surpri-er, whatever

to the tune of: Night and Day by The Real Group

It was doomed from the start. From before it began, some would say. But alas, despite the best efforts we could muster, we just had really bad luck surprising Dave for his birthday. Ingredients for poor planning: uncertainty about where we were going to be living come the weekend, a CURIS poster session keeping us at Gates till late hours, and RCC training keeping me away from the phone and AIM most of the day.

The plan in the end was simple. Dave's friends would head to Fu Lam Man on the Castro (Kat's suggestion) and wait for us there. Aria, Ben, and I would take Dave out to dinner. We'd just happen to pick the same restaurant. Hilarity would ensue.

People were late in showing up so we gathered them at Willis Lounge. I went out to "get the mail" and usher them off to their cars in the parking lot. What I didn't know was that Aria had brought Dave outside, where he could plainly see a crowd of people behind me sneaking off to the side of the building. This was warning sign number 1.

As we headed off to Mountain View, my cell phone, which normally rings once or twice a day, was going off every few minutes. Apparently this place was not that easy to find. Of course, Dave was sitting in the car so I couldn't well direct people to our destination. The best I could manage was vague codespeak about results averaging "around 240, maybe even up to 260" and a conversation about finding a paper on my desk that convinced Cheng I was drunk. Amazingly, the more these calls persisted the more Dave started to believe my lab partner was really working on a Friday night.

Finally, as we're walking down Castro looking for the restaurant, Robin pulls up next to us and honks her horn. Covert was clearly not the word of the day. But we finally had a nice dinner with the birthday dude, which he seemed to appreciate.

We took him to see Hero, quite possibly the most artistic piece of Communist propaganda I'd ever seen. It really showed just what a Western lens we view film through. Things like character development, motivation, realism...we feel gypped out of our $10 when an American movie fails to deliver on them. Yet that wasn't at all what this movie was about. This was one of the rare films you feel like the director was using the screen as a canvas, on which to express artwork that has its own true intrinsic beauty, apart from any real meaning. Of course, it's not hard to apply meaning to the work--about how it subjugates the individual for society, how it glorifies China, whatever. But to get bogged down in that, or in the unlikabilty of the characters, really misses the aesthetic beauty of the film.

Wow, I should have been a fuzzie.