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).

Independent (or just confused) Personality

He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

That's a small quote from the middle of a long article in last month's Atlantic(1) about a long study that purportedly sheds light on what makes for a happy life.(2) It interests me in a personal way because I have taken seriously my deliberate decision to belong to neither the Democratic nor the Republican party. I've always felt that my political beliefs(3) have never consistently fallen in with either party and that I've been free to agree or disagree with either at any time. This little quote nicely confirms this thought. Read those personality traits again. If I or anyone else extremely close to me had to choose five words to describe me, those might be the first five picked.(4) I have all the dominant traits of Republicans and Democrats.
So I think what this means is that I ought to be on the Supreme Court.

1. I've loved this magazine for a long time, and you really can't go wrong reading anything in it. But I've got a little complaint about how they changed their name from the Atlantic Monthly to just the Atlantic. A little too pretentious, if you ask me.
2. I'm not sure if I'm terribly impressed with this article. It was the cover feature last month so normally you'd be free to just end the debate and start anthologizing it. But it wandered around, never really answered its own hypotheses, and turned into a biography on the study's director, which would be a fine and simple article to write, but not terribly interesting in a broad sense or enlightening in any sense. I still feel the same way about the Atlantic now that I did about PBS a few years ago (enthralled, awed, and completely devoted), I'd just call this article the "Antiques Roadshow" of the Atlantic.(a)
3. My beliefs on social issues are decidedly liberal. I am mature and humble enough not to always assume I'm right about diverse and complex political and economic issues, but not social ones such as gay rights or abortion(b) or the like. There I am no better than a petulant child. The only difference is that instead of being absolutely certain of my own rightness, I'm more sure of my adversary's wrongness.
4. Let's put them in this order: pragmatic, introspective, organized, sensitive, cultural.

a. Hopefully anyone reading this knows enough about me that I don't have to explain how I feel about "Antiques Roadshow." Let's just say that Mondays, and any day they were doing a pledge drive and giving away Broadway-related merchandise, were disappointing evenings for me.
b. Abortion being a very interesting issue. It's got both a strong social component as well as a strong political one. I don't disagree that there are a lot of sensible arguments on both sides of the political abortion issue, but only one on the social side. A woman has a right to choose what she does with her body, no matter what any religious text has to say about it.

Re-Dedication, for real

A little more than a week ago, someone ran away from me in Central Park.
No, I was not wearing my rapist costume, aka my normal wardrobe. Nor was a offering children candy. I was running. And--here is where it becomes noteworthy--so was the other person.

My first year living in the city (2003+), I didn't have much money or many friends, so I didn't have as much to keep me from running more often. Also, I was closer to my competitive days and so naturally a little more plugged into it. Almost always I ran in Central Park. Two things used to constantly impress me: how many people seemed to run in NYC, and how slow they all were. For the latter, I should really say, how no one I ever saw was fast. Of the many many runners I encountered in the park, they were all no better than recreational, even the competitive-looking ones were past their prime (so was I, really). After a few months, I noticed that no one ever passed me in the park, or anywhere else, for that matter. I mean literally, I was never passed in the park. So after I made that observation, I would think about it and occasionally look around wondering if someone would pass me that day. It never happened. I remember one or two instances where I saw someone approaching fast from a tributary path and I upped my pace just slightly, enough to stay ahead of him. The streak continued. There were two other notable instances I remember clearly: one where a guy was certainly running faster than me, only he was going in the opposite direction so I didn't have to count it, and another where a woman was doing some kind of interval work around the reservoir and I popped up onto the loop just after her and she moved on ahead faster than me (I did pass her eventually, after she reached the end of her repeat and stopped to walk).
I can't remember exactly how long it was (at least a year) before someone finally passed me running in NYC, but it happened, though it remains to this day an exceedingly rare event.
But it happened last week. What makes it different is that the guy wasn't running fast and he didn't look fast. He was a gangly almost awkward dude running maybe 6:40 pace. Now, to be fair to myself, he passed me just after my turnaround point, before I had gotten back up to speed, and after he got ahead he didn't continue to make ground on me very much. The fact remains that he did pass me and he was running faster than me, maybe by about 12sec per mile. (Let's also make note that six-plus years ago, the phrase "before I had gotten back up to speed" never applied. I used to jump over three-foot solid barriers at high speed while barely breaking stride, for crying out loud.)

When I was running competitively in college, our long slow runs would check in around 6:40 pace. Sometimes a touch slower or faster, but that was the guideline. If, as often happened, I was running on an unmeasured route, I'd just divide the time by 6:40 to get the distance. So 6:40 was about the upper bound on my pace then (I only really got as high as 7:00 either in the dead winter or for the morning portion of a two-a-day). The lower bound for what I could still call a casual, easy pace would have been probably 6:00. 6:00 was a kinda quick pace, even for somewhat shorter runs, and even for my fellow college runners, but my body was pretty well suited for hitting a higher-tempo at a minimum effort, and I only sometimes clipped along at that pace for easy runs. (I gave this advantage back by being both an inconsistent racer and not having quite the distance threshhold of others.) Anyway, you could safely call anything between 6:15 and 6:40 my "effortless" pace.
The curious thing that I noticed in the first couple years post-competitive was that my effortless pace didn't really slow down any. Instead, all of my fitness seemed to be disappearing on the distance side of the equation. In fact, this continuance of ability to hold a quick easy pace stuck with me at least for a few years into my NYC residence. I noticed that after I'd have a little lay-off, or several weeks of very low volume, I would be able to come back and produce a 6ish mile run at my old easy pace of 6:40. I would struggle with slightly longer runs, and my "effortless" pace didn't dip much if at all below 6:40 like the good old days, but I could still roll.
So then as time passed and I continued to run with lots of inconsistency and little volume, my easy pace started to become 6:40-6:50, and then 6:40-7:00, and my ability to crank out 6 milers at that speed started to become inconsistent. Sure I could still do it often enough, but not every time, at least not with minimum effort.
Here we are now then, in 2009, almost exactly eight years since my last track race, and 7.5 years since my last competitive race, period. Now my easy pace is more like 7:00, with the random dip into the 6:40 range. I still have the uncanny ability to produce 6 mile runs in 6:40 pace with almost no effort, but those days are becoming less and less likely. A standard run for me now is 5 miles at just under 7:00 pace with some fatigue hitting after 3.5 miles or so. Half the time I run farther or faster or with less fatigue, half the time not. And every once in a while I get passed by a random guy.

What I'm saying after all that lead-up is that, at 28.5 years old, I think my inconsistent ways have finally started to chip away at all the wonderful foundation I built up through my college years. It's not just running, either. If I work out a little too vigorously, there is a chance I might aggravate a mild shoulder strain. I can't just roll out of bed and workout either; I need a little while to loosen up, especially my back. Most egregiously, though, I can't just take for granted a flat, ab-rippling stomach anymore. I'm not talking about just losing that youthful metabolic level either. I'm talking about paunchiness or spare-tireness. Even when I work out for a good stretch, I find it somewhat hard to make the mini-bulge go away from just above my belt line. I've turned into one of those dime-a-dozen guys from college who look great in a wife beater but only kinda good with a shirt off.
Maybe I'm nitpicking with myself and I should just be fortunate in my natural physical gifts. I can still get back on the workout wagon after some time off, and after just a couple weeks see real results. That's nice. But I've always held myself to pretty high standards, and I always want to continue to do so. I'm getting married in 2.5 months. I know it's almost cliche to get in good shape in the run-up to your wedding, but I want this to be more than that. It's not enough that I was once a pretty nice specimen. Sara never knew that me, so I want to get back as much of that as I can. And while I know I won't ever be able to race as fast as I did in college, I can at least look like I did when I was running like that.
Fitness has always been my goal. I never cared about stupid exercises that were more for vanity than for actual strength. Same with running: I haven't run an interval in years. But, at least until I get back to a great level of being, I'm going to let myself work just as much for appearance as for ability. I think it will take two more months of consistent work. Then, hopefully I can start rampin up the running. It's a little early, but with any luck I could be running genuinely fast again by next spring or even winter. And that gangly son of a bitch will be back to being something for me to toy with.

Yankee Stadium Review

Well, I didn't think it was any more likely than you did that I'd be writing a little review of the new Yankee Stadium, especially this soon, but thanks to the fates (who love trying to make me look like a hypocrite), here I am. Good old Mr Dyer sprung a nice field-level seat on me at the last minute this Monday, and I jumped at the opportunity since 1) it was probably a rich a-hole who paid for the ticket, not me; 2) I love watching baseball games; and 3) when would I get another chance to see a game in the new stadium, seeing as how I've boycotted it and all?
First, the stadium itself is mostly reminiscent of the old stadium (the renovated old stadium, I mean, since by all accounts the actual "old" stadium was a far sight different from the renovated version I saw many times firsthand). I say mostly because it carries none of the grandness of the scale of the old stadium, so at no point during your stay in the new one will you ever forget you're not in the old one. It doesn't feel as big, for one thing (which of course it isn't. They fit many extra seats in to offset the capacity difference, but those come at the expense of less foul territory and more outfield seats closer to the field. The simple size of the stadium is quite smaller).
This is a lazy thing to say, but it sorta just seems like a lot of the newer stadiums in the league: nicer than most of the old, and more inviting, but ultimately less distinct. This kind of thing would be a definite plus if replacing a stadium such as Shea, or the Pitt/Philly/Cincy bowls, but not so great when replacing something as iconic as Yankee Stadium.
Now to the positives. The concourses (at least the lower one, that's all I saw) are excellent. It's all very very open with great sightlines, not just from the concourse to the field, but also from the lower seats up into the concourse. This is nice since I could just sit in my sight and scan around the stadium to see exactly where I wanted to go for beer or food or restrooms. It's one of those smallish things you don't notice initially that shows what a lot of thought was put into this stadium (pricing excepted of course, as well as the theorized possibility of a homer-heavy wind draft). There is a large enclosed bar right behind center field, and the windows are tinted jet black so they double as the batter's eye. The seats are nicely cushioned and sized, and the food, while nothing spectacular, was adequately varied so that if you wanted something reasonably healthy or nonstandard, you could get it (I had a pulled pork sandwich that was pretty good). The scoreboard is nice and big as expected (Scotty brought up an odd point, that since the scoreboard is directly in center, and features a huge headshot of the batter, would it be odd for that batter to look right over the pitcher's shoulder and get distracted by his own massive image?) and the score and count seemed to be visible from most angles. There was an electronic K counter, plus count, pitch speed and description, plus a nicely detailed rotating out-of-town score and current pitcher-batter-base-out status. Each batter also got a full six season stat categories: AVG, HR, and RBI, plus R, OBP, and even SLG. Very nicely thorough. Sticking in the outfield, although I didn't get a good look from there, the outfield seats seemed to be vastly improved from the old stadium.
A very nice thing is the friezes ringing the top of the stands. These were the famous image of the old stadium (not so much the renovated), so it's very nice they've got them somewhat prominent. Maybe it's sentimentalism, but they look very good, and somehow not forced.
Now, to a couple random points. There is a vast almost-hall-like area off to the first base side of the stadium, behind the concourse but within the outer wall, that was quite visually impressive and maybe even intimidating. The only problem was that it didn't have much use, being mostly empty except for a selection of your standard stadium vendors: bank/credit card companies, a lemonade stand, couple beer stands, and some souvenir stands. Amidst this out-of-the-way randomness was one detail that amazed and--I'm almost ashamed to say because I know they're shamelessly pandering to someone just like me--impressed me was their "Retro Beers" fridge. This nondescript vending spot was manned by two lonely people, and contained 16oz cans of PBR, Schafer, Schlitz, and even Ballantine. Of course I bought a Ballantine, and of course I was upset they had to pour it into a plastic cup, since everyone knows the only joy in drinking a Ballantine is showing off the can while you do so.
Back to the concourses, and another thing I was impressed with: they seemed to be letting anyone who wanted, for as long as they wanted, to just stand at the edge of the concourse right behind the last row of seats and watch the game. I've always wondered why teams didn't let people use the standing areas of stadiums, and they seem to be doing just that.
Finally, on a personal note, I will turn to our specific seats. They were labled $325, and were located 9 rows up directly behind the visitor's dugout. They were in the fourth row beyond the infamous Legends Suites, but they still were low enough to have the offensive (to me) waiter service that they also practiced in the old stadium. They were very good, providing a perfect side-view perspective of the pitcher-batter matchup, as well as the flight of the ball of the bat (so I always knew if a fly was shallow, medium, deep, or a homer, and didn't do the annoying expectant gasping thing that some people do in stadiums anytime a batter lofts a ball out of the infield.
Scotty told me that his company (who provided the tickets) was actually given two extra seats (they orginally bought four), when the Yankees recently came to their senses and lowered the prices for all the lower-level seats. So the absurd pricing for those seats is slightly less absurd now. They're still a bunch of bastards.
Anyway, to sum, new Yankee Stadium is nice, and they mostly did everything right, both macro and micro. You can't build character, though, and I'm not sure that this one will necessarily ever produce it much on its own. That's where it will likely always lag behind its predecessor.

Russians: You Win

I'm still thinking about a PBS World War II special that I was watching last week. It's atypical focus was on the Eastern front, and the Russian experience in particular. It wasn't actually that good of a show, containing those horribly acted re-enactments that you see in historical shows sometimes, but the subject matter I found to be enthralling.
Like a lot of young males, I used to love war documentaries, films, books, anything. My favorite movie ever was Saving Private Ryan, and I was one of the people who actually loved that back in the day all the History Channel ever aired was WWII shows. But even through this exhaustive coverage, you don't often get the full story. According to everything I was ever presented with, D-Day was the biggest thing ever, and the North African and Italian invasions were anything more than diversionary. This is of course false. The Eastern front during WWII was far bloodier and more "important" than anything the U.S. did elsewhere. The Russians basically won the war for us, or put more descriptively, the Russians wore out and defeated the Germans, which allowed the Allies to win the war. I think partially because this side of the story is so often left out of the history that Americans consume, and partially because the actual scale of the Russian/German fighting, is precisely why I am so fascinated by it.
One focus of the PBS special, and the reason I'm still thinking about it a week later, was the Battle of Stalingrad. I urge you now to do a quick search of this battle just to educate yourself. It was immense and horrible and hugely deadly and basically the end of the Third Reich. And the Russians were literally fighting in defense of their country, meaning if they had lost they might not have had a country anymore. This small matter is something that the U.S. has not had to face since at least 1815. Sure we have participated in wars since then, but never really with the fate of the country or its civilians' lives at stake.
The point of this post now is to display my complete awe at the country of Russia (Soviet Union) in general, and specifically the people who participated in the Battle of Stalingrad. Secondarily, I would like to ask any American alive during the Cold War who thought they would like for us to actually go to war against the USSR, just what the hell were you thinking? The Russkies would have completely destroyed us in any ground (non-nuclear, I know the qualifier is non-trivial, but go with it) war, the reason being that they as a people are simply made of tougher stock. It's hard to make these comparisons, but I consider myself to possess relatively strong fortitude, but I can promise you that there is no way I would have held up through Stalingrad. No way.
Scroll back up and take another look at the statue in the picture. That statue was dedicated in 1967 on a hill overlooking Stalingrad where particularly bloody fighting took place. It's 279 feet tall. The sword alone is 108 feet long. It's called "The Motherland Calls." It's hard to see, but look at the face. They showed a close-up of the face during the PBS special, but the point is that the mouth is wide open and the face is straining in horror as if desperately exhorting someone to action. It's terrifying. It would be terrifying if it were only 6 feet tall, but those crazy Russians built it 279 feet tall. The imagery is supposed to call to memory the fact that Russians from all over the country were summoned to Stalingrad to fight and die (fact: at one point during the battle, the life expectancy for a newly arriving Russian solider was less than 24 hours) to defend the Motherland.
I simply can't imagine how the United States would ever have a chance against that kind of national backbone. Even today, weakened and relatively shamed as a world power and failed economic state, I would not want to mess with Russia in a traditional war. We have innumerable technological advances that would likely never let a war devolve into the brutality of Stalingrad, but you still can't hide from the fact that those Russians are some frightening sons of bitches.

Hey Yankees--Go Fuck Yourselves

Post title directed more at the team's ownership and management. The players I'm basically ambivalent about.

Most people know that I am a pretty big baseball fan. Since I've lived in NY, I have zealously attended many games (highlights: 2006 Mets playoffs, 3 Sox-Yankees matchups in 2003-04, including one Pedro start, and a Yankee/Shea stadium same-day double last September) and would reasonably be expected to continue to do so as both the Mets and Yankees open new stadiums this year. For the Mets, this remains true, for the Yankees, not so much.
In fact, I am stating now for the record that I will never attend a game at New Yankee Stadium, unless I'm getting the ticket for free (and I don't mean a friend buying the ticket, I mean free from some corporate kickback). Even then, I will have to think long and hard before ending my boycott.
You see, what the Yankees have done in the last year with ticket prices and ridiculous arrogance is just absurd. Go to their website and check ticket prices. For the first sections (I said "section," not "row") in the outfield that used to be bleachers and cost $12-15, they are now charging $95-150. For the lowest field level, even several sections away from the dugout, they are charging a minimum of $525 per seat. For the best sections behind the plate and dugouts, they are charging $2,625 per seat. Again, that's $2,625.
For comparison's sake, the Cubs (another large-market, popular, recently-successful team) charge $325 for an equivalent seat. The $525 seats at Yankee Stadium are $90 at Wrigley. The $95-150 outfield seats at Yankee Stadium are $50.
For a breath of reality, the Pirates charge $27-35 for their equivalent of the $525+ Yankee tickets (the "Legends Suites").
On top of this, the Yankees have been getting a lot of bad press lately for their brashly condescending attitude toward fans, and especially their refusal to let other people even so much as enter the Legends Suites during batting practice. These overpriced seats have been largely empty most of the year, fyi.
Probably the most egregious example of what's cause me to tell the Yankees to go fuck themselves is their refusal to seat people in these precious Legends Suites during the recent NYU graduation held at the stadium (pic at left). They're not even playing a game and they still won't let even the people taking part in the ceremony that they're hosting to use these overpriced seats? Really? No thanks. I'm sure your new stadium is nice enough, but I'm equally sure I have no interest in finding out.

Trigger

I got sucked into Brokeback Mountain last night, and felt the need to stick with it until the end. It was my first time watching it since seeing it once in the theater, and no I can't blame Sara because she was already asleep.
Three very clear things about the film:
1. It's very good. Heath Ledger is very good. If you know anything about my filmic sensibilities, then you know that I greatly admire the late scene where Ennis goes to Jack's parents' house. So subtle, so natural, so loaded with the unsaid, so good.
2. As sometimes happens with me and good acting performances that contain accents, I wish I could talk like Ennis all the time right now. I believe I have confessed to enjoying a nice Texas accent in the past. Heath's character is from Wyoming, but his accent has the same general western blue collar twang. The newscaster/Ohio/Indiana voice is probably the "voice" of America, but this western proletarian gruffness really hits the right notes for me.
3. That goddamned bloody shirt got me. I remembered it was coming and so my senses were a little primed. When Ennis got to the parents' house it became palpable. Then he went upstairs and I could feel my throat tighten, my face soften. He looked around, opened the window, went into the closet. I felt the strong need to swallow but it didn't help. Then he knelt down and handled the boots and finally he saw it in the back, the bloody blue shirt from their summer together. I fought the good fight as he noticed his own shirt tucked inside Jack's blue one, then my eyes had a mild sting and my vision sharpened as he hugged the shirts and broke down. All in all, I held it together pretty well, not letting much slip until some minutes later, after the film had ended and I finally succumbed to the animal urge in me to embrace Sara's sleeping body.
You see, two years ago I wouldn't have experienced this response to this or any similar film. I would have had a response, and it would have contained emotion, but it would have stopped short because the film was just a film at that point in my life, and not a connective medium to strong emotion that's constantly present in me.
I'm a pretty freaking fortunate man. Ennis's love story is a terribly tragic one; it binds him not to companionship but to loneliness. My experience is far more traditional but that doesn't make it any less magical or personal. Sometimes I can get lost in the fairy tale and take things for granted. That's why I am thankful that sometimes all it can take is a blood-stained blue shirt to make me remember how well I've got it.

No B.S.

In a haze this morning, and wondering what the weather was up to, naturally I turned on NY1. The All-Canadian Hero, Pat Kiernan, was just finishing up In the Papers and he segue-ed (no idea how to write that and too lazy to check) like the pro that he is to a bit about local schools re-opening after the swine flu scare. He concluded the segment by very calmly remarking that global cases have plateaued, no new cases have been reported in NYC, and that of the confirmed local cases, all were mild, in fact only resembling a simple seasonal flu.
And that was it. Shove it up your ass, national media. Go find somebody else to try to hook with your irresponsible fearmongering with your proclamations of terror and plague. I'll have none of that because I have the calming voice of reason that is Pat Kiernan. I'm not the first nor the thousandth person to extoll his journalistic virtues, but some things ought to be repeated.

Keep It Down

I really don't like loud things. I'm extremely uncomfortable in a loud restaurant. I hate it when the TV is above a certain volume. One of the big reasons I can't stand going to music shows is that it's just a wall of noise.
I get annoyed even by people with loud voices. Everyone hates that loud person walking down the street on the cell phone, though that's probably more a look-at-me thing than just ignorant noise. It also drives me nuts when I listen to someone else talk on the phone and that person raises their voice about five steps too high just because the person on the other end is talking loudly.
I was at dinner last night and there were at least two people at a big table behind me talking extremely loudly. There was one woman's voice in particular that I was later completely amazed belonged to a 30ish woman. The tone, volume, and subject matter of her words more befit a 16year old, though I could just be projecting that opinion based solely on the loudness. What kind of adult talks like that? Do you really need to call attention to yourself that much? Sometimes I feel bad criticizing people for having low self-confidence (because I have effortlessly always had plenty, and I can appreciate how that might be a semi-genetic trait, I try to understand), but for godsakes it drives me nuts. Often.
I experienced a different form of obnoxious loudness on Friday night: the drunken loud. I was about four hours late arriving at a friend's party and evidently I missed quite a bit in those four hours, because I was hit with semi-inappropriate speaking volume from all angles. It's a little abrasive. I won't mention who, but some parties were more guilty of this than others. Generally, when I find myself in a situation where I am less drunk than most everyone else, I will try not to judge and will be liberal in giving the benefit of the doubt, but there are instances when the drunken loud is just shameful. I'm sure everyone has walked mostly sober down the street and come across a group of people who are mostly drunk. The drunk group will not only be loud, they will also be stupid. It's hard to reconcile with the fact that even the most seasoned and responsible drinkers will act far less intelligent when drunk. That might seem like an obvious statement, but look yourself in the mirror and admit that, when drunk, yes indeed, you are at best a fucking moron and at worst a fucking douche. It's hard to accept that you are not special. Long story, but recently I happened to view an old party video I used to tape from college parties we hosted. This was 8-10 years, and many degrees of maturity, ago; but still it was a little surprising to recognize what a dumb douche I was. (I'm naively now going to attribute this solely to the drunkenness, because clearly my 21-year-old-Ohio-State-attending self couldn't possibly have exuded anything close to douchitude when sober. Clearly.)

The Good and the Bad of HGTV

Sara watches pretty much just two channels: TLC and HGTV. Sometimes she wanders over to Discovery Health, but that's about it. And since I spend lots of time watching MLBTV on weeknights, I try to give her some space. Basically, I can't stand anything that I've ever seen on TLC (The Learning Channel, btw. Good luck "learning" anything while watching numbing reality crap about little people or prodigiously fertile familes), and most of the junk on HGTV is hardly better.
BUT--I've got to say that the block of homebuying/renting shows that air most weeknights from 8-11pm or so have got me a little bit hooked. Most of it is the timeliness of my own relatively recent decision to purchase a condo next summer upon our expected move to Chicago. Watching people look at houses (they even have one called "Property Virgins," which is what it sounds like and naturally a good fit for me), and seeing the way they approach the lending process, is quite informative. One big complaint I have is that, in an attempt to keep engaged a larger audience, they don't do a very good job of reminding viewers where their Virgins or Hunters are lookng. It's great for me to see that the house they are touring costs $195,000, but it makes a giant difference if that house is in Arkansas or Connecticut. You more or less have to take their $$ with a grain of salt.
Outside of the actual informative value of these shows, it's fun, and sometimes maddening, to watch the prospective buyers. For one thing, I love to see the idiots hone in on totally inconsequential things like the paint color or the carpet, or to be excited about the furniture. You're making a $200k+ investment so please don't focus on $500 worth of paint or multi-thousand dollars worth of furniture that doesn't actually come with the house. Unbelievable. There was one couple that was looking in the $500K range in suburban Atlanta that was completely and totally consumed with a "formal dining room." It was the first thing they asked for and the first thing they commented on in each house. If a single--and let's face it, stupid--issue is that important to you, you're probably not qualified to be signing away half a million dollars that you don't have. Which leads me to my next troubling observation: no one understands how mortgages work as they relate to down payments. No one. Even the most seemingly intelligent, prepared, and thoughtful people on these shows will never put more than about 12% down on their purchases. I've seen numerous people buy places for over $200k with zero down payment. It's particularly troubling/amusing to know that most of those shows were filmed in early 2008 or before, and that all these idiots and the banks that loaned to them were partially responsible for the collapse of the US economy. Thanks, folks.

So anyway (poor segue), what I started off intending to talk about was design shows that HGTV sometimes sneaks into their evening homebuyers lineup. Last night I was treated to one of these. Correction: I was subjected to one of these.
Right up front I should say to all of those people out there who actually subsist as "designers:" congratulations. I'm going to say wholly disrespectful things about your profession, but at the same time I can totally respect a good con artist. So, bravo.
I've long been mystified by the whole field of design. No, not the whole field of design but more the idea of re-design that manages to sell many magazines and fill many TV hours. (People who actually initially make something functional from abstract ideas, or who figure out how best to put something together I admire greatly. Whoever was responsible for making a fan's blades in just the right shape and tilt scores big points from me. Same for the person who came up with the famous London subway map.) What drives me nuts are the personal or home "designers." They are full of shit, basically.

Last night, some relatively attractive woman (that's her to the left) who is no doubt full of herself and her "talent" was charged with redecorating another woman's bedroom. Basically what she did was spend some money to buy new things and also add a few pretentious flourishes, most onerous was the creation of a "sitting area" where previously the owner had a dresser and a TV. The "designer" was extremely proud of herself with this change, but she never really mentioned what she did with the dresser or the TV. I guess the owner will just have to find some other place to keep her clothes, but hey, at least she has a nice place to formally sit down and read the paper--in her bedroom. Also, I guess she won't be watching HGTV's design shows from the comfort of her bed anymore.
The "designer" also described the room before as a style-less "mishmash" of "hand-me-down" items. After she had finished working her magic, she described the room as an "eclectic" combination of pieces that she had "re-used" (this last bit was to brag about how she saved money).
Let's take the SATs -- ECLECTIC:MISHMASH::RE-USED:___________.
Give up yet? How about "HAND-ME-DOWN"? Yeah I think that would work well there. Hey designer lady: go fuck yourself. You're full of shit. Apparently all it takes to become a "designer" is a thesaurus. I don't know why this stuff bothers me, but it does.

Wondering

1. In preparation for the new phone system we're installing tomorrow, I'm going through the generic online training tutorial (I mean literally right now I'm doing this, it's droning in the background as I write from the reception desk). What's fascinating me now is of course not the content but the nice gentleman speaking and operating the phones in the first-person perspective presentation. He's got a nice clean voice, which is probably why he was chosen to do it. However, he's also got a little bit of a lisp, which is utterly consuming my attention. I don't mean like a homosexual lisp but more of an adolescent lisp, where many of the words are just sloppily or lazily pronounced. It's not regional, like a dialect. For example, he just used the word "regional," and he spoke it as "reguh-nool." This is a very slight example. "The" becomes "deh," "external" becomes "etsternal," "calls" becomes "cualls." But the biggest one is row. He says "rwow." It's like how Bobby Flay talks. It's a soothing voice, but I don't know why. I also for some reason associate it with Asian people, which I why I'm assuming this gentleman is Asian. I wonder if that association comes from the l/r problem they often have with English? I wonder if my assumption is a social stereotype or if Asian people just get used to pronouncing things slightly wrong because they've heard it so much from family?
Whatever the answers to those questions, this particular guide has got my sense of perception engaged, and I haven't got much to work with. His hands aren't model hands but instead a bit lumpy, and tanned. Other than that, so far I've only gotten a quick view of his upper right forehead and his button blue sleeves. Nonetheless, I feel acquainted with him, and my reaction to this is similar to any time you meet someone new or mysterious: I want to know more, and I want to project things onto him. Why do people do that? Why does a disembodied voice and two hands cause me to want to know about the rest of him? Why does his odd speaking spark that zest to know more? We are a curious species.

2. Something more generally interesting is this next thing. I was back in Columbus this past weekend and ran into some old college friends. One person (who was really more a friend-of-a-friend, meaning I haven't talked with him and never would have known him were it not for my friend, still this is someone with whom I effortlessly communicate) asked me if I was still writing my blog. Fairly mundane question and I answered that sure I was but not prolificly. The interesting thing is that he almost instantly added: "sorry if I'm not readng it regularly," as though some mention of his reading habits were necessary.
Now, nothing in the way this person acted was remotely out of the ordinary, and naturally neither of us made any notice of anything odd occurring. Nevertheless, I find his qualifying remark (sorry if I'm not reading) to be very interesting. Why did he (or would anyone) ever feel the need to apologize there? Has our blogging society become so (im)personal that people read by requisition? Is it a personal reflection on a person if an acquaintance of that person either does or doesn't read his blog?
This is a dangerous trend, I think. To borrow Descartes: "I write therefore I am read."
I think a requirement for a valuable friendship is to find the person interesting, so naturally it would follow that you would enjoy talking with him or--back to our example--reading something he has written. Now, when we talk to someone, we share in leading the conversation; we have a say in keeping things interesting to us; however, when a person writes something they are free to go off on their own without regard to someone else's interest level. There are people who do write solely with the intent of keeping people interested, but those people are not merely writing, they are entertaining, and only using written words as a medium.
I don't blog-write like that. I write what interests me and I let myself go with a thought. It's what I love about this form of writing: it's vaguely formal but simultaneously totally personal. I feel almost as though whoever may be reading I am engaging in one of those long thoughtful conversations that seem to occur around fireplaces and involve politics or religion (since most people aren't conditioned well enough to have serious intelligent and actual free-will opinions on anything else, but that's digressing too much for now). If someone out there doesn't find a topic as interesting as I do, then don't consider it a reflection on me I consider it a reflection on us as we relate to that topic. Nothing more. Some of my best friends really get into current music, but I get no interest from it so whenever they talk about it I either drift off or find someone else to talk about something different. It's nothing personal that I don't share their interest in music.
So I wonder if apologizing to someone for not reading their blog is more meaningful than that? I know that I think it shouldn't be, but probably it is. I guess an easy way to describe my general belief is that if you are a person who would be offended by someone not reading your blog, then you probably shouldn't be blogging, or you should get new friends.

Things I Learned in Columbus

Here are some things that might offend some people:

1. I think it's time for airlines to start charging extra to fat people. An airline isn't actually a part of the service industry anymore, it's merely a form of transportation. (Why are there even stewardesses anymore? Just hand out drinks before boarding and call it a day. Or scrap the drinks and charge me $2 less up front; I'd survive. It's not like the old days when they were passing out meals and blankets and ashtrays and whatnot.) An airplane has a finite amount of space and they should charge you by the amount of cubic feet you occupy. Obviously, there should be a limit under which everyone pays the same, because a seat is a seat even if it's only got a kid in it. But I'd say maybe anything above a 46 inch waist or hips should have to pay extra. Taking it an extra step, when you are selecting your seats, you should know how much space each person is consuming and those who select a seat next a larger individual should pay less for the inconvenience, exactly the amount that the fat person has to pay extra.
Yesterday on my return flight from Columbus, I was stuck in a window seat next a woman who's, uh, body was spilling over into my seat. She was nice about it at least. I mean to say, she was cognizant of her life failure and seemed to feel the appropriate amount of shame. Even though it must have been slightly painful, she kept the armrest down, I'm pretty sure as a futile attempt to keep herself contained. I accepted this gesture of goodwill, and since it was a short flight, I simply leaned over toward the window and read my magazine. She seemed like one of those fat people who fears being in crowds, and I'm sure that if I weren't sitting next to her, that she would have been very content to just stay in her third row seat until everyone else on the plane left so she wouldn't bump into or slow anyone down.

2. A fixture of my college years, Bob Evans has gone downhill. It's gone downhill enough for me to say I don't really care to patronize it again. I will go if in a group and that's the majority desire, but I will never suggest it and I can't imagine craving it again.
I had the sunshine skillet and a bowl of sausage gravy. The skillet was far worse than I remember them being and the gravy was thin and the sausage therein was curiously tasteless, given that it was made of pig. I can make breakfast food at least as good myself, and I don't consider myself anything like a great cook. Saving grace is that my huge meal only cost $11 and the biscuits are still spectacular. But either Bob's has changed or I have changed, because it just doesn't do it for me anymore.

3. I was playing pool with a guy named Broshaun (BroShaun? BroShawn? Bro'Shawon?) on Friday night. He seemed to be a genuinely nice human being but he wasn't going to win any IQ contests. He casually mentioned being "locked up" when he was younger, and that makes me really regret not having asked him why the first two fingers on his right hand were missing everything above the first knuckle. It doesn't take much to live an interesting life. Every person has a story.

4. It's inevitable to feel this way at least a little, given that I've lived now almost six years in NYC, but Columbus--or rather the campus area--is a lot less interesting to me than it used to be. I seriously wonder now if I were to go back and relive my four college years at OSU, but do it in the current climate, that I would enjoy it as much. Granted, that's not saying much, because I will always be incredibly grateful and appreciative of all I got out of my college experience, but I wonder if that level of satisfaction would still be possible for an 18 year old me in 2009. The degree to which it would be less enjoyable is likely much smaller than I'm assuming right now, but I'm quite sure it is still less.

5. This won't offend anyone, but on the return flight I was buried in my magazine most of the way. In fact, the first time I looked out the window, would you even believe that the town thousands of feet below was good old Steubenville, OH? It's really not so bad looking from that height.

A Very Short Story

Effect
A man sat in a park and watched a bird. It stopped near him briefly, then flew away. An hour later a similar bird did the same thing, and flew away. Just then the man's girlfriend greeted and sat down next to him. The man nervously slipped his rigid, clammy hands into his pockets and was surprised to feel the small metallic ring. He had forgotten.

your efforts are futile

ive come to realize that i have a real talent for something. hold on now, because no this isnt going to be any kind of back-slapping exercise like i sometimes engage in. i only realize it's a talent because ive noticed that not only do not many people share this talent, but quite a few are actually utterly incapable of it in any regard.
i have an effortless ability to not feel another person's uncomfortability in conversation. basically, i do not naturally feel any empathy in conversational settings. ive only come to notice this over many years, as i watch other people get sucked into things they dont want any part of simply because they do the normal thing and act interested and nod their head and otherwise dont ignore the other person imposing on their time/space.
if you find yourself with me in a social situation and neither of us has anything natural to add, then you can just save yourself the agony and know that i wont say anything and i wont judge you for doing the same. see, what happens for the huge majority of people is, while they might be able to recognize that i wont add anything to the "conversation," almost no one is able to come to terms with the latter fact: that it really is ok for them to do the same. pretty much everyone i ever come across finds it impossible to leave well enough alone and forces some attempt at chatter, only to find that their efforts only enhance the awkwardness.
i say awkwardness because i can appreciate the sensation that most people have in these situations. i am capable of feeling awkwardness, though it is relatively rare. the important thing to know here is that, with extremely small exception, i dont feel awkward during conventionally "awkward" social conversational situations.
if you want to talk to me about your cat or something and you cat doesnt happen to interest me (this is an apt example, fyi), then i wont really engage in your conversation and youll end up basically talking out loud for no good reason. if you tell me something about the weather being hot, i will recognize this as a forced attempt at breaking through, but i will do nothing to help you there; instead i will either agree or disagree about the actual point you make regarding the heat, and then stop talking.
i dont want this now to sound like im not ever interested by things people say or merely people themselves. this is far from true. sometimes the smallest or most banal things will completely engage me. i think i am interested by things a pretty normal amount. normal, meaning about the same as most people. which, given the fact that i felt the need to write this post on this subject, would seem to suggest that most people who are normally interested by things do not actually behave that way. they will act like they are interested in far more things that they really are. they will be phony. i am sorry but this is true. if it's a bad thing to be phony on a macro level then surely it should be just as bad to be phony on a micro level.
i think this ties back into how i started this, actually. it's ok to feel uncomfortable. it's ok not to care about things, just as much as to care about things. do not get frustrated by my seemingly poor social skills just because you have a hard time understanding this, and i promise not to let your lack of awareness further degrade my social abilities around you.

More words than necessary on NCAA pools

My NCAA bracket is ranked only in the 22nd percentile overall. This is poor. I was correct with only 11 of the final 16, and I have only one of the four elite 8 representatives correct so far. I take solace in the fact that any baboon could have successfully picked many correct teams so far since there have been so few upsets. This year, the pools will all be won on the last two rounds, when the little number next to each team becomes irrelevant. I'm quite fine getting trounced by 78% of the United States this year. I'm fine losing to 78% of the field several years. Playing in NCAA tournament pools is not like taking a test in high school. If you get an 85 on a test that score will carry over and affect the average. NCAA pools don't carry over. You either get a 100 or you don't. A series of 85s or 90s is impressive, to be sure, but they're all failures. You might was well have all 0s. I think too many people playing in pools, even the very smart ones, lose sight of this fact. It's hard to turn off the natural human instinct to try to do the best you can. Probabilities work amazingly well over the long run, but they're basically worthless in a small sample size. People who habitually pick the higher seeds in NCAA pools will consistently do well, and that helps to prevent these people from changing their strategy.
I don't have statistically proof to back this up right now, but the best way to win an NCAA pool is to make one or two big guesses that very few other people will make. The reason for this is that if you stick with the seeds like everyone else, then your margin for error slips to virtually zero; you'll have to be right with basically all of your late-tournament picks, something ridiculously hard to do. If instead you single out one unpopular team, then all you need is for that one team to hit for you and you will have close to an even shot at winning. Basically, the odds of your one team coming through for you--even though it must necessarily be an underdog and somewhat of a longer shot--is much better than to hope that a whole sequence of final four and title picks falls in line. Remember that if you play it conservative and do well heading into the last few games, you will still be competing against a large chunk of the pool. and late in the tournament is when you have to start guessing more anyway.
The beauty of my theory is that you have much more freedom outside of your one big guess to go with your gut. And if your gut proves right, then you've just hedged against the possibility that your big guess only ends up half-right. You're narrowing the playing field immensely.
I won a 65-person pool in 2005, and should have won again last year, using this philosophy. 2005 is maybe a bad example because everything hit just perfectly that year, but even still i don't think I had more than 12 Sweet 16 picks right. Last year I picked Memphis to win it all. They were a 1-seed but they were a very unpopular title pick. I may have only gotten 10 Sweet 16 picks and 4-5 Elight 8 picks right, but still if any number of things had happened in the closing minutes of the title game, I'd have won the pool again. In between these efforts, you have years like this one and a couple others where I've finished in the bottom third. It happens. I guess the great unsaid secret in all this is that you have to have a good eye for who these unpopular picks will be that will surpass expectations. This is where I've done well, and the reason I've finished so high in so few years. Memphis was a really good, well-rounded team that was disrespected because of its conference last year. They were easily talented enough to win it all. In 2005, 5-seed Michigan State helped win me the pool by making the Final Four. They were another very talented underrated team that did lots of things well and had my all-time tournament hero coach, Tom Izzo.
Wrapping this up, and perhaps explaining why I'm thinking about all of this right now, I'll remind you of my 22nd percentile standing. I can still win, because I have two potential aces up my sleeve: 4-seed Gonzaga making the Final Four, and 2-seed Michigan State making the title game. If both of these things happen, I will have a better than 50% chance of winning. If only one happens but my other picks are good, I still might have a chance. More than likely, they both won't succeed, and I'll finish 58th out of 75 or something, but maybe they will. And they're both playing tonight.

Chicago Errata

I never took the time to mention anything about my Chicago trip from a couple weeks ago, so now here are some bits of impression:
1. Chicago is a very segregated city. I mean, very segregated. I was looking at a website while there that had demographic info on each of the many neighborhoods (Chicago prides itself on being a "city of neighborhoods," if you didn't know. Presumably that's to make it seem more friendly). I can't remember which, but one had a Hispanic concentration of 97%. That's 97, not 9.7. I made the joke to a couple people that NYC doesn't even have single apartment buildings with that high a concentration of any one race or ethnicity. It's pretty ridiculous, but evidently that's how it works. I guess there are some benefits to having an relatively exclusive community to yourself if you belong to a minority, but that can't be good in the larger sense.
2. The is a punk club located in an oddly barren spot along North Ave that's called Exit Chicago. On its marquee it offers two proclamations: "Chicago's first punk club," and "since 1983." That's cute, Chicago. Really, 1983?
3. Another bit of date oddness: I went to a basement bar/seafood restaurant (that was pretty cool and good food actually) that claimed on its outside sign to have been open "since 1969," while the sign inside claimed its founding at 1968. This wouldn't be as odd, but the two signs are literally not more than 5 three-dimensional feet away from each other.
4. Location isn't terribly important when it comes to the cost of renting apartments. You would pay close to the same cost for a decent 2-bedroom in a far northern neighborhood as you would for an identical place in the more conveniently located and hipper Lincoln Park. Obviously this is a gross simplification of things a realtor told me, but taken in context to my six-year residence of NYC, it's pretty jarring information.
5. Chicago is on a grid system too. Now, truly--forgive me for even suggesting this, but--their grid is probably even smarter than ours. It's not simply based on numbered blocks, but actual measured blocks. As opposed to having a bar located at 86th St and 2nd Ave, you'd have a bar located at 2400 North Clark and 800 West Diversey (that address is not necessarily perfect, I'm just making it up from memory, though it's probably not off by a huge amount). All you need to know is that the N/S/E/W quadrants zero downtown, and that it's a half-mile for every 400. So really all you need is the address and you're there. It's just a full mathematical graph, whereas NYC's is more of a single-quadrant graph. I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting to something new. It's increibly intuitive though, and that's right up my alley.
6. The El is a horrible idea, and it's the great stubborn fault of the city itself that they've never put it underground. It's dirty, it's loud, it's exposed to their horrible winter, and it's slow. How the El ever came to be some romantic image of Chicago is beyond me. Wake the fuck up, people.
7. This says more about me living in NYC than anything else, but there is a lot of light in Chicago. You don't get the constantly-shaded canyon effect there. At 3:00PM on a sunny day, you can walk down the sidewalk and be bathed in sun. There are definite benefits to not having many buildings taller than 4 stories, and not as densely packed.
8. If anyone ever wanted to know where Chicago sits on the continuum of American cities, there were far far more areas there that reminded me of Columbus than New York. This is slightly unfair, as NY is unique, but it's also true. While Chicago is certainly large and definitely has the feel of a city some magnitude larger than Columbus, it feels to me even more than that smaller than NY. Maybe "smaller" is not the best descriptor. It's residential. It's downtown stacks up nicely with anyplace, but it goes almost immediately from there to endless blocks of houses and townhomes and small apartment buildings.