In the future we shall all have dancing robots

I’ve said all of the following over the past few weeks. I don’t know when I got so old but I doubt that five years ago I ever anticipated myself saying any of the following…

·         You know, purchasing a tuxedo turned out to be a wise financial decision.

·         You have to go with the vest instead of the cummerbund. A cummerbund just screams high school prom.

·         Ok, just let me finish my yoga workout and I will get back to you.

·         Hey, remember back when VH-1 used to show videos?

·         It would be a lot nicer here if they turned the music down.

·         Instead of the vegan option I would prefer to have a steak in which the cow was continually insulted throughout its lifespan. Just so that it always knew who is the boss around here.

(Ok, the last one was more of a failure of the Sincerity Project than a sign of my growing old but it was my best example as to what the polar opposite of what a militant vegan would be. Sometimes having those analogies ready comes in very handy.)

Yes I do want to mention that I own a tuxedo and I really do where it with regularity. Kim often goes to black tie events for work and I get to accompany her as arm candy and I do my best to look dashing. The fact that this is my life stuns me to no end. No kidding, I am wearing a Star Wars t-shirt as I write this but will occasionally dress up like James Bond. Life is a neverending series of adventures, much like The Neverending Story but sadly with fewer Luck Dragons.

Remembering the 80’s Volume Two: Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”

Wow, so much I could say about this one. Let me run through the highlights…

·         Maybe I was the only one who heard this rumor but I was under the impression as a kid that the reason this song didn’t have any lyrics was because they were so dirty that they couldn’t be aired. Apparently no one ever informed the nine year old version of me about jazz.

·         Seriously, there was a point in time in which a jazz / hip hop fusion piece could become a hit song primarily due to the fact that it had a video featuring relatively simplistic robots. The 80’s were either quaint or avant garde in that respect, take your pick.

·         Also, I really do recall there being a good bit of moral outrage surrounding this video driven by the fact that it features mannequins in lingerie. We’ve advanced in that regard thanks mainly to the groundbreaking films Mannequin and Mannequin 2: On the Move.

·         I will to my dying day remember the robot who gets his head slammed into the cereal bowl over and over again. That is a metaphor for life if I ever saw one.

·         The fact that I have gone my entire life without designing a set of those dancing legs for my personal bemusement is one of my greatest regrets. I think that they would make for a great statement piece for any home.

·         Probably the toughest concert decision of my life was whether to see Herbie Hancock or Fats Domino at Jazz Fest one year. I chose Fats (who put on an amazing set) but part of me wishes I would have seen Herbie even if he was sans robots.

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.

Wasting the next morning away

I was talking with Kim about this earlier today and we both came to the same conclusion; it is pretty amazing how in a few short years your body can change. Mainly with regards to how quickly you can recover from a late night out with little sleep. I will be the first to say that in the past five years my tolerance for lost sleep has changed completely.
When I lived in Kansas City much of my time was spent going to concerts or competing in bar trivia contests both of which resulted in some rather late nights. Yes, bar trivia contests can run late into the evening as once you start challenging people on their knowledge of state capitols you really can’t stop until one of you is lying on the ground unconscious. This meant that I would occasionally go to work with much less than eight hours of sleep (sometimes as little as four). Despite the fact that I was caffeine free for my time in Kansas City (I was Straight Edge in that sense) I still could be a productive citizen on that little sleep. Today though that has completely changed.
Now if I am up late watching television I can barely get going the next day. If I was up due to my mind running on whatever subject is in my head at the moment, which can range from work to rewriting pro wrestling pay per views so that my new wealthy villain Count De Monet becomes world champion, it is even worse. I’m not even getting into what happens on those occasions where I decide to relive my time as the guy at the end of the bar. I feel off for days after those nights. It is like my body can’t take it anymore.
That is one of those points of growing older that I did not really fully comprehend. I knew that it would happen one day but I thought that it would be when I was fifty or something. I’ve realized that I am basically closer to retirement than I am to high school at this point in time but in my mind I cannot bring myself to view life that way. I still feel like the high school kid in my head but my body no longer can keep up. Though I am working to repair that. More on that effort tomorrow.
Best of 120 Minutes: Speaking of high school let’s listen to some Social Distortion.

Life in bits and bytes

I could point out a thousand reasons as to why I have suddenly started to feel old. Just the simple fact that I started this blog when I was 31 and I am now 38 is reason enough. Hell, blogging has gone from a fringe activity to the mainstream to now a relic of the ancient past over the seven years that I have been doing this. Technically I am supposed to just be tweeting this and posting tidbits on my wall or whatever it is that kids do today. But today I feel old and proud of it because we are celebrating the 30th birthday of the greatest machine ever developed: the Commodore 64.



This is the first computer that I ever had. I still have it, stored at my parent’s house and I am extremely confident that if I could figure out a way to hook it to a modern television set that I could get it to work. I can barely get a laptop to survive a year or two but the Commodore put in a good decade of service to myself and my brothers and taught me ninety percent of what I would end up knowing about computers. I learned how to program on a Commodore, I figured out how to do word processing and spreadsheets on the machine, and I figured out how to determine the best football team ever using Super Bowl Sunday (in which I took the 20 teams provided, created two 10 team leagues with each team playing ten games (9 in conference and 1 out of conference) culminating in an 8 team playoff, simulated every game, printed out the statistics for each game and computed season statistics for all 20 teams. I still remember the 1984 San Francisco 49ers losing to the 1981 Bengals in a playoff game with Dwight Clark being tackled on the one as time expired. Somewhere in my parent’s basement I still have stored all of the printouts. Yeah, I was an indoor child.)

What is incredible is that all of this was done on a machine that could only actively store 64 kB of data. Put it this way, the size of all of the text I have written for the blog this year is more than that. There is basically nothing that you can do with 64K of data yet the machine and a disk drive that was roughly the size of a beige Playstation with a fan that made it sound like an airplane engine I played more inventive games on this than I have on any other system since. And I truly would program my own games. I used to pick up computer magazines that had programs in the back that you could type up and enter into the system and play. That is how I learned the basics of programming by typing in code found in the back of magazines.

It is rather amazing to think that I have been around for nearly all of the personal computer revolution. I missed out on the whole homebrew era of the 70s what with my being an infant and all but for the last 30 years I have had iterations of every machine imaginable. I moved on from the Commodore to a Packard Bell in the days when they were referred to as IBM clones. I learned how to create boot disks because it was nearly impossible to run anything from Windows. I remember scoffing at the launch of Windows 95 because I couldn’t imagine having to run something outside of a DOS environment. I was on the web using Mosaic and at once point has both a CompuServe and an AOL account. I still use AOL email, which is rather depressing once you think about it. I’m at over 16 years on that email address. I am not as savvy as I used to be and I have kind of given up on my programming days but I really have seen computers grow in ways I never expected.

If I am feeling extremely grumpy I can talk about how kids today don’t understand how good they have it. That they will never understand what the world was like before everything was online and we were constantly connected. Except that I feel more sorry for them than anything else. Not only did they not get to enjoy the journey but they missed out on a simpler time. I know part of this is that time speeds up as you age but I really feel that time is much more scarce now than it was in the past. There is no such thing as free time. I’ve received six emails while writing this and a dozen posts have gone up to Facebook. I can contact anyone I need to instantly without worry that I would tie up a phone line or need to wait several days for them to get a letter. But that speed means you are always instantly accountable. There is no way to just sit back and relax.

I miss the days of just sitting at my Commodore 64 and enjoying the moment. Playing a game and not caring about anything else. Living a life where you are not constantly on call in a world where it is as though everyone is carrying a pager and must respond 24/7. There is something to be said for nostalgia. It reminds us to slow down.

Obsolete skills

Because of my birthday I’ve been thinking a lot about growing old and the changes to society that I have seen in my lifetime. I’ve realized that I have already had a number of skills that I have acquired become completely useless due to changes in technology. A simple example is understanding how to roll down a car window. When was the last time you saw a manual car window? Here are a few of the big ones that I thought of over the weekend.

Being able to read the financial pages of the newspaper: When I was around ten I started getting interested in how the stock market worked. My dad to his infinite credit took this as an opportunity to teach me about finance. I may have not been able to throw a spiral but he taught me how to read stock quotes in the newspaper. What were a mystical list of acronyms and numbers became clear to me and a few trips to the Board of Trade made me understand how markets worked. For years this is how I kept track of the market, checking quotes in the morning paper. Now I can’t even recall the last time I looked at that info if the papers even print it. You can just go on Yahoo and pull up the quote in real time. Imagine having to wait until the next morning to see how your stock did.

Use a card catalog: I was a master at using the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System for finding material in the library. If a book on a subject existed I could find it in that mass of cards and then quickly scour the stacks for it. I doubt libraries even have the physical card catalogs anymore, except as a relic of a bygone era. Everything is done through computer databases and while it is quicker and more efficient it loses some of the obscure glory of having to go on a treasure hunt just to find a book.

Ability to program a config.sys or autoexec.bat file: A few weeks ago was the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of Windows 95. I remember how big of a deal it was mainly because it freed us from the world of DOS. However, that meant that all of the DOS commands that I had learned over the years had become useless knowledge most of all the ability to create DOS boot disks in order to play video games. Basically prior to Windows 95 it was nearly impossible to run any good game in Windows and you had to set up these boot disks to put your computer in a special state just to run the game and god help you in trying to set up the soundblaster configuration. Windows 95 turned out to be a mixed blessing. Using a computer became much easier but I lost that innate knowledge of how it worked because I no longer had to spend hours figuring out every aspect of the operating system in order to get NHL 93 to boot up.

Communicate for months via letters: I’ve mentioned before that the first girl I ever fell for happened to live in Minnesota, which was a slight issue given that I lived in Chicago. Given that this was before the days of cheap long distance phone calls at least part of our relationship had to be managed through hand written letters. No one today writes an actual letter. Long distance is essentially free, emails are instantaneous and I assume that everyone’s handwriting is now atrocious. But when I was in high school I would sit down, put on a U2 cassette, pour my heart out on a piece of paper and then walk down to the mailbox to send it on its way. It’s kind of sad that I am going to go down as the last person who actually did that. Takes all the fun out of courtly love if you can just have a Skype video call.

Make a mixtape: Not a burned CD, not a playlist, but a proper mixtape. Meaning a cassette tape. The work involved in such a task, beyond just picking songs, was just unimaginable. First, you had to get the timing right so that you maximized the amount of music on each side without cutting off a song halfway through. Then you had to sit there and CD by CD (or even tape by tape or record by record) carefully set up the recording leaving just enough blank space for a smooth transition. Then you had to write out the songs in the little cassette booklet so that the intended party would know just what they had on their hands. It was backbreaking labor. Now it takes about three seconds on iTunes. Apple takes the fun out of everything.

Best of 120 Minutes (9/13/1993): I may have posted it before but who cares; it is Bob Mould in his Sugar era. Plus, Bob Mould went to Macalester College in Minnesota, which also happened to be where the girl from Minnesota went to school. Pretty fitting connection if I must say so.

And he gave us Seinfeld....

In honor of his passing here is my favorite personal George Steinbrenner story. I think that the only time I ever saw the Yankees play may have been the first game I ever saw. I couldn’t have been more than four or five at the time when we went to Commiskey Park to see the Chet Lemon led White Sox take on the Yankees. I’m pretty sure this was a Cub Scout outing and I was the tagalong little brother. Anyway, none of that matters other than being five at Commiskey was an experience in itself as you learned quickly that baseball was synonymous with smoking, heavy drinking and Andy the Clown.

This was when Reggie Jackson was with the Yankees and he was in the midst of a huge contract dispute with Steinbrenner. And it is amazing to think that what Reggie was asking for in today’s terms wouldn’t even get you a crappy utility infielder. Anyway, the White Sox fans in their infinite wisdom would, when Reggie took the field in right, throw money at him. Along with probably a few Reggie bars. And what would Reggie do when the inning was over? He’d go over to the warning track, collect the money, and wave at the fans. So I have George’s stingiest to thank for that memory. Worth all the years of having to hate the Yankees when you think about it.

No post yesterday I know and I have no excuse other than I fell asleep. I am doing that more and more often now that I think about it. I was in my bedroom changing last night at 9, put my head down, and before I knew it I was out like a light only to wake up and wonder what day it is. Couldn’t really bring myself to write after that given that I assume that nothing that I would have written would have made a lick of sense.

What is strange is that it is not like I am not getting enough sleep each night. Maybe I can’t live on seven hours of sleep anymore but like I wrote earlier; it’s not like I’m staying up to three in the morning on a regular basis. You’d think that with my new workout schedule that I would have even more energy but it seems that the opposite is the case. Maybe I am just growing old. Yeah, I’ll just blame it on the ravages of time.

Pretty much the only other news is that Mel Gibson is officially insane. Actually most of us had known that for a while now but he at least had the presence of mind to record it on several different occasions just so that we would have incontrovertible proof of our findings. I guess that we should just consider his career to be officially done right now. Well, maybe he could make a comeback in a few years at least as a director (hell, Polanski is still allowed to work though now he must stay in Switzerland for the rest of his life.) His acting career is now below that of Tom Cruise who really doesn’t have one anymore. Amazing to think that in a few years both of these guys have gone from leading men to weirdos in the supermarket tabloids.

Molly and me

I’ve been thinking more and more about the John Hughes tribute during the Oscars. It is the only moment from the ceremony that I find memorable but more importantly, I really see it as a touchstone moment in the history of Gen X. It really marks the moment where we are all forced to realize that we are adults.

To put this in a little perspective: Molly Ringwald is five years older than me so while she would not have been in high school with me (unless my parents would have relented and let me skip a few grades) but she would have been a classmate of one of my brothers. Same with Anthony Michael Hall. Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez are a few years older than that and Judd Nelson is fifty, which is just frightening. So the cast of The Breakfast Club are slightly older than me but not by too much. And Molly and Anthony Michael really are in the core of Gen X.

That is what makes their appearance at the Oscars so important. In part this is almost an acceptance that my generation gets a seat at the big kids table now. Sure, we have our own awards over the years but now we are called upon to honor a director who exemplified our generation. It wasn’t a Spielberg on stage honoring a colleague; it was people my age. I can’t quite remember something like that before.

Even more important though is the fact that this moment showed that we are all adults. One of the wonders of film is that certain stars will always remain a certain age. Molly Ringwald will always be a teenager in our minds and to see her as a true adult, beautiful and confident, takes us a back a little. We all have our own mental age, which is what we feel we are in our heads. For me it is something like 23 or 24. I’m continually in that just out of college stage. But Sunday night showed that is not the case. Anthony Michael Hall looks old in the sense that he looks like me and all my friends. We are old.

But even though Gen X is now old we have created this whole environment where we are perpetual teenagers. The majority of my Facebook status updates come from people I went to grade school and high school with otherwise known as people I have not seen or talked to for nearly twenty years. Most of them I would have no clue who they were if I passed them on the street. But thanks to Facebook I am constantly returned to high school with all of the bad and good that that implies thanks to their comments. I’m not alone on this. We are the John Hughes generation and we never left high school.

It’s strange to think that we have no voice in Gen X that I know of to lead us into adulthood. The boomers made their own show Thirtysomething to deal with it. We have, uh, Cougar Town? I don’t know of any good, mid 30’s television show out there. The voices of our strident college years are all gone, several of which by their own hands. The only music act that is still relevant from my college years is Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder does one hell of a job putting up the good fight (Just Breathe may be as touching and meaningful as anything that I have ever heard.) Still, Dylan always spoke for the Boomers and we seem to have lost or maybe even never had that type of voice. We are a small generation that is no longer a target market. Media doesn’t care about us anymore.

Maybe that is my last take on the group of them standing onstage at the Oscars. They were successful but unsteady, for the most part unsure in their own skin. They all knew that they were adult members of society but the fancy clothes just felt wrong even on someone like Matthew Broderick for whom this is second nature. I think Gen X is scared of taking that step into adulthood. I know I am.

Those darn kids today...

A few years back a company was foolish enough to let me work in their marketing department. The fact that said company is now nearly bankrupt is probably not a coincidence. Seriously, given that all marketers think that their customers are precisely like them it is not entirely wise to try to build a campaign that would make me happy. If I am anything it is non-typical.

One of the things I did learn though is that everything sold is geared towards the needs and desires of males aged 18 to 34. When I was in marketing I was in this age range and therefore felt perfectly happy. As a 36 year old though I have begun to realize that I am no longer a target market. In fact, I have lost touch with the mainstream. Here are a few mainstream media staples that have no bearing on a 36 year olds life.

Saturday Night Live: Taylor Lautner hosted a few weeks ago. I don’t know who Taylor Lautner is. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you if Taylor Lautner is male or female. I know that Taylor Swift, who also hosted, is female and that one of the members of Hanson was named Taylor but I am at a loss here. January Jones also hosted and I know that she is in Mad Men in the same way that I know that the sled’s name is Rosebud: I’ve never seen it but that is what I have been told. It’s not as though SNL is cutting edge; it is about as far from it as is humanly possible. But if I can’t recognize a host I am in trouble. Also, it stopped being funny once they got rid of Adam Sandler and David Spade. And whatever happened to Ellen Cleghorne anyway?

(Oh and do you know who the musical guest was the last time Charles Barkley hosted? Nirvana. Alicia Keys: Definite downgrade.)

American Idol: The new season starts this week! I was vaguely aware of the show when it was that fat guy going up against the Barry Manilow impersonator but I’ve completely lost track of the show. Apparently we no longer have Paula Abdul to kick around anymore, which will cause the show to…to…ok, what was her job anyway? Other than act like a complete whack job? Basically, this show now consists of performers I don’t care about singing songs that I don’t like.

Prince’s 1999: Completely out of date yet no one has come up with another date that we are supposed to party like it’s. I guess I’ll stick with 1999 for the time being.

Two and a Half Men: Actually, this has bearing on no one’s life except for Charlie Sheen. If it wasn’t for his attorneys this show wouldn’t even be on the air.

Jersey Shore: I was remembering this week about the Real World: London cast in which the producers a) sent them on an Outward Bound style team building activity and b) took a safari trip to Africa. Fifteen years later we have the Jersey Shore in which, well, stuff happens. Take basically the worst people you knew in college and have them invite over their douchebag friends and watch the punches fly. This show doesn’t cast negative aspersions on the people of New Jersey; it passes negative aspersions on the human race.

Yes, I have now become a curmudgeonly old man. Sigh.

9th Best Album of the Decade: Josh Rouse “1972” (2003): I was completely unaware of Josh Rouse until a few years ago. Now he is bar none one of my favorite performers. There is just something about his voice that puts me in the right perspective. I can’t really explain it other than there are some performers who you just get. 1972 is his masterpiece with its lush, early 70’s inspired sound. Even in this clip with just Josh and his guitar you can get a sense of how full it is. “We’re going through the changes / and hoping for replacement / until we find a way out of this hole.”



The five random CDs for the week:
1) Bruce Robison, Charlie Robison, Jack Ingram “Unleashed Live”
2) The Subdudes “Behind the Levee”
3) Liz Phair “Whip Smart”
4) Gillian Welch “Revival”
5) Josh Ritter “In the Dark”

The time of your life

At what point do you start feeling your age? Or start admitting that you are old? Seeing that I turn 36 in a few weeks I am starting to ponder that question.

Per the latest study, the typical white male is expected to live 76 years. This means that I am almost, but not quite, at the official halfway point of my existence. Yes, I can now have a mid-life crisis and mathematically speaking be accurate about it. Now I don’t think I am at the halfway point of my life and I certainly don’t feel it but just that idea that half my time on this planet is used up is enough to make me curl up into a ball in the corner for awhile.

Or how about this one. Back in seventh grade I was 12 years old. We all remember being 12. Thanks to Facebook we can all now relive our friendships and grudges from those days all over again. I can’t even comprehend that I have had two thirds of my life since that point. Or that half of my life has been post high school. First off, those days don’t seem that long ago but more importantly those days still hold much more sway on my psyche than they should. How many people fear a high school reunion because they feel the need to show how successful they are? In fact, isn’t that part of what Facebook is about: proving to people you once knew that you have made something of yourself. All for people that were only important half a lifetime ago.

I’m really beginning to get the sense of how time speeds up when you are older. I’ve mentioned it before but nothing lasts as long as a summer when you are ten years old. You have just enough knowledge to enjoy yourself without any of the responsibilities and the days just go on forever. I think that summer lasted five years. Now I’ve just celebrated my six month anniversary with Kim and it feels like it has been a long weekend. The time has just flown by that quickly. In two weeks I will mark my year in Delaware and a year removed from all my friends in KC. I can’t even fathom how quickly it has gone.

Here is the one hope that I hold out for myself and, not surprisingly, it revolves around theoretical physics. The idea is this: in our universe we have as constants a) the universe expanding, b) entropy increasing and c) time moving forward. Now, there is a possibility that at some point the universe will stop expanding and start contracting. It is my hope (and Hawking has at least touched on this idea in a supportive light) that when the universe starts to contract that time will start flowing backwards and we will get to live our lives in reverse. That way we will get to live our lives out one more time. Get to see everyone again and have those summers of our youth play out as we wait for the coming of spring. I just find it a pretty thought.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Only one song would be fitting

Poor out some slime tonight

I would like to start off tonight by taking a moment to remember the passing of a true television icon: Les Lye. Everyone reading this knows who Les Lye is. He was the adult on You Can’t Do That on Television. He passed away on Tuesday and his contributions to television should not be forgotten. It is a shame that his death actually was by firing squad. Either that or he finally ate one of his own Barth Burgers.

Seriously, I lose a piece of my childhood every day. When Walter Cronkite passed away last week that held some pretty significant meaning for me. I grew up in a CBS news household. Every night I would sit in front of the TV and watch Walter Cronkite present the news. Maybe as a six year old I did not understand everything that he was discussing but he was as much a part of my daily existence as Big Bird. Every day we seem to lose someone who was part of my early years and I have to face the fact that I am now most certainly an adult.

(And yes, even as a six year old I watched the news every day. That was just the way my family worked. In the evening we had the news on and there was no debate. I still claim that I learned to count via the Iran hostage drama in which every night they would list how many days the hostages had been held (444 in total, which I remembered because I thought it was a cool number.) We also always had newspapers and National Geographics around for us to read. I will always state that my parents never pushed me to excel in academics; they simply provided me with all of the tools necessary to love information and learning.)

It is tough for me to come to grips with the fact that I am getting older. When simple realizations like a teenager today has no idea what a cassette tape is cross your mind you just feel like sitting down for a while. I still don’t feel old and I definitely don’t look it (distinguished gray hairs notwithstanding.) I can still get carded for alcohol and can confuse people about my age. And it is not as though my life has settled down in some boring, humdrum pattern. In fact, it is more exciting than it has ever been. But with all of that I am constantly reminded that I am aging.

I’m going to fight the good fight against growing old. This doesn’t mean that I am going to start dressing like a teenager. I didn’t dress like a teenager when I was one and by no means am I going to start now. But I will always try to stay on the cutting edge in terms of media and culture and technology. I will try my best to keep my body together as things start to slow down and weight begins to accumulate around my middle. Mainly I will just keep on enjoying life. Do that and age really doesn’t matter.

Age is a state of mind, right?

I was carded while buying beer this weekend. This is a rather astounding development and while I would like to thank my youthful good looks it is somewhat disconcerting. While I am happy to know that I still can carry off the look of a nineteen year old trying to sneak out a six pack you have to wonder a) why a nineteen year old would be buying good beer and b) how many nineteen year olds have hair that has tinges of gray in it? It is a dignified gray, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t scream college kid.

The thing is this now bothers me as I have now reached a certain age at which changes in my body are becoming very apparent. No, this does not mean that I am going through puberty though some people would question whether or not I have ever completed it. Though it does have the whole “hair in places there was no hair before” moments in common it doesn’t have the same thrill as it did as a teenager. I know that some people remember those times with fear but my reaction was always more like, “Sweet. That wasn’t there yesterday.” However, you just don’t do that with nose hair.

Yes, I now have nose hair situations. Actually, I have had those on and off for several years now and own a pair of electric nose hair trimmers as a result. (I know that for many of you this will fall under the category: Too Much Information. If so, just scan down until the Best of 120 Minutes section.) It is annoying but controllable and something that I knew that I would have to deal with. Hell, even Queer Eye for the Straight Guy mentioned it years ago so I expected to have to address it as part of my daily grooming habits. It is the next part that concerns me.

Much like a sixty year old man, I occasionally get ear hair. Now I don’t get the ear forests like you see on some people but there are times when I look at the mirror and go, “That is not good.” Because there is nothing that tells you that you are old and should start wearing sensible trousers than having ear hair. It is totally not fair given the fact that I still can’t grow a moustache or a goatee to save my life but I get hair in places I have no desire for it to be. Yes, I break out the trimmers so no one notices (well, other than the people who read the blog. Probably should have thought about that beforehand) but it is one of those signs that I have reached a certain point in my life. I already knew that my body doesn’t recover from workouts or late nights the same way that it used to. Now I just have a more visual example that my careless days of youth are behind me.

Best of 120 Minutes: Let’s all go back to the dorm and listen to the Pixies. Break out the black t-shirts!



The five random CDs for the week:
1) Bon Iver “For Emma, Forever Ago”
2) Kathleen Edwards “Live from the Bowery Ballroom”
3) Rufus Wainwright “Want Two”
4) Matthew Sweet “Girlfriend”
5) Garrison Starr “Fans Greatest Hits Volume One”

A toast to the sidekick

Thought that I would write about this tonight. Losing Ed McMahon brought this point to the front of my brain and the older I get the more true I find it to be. Maybe it is a sense of growing old and losing one’s youth or maybe it is the fact that I have seen society change so drastically in my twenty some years of cultural awareness that I can’t figure out how we got there from here. It will make more sense as I write it.

(Though I do want to say I love the fact that after I mentioned at work that he had died I was asked how he died. Just once I would like to have the answer be “in a shootout with the police after a failed bank robbery attempt” or “murdered by a team of ninjas.” Much cooler way to go than just natural causes.)

I think what people forget about what it was like to be a part of Gen X growing up is that we fall into the last generation to experience an awful lot of things. We may be the first generation online and the first to experience cable as part of our youth but neither of those were ever present in our childhood years. Cable is the example that I am going to focus on here. Yes, we had cable television in our house but as opposed to today when every television in the house would be hooked up we simply had the television set in the living room connected to cable. This meant that except for those moments when you were home alone you seldom had full control over what you watched and given my huge family that was a rare moment indeed. Even sneaking out and watching late night tv was forbidden given the risk of being caught as you walked down the stairs, flipped on a switch and watched something in a room that sat directly underneath your parents’ bedroom. All of this is to say that unlike kids today I didn’t have a hundred channels in my bedroom to choose from.

Instead I often settled for a black and white set with an aerial that taught me many of the practical applications of Maxwell’s equations at a very young age. And when you are eleven or twelve, especially on a summer night, you begin to want to test the boundaries. To do things that you know that you aren’t supposed to do just to see what they are like. Nothing horrible (at least not in my case) but something that gives you a sense of having complete control of your life is like. For me that was staying up late to watch the Tonight Show.

I really would stay up late, turn the lights off in my room so my parents wouldn’t notice, and watch the show. It just seemed so adult to me. Almost forbidden in a way that I didn’t quite understand. I knew why I wasn’t supposed to watch Benny Hill due to the horrors of seeing women run around in their underwear. That wasn’t the case with Carson but you knew that there was something there that you weren’t supposed to see. It was like sneaking into an uncle’s poker game without anyone noticing.

That is what Carson and McMahon were at their best: your favorite uncles. Johnny was the kind and inquisitive one with a refined but ribald sense of humor while Ed was the lovable drunkard who laughed at everything. They could make it seem as though if all the cameras were turned off they would spend their evening doing the exact same performance for themselves. And there always was that slight sense of danger. Carson was the master of the literate entendre. It was only risqué if you were smart enough to notice.

I tolerated Ed on TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. While I never won anything from Publisher’s Clearing House I applaud him for his effort to get people to buy magazines. I can even forgive him for unleashing Sinbad onto the world as a result of Star Search. I just wish that I could once more get that thrill of staying up late and watching something I wasn’t supposed to. I don’t think kids today experience that. Partly due to Leno being too tame (Conan and Dave are a bit more on the edge) but more because they have the world at their fingertips. They become desensitized too quickly and I think that takes the wonder out of life. Sometimes life is better when things are simpler.

Kids these days...

(Woo hoo! It’s 5:20! When we, uh…sit around the campfire and eat smores?)

Anyway, as I continue to ponder my slow descent into old age I thought that it would be interesting to list some of the things that were a part of my life growing up but that a high school or college student today would have no clue about. Here it goes.

· Floppy disks: And I’m not talking those 3.5 discs either. We are talking about the 5.25 discs that could actually bend. The ones that held all of about three pages worth of data on them and that you would punch a hole through to make double sided.
· Rotary phones: I wonder if you could even find one of these anymore. I don’t even think most voice mail systems ask if you are on a touch tone phone.
· Long distance being expensive: The first girl I ever fell for lived several states away from me (what a surprise, I know.) This caused a rather significant issue in the early nineties as calling someone long distance was not for the faint of heart. You could rack up a pretty major bill in no time flat. Now I would just use my nightly minutes on my cell or IM. Just not the same.
· An actual handwritten letter: Do you know that I actually wrote girls letters back in the day? Pen and paper letters and they wrote me back? Those really must be the last of their kind. No one would sit down and write by hand anymore. Kind of a shame really.
· Typewriters: Actually, I don’t miss the dread of trying to type out a form and failing miserably because the paper was never aligned and the spacing was always off.
· Mix tapes: Ok, the concept of the mix tape has survived and thrived. Now you have mix CDs or special playlists for your beloved’s iPod. But it is not the same as having to sit down with a stack of CDs, a cassette tape and painstakingly measure out track lengths so as not to have the tape end in the middle of a song. It was a job to make one of those.
· Wide World of Sports: An entire generation has grown up without the dulcet tones of Jim McKay or the wonder that is watching bobsledding from Austria on a random Saturday. Plus nothing could beat the annual Harlem Globetrotter appearance. Losing this show is one of the ways that ESPN has ruined sports.
· Card Based Sports Games: Ok, this might just be me but let me explain. Part of my love for sports comes from the immense library of sports board games that I had as a kid. Mainly Avalon Hill but a few Strat-O-Matic games as well. These games had cards for every single player and rules that could be either simple or so incredibly complicated that even a young EC couldn’t figure them out (I still have no clue how stamina was supposed to come into play in Status Pro Basketball). In the days before computer games this is what I spent my afternoons playing. I ran games, kept detailed stats and memorized entire rosters. I’m sorry but playing Madden just isn’t the same.
· Life without cable: I grew up in the time before cable. Even when we did get cable we did not have it in any room other than the living room until college. I really wonder how kids cope with having everything they could ever want at their fingertips. How do you keep an imagination in such a world? What is the equivalent to staying up late at night to watch a British show on PBS just for the possibility that it might be interesting (or show a boob?)

Wednesday Night Music Club: Let’s rock it out with LCD Soundsystem.

LCD Soundsystem MTV Music

Yep, I've gotten old

I have realized that now that I have reached a certain age (specifically somewhere in my mid-thirties) a number of activities that I had enjoyed for the majority of my life are no longer available to me. Not in the sense that it is physically impossible for me to perform them. More along the lines that it is not befitting a person of my stature in society to be seen in any of the following situations that I will conveniently list in bullet point form.

· Bring a baseball mitt to a pro game as well as dressing in full replica uniform on the off chance that the team will need a pinch runner and choose the drunk guy in the right field bleachers.
· Similarly, I am no longer allowed to keep score at a baseball game. Mainly because I have to explain why I am doing it when there is a scoreboard right in front of me.
· Wear a t-shirt that announces my occupation as a Female Body Inspector or employs a clever pun using the name Johnson.
· Showing up to a movie wearing any type of costume (can’t believe I was thrown out of the premiere of Hitchhiker’s Guide for wearing a bathrobe).
· Order a drink solely because I think its name sounds funny. Exceptions granted for Red Headed Sluts and Harvey Wallbangers.
· Sit in the front row of a WWE event with a sign that reads “We want the Macho Man!”
· Use the words “romantic dinner date” and “Outback Steakhouse” in the same sentence.
· Participate in a mosh pit and / or crowd surf.
· Shout “woo hoo” at any moment in time.
· Spend three hours arguing the logic behind the time travel paradoxes in Quantum Leap, Star Trek or the entire Terminator franchise (which breaks more laws of temporal space than actually exist.)
· Dye my hair any color that does not naturally occur in nature.
· Go “I could totally jump that”

I know that I am missing a lot. What else do you think I am no longer allowed to do as a result of age?

One by one my hair is turning gray...

This is going to be another short post tonight due to circumstances that are entirely within my control but that I just don't want to deal with at the moment. Or at least I think that this will be a short post; I never quite know how long these will be once I start writing. I will have to postpone the Best of 120 Minutes for a day as I am in no mood to surf YouTube at the moment. For those of you who need your fix, just search for Jeff Buckley. Thanks to Sony Music I cannot post a Jeff Buckley video. We now know who will be next in line behind Ticketmaster to go up against the wall when the revoultion comes.

Anyway, here is the question that has been bugging me since this morning. I looked in the mirror this morning and was rather surprised by what I saw. Now I'll have to admit that I am not someone who tends to look at themselves in the mirro with any kind of critical eye. Hell, I probably go months without looking at myself at all. There is probably some deep seated psychological reason behind this tied to my lack of self-esteem. More likely, I'm usually in a hurry and as long as my hair looks presentable and I don't have half a sandwich hanging from my face I feel as though I am good to go. Sadly, this morning my hair was no longer presentable.

I'm going gray.

I know I've joked about this before but really, today was the first time I noticed just how many flecks of gray there were in my hair. For the people who know me, has this gotten more noticable recently? Because it hit me like a shock today. I know that I've been under a lot of stress and that isn't helping but wow, this wasn't what I expected.

Well, I guess it is expected. I'm a month away from a momentous birthday and I've reached an age where my hair is going to lose some of its sheen. Thankfully I have a full head of hair and this should make me look distinguished and debonair as opposed to ancient and decrepit. But it is a sign that I am no longer a kid. I still view myself as though I was 16. I don't think that I've grown up emotionally since then. I might be able to land great jobs and be given loads of responsibility but at the end of the day I'm just a kid. Or at least that is all I ever want to be.

I guess I'll just start emulating George Clooney in every aspect of my life. He at least has the lifestyle I want and carries himself with that air of confidence that I so desire to have. I could do worse. And if I really start to go gray I am just going the Steve Martin route and going all gray and making it part of my schtick. Who knows, maybe middle age will suit me better.

You wax poetic about things pathetic...

Wish that I had a lot of grand adventures to report from this weekend but sadly it wasn’t the case. It was just a rather lazy, quiet weekend for me. The fourth consisted of a trip to the airport (which is a long, interesting and emotional story that I simply am not allowed to discuss in this space) followed by my sleeping on the couch and then patriotically doing laundry. I’m sorry but I just don’t see the big deal about fireworks. I’m certainly not going to drive somewhere and hang out by myself to watch them. It just seems even more pathetic than spending a holiday folding laundry and watching bad movies.

Not sure if I could say that the rest of the weekend was an improvement, though I did watch Nascar and Wimbledon. The Daytona race wasn’t much to write home about as the cars continued to turn left and no one has yet tried to drive the wrong direction in an effort to create ultimate havoc. Also, the fact that the race was one long advertisement for Coke Zero (it’s just like Coke but it’s not) was rather annoying. The Nadal-Federer final today was some of the best tennis I have seen in years though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more even match in my life. When you are deep into the fifth set and both guys have won the exact same number of points you realize just how evenly matched they are.

I guess if I have realized anything from this weekend it is the acknowledgment of the big date that is looming in my future. I am now less than sixty days away from turning 35. For some reason this has become a rather epic birthday in my mind. Much moreso than when I turned 30, which just seemed to be a bit of a ha ha moment. I knew turning thirty meant that I was now older but I was still a bar hopping, live in the moment kind of guy. But being 35 will mean that I am in my mid-thirties, no questions asked, and that implies a lot. Like I should be settled down by now and right now if there is one thing that I am not it is settled.

Interestingly, I really feel like I am 35. I’ve been using that as my age for a while now just because it really fits me. My hair is tinged with gray and I don’t recover from a late night with quite the vigor that I used to. I’ve had to see a cardiologist and discuss my cholesterol levels. Being 35 fits me in that respect. I’m not a kid anymore. I should be a respected adult.

The problem is of course is that I still don’t have the life of a respected adult. I’m a guy in an apartment who doesn’t know where his career is headed and his social life is once again in shambles. I really did expect to have a wife, a house and a dog by now and I somehow have avoided acquiring any of the three. That is probably the biggest issue in my life right now. The life that I want and the life that I have simply do not match up on even the most basic level. I still enjoy myself but it isn’t what I’m looking for. Finding it in two months is a bit too much to ask for but who knows. Stranger things have happened.

Best of 120 Minutes: For some reason I am in a real Paul Westerberg mood at the moment. As a result, here is World Class Fad. It is a very good song to play at high volume on a Monday.



The Random CDs of the moment:
1) Jeff Buckley “The Grace EPs”

Hasek to the castle

(I know this is of interest to no one other than me but according to my writer’s journal this is my 202nd entry of the year and I’ve written just shy of 160,000 words. I’m now somewhere north of 750 blog posts as well. And the three year anniversary of the blog is coming up in a few weeks and you know what that means. Actually, if you do please let me know. I’d really like to find out.)

There are times in your life where you begin to question just precisely when you lost the plot. Driving to Lawrence on a Wednesday night to see a band from Prague mainly just so you could say that you’ve seen a band from Prague is one of those times. Actually, I owe much thanks to a friend of mine for telling me about Uz Jsme Doma, a rather cool band from my homeland. Though traveling the US to play next to pinball machines at the Replay Lounge seems to be an odd fate.

Now despite the fact that I am Czech and have a last name that is apparently unpronounceable I don’t actually speak the language. I can recognize it when I hear it and it does sound familiar at some level but it is odd to hear people singing in it. Not that I don’t listen to music in foreign languages. I’m a huge fan of the Iguanas and most of their stuff is in Spanish and I don’t know how many Cajun and zydeco discs I have that are in French. But it was comforting in a way to hear the language in the crowd and during the sound check. It is a part of who I am, after all.

(Personally, I just like the fact that when someone asked me today about why I went to Lawrence to see a band I had never heard of I was able to answer “Because I can.” At the end of the day, sometimes you have to do things just because you can do them. It keeps you from being a target market complete with focus groups and fun sized self sealed packages of enjoyment.)

You might have noticed that this makes four shows in Lawrence in eight nights, which I believe is a new record for me. It also is one of the reasons why I’m taking tomorrow off from work. I just cannot run that many late nights and long drives in a row. It didn’t help that one of the long time friends of the blog decided that at 2:15 in the morning it was vitally important that I know that he was currently watching old Beavis and Butthead videos. I’m a bit sleep deprived right now as a result of all of this.

I guess that is a sign that I really am growing old. I swear that a year or two ago I could bounce back from a schedule like this a lot quicker. Not that it was easy, just that I didn’t get home from work and immediately want to lie down and not move for twelve hours. I hate the fact that I’m going to be forced to admit that I’m an adult sooner rather than later. I can hide the gray in my hair but I can’t hide the fact that closing time is getting harder and harder to reach. I read somewhere this week that at 35 you realize that you have become the person you are going to be for the rest of your life. I’m ten months away from turning 35 and that scares the hell out of me. I still need to evolve.

And with that, enjoy the weekend everyone. At least Notre Dame is guaranteed not to lose this time.

When You Wake Up Feeling Old...

So I turned 34 today.

Sigh.

Let’s see, when they were my age Kurt Cobain had been dead for seven years, Jeff Buckley for three and Christopher Marlowe for five. F. Scott Fitzgerald had already published “This Side of Paradise” and “The Great Gatsby” while Hemmingway had completed “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell To Arms”. Hell, Sheryl Crow had recorded “All I Wanna Do” and Joan Osborne had convinced everyone that “One of Us” was a good song. Makes me wonder what the hell I am doing with my life.

I have to admit that I have a rather ambivalent view towards my birthday. It’s just never been this big day of celebration for me. Part of that is due to the fact that an early September birthday is kind of sucky when you are a kid. Your birthday means that school is starting so you have nine months of learning new things accompanied by nine months of ridicule and insults because you happen to find learning new things interesting. That always put a damper on birthday celebrations and it still filters through to today. Of course now it is more of realizing that I am hundreds of miles away from my family and late at night I find myself wondering if I have more friends in Mexico City than Kansas City. So you can pretty much assume that I haven’t broken out the balloons and streamers tonight.

I know that it is weird and maudlin but this is the way I get on my birthday. I sit and look at my life and wonder what the hell am I doing here. I mean, my senior year of high school is now literally half a lifetime ago yet I still myself wondering about those days and having nightmares about not having finished a Physics assignment. College was more than a decade ago, I haven’t worked as an engineer for six years, yet I still can’t tell you where any of those years went. In “Kitchen Confidential” Anthony Bourdain wrote about his ice cream truck theory. The idea being if you happened to get run over by an ice cream truck what would your last thought be as the pleasant jingle rang in your ears. He wanted it to always be “I sure had a lot of fun”. I’ve been wondering a lot about what mine would be.

I’ve accomplished a lot in 34 years. I’ve collected a lot of pieces of paper that say I’m smart. I’ve made some great friends and hope that I’ve lived my life by my only rule, leave the world a better place than you found it. I have yet to force any company I’ve worked for into bankruptcy and have, on occasion, helped board members to large bonuses. I’ve built an eclectic and schizophrenic resume but one that looks mighty impressive. Whether any of this means anything is debatable. The fact that I haven’t exactly focused on maximizing my enjoyment in life really isn’t.

It’s strange, I was thinking the other day that there is very little I require in life. I’m not a heavy baggage / high maintenance type of guy. Give me some good books, some good music and halfway decent conversation and I’m good to go. If I could ever find a girl who liked me and could also tell me ten things I don’t already know I’d probably follow her to the ends of the earth. But what really drives me is the fact that there are things that I don’t know and haven’t learned. A friend of mine emailed me last week recommending that since I love music so much I should take voice lessons and learn to sing. I could add that to the list of things I want to accomplish except that there are two out there that I promised to do before turning 35. One is write my novel. The other is get married. I’ll get one of them done at least.

Before anyone starts getting really worried I still feel that I’m living a pretty awesome life. A year ago today I was on a plane flying to London for business and got to hang out drinking Guinness across from the British Museum. There are a lot of times I look at my life and wonder how I pulled all of this off. But there are a lot of things missing, too. And a few years ago I could just think “Don’t worry, I’ll do that later.” Now I’m in my mid-thirties. Later has basically arrived. And I really have no clue what my next step is going to be or what I have to do to turn my life into what I feel that it should be. Coming from a guy whose entire life has been built by knowing exactly what to do in every situation this is not a fun feeling.

A verse, then a verse, and refrain

“Today’s the fourth of July / Another June has gone by / And when they light up our town I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.” Aimee Mann

This is a strange holiday for me and not for any of the usual reasons. This isn’t going to be a post about patriotism or how any product can be sold better by incorporating a picture of Abraham Lincoln or even how somehow celebrating freedom has become equated to getting drunk and blowing stuff up. Heck, I can’t even say that I did any celebrating today. I spent all day doing laundry, cleaning my apartment and basically getting my life in order. And there is a reason why I did that over any other possibilities today.

See, as of today I am two months away from turning thirty four. That doesn’t sound like much as thirty four isn’t one of those momentous birthdays. Heck, when I was in New Orleans a few weeks ago someone asked me my age and I instinctively answered thirty four even though I knew it was wrong. I feel that old. When each haircut is met by more and more gray hairs on the floor you begin to realize that you are of a certain age. And that is why I’ve been sitting around doing some serious pondering the past few weeks.

A few people know about this but others don’t but if you searched my wallet hidden amongst my business cards and insurance cards and student ID’s for schools I haven’t attended in a decade you’ll find three note cards. Four years ago I wrote all of my goals on these cards and put them in my wallet so I would know that if I ever needed to figure out what I was meant to be doing all I would have to do is look. Some goals I’ve accomplished, others are at least planned (I’ll write my novel in November as part of National Novel Writers Month) but there is one that is just sitting there and hanging over everything. And that’s the goal to be married by the time I turn 35.

Barring a major change of events that is not going to happen. I mean, it is still possible and thanks to Vegas it probably is not an impossibility until roughly 11:53 P.M. the night before my birthday but let’s face it, the odds are not in my favor. Now part of me doesn’t want to make a big deal about this. I like being single and being able to do whatever it is that I want to do. I’m beholden to no one and live the life that I find suits me. But the thing is, recently I’ve been really longing for a life that includes a wife, a house and a dog.

(Technically, I could just buy a house and get a dog but stay with me here. Hell, thanks to mail order and eBay I could probably accomplish all three using PayPal but I’d like to do a few things the old fashioned way.)

A few years ago I was pretty adamant about not wanting the house, the wife and the dog. It’s why I live where I live. If I lived by my office it was almost as if I was admitting that I was settled into middle age and I was nowhere near that point. I still don’t think I’m at that point but recently things have been changing. I’ve slowly gotten sick of renting or at least sick of having neighbors who really enjoy testing the bass on their stereo system. The concept of a yard has gone from something that is completely frivolous to something that I think I would possibly enjoy even if it meant paying a neighbor kid to mow it. And you know, part of me is just saying that maybe it is just time to start settling down. Life can’t always consist of Voltron DVDs.

What does all of this mean? I’m really not sure. I’m not the first person to get old or the first person to wake up and wonder just what in the world is he supposed to be doing with his life. It’s just that I am so used to setting five year goals and reaching them effortlessly that the thought of missing one leaves me flummoxed. Life isn’t going entirely according to plan anymore. That’s probably normal to everyone else but to me it’s shocking especially given that I was certain that my equations were correct.

So that’s why I spent the day cleaning and organizing my apartment as opposed to going out and celebrating or doing whatever it is that people do today. Because the only way I can go forward is by making sure that I have everything together before I start. It might not make sense but it’s the way that I work. A clean apartment means that my life is together and everything will fall into place. I’m pretty sure my life is looking at some major changes soon. Growing old and changing all at the same time. It’s a recipe for brilliance or disaster but definitely a novel.

The promise of youth and the truth of near middle age

Just in case I wasn’t feeling inadequate enough, I read today that a fifteen year old in India performed a caesarean section in order to become the youngest surgeon ever. Yep, I’m more than twice this kids age and the highlight of my day was looking up biographies of pro wrestling referees on Wikipedia. We’re nearing the point where I feel ashamed to share a room with a plant. At least the plant provides oxygen.

(On the other hand, what do you think the woman thought about this surgery? Would you want to have a fifteen year old as your OB/GYN? Though in some way that might be every fifteen year old boys dream. Well, that dream world where every woman is a supermodel at least. Still, would you trust your pregnancy to Doogie Howser?)

It’s been strange that in the past few months it has really begun to dawn on me that I am no longer the child prodigy that I once was. I know I’ve written about this before but for some reason I always view myself as a sixteen year old kid, someone with a lot of potential and a seemingly endless amount of time in front of him. Even with my gray hair I still thought that I’m just this punk kid making a name for himself in the world. Except that now I look around and realize that I’ve been working for a decade and have consistently slouched my way towards middle management. Even I can’t view myself as the young hotshot anymore.

That’s a real challenge. I know part of this is just growing up and admitting that I am now an adult, which is something that someone in his mid-30’s should probably not have an issue with, but it is a real change in my world view. I’ve always taken a me against the world view of life. I liked being the underdog, the guy with something to prove. It fed into my belief that while I might not ever be able to outsmart anyone I could always outwork everyone. But now it just feels different. You can’t stay intense all the time when you are my age. People look at you funny and say things like “He’s really bitter.”

So instead I’ve somehow come to the conclusion that it is best to view the world in a manner of befuddled amusement. I’m now the grizzled old-timer who knows that this isn’t his first rodeo and can just sit back and point to other’s mistakes. I’m not really happy with this change as it seems that I’ve given up on life before it has ever really started. It’s just that I still haven’t come to grips with being an adult. Part of me still wants to go back to a simpler time and just live life without a concern about how this is going to impact my career or my investment portfolio.

When I was in high school I remember telling someone who told me that this was the best time of your life, “Dear God, I hope not.” Partly that is just my usual bitterness at high school and not being one of the cool kids (I was the guy who gave the cool kids answers on the test.) But really it was because I didn’t want my life to peak when I was 16. I also don’t want my life to have peaked when I was 29 either but right now that seems to be the case. It isn’t going to be, I just need to find that next huge challenge and adventure. There’s still a place for me out there where I’ll be the new kid on the block who changes everything. I still have that hope.

Have a great weekend everyone. Two features for next week: CDs you don’t own but should and The Top 10 CDs of the Aughts. Or whatever the hell we are calling this decade.