adrian is rad

I haven’t posted anything for a while so I thought I’d put in a couple updates.

I saw Crash last night, which was directed and written by the screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby (and creator of Walker, Texas Ranger), Paul Haggis, and stars just about a bazillion people. It’s a Magnolia-like many-stories-happening-simultaneously-and-somewhat-related sort of story. It’s largely about race and things like that. Besides being intense, it’s also uncomfortable—”good” characters do bad things and “bad” characters; a nice muddle moral pool to make one uncomfortable. But it’s good. It’s a thinking movie.

At Wally’s recommendation, I got Freestyle: the Art of Rhyme, which is a documentary about, amazingly, freestyling. Freestyling is often exhibitted in battles, like those in the movie 8 Mile, if you’ve seen that, but just as often, or more often, in parks and on street corners. For those not as entrenched in the hip hop arts as I am, freestyling is rapping off the top of your head. There were two characters that were focused upon a bit more than others in the movie, Supernatural and Juice, both of whom are absolutely amazing in their ability to rhyme just about anything without any forethought. There were clips where both of them were just going about their normal business rapping about their surroundings and things as they came along. It’s an interesting movie. I’d recommend it.

On Saturday, I swam for the fourth time in Aquatic Park, in San Francisco. After all this time, I’ve decided to show what it actually looks like. I decided to do a “perimeter” swim on Saturday. I started between those two short docks on the right centerish, went left and a little down across towards that boat house looking thing on the left side, then headed up and a little left for a while, then went almost directly right toward that boat—aww, I suck at describing this. I’m just going to draw you a hastily drawn map. Two points of interest are marked by the dots. Around the one at the top, there it was quite choppy because it was basically open to the Bay at that point. At the one on the right side there was a wicked current toward the right that almost carried me into one of those large boats on the right side. The X at the bottom left is where the last swim bouy is; most people swim back an forth between that swim buoy and one located near the two docks on the right side.

The big swim is this coming Saturday. Wish me luck.