murky light anyway. The crowd loved it. Indeed, our first question in the Q&A section was about my urinal system, so I talked about it at some length, saying how it had improved my productivity for The Organization and detailing where the urine goes when the bucket gets full. It was perfect for this crowd; here I was confronting a fundamental ritual we all perform and rarely consider, and I'd completely transformed it into something else.
After "the love bubble," the entire IT team decided to catch an Uber to the nearest Veggie Grill in Hollywood. We got down to the parking lot (where rental-car-driving tourists with Russian accents asked us in broken English how best to get to the big letters on the hill) and found a taxicab instead.
Da could expense the dinner, but not the alcohol. So I paid for that part. We had a rollicking good time, with all of us drinking beer except Ni (alcohol makes her feel ill). The food was decidedly better than the stuff back at the mess hall, where it seemed we'd had two or three consecutive identical fajita-based meals. As for the beers, well, Veggie Grill only carries two or three beers, all of them West Coast microbrews, and I had to settled for the Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale.
On the Uber back to Camp Hollywood, we saw a smattering of coyotes at the gate to Griffith Park. Evidently they just hang out there all the time. Later in the night when I had trouble falling asleep, I heard a group of coyotes carrying on nearby. They start out with yippy little barks that sound fairly doglike. But then it takes an unexpected turn for the alien, with added syllables rising rapidly in pitch.
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