How to Be Great

Installment Three: Buy It

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

It's a Girl (!)

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

How to Be Great

Installment Two: Focus

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

How to Be Great

Installment One: Repetition

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

Prestige and the Olympics

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

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


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

Stuff Your Sorrys in a Sack

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

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

Save Yourselves

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


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

Hamsgiving IV

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

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

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

A Showy Weekend

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

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

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

Dragging in the Void

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

Stimulating Television

Lately I've developed a mild addiction to Man vs Wild. I don't feel compelled to seek it out, but if I'm scrolling and it is on, I am unable to not watch it. I think a new season has just started so the show is more visible, though just from watching the episodes, you'd never know if it was the newest or the oldest in the series. I'm not actually sure how they plan to keep running new episodes, actually, since it seems like every one follows a predictable pattern, and it's hard to tell the difference between the survival skills he displays whether in the Amazon, Panamanian, Chinese, or any other random jungle locale.
The thing that I noticed not long ago as I was watching one of them is that it isn't actually a how-to show. Sure it is somewhat informative, but for a show who's premise is teaching the viewer how to survive, it contains precious few moments of teaching. The real point of the show is to entertain, of course, to show Bear Grylls doing nasty things like eating snakes or rubbing mud in his ears, or wild things like jumping off a 50ft cliff or swimming under an ice sheet. I'm not saying they're not in there, but to actually ingest usable survival skills while watching the show, you have to be attuned to them and to already have a little knowledge of wilderness techniques to begin with. This from a show who's whole reason for being is presumably to teach.
What I'm getting at here is that there are shamefully few shows on TV that a viewer can learn anything from. There is a whole goddamn network called "The Learning Channel," but they fill up their hours with crap reality shows about midgets and irresponsibly pregnant women. Every so often there is something medical that might pass off as informative, but even then it's more by accident. Why is it that there are so few places to learn things on TV? Why does it all have to be for simple entertainment? Ideally, the informative shows would also be somewhat entertaining, but you never see any of these "entertaining" shows provide anything informative.
The only place where you see consistently informative programming (I means shows that are conceived and executed with a consistent focus on teaching) is cooking shows. Why nowhere else? Cooking shows aren't ratings gold or anything, but they've been around and heavily watching for a long time, prominently enough to sprout a whole network devoted to them. Their informative nature doesn't prevent them from succeeding as a business model. So why nothing else?
I feel like the History Channel used to be better and providing useful programming, but over the years has turned into the same kind of crap you see everywhere else: dedicated not to really captivate a viewer and give him a reason to watch TV, but more to simply hold his attention while he happens to be watching TV anyway. Someone is surely pulling the strings here. Some focus groups must tell network people that it's better for ratings this way. That's bullshit laziness.
The market for substantive TV is there. I know I'm not alone.

A Folger By Any Other Name

We know now with almost complete certainty that Sara's fetus is a girl. Which is bad news because of the names that she has been floating my way. The girl ones have all been pretty terrible.
We decided that we wouldn't put much effort into names until we knew the gender, so I guess now the floodgates are open. The only thing that we ever did talk about was two names that we both liked: Theodore and Macdougal. Both boy names. Macdougal comes with a whole story involving her pet name for me, while Theodore has been my pick for a while. Both names are solid. Not totally unique but also not exactly popular. They pass the sound test, and work well with Folger. They also both shorten very nicely, to Ted/dy(1) and Mac. But again, they're both boy names; we don't have any legit girl names ready to go.
There are three names that Sara has liked enough to present to me prior to this gender-unmasking: Minna, Matilda, and Veda. Maybe you find those names attractive; I do not. The first one is to pay respect to a relative of hers. Fine, use it as a middle name. Matilda is just an ugly name(2), and Veda sounds like the name of one of Capt Kirk's conquests on Star Trek. I looked up Veda and it's an Indian name, as in India. I actually like Indian names(3), especially for girls, I just think my wife happened to pick out one the worst ones.
I'm sure we'll find a nice name for our future girl, it just seems a lot more difficult at the moment. Assuming you are not going the traditional route, girl names seem more complicated and diverse than boy names. Maybe I'm inventing this, I don't know. I actually like using masculine or neutral names for girls. Names like Dakota or Murphy or Bill. (Just kidding on the last one, wouldn't that be something.) It feels like cheating, and it's just my lazy brain playing tricks on me, but I actually really like Theadora for a girl. The shortened forms aren't as good though: Dora or Thea, I assume, with Thea being either "thee-ah" or "thay-ah." Not bad, but not perfect either. The big problem is that if we use Theadora now, we couldn't use Theodore on a future boy. No, we're not going to be those weirdo parents who name their kids all similarly (though Dora and Teddy disguise their root similarities nicely).
It's a lot to think about.
I used to be really good to coming up with fake names to be used as aliases. You'd think that skill would translate to baby-naming, but I'm not sure it does. My favorite personal aliases are Mordecai Sinclair, Sebastian Parker, and of course Chuck Swanson. Those are A+ names. They also don't include the one name that is a prerequisite for our kid: Folger. Folger is not a perfect surname to match first names with. Phonetically, it's kinda heavy with the g in the middle. I've never had a problem with my own full name except that if you use the long form it does whatever is the opposite of "rolls off the tongue." It seeps into the tongue like leaves in a compost pile. We'll need to keep that in mind.


1. Here is where we had an honest disagreement. We both like Theodore, but Sara was somewhat adamant that the diminutive should be Theo, while I was just as adamant in favor of Teddy. My main point of argument: you can't have a white kid going by Theo. A white adult, most definitely, but not a kid. "The Cosby Show" pretty much killed that for all caucasians. Plus, doesn't Teddy just sound awesome for a little boy?
2. No offense to Ryan or the waitress at Bondi's, who is herself not ugly.
3. I had an honest infatuation with a girl for a couple years a while back, and while she was certainly very attractive, hindsight forces me to consider that a big part of it was her awesome name: Rajika. That is an attractive name.

Another Kind of Love

Last week Sara was on the phone and her sister put on her two girls (our nieces). Sara--not on speakerphone--talked to them briefly and then said "I love you" before hanging up.
This might not be thought-provoking to you, but it really was to me.
If I had been on the phone then I would not have ended the conversation that way; in fact, it never would have even occurred to me to end it so. Part of this is because the two nieces are 2 years old and nearly 4 years old, so they were around both before the wedding and even before I really knew Sara. Also, they live 800 miles away from us and I've spent less than ten days in their presence at this point. I don't know them all that well and they don't know me much either. In fact, though they are very warm with Sara they mostly react to me like I'm a hairy-faced unfamiliar adult, which is exactly what I am. The older one is old enough so that she warms up to me after some time, but the younger is definitely not there yet.
And yet this is my family now. After we move to Chicago next year, they will be close family that we see often and regularly for an indefinite amount of time. They will become friends and frequent play-partners with our unborn children.
"Love" is an appropriate word to use, then, if you think about it in this macro sense, but that doesn't change the awkward feeling that I would have when presented with it in the moment. There are different kinds of love, and I'm not just talking romantic vs familial. There is the inner love that we effortlessly produce for other people, and there is also what I'd call the outer love that is part of circumstance that we pull from to give to other people. The love I have for Sara comes from within me that I created (or that her presence or my belief in her wondrousness created in me--deep romantic love can never be fully explained in words), while the love I have for any family member came originally from our shared environment.
My own aunt and uncle tell me that they love me, and nothing seems odd about that. They are family that I've seen consistently throughout my life. Of course we feel a love for each other.
Is it ok that I don't currently feel love for my young nieces? Is it ok to grow into it? I think it should be. Think about it another way: if you are either recently-wedded or have had a partner for a few years, how would you feel if one of your in-laws passed away? If you have not had the time to build up the natural feelings of love for the person, how do you react?
I guess I honestly wonder about this, because my disposition with regards to this stuff is reservedness. I don't quickly come upon love, and when I find it (with one big exception--thanks, wife) I am slow to acknowledge it, especially verbally.
I am a classic midwesterner is this regard. My mom always says she loves me at the end of phone calls, but I rarely return the comment (in fact Sara always pesters me to say it so I do it more often now). I of course love my mother. I have always loved her outwardly and very early on in life I learned to love her inwardly, too. But still I don't always like to offer it up: "I love you."
When my mom talks to me on the phone she does so via the speaker so my dad is almost always there too. At the end of the call, he hardly ever adds his own "I love you." My father of course loves me. But he doesn't always like to offer it up. When he does, I find it more amusing than comforting, because he'll deliver the words in a louder, clearer voice, almost like he's reassuring himself that he says it often enough, changing his cadence as an involuntary way of marking a change in substance, like a writer using CAPITAL LETTERS.

I feel like I need a summary of this post. Everyone loves their parents because they're mom and dad, but not everyone really loves them because they love them; but presumably every husband loves his wife because he really loves her.
A man can let his heart find him a woman, but not a set of parents.
To truly love a person is to not need to use empathy to have emotion for him. I think this is how you know if you love an in-law or a relative.
Is it ok to love a relative only as a relative and not fully emotionally?
Is it normal or acceptable to fully love some relatives and not others?
Does biological immediacy require clean demarcations of emotional attachment, or would it be normal to love a distant relative more than an immediate one?
Is there an initial grace period with new relatives to let love build naturally, and if so roughly how long do you have before wondering if it might not happen?

Stress and Irritability and Marriage

When I went out to get lunch today I encountered a giant asshole trying to hail a cab. I mean like how people do it on TV, running toward the street and screaming "Taxi!" over and over. No one actually does it like that in real life, not even when they are in a big hurry. But this guy was different. He came bowling around the corner toward Park Ave, with his fat ass and big black jacket and flowing brown scarf, all big-faced and jowly with longish wavy hair slicked straight backward, like an asshole. He was maybe 50 and was also dragging one of those suitcase-on-wheels that assholes use in midtown to display to the world extreme pride either in their own laziness or their ability to acquire worthless and frivolous items. On top of everything, the two cabs that he was soliciting from 30 feet away were both very clearly about to be occupied by other more timely and discreet individuals.
As I saw this sorry scene develop, a real rage built up inside me very quickly and I had a sudden fantasy of picking up my walking speed and ramming the fuck into the guy's chest like a linebacker, just laying him out and watching his crap go sprawling while the crowded sidewalk full of people mocked him. I even had to physically bite my tongue to suppress the violent urge, something that I find myself doing every now and again.
So my question then is have I become a more stressful person? I don't remember ever really having to bite my tongue as a way of diffusing frustration. Is it possible that my lifestyle has finally gotten to be stressful? My disposition for all of my life has included the least amount of stress that I think any person has ever felt. I'm extremely reserved and patient and generally unconcerned of all outside stimuli. I always assumed that this was just a permanent character trait, something that I was born with, so that the idea that this might be slowly changing is interesting to me.
I think a general assumption would be that, if anything, a person's stress levels would decrease as he ages as he becomes more confident in himself, settled in his life, and generally wiser or more experienced. Maybe that is true in a linear sense, but from a little personal experience I can add to this, such that maybe the stress level through life is more of a bell curve.
Now that I am positively married I share most of my life with a reasonable person, which over time reinforces itself so that more and more I have interactions with a like-minded person (my wife). Also this thing called love will cause her to perhaps agree with me more often than normal. The effect that this seems to slowly produce with me is that I don't have as much patience with things or people that I find to be irrational or sociopathic. In addition, the amount of time I have to share with the world around me has been greatly reduced due to the added time I spend with my wife. This means that I'm much less patient with a person who I feel might be wasting my time, and can add to my irritability. Any enemy of logic has more often become a real enemy of me, instead of just a curiosity or a source of amusement.
I guess what I'm saying is that it seems that marriage has indirectly caused me to be a more stressful person.

Film Review: Crazy Heart

Two weeks ago I saw Crazy Heart, and now I'm finally going to share my thoughts. It should be noted that I didn't need to wait this long: it wasn't such a powerful experience that I needed to fully digest it before producing a reasoned response. It was just laziness.
Usually at the end of the year there are a whole list of awards-bait movies that I want to see, but this year was different. There was Crazy Heart, and then maybe Nine, though I've soured a little in my excitement for that one. That's it. Congratulations on being uninteresting and uninspired this year, movie industry.
Anyway, for a person who liked The Wrestler so much just a year ago, it's impossible for me not to compare Crazy Heart to it. A washed-up entertainer slumming around trying to reclaim past glory, while having hit-and-miss experiences with family/lovers, all held together by a dominating performance by the lead actor. Yes, Jeff Bridges really is pretty great in this. Unfortunately for the film, nothing much else about it rises above the level of average.
First, like a lot of people, I will always have a special fondness for Bridges thanks to his appearance as The Dude. (There is actually an obvious but great homage in this movie about thirty minutes in involving sunglasses and a trash can.) His Dudeness though tends to help obscure or marginalize the fact that he really is a good actor with interesting abilities, which are on full display here. He plays simple about as well as anyone, and by "simple" I don't mean dumb but rather uncomplicated. This is a lot tougher and nuanced to act out than you might at first think. One way to think about it is to conjure the stereotype of Oscar-bait roles: handicapped or other obviously-challenged people. Jeff Bridges excels in roles that are just the opposite: people who project no dominating characteristic, other than simply being themselves. That he may have succeeded in this task so much as to be an Oscar contender is all the endorsement you should really need.
Aside from Jeff Bridges, I can't really recommend much else in this film. It stands up as an average one, not a failure or anything but only notable for his presence. Unlike The Wrestler, there was nothing in it's style or delivery that I found interesting, and its ending was ridiculously inferior. As a side note, I'll comment briefly on Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is weirdly cast as Bridges's love interest. She seems to be a pretty trendy actress right now, someone for whom it is fashionable to say you really love and respect as a thespian. I don't see it. She's not bad or anything, and is perfectly capable of giving you a passable performance, but I've never been impressed. She seems to still be fairly young so maybe she'll become something worth talking about, but as for right now let's not make her out to be something she isn't. She's kinda like a less-accomplished female Matt Damon.
My final note here is only slightly relevant to Crazy Heart. Robert Duvall plays a small role as the friend of Jeff Bridges's character, and while he does a typically fine job with it, the role is small and the character is not very interesting or essential to the story. Ultimately forgettable, though that's not Duvall's fault, which brings me to my point. It's time for Robert Duvall to get a big lead role in a film, a role that should either be written specifically for him or that fits him like a glove. Duvall has been an excellent actor for a long time and I'm not sure he's really fully gotten his due. Even better, in his later years, his on-screen persona has really taken on a life of its own. I'd like to think that Duvall was choice #1A for Tommy Lee Jones's character in No Country for Old Men, because he would have been perfect for it. He's gotten to the point in his career where he doesn't even need to act much if you give him the right role. I mean that as complimentary, not like how you might disparagingly say the same thing about Denzel Washington. Duvall has an irrepresible screen personality, and he's clearly capable of using it to dominate a film.
So after I mentioned most of this to Sara she went to IMDB to check him out, and reported back to me that Duvall is scheduled to play the role of Don Quixote in an upcoming film. I can only hope that his part is the lead, because that actually sounds like exactly the kind of forum I'm hoping for.

Random Observations

1. I have a perhaps irrational hatred of Jack in the Box commercials. First, I don't get the Sleepy Hollow-like "pitchman." Why the stupid spherical head with the crooked hat on a normal body? What could be the meaning of that? I don't like his eternal smugness either. I'm not an advertising expert, but I can't think smugness field tests very well among fast food customers. Even the way he constantly gestures out with his hands the same way every time no matter what he's saying annoys me. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Jack in the Box store, but I'm sure that if I did, I wouldn't eat there. Assholes. You know who wasn't smug? Dave Thomas.
2. Colt McCoy's interview after the game last night was damned impressive. Either he's going to win an Academy Award for acting in his second career or he was as honest as I've seen an athlete in an interview in a long time, and the context made it all the better. The guy's whole career basically built up to that one game, and he goes out on a fluke injury five plays in, then he watches his team look helpless only to mount an ultimately failed comeback? Amazing. At this point, there is still nothing more than a lot of speculation about what happened or especially why he wasn't able to return, so I won't comment on whatever sinister or conspiratorial events were taking place in the training room that required his father's presence (ok maybe I will, because you have to at least wonder if ol dad was summoned because he could have played through the injury but it would put him at a greater risk in the future; ie he would be hurting his chance at more money in the draft). That aside, McCoy managed to answer every question both honestly and with the necessary acknowledgments of the other team's superiority. He did this while pausing to choke back emotion, emotion that didn't get in the way of his responsibility in facing the questions. That's a man that is fit to lead. I always figured him to not quite have the goods for the NFL, but maybe he's got a sneaky Brees-type career in him after all.
The secondary comment I have on this is about the interview itself. I generally hate postgame or halftime interviews with any athletes (especially the literally breathless ones given to track athletes--ridiculous), but I guess I'll put up with hundreds of worthless ones if it might eventually lead to something like McCoy's. That actually added to the broadcast in a meaningful way.
3. I have a friend who won $150 on one bet on last night's game. I won $20 on the same bet. This, along with general overconfidence and delusional thinking, is why I always end up losing overall when gambling online.
4. Jon Heyman is a dickbag. Read this and tell me you don't agree. There is a similarly stupid article on SI's site from Dan Shaughnessy, but I'd rather bitch about Heyman. They both are purposefully ignorant writers who are way over on the wrong side of history, and curiosly proud of it. Arrogant, actually. But that's just the baseball Hall of Fame vote. What makes me pity Mr Heyman even more is that he is one of a handful of guys who, over the last couple months of baseball's offseason, has constantly put out articles and statements and twitters trying to scoop about which free agent is signing with which team. Basically, Heyman's status as a journalist is that he is one of this small group of guys who comes up with these scoops. I'm sure the job is tough--he has to make phone calls pretty much constantly and always keep up on the latest gossip (let's face it, that's all that it is), but it's also totally unecessary and irrelevant. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, there may have been an honest need for a guy to tirelessly monitor a group of contacts to stay informed, but in 2010 there is this thing called the internet which happens to have shrunken the news gathering timeline to zero. So what I'm saying is that scoops are a total relic of the past. The only thing that benefits from Jon Heyman being the first to report that Mike Cameron signed with the Red Sox is Jon Heyman's ego, because if he didn't report it, then someone else would have, usually within minutes. It's mid-December and you are a baseball fan. you learn that Mike Cameron has signed with the Red Sox. Really, what good is this information to you? What good is it to you right now? It's worthless. You could be lost at sea and only learn about the signing a month later and it would really make no difference. The whole enterprise of digging for scoops in the baseball offseason bothers the hell out of me, so when I see one of the posterboys of it write such haughty uninformed garbage as Heyman does in that article, it really gets me.

Reaching Out

Here is what happens when your wife is pregnant: when you go to CVS, in addition to buying such normal items as sponges and milk, you also buy a stool softener for her constipation (it is what it is, which isn't always pretty), a long-handled shower brush for when she isn't able to reach everything anymore, and a can of mixed nuts to help keep her vegetarian protein levels up.
We had our third visit with the obstetrician on Tuesday. She was in her 15th week(1). That's early in the second trimester. We will continue to see this doctor every four weeks for a few more months. I say "we" because I've attended all three so far. From what I gather, the standard is usually for the man to attend the first visit and then the big "anatomy" visit somewhere around the 18th week, when they do the only important ultrasound and you learn what the gender is. Sara is happy to have me at these visits and so far I've been happy to go, even though the last two have mostly been simple check-ups, consisting of "how are you feeling?" a weight check, and a quick look for the fetal heartbeat, followed by answers of any questions or concerns from us. I'm pretty sure I'll be skipping at least the next visit with this primary doctor. The big anatomy visit, conducted by a separate doctor in a different facility, is in just two weeks, and though we're going a little early so I'm worried we won't be able to find out the gender, I'll be attending that one for sure.
There was really an amazing amount of excitement leading up to our first visit, when Sara was only 6 weeks along. Probably unsurprisingly I'll say that I was waiting for some confirmation at that first visit because it didn't seem totally real yet. The doctor brought out the ultrasound and, not knowing what to expect(2), I was actually a little unimpressed. The doctor didn't hesitate calling it a baby when looking at the black circle in the sea of grey noise on the screen. She moved around the internal ultrasound probe, and the black circle moved around and sure I could see a few whiter smudges or streaks inside the circle, but nothing comprehensible. Finally she stopped moving it around and got out her pointer, making tiny marks on the screen in a couple spaces and claiming that she could see the heartbeat. Now, I was sitting across the table about eight feet from the screen, so I didn't see squat, but then she printed out the image and gave it to us. Sara framed it, naturally, but I still didn't see squat. I'd hate to say it was disappointing, because I had no real idea what to expect, so maybe I'll go with "underwhelming." There was nothing human in that image, and barely anything biological, only if you had an active imagination.
The second visit was different, both in my expectations (lower) and the results (wow). This time, the doctor did the more classic external ultrasound, and after some brief abdomen searching, there it was. A very noticeable fetus(3). It seemed almost implanted to the edge of the black circle, like it's back were pasted to it, and the head and neck were pretty distorted, but it had an honest-to-goodness body. The real kicker, though, was the arms. They were fully extended, like grabbing for something. By this time, with Sara at 10 weeks pregnant, I'd seen a lot of ultrasound pictures online. I don't think I ever saw one with outstretched arms. For me, those arms were important. Without them, the image was still mostly inert and abstract, but with them it became animated and very human. For the first time, I could see it and imagine that it was something, that eventually I would be able to touch it and speak to it. Pretty great.



1. I just learned that you don't say it like that, you count it like you do a person's age. So in her 15th week, she's just 14 weeks along. As of today, she is 15 weeks pregnant. 15 weeks and zero days, though you don't say how many days. Anyway.
2. My aggressive online research-gathering hadn't yet begun at this point.
3. Let me be extraordinarily and unnecessarily political now. As a pretty staunchly pro-choice individual, I think I'm going to try to stick with the nomenclature of "fetus," instead of lapsing into calling it a "baby." This will be difficult to sustain, so forgive me and try to remember the intention I'm laying out now. Pretty much the only logical (religious concerns are never logical) argument for a pro-life stance is to draw a hard line around the killing/life issue. So for you to call something that doesn't have independent life a "baby" would be misrepresenting it. Sure, if you have no intent of aborting it, then eventually it will become a baby, but so long as it's in the womb it's still a fetus. So that's done then.

Happy New Year!

Today was welcome back to work day for most of the people around my office. And since today is January 4th, it also means that it was "Hey! Happy New Year!" day for most people. "Happy New Year" as a greeting stikes me as very stupid, but when delivered in conjunction with an overall huge sense of excitement and energy by a person who has not worked in 10-15 days and therefore wants to burn five minutes mindlessly talking to you every time he/she sees you, then it can drive me crazy. First, to me that greeting loses it's novelty around 6pm on January 1st, so to hear it over and over in that forced chirpy way people deliver it in workplaces three days after the fact is too much. Second, I've been back in the office for a full week, people. I don't want to share details on how my holidays were anymore. I had a whole week to do it at work plus a whole three-day weekend to do it amongst friends and social acquaintenances. I don't want to do it anymore. Finally, and maybe the worst aspect of a seemingly banal phrase, "Happy New Year" has only one acceptable response, and of course that response is: "Happy New Year." What's the goddamned point, exactly? Yes, your vocal chords can pronounce four syllables in our shared language, and so can mine. I'm glad we just sorted that out. At my alma mater, Ohio State, there is a pastime among students and especially graduates to greet each other by spelling out the letters O-H-I-O. The first person calls out "O-H" and the second person responds "I-O." I hated this. I hated this from the first time I heard it. Even in the company of friends when a friend will start this greeting (to be fair--often out of spontaneous sports-watching excitement) I will go out of my way to ignore it or even say something disparaging about it. If how alumni choose to distinctly greet each other were the top criterion for choosing a school, then Ohio State would have been near the bottom of my list. The point here is that "Happy New Year"* is basically the same thing as "O-H-I-O." They're like telling a knock-knock joke but without the punchline. Terrible, stupid, a waste of time. Worst of all, people use them as excuses to pile on fake enthusiasm where it has no business.

*I'm excepting all exclamations within 15 minutes of midnight on New Year's Eve, of course. That's about the only time when it makes sense, and doesn't require a rejoinder.

The Empty Office

1. This has been a special week. At least twice I've been able to pull of the subway double, when I'm not required to touch anything in the train during either my morning or evening commute. Of this is because the trains are empty and only saps like me have to go in, but still it's a nice feeling walking out of the station in the evening knowing I never had to take my hands out of my pockets.
2. One reason I enjoy #1 is that I don't like to wash my hands any more than necessary in the winter. Hands get dried up bad enough in cold weather, so I don't need constant wet-dry exchanges to add to the problem. Another reason this has been a special week is work. It's been me and about 6 other people every day this week, so I haven't encountered much traffic in the restrooms. Which of course means that I am free to use my own discretion with hand-washing after. Which of course means that usually I won't do it.* I think an impossibly perfect day would be combining the subway double with not having to wash my hands at work at any time. This would be herculean, because I drink lots of water during the day and urinate at least 4-5 times at work every day. It should be noted now that I do feel obliged to wash my hands at work from time to time. I stock the pantries every morning and my conscience does require that I wash up before touching other people's cups, straws, juice bottles, etc. But again, this week has been different and I've only had to do mild restocking twice. Both times occurred first thing in the morning and since I haven't been strap-hanging, I haven't had to wash my hands before doing it. The emptiness of the office hasn't forced me to go back to the pantries later in the day.
3. The last awesome thing about the office being empty is that I'm free to just let fly with the farts. Normally, I restrict my cheese-cutting to a couple infrequently-used locations on our floor, a small supply closet and the freight elevator area. I will never--as long as I can control it--drop ass in the hallways. Never except for this week. Quite the little moment of freedom to let one go as I please.


* I've covered this before, but I've had a longstanding curiosity with automatic hand-washing after peeing. Especially in the winter, my genital region is always cleaner than my hands. The joke I used to use is that I ought to be washing my balls after peeing cause they came into contact with my hands. It was brought to my attention some time ago by a person who'd heard my opinions that the comedian Patton Oswalt did a bit pretty much exactly like what I said. On a similar note, Paul Scheer's character used the word "sucktard" on an episode of "The League" this fall. I should absolutely be receiving royalties checks.

It

So the big new news around this blog that has actually prevented me from writing as often over the last couple months is that in about six more months, I'm going to become a father. Yeah. And I thought hearing myself referred to as a "husband" sounded jarring.
We've known about this development since late October, but keeping with societal expectations, we waited until a couple weeks ago to start telling other people. So for almost two months I've carried around this huge bit of personal news that I was unable to share in any format with almost anyone (our parents and siblings excepted). This was awkward for me. Not so much socially--actually conversing live with other people--but via email responses and especially sitting here typing in this space. There have been many times when I've read something preposterous (and I've read a lot about babies/pregnancies already) or something crazy occurred to me, that I have really wanted to share it on the blog, what seems to be the natural place for such things.
Now that all is in the open, I find myself leaning toward another impulse: restraint. Having a baby is not only a slightly more personal event than most, but it's also something with which most of my friends and acquaintences have little to no direct relationship with, so turning now to regular baby-prep talk would seem irresponsibly self-involved. Also, the long history of parents or parents-to-be behaving in an embarrassingly haughty and superior manner tends to make me a little more afraid of seeming anything like that. Sure, this new life will necessarily become the most important thing in my life, but I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't have to become a club that I metaphorically beat everyone around me over the head with. For me it is of supreme importance; for others it is merely another facet of who I am when they see me.
It's another huge barrier being placed between my private and public lives. First it was general maturity and self-recognition, then a big one was marriage and devoting a much larger piece of myself to a single person instead of a community, and now this. There is nothing wrong with having a clear distinction between public and private selves. Some people can live long lives without them, but for most it's perfectly instinctual. As long as we are always honest, we are who we are, no matter where we are or who we are with. It's just the natural discipline to keep our business separate that changes. We don't talk about our fantasy football teams or our pass-out drunk stories with our mothers. We don't talk about our fathers' health problems with our seldom-seen college friends. And we don't usually talk about the jewelry we buy for our wives with our daily friends. These details can occasionally be interested across barriers, but more often than not they aren't. Striking a healthy balance among these things is an interesting life change for someone like me.
Back to the topic at hand: I don't figure to start talking about babies or kids very often in conversation unless prompted to do so first. But this blog I will handle differently. I'll let it come out naturally. Invariably, I will use it as a main topic, but just as clearly I will stop myself and make sure it's interesting or relevant to anything first.
This brings me to a thought about just what this blog's purpose is, both for me and for you. A couple years ago I think I wrote mostly for a faceless audience and consciously tried to entertain. This of course fed both my ego and my artistic side. I still try to do this from time to time but more lately--as my "life" has seemed to finally start in earnest--there has been a kind of desire for posterity from me, as though I only want to get it all down so I have a record of it. This type of content can still be interesting, but in a totally different way than simple entertainment. I guess the goal of everything remains the same: to try to show what it is like to be me, what it's like to live my life and, most importantly, simply what it is like to see the world from my perspective. A lot of people have been 29 and married and white and male and expecting a child, but I never have. So we'll see.

A Sport as We Know It

I have been meaning to write about football injuries for a long time now. No, this is not about concussions, though the recent increase in interest toward concussions--both from the public and within the sport--is a very good step in the right direction. It's incredibly obvious that repeated blows to the head, which are of course common in football, will shorten and handicap a human being's life. I don't need to explain why that is a huge concern.
Actually what has interested me for a while is sudden traumatic injuries. Paralysis, severe ligament damage, broken bones of all variety, and the body generally being made to move in ways it wasn't meant to move.
Background: I don't like watching people get hurt. MMA is displeasing to me, for example. When an athlete hyperextends a joint and they show the replays on TV I will always look away.
In a violent sport such as football, serious injuries are unavoidable. The participants and the audience accept this. But lines can be crossed. Football players have become more and more efficient implements of violence, and faster moving bodies produce more dangerous collisions. The whole sport is seemingly on an unstoppable path toward true self-destruction. I mean, literally, someone is going to get killed, on the field, during a game, in front of millions of TV viewers. I can't possibly be the only person who realizes how inevitable this is? Secondarily, I can't possibly be the only person who thinks this is wrong?
Watch a clip of an old football game sometime. Even as recent as the 1970s will do. Don't watch the game, but the players. They were so much smaller and moved so much slower and collided with each other so much gentler (relative term). People still got hurt, and sometimes seriously, but the imminent mortal danger that I'm talking about wasn't there. A guy like "Mean" Joe Greene was famous for being a big and nasty guy. He was 6'4" and weighed 269 pounds. Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers current quarterback, is 6'5" and weighs 241. Football is a game played today by entirely different kinds of athletes.
To illustrate this point in another way, watch a lightweight boxing match sometime. Then watch a heavyweight contest. Different worlds. It's hard for the lightweights to knock each other out, even though they are both so small, because they're just not strong enough. But if you matched a heavyweight versus a lightweight, the heavyweight would seriously struggle to beat the little guy, even though his power advantage is massive. Why? Because he's probably not fast enough to land a solid punch on the more nimble lightweight. Today's football players are like an unholy mixture of the two boxers: both big and strong enough to inflict damage, and also fast enough to compound that force.
I guess a lot of this is obvious. The reason I decided it was a pressing concern has nothing to do with it, though. The clearest risk in football today is the failure of helmets to stay on heads. It used to be you rarely saw a player's helmet pop off on the field, and when you did, it was more of a blooper, something to laugh at. Hey, look at that player without his helmet, haha. Now, through either poor design or--most likely--poor attention to actually buckling them on properly, helmets seem to come loose on every other play. Of course players are taught to be tough and to finish plays, too. I think you can see what I'm getting at. Someone is going to die on the field, perhaps soon. Someone's head is going to get split open, literally. Hey players: there is no glory is getting your head split open. It doesn't make you tough, it makes you dead.
So the combination of helmets coming loose and players--through evolution, constant weightlifting, and of course steroids--morphing into deadly instruments themselves, will surely lead to what will be called tragedy. I guess the question is: who will care? Will the games go on? Will changes be made, instantly or over time? Will TV productions change at all? There is definitely a gladiator effect in play with today's NFL, from both the players' and fans' aspects. An important thing is to understand, as a fan, how you feel about this complicity. Are you ok having your players die on the field? If not, would you support mandatory increases in time missed after injuries (such as with the ongoing concussion debate), or even changes in the rules? If you are conscientious about this issue at all, then you would have to be fully in support of anything that increases safety. So, while I'm at it, let's see if I can come up with anything.
(disclaimer--these might be terrible ideas.)
Possible solutions to the NFL's upcoming death problem:
1. Fewer players. Perhaps 9-on-9 instead of 11-on-11. Fewer players means less hitting and more space. Naturally offense would increase substantially, but that's something we'd have to deal with.
2. Bigger fields. This is just a corollary to #1. The only downside here is that with more space, some players might actually have more room to build up speed and then actually hit harder.
3. Mandatory weight limits. A radical idea, sure, but maybe no lineman could be more than 310 pounds, no linebacker more than 260, and no running back more than 235. The relationship between size and speed and violence is a geometric one, so that a reduction of any would have a potentially large impact, pun intended.
4. Full-scale steroid and hormone testing. Obviously.
5. Increased pad protection. This would not only help protect players from hits, but it would also slow them down and make their hits less dangerous. This is my favorite solution so far. In the absence of #3, this would have a similar if less drastic effect.
6. Bigger penalties and bigger fines. This is my least favorite solution because it bastardizes not just the game but the players themselves. (Oddly, this is the solution that is closest to the NFL's current approach. Go figure.) But you could make unnecessary hits penalized up to 50 yards or more, and fines could be raised almost limitlessly, until the players finally got it.

The unfortunate reality of some of these improvements is that it would reduce competitiveness. But maybe that itself is a larger issue. Maybe the NFL, in so long dancing with the devil that is violence, has let itself go too far, so that the only way to save itself is to turn itself into something different. I mean, maybe they have crossed the point of no return with regards to player safety.

(Now, a personal note. I am a fan of the Steelers. They have been a franchise famous for tough football and aggressive often violent defenses. During the 1970s, they also apperently helped proliferate the use of steroids to exacerbate the violence problem. Maybe my favorite Steeler of all time is Troy Polamalu, a man who's freakish athleticism and reckless play renders him bascially incapable of staying healthy. A human body just isn't equipped to handle his level of physical ability. Finally, probably my most admired Steeler of my lifetime is Hines Ward, a man often called the dirtiest player in the league because of his deliberately violent hits, and a man who has been brutalized himself more times than I can count. Of course one of the reasons people, including myself, love him is that he bounces right up from these nasty hits with a smile on his face every time, as though he enjoys the violence. I am sure he does enjoy it. But how is he any different from a Roman gladiator and how are we any different from the bloodthirsty fans? Hines Ward's life after the age of 60, if he makes it that far, will be pathetic. Sure, it is the path he has chosen, but what does it mean to have helped and supported him along that path?)

UPDATE: If you agree with any of this, you ought to check out Part II of ESPN.com's Malcolm Gladwell-Bill Simmons email exchange. Or at least one little section of it, as it's very long. Amazingly, it was published the very same day as my blog post here and more amazingly it contains some very similar arguing points (one of them even mentions weight limits, for crying out loud). You'll just have to trust me as a non-plagiarist. I guess it's a good thing though: this stuff is a more present concern to more people, so the chance is just slightly higher that positive changes are possible.

Why Not Just Carry a Boombox, Asshole?

Here's something that bothers me. People--like the girl this morning--riding on the subways (it could be any confined space, really) wearing headphones with their music turned up so loud that it distracts nearby people. I'm not talking about merely being able to hear the noise, or even being able to make out the tune, I'm talking about so loud that it's distracting, like they put the ear nodes in backwards or something.
I despise very loud music so being in the proximity of one of these ultra-loud headphone people grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. It's not just the noise, either, since I have gotten good over the years and tuning out music. It bothers me more that the people between the headphones really think it's necessary to play their music that loud. Can they be so socially oblivious to not know that the loud scratchy treble-fest that emanates out from their headphones is annoying? I think that some people are that oblivious, which is itself quite enough to elicit some deserved scorn. The worst ones, though, know exactly how loud their garbage is to the rest of the world, and do it anyway. Psychologically, I'd like there to be a study done on what motivates these people. Surely for some they think it's cool. For others, it's attention-seeking. No matter the reason, a person who consciously will play his headphones that loud and knows the consequence is a person that I hate. And hate is not something that should be spread around indiscriminately, so I really would like to understand what the fuck is wrong with these people. (Then, once these specimens are effectively cataloged, they can be properly sequestered. That's what science is for, right? Not helping the misfits but keeping them away from the blessed few?)

Fear

It's in the title of the blog, after all. Even if the title is just vague pastiche, I still might as well slip a little in.

I never had any intention of writing anything about Tiger Woods. I try to stay as far away from celebrity crap as possible, after all. Something does not become interesting to me merely because it happens to a famous person, and very rarely are the things that happen to famous people in any way relevant to my own existence.(1) But this Tiger story just won't go away. It's become almost fascinating, even to me.
Of course, I'm not going to get into any of that stuff, because even if gossip trash becomes fascinating to me, my take on gossip trash will never be interesting to anyone else and I will never ever subject people to it.
So then what am I doing here writing now? Fear--I am acknowledging fear and how Tiger Woods scares me.
First, I will commit the sin of making an assumption about a famous person that I actually have no idea about. For illustrative purposes, though, let's go with it. Tiger Woods seemed like he had his shit together, so much so that if you find out that in fact, he did not at all have his shit together, you'd wonder how can anyone have his shit together? If this seeming paragon of austerity can be exposed in such a comprehensive way, how can a mere mortal expect to succeed in life?
That's being a bit heavy-handed, but my point is that you can't take things for granted in this world. I am not a philanderer. Just the idea of cheating gives me the willies. I think I have extremely strong self-control, stronger than anyone I know actually. I can say with complete confidence that I will always be completely faithful to my wife and my future family.
But. How can I really be so sure? Humans are human, after all. Mistakes are made, and if you crack open that door even a little, it's not hard to slowly let it slide open completely.
That is the lesson I take from this Tiger scandal: fear. Fear of what anyone, including myself, is capable of. I need to be mindful of that and to always be prepared to answer to anyone. It's almost like being a role model for yourself.


1. Weird, I know, but I don't do drugs, don't fly in planes more than a handful of times a year, don't have my picture taken anonymously, don't spend much time on beaches more exotic than Rockaway, don't dress well, don't have a publicist or an assistant, don't wear big sunglasses, and don't go to clubs or indulge in bottle service. Also I don't have grudges or fueds and don't have a dysfunctional family. Oh, and I'm not bisexual, as far as I know, because I've never been in an orgy or even in the same room with other people having sex.