constant narrator

I went to see the Laura Dunn documentary The Unforeseen tonight at the Alamo. I’ve been wanting to see it and with M out of town I took myself on a movie date and went on my own. It was a little slow out of the gate, but the cinematography made up for it. It’s sad, uplifting, completely depressing and moving. It’s haunting, really. I was so at a loss when I left the theatre that I drove to Lady Bird Lake and walked out over the water on the pedestrian bridge and watched the sun set to get myself collected.

There were so many people on the bridge. Many sat with their friends, laughing in the warm wind. I watched the cars go by on the Lamar bridge and thought about how much I hate driving. I thought about the project I’m currently working on and how it has little redeeming social value. I thought about how I’m not volunteering for anything lately and how that makes me feel crappy. I felt overwhelmed and buffeted. And then I remembered the game I played with my brother on Monday, the problem/obstacle/solution game. So I played it with myself and came up with some solutions to feeling crappy. Here are some I came up with that I’d like to try:

* ride my bike more
* volunteer to help Project Transitions with their terrible web site so they can get more donations and better help their clients
* insulate and weather-proof my house
* work for better transit solutions in Austin (the new light rail proposal was unveiled today)
* win the Texas Lottery and buy a huge tract of land over the Edwards aquifer and make a nature preserve out of it

That last one will take a bit of luck. Oh, and me buying a lotto ticket.

I attended a preconference seminar with Peter Morville today at the IA Summit. The summit starts tomorrow. I’ve met a lot of interesting people already. Kia is here and it’s been wonderful hanging out with her. She is speaking during Sunday’s session. We went to the mixer this evening and then went with a new friend Alla to Versailles, a famous Cuban restaurant in Little Havana. We drank strong sangria, I ate a lot of seafood and then we went to the Cuban bakery next door where I got the craziest Cuban-tiramisu thing. Nom nom nom.

Miami is strange. It meets my stereotypical expectations in some ways and is delightfully surprising in others. There are palm trees, tourist crap and gleaming white buildings. There are also tons of people speaking Spanish, but not Texan/Mexican Spanish. Caribbean Spanish. And there there is the Creole, which is so unlike Louisiana Creole that I actually giggled with joy when I first heard it. It bubbles and is full of Haitian French and African nuances. It’s gorgeous, and those that can speak it seem to have a lightness to them that the rest of the Miamians don’t have.

I’m staying downtown in a hotel by the conference center, so I know this is nothing like the Miami that locals know. It was nice to go farther out into a neighborhood tonight. Kia is threatening to take me to South Beach, which should be, um, something.