So Now That's Done

I just bought a wedding ring(1). How about that? When I got Sara's engagement ring, I only got her a simple set of three, the proper rings didn't come until a couple weeks later, and then she was with me helping to pick them out. So this finally feels like the grown-up moment.
I strongly recommend that anyone intending to buy a substantial ring should at least shop around on 47th St, aka the Diamond District. Even if you are sure you're going to buy from a more traditional or a big-box jeweler, or if you're not from NYC, you still owe it to yourself to experience the uniqueness that is the Diamond District.
Walking down 47th St the first time, I was overcome with curiosity at just how much money's worth of diamonds was stored in that small corridor. Billions would not be an understatement(2). The diamonds are overflowing from every shopfront for a solid block. There are guys standing about every 20 feet on the sidewalk wearing mini sandwich boards and basically doing anything they can to solicit your business. There are lots of yarmulkes and a higher percentage of beards than you'd normally see. There is a strong sense of activity and yet very few people are actually doing anything, and those are simply talking to customers.
I made my first trip there almost a month ago, and that is when I did my true "shopping." I spent about 90 minutes total and walked out of there honestly a little shell-shocked. You see, it's not just along the street where there is insane competition, it's within each "store." Most of these places are long straight hallways with booths set up on either side, usually not more than 10-15 feet wide, competitors stacked literally elbow-to-elbow. At one place I walked into, a person on the first booth on the right greeted me before I'd even fully crossed the door threshold. Just to put that person off, I chose to browse at the first booth on the left. This vendor ended up being pretty good and so I went through my whole spiel about what I wanted and let him give me a price. So I took this guy's card and turned to leave but the vendor right next to this one called after me. I half turned to see if maybe I'd dropped something and the dude waves me over. In a generous mood, I walked over to give him a chance. First thing he says is: "I was listening a minute ago. What price did he give you? I'll take $100 off it." Awesome. So I took his card too, even if he seemed like little more than a shuckster.
This process came close to repeating itself, though not as directly, everywhere I went. You walk into these places and meander through the maze of booths, constant exhortations raining down on you, and after about five stops to chat they all look the same. Dingy, cluttered, (curiously) poorly lit spaces, eager sellers behind a standard cheap glass case, sparkling diamonds all over the place, always the feel like you're in the bowels of a suburban mall, back where the janitors and shopgirls and boys take their breaks next to the bathrooms(3). I'm sure just the setting would put off a large percentage of Americans, and that's another reason why you've got to try it.
I dare anyone to walk into at least 5 or 6 vendors--go ahead and let them price something for you--and then go back into the street and try to distinguish any place from another. But they keep coming, they are everywhere. It's a paralyzing, defeatist feeling to stand out on the sidewalk pondering your next stop, but realizing you can't just stand there and compose yourself because another barker will latch onto you if you show the first sign of uncertainty.
Back to today. Since I couldn't stomach another round of price comparisons, my plan was to call the guy who did the blatant undercutting and see if he would commit to the same price over the phone. If so, that would be my guy(4). So this morning I called twice and got no answer. And that is how easily you can lose a sale. My new plan was to walk into that shop and deal with the other guy, the one who I trusted (whoa let's not get carried away with words like that) or preferred more anyway. Fortunately for me, this guy was very helpful in making suggestions and even talked me into smaller diamonds because they would accentuate better than the biggest ones. So nice going there.
Finally we got down to the price of my creation (I'd altered my specifications since my last visit). Being the tactful diamond-seller(5), he didn't tell me the number, he showed me the number on his calculator. My haggling consisted of: making a face when looking at the number that conveyed "sheesh, that's a little high," followed by about 20 seconds(6) of silent consideration, followed by me telling him I'd give him a number about 10% less than what his calculator showed. Next it was his turn to look surprised/offended. He stammered a little: "I don't know, that's hard for me," all as his English of course got a little worse(7). "........economy...........not much room for profit.........." Finally I cut him off by saying "Look, I'm ready to do this right now, I've got my credit card, so you can either take it or leave it." Ahhh, magic; those words were. He hunched his shoulders and said ok and that was that. I left happy and will be happier still in two weeks when I get my ring and far happier more of course in six weeks when I give it to Sara.
But do yourself a favor and dip your toes in the pool of pure market capitalism that exists on 47th St sometime.



1. Not pictured.
2. How about we do an exercise? All of this will be rough, but google-able facts.
One carat of diamonds is about $1,000 (usually more but let's be conservative with the first step). A one carat solitaire diamond is large but not huge, so that if you think of a standard engagement ring you're talking about roughly one carat. Sometimes the solitaire will be smaller but often enough there are littler stones on the band as well. So basically our image of one diamond ring represents $1,000 in diamonds (no I'm not even going to count the value of the gold, platinum, etc). Now, every 30 feet of sidewalk will have up to 10 individual booths, and each of these individual booths will be stocked with maybe 500 rings, plus perhaps 500 rings' worth of loose diamonds. Note this is not even considering the lavish displays at the window; that will serve as a hedge against some empty booths. So we have 1,000 rings per booth times 10 booths yields 10,000 rings per 30 feet of sidewalk. That's $10million per 30 feet of sidewalk. The block of 47th St between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is about 850 feet long, after removing feet from each end to compensate for potentially non-diamond industries. Multiply that by two to account for both sides of the street, so 1,700 feet. Clearly we must reduce that number by a large amount because--while the stores are often stacked on top of each other--there are some small gaps between many stores; I think 1,200 is a fair number for actual sidewalk distance covering diamond stores. 1,200 divided by our test case of 30 feet is 40, times $10million is $400million. Well, that's a lot less than a billion, Josh. Yes, you're right, but we took extremely conservative estimations at every step, and we only considered the first floor and neglected any backroom storage. And shit, there is easily $100million just in those windows. Anyhow, a staggering amount of real value in a small space.
3. When I was very young I used to be afraid of mall bathrooms. Not actually the bathrooms but where they were located, way at the end of those long plain hallways. There was something unsavory about how isolated they felt from the splendors of the mall shops.
4. Sorry if that's exactly the kind of simplistic logic that causes Wal-Mart to be the biggest but least employee-friendly company in the world. I am what I am.
5. Clearly, sarcasm. Maybe also irony. Sorry.
6. Don't laugh, 20 seconds is a long time in haggling.
7. He's foreign. Maybe Yugoslav or one of the former Soviet Republics. Not visibly Jewish.

It was made just for me

www.sporcle.com
That is a website that scratches me where I itch. It's basically trivia, but not just random trivia, it's got context and lists. I don't really see how its model can be improved upon.
I will waste lots of time at home (and sometimes though not often at work) drifting through that site. Naturally, I'm better at the sports ones, but it's got a feature where you can see the stats from others who've taken the quizzes and compare your scores. I can usually score around the 85th percentile. Yes, that's bragging.
The one I just took appropriately enough asked to list the top 20 cities by population in Ohio.(1) While this seems easy enough, know that I could name only 12 of the 20, just 60%. Before I had time to feel too much shame, I checked my score and I was still in the top 6-8% of all test-takers for that one. Still, 12 out of 20 is not very good for me. It just goes to show you that Ohio has a lot of nondescript small cities, and helps to explain how it can be 7th most populous state. The 20th city on the list, Euclid(2), has 47,940 residents.
I've got to say that the number one thing that surprised the hell out of me by this quiz was that Parma is the 7th largest city in Ohio. Parma. I had heard of that before, but I will freely admit that I had to look it up online to find out where in the hell it was. Up close to Cleveland, it turns out. It has 78,785 people. If it were in Central and not Northeast Ohio it would have been swallowed up by the Columbus annex machine long ago. Just for fun I checked out its wiki page and sure enough it's got at least one fun fact: it played a "signifcant" role in the massive 2003 blackout thanks to a tree taking out a transmission line. Also, Chef Boyardee(3) died there. Parma.


1. Special note: Steubenville is not one of them.
2. I got that one right actually.
3. Real name: Hector Boiardi. Boi-ar-di. Sensing how "Boyardee" is more Americanized than "Boiardi" is too subtle for my sensibilities.

bleh

Boy, I am sure feeling kinda like a turd right now. Grumpity skunkity. Not physically, either. It's just a mood problem.
Sorry if this post won't have much in the way of insight. I usually try not to write simply about myself, but more about how I see and am fascinated by the world. Tonight is an Inner night, though. But although it's mostly just an homage, this blog is called "Fear and Loathing," after all, and I am certainly feeling loathing and most likely also fear.
I think it's Sara's fault. This will shortly be my seventh consecutive sleep without her, and while the advancing summer climate can make it nice to have a large bed to myself, the omniscient absence of her is far worse. Quite simply, I have lost my way.
Yesterday after brunch I just came home and did nothing. I half-napped and half wasted time with the TV and the computer. Then I continued to accomplish nothing before eating poorly and going to bed. Today I got home from work and started in on a workout. After just four sets I stopped cause I didn't feel like it anymore. I also intended to do some organizing or tidying of things in advance of Sara's return tomorrow evening, but I lost the motivation for that too. So I'm feeling quite the waste.
I used to be sporadically susceptible to a kind of internal social depression. That is a big ominous word I know but go with it. That's what my current mood is strongly hinting at. So I suppose my emotional self has now become fully dependent on Sara, enough so that only seven empty days can reduce me thusly. Maybe I will take a "mental health day" from work tomorrow. Probably not. For one thing, I'd probably just continue to sloth around and feel more for shit, though you never know, I could turn knowing I'll be seeing her at the end of tomorrow.
It makes me kinda scared to wonder what if something were to happen to her someday. I've experienced the sorrow of parting from someone loved, and I can easily say that I don't react well. And clearly, this is a different kind of love with Sara. It's fuller and more comprehensive. It's comforting in a way that I'd definitely never known, and maybe therein lies the secret to my current mood. Trusting vulnerability is an important part of loving someone, at least for me. I'm a pretty confident and independent person, so it's key to be able to cede control and let the other person often decide what's best for me--and then, more importantly, actually having her instincts in that regard always be correct.
Finding someone who's a perfect compliment to you is deconstructionist and infantilizing, to an extent. You spend most of your formative life learning how to cope with a world where no person is exactly like yourself, but then you find a person who is uniquely identical to you in all the important ways, so what other reaction is there than but to recede back into youthful simplicity.
I need that guidance back. Most importantly, I need my primary connection to humanity to return so I can feel a part of things again.

Who? No, I'm sorry.

I know you're wondering how my precious left knee is doing. It's getting better, but slowly than I'd like. Best-case scenario, I thought today would be the day to test it out with a short run. Not gonna happen. New best-case scenario: I test it out with a short run sometime this weekend, but even that is likely too ambitious. My flexion is currently at a post-injury high: I can actually pull my ankle all the way to my butt now. But my lateral ability is still pretty poor, particularly on the inside. That's MCL territory, so hopefully that starts getting better in the next week. My new benchmark for knee health is being able to apply equal amounts of weight to each leg while walking at a normal speed. Once I can do that--but not a day before--I can test it with a run.
Sara has been out of town for 6 days now and I had expected to use the unencumbered evening laptop time to do some more of this writing. Hasn't really happened. One potential reason: I only about a week or two ago discovered that we have Showtime On Demand. Wasn't a very noteworthy until about five days ago when I discovered that Showtime On Demand has a rather lengthy selection of soft-core. I will always be a sucker for soft-core; in fact, I might even prefer it to real porn. This is probably because it was my first experience with anything pornographic. This is dripping with cliche but, when I was 12 or 13 I figured out how to tune the TV just right so the scramble was not really a problem. Shannon Tweed quickly became a favorite. I spent about an hour online one day trying to figure out the name of a still vividly remembered (in my mind) legendary Tweed performance where she has sex with not just the husband and wife of a family, but also the son. Amazing.
Anyhow, I had a lot of experience with skinemax before ever venturing online for the real stuff, so I developed the idea that soft-core was the way it was supposed to be. Also, until I lost my virginity late at 21, I had never had a fully-formed sexual experience, so I didn't have anything to make real porn personally relatable. In that way, real porn wasn't any better than soft-core, and besides the skinemax movies always had better-than-average production quality.
Ok now let's segue naturally to my ten-year high school reunion. It's coming up in October and last week I gave a confirming RSVP to the organizer. I guess this means I'm going, though I haven't yet bought a plane ticket so still time to back out. I'm not sure why I was thinking about my reunion, but I had a moment of anxiety about it. I'm going to have lots of people saying hello and talking to me (and asking me "So what do you do?") and lots of the time I'm not going to know who the person is. I'm not talking about the standard reunion not-recognizing the person or anything, I'm talking about totally forgetting.
1. I tend to be self-centered and therefore don't pay as much attention to other people.
2. I took the advanced classes for most of my academic career, and therefore my sphere of classmates was much smaller than most.
3. How to put this.................I was more, uh...........accomplished than most of my classmates. I mean, my name appeared in the newspaper and was announced over the loudspeaker pretty often. There is not really any way around this fact.
4. Corollary to #3, my mother was a teacher at my high school. "Folger" was for that reason used with great frequency.
5. I have this tendency to completely black out certain parts of my past if they are not very present to my current life. When I moved to Columbus for college, I stopped thinking about high school and didn't carry forward many friendships. When I moved to NYC after college, I basically stopped thinking about college and only carried forward the few closest friendships. When I move to Chicago next year, a whole segment of my current life will totally drift into the shadows. I know this is how it works for lots of people, but I'm fairly sure I'm much more severe about it.
6. Hold your amazement, but I wasn't hugely social with a lot of people in high school. I didn't really look down at people and I'd like to think I was a lot more respectful towards others I didn't know well than most kids, but I rarely ever went out of my way to engage people. Basically, I had my group of friends/smart kid classmates that I socialized with just enough to be normal. I didn't branch out with any substance too much.
So anyway there is the anxiety: I don't want to be a dick about it, walking around like I'm too important and don't remember anybody, even when many of them will remember me. I mean, I'm going to the trouble of attending the damn thing. If I wanted to be aloof about the whole exercise, I could just as easily do that from the comfort of NYC.

1. Let's give some props to Iran, or generally to the people of Iran. We in the U.S. tend to take things for granted since we've had it so good for such a long time, but there are lots of places in the world where there are no guarantees. An event like 9/11 would be just a blip on the radar for many countries. I'm amazingly impressed by the extemporaneous and courageous actions of all those people who aren't afraid to be pissed off. Let's face it, Iran isn't the most hospitable place for discord or nonconformity. Remember this is a country that's dominated by a religion not known for acceptance and governed basically by a dictator. It's hard to find many more precarious environments in which to protest.
Another thing about Iran that I don't think many of us are attuned to: it's big. Iran is bigger and potentially much more powerful than most Americans realize or would ever care to accept. As the 18th-largest country in the world, over 70 million people live there, including over 7 million in its capital of Tehran. It would be Europe's third-largest country(A), after Russia and just 12 million people smaller than Germany. It's bigger than France, Britian, Italy, Spain, and Korea. It's more than twice the size of Canada and more than three times as big as Australia. This is not a small country that can be written off or neglected. Just imagine if a shitstorm like this were taking place in Germany or France right now. Iran is a very big deal.(B)

2. In addition to the more famous ACL, did you know there was a PCL in the knee as well? The Ls (ligaments) don't end there, either: on either side of the knee, you've got an MCL and an LCL. To add confusion, the C doesn't designate the same thing in each case. ACL is Anterior (front) Cruciate (crossing) Ligament, PCL is Posterior (back) Cruciate Ligament, while the MCL is Medial (inside of knee) Collateral (supporting or running alongside) Ligament, and LCL is Lateral (outside of knee) Collateral Ligament.
The reason I know all this right now is that I rather stupidly hurt myself last weekend and I've been googling in an attempt to placate my fears of serious injury. To leave out some important details, I fell while running and landed very hard on my left knee. I first thought I had messed up my kneecap in some way (I did bruise it), but now almost a week later I realize what I actually did was agitate at least one of those four Ls listed above. Best uneducated, non-doctor guess: ACL and MCL. I'm still a bit swollen which could mean the patella was bruised worse than originally thought, but it could also mean the blunt trauma scared up a lot of scar tissue and seriously inflamed all those bursae hanging out in the knee. But my main concern is that as the days have passed, my flexion has increased pretty consistently, but my turning ability, even while walking slowly, hasn't improved much. I can actually almost feel the MCL when turning, and it doesn't feel great. So basically what I think happened is that I heavily bruised the patella and seriously inflamed my bursa sacs while also inflaming (but probably not straining) through blunt force the ACL itself, and that all of this has caused me to lightly strain the MCL as an effect.
Nice, huh. I'll report back in another several days to see how right I am. Now though, some things I've found are very difficult when dealing with a knee injury: pooping (actually ass-wiping), walking faster than a toddler, getting into and especially under the covers in bed, putting on socks, stairs (obviously), and even sitting with any kind of posture at my desk at work because I need to extend my leg constantly. So naturally my backs hurts now too.

3. It's really fun when a stereotype comes to life before your eyes. In addition to eight different flavors of coffee, we also carry green tea here at the office. Up until about three months ago, I would have put green tea maybe 7th or 8th in popularity out of the nine options. Lately, it has been more like 3rd or 4th. Now you surely must be curious what might have happened about three months ago to cause this change. Well, of course we started subletting four offices(C) at that time to a hedge fund comprised of five Asians. That's it.
My follow-up to this is: what would be more amusing, to have a minority group show up and absolutely display a classic stereotypical behavior, or to behave in just the opposite way you might expect? I don't have a good answer to this, because they're both great comedic results.



A. No, I'm not counting Turkey, which is just over a million people bigger than Iran.
B. So maybe we westerners can resolve to pronounce the goddamn name of the country right? It's Ih-RAN or Ih-RAHN. Not hard.
C. That's four offices out of about 75 or 80, so a very tiny percentage.

Slappic Discord

Some questions:
1. We have a couple of trash bins at work that are used specifically for people to place documents that are to be shredded. It's my responsibility to empty these bins on a consistent basis. Something that drives me about as nuts as I can be driven is when someone tears up their paper into four or more pieces before dropping it into the bin. Are you freaking kidding me? It's going to be shredded, why in god's name would you ever think you need to tear it into pieces beforehand? It's stupid, it's inconsiderate, and above all, it's embarrassingly inefficient.
2. I was watching Seinfeld last night for the first time in a while and found myself laughing harder than normal. But something I never paid much attention to: why in the hell are they always driving places in that show?
3. Does anyone else agree with me that it's time we come up with some new words to describe familiar things? Ironic is a word that used to clearly communicate something specific, but it's been so heavily used in our culture that it's taken on a life of its own and doesn't often effectively communicate the idea that it's supposed to anymore. Maybe you could say something is slappy instead, so that slappy represents the actual dictionary definition of irony, whereas irony will then only represent the popular usage. Irony isn't the only or even the best example of this, of course. Pathetic or pitiful are two similar words. When people now hear that something is pitiful, they probably think of something bad or weak or shameful, while either missing entirely or only getting secondarily the simple true meaning of pitiful: something that inspires pity. It's a word that is more about empathy than judgment or condescension, but due to it's commonness, it has lost its specific meaning. When using pitiful, I find myself having to state that I mean it in the dictionary way, and to me that signifies that pitiful has stopped being an efficient and effective word.
Imagine that blue, in our culture, was a word that described not just what we now know as blue but more broadly the whole range of colors including purple, violet, and green, and that the words purple, violet, and green have become too obscure to have much meaning. In this scenario, we've lost effective descriptive words for purple, violet, and green, which is a lamentable thing, but we've also lost the word for blue, since blue has been bastardized into encompassing all of purple, violet, green, and blue. In this scenario, not only would we be wise to recover those words purple, violet, and green, but we'd also probably need to give up and scrap blue and come up with a new word for blue.
Basically, the more popular a word becomes, the less communicative it becomes. Kinda slappy, actually.

A Conversation, Part II

So I was drifting along the fringe of this little conversation, mostly just waiting for it to be over and trying not to make it seem so, kinda enjoying the fact that I didn't have to join in much, when the other woman finally focused on me, and I'm pretty sure she only did so in a trying-to-be-nice way so I wouldn't feel excluded or so she could show how nice she is by showing interest in me, someone she'd probably never see again. Her question was so predictable that you might be amazed that at this point in my life I haven't ever bothered to create a stock answer for it.
"So what do you do?"
This is not even a difficult question to answer. And yet. I hate this question. It's not just the chit-chat banality of it, either, though I do hate mindless chatting.
When engaging in conversation with someone you don't know, 99.9% of the time the other person will be looking for a quick and easy way to stereotype, judge, and compartmentalize you(1), in that order; or, if you're lucky, they're not doing that very actively and are instead just trying to ask the flattest questions possible so as to fill the time until someone else shows up without having to mentally engage at all. "What do you do?" is the quintessential example of the latter, but its insidiousness lies in that after your brief chat is over, the other person will quite often actually remember how you respond to it and from then on that is how they will know you. To them, you will not be you, but instead a first name and an occupation(2).
Ah but this is my blog and this is going to be more personal than that. So let me admit that the other big reason I loathe "What do you do?" is because--at least compared with most people--I don't have a very good answer to it. I've been seriously employed for 6 years now so naturally I have a perfectly suitable answer, but I don't have a "good" one, an answer that engages the interest or, presumably, respect of the questioner.
My official title is Assistant Facilities Manager, but mostly I answer the question with Office Manager, because that word Facilities tends to confuse a lot of people. But everyone knows what both an Office and a Manager are. Telling a near-stranger that you are an "Office Manager" doesn't really elicit much interest; I know this because I don't often get a follow-up question outside of "Where at?" or "What company?"
Some of the reasons people don't find much interesting about my job title: I usually don't like talking to strangers all that much, I don't with any comfort brag about myself(3), I am pretty much biologically wired to hate all things pompous, and am therefore unable to engage in the same phony bullshit that people do to try to impress other people, and finally, I myself simply am not all that interested in talking about jobs, so my general inability to disguise my feelings about a subject can pretty easily influence another person's reception of it.
I am not what I do. A lot of people are, but not me. I don't take my work home with me, and I would change careers almost instantly if that were to ever change. I'm not usually very productive with my spare time, but I rather zealously will defend my right to it.
For me, a job is a way to make enough money to make myself, and now my future wife and presumptive family, happy. I've never really had much of a desire for a specific job. Maybe that's laziness and maybe it's a lack of ambition that's followed me most of my life, but I don't really care. It's hard to make other people interested in what you do if you don't devote terribly much of your own interest to it.
None of this is to say that what I do is boring or unfulfilling or in some way shameful. Well, I work in an office, so sometimes it actually is boring, but not usually. I will say that at one point I did wonder how essential my position was. Basically how replaceable was I? But that passed because I realized that yes indeed some of my personal skills provide sometimes great value to the company. It can be hard to effectively explain with any brevity what I truly do. Mostly this is because I do a lot of different things. Truly, I am not an Office Manager. I do many different things in many different degrees of intensity for almost random durations, and so I often don't know what I'll be doing in the next week.
Sometimes I am an Accountant. Sometimes I work in Real Estate. Sometimes I stock shelves. Sometimes I am a Financial Analyst. Sometimes I am a plain old Manager. Sometimes I work in HR. Sometimes I am a Project Coordinator. Sometimes I am a Painter. Sometimes I pass myself off as a Lawyer. Sometimes I clean up messes. Sometimes I am a Creative Consultant. Sometimes I am a Carpenter. Sometimes I work in Demo. Always I am looking for ways to be more efficient. Almost always I am a professional. I could probably get a lot more milage out of some of the specific aspects of my job when trying to impress people talking about what I do, but I don't try to impress people. I have heard friends or acquaintances answering the "What do you do?" question in the way that you are supposed to: embellished and aggrandized. I cringe when this happens. You see, it's the delivery and acceptance of this practice that makes people seem almost let down when I answer simply and reservedly. "What do you do?" isn't even really a question, it's an invitation to show yourself off. It's like a job interview question. And most people will bullshit with the best of them when given the opportunity.
Fuck those people. If you ask me what time it is I will say "4:15" or whatever, I won't talk about how great or expensive my watch is. If you ask me what I studied in college I will say "English," I won't give a dissertation on why I so dislike Charles Dickens. If you ask me if I have a girlfriend I will say "yes," I won't talk about how I often honestly feel like I have a better relationship than anyone else in the world. If you want to honestly know about my relationship experiences, then you're going to have to honestly ask. If you want the description of my job to sound like a CEO or a famous artist or goddamned race car driver(4), then you're going to be disappointed. Contrary to the way most people talk about themselves to strangers, those interesting or prestigious jobs are filled by a tiny tiny minority of the population.

What I do is I enjoy myself. Who I am is a much deeper and more complex topic than could or should ever be discussed with a stranger.


1. Those other 0.1% of people are the ones who become my friends.
2. This is only vaguely related, but I went through a phase a while back where I used to not want people to tell me their names when I met them. This was for two reasons: first, I would often just forget the name anyway; and second, since a person's name isn't of their choice it really doesn't say anything about him. I much preferred to see first if I enjoyed the other person any, and if so, only then would it really be necessary to know the name. After all, if I turned out not to like the person, I would not be communicating with him again and would have just wasted a tiny space of my brain by putting his name there. Efficiency.
3. I should say "truthfully" brag about myself. I used to, and sometimes still do, love to display a faux arrogance. I do it for laughs or to diffuse situations, but since I'm such a naturally gifted actor I can give people the wrong impression that I actually am that arrogant.
4. This is almost straight out of the movie Swingers, but I don't care. What kind of pretentious asshole society are we in where we are just as well making up some ridiculous fanciful lie about ourselves as telling the simple truth? It doesn't seem to matter that a person is happy with his life if he doesn't get appropriate approval from a stranger. Being proud of yourself is a 100% internal personal emotion.

A Conversation, Part I

Sara's mom was in town last weekend. Now, since they live in Chicago and we've only been around a handful of times, I'm still rather new to the whole mother-in-law situation. There is the stereotype that all mothers-in-law are awful people, to be dealt with only when necessary, and then swiftly and forcefully, but I can't say that I've had that yet. Maybe it hasn't fully sunk in yet that she is going to be a part of my immediate family, and not just a parent of a friend. The latter is the way I've approached her so far. Actually that's basically how I approach everyone in my life. But I wonder how things will change as time goes by.
On a more immediate level, her visit last weekend came with its perks and its.......uh, not-perks. Really the only not-perk is the simple obligation to spend large amounts of time doing things that I might not necessarily choose to do in normal circumstances. This obligation-reaction is probably just the bachelor part of my psyche trying to fool myself into thinking I ever live my life fully independently anymore, and since you know I'm going to be married in just a couple months, you know that's certainly not true. Anyway, I'm still dealing with making these simple sacrifices of my personal time for the greater good of my lovely Sara and my new family. I'll get over it. And besides, having multiple meals and other things paid for will always far outweigh any childish instincts I may have.
It was at one of these gratis events that something happened to spur this post in the first place. We three went to see an Off-Broadway show on Saturday night.* After the show, we were talking with a couple from Chicago that Sara's mom knows and randomly bumped into.

--Give me a brief aside here. Try to think of a social situation in which your dear friend Josh would have the least amount of things to say or add to the conversation. Now compare that scenario to the real-life one I was confronted with here: Saturday night, with future wife and future mother-in-law, just exited a Broadway show and have about 1/1000th the sensibility for them as my two companions, who are exhorting me to share my thoughts on the show. Add to that mixture two similarly-aged friends of future mother-in-law from her city in town specifically to see Broadway shows. Oh, and the conversation started off reminiscing about how future mother-in-law's friend is the mother of a guy who represented future wife's first-ever date, which took place when she was in the 3rd or 4th grade. Oh, also, this guy is either married or engaged and happened to bump into Sara when she was alone a few months ago and hit on her. Wind-up Josh doesn't have any pre-prepared quips or lines to deal with this situation. Ok, back to the story--

So anyway, the conversation progressed as you might expect, mostly Sara's mom and the other wife talking, Sara smiling happily and jumping in from time to time, the husband doing the fake smile only older married men are capable of while slipping in the proper amount of jokes. You notice I didn't mention anything about myself. That's because I didn't really add anything, rather predictably.

Ok, I realize now I'd like to break this into two parts, this one contains enough observation for now. You'll get Part II with the actual meat of the post later.

* I've been to two shows now and I can say a few things about them. First, if the show is not on the campy side of the spectrum, I can certainly enjoy it. Both of the two I saw were safe here. Second, my ability to appreciate the medium of Broadway is nowhere near fully formed. It would be presumptuous of me to make any assumptions about when or if it ever does form. My commentary on any show would be like a tourist just back from a 5day stay in Russia rhapsodizing about communism. It's best just to stay out of things you don't know. Third, I'm going to make an honest effort to go to more shows at irregular intervals because I realize that Sara approaches these shows in the same way that I approach live sporting events: they are very nice and fun, but ultimately just a tip of a larger obsession, but nonetheless if I avoid live sporting events for too long a time, I will find myself needing, not wanting, to attend one. Finally, why can't these theaters invest in comfortable chairs? Is there some tradition I'm unaware of that dictates that seats should hold your ass comfortably for no longer than an hour, even though any show is at least 30-40 minutes longer than that? Come on, broadway, the movie industry figured out that it's ok to let audiences be comfortable in their seats for long periods. The few you will lose to sleepiness will be easily offset by the more who will come because they don't have to worry about ass ache (I'd like to say I'm part of the latter category, but I can't promise I wouldn't also belong to the former).