The Sincerity Project

“Man, I had the weirdest dream last night…”

“Why, what was it about?”

“An angel came to me and showed me how everything would be if I had never been born.”

“Wow! What was that like?”

“Well, it would have been a lot better if everyone hadn’t been so damn happy.”

I posted this to Facebook a few weeks ago as a status update. I have been using this joke, or something like it, for at least a decade. Hell, I think I stole it from the Beavis and Butthead Christmas special. But in writing it and posting it I just felt wrong. Partly because the format made it less funny but mainly because the person who made this joke ten years ago is not the same person I am now.

When I was a teenager I perfected this persona of a sarcastic, cynical, world weary geek. In many ways it was a defense mechanism. I was never going to be the athlete or the life of the party. I was a shy, awkward kid who was always more comfortable talking to a teacher than a classmate. I was the kid who no one called unless they needed to know the answer to problem number seven. In my mind the only way to protect myself from being picked on was to be as self-deprecating as possible because I knew that I could make funnier jokes about myself than anyone else could. Plus, you don’t bully the guy who bullies himself and makes you laugh in the process. This view of me, as the geeky loser who takes a darkly comic view of the world, has lasted for almost thirty years.

At times it worked. As someone who didn’t really know who I was, and certainly had no confidence in front of people, I realized that this façade helped me to be social. It didn’t get me a girlfriend but it got me out of the house and as strange as it is to say that was a huge victory. Plus, there is a huge thrill in just being a sarcastic bastard who tears into the world and the hypocrisy around him. Better than just sitting there blankly.

But somewhere a little over five years ago things began to change. I kind of got a better sense of who I was. I had a job I didn’t care for in a town I wasn’t a fan of and that gave me the freedom to finally let myself just be and weird things started to happen. I started to go out and enjoy myself, I had my employer pay me for four months to just stop showing up at the office and this led to me lucking into the job I had been working towards for my entire career. And when the woman of my dreams called me up I was ready for it and somehow, through a series of events that still mystifies me, we get married. Everything was how I had always wanted it.

Yet I remained a cynical bastard.

That is a nice way of saying that I could often be a complete asshole. A well-meaning one in that I never intentionally tried to hurt people but an asshole nonetheless. I would just say mean spirited things on the nature that they would be funny and maybe they were but they usually weren’t. It certainly wasn’t funny to those people who had to deal with me regularly and I kept on feeling that I wasn’t myself even though I once again did not know who I was. I had been the cynical loser for so long I didn’t know how to be the successful married guy. I kept on struggling to figure out what was missing in my life. What had been lost from my world view that I needed to make my life worthwhile again. Then I figure it out…

Sincerity.

We live in a world where sincerity no longer exists. We live in a world of snark, where once a news story hits we are all rushing to Facebook and Twitter to crack the first mean-spirited joke in some hope to gain immaterial internet points. We have to have arguments on whether people have the constitutional right to be assholes in public forums. It is almost impossible to watch the news due to the constant rhetoric and complete lack of compassion or consideration for the viewpoint of others. And I hate to admit but I am as guilty of this as everyone else.

So when I was thinking about resolutions this year I decided that I would do something different than saying I would work out more or lose weight or eat eight fruits and vegetables every day. My resolution this year is to be a sincere human being: a considerate, caring non-judgmental person in a world full of sarcasm and noise. I read somewhere that if you want to be avant-garde in the world today you should be sincere so in some strange way this is just me reliving my punk rock fantasies in an incredibly productive way. So for 2014 I am embarking on (and hopefully documenting here) The Sincerity Project. The dream of a cynical bastard to become a better human being by being open to some of the wonders of life instead of hating everything. I have no clue if this will work, or how I will even accomplish it, but the journey should be fun. 

DDP Yoga: The best workout you are not doing

(Sorry, keyboard got a little dusty there. It always seems to whenever I watch that video.)

Let's set the stage here a little. Over the past few years (not coincidentally since Kim and I have been together) I have tried to get in better shape. I tried fitness through video games (EA Active for the Wii got me in shape for my wedding), worked out with trainers but nothing really seemed to stick. The video games were weird and finding time for the trainers was a huge challenge especially given my constant travel. I never tried any workout DVDs mainly because nothing I saw seemed focused towards my needs. P90X and Insanity both seemed to be directed towards people who were already in shape. I have a bad shoulder and a bad hip and was never an athlete in my life. I looked at those workouts and knew that there was no way that I could start at that level.

I knew of Diamond Dallas Page from my years of watching wrestling and heard that he had become a motivational speaker and was doing yoga. The fact that I can tell you the post wrestling careers of many wrestlers (Paul Orndorff owned a bowling alley for a while) as well as their real names gives a sense of my intensity from the wrestling side. When the above video went viral though I realized that I had to give DDP yoga a try. There is no way you can watch that video without being inspired to get off your ass and work out. If Arthur can do that using DDP yoga it has to have something to it. So for our anniversary Kim got me the DVD set.

I am on week eight of the program and I am just thrilled so far. First off, any exercise program that you stick with for eight weeks is a good one. It is so easy to get tired of a routine, expecially when you are doing the same workout for the fifth or sixth time, and just quit. Somehow, DDP makes the workouts interesting with a good level of energy. Plus, all you need is a yoga mat and the will to complete the workout.

The workout themselves are a mix of traditional yoga and more traditional exercises. Yesterday I mentioned how yoga has a learning curve but DDP makes it easy by starting out with clear examples of each move and changing some of the names to either a) make them clearer (raising your hands over your head is Touchdown) or b) make a bad pro wrestling pun (Warrior poses are now Road Warrior poses but without the face paint). You start out with relatively easy routines with plenty of options to make them easier or harder. That is a great thing as I really feel that anyone could get started with this program. Today I did the introductory workout again and I was impressed by the challenge still but happy that it had become much easier. Typically you do a lot of lunge related moves, some dynamic resistance, and then a lot of core work.

Over time you get into harder workouts. Right now I've maxed out at the Diamond Cutter workout, which is 50 minutes of hell. One of the hallmarks of the rountine are slow count push ups. You hold yourself in a plank for a three count, then lower down on a three count, hold low for a three count and when your arms are burning like mad you push back up on a three count. In this workout you do more of those than you can imagine. While the entire workout is no impact you never stop working so it is great for cardio. You'll sweat, you'll be tired but you never feel as though you are about to hurt yourself. After eight weeks I have definitely become more flexible and I feel stronger. I don't have six pack abs but at least I feel like I have abs, which is an accomplishment in and of itself.

I don't expect that this workout will turn me into a star athlete but I don't expect it to do so. But it gets me off my ass and I can do the workout wherever I find myself that day. As I said before, the best workout is the one that you actually do. I really recommend giving DDP Yoga a try. It is a great gateway into yoga and workouts in general and if you stick with it you will see results.

Yoga: Threat or menace?

(Before I start I want to give a shout out to Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club for getting a shout out in Esquire's Best Bars in America list for being the best dive bar in the Kansas City area. I spent many a night there thanks to the owner's great taste in booking bands and the ambience provided by a bar that dates to Prohibition that also just happened to be across the street from an adult bookstore. It was like music, alcohol and porn all on one corner. They also named Harry's Country Club as one of the best bars and though I drank there several times I am so loyal to Harry's Bar and Tables that I am using this only to bring up the fact that Kansas City is the type of town that has two different bars named Harry's. Creativity was never a strong suit in the heartland.)

Anyway, so a few years ago back when I was posting regularly I listed my New Year's resolutions and crowdsourced one of the resolutions. The winner was that I would try yoga that year. And I did, if Wii yoga technically counts as yoga. I did a tree pose on several occasions so that should count as yoga. But while that is a start to yoga it really isn't a full experience.

After Kim and I got married we started to go to yoga classes together. This was a really good experience as working out for an hour together was a good way to work out the stress at the end of a week. It also helped to show how poor my flexibility is and the fact that I can't balance on one leg to save my life. But I have to admit that I had three significant problems with my yoga classes.

1) I was the only guy in the room. For years I would not consider that to be a problem. Hell, it isn't even the first time I was in that situation. I've been in writers' groups where I am the only guy (and the only person not writing cat mysteries) and while it is a weird experience it can be rewarding. Plus, I was with Kim so at least I wasn't truly on my own. However, there is no way to be the only guy in a room of women working out without coming off like a bit of a creep. Especially when you are the out of shape guy in the back who keeps on falling down. Plus, when the teacher said "This move will really help you look good in a bikini" my response of "Hey!" was not really appreciated.

2) Yoga classes start with the expectation that you know what you are doing: Everything in yoga has a name and for the life of me I have no idea what any of them are. I had a great teacher for the class but they are always referring to their left when they are using their right and would then say things like "now walk the dog" and "go into crocodile and then push up into down dog" and I am trying to simultaneously look up at the teacher to see what am I supposed to be doing, look down because by looking at the teacher it looks like I am staring at the women in the room, and falling over because apparently I am supposed to be able to lift my leg over my head backwards. The learning curve for me was something fierce.

3) There was always a spiritual element that I was never comfortable with: The class that Kim and I took was a really cardio focused yoga so it was much more a workout than anything else. That said, at the end you still found yourself lying on a mat with your eyes closed being told to find your center and let yourself melt into your mat. This at a moment when I would really appreciate toweling off, having some water and getting on with the rest of my day. I appreciate the idea of meditation and I have done it in the past. I just like my workouts to be my workouts.

But for the past eight weeks I have been trying a different type of yoga and I have been loving every minute of it. This is the best exercise program that I have come across in years. So tomorrow I will provide my review of DDP Yoga. Because if you are going to do yoga why not do one promoted by an aging, slightly well known retired professional wrestler?

Things that confuse me at the moment...

1) That Amanda Bynes a) claims that she did not throw a bong at a cop (it was a vase), b) that her reaction to her mug shot was "I need another nose job and c) we as a society just sit here and watch the train wreck unfold but never do anything about it. I know that as individuals we have no real say in the matter but it would be nice if the editors of Us Weekly would not put her on the cover every week or if everyone would just stop buying Us Weekly. Celebrity culture just continually eats its own tail.

2) That you always seem to need more mulch. We have a new house and have spent nine months working on the landscaping and I swear every week we buy bag after bag of mulch and at the end of the day we look at everything and realize we need one bag more. There has to be some way to estimate what you actually need but damned if I know how.

3) The fact that every new game console that I see out there seems to want to be every possible thing other than a game console. I really don't want to admit that I have reached an age where I've stopped playing video games but I basically have. Not only do all of the controllers have thirty seven buttons and I grew up where we had one button and we liked it but everything is this ultimate internet entertainment device that should theoretically make my life easier but a) would require me to learn another user interface and b) provide me with all of these entertainment options that I have absolutely no time to take advantage of.

4) That Chick-Fil-A still demands to be closed on Sunday. I will never understand how it is God's will that we are unable to have reasonably priced chicken sandwiches with waffle fries one day a week. Settling for KFC is never a good option what with the whole military despot of the colonel behind the whole dasterdly enterprise. It is the only fast food chain with its own military junta.

5) The entire fact that we are in 2013. I remember 1993. I really liked 1993. That was a great year for pretty much everybody. That was twenty years ago. Really good years of your life shouldn't be twenty years ago. Plus, I think the only challenge to the theory of evolution is to look at the decline of popular music over the last twenty years. At least Hootie and the Blowfish have some merit (though while it is nice that Darius Rucker has a hit covering an Old Crow Medicine Show song I have to admit I liked it better when Old Crow was playing it as opposed to fing Hootie.)

Celebrating the holiday by turning left....

Here is a change that happens when you get married, or just find yourself in a relationship in general. A few years back I made it a tradition of live blogging the Indy 500. This basically meant sitting in my apartment alone, typically hungover from the night before, and while watching the race I would write down my thoughts and typically a few really bad Danica Patrick jokes. (You know, she doesn't have to continually keep her left blinker on the entire race.) Last night, seeing that the Monaco Grand Prix was going to be broadcast live on NBC I realized I could spend the entire day watching Monaco, Indy and the Coca Cola 600 and just write about sitting on the couch and watching auto racing all day. Then I remembered that I am married and would like to remain so. Thus, I've just watched parts here and there while doing gardening and other things. Still, here are my thoughts.

1) I really expected a better finish by Tony Stark at Monaco this year. You would think that he would have been able to modify his strategy to address potential attacks by Whiplash but apparently he is still susceptible to attacks by an unkempt Mickey Rourke.

2) I was lucky that Monaco was delayed by a crash so I actually got to watch the end of the race live. It is an amazing race to watch just because of the sheer insanity of it. Cars running on incredibly narrow, continuing twisting city streets and several tunnels. It is a video game level come to life.

3) There are three songs you need to hear every May. My Old Kentucky Home, played before the Derby, Maryland my Maryland, played in front of a crowd suffering from acute alcohol poisoning at the Preakness, and the undying zombie that is Jim Nabors belting out Back Home Again in Inidana.

4) Really happy that Tony Kanaan won Indy. I've watched the race for 30 plus years now and over the last ten years or so he has done everything except win the race. At least once he was in first place when the race was stopped for rain and would have won if it kept raining. Other times he just got caught in wrecks that weren't his fault. He always seemed like a nice guy and someone who everyone in racing liked. Awesome.

5) And as always, congrats to the Indiana Dairy Board for the most bizarre tradition in sports. You've just spent three hours in a car, wrapped in a safety suit to prevent you from catching fire and what do you do when you are finally done? Have a sip of warm milk.

6) The NASCAR race is still going on but we already have our story of the night. A cable on the Fox Sports Sky Cam broke, fell on the track, was run over by several cars, damaging those cars and injuring fans. Fox Sports, were just like Fox News except with slightly more injuries.

Sunday Night Music Club: Please remember what tomorrow is truly about. If there is any song I can think of that expresses the way is this one by Jason Isbell. Remember those that didn't come home and help those that did.

Your Superhero Starting Lineup

Ok, I saw a discussion of this on Deadspin today and I figured that I would have to add in my thoughts. The question was if you were going to design your ultimate football team using superheroes who would you use. To make things a little more interesting I will not allow anyone to play both ways.

Offense:
QB: Superman. Pretty basic there. Strong arm, mobile in the pocket, can take a hit and has definite leadership skills.
RB: Flash. Probably will not be my best option for runs up the middle but if I can get him to the outside I don't think anyone is going to catch him. If Flash is not available I will settle for Walter Payton.
FB: The Thing. Has good mobility for a big man and should be great for pass protection. Also should be able to bear down for those short yardage situations.
WR: Spider Man: Fast, agile, great hands and really scrappy. He's the superhero version of Wes Welker.
WR: Nightcrawler: Also seems to appear in the open when needed.
TE: Iron Man: Can block or get into the open field. Very gritty with strong field awareness. May complain due to lack of quality playing time.
Center: Beast. He may not be the biggest or the strongest available but as a doctor he should be smart enough to call out adjustments from the line. That just doesn't seem like it would be one of the Hulk's strengths.
Left Tackle: Thor. I need someone reliable to protect Superman's blind side. Easily fooled though so we may need to keep Thing back for additional blocking support.
Right Tackle: Hercules. I like my offensive lines bookended by gods. Though why gods ended up in comic books is beyond me.
Left Guard: Steel: I think Shaq played him in a movie or something. Maybe it was Cyborg
Right Guard: Cyborg. Or whoever it is in Teen Titans, I was never really a DC comics guy.

Defense: (I'm going to use a 4 - 3) for a reason that will become apparent.
Defensive Tackles: Hulk and Wolverine. That should take care of any plays up the middle though I worry that Hulk is going to be susceptible to being drawn offside due to a hard snap count.
Defensive Ends: Captain Marvel (DC Comics version) and Colossus. One should give me more of a speed rush while the other adds some additional bulk.
Middle Linebacker: Captain America. My defensive leader. I just see him being Brian Urlacher back there, calling out the defensives and always making the tackle.
Strong Side Linebacker: Batman. Hits hard, makes the tough decisions and is willing to play through pain.
Weak Side Linebacker: Robin. We'll have to hope that most plays are run to the strong side.
Cornerback: Mister Fantastic. Slightly more arrogant than Deion Sanders, slow as hell, but always seems to be able to get a hand in to break up the pass.
Cornerback: Green Lantern. Will be benched if we play a team whose uniform features the color yellow. That is still the most inane weakness I have ever seen in a superhero.
Strong Safety: Daredevil. Plays without fear.
Free Safety: Jean Grey. She seems to have an amazing ability to read the opposing quarterback's mind.

Special Teams:
Kicker: Morten Andersen
Punter: Ray Guy
Return Speciialist: Devin Hester

Agree or disagree?

Find Your Musical Touchstone

I am writing this from a plane, trying to take advantage of the really spotty Southwest Wi Fi, as I make my way back home to Fort Myers. For the past two years I have basically done this exact same trip every week. For the two years prior to that it was every two weeks as I would fly to Fort Myers to see my fiancée, or my girlfriend, or the woman who ten years ago this week sat directly behind me at graduation and who I really hoped would become my girlfriend. The fact that this all refers to the same woman stuns me, partly due to the nature of the story and partly for the sheer fact that someone would put up with my nonsense for four years and counting. But for every flight there has been one constant. Every single time I have gotten on a plane to see Kim the first thing I do after we reach 10,000 feet is put on my headphones and listen to Josh Rouse.


I am not exaggerating about this in the least. On every single flight I have listened to the same performer. You can call me a creature of habit (or obsessive compulsive if you happen to be my therapist) but this is part of my routine. I have listened to all of his albums over and over again to the point that I can discuss individual chord changes and can probably identify when he changes members of his band. All this for someone who has never had a single hit and who almost no one I have ever met has ever heard of.

Even I have a hard time explaining how I first came across his music. I think it was from of all things one of those Music Choice cable channels that exist at like channel 753 on your cable system. The ones no one ever visits, especially the one channel that focuses on Americana or Alternative Country or Music that Sounds Vaguely Folky but not Hipster Folky like Mumford and Sons or whatever we are calling that genre this week. There I came across a song I liked from someone I had vaguely heard of so I picked up a copy of Nashville. And then a copy of 1972 and of Home and of Under Cold Blue Stars and on and on and on. And the only reason I could ever provide as to why I kept on buying CD after CD was that whenever I listened to one of his discs good things happened.

Josh Rouse has obviously become one of my favorite artists and yet I still struggle to explain his music. He just writes simple and beautiful pop songs. He can make a line like “In the Nashville sky shines a diamond bright” sound like pure poetry. There are no obtuse lyrics or stretches for meaning or repeated singing of “Baby oh yeah baby all right.” Everything is straightforward and heartfelt and for some reason that I can’t explain can turn off all of the noise in my head, remove all of my anxieties and leave me hopeful for what is to come. One of his lyrics has even become a personal motto for me. “Some people don’t evolve. They’re content with what they’ve got. They just sit back and they watch TV. But that’s not me.”

I read online this week someone try to explain how when you are growing up and finishing college you kind of have a view of the world that once you become an adult and are out in the real world that life will become easier. That and all of the flailing about that you undergo in your youth falls away and everything makes sense. Of course that is complete nonsense as becoming an adult just means more wandering about with no clue what is going on in the world except that now there is even more pressure on you. The only difference is that becoming an adult means that you recognize this and learn how to handle it. Music has always been one of my ways to make sense of the world and Josh Rouse has played more than his role.

Everyone should find some artist like this in their life. Someone whose work you follow, who you build a personal connection to and who just plays their part in your personal soundtrack. Life can be rough and horrible and more challenging than you had ever feared. I know that all too well and I’ve had as blessed a life as anyone could ever imagine. We all need are touchstones in life. Josh Rouse is mine. Listen to his music. Good things will happen.

“We’re going through the changes, hoping for replacement, until we find a way out of this hole.”

Ten things that makes me feel old...

1) The fact that we have apparently decided to eliminate the letter e from our language. Tumblr was purchased this week. People still use Flickr. Is it that beneficial for us to drop one letter from words.

2) Text speak in general. Look, I understand that it can be difficult to know when to use to and when to use too. Using 2 as a cutting the Gordian Knot approach to the problem is not an adequate solution.

3) The fact that I was listening to a story on the radio about a teacher having her students write letters and discovering that none of her students knew how to write a letter thus meaning that I might be the last person to try to keep a long distance relationship alive through the mail.

4) Most college graduates this year were born after I started college. There isn't a single pop culture reference from my youth that would be relevant to a college graduate except in a strange reboot sort of way. Like they would know Optimus Prime from the movies and not from the cartoon show or even the original cartoon movie.

5) I can't remember the last time I bought a CD. All my music is now through iTunes and I fought forever (up to and including owning a Zune) to keep that from happening. Add the fact that even I don't have a way to play tapes anymore I now have no connection with the way I had purchased music throughout my entire life.

6) When Mozart was my age he had been dead for four years. F. Scott Fitzgerald only had four years left.

7) A kid today will never understand a disconnected life. Where directions involved looking at maps, meeting somewhere required plans and you didn't have all of the information in the world sitting in your pocket. They won't understand silence or being separate from anyone or even just the freedom from the world of YouTube comments. They will never have the ability to escape that of the lowest common denominator.

8) I have a t-shirt that celebrates Duke winning the national championship in 1991. Which means that I have shirts that are older than college graduates. Shirts.

9) Music I actually like is now played on classic rock stations. The alternative has now become classic rock.

10) I remember watching the first episode of the Simpsons. 24 seasons ago. I've been watching the Simpsons as long as a very lazy college student has been alive.

The power of nature

There are some news stories that just force you to catch your breath and mutter "Jesus Christ" while looking at the television. The tornado destroying the suburbs of Oklahoma City is one of those stories. An old colleague of mine lives near there and I was happy to find out from Facebook that she is ok but a lot of people are suffering out there tonight. I know that much of the country considers this area to be flyover country but the degree of devastation that we are seeing out there is almost unimaginable.

I was lucky in that during my five years in Kansas I was able to, for the most part, avoid the major storms. Lawrence was hit by a tornado right before I moved to the region and the Joplin tornado hit after I had moved away. There were a few storms (and one tornado at least) that hit the region while I was there and I will say that it is the weirdest feeling in the world. I still remember being out running errands one afternoon and just going "the air just feels wrong." It wasn't even raining yet but you could actually feel the air pressure changing and you knew that something bad was happening. I went home and that turned into the one storm where I actually ended up taking shelter in my bathroom because I really wasn't sure if a tornado was about to hit my apartment.

(My apartment building didn't have a basement. In fact, the only place that I knew in Westport that had a basement was Kelly's and I didn't know if the best course of action in a storm was to run down three blocks, past the portion of Westport road that would always flood, just to get to a bar which might be safer than my apartment. Possibly the only time in my life where I decided that going to a bar could be the wrong decision.)

The entire nature of tornadoes always amazes me, especially how we just have trained ourselves to admit that they just happen. Think about it, we take it as a matter of fact that occassionally a storm will cause winds to circle to a point where a cloud will come down from the sky and destroy everything in its path. We consider this to be just a part of nature, a bit of background noise like earthquakkes and volcanoes. Instead I think we should always be in awe of just what this planet is like. Events like this just point out how little influence we have on what happens around us. In the end, the planet wins. Best we can do is understand that it has the upper hand and anticipate when it is going to play its cards.

(Side note: Ray Manzarek passed away today. I am on the record as saying that the Doors are my least favorite band of all time, even beating out the Grateful Dead. However, I've always said that Ray Manzarek's noodling on keyboards was the only redeemable quality of any Doors song so I want to give him some praise here. Plus, I didn't know that he produced albums by X and Echo and the Bunnymen so for that he earns my respect.)

When are you really you

I mentioned a week or two ago how Jonathan Carroll is one of my favorite writers and that he also has the best Facebook posts of anyone I know. He'll post strange images and quotes and ideas that just strike his fancy. It is like a constant stream of brilliance. You never know what he is going to discuss but you can almost guarantee that it will be staying with you for a while.

One of the things he posted recently was how he was thinking about the question he is often asked "Where I should I get started in reading your work." He's written novels and short stories over decades and it is sometimes daunting to wonder just where to begin. Do you start with his first novel, do you read what people consider to be his best, do you grab his most recent and relevant work or is it somewhere in between.

He didn't answer that question but instead asked the following: "If you were to introduce someone to yourself when would you have them meet you?" Meaning at what age, at what moment in your life were you the truest version of yourself. When you look back at your life at what point do you say, "If you met me then you would know all my dreams and fears, all of my hopes and desires, you would know exactly who I am."

What an amazing question. I've spent weeks going back and forth with myself as to what my answer would be. It is tempting to say the end of high school or the beginning of college because that is when you are optimistic and energetic and feel like you are the most important being in the world. Except that looking back at myself I am embarassed by who I was, how uncool I was and how I was stumbling trying to figure out who I was. I had a vision and I had good intentions but I'm not sure if it would represent who I would become, for better or for worse.

Likewise I'm not sure if I would want someone to meet the current version of me and state that this is who I am, even though I am doing everything I possibly can to continue to improve whatever it is that I am. Life knocks you down as the years go by and even though you continue to get back up your skin grows more and more calloused. I'm more cynical than I was when I was younger and not in the hipster sense. It's a negative, depressing type of cynicism that I am trying to change. I don't think you can know who I am without understanding those hopes and dreams that I had that now lie much farther underneath the surface.

Maybe there isn't one moment when you are truly you. The act of observing effects the observed. We are continually changing and evolving and unless you have been along for the entire journey you can't understand the full story. Maybe it is just that we should strive every day to be who we truly are. To express what it is to be us. It is a challenge, though.

Sunday Night Music Club: I'm trying to get back into music and posting videos. Mainly this will mean lots of Drive By Truckers songs. Not a bad way to start.

Anyone want a nude portrait of Bea Arthur?

Look, it was late, I had been drinking and the eBay auction was enticing. And besides, who wouldn't want to have a nude portrait of their favorite Golden Girl hanging on their wall.

I'm not kidding about this. Ok, I'm kidding about actually purchasing this but this painting does exist and was sold at Christie's this week for, and I swear to God I am not making this up, $1.9 million. I am trying to think of what part of this is more disturbing. There is the sheer fact that this exists of course but there is also the fact that someone was willing to pay $1.9 million for it. Not only that but since this was an auction it meant that someone else thought that it was worth $1.8 million and there had to be a handful of people willing to pay $1.5 million. At what point do you go "I sure want a nude painting of the star of Maude and am willing to go to $1.8 million for it but not a penny more?" When you are willing to buy something like this when do you just say "This is a rather silly use of my money?" That and how much would you pay for one of Betty White. Or all four Golden Girls playing strip poker alongside a group of smoking dogs.

(I apologize for that last image. And request royalties from whoever paints it and puts it up for sale.)

(Oh and obviously I haven't posted the full image. It's online if you need it. I shouldn't need to add Not Safe For Work but having seen it I should probably state that it is Not Safe For Life.)

But let's give credit where credit is due. For a show that is not probably twenty five years old you can make a Golden Girls reference and people will still get it. Sure, there is the benefit that Betty White is a comedy legend and Bea Arthur was, well, Maude, and Estelle Getty was in Stop or My Mom Will Shoot but is that a reason for us all to remember fondly a show regarding four older women living in Florida? Hell, how many sitcoms from five years ago could you recall. Remember Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place? Of course not. That show was awful. But we will always remember Golden Girls. It will never be considered the high point of comedy but it made an impact and that is an achievement on to itself.

The Fighting Electronic Sun Devils...

Today's Sign that the United States is Doomed: Heard an advertisement today for Arizona State's online university. Ah, the final melding of the fraud of online education with a university that most recently made the news for having members of a frat drop off one of their brothers at the front door of the hospital. Not in the hospital itself but in the doorway. With a note pinned to his chest stating that he had just consumed 20 shots of tequila after competing in a shot drinking contest and hence had a BAC in the .4 range. It is nice to know that Arizona State teaches personal responsibility if not actual follow through. Oh, and why does Arizona need two online universities? We already have the University of Phoenix? Is there some weird online education synergy in the southwest?

I don't want to make it sound like I think that all online education is bad. I've started downloading podcasts of classes that interest me but I just think that taking a class online removes all of the dedication and rigor from the process. Students barely pay attention in class to begin with and now you can just play a lecture while completely ignoring the content. Just work the problems, write a paper, get a grade and earn a degree without ever really being challenged or interacting with people or ideas that are counter to your own. That is what education is about. Grade inflation makes things bad enough as it is; the watering down of degrees just makes it worse.

One of the things that concerns me about education (and to be honest, the next generation in general) is just how different it must be than from how I learned due to the internet. Understand that while I was online as a sophomore and Illinois invented the web browser we really didn't have a connected world at the time. We learned from textbooks and overhead slides and lectures with actual blackboards. For homework you would work it out personally with the concept of working together being considered cheating. To copy a paper or plagiarise actually took work. Now all you have to do is search google.

That really stuns me. I assume that any electrical engineering student could type in some of the details of a problem and find a solution online. It would make assignments simpler than ever and if I had that at my hands I would have learned nothing at all. The only way I was able to learn was by struggling with problems over and over again until finally the pieces fell into place. There were times when you would look at a problem and go "I have no idea how to get an answer so let's at least try to figure out what it is that I can figure out and then maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually see an answer." That was probably how I learned my greatest skill. That is all real life is. You don't know the answer so you figure out what you know and try to get there. Searching online will not provide you the answer.

So kids, try to turn off the computer once in a while. Grab an actual pencil. Maybe you will learn something.

Get Fit Using Math!

It would probably surprise a lot of people that I was a two sport letterman in high school. That statement becomes much easier to understand that this implies that I was a football trainer and a baseball manager. Essentially despite my love for sports I don't have an athletic bone in my body and as a result spent most of my life ignoring my body and my overall health. Four years ago as I started dating Kim I found myself weighing 215 pounds and edging higher. So I decided to at least make an effort at changing it.

I've gotten down to 180 pounds at times and am now in the high 180s, which actually puts me in the normal range on BMI. There is nothing better than going to the doctor and not being told to lose weight. As I look forty in the eye I am trying to continue to keep my weight down, work out and try to be healthier than I have ever been. In order to do this I have tried more than a few tools. Today's product review: the Nike Fuel Band because there is nothing your life needs more than math.

Now I should state here that I have two rules regarding working out. After spending years reading Men's Health, searching out websites, hiring personal trainers and playing Wii games I think you can break working out down to the following two points 1) doing something is better than nothing and 2) the best workout is the one you actually do. This won't turn you into a star athlete but it will create some level of benefit.

The Nike Fuel Band (a Christmas present from Kim for the record) focuses on the first part of that maxim. As you can tell it looks like a Livestrong bracelet without the need to feel like you need to take a shower after realizing that you are supporting Lance Armstrong. It weighs a little more than that but you don't really notice it. In essence it is a fancy pedometer, measuring steps taken, calories and the ever nebulous, but vitally important, Nike Fuel points.

What are Nike Fuel points you might ask (if you are one of the six people who probably got this far reading this post upset that I am not writing about Ted finally meeting the goddamn mother)? Well I've been wearing this thing daily for four months and I still don't have a clue. I've earned 1,797 points today. This theoretically is a measure of how active I've been today. Over the past few months I've realized that if I spend the day driving to the office, staring at the computer and only getting up to drink coffee before collapsing in front of the tv in the evening I won't break 1,000 points. A pretty active workday like today (where I walked around downtown and put in 40 minutes of yoga) can get me near my daily goal of 2,000 points. Working in the yard for a few hours or running puts me closer to 3,000 points. That said, drinking a ton of coffee and getting in an hour long conversation where I talk with my hands will earn me 300 points without even leaving my chair.

And that is what is great and what sucks about the Fuel Band all in one nice metric. It works great at giving me a quick sense of how active I've been for the day. Since I've worn it for months I know what my average activity translates to and I can try and beat it. However, since all it is measuring is if your arm is moving the actual measure itself is worthless. Weightlifting, yoga (which I will talk about another day) or anything that doesn't translate into a specific movement isn't captured. It isn't water resistant so the fact that I spent Saturday in the pool translated to my being incredibly lazy. As a motivation tool I really like it and it is why I continue to wear it.As a measure of fitness it leaves a lot to be desired. The fact that I haven't graphed my daily activity shows that even I can't find a use for Nike Fuel points.

(Oh and you can also share your daily information on Facebook which I don't because who would ever want to learn everything about me.)

One last benefit that comes with wearing it while you sleep. Not only do you earn points by sleeping it has an LED screen and a clock. As you age and become so nearsighted that you can no longer read a digital clock without glasses if it is more than six inches away from your face this allows you to actually tell the time. Sadly, this is now one of the things I look for most in sports equipment.

Life in airports...

Sign number 27 that you fly way too much: Southwest has switched terminals in the Fort Myers airport. Given that I knew every inch of Concourse D from literally days spent there this is a huge change. Even more important is that this new concourse has a Burger King in it. I have never been so happy to see a Burger King in my life. I don't think anyone has ever been happy to see a Burger King before but finally I have a place to get a decent meal. Ok, not a decent meal but a food based product that is theoretically fit for human consumption.

One of the things that I am going to be writing about over the next few weeks is my drive to become healthier and eating better is obviously one of those portions and I wish I could tell you how to eat helathy at the airport. I really do fly roughly once a week and have been doing so for several years now and that means many meals at airports. The best option that I can usually find is a decent sandwich (Potbelly at Midway is usually a pretty good option) but if I don't have the time or if the smell of fries are too tempting then it is off to McDonalds or whatever other fast food option is available.

It also doesn't help that you can't seemingly buy a regular sized candy bar any more. Everything always seem to be "King Size" or "Share Size" or much bigger than any one person should eat. Since I am usually travelling by myself this means that I end up downing way too much junk food as it is the only thing around. Not good for someone who is trying to keep an eye out on how much he weighs at any point in time.

Here is my best advice about staying healthy in the airport: never take the moving walkway. Think about it, if you are not in a massive hurry where you need every second in order to make your flight the moving walkway does nothing other than annoy you. Walk on it and you are guaranteed to end up behind a group of people who are just standing there like cows on the way to the slaughterhouse. You expect to see a large man swinging a sledgehammer at the end of the line. For people with health problems I completely understand, I just see too many people who are just lazy. So if you just walk alongside it you find that you are going at about the same pace and you are getting a but more exercise. Not a lot but at least it is something. And that is what I am going to talk about tomorrow: the idea of just trying to be a little more active than you were the day before.

Why are you doing this again?

Yes, I know, I do this every few months. I spent six years or so writing five nights a week and while I can't say that I actually built up a readership I at least had people and more than a few robots who would glance at the words I wrote and occassionally write a comment on either my brilliant insight or how they wanted to kick my ass because I described their band as "a downgrade from the background music that they were playing before they took the stage." Then, a little over two years ago I simultaneously got married, switched jobs, moved and found myself living in one part of the country, working in another and spending much of my life in the fourth row, window seat of Southwest flights.

(Seriously, that is the seat I always take. Fourth row is the first row where the chairs are as wide as they get, I like the window because it is easier for me to sleep and the fact that I know all of this just shows I fly way too much.)

So basically I've spent the past two years doing everything possible to, as Patterson Hood of the Drive By Truckers elegantly put it, keep it in between the ditches. Everything in my life had a higher priority than my writing and given I was screwing up my non-writing priorities royally I just couldn't carve out the thrity minutes a night I needed to write. Sadly, those minutes were usually wasted online but that was just another of the many mistakes that I've made. Again, I'm just happy I kept it in between the ditches, barely.

But a few weeks ago I thought about the fact that I am turning forty in less than four months (start shopping today) and thinking about what I am doing about it and where my focus is. It is not a case of mid life crisis yet but I did some reflection on what it is that I want to focus my attention on. I also thought about what I have been doing in my life, how much I have grown over the past few years and about all the stories that I wanted to tell. Everything just came back to ideas that I wanted to write down and share and how just sitting at a keyboard and letting my thoughts out helps relieve my anxiety. Hence, back to blogging.

Don't know if this is going to be good or not. Not sure if anyone is going to bother to read it. I'll probably put some effort into promoting it and I might finally break down and get on the twitter machine though given that I am someone who still uses an AOL email account I don't think that I will ever be cool enough for Twitter. I just want to see if I can grab those thirty minutes a day, look at a blank screen and try to use that time to make some sense of the world. Explain what I want to do in the second half of my life. As scary as those words sound that is where I am. It is going to be quite the journey.

(Oh, and the reviews of Gatsby seem to have proven my fears right. Though they say Dicaprio gets the sliminess of Gatsby right. So that is a plus.)

What I've Read (Since 1998....)

If there is anything that I am well known for it is having an incredibly well-documented life. For no apparent reason, other than a strange belief that one day a group of biographers will be forever grateful for my initiative, I've basically kept track of everything in my life. As in I have kept track of every book that I have read since 1998. There is no real reason behind it, especially why I noted when I started and finished each book, but it did make it much easier when I joined Goodreads.com and was asked to upload the books that I have read.

(Admittedly I did this so I would have the largest number of books read of anyone I knew on the site. Kim found out and then trounced me to a degree that is frightening. We have a literal library room as in we had to implement the Dewey Decimal System for tracking purposes.)

So, since Goodreads allowed me to finally track and quantify all of this I can say that since January 1, 1998 I have read 467 books. Effectively 30 books a year or so, which I think is pretty good. It also told me which authors I read the most over this time frame and I've decided to use the blog to review my top twelve. Some notes to start.

1) Reading a book means that I read every page. No, I started the book, got halfway through and realized it was crap and gave up. Reading means finishing.
2) A book is a book is a book. Meaning that David Foster Wallace's "This is Water", which is just a reprinting of his commencement address at Kenyon College and has for some reason become a viral video today counts the same as his "Infinite Jest", which is 900 pages long and has 100 pages of footnotes that must be read in order to understand the book. But hey, they both have bindings and an ISBN number so they are books.
3) Plays count as books. My list, my rules.
4) Graphic novels are books if written by Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman or if I decide there to be literary merit to them. Pure super hero comic compilations don't make the cut.

Ok, the top 12...
7 Books Read:
J. K. Rowling: The only female author to break the top twelve and proof that I have read the entire Harry Potter series. One of the interesting thing about Goodreads is that you can compare what you have read with other people and see what you have in common. Everyone has the Harry Potter books in common. It is fascinating just how many people have read these books.

Julian Barnes: I am kind of surprised that I have read so many of his books. He is an award winning British author who wrote one of my favorite books of all time in "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters", which is one of those books that has the ability to change your life if you let it. Some of his other work is great, others are kind of slogged through but still worth checking out.

Chuck Klosterman: I have said this on many occassions but he has the career I dreamed of but didn't pursue because I never imagined that it could be an actual career. He writes about music and sports and pop culture in general with no real purpose behind it. Just commenting and considering and pondering pop culture, making some observations but without no real driving thesis other than, "Isn't it weird that a guy from South Dakota can somehow make a living by making an analogy comparing Real World casts to varios incarnations of KISS?" That so could have been me.

Mike Gayle: You don't know who Mike Gayle is. No one knows who Mike Gayle is. I don't even think he has had seven books published in the US. First time I was in Kim's house I looked at her bookshelves and saw that she also had a copy of Mike Gayle's "My Legendary Girlfriend". That sealed it in my mind that we were meant for each other. Oh, and he is basically Nick Hornby lite or Bridget Jones for guys, depending on how you feel at the time. Still a good read.

8 Books Read:
David Foster Wallace: My choice for the greatest writer of my generation. His essay on Roger Federer is at a minimum the best piece of sports writing if not the best short piece written in the last twenty years. He is also one of the few people who I would ever consider to be better than me at both writing and math. Lots of people are better than me at one; he was at many levels beyond me at both. I understand how many people consider him to be overrated and I still have two books to make my way through before I can complete his works but from a pure literary standpoint I am a believer.

9 Books Read: 
Douglas Coupland: I have a love / hate relationship with Douglas. When he is at his best (Microserfs, jPod, Generation X) he can capture precisely what is going on in the culture around me. At his worst (Polaroids of the Dead) he makes me think that if I have to read one more word about Deadheads I am going to head up to Canada and tell him that no one cares. I think that that might be my least favorite book of all time. But when he is on he is a genius.

P. J. O'Rourke: My personal choice for political criticism. Funny, doesn't play favorites, and is at his best when he is pointing out just how stupid politicians can be. His view of the political world is probably the closest to mine that I have been able to find.

11 Books Read:
Nick Hornby: The winner for most variation in books written. I have read his novels, his young adult novel, his nonfiction books on soccer and music as well as four separate collection of magazine essays where all he does is write about what books he read that month. Someone after my own heart in that respect. I mean, he wrote High Fidelity. I really shouldn't have to say more.

Jonathan Carroll: The best writer you haven't discovered yet. Quite possibly the reason Kim and I are married is because of his book "The Ghost in Love", a story I will tell in detail one of these days. He has the best Facebook feed of anyone I know and I don't even technically know him. His stories can be described as dark fantasies or speculative fiction or however you would want to describe a world exactly like ours outside of the occasional talking dog. I have yet to find a writer who can turn phrases and set scenes in such a way that it legitimately makes you stop reading. I've literally been stunned by his work. Some of his stories have made their way into my dreams. Seriously, please read any of his books. The fact that he isn't considered one of the best writers on the planet is a travesty. (He's also the highest ranking American on my list if you discount the fact that he has lived in Vienna for the past few decades).

12 Books Read:
Neil Gaiman: Few writers can create whole worlds out of thin air the way that Neil can. Some authors have to struggle with getting one or two characters to be realistic. Neil invents entire mythologies out of whole cloth and the result is spectacular. I don't know if anything can touch Sandman in terms of graphic novels and his more traditional writing can be jaw dropping as well. Can't wait for his new book this month.

15 Books Read:
William Shakespeare: I read one play a year. I've made my way through all of the great plays, most of the good plays and now I am at the stuff he wrote just to pay the bills. At some point I have to go back and reread some of the stuff that I read when I was younger and didn't understand in the slightest. There is a reason to this yearly tradition. Over time I've learned how to read his plays without needing notes and definitions. Things make more sense now. While I appreciate being introduced to Shakespeare as a teenager I don't think you can really understand him until you have a few years under your belt.

23 Books Read:
Terry Pratchett: Ah, good old Sir Terry. The creator of Discworld, my favorite fantasy world where dwarves fight trolls, one of the cops is a werewolf and the witches are not to be messed with. His books work as fantasy, comedy and social commentary all at the same time. When I was first reading his stuff (and it was tough to find his earlier work in the US) I would come back from a trip to England with four or five of his books in my bags. Definitely an all-time favorite.

Why Making a Film of The Great Gatsby will Never Work

Anyone who knows me in the slightest quickly figures out that my favorite novel of all time is The Great Gatsby. Look at this blog. For nearly ten years I've maintained the kcgatsby domain (even though I haven't lived in Kansas City for five years). I named the blog Battling the Current in reference to the last line of the novel. And, most importantly, for years I mentioned in my profile that a fortune teller in New Orleans once told me that I was the reincarnation of F. Scott Fitzgerald and all I needed to do was find my Zelda. It took me a while but I did and for our anniversary this year she gave me a novel based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald.

All this is to say that there is no book that has ever stayed with me like Gatsby. I can discuss from memory so many scenes and symbols from the book. The green light, catching the clock, shirts flying in the air, a voice that sounds like money and the fading eyes on a billboard are some of the greatest pieces ever written by an American author. And every generation or so they try to make a movie out of the book and it fails. I haven't seen the latest (and I'm not planning on it) but I can't imagine it working. So, here are my reasons why you can't film Gatsby in a way that can match up to the book.

Point 1: The book isn't about Gatsby. Hollywood can never figure this out. The book is really about Nick and how he is changed by all that he sees around him in that one summer. How a boy from the hicks (technically the Midwest but even back then it was flyover country) is swept up in a scene and witnesses the undoing of lives all around him. He's the narrator, he's an observer but he is the one who undergoes the transformation. Sam Waterson fit the role, Tobey Maguire will probably do a good job, but it is incredibly difficult to focus a film on the character who is pretty bland instead of the enigmatic, charming title character. Speaking of that....

Point 2: Casting Gatsby is hell: They try, really they do, and the last two choices are good but not quite. The temptation is to pick the most charming, handsome actor in his 30s for the role, which is how we get Redford and Dicaprio in the role. But those actors by their nature of being charming and famous can't capture the innate character of Gatsby. First off, there is the realization that Gatsby began as a nobody. When he meets Daisy originally he is so far below her that nothing he can do, nothing he can say, can win her over. That inability to win, that desperation to get the girl and failing, that realization that you are not up to par is what sets Gatsby's life on its path. But for a star actor you can't ever imagine them like that because they always get the girl.

You also have to add on the fact that there is an incredible dark side to Gatsby's character. It's never clear how he made his money other than there was no way it was legal. I always viewed Gatsby as someone who when you looked at him you knew that he had done some really bad things in his past and he would do them again if necessary. Just the look of someone who had been to the dark side of life and while he didn't enjoy it he would return to reach his goal.

Point 3: The party scenes are great but they aren't the focus of the books: This is just a flaw in adaptation. The party scenes make for wonderful set pieces with amazing costumes and music and dancing and overall extravagance. Sadly, that makes the scenes all about the extravagance and not what is going on during the event, why it is happening at all, and how people react to it. You can get all of the style but you miss all of the substance. Oh, and for the love of God, Rihanna isn't in the goddamn book. Stuff like that makes me dread this movie.

Point 4: You can put the symbolism in the movie but that doesn't mean that people will get it: I can talk for hours about the symbolism in Gatsby. This is mainly because my high school English teacher worked to make me aware of what was in the story and what it meant and that you had to keep on looking deeper and deeper and thinking. When I write about Gatsby catching the clock and the glorious moment where he has made time stop and in that brief moment he has everything he has ever dreamed about I hear Riberdy's voice in my head (and realize wistfully that I did one day catch the clock myself). But it is symbolism that you have to work at to discover. The wonders of Gatsby is not the plot itself, which is actually relatively simple, but the words themselves. This brings me to my final point...

Point 5: The glory of The Great Gatsby is in its language, its tone and its flow and not in the story: Some books make wonderful movies because they are all plot. The Da Vinci Code was written to be a movie or possibly an episode of Scooby Doo. The characters exist but really if you wanted to change out the female lead with Daphne it would work (Thelma would be a bit of a stretch). But that is not the way Gatsby works.

You can't film a scene where you grasp the meaning of a line like "her voice was filled with money". You can't slow down a film like the book does as it goes through the lazy days of summer with characters talking about the longest day of the year and how we always look forward to it but never do anything about it. You can't catch the rhythm of the notes in the words, the way the book ebbs and flows, how it captures the transition from summer into fall and how everything collapses and decays. There is something about the nature of literature that allows you to create that image that cannot be duplicated on film. Books are a slower medium, a more reflective medium, and Gatsby is the book that the more you think about it the more you understand.

My guess is that Baz Luhrman is going to go wild with music and spectacle and costumes, pay some lip service to the novel and put something on screen that is pretty but not very true to the original. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. It's just that in my mind there is only one version of the story and it is the one I keep on my nightstand.

(Yes, and I am returning to blogging. Explanations to follow.)

Dating Bluders: Volume Two

Keeping with this week’s theme of romance tonight I figured that I would rattle off some of the incredibly stupid things I have done in the attempts to find love, a relationship or just someone who would acknowledge my existence. Usually when people talk about how their relationships fail it is always because of something wrong with the other person. Looking back I’ve finally realized that I was just a complete idiot. I’m married now. After reading the following you will wonder how the hell that happened but understand why it took me nearly seven years of effort to get Kim to go on a date with me.
1) At the age of 29 I took up smoking in an attempt to look cool. Or, as one of my drinking buddies put it. “If you are going to inhale all of this secondhand smoke then you might as well get some benefit from it.” Plus there was the surprisingly accurate logic that if you sit at a bar with a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches in front of you people will talk to you, if only to bum a cigarette. That part of the plan actually worked. It is an amazing prop to have if you need one. However, I never took into account the fact that I did not know how to smoke, that I couldn’t smoke without coughing and that the entire thing made me look even less cool in the process. This culminated when a girl, who had asked me for a cigarette told me, “Give me your phone, I want to call the idiot who told you to start smoking in order to meet women.”

2) Purchased “The Mystery Method” by Mystery of VH1’s The Pick Up Artist fame. Given all of the crap that VH1 now airs why haven’t they brought that show back? We need the wisdom of Matador and J-Dog, damnit. Yes, somewhere in my book collection I have a dating guide that discusses the importance of peacocking and how to utilize negs. Theoretically I purchased this for entertainment purposes. Or at least I hoped so.

3) In the “it was a good idea at the time” category, I knew where one woman I liked would occasionally hang out and since it was near my apartment and the place served alcohol I figured that I would stop by every once in a while in case she was there because if she wasn’t, well, alcohol. This actually worked when I ran into her until I quickly realized that I had no Step 2 to the plan and looked like a total stalker. Yeah, not my best moment.

4) Been the “let’s go out and drink coffee together” guy on more occasions than I would like to admit. This has become a running joke for Kim as whenever I discuss any girl I knew in college she reminds me that going out for coffee doesn’t technically qualify as dating. Admittedly, on an engineering campus being within fifty yards of a woman technically qualifies as dating so I still feel that having a conversation made me a superstar under the circumstances.

5) Rocked the “cool, hip t-shirt under the dress shirt” look for years in an attempt to show that I had a good job but was still with it. Yep, never worked. Never once did I have anyone mention the t-shirt. Ok, one time someone did ask if I had ever been to CBGBs but given that I purchased that t-shirt at Urban Outfitters I felt more embarrassed for being asked the question than anything.

6) Decided that my go to small talk question would be “Who is your favorite muppet?” To be honest, I still think that question is awesome.

Dating Blunders Volume One

It’s Valentine’s Week so that means that it is time to tell stories of love won and lost. Or in my case, I’ve decided to use this week to write about some of my worst dating experiences ever. Oh and I will tell the story of my first date with Kim on Thursday as it will tie in nicely and at least that one will not rank as one of my worst experiences ever. I have more than enough of those to go around.


Now before I tell some of my stories I have to remind people that in the not too recent past I used this very blog to openly promote myself as a date for Valentine’s Day. In fact, I had a standing offer in Kansas City to take any woman who volunteered to be my date on Valentine’s Day to the following: 1) Dinner at the Outback Steakhouse (value up to $25, everything above $25 directly ordered by said date must be paid separately. Shared appetizers will be split evenly but please bear in mind that I have a strong dislike of Bloomin Onions because there are some things that even deep drying does not improve, 2) Tickets to see Air Supply in concert at the Harrah’s Casino and 3) one cocktail of their choice at the Casino venue and let me say as someone who had a lot of $6 beers at that damn Voodoo Lounge in that place that is a very nice addition to the package. No one ever took me up on the offer but one of the girls on a competing team did say that she would have but she had to be out of town that day. Seriously, I would have done it just because the sheer thought of seeing Air Supply on Valentine’s Day with a random person would be too good to pass up.

Things were so backwards in Kansas City that I did actually utilize the It’s Just Lunch dating service. Of the many things I learned from that experience number one is that I shouldn’t choose dating services based solely on their advertising in every in flight magazine that I have ever seen. I went on fourteen or fifteen dates in the year or so I was a part of it and I saw a grand total of one woman on a second date. And there was another that gave me her number but never returned my calls. So yeah, not a great history there. However, my final date using them has to be the worst blind date that I have ever been on, made worse by the fact that I technically paid for the experience.

It was either January or February and it was the only time the restaurant where the date was set up to be was within walking distance of my apartment. Given that I lived in the nightlife / entertainment district of the town this never made any sense to me but oh well, at least this time I could trudge through the snow to get there. I sit down, starving for dinner, order a beer and wait fifteen minutes for this woman to appear. When she finally does you can tell that she really doesn’t want to be here either.

I was always surprised at how game people were on these blind dates. I mean, it was an entirely contrived experience, this meeting of a random stranger that someone told you about over the phone for dinner on a Tuesday night. And some nights after a crappy day of work the last thing you want to do is sit down across from someone and make small talk. I always tried and for the most part I always at least had an interesting conversation. Besides I can always talk about books or music or pop culture and find some common point of interest. This night however there was nothing we had in common.

She wasn’t in to music while I was going to concerts every week. She was into hiking whereas I felt that if God wanted us to climb mountains he would have made them smaller and installed hand rails for safety purposes. The crowning moment came when she mentioned that she was originally from Washington and I sensibly asked if she gets the opportunity to get back home and visit her family much. To which she let me know that both of her parents had passed away.

I believe the awkward pause that hung in the air after that statement is still going on.

Trust me, there is nothing you can say in that circumstance that can make you feel like you’ve recovered even though this was a subject that I had no idea about and quickly apologized and switched topics. It is just this feeling of being the biggest ass in the world. We both decided quickly that we didn’t feel like ordering dinner (even though I was absolutely starving) and I walked her to her car and let her know I was walking home. I watched her drive away and then quickly walked one block over to my favorite bar where the bartenders were pouring a beer for me the second I walked in the door. To be honest, for those five years in Kansas City Harry’s was as much of a home for me as my apartment and that night, after sitting through the most awkward conversation that I had ever had, the only person I wanted to talk to was a bartender.

Nerdism personified

It is strange that the older I get the geekier I become. I mean, I was actually excited yesterday when I heard that they found a new largest prime number, which is incredibly important if…ok, to be honest knowing that a number that is millions of digits long is prime really has no practical application outside of really obscure cryptography purposes but, hey, it’s another prime number. And they still have to test it by doing things like “can we divide it by 3? Well, how about five? Seven, then? Damn, this might take a while….”


I do find now that though I am not as fast with math as I used to be (and way too reliant on spreadsheets for my own good) I probably understand and appreciate the ideas behind all of the high level math that I was taught. I’ve joked with people that I reached the level in college courses where numbers no longer existed and all you were dealing with were greek letters and neverending discussions about the imaginary portion of the equation. This is actually true. I still deal with imaginary portions of equations to this very day and for the life of me I cannot explain it. The square root of negative one is i, or maybe j, but it exists. You just accept that it does.

I bring this up because it just shows how a school subject changes as you get older. As a kid math was a competition to the point that a) I made state in the Illinois math competition my senior year of high school, b) said state math competition had an official song, c) I have heard people referred to as mathletes without a sense of irony and d) math competitions have marked the only time in my life where I could look around and realize that I am the coolest guy in the room. Then in college and starting work math became my tool. I’ve mentioned many times that I really only have two skills and being good at math is one of them. Being able to spin numbers around and make sense of them has built a career for me. But it really was just a tool that was just a step above a parlor trick. Now I actually enjoy thinking about how numbers work and thinking about the paradoxes around infinity and how some infinities are larger than others even though they are all still infinite. I don’t understand everything and I am much too old to develop any great theorems but I really enjoy reading up on the theories.

God, I’m such a nerd.

Super random fun time

Yes, I know that I promised to write a lot more often this year. Sadly, life has an unnerving ability to get in the way, cause me to spend weekends in the office, find me in various gin joints in the French Quarter with my special someone and just generally eat into my precious writing time. As I have mentioned before I am in the market for an assistant, not for work but more for my life. It doesn’t pay, you’ll have to deal with the fact that I have almost no ability to function in modern society but I can probably get you college credit. At least at the University of Phoenix. Anyway, some random thoughts at the moment….
1) As someone who has spent much of his life in the electricity business (slightly more than a quarter overall, which means that when I ask the rhetorical question “what have I done with my life?” my answer will be “Determined the amount of imaginary power in the circuit diagram”) watching the Super Bowl blackout was a bit of a thrill. First because I knew that there had to be a bunch of utility execs freaking out at the moment. Then because it was incredible to watch the sideline reporters struggle to understand concepts like fuses, circuit breakers and the fact that it takes time for stadium lights to warm up.

2) I miss the Bud Bowl. I’m sorry, I just do. I don’t care what type of new, hip beer Budweiser wants us to drink this year. I just want beer bottles playing football. Well, that and Bud Dry. Or whatever ice beer is hip at the moment.

3) What I miss about college / my misspent youth item #23: The annual changing of the hip drink / beer. Remember when everyone had to drink Red Dog? When you couldn’t step foot in a bar without hitting ten guys drinking Icehouse? Or that brief moment when people were drinking Zima unironically? Ah, those were the days.

4) Heard on the news today that Muzak is being rebranded. In a way that makes me incredibly sad. Not that the product is disappearing or changing because it isn’t. The company is still going to produce inoffensive, moderately upbeat versions of songs that are popular enough that you recognize the melody but are completely oblivious to the name of the song. They just aren’t going to call it Muzak anymore. I just don’t see the need for the change. We have a perfectly good name for a product we all barely tolerate, why should we be forced to change all of our default small talk statements just so someone in marketing can justify their existence.

5) Yeah, it is tough for me to believe that I was at one point that person in marketing trying to justify their existence. It was Kansas, though. Nothing makes sense there. Any place where the primary mode of transportation is tornado is one where logic need not apply.

6) I wish we could get to the point where we no longer cared about the Super Bowl halftime entertainment. We didn’t care when it was Up with People, we didn’t care when it was in 3D, we didn’t even really care when it involved Michael Jackson. To be honest we could go back to the days where everyone changes the channel for twenty minutes and watches something else and we really wouldn’t lose anything.

7) Oh, and the Ravens won. That was nice, I guess. Delaware’s own Joe Flacco now has a Super Bowl ring so that is nice to know. I believe that automatically makes him the next governor but there are only ten people in the state so it was probably his turn anyway.

Life as a Nerd

So, I can’t say that I watch Portlandia though I can say that I did hit on Fred Armisen’s wife once at a concert (Sally Timms, who is now his ex-wife not that there is any coincidence there. Actually, that is purely a coincidence.) Still, this sketch hits upon something that has been bouncing around recently which is what does it mean to be a nerd.

Now growing up I was undoubtedly a nerd. I’m not sure if I have ever left it, more like I have grown into the role and become more comfortable in my skin. I still wear glasses, not as a fashion statement but because otherwise I’m blind. As the skit states, taking off my glasses doesn’t turn me into a swan; it leaves me with a bad tendency to walk into walls. Kim correctly states that I look much better without glasses and I agree that I do but I’ve been wearing glasses for 75% of my life. I’ve been wearing glasses for just slightly less time than I have been wearing shoes. I’ve promised Kim that I would look into laser surgery and have put off and reneged and feel guilty as hell about that. But that just shows how attached someone can be to an object that has come to define you.

But I am straying from the point here. Now that there is a sense of nerds being cool it really raises the question of what being a nerd is and people who are posing. However, it isn’t that being a nerd is popular it is the fact that a lot of the aspects of being a nerd (video games, comic books, computers in general) have now become mainstream. I grew up in the Dungeons and Dragons crowd with people who memorized Tolkein; now everybody has seen the movies and reads about a boy wizard and is surprisingly attracted to stories about moody teenage vampires. This is a good thing. There is a reason why we were fans of these genres to begin with and as opposed to music I don’t feel as threatened by having others become fans. More people reading Captain America doesn’t bother me as much as knowing the people who picked on me in high school have now claimed my favorite band as their own.

What a nerd is, or at least what everyone who called me that implied, is someone with low self-esteem, who is anxious in social situations, who is smarter than average and has escaped into topics and crowds that he can relate to that does not correspond to what everyone else is doing. Basically being a nerd is not being average or typical or walking the standard path. There is a surprisingly fine line between being a nerd and being punk rock. You could make a introverted / extroverted connection or one is more making their own reality versus confronting reality but the idea behind it is the same. We don’t fit into the normal box and we are not going to force ourselves to conform to that box. People make from of what is different and what confounds them and that is why I was called a nerd. It hurt of course, but it made me who I am. I’ll take my life today over any life formed by a personality that I had to contort myself to make it work.

President for a day

So Kim and I were watching news coverage of the inauguration today and the topic of your favorite inauguration memory came up. My immediate response was “David Rice Atchinson becoming president for one day because Zachary Taylor wouldn’t take the oath on a Sunday and since James K. Polk’s term ended at noon on Sunday technically the presidency fell to the President Pro Tempre of the Senate, which was David Rice Atchnison. On his one day as president he is best known for taking a nap. Either that or Reagan’s second inaugural when it was so cold out that they had to cancel the parade for fear that the marching bands instruments would freeze to their lips.”


Somehow I always expect to then see her look at me with admiration and awe. Not so much in reality. More like the look of one just saying “Seriously, this is what you have designated brain cells towards?”

I mean, how much can one say about an inauguration where there is no transfer of power or no real change at all? While a presidential inauguration is a rare and at times important event these second term inaugurations tend to fall more in the range of the press conference announcing a contract extension for a head coach, albeit one that involves a parade and marching bands. There is a major speech, of course, but we will have the State of the Union in a few weeks and then political gridlock for months on end. Yes, maybe I have gotten that cynical about politics over the past few years.

The other news of the day is that Atari has declared bankruptcy. For people my age this inspires nostalgia of video game consoles with faux wood paneling and joysticks that consisted of a stick and a button and that was the epitome of high tech. Why the wood paneling I will never know but it was a nice touch. Now with the near realism of video games and controllers with more buttons than one has fingers it goes to show just how far we have progressed.

Of course, Atari today has nothing today with the Atari of my youth other than naming rights. Atari essentially died after the disastrous release of E.T. the video game in which you, well, that was the problem. No one has ever quite figured out what the purpose of the game actually was. The assumption was that E.T. was popular so just stick a sticker of a kid with a bike on a cartridge and it would sell millions, despite the fact that the movie would be hard pressed to turn into a game of any form. That put the company out of business and it was then sold off and rebundled and repackaged into all that was left was a logo and a backlog of Combat cartridges.

Still, Atari was the first video game platform that I ever played. I still have it as well, or at least it is stored somewhere at my parents on the hope that I will one day figure out how to attach it to a modern television set. Even losing the brand will make you feel like you are getting old. That said, everything makes me feel like I am getting old.

When to print the myth...

There are so many aspects to the Manti Te’o story that are interesting that this may soon become one of my favorite news events ever. I know that many people are sick of the story already and the fact that it really doesn’t matter but to me that is one of the fascinating parts of this whole thing.


Now I will admit that as a Notre Dame alumni I fall into a slightly different category here but there is a question as to why anybody cared in the first place. We spent months focused on the story of a football player (who we had never met) and his girlfriend (who we, as well as he, had never met) and how she tragically died of leukemia during the season. Sure there is the tragedy of someone dying young but sadly that happens every day. We don’t focus on it for months and then act appalled because the nature of the story changes. But tying it into a sports story completely changes the narrative.

We don’t typically grasp just how much of a story that we add over sports in order to create a better event. In reality all sports is a group of people in one color shirt challenge a group of people in another color shirt and eventually one side wins (or, in the case of soccer, end in a 0 - 0 tie and thus make the entire enterprise completely pointless.) As has often been said, on some level all you are doing is cheering laundry. So we create storylines and plotlines and create heroes and villains and describe long standing rivalries that typically have nothing to do with the competitors. We talk about the long standing rivalries between the Red Sox and the Yankees but do the players from Japan and the Dominican Republic really care about some games played and lopsided trades between these two teams nearly a hundred years ago?

The reason pro wrestling exists is because it allows for the creation of the drama of sports without having to worry about the fact of having random results. Instead of trying to find the plot line or resorting to the dreaded Olympic human interest story you write the story, determine the ending and then just perform it for the crowd, altering it based on the whims of the individuals who actually pay to watch pro wrestling. We scoff at wrestling while Bob Costas did the exact same thing every night in London.

So we have some right to be upset about being lied to in a story by Te’o. I still am in the camp that he was duped into thinking that she was real, decided to embellish the relationship because why let the truth get in the way of a good story and by the time he figured out that she wasn’t real the story had taken off and could not be retrieved. But we are lied to in every story about sports. We use sports to illustrate the human experience. For the allegories to work we have to tweak the game to serve the message. Manti did the exact same thing. It’s not entirely the same as being upset about the last scene of the Soprano’s but it is close.

My Life in Music Part 1 (1973): I’ve decided to start a new feature on the blog in honor of my turning forty this year. I figure that I can trace my entire life, interests and beliefs through the music that was created throughout my lifetime. So I will go year by year picking one song and artist that I feel represents at least some aspect of myself. I promise not to repeat artists and will do everything that I can to insure that I have seen each artist live in concert. That second one may be tougher, especially until I get to the mid-80s or so but I will certainly try my best.

For the start I will go back to an album that was released a month after my birth by a guy who literally lived in the next town over: John Prine with his song “Dear Abby”. This is a nice place to start given that Dear Abby just died even though I must admit I thought that she had died years ago. As a Chicagoan growing up I knew the story of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, twin sisters who wrote dueling advice columns for dueling newspapers and thus taught you that the people who provide advice are the same people who would publicly feud with each other. More importantly this song has the legendary refrain “You are who you are and you ain’t who you ain’t.” It has taken me nearly forty years to figure out who I am and who I am not. Once you get that lesson down life becomes easier. Not necessarily better but easier.

I swear I really did have a Canadian girlfriend

Well I don’t have to look too far for a topic tonight. Here are my thoughts on the Manti Te’o story and what I can make out of it.


The first big question is what Te’o the victim of a hoax or was he behind it? Obviously the first thought that many people would have is that this was a big plan that he developed in order to gain more press. Invent imaginary girlfriend, have imaginary girlfriend die early in the season, gain great press from playing in her memory and use that to improve your draft position. To me that doesn’t make any sense at all. Obviously people could check up on the story and there was no guarantee that Notre Dame was going to have this amazing season and turn Manti into a Heisman candidate. Plus, why include a fake death when his grandmother, who he was incredibly close to, died on the same day? Yes it adds to the story but it wasn’t really necessary. He was already the top prospect and a prospective first rounder on a team that is on television every week.

If Manti was involved in the creation of the imaginary girlfriend and he did it for publicity he would have to be a stone cold person. From every interview and comment that I have seen about him for four years I’ve seen no indication that there would be anything like this in his personality. I’ve never heard anyone say a negative thing about the kid. If he was involved in the setup of the hoax I would be stunned and disappointed beyond belief.

So if he was a victim of the hoax what the hell happened? After thinking about it for a few hours this is my best guess.

Manti gets a message from someone on Twitter and starts a conversation. They tweet and text regularly over time. Maybe they even talk on the phone a few times. Her backstory becomes more convoluted (car accident, cancer, bone marrow transplant) until, on the same day that the news breaks that his grandmother died the person behind the hoax also tells him that the girl has died. In talking to the team and press about it Manti describes her as “his girlfriend”, which leads to the story getting confused in the press.

See, the term girlfriend is what has always bugged me about this from the start. You notice that they never showed pictures of her with him throughout the season, or mentioned him by her bedside, or any other behaviors you would expect out of someone whose girlfriend (in the standard definition of the term) is dying. But I can easily see a guy, even a top football player, refer to someone he only talks to online as his girlfriend because, hell, I’ve been guilty of that one.

Obviously my geekiness and dating challenges are well documented on this blog, which makes the fact that Kim and I are married still the best proof that I have that miracles are still possible. But in college I referred to a girl I met every week for coffee as my girlfriend. We never dated, never even really came close to in fact, but we regularly spent time together and there is no good word for a relationship like that especially when trying to explain that to your buddies who don’t know her. She can’t be your friend because then they would know her so it is just easier to describe her as a girlfriend. I’ve written about relationships where I went on a few dates or one date or never technically been on a date but more like we happened to repeatedly find ourselves in the same bar and described them all in this blog as relationships or girlfriends. It’s a huge lie and I think everyone realizes it but it makes you feel better because as a guy you never want to admit that you can’t get a girlfriend. There is just a part of the evolutionary, lizard like portion of your brain that constantly goes “I would make an especially good mate. My sperm are healthy and plentiful” and you will invent Canadian girlfriends galore to keep that image up.

So Manti talks to a girl online and describes her to a bunch of buddies as a girlfriend. He is duped into thinking she was real and when told that she has died he calls her a girlfriend. When the press calls him out on it he doesn’t want to admit that they had never actually met and they weren’t really dating so he makes up a story about how they met and how they hung out together a few times. The story takes on its own life and once someone looks into it and finds out that she isn’t real the entire thing explodes. That version makes sense to me.

I do also want to add this, though. I want to give huge kudos to my friends at Deadspin for breaking this story and doing the leg work behind it. For those who don’t know, Deadspin was founded by Will Leitch who was a few years behind me at Illinois and if I remember correctly was on the team of Daily Illini writers who beat me in the intramural sports trivia competition my senior year (yes, sports trivia was a legitimate intramural sport at Illinois.) The fact that no one else: ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CNN, every news outlet that you can think of, did the research into this story to find out the truth just shows how great of a job Deadspin does on covering sports and just how bad the mainstream media is. I mean, how can ESPN not send someone to find the girl’s parents to talk about the relationship? How could no one else do the work to find this out? That might be as big of a story as anything else here. The story should be less on the hoax itself but how in the world could the main story of the football season, involving the Heisman runner up, be false and no one notice?

Wednesday Night Music Club: Actually these are really the New Pornographers, right? I mean, I’ve met the band…

Regaining a voice

I will admit that this return to blogging has been very uneven so far. I am still working on a writing schedule and the fact that I have taken nearly two years off from writing has resulted in my talent and creative muscles suffering greatly. It is amazing to what degree creativity really is like a muscle. Writing right now is very similar to me as those first few workouts; you are enthusiastic at first but then you are discouraged by your first effort and then you are sore in ways that you cannot recall. The main challenge is not to write something brilliant but rather it is just to write. I have to sit down day after day and put words to paper and eventually something will happen, much like hitting the treadmill day after day until the pounds begin to fall off.


What I find now as opposed to when I started this blog in 2004 and certainly compared to when I was a teenager or in college is that I no longer assume that what I write is brilliant. I truly thought as a teenager that I was on the verge of writing the Great American Novel or penning some brilliant satire. I’ve looked back at those stories and those first twenty pages of numerous novels that I tried to write and have realized that they were horrible. Just embarrassingly bad with no form, structure or hope at all. There was talent there and I can see my humor working at times but it is so immature. But that is one of those wonderful blessings of youth, you think you are good so you work hard and do a lot of crap work until one day you slowly start to improve.

While I may never be brilliant I do think that when I was blogging regularly I did have a run where I was writing something that was interesting and even though I have the talent it has really hit me that I can’t return to that spot because my voice has completely changed. If you think about it the blog really captures my early 30’s when I seemingly spent my nights in bars, listening to bands, playing trivia and having a series of relationships fail in more and more ridiculous ways. The posts capture the thoughts of someone who still feels young and who finds himself in a city where he knows no one and is trying desperately to find any meaning in life at all.

But that isn’t my voice now. To be honest, I’m not sure what my writing voice is now. I no longer feel young. I still can’t say I feel mature or middle aged but I just feel different. Like I can no longer bs myself into thinking that there is this grand mythology surrounding my life. Not that anyone should take that as a complaint. I’m happily married to the literal woman of my dreams, a woman who when I first met I turned to a friend and said “One day I am going to marry her”, so it is not as though I have any desire to go back to those days. It is just that my life has settled down and I am not sure how to write about a life where I am content. Hell, I am the only person who has a challenge dealing with the fact that he can now consider himself to be happy.

I guess I am writing this to say that I am not sure where I am going with this and it might take me a long time to get there. Some of it will be crappy. Ok, a lot of it will be crappy. Last night I read a David Foster Wallace essay as well as one from an old friend and it just drove home how far I have to go. But I really want to make this work. I have to find my voice again.