Surprise!

I started this blog around this time last year and wrote almost non-stop for two months before my productivity somewhat rapidly petered out.

Perhaps it’s a change in seasons thing, but I’ve got like five posts lined up for over the next few days, and I’ve written all of them in the last 24 hours. Whoa. I’m so sorry that I feel a desire to share.

Fabric Band-Aids, Jesus, and Learning Always

I skinned my knee playing keeper the other day. Proper superficial wound care is a bit daunting (I have some firsthand experience [NOT PRETTY]), but life was made easier when I was given fabric bandaids by K.Bo and Ilana. They changed my life, and this is no overstatement. I’ve always passed over fabric band-aids because they’re ugly and they’re just not as iconic, but I had no idea I was missing out on 24+ hours of adhesion, versatility, and, ultimately, comfort. I am quite certain I will use only fabric bandaids on whatever children I eventually acquire/develop.

Twenty eight years and I had such a fundamentally life-changing nothing-that-is-something over literally a skinned knee. What else is comparable? That is, how many more lessons like these do I have left in me? I’m not entirely joking when I compare it to accounts of born-agains: you experience something and that’s it, you see everything differently. Yes, I just compared a fabric band-aid to Jesus, but stick with me.

Did you feel a jolt when you picked up whatever instrument you decided to play for the rest of your life? Even if you did, I don’t think that’s inane enough. It’s too significant and consciously active. Perhaps those fancy bed sheets I mentioned previously? No, I still happily sleep in beds that aren’t as amazing; nice sheets are luxury while the fabric band aid lesson is simply a lesson in what is better.

If you learned to drive stick after years of automatic, maybe that’s got the je ne sai quoi I’m looking for – yet that’s not under-your-nose universal enough. I liked realizing that we’re all just down the street from one another if you just figure there are a bunch of turns along the way.  Or realizing that by the time you are close enough to give someone a kiss, that person is going to kiss you back.

Maybe you run out of these moments and realizations, and that’s when you decide to do something crazy, like have a kid or fix up a house, so that all sorts of shit happens to you. Surprises are good. And I’m falling asleep….

New sheets — treat yourself nice because you’re nice

I bought new sheets last week. I bought a duvet cover (plus sham) the week before that and a down comforter before that. (tip: the “famous maker” on my blankie’s tag is Eddie Bauer!!)

I wish I could leave it there. If I thought my opinion on matters counted for much these days, I would write a product review on the site (THE LUXURY BEDDING I GOT FROM EZIBA IS FIT FOR A PHAROAH [GET IT? BECAUSE THEY ARE EGYPTIAN COTTON!]) or an incredibly detailed, picture-filled review on this blog to be one of those rando blog pages that gets lots of page views because it comes up when you  google for reviews of specific and obscure products. (If you found yourself here looking for a review of the West Elm Organic Cotton Pin-Tuck Duvet Cover: it looks like that. It does not feel like sandpaper. And I hate top sheets in principle, but get a nice one and the cover’s low thread-count is out of the equation. Get it. You’re going to be alright.) Or  maybe I could have produced a totally sincere haul video of me unboxing the bedding, washing it, putting it on my bed for the first time, then crawling into it naked, enjoying  800 threads of sateen finished Egyptian cotton on every square inch of my freshly showered nude body.

But mostly it’s a reminder that having nice things and taking care of those things can really be overlooked. Let’s be more mindful of the environments in our control. I’d prefer anyone other than me to talk about design and living, and neither am I advocating for materialism. I just think hand-me-down sheets are hard to get jazzed up about, and when a place where you spend anywhere from 6-10 hours in each day feels better in the most literal sense, it must effect your well-being.  I now find myself making the bed in the morning, which isn’t insignificant. Making the bed in the morning is a proven stress reducer. Another benefit: when you come home and your bed looks like the beds in the stores, I mean, don’t we all want to jump on or in the beds in the stores? Sleeping is awesome (I should do some of that now actually).

Sheets, socks, and underpants. Just because you’re not royalty doesn’t mean your intimates aren’t regal.

That time of life: friends’ weddings years

Last month I had a rare wedding-filled weekend: I went up to Brooklyn for a Saturday wedding then drove down to the Eastern shore of Maryland for another wedding the next day. At one point I could have theoretically been another +1 the week prior  and before even then I was joining my good friend Lisa, fetching her batteries, eating cake, etc throughout the spring.

I am also a registered wedding officiant in the City of New York, and so I’m supposed to be paying attention to how people do these things, keeping an eye on ceremonies and what the officiant says.

I don’t want to say too much because I want to save some thoughts for whatever I might say at the wedding (I also sign the marriage license! LOL!). But do people remember anything other than the reception?

I don’t think I like that idea, but I guess there are only a few ways you can talk about love in the context of a wedding ceremony. Unitarians sound like expository Hallmark cards, the Catholics talk about gee oh dee, others go through the tropes of new vs. old love or being best friends/companions. Can a wedding ceremony make someone cry beyond the fact that it’s a wedding ceremony? You’re sort of destined to be generic, like giving a graduation keynote speech if you aren’t someone that isn’t actually famous. Is any officiant going to blow anyone’s mind or do/say something actually riveting?

I will soon try to find out, but till then, I can give some advice on being a good +1. Watch a lot of old Soul Train videos. Anyone with a sense of rhythm can do many of those moves: don’t be afraid of the occasional high kick. Dress if not well, dress interestingly. Ask your friend’s friends lots of questions, because everyone is a little narcissistic and likes talking about themselves. Let your jokes fail or call yourself out on bad ones because I’ve noticed some guys don’t like it when ‘new guy’ gets to be ‘new funny guy:’ important thing is to throw things out there, but don’t force it. Don’t be the first one on the dance floor, but make it a point to walk across the floor with your date when no one is yet on it and shake your legs a bit to plant the idea that it’s never too early to start the party. Would you rather be the person standing over your friend’s shoulder sipping gin, looking slightly creepy, or would you rather be ‘that guy’ dancing with grandma or the little kid?  We know there is always that guy or girl, and it might as well be you: remember you’ve got nothing to lose as +1 as long as you aren’t a douche — that means only asking your date to dance because you’re there for them, though of course you can dance with others if they ask you to. It’s also incredibly, incredibly hard to hit on the photographers, but it’s not an impossibility.

Yes, a +1 is there to be a good date, but I think a good +1 is there to shake up a party a bit. It’s someone who makes the party something more than just a fancy-clothed version of what you did in college or on the weekends. If you’re a friend of mine, I think you’ve probably got that in you already.

This annoys me a bit: I wanted to talk about ceremony more, but only talked about the party. But I suppose that’s appropriate and true-to-life. Still, if you have any thoughts about making a ceremony interesting, I’m all ears.

I write in Avenir like Ernie wearing red cowboy boots: thoughts on the “I Write Like” site

Just a few quick thoughts on the “I Write Like” site that made the rounds on Facebook yesterday. For much of yesterday afternoon I saw individuals from some of my very different social circles post their results to the site on Facebook.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen anything like this go mini-viral on Facebook: we remember the huge 25 things notes and the various quizzes that told you which Sesame Street character or piece of footwear you are. But since then, those sorts of quizzes stopped for any number of reasons (fatigue, Facebook controlling quiz apps, etc.) It made me wonder why this specific site flared up and what it might mean.

To lay the groundwork: I wonder whether there is a connection between the Facebook privacy concerns of the last year and some possible fatigue for broadcasting everything about oneself. I understand that my social media experience only speaks for myself; I have heard that the microgeneration that is currently in HS has very different attitudes towards social media privacy than recent college grads, much less someone in his late 20s. Specifically, “Gen Z” is savvy enough to understand how to handle privacy matters but they have different concepts of what should and shouldn’t be private compared to folks in their early-mid 20s who were blindsided 2-4 years ago by the realization that everyone could see everything they did. Blah blah blah, the internet is growing up, etc etc.

All of which is to say, there doesn’t seem to be as much “here I am wrapped up in a neat package,” nor as much “here is my daily life” type online activity. Which brings us back to the “I write like” site and the sharing of its results.

Part of its appeal might be the sense of being “graded” by an objective party. Here is a site that allows you to cut and paste anything –  blog posts, emails, undergrad literary efforts – and it will compare that piece of text to that of someone you may admire (e.g. James Joyce). Even if you’re aware of the bullshit, if you take some pride in your written work, it does feel a bit nice to be told by a robot (which is certain to be objective!) that you write like David Foster Wallace (or, conversely, Dan Brown).

But why tell everyone on Facebook how you write when we’re all tired of reading about which musical chord or typeface represents you, and now nobody wants to contribute to that din? I say it’s because the website is not an evaluation of yourself: it takes something everyone on the internet does in decent amounts – write – and evaluates that product. Critically, it’s a step removed enough to say “I’m not being totally self-indulgent here!” but close enough to say “Well look at me, I write like Nabokov! Sorry, Facebook friend who writes like Stephen King!”

Point is, I don’t know if the desire to broadcast your personality went away; I wonder if it was just subdued by jokes about emo cutters who are still on Livejournal. But if a little engine promises to take something that actually is representative of yourself – your writing – and compares that to something we all relate to – well ooh, that sounds like harmless fun that’s just a touch intellectual, and doesn’t that make my Facebook profile look so interesting.

By the way, according to the site, this is written like DFW. (note I didn’t say it’s like something DFW would write)

These are my excuses. We are my reason.

It’s been almost two months since I’ve written anything. I’ve told myself many times that tonight would be the night I would write something interesting. That tonight never happened, clearly.

Everyone always has something in the way, right? I’ve had to find a new place to live, and it’s been too hot the past few weeks. I started a new job. I had allergies. I’d also taken a lover who actually enjoys my rambling in person, so wouldn’t you know it, sex is just that much more satisfying than page view numbers; I don’t wanna write about my navel when I can get drunk with a real friendly lady.

But last week I was talking to some friends about the Luis Suarez incident, stating what I thought was the popular moral opinion that the red card was not harsh enough, that FIFA should have suspended him for the rest of the tournament: I couldn’t think of an equivalently cynically unsportsmanlike action in sports (Henry and Maradona’s handballs still required some degree of chance [the Hand of God could have gone over the bar, Henry’s cross could have missed Gallas who could have flubbed the shot] while what Suarez did was a certainty.) in which the risk/reward for breaking the rules was so tilted in favor of reward that the punishment was grossly inadequate. The friends’ position was perhaps more common than mine: the rules are the rules, anyone in the world would have done that, he got a red card (but if you get sent off in the last gasp of a game, are you really sent off?), and that’s not just okay but admirable in a world where we have to win at all costs.

You don’t need to have stepped into a college philosophy class to know that moral behavior is not always popular behavior (I actually thought philosophy was silly). And I don’t think you have to have read the Communist Manifesto to think that the me-first attitude of winning at all costs without concern for the world at large is a source of some of our greatest problems (a. I didn’t read that and don’t plan to. b. Hello, Great Recession.) While I repeated this idea a number of times in the conversation, they still maintained that what happened was okay because it was within the rules of the game. When one friend said, “well sure, they could change the rules,” it hit me.

I don’t think we’re challenging each other enough. I don’t know what to blog about because I don’t think I’ll say anything you don’t already think. Basically, groupthink creeps into our everyday social life and it makes us lazy. I talk to people that read publications with “New York” in the title. We try to recycle and if we don’t compost we know people who do. You get tipsy on good beer, cocktails prepared by men dressed in vests, wine from the Pacific Northwest, or the occasional PBR or High Life. You value beautiful things just because they’re beautiful. When watching the World Cup final at a bar you were also annoyed at the slovenly Americans who talk with a rough accents, these buffoons who do unenlightened things like shop at the Gap and drink jagermeister, the drunkards who don’t know what the offsides rule is, and the loud guy who loves America and drinking and that’s why he’s watching a game between Holland and Spain, and these people don’t make sense to you. And you and me, we’ll shake our heads and drink our seasonal microbrew (or maybe a Sam Summer Ale) and feel pity.

Man, we’re assholes.

I bet one of those guys could teach me about fishing or some music I don’t listen to. Because, right, everything is important. I used to live for adventure, not just cookies and girls.

I’m not saying leave your friends and make new ones. Just that all of us old friends, let’s argue more, every once in  a while, to keep things sharp, to shake things up. If we all agree that at least certain things are important, let’s talk about them.

What I learned at my 10-year HS reunion

On Saturday night I went to my 10-year high school reunion.

I think the greatest thing about my high school reunion wasn’t the top shelf open bar with my best friends or sharing a remembered laugh with an old friend or hearing about asshole ex-classmates being carried to the hospital after OD’ing on coke and half-bottles of vodka or marveling at how a lot of people I never really liked don’t have discernible necks. As a former fat, insecure kid with horrible hair, it was nice for me to see girls that I once thought were attractive and think “oh, I have ex’s many times more attractive than them” and it was especially great when I heard someone with a sprawling wet spot on his shirt say “this guy came up to me and goes ‘Hey, nice pink shirt,’ and I said ‘It’s not pink, it’s salmon, asshole’ and then he poured his drink on me so I poured mine on him!” Yeah, you really won that battle, guy who didn’t remember my name.

I don’t want to talk up the negative anecdotes and make this a clichéd “angry high school reunion” story, but there’s a good one after the jump.

Smiling should not be a new car option

Now that we’re well into spring and road trip season is nearly upon us, I would just like to say something about the sunroof/moonroof (Sunroofs are opaque. Moonroofs are transparent to let the moonlight in, what us young folks usually think of a sunroofs.).

A car is not complete without one.

I guess that’s all. It just shouldn’t be an option on cars these days, and by these days I mean both in the summer and in this, you know, epoch.

This isn’t something you can afford to be indifferent about. There’s the old Louis CK thing about how everything is amazing and yet nobody’s happy, and a moonroof just really makes people happy. This is important! Mandatory! We are not happy enough and this will help, I swear it.

If you’re going to be happy in a car in the summer for more than 30 minutes (It’s not a road trip if it’s <2 hours and even on a day-to-day basis, it’s pretty likely given the average American commutes 25 minutes each way in a car), your sunglasses are going to complain about the taupe ceiling upholstery of your import. It’s worse than wearing sunglasses at night because the sun is supposed to be right there, on top of you.

You put the windows down, right? Maybe you stick your head out the window if you’re in shotgun? Maybe you do that wavy thing with your hand, even if you drive stick and aren’t supposed to hold your left hand out the window? But then maybe you don’t on the highway as it’s loud and bad for gas mileage. Moonroof, obviously.

Convertible? Arguably douchey. More importantly, it drowns out the country music you’re supposed to be listening to on your road trip.

The only thing that’s recently been made known to me that could possibly beat a good open roof is pictured below, but that’s conditional based on gender. My friend K.Bo drove one of these, a 1978 T Top Camaro, in high school. She is a she. If any guy drives this, maybe too cool, maybe a douche (hard to say).

I don’t know how I went 28 years without knowing about T-tops, but not too noisy and obviously plenty of sun and air.

Anyway, this has gone on long enough and if you’ve spent any time on a road trip with an open sunroof you’ll know I’m right. Blah blah blah, sun and vitamin D (Oprah’s on the bandwagon… not a good thing?) and SAD and more silliness like stargazing at scenic highway overlooks. These things are great.

Small pleasures, ed. 1

I do not want to say YouTube or Digg or Facebook or Twitter or your Google Reader are wastes of time. Okay, maybe Digg is (except for this game that is up there now holy shit this is a dream come true). But I’m afraid I had forgotten how to waste time (in the office) without the internet.

Okay, I’m blogging, or maybe I could write an email to an old friend, but those are tasks. I also think YouTube or watching TV is a task: it’s research for conversation, after all. I want to know what you really do to waste time when there’s no computer or phone.

This is not the 21^st century equivalent of “you kids these days with your Sega Master Systems. In my day we played kick the can and spent days hoop trouling and we would put little Granduncle Zeke on the family dog and feed him rocks until Little Brown collapsed under the weight and then we would laugh and drink whiskey till Zeke threw up the pebbles. Yup, that was a good 6^th birthday party.”

What I’m saying is this: I just spent 4 minutes balancing my drinking glass on my teacup. This is not difficult. The curve of the teacup’s lip makes it easy for many reasons.

What is this good for? Like war: absolutely nothing. There is no way I could recall this task’s dexterity and sense of balance were I to be put in a Macguyver-like situation. That’s a waste of time as far as I can tell.

But such a pure waste of time is something to be treasured, and I have to believe such smaller, more aimless pleasures existed before we developed convenience-making technologies granting us access to so much of the world’s information and a million ways to be creative with no goal. Small pleasures like lickable stamps.

There is also something to be said for lickable stamps, but I don’t want to go there right now. The technology behind developing the adhesive for no-lick stamps at low cost, the calorie content…. But I have a 5:45 deadline I just missed. Dangit, K.Bo, my disappointments are endless.

White bears, sleeping in their own fluids. That’s what this is.

It’s Monday morning and I woke up at 11:22 because my phone was ringing. I am in NJ, not on Capitol Hill. My sister was on the line and she had just come out of an audition. I want to clarify and reiterate, I slept through Monday morning, hundreds of miles from my job, and my little sister had already auditioned for a stage production, which is something I have never done and the idea of which scares me.

So this is why I’m writing a post: not because I want to log my life’s events (though I’m afraid it has become this more and more as I write less and less), but because I really need to make something.

All I have made lately is lots of love dirty laundry and semen. I want to stop you before you think it: these two products are not connected. But my non-productivity is a fact: my life has been quite disorganized since marathon training ended, and I was all nervous, unproductive energy in the month leading up to the marathon.

It’s been said many times before: when you’re in a funk, just do something. A few times this past weekend, old friends told me I should be blogging more. While I do not self-identify as a writer (it’s far down the list below anything athletic, musical, or anything to do with eating large amounts), I suppose it’s a good skill. I’m reminded of Merlin Mann’s classic nugget.

Top 1 Habits of Amazing Writers

1) They write.

For me, again, I don’t think it’s about writing. I think it’s about thinking, and it’s about thinking because thinking quick means you’re good at making jokes, and making good jokes makes people like you, which is what someone with chronic(ally-affected) low-self esteem needs.

(Please say something nice about me?)

In the 20 minutes I’ve been writing this post and 3 days since I’ve thought to make a “comeback,” I’m further reminded of the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice principle: that what separates experts from the average is the will and ability to practice (with purpose) a lot. And as I sit here and plot out this paragraph, I’ve come to why I’ve stopped. Here’s the hole I dig in my head: the deliberate practice thing, what’s fun about that is that the average IQ of the experts – whether they are pianists, painters, or porn stars – is that of the average college student. This is encouraging. But it also says that success is about specializing, and I am not a specialist. And so I stop writing and start digging.

But really I should just shut up and typity type. The hole reminds me of Dostoevsky’s quote from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: “Try to avoid thinking of a white bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

If I am trying to come up with the next brilliant idea or funny tweet (hey, I think I had a few good ones a few months ago and felt brilliant!), it won’t happen, just as saying “fall asleep now, fall asleep now” won’t put you to sleep.

So there you go. New motivations for this blog:

Definitely not a diary.
Just make more shit after reading some shit and hope it’s interesting.
At the very least, find myself, haplessly, becoming a better [something].

Now it’s time for lruakfnchst.