How to Be Great

Installment Three: Buy It

This will be disconcerting for all my fellow middle-classers out there, but yes of course you can buy greatness. "Greatness" perhaps not being the perfect word, but I've got a theme going here in case you couldn't tell.
I'm talking about vision. Not 100% of the time, but lots of it, I can see better than just about anyone, and the way that I've "achieved" that was to buy it.
Two and half years ago I had laser eye surgery, surgery that not only did away with the poor vision I used to have, but also took me past normal and into a heightened level of sight. I'm talking past 20/20, into the realm of 20/15 and even 20/10. It feels good, a hell of a lot better than the struggle I put up with to have contacts in my eyes.
Of course there are some slight drawbacks to the surgery. My eyes are much more sensitive to drying, and since I don't like to put drops in as often as would be optimal, my vision can tend to fluctuate, not just daily but minute to minute. Sometimes it seems like I can even feel my vision sharpening as I look at something, which is different. The weather can affect my eyes, too. Large temperature swings can put me slightly out of whack for a few minutes, and extreme humidity can do the same but more muted and for longer.
I will put up with all these little things though because (in addition to their being both minor and inconsistent problems) sometimes the pendulum swings back the other direction. Maybe a week ago I had one of those experiences. I was walking in downtown Brooklyn toward the train on a sunny afternoon and it seemed like there was no end to the sharpness. I didn't stop and count the blocks but what caused me to notice was the fact that I could make out the different parts of the little pedestrian stick man on the walk signs from several blocks away. Thinking about it now, it seems impossible, but my memory places me just below Atlantic Ave, and clearly seeing the sign at Joralemon or even beyond.
So, you too can have robot eyes, as some of my friends used to (not always genuinely) call me shortly after the surgery. You just have to pay for it. Simple enough, right? At least a lot easier than pumping up thousands and thousands of free throws.

It's a Girl (!)

It has occurred to me a few times that what I write here about the pregnancy and my feelings about this new parenthood might have some benefit to posterity, and that potentially some day in the far future, my daughter will be able to read this. I don't of course write "to" her--because that would be weird--but sometimes I do understand that she may see it. That maybe makes what I'm about to say sound even worse.
I admit that I was a little disappointed when we first found out that our fetus's gender was female. That was three or four weeks ago, and only now am I completely sure that any and all disappointment has vanished. I'm very happy with our future girl and I can hardly remember that I was disappointed in the first place. I no longer think about any differences due to it being boy or girl or anything like that. It is a girl and it seems silly to think about it being anything else. But initially I had a strange reaction to finding out the news.
The last big thing to be anxious about in a pregnancy (beside the birth of course) is when you find out the gender, which is at 18 weeks, plus or minus a few. I was certainly very excited, so for one thing after we found out I had that normal post-anxious-excitement letdown. I guess that made me feel like I was more disappointed than I really was. Still, during the many weeks after becoming pregnant and before finding out the gender, unconsciously I mostly imagined it being a boy. I think as a man that when you first learn you're going to be a "father," your instinct is to think "son." That's what all fathers once were, after all. Probably this contains selective bias, but it has always seemed to me that a boy has a special relationship with his father, moreso than mother-daughter, mother-son, or father-daughter. What I'm saying is that there was a fairly strong default setting in me regarding expecting a boy.
The more important factor which caused me to hope for a boy relates to Sara. In her family there is something of a curse or whatever you might call it, so much so that it is something they openly talk and joke about. The women only produce girls. Sara's mother is from a family of just two girls. Her aunt had two children, both girls. Sara's mother had two girls. Her sister thus far has two kids, both girls, naturally. I don't believe in voodoo and am a religious follower of stats and probability so the idea that there is something fishy that causes her family to only have girls seems totally implausible. If a doctor doesn't confirm it, I won't believe it. Sara is not as staunchly scientific as me, though, and she has said many times that she wants to have boys (I'm sure she's very happy to have a girl, but for some reason she's shown a desire for male offspring). Being a wonderful husband, I am of course sensitive to her desires. So if she thinks that she's "doomed" to only produce girls, I want to be able to comfort or reassure her. What this all means is that it would have been much easier to have a boy with the first one when there is no pressure, so that the voodoo idea isn't allowed to get inside her head and create an unnecessary sense of anxiety about any future pregnancies. Basically, we are happy to have either a boy or girl with number one, but with any subsequent kids we will start caring much more that the little fetus be recognized as male.
I don't really want to be one of those couples that allows themselves to be disappointed by news of the gender of their fetus. There was a family in my church when I was younger that had 4 or 5 boys in a row to start. Every time the woman got pregnant there was more and more finger-crossing that this would be the time a girl came. Finally it happened, but being in the middle of that would be maddening to me. The specter of there being a girl-dominant gene inside Sara would make this anxiety multiply. So there you go.
Anyway, here we are now, 22 weeks in, more than halfway, and I'm happily looking forward to our future girl. I won't think much at all about having a boy until after she's at least a year old probably, if even then. It's way too early to consider something like this, but I'm actually starting realize that I wouldn't mind having three kids instead of always assuming it would be two (I come from two and so does Sara so it would seem that is the natural way). So whatever potential anxiety I talked about just now would really be deferred at least for a handful of years, so far in the future that it's irrelevant right now. Which it is.
In other baby news, Sara has decided to knit a blanket for the baby. I think this is a fantastic idea (I bought her the yarn for Christmas, after all). She had an excellent question a few days ago, though, wondering since she was spending so much time working on something for it, what was going to be my pre-birth baby-bonding exercise? Hmm. I can't make it a fast runner, that would already be in the DNA. I can't teach it how to appreciate baseball statistics. I can't organize or coordinate for it. I can't rationalize for it or break something down with logic and without bias. I could write something for it or to it, I suppose, but like I said I don't really like the idea of writing to it, and it would feel a little too Hallmark-y to purposefully write something for it. These are some of things for which I possess skill. Finally, I think I've decided that I'm going to build it a dresser. This is sorta cheating, because we need to buy a small dresser to store things anyway, so it's more a present for Sara and me. Nonetheless, it gives me something to do nominally for the baby, something to spend time on and therefore presumably something for me to do that is fatherly. In this way, it is wonderful, and I very carefully and even more pridefully will do it.

How to Be Great

Installment Two: Focus

Michael Jordan did many amazing things as an athlete. Before he ever dreamed of playing for the Wizards, back near the peak of his abilities, he had a career scoring average of 32 points per game, the highest all time. Someone asked him how he could possibly score so many points, every single game, over and over again. Being a kind of genius, he didn't fully understand the incomprehensability of his feat and said something to the effect of: "Easy. I break it into quarters. It's just eight-eight-eight-eight." Indeed. No one is amazed at scoring eight points in one 12-minute quarter, so why should it be so hard to do it again and again? Focus.
MJ never allowed himself to relax in his pursuit of greatness. He had the strongest focus of anyone to the achievement of his goals. It wasn't good enough to get three straight quarters of eight points each, he had to have all four. And then he had to do it again, every game, it never stopped. It takes an amazing focus to combat your natural laziness, or to deal with the myriad obstacles that will crop up to derail this stoic approach. And yet he did it, for years.
Michael Jordan is of course an extremely rare talent, not just physically, but mentally with his determination and focus. Mere physical mortals though, can honestly strive to replicate some of his focus. You've got to start small.
When most people start shooting a lot of free throws, they will count their results per five shots, or ten shots, then make an observation of what's just happened: "Ok, that was 7 out of 10, 70%, not bad but a couple of those makes were a little sloppy." Then the person will try another ten and make another mental judgment. After some time and practice, this person's goal will be to make all ten in any ten-shot set. They will have built up the focus to make perhaps ten in a row before relaxing. Let's say then that a person succeeds and hits ten straight. What will likely happen then is that they will push on and keep shooting until they miss. The problem here is that their brain has been coached to focus for only ten shots at a time, so if they start mentally counting 12, 13, 14.......then very soon they'll be out of their element. What a person needs to do is stop and start over with a new set, while forgetting about the first ten. Eventually math probability will take over and the person will miss a few, but they'll keep their focus much easier by breaking the greater achievement into smaller more manageable ones.
When I was at the top of my shooting groove, I was recording with pencil and paper every 100 shots, and making around 95 of them. Of course keeping focus for 100 repetitions is too much to ask, even for a shooting savant such as myself. So I broke every 25 shots into sets, with the goal being to miss only one per set. This amounted to 96 out of 100, which is almost exactly what I made at my peak. (Of course this makes you wonder what more the brain would be capable of. With more practice and a revised goal of missing just one out of 50, could I then have made 98%? Who knows. As it turned out, I didn't devote enough time.) Counting 25 at a time required focus, but it also helped to instill extra confidence. It's one thing to say ok I'm going to hit 24 out of 25 shots right now, it's another to have to slowly do it one at a time. Mentally I knew I had to make at least the first ten shots in order to have a good chance to go 24-for-25. Of course I would pretty much always make those first ten, because I knew I had to, and because I was able to focus on the larger goal at the same time so that the single shots were merely inevitable. Before I knew it, I'd be up around 20, when it would take enhanced focus to make the five more to close off the set. Do that four times, voila, one hundred.
Of course no person is a machine, so it's never quite that easy. I plowed through robotically for a long time, but when I got up to about 80 in a row, the specter of what I was approaching started to become palpable. This is when you need to turn up your focus even more, since it's not good enough to overcome the banality and sheer volume of the task; you've also got to control your nerves and your brain.
There is a very small zone between being too tense and being too nonchalant, but that is the zone of focus you need to find. You're not merely shooting a basketball at a hoop, but you're also not letting your whole existence ride on the result of each individual shot. It's about trusting yourself as much as anything, and of course tuning out all the things that can cause problems.
I was able to do all this and keep chugging along, crossing over the magic 100 barrier and not stopping like I normally would but letting the string play out. Of course after I achieved it I started to ease up and my focus started to fall away. That I made 16 more after hitting 100 is a testament to the muscle memory I had built up more than anything, because my head wasn't locked in anymore.
Focus is a slightly tougher thing to master than repetition, but it is master-able nonetheless. Some of the trick is truly convincing your brain that what you are doing is the most important thing, so any random stimulus doesn't affect you as greatly as it otherwise might. I think that most of it is in your approach to the problem, having the ability to focus on pieces of the whole, and the discipline to hold that focus for a long period of time.

How to Be Great

Installment One: Repetition

When I was eighteen, I once made 116 consecutive free throws. In no attempt at modesty, I'll pause and make clear that this is a very impressive accomplishment. I've never met anyone who has ever made that many in a row. Still, the point of my writing now is to convince you that it's achievable with the right mental and physical approach.
Again, 116 free throws is a lot. I didn't have a watch on at the time, but since I was rebounding the shots myself, it may have taken a half hour. Doing pretty much any activity with binary results and producing the same result every time for a half hour is not easy.
What I'm trying to say is that in order to be able to hit than many in row, you've got to lower the mathematical improbability. You've got to take lots and lots of shots. It was early spring of my senior year in high school when I pulled off this feat. During the last period of my school day, I had what was called Senior Release, which was available to seniors with good enough grades and effectively shortened our days by about 50 minutes. In addition to that, because I was a successful athlete and pretty well-liked by the school's administrative types who for the most part doubled as sports coaches, I was able to rig my schedule so my Senior Release period was preceded by a Study Hall that was "taught" by an assistant track coach. Basically I had over 90 minutes of time to kill every afternoon at home before returning for track practice. Since I was a good kid and it never occurred to me to use that time indulging in illegal activities, and since the weather was just getting warm enough to be outside, and since I loved just shooting basketballs, I would shoot free throws.
It helped that I was fairly good with free throws to begin with, but shooting for an hour or more pretty much every day, made me much better. Additionally, since I'm a kind of compulsive stat-keeper, I kept a sheet of paper inside the garage and recorded my results for every 100 shots taken. It was not uncommon to rack up four or five hundred per day, and on the weekend sometimes more. Do that for a couple months, and your results will only get better and better. I got to the point where I was 95 or more out of 100. My total percentage from the beginning and covering many thousands of shots was 92-point-something percent. But there was a groove I was in near the end when it was hovering around 96%.
Just making pure assumptions on the math here, but if you're hitting around 96% every 116 shots, that means you're missing fewer than five per, which means that a perfect 116-for-116 result wouldn't require a huge improvement in standard deviations above the mean.
Repetition. Doing the same thing over and over again so that you get good enough at it to make the seemingly impossible become less impossible. This is achievable for anyone, whether or not you've got a beautiful Reggie Miller release like me or not.

Prestige and the Olympics

While watching the Olympics this week I found myself accidentally in an argument with my wife. Accidentally because I thought I/we were just talking and then suddenly I realized too late that it was an argument. She knew this sooner than I did.
The point of the argument started with the idea of what is or isn't a prestigious sport/event, and it morphed into me being arrogant and biased (that's the part that I didn't realize, and the only part that I cared to dispute). I'm going to ignore the second part for now cause that's not really interesting to other people, but the first I think is.
People don't take the Winter Olympics as serious as the Summer Olympics. This is for a lot of reasons, but primarily we of the general populous can sniff out legitimate sports and are instinctively attracted to what we feel are more popular or "important" sports. We like to be a part of a larger interest, and we blindly seem to accept preconceived notions about what we ought to consider important. Just look at the Super Bowl. The Olympics of course are a perfect example of this too.
Who would ever care about a 16 year old girl jumping around on a beam? There is no intrinsic value in that activity to other people, and, more importantly, it doesn't really relate at all to anything we do in our regular lives or any of our sporting pastimes. And yet, every four years a large chunk of not only the American population, but also the world's, stops and cares about 16 year old girls jumping around on a beam. I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that the percentage of the population that either regularly participates in beam-jumping or watches same, is infinitely smaller than the amount that care once every four years. I think that's interesting.
It's especially interesting with the Winter Olympics, because those sports are usually much more exclusive or foreign to most people than are Summer sports. I heard an announcer mention that a U.S. female luge competitor was from Lake Placid, NY. Of course she is! How many luge tracks are there in the whole country? Salt Lake City and Lake Placid, for sure those two because they've hosted Olympics, but where else? Further, why would there be more than that? As a mere observer of the Olympics, it seems to me that the whole point of luge is just to be an Olympic sport. Its end is the same as its means, so for me it's hard to justify its existence.(1) It's not a recreational activity.(2) It's not even a regular competitive activity in the U.S., outside of perhaps a concocted national competition or something similar.
Even the WO sports that aren't utterly contrived are relevant only to very small minorities. Sure, most people have done it at least once, but who ice skates regularly? Cross-country skis? Ski jumps? How are any of these tied at all to most people's human experience? Alpine skiing is the only individual sport that can claim semi-regular recreational participants in non-trifling numbers. Even the only sport that functions as a high-level professional undertaking--Hockey--stands as the little stepchild of the major pro sports.
I think I saw it in Sports Illustrated, but somewhere there was a map diagramming where all of the 200+ members of the U.S. team are from. All but a handful are from the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, or California. That's ridiculous. It makes perfect sense, too, which makes the whole thing even more ridiculous. Here is a list of the top all-time WO medal winners, in order, along with their rank by world population:
Germany -- 14
Russia/Soviet Union -- 9
Norway -- 116
USA -- 3
Austria -- 92
Finland -- 112
Canada -- 36
Sweden -- 88
Switzerland -- 94
The southernmost of those is of course the U.S. Basically, if you live anywhere in the world south of Chicago, you'll never have a chance in the Winter Olympics. Sounds pretty fair, right? Sounds like the kind of thing that the whole world ought to unite to celebrate, right?

Ok, I've gotten slightly off-topic. I meant to discuss what is or isn't a prestigious Olympic sport/event. I'm going to define this by the perspective of the entire world, not just the U.S. So basketball could never count. Or swimming, which happened to be Sara's suggestion when asked what the most prestigious sport was. Outside of the U.S. and Australia, most of the world is much more ambivalent about swimming. Rightly so, since you've got to have the money to have access to pools. Also, you can't count soccer. Even though it's the world's most popular sport, the Olympic soccer competition isn't taken nearly as seriously.
To think of what makes something prestigious, imagine that you are a prospective father of an unborn child. You are told that your child will grow up to become an Olympic champion, but you can choose which event. What would be the most popular answer for people all around the world?
Really, it's no contest as to what is the most prestigious Olympic sport: it's clearly track & field.(3) In fact, I just perused the list of Summer Olympic sports, and it's not even close. It's almost more prestigious than all the other sports combined.
So what about the premiere event of the Olympics? Using logic, the answer must surely be the men's 100meter dash, but I'd be more willing to listen to arguments on other specific events. Maybe the men's or women's all-around gymnastics? Maybe something from swimming? Maybe the 5,000meter run, or the 1500? In my opinion, it's definitely the men's 100meter, though.
While I'm at it, just off the top of my head, let's make a list of the most internationally prestigious events in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
Summer events
1. Men's 100m run
2. Men's 1500m run
3. Men's decathlon
4. Women's all-around gymnastics
5. Men's all-around gymnastics
6. Men's 5000m run
7. Men's freestyle swimming, 50 or 100m
8. Men's marathon?
9. Men's wrestling? any weight class
10. Modern pentathlon. Just kidding.
Winter events
1. Men's downhill skiing
2. Women's figure skating
3. Men's figure skating
4. Men's hockey
5. Men's speedskating? any distance
6. Women's speedskating?
7. Men's slalom skiing?
8. Men's 4-man bobsled?
9. Men's team cross country skiing?
10. Snowboard cross. Just kidding.
These look pretty sexist. What can I say? Sorry? Also, the Winter list is obviously much more of a crapshoot. Probably hockey should be higher, maybe even #1. Skiing is really popular all around the Winter Olympic countries, though, and the downhill is legendary.


1. Boy, without intent, but I'm putting on an it's-vs-its clinic in this sentence.
2. No, luging is not the same as sled-riding. Not even in the same ballpark.
3. Or, as official Olympic programs refer to it: athletics. Doesn't get any purer than that.

Stuff Your Sorrys in a Sack

This morning a guy deliberately stopped a full elevator car from closing so he could rush in at the last second. He knew it was already full but acted like he didn't. I was on this car, and when the guy got on he said, "Sorry, sorry about that guys." There was at least one woman in the elevator. It was first thing in the morning for me so I could be wrong but I think I showed no reaction to this (stopping a car like that is basically innocuous but still in the coda of big office building work, it's considered a dick move). No one else reacted to him either. I was looking glassily ahead at nothing when the guy, who was now standing right next to me, looked deliberately right at the side of my face and said "Sorry about that." Thankfully my floor was the first stop and so I didn't have to maintain it for long, but at that I very purposefully ignored him. What was with that follow-up apology? Jesus, dude. Some people are so freaking concerned with how their are viewed, even but total strangers they may never meet again, that they unwittingly create the problems that they're so anxiously trying to avoid. I hate these people. Just chill the fuck out, man.

I feel silly mentioning this, because the plot of the show dealt heavily with race relations, but watching "Memphis" last night, I experienced the black-movie-theater effect while in a Broadway theater. It was awesomely amusing. I'm not talking about whooping and "No she didn't!" and all that flamboyance, but several times during the show a few scattered people, including a couple just about 10 feet away, let loose with seldom-heard-at-live-theater exclamations. The first time a woman shrieked I giggled because I was amazed that she could be so amazed at such a fictional scene. I didn't realize until after a few more, when I did the half-turn and realized that it wasn't just a jittery individual but a member of a different race doing her very best to uphold a stereotype. At that point I couldn't stop laughing.
During intermission of the show, Sara started talking to the couple sitting next to us, the woman was also a teacher at her school, though in a different department or level because it didn't seem Sara knew her. We were all standing at our seats and they were talking and I exchanged a half-awkward look with the guy before doing a couple not-just-nervous-fidgeting-but-probably-looked-like-it stretches before giving up and sitting back down, where I was mostly obscured by Sara from the couple. Is it such a horrible thing of me to not put up the little social effort there? Is it so horrible for me not to be interested? I really don't care if the other person doesn't find me interesting. If I know an interaction will last no longer than five minutes and I have the option either to engage or not then I will always choose not to. I'm very socially lazy, which I think rubs people the wrong way. Though it shouldn't, unless these people are willing to accept that their offense-taking itself represents some irresponsible and ugly self-centrism. I guess that's a roundabout way of me justifying my aloofness. Whatever, it's true.

Save Yourselves

On the only-80%-full 4 train this morning, I saw a woman reading the Daily News. The cover said "CHILD'S PLAY," and the sub-headline said something about how the city was "almost" back to normal today.
You may not have heard, but we got a little snow here the last couple days. That's sarcasm. The media blitz over this pretty standard winter event is embarrassing. I heard a group of three Australian guys in the elevator making fun of the wall-to-wall coverage of the snow on the news. Australians, for godsakes.(1) The storm is long over and the sun is out this morning, but I think the weather service is still trying to predict another 5-6 inches of BLIZZARD.
On Tuesday night, weather.com's special weather alert stated that until Thursday AM, total expectation was 10-16 inches. On Wednesday at about 9AM, when we had to that point only received perhaps an inch or two, it was the same. Wednesday at noon, maybe 2-3 inches total, and they upgraded the forecast to 12-17 inches, plus added a few disclaimers stating (paraphrase): "It may seem like the storm is over but it is not. Conditions will severely worsen. This is only the lull before the big one. Death. Destruction. Plague. Make sure to tune in to The Weather Channel for tips on how to survive the fallout."
I woke up this morning and there couldn't have been more than 6-7 inches in Downtown Brooklyn. Midtown is the same, though because of the shovel brigades from the office buildings, the sidewalks are already dry here.(2) So, spread out over about a 24 hour period, we received no more than 8 inches. I'm very confident that at no period did we ever exceed an inch per hour.
City public schools preemptively canceled classes yesterday. Sara's private school called Wednesday off as early as lunchtime Tuesday. I wonder how stupid these administrators feel today. Everybody loves a day off, sure,(3) but some discretion, please. It's a little snow. Not volcanic ash. Not a swarm of locusts. Not a tornado or a tsunami or an earthquake. Snow. I experience much greater annoyance getting around in heavy rain/wind than in a half-foot of snow.


1. I checked wikipedia. Trying to find a geographically diverse set of Southern Australian cities, I chose Perth, Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney. Only Canberra ever receives any snow, but: "Light snow falls in the city in one out of approximately three winters but is usually not widespread and quickly dissipates." Here is what it says about Sydney: "Snowfall was last reported in the Sydney City area in 1836."
2. I've heard that snowfall within the predicted amount occurred in areas outside the city, that these areas received 2-3 times as much as we got here. I don't really know what to say. 8 million people live inside the city. I assume 100% of city schoolchildren and parents live inside the city. With some reasonable delays, all the commuting options have been running fine throughout.
3. Hell, I left the office early, at about 3:15 yesterday afternoon. The doom and gloom reports left the office virtually empty, so why stick around? One of my bosses sent multiple emails urging us to go home and avoid the fury.

Hamsgiving IV

Yeah, fuck it, I'm using roman numerals.
I haven't talked about Hamsgiving yet, which is odd. Odd because I normally run out a liveblog of the occasion and odder because we hosted it at a bar this year, which added to the complications about tenfold. The weird thing though is that in spite of the prep, it was less memorable this year, at least for me. I did leave earlyish, so maybe I missed some things, but then everyone leaves early on Hamsgiving. You don't start drinking at 1:00 and expect to go all night. I should say, not anymore at least.
The big news is that our celebration was overrun by the Idiotarod. Dave said it first when breaking the news to me: that it was really the worst-case scenario. The fairly obscure and extremely out of the way bar we chose, Wunderbar on the fringe of Long Island City, which holds about 100 people with some comfort, just flukishly happened to be double-booked with us and a group of worked-up, aggressive and drunken fools. A few hundred of them. I've thought about it some since then, but I still haven't been able to think of a worse group to have "sharing" a space with Hamsgiving, especially starting as early as they did, like 4:00pm. I remember standing there outside the bar, tending the grill right after Dave broke me the news, and looking down the sidewalk a few blocks away, seeing the first few people snaking their way towards us. I'm sure it sounds hyperbolic, but the uncomprehending shock very legitimately paralyzed my judgment. I guess I'd be no good in a war, because my response to this stimuli is just too slow.
The truth of the matter is that the Idiotarod-ers weren't really as bad or as numerous as expected. In the heat of the moment we were forced to have our guards up, which knocked down the enjoyment level a little, but in actuality their presence ended up being almost a wash. They inconvenienced us for sure with our food spread and with their thievery, but having a huge number of people added to the "party" and their dumb-ass costumes provided entertainment. They did eventually force us to relocate and perhaps lose a few of our attendees, but we did end up getting slightly cheaper beer, plus use of a large grill, plus free cleanup, all without having to pay the bar a cent. That worked out ok. We should have even left much sooner, but whatever. I was happy with my shirt, I was happy with the Polish sausage guy on First Avenue, I was happy with the grill, I was happy with the drunkenness, I was happy with the ham and all the other great meat efforts this. The only thing relating specifically to the holiday that disappointed me was that in the confusion of the crowded bar I didn't get to sample as much of the food as I'd have liked. And I never did get a meat sweats shot.

Before I go on with this unorganized post, I want stop and focus on something very negative. it doesn't have to do with Hamsgiving exactly but more humanity in general. Sometimes I'm too much of an idealist I guess, but I was really disappointed with a couple of people that day. First is obviously the manager of Wunderbar. This guy never told us about his double-booking of a huge group. Ultimately he didn't ask for the bar fee and he sorta tried to make things up to us at the end of the night, but that definitely doesn't excuse his motives or his deceit throughout the process. It was just blind greed. (I think I should be proud that encountering this still shocks and appalls me, right?) I know a businessman needs to concern himself with business, but doesn't anyone have a conscience about money anymore? Maybe the capitalist system is to blame, I don't know. There isn't really any incentive to ever do the right thing, and the right thing very often isn't the most profitable. That's counter-intuitive. The simple fact is that if we knew he had double-booked us with the Idiotarod, we would have never gone there, no questions asked. And he knew this, and he knew we would be paying him $250 plus bringing in around 75 people to buy his drinks all day. So instead of doing the right thing and being honest with us (actually, doing the right thing would have been not even booking the Idiotarod in the first place), he said fuck it and followed the dollar signs. I should note here that Wunderbar isn't exactly the kind of place to pack in customers, and that really it was us that was doing him a favor from the get-go, giving him a shitload of business that he never would have had, so you really might have expected him to be grateful for it. There was a ton of room for us to have our party in relative peace and for him to have a very profitable day. But I guess when you have a whole tub of ice cream in front of you, if you are a dumb fucking robot then you'll just eat the whole thing, no matter what effect it has.
It was a similar story when we relocated to LIC Bar, a bar that I like. The bartender though was a raging bitch. Initially she cut us some slack and let us use their back room (which we didn't actually need but at the time was empty) until another scheduled group came in, but again, we instantly produced 50+ (I was drunk at this point so have no real idea how many people we had) people when before us she had about 10-15. You'd think she would be happy, but no she wasn't really shy with displaying her opinion that she was being more inconvenienced than anything else. 50 people x 2 drinks per hour x $6 per drink x 2-3 hours = $1500. You are a bar owner. On a normal day you have 10-20 customers drinking at the rate stated, between 4-8pm, then you have 25 people from 8-11, 50 from 11-12, and 15-20 from 12-2am. This is all just very rough, and I'm sure I'm being liberal with the numbers for LIC Bar. Anyway. Round the numbers a little and add them up, so that on a normal weekend night, you make a little more than $2000, including tips. When we walked in the door, we almost doubled her income expectation. Fuck that woman. I understand we should be happy we found a home there, but it was LIC, we could have stopped at basically any place and had plenty of room. She was very lucky that we happened to choose her, and really amazed me with her sense of entitlement. She found a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk but got pissed that she had to bend over to pick it up.

So I said earlier it was more complicated this year, and it was, but I really hope that doesn't discourage people. Most of it was our fault in procrastinating with the planning, and then latching onto a half-assed idea of using a bar. Using a bar by itself is not a half-assed idea, but locking in on the specific one we chose for no really good reason probably was. With more lead time, and probably a slightly higher expectation concerning booking fees, we could very easily find a more convenient and more upfront location.
Two big things have happened in the last year: no one lives in a big shitty apartment with outside space anymore, and no one has the ability to just accept a trainwreck mess of an apartment afterward anymore. Plus, the pool of partygoers keeps increasing. Using a bar is really the only reasonable option for future years. We've got to get started earlier and we've got to treat it like a legit event with contracts and such, not like an informal agreement amongst us and the bar manager.
I say this all directly, but the fact is that I likely won't have much if any involvement in the planning for Hamsgiving V, since I'll be in Chicago. It's no guarantee I'll be able to even attend, although right around that time would be about perfect for my first visit back to the city. I guess I'm just really hopeful that the perceived stress of staging this event--especially when outside factors are conspiring against us--doesn't outweigh the actual enjoyment of the celebration. I hope it doesn't get in the way of things.
I do know that whether I'm able to attend next year or not, I'm going to initiate a Hamsgiving West in Chicago for sure. It's a perfect city for it, too.

A Showy Weekend

On my way to the train this morning I passed a woman on a phone in the middle of a seriously heated argument with someone. Yelling, repeated phrases, even a little unconscious foot-stomping. My question is: who in the hell has the energy to get that angry at 8AM on a Monday morning (the Monday after the super bowl, no less), all while standing outside in 25 degree cold? In the words of my father when I was an unstoppably energetic little kid: go run around the block a couple times, that'll settle you down. (Incidentally, that could have been the start of my running career, since frequently out of spite (yeah, little kids can have spite) I'd take him up on it.)

Friday, I went with Sara to see "Fela!" (exclamation theirs). We also had dinner at Bar Americain, which is one of Bobby Flay's restaurants. The restaurant was very good but not very great (Sara liked it more than me). The mayonnaise for the fries might have been the highlight, which is not the point of a semi-fancy place I don't think. We split an excellent crabcake that came with a remarkably good slaw, though the single crabcake cost a fairly ridiculous $19. I got the porterhouse cut pork chops, which were good. I'd never seen pork in that cut style before, so kudos there. It's a sloppy cut though, and a pork chop is not nearly as big as its beef cousin, so it was maybe a little more work than was necessary. Nice almost melt-away consistency of the meat though.
The show was at the very least interesting. I've now seen three very different broadway shows in the last 14 months. The first, "Pal Joey," was a revival of a pretty classic old-style show, the kind with the almost awkward stop/starts for songs and dances. Not my favorite. The second was a sort of very contemporary update of that classic form, "In the Heights." This was still not really in my wheelhouse, but it was very energetic and entertaining so the audience experience was distinct. "Fela!" isn't really like the others. It's not a standard "broadway show," instead more of a thought-provoking musical concert with staged interactions and realistic but heavily (and interestingly) choreographed dancing. That's the good. The bad is that--in this novice's eye--pretty much every facet of the show was just slightly lacking. The story was dramatic but not hugely so, the lead actor was entertaining and talented but not quite charismatic or engaging enough (this is a big problem, actually), the production started trying to be uniquely interesting but then sorta gave up, and the music was all very good but ultimately the songs were fairly weak. It's only been three days but I can't recall any specific tune from the show. Excellent and very danceable ambient beats but not a whole lot more. The best part of the show for me was the set and the visuals, especially in the second half when it gets mystical and the lights go out and there are about 4-5 layers of visuals with glowing dancers and even an odd sense of magnetic light. It's tough to describe it all but I think it was spectacular.

The second show of the weekend was entirely different. Saturday night, Lyndhurst, NJ, Medieval Times, dinner and tournament.
Before I say anything, I'd like to note that it's really hard to form a natural opinion about this spectacle because anyone experiencing it for the first time carries such massive preconceived notions going in. I'd also like to disclaim that I absolutely promise to keep my mouth shut any time in the near future that my friends and fellow attendees enthusiastically talk about it. I've thrown cold water on positive memories in the past, so I'm trying not to do it now.
Anyway, the whole thing was a little disappointing for me. There were indeed knights on horseback and sometimes aggressive swordplay and stupidly long bits of blustery proclamations from the "king" and others. And we did actually have to eat bone-in chicken with our hands. And they had big novelty-sized beer vessels. And we got to wear silly paper crowns. Basically everything else was underwhelming.
No one was in character except the participants during the actual show. Waitresses, cashiers, bartenders: they were all just normal people acting normally. Even the participants spoke to us as themselves after the show. I had thought the whole experience was the show, that people would be playing characters the whole time? I guess not. I can't believe I'm complaining that it wasn't nearly campy enough, but I am. I wanted to feel embarrassed by the awkwardness of the spectacle throughout, but it only succeeded in that accidentally, whenever the "king" spoke (the guy had the most ridiculous nerd-voice ever, and he wasn't doing it on purpose).
I was almost offended when they passed out individually-plastic-wrapped towelettes after dinner. What's the point of eschewing one modern convenience only to indulge in another? I looked around briefly after being given mine and then did what any 21st century man would do when surrounded by aborted disneyfied half-assedness: I accepted the fail and indulged.

Dragging in the Void

My weekend hangover has been a little bit more vicious than usual this week. Probably because of the anticipation and then execution of Hamsgiving weekend (post upcoming), which included three days of drinking and walking long distances in bitter cold.
Not so long ago, when my life revolved not around a loved one but two consecutive off-days per week, I suffered weekend hangovers pretty regularly. Mondays were not fun. I'm not even really talking about physical hangovers (because those would happen on Sundays usually), but the emotional letdown. Much keeping with the hair-of-the-dog effect, a lot of times it seemed like the only cure was another weekend (fortunately our good friend Time ensured that I was never out of stock), and this one is only beginning to show signs of letting up mostly due to the Super Bowl coming up, and my current devotion to creating prop bets for our pool.
I only mention all of this because I haven't had a weekend hangover in a long time. Part of that is simply not getting after it as hard on weekends anymore, but a much bigger part is Sara's steadying influence, plus the not-insignificant fact that lately my life has had much larger anticipatory events than simple weekends. From the time I was engaged, I had about one year of steady build-up with wedding and honeymoon plans. Smaller cycles of months and weeks were washed under by the higher tide of the wedding. Then I had the afterglow from that for a while, and in short notice, Sara became pregnant and it kicked into another gear.
I have to say that--outside of a 2-3 week period of intense honeymoon prep--the depth of education/preparation for a pregnancy just blows away anything wedding-related. And this is how it should be. You get lazy and ruin a wedding and you've got one bad day and a few weeks of residual damage, but you fuck up a pregnancy and you've got a lifetime.
Starting in late October when I found out she was pregnant, through the pretty recent past, I immersed myself in all kinds of pregnancy- and baby-related things. How fast does a fetus grow? Why is a diaper pail different from a simple garbage can? How heavy is a 3-month-old baby? Is it really necessary to take four giant pills per day? Will it hurt my child's rap career to be born in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn? There is almost no end to the topics you can research in this area, and I only barely ever restrained myself. I think we have finally moved into a down period in this regard. We're 6+ weeks since we've told everyone, so that novelty is gone. We've had enough doctor visits so that they're becoming routine (so much so that I'm actually skipping one today). We're far enough into the pregnancy that we basically already know everything we need to know, so the actual labor and delivery is the only thing left (for me at least. Sara gets to deal with the restless nights, back pain, etcetc. Sorry about that). We're not close enough so that we can actually start buying things for after the baby arrives. And, sometime in the last few weeks, I've stopped automatically knowing how far along she is. She's almost 19 weeks now, but I had to stop and think about it.
I guess what this is all about is waiting. Nine months of a pregnancy is a long time, but given all you need to do, both internally and externally to prepare for that huge life change, it can be intimidating and seem like not long enough. Not right now, though. Right now it just feels like a time void between now and June, like I know my life will change and I'm ready for it but it's not here yet. I'm just waiting for the future to happen, a future that I mostly already know, which is weird.