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.

My Life as a Sitcom

I dreamt that I was in college again last week. I know, I know, there is nothing less interesting than reading about someone else’s dreams but stay with me here. There were a couple of aspects that probably give you every insight into my psyche that you will ever need to know.

1) I was heading back to my dorm room with my roommate to drop off some books and then head to the cafeteria for lunch. This was my standard protocol back in the day.

2) Once I get to the room I realize that I have not finished my lab report writeup for that afternoon’s class so instead of having lunch I was going to have to quickly try to finish it before class and skip lunch. This is more stressful than my life usually was and is probably a sign of one thing or another.

3) While realizing that I hadn’t finished the lab writeup I also realized that this is the same class that has appeared in multiple other dreams where I had attended the first day of class, which was ended early without any experiments, and then missed classes for the rest of the semester without realizing that I hadn’t dropped the class. This is my usual stress dream of the class that I forgot that I was taking. On one hand I was unnerved to realize that I only have this dream when I am stressed out of my mind. On the other hand at least I could rest assured that I had at least started trying to make it to class again.

4) My roommate was Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory.

5) My dorm room was surprisingly clean. I mean, my desk was immaculate with everything neatly stacked and no stray papers floating around. I could only dream of having a desk that clean and I guess that I apparently did.

6) Yeah, I guess I should explain point number four in greater detail.

Yes, I dreamt that I was sharing a college dorm room with Sheldon and that did not shock me in the least. I mean when I woke up it seemed perfectly logical that he would be my roommate and I was much more upset that I had waited to the last minute to finish a report and that I had missed months worth of classes and would probably fail as a result. The fact that my roommate was a) the embodiment of modern geekiness and b) fictional seemed par for the course. Which, given my experience in college, makes a lot of sense.

Being an engineering major makes for a very odd college experience. I saw somewhere online where they said that the average engineering student spends 20 hours a week on homework and my first thought was “only twenty?” I remember one four question assignment taking a team of ten of us twelve hours to complete and we still only got two of the questions right. I remember being in the EE building at 12:30 at night and not leaving because the bars closed at 1 and I didn’t want to walk past everyone leaving the bars while carrying my backpack. I don’t even think people would have made fun of me; it was just that the act of walking back to my dorm past people who had a much better night than I did was too depressing to expose myself to. As a result you end up with this strange, insular group of friends and, well, the Big Bang Theory becomes surprisingly accurate. Luckily I ended up with Penny.

Second star to the left

Ok, time to discuss some astronomy, logic and something that is either extremely interesting or depressing depending on your point of view.


We know that there are billions and billions of stars in our visible universe alone. We have found evidence of planets around stars so we can easily assume that there are billions of planets out there. Given that in our solar system we have intelligent life on one of the eight planets (Pluto isn’t a planet, sorry) and since there is nothing to indicate that we are in any way unique in the nearly infinite universe then we should expect that there is life all around us in the universe. Given that the universe is billions of years old then numerous planets should have resulted in intelligent civilizations who have achieved space travel and are exploring the universe. Except that we see no evidence of this at all leading to the question “Where the hell is everybody?”

(This is called Fermi’s Paradox as Enrico Fermi was the one who first brought this point up. It also ties in Drake’s Equation, which tries to determine the likelihood of life in the universe, and the Copernican Principle, which states that we aren’t special in the least. Why I know these things and why Kim has to constantly say “Well he’s kind of like Sheldon” when describing me are probably related.)

So here is what all of this probably means. If civilization’s natural endpoint would be massive space traveling cultures like in Star Trek or Star Wars complete with laser beams and Ewoks and the planet Endor being crushed under the debris of an exploding Death Star then the evidence of that should be easy to find. Since there isn’t though then it would seem that we never reach that point (and by we I mean intelligent civilizations across the entire history of the universe.) Or it’s because those civilizations realize that they don’t want to make anyone know where they are so they don’t broadcast themselves. Or they’ve visited us and just decided to drive on the way you do when you get off a highway exit to get some food and take one look at the McDonald’s parking lot and figure you would rather try again ten miles down the road. Or we are living inside a hologram so there is no other life because they just didn’t bother to program that bit. Though that leads to the question of who they are.

Why is this on my mind? Well, partly because I came across this on Wikipedia so I got sidetracked reading about it but mainly because we spend so much of our time thinking about the narrow piece of space and time that we inhabit. Most of the time we probably only think about the few miles we cover in a given day. We can’t really grasp just how vast and full of stuff is really out there. Sometimes it is useful to be amazed by just what is out there just outside our grasp.

Virtual Homeroom

Given that I have been on Facebook for probably five years now it is pretty amazing to see how it has impacted my life. To be honest I am not a very active user. Sure when I started I took full advantage of Facebook chat and games of Scrabulous (which was Words with Friends for people who lacked words or, uh, friends) and would regularly update my status. Now, other than the occasional status containing a really bad pun I now am more of a Facebook lurker than anything else. Kim still feels I waste too much time on it but there is an aspect to it that I find fascinating. Facebook has resulted in everyone having a Virtual Homeroom.


Look at your Facebook friends and see how many of them are from grade school or high school. Given that I switched grade schools when I was ten I literally have Facebook friends who I have not seen or spoken to in thirty years yet I get regular updates on their life. Every morning I check the news feed and I listen to the background chatter of people who I knew but don’t really know. To be honest this is exactly what high school was like for me. I knew everyone in the room but I’m not sure if I really had a clue what any of them were about.

Yet homeroom in high school plays a huge role in your life and I swear to this day that I have dreams relating to high school and homeroom. It was where you heard the daily gossip and complaints and news of the day. Nothing really happened but you saw the cliques form and alliances dissolve and friendships and relationships morph daily. It was a place where a group of people gathered for fifteen minutes a day for no reason other than circumstance brought them together.

When I first started thinking about this I started to wonder if it would be good if you had homeroom throughout your entire life. Imagine every workday you met in a room with people, some of whom you would never see again that day, and hear the daily announcements and get the updates on the day. I guess we would now host it in a Starbucks as I couldn’t see surviving that atmosphere without coffee but I started to envision what it would be like to just have that daily gathering. Over time as people moved about they would switch homerooms and others would join in just like when you had the new kid in school. The daily drama of homeroom would play out throughout adulthood. I still don’t know if that would be a good thing or not.

But the more I thought about it the more I realized that is entirely what Facebook is. There is no substance there. You can state your political opinions or your theoretically funny shared greeting cards or spam game requests but for the most part none of it actually matters. It is just a spattering of gossip and clans and complaints about life. It really is the same as homeroom and it is now permanent. You can’t escape the people you happened to meet when you were nine years old. They now follow you for the rest of your life. It scares me as to how this will affect kids today. I know I spent a good portion of high school wanting to just get beyond this incredibly awkward point of my life. Now you never get to leave.

Wednesday Night Music Club: I am not sure which of the old blog standards are going to survive into this new format but this one probably will. Besides, I would have to share this performance by Beth Orton with everyone anyway. This is her song Magpie off of her latest album (CD? iTunes release? What the hell do we call new music now?) When I first saw this I was just floored. Something about repeating the line “What a lie looks like” with that slightly flawed voice of hers just stopped me in my tracks.

Well, at least we scored 14 points...

My thoughts on last night’s game and a few other things that are floating around my head at the moment…




1) The irony is not lost on me that at one point during the night I switched from the game to watch The Biggest Loser again. Though it is always fun to watch Jillian Michaels swear at overweight people and then act shocked when those same people somehow are not encouraged to lose weight.

2) I had hope for the Irish last night and at least thought that they could keep the game close but they just could not hang with Alabama. My hope was that the game would start like the Oklahoma game where Alabama would put up big drives but get forced into field goals and then ND would get a big play to flip the game around. Instead they just could not make a stop all night and stood no chance at all. I will agree with a few other commentators though, I am not sure if there were many college teams that could have put up a good fight last night.

3) I would say that the biggest problem Notre Dame had was the long break between games. The Irish had been playing on emotion all season and had played well beyond what people had expected. When a team like that faces a long layoff that cohesiveness and spirit falls away and they just come out flat. On the other hand, Bama just rested up and healed and got back on track. Big difference.

4) Flying out of Florida this morning to Chicago I saw a lot of sad looking people in Notre Dame gear and this is from an airport several hours drive away from Miami. What I will say about that is that it must have been an amazing atmosphere there before the game if that is a sign as to how many ND fans traveled to the game. I knew several people who went and Kim and I were debating it over the past few weeks. I bet it was a good time no matter what the outcome.

5) For those wondering, that makes my alma maters 0 for 2 in title games in major sports (and screw you Sean May). I guess I should just be happy that my schools can occasionally compete at that level especially given that I am an Illini. One day we will have a football program in Champaign.

6) My one pop culture note for the night: I really hope that Taylor Swift’s next single is called “I apparently have long unresolved commitment issues.”

Once in a Lifetime

I can’t take credit for the following, as I heard the sentiment voiced on a Chris Hardwick podcast, but I can agree completely. Every year that passes causes the song “Once in a Lifetime” to make a hell of a lot more sense than it did the year before.

Let’s start by putting things in perspective. The song came out in 1981 when I was eight and if I remember correctly we got cable in 1982 or 1983 so I would have been nine or ten when I first saw the video. And what would that video mean to me as a kid? Well, it was bizarre enough to make me laugh. Here is a skinny guy with glasses in a suit, sweating like mad, just flailing about and periodically making chopping motions on his arm. Absolutely nothing made sense, David Byrne bounces in and out of frame, and throughout all this time there is this amazing back beat while David wonders “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.” At ten, I found this to be unbelievably cool and, sad to say, probably had already realized that I would grow up to look, sweat and dance pretty much exactly like David Byrne does in this video.

“You may ask yourself: Well? How did I get here?”

I’m turning forty this year. This is not unusual. Everyone born in 1973 will experience this same phenomenon this year so I can’t act as if this is some type of great insight but it really is hitting me. And to be honest, I have no idea how I got here. I do have a beautiful house with a beautiful wife. And I find myself behind the wheel of a…Ford Taurus, which is a very respectable automobile if I can say so myself. For the longest time I would never have dreamed to be in this position when I turned forty. Sometimes I still can’t believe it.

“You may ask yourself: How do I work this?”

The fact is getting older hasn’t made me feel as though I am more of an adult even though clearly I am. I still have dreams about high school and college and like apparently every other male my age we just can’t seem to grow up. I own a full collection of Voltron DVDs. I am still searching for a good collection of the full series of the Monkees and have gotten into serious debates as to why they need to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Half the time I look around clueless and the other half I pretend that I actually know what I am doing. It works, somehow, yet the older I get the more baffled by the world I seem to become. That sense of self-righteousness disappears as the gray hair makes it first appearance.

“You may ask yourself: Am I right? Am I wrong?”

I’ve basically stopped writing for the past few years after literally writing a novel a year for over a decade. (Well, more like I wrote more than 60,000 words a year with absolutely no connection between them other than I was the one typing.) It was probably a big mistake as writing is my main release of thoughts and ideas and tension and all of those other things. But the reason my writing output slowed was because I actually had a life. Kim and I started dating and got engaged and got married and I had to go through this process of changing from I to We which is still a challenge that I haven’t quite mastered. While it is great to know that my personal life and my career have far surpassed what I have ever hoped for it just seems wrong to not sit down and write and give my view of the world.

“Time isn’t holding us; Time isn’t after us.”

So I guess I will be back in the blogging biz if I can hold to my New Year’s Resolution. I have no idea what is ahead of me, or where in my day I am going to find the time to sit down with a laptop and just see where the words take me. Like the Mayans, I didn’t expect to get here. But the journey is always fun.

I’ll end with a quote that my favorite writer, Jonathan Carroll, posted to Facebook this week that has sat on my mind the way most of his quotes do. “Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”

Taking stock of yourself

I turned 39 today, which is I guess as close to officially being middle aged as one can get. Or at least most of my body is middle aged. My kidneys and liver are probably closer to retirement and my appendix is looking around nervously like Old Yeller and going “Nah, we don’t really need to go out back, do we?” Still, if there ever was a day to take an official reckoning of my life this is the day to do so. Here we go.

Height: Six foot one. Or so I still claim. The last couple of doctor’s visits have measured me more around six feet which means that either a) I even slouch at the doctor’s office, b) my poor posture has finally started causing back problems or c) the definition of an inch has been slightly changed from when I was twenty one. Outside of the concern of lower back problems (talk about entering middle age) the real reason this bothers me is if true I will no longer be able to say that Liz Phair wrote the following song about our failed relationship in the early 90s…


(Look, in the early 90’s we thought this sounded good. It was a weird decade.)

Weight: 185.4 pounds! That is a BMI of 24.4, which puts me in the normal weight range and slimmer than 63% of the population. This may not sound like much but back when Kim and I started dating I weighed more in the range of 215 pounds and was horribly out of shape. Now I have at least improved my diet to the point where I have been able to keep the weight off and have a personal trainer who has helped build up my strength (though I have faded a bit in that the past few months).

5K Time (treadmill at 0.5 incline): 39 minutes, 10 seconds. Yeah, that sucks. I’ve been trying to beat my age in a 5K and I can now almost do it but that is solely because I keep on getting older. One of my goals for the year is to really build up my speed and cardio and knock a couple of minutes off of this time. I don’t know if it is realistic for me to break 30 minutes given my history of leg injuries but I would love to get a lot closer to it.

Work: I now have a cubicle with a door on it. After 15 years of work, two years of grad school, and numerous times of staring up at the fluorescent lights while seeing grey walls around me I have finally advanced to the world of having my own door. And a massive whiteboard! Honestly, that might be the greatest thing that I have ever had. I can spend all day drawing up ideas, building lists and just jotting down ideas. Of course, they are making me move in a few weeks so it will probably go away and I will now be in a cubicle that sits above a bowling alley and below another bowling alley but such is life.

Personal: I think I have finally entered adulthood. Kim and I have been married for 17 months (take that Kim Kardashian) and while it hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world we work well together. The fact that I am always on the road makes things really challenging but we work through it. We just bought a new house, marking my first personal entry in the wonderful world of home ownership where I get to say things like “what does escrow mean” and “does the house really need gutters” and “instead of paint couldn’t we just put up a half dozen neon beer signs?” Again, the fact that I am with Kim makes me the luckiest man alive. There are times where I can barely deal with me and I’m me.

Writing: Yeah, this has been the biggest challenge. I just have not been able to get back into the swing of things writing wise but I want to give it one more try. I just miss sitting down and writing and talking about whatever is on my mind and having that outlet. It really is a time management issue. Marriage, work, travel, keeping up the house, exercise, keeping up the house, everything takes time. Sadly, I still waste a hell of a lot of time surfing the net and reading pro wrestling websites. I just have to prioritize and do what is important. So I will try to get back into the blogging game. Once more into the breach my friends, once more.

The Case for Ted and Victoria

Thanks to Google providing some advanced statistics I can now tell precisely which of my posts bring the most traffic (as well as the search terms that bring people to my blog. According to them I am apparently the go to website for any and all information on Strawberry Shortcake’s antagonists.) Anyway, it seems that people were really interested in my thoughts on Ted and Victoria on How I Met Your Mother so tonight I am going to break down just why the two of them should be together.


1) Chemistry: It is pretty amazing that in a show where the theoretical focus is on how Ted meets the mother of his children he seemingly dates women where there seems to be no connection between the two. I never understood the whole Stella storyline where other than the one minute date they never even felt like a couple. I wasn’t really upset when he was left at the altar because I didn’t think they should be together. The less said about the entire Zoey storyline the better and after that we pretty much go into random guest star category. Even the Slutty Pumpkin wasn’t a good choice. In the entire history of the show there are only two women who Ted has dated who any reasonable observer would say is a good fit and one of those is Robin, who isn’t a good match for a few paragraphs worth of reasons.

However, the chemistry between him and Victoria has always been amazing. I don’t think there ever was a scene with the two of them in it that wasn’t awesome. To the point that I wonder why Ashley Williams does not get more work on television because she certainly seems like a great actress. The fact that for years that whenever anyone would post a poll on who should be the mother she would always win, even when she hadn’t been on the show for years. That means an awful lot.

2) Destiny: In a sense, the entire show is about destiny and how certain things are meant to be and that the universe will just force events to happen. So much of the show has been about how things just happen and this would fit that perfectly. Now this isn’t destiny in the sense that there is only one person who is a match for someone, which even I don’t believe. It is more that there are certain people in this world that you just connect with and you can come together again and again and it just feels right no matter how much time has elapsed in between. It just makes sense for the two of them to be together.

3) Reference to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset: Ok, if you did not immediately think of the last moments of Before Sunset at the end of this episode that can only mean that you have never watched Before Sunset (which you should immediately do but only after watching Before Sunrise because if you haven’t seen one you probably haven’t seen the other.) I am a sucker for any relationship that can parallel Jesse and Celine.

4) Personal Bias: Given that I happened to marry someone who I had originally met years ago, someone who I felt was my perfect match then but was unable to connect with due to timing and geography and being at different points in our lives, I really would like to see Ted and Victoria work out. If you go back to my posts in 2004 and 2005 you can see me complaining that they were stealing stories of my life for episodes of the show. I still state that the “Red Dragon” shots were plagiarism of the highest level. But this means that I have a personal interest in Ted and Victoria making this work.

5) Victoria doesn’t have to be the mother: One of the main arguments against Victoria is one of plotting. She can’t be the mother because we had already met her and then the storylines would make no sense. My workaround of this, and I am not sure if there is anything in the How I Met Your Mother canon that would make this impossible, is that while Ted is talking about how he met their mother he may be talking about their biological mother and not the woman who is raising them. This would allow for a bit of wiggle room without causing the entire logic of the show fall apart. (For those wondering, the favorite as to who the Mother actually is right now is Barney’s half sister. Who we have never actually seen.) Also, they could always just say that we are constantly meeting the same person anew with the last time being when he knew she would be their mother. That would get around the issue completely.

Now I will have to address the whole taking Victoria away from the wedding issue. Yes, that is a douche move but we are talking about Ted here. The guy has been a douche for nearly a decade now. Yes, it is horrible to leave someone at the altar and Ted knows that first hand. But this isn’t a case of him showing up at the church and yelling “I object!” and then storming to the front and sweeping her up in his arms. As crappy as this is, sometimes in life you make a selfish decision because it works out best for you. If what is best for you turns out to be finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with maybe you can get away with being selfish. Maybe this is me showing my romantic side over my practical side. I just think Ted and Victoria belong together.

Let's go for a well documented walk

I have to say that I am extremely happy to see people commenting on the blog again. Thanks for reading and trust me, I appreciate everything that people say. This is still a bit of a work in progress as I try to get back into the groove of writing so things may not be at their best at all times but I will keep on working at it. Also, as you can tell from this week my current schedule just does not work very well with my old Sunday through Thursday posting routine so while I am still going to aim to post five nights a week I can’t guarantee just which nights those will be. Basically I write whenever I can sneak in the 20 or 30 minutes of time that this requires and until I either get a longer day or, preferably, a helper monkey things will have to be on an as it happens basis.


Speaking of trying to find time I decided to look at one aspect of my personal fitness that I had been ignoring. After reading A. J. Jacobs’ “Drop Dead Healthy”, in which he examines in detail a ton of fitness trends, I decided to look into this idea that you should walk 10,000 steps a day. After the debacle of buying three separate sound machines at least this time I found a free iPhone app before buying a pedometer at Target. After tracking my steps for a few days I’ve found out a few interesting facts.

On a daily basis I walk a little over 3,000 steps. Most of those are to and from my car in the parking lot and the only reason that I walk that many is that I tend to come to work later than most people so I end up with a parking space farther away from the door. Other than that my walking at work is confined to getting printouts and coffee (and I am requesting a helper monkey to take care of the latter.) One day at lunch I just decided to walk around for 20 minutes in which I walked a mile and took around 2,000 steps. All of this means is that there is no way in hell I could walk 10,000 steps in a day.

Think about it. That is a recommendation to walk five miles a day. Outside of specifically scheduling time on the treadmill there really is no practical way for me to achieve that amount of walking. It is not a question of ability. I’ve done four to five miles on a treadmill on a number of occasions. It is just that my current daily habits do not allow for anywhere near that much activity. I’m not sure I know of anyone, particularly anyone who works in an office job outside of a major city, that would naturally walk that much.

When I worked in downtown Chicago and took the train to work I wouldn’t be surprised if I walked that much. Certainly when I was in college and had to go back and forth to a number of buildings throughout the day that was the case. But now I find myself in a career path where getting up out of my chair is almost a rare occurrence. It really does say something about our current society where getting up and moving is considered rare. I’ve thought about walking to Subway or Starbucks when I work from home and I wonder what people would think about a guy walking a mile instead of driving.

Anyone have any advice on how to be more active in this regard? Outside of spending my lunch hour walking around the parking lot I’m not sure what to do. I mean, I did an hour workout in the morning so how much more activity should I do?

Wednesday Night Music Club: Not sure why but I’m kind of in the mood for Old Crow Medicine Show tonight. One of those bands that if you told me twenty years ago that this would be my favorite type of music I would have thought that you were insane. That said, twenty years ago I thought Sting was cool so what the hell do I know.

Ted and Victoria, together thank God

I admit that I only saw the second half of How I Met Your Mother and that we have been told on more than one occasion that Victoria is not the mother but if you didn’t feel a tug at your heart when Ted and Victoria drove off into the sunset then you have no soul. From the first season I’ve felt that Victoria was the absolute perfect match for Ted and given the fact that Ted always is referring to the Mother and not his wife I am hoping that they end up together with the kids being someone else’s. If not, as someone who did end up marrying the one who got away at least my televised doppleganger has been able to experience the same moment that I did.


Plus we always knew that Barney and Robin were going to end up together. Just a matter of time and a few magic tricks.

I will have to say though that since I am constantly on the road I have really fallen behind on my television habits. Guess that one can’t consider that to be a bad thing but it certainly is odd when you end up following shows by reading reviews online as opposed to actually reading them. I probably saw most of How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory though I know that I missed episodes here and there. I watched most of Awake which only meant that when NBC decided to cancel it that I could feel as though I had completely wasted my time. I’ve fallen out of most reality shows other than occasionally watching The Biggest Loser on the hope that one day it will be a show that actually inspires you to lose weight as opposed to deciding that every single contestant on the show is a horrible human being. (They walked off the show this year because it wasn’t fair. Yes, a show about weight loss is unfair. I have yet to figure that one out.) Luckily there are always episodes of Hoarders to catch up on and to inspire me to clean the garage.

Can't tell where you are without a scorecard

I know that I have mentioned it before but the degree to which my life has changed over the past few years is really amazing. When I started this blog my daily routine was wake up, realize that I am living in Kansas City, shake fist at sky, go to work, and either a) go home and surf the net, b) play trivia in a bar or c) watch an unheralded alternative country band with the same fifty people who saw a different unheralded alternative country act the week before. On weekends you could add sit on the corner barstool at Harry’s and drink Boulevard Wheat beer while simultaneously wondering why I was gaining weight. Compare this to my schedule the past few days.


Tuesday: Wake up, take the dogs out, spend some time with the wife and then drive from Fort Myers to Orlando. Attend a conference in which I spend four hours in a windowless conference room discussing minute details of economic modeling software and find it to be a great use of my time and never once think about how Universal Studios is just down the street. Afterwards feel slightly guilty about that fact. Then dinner, call home, write a blog post and fall asleep.

Wednesday: Wake up at four in the morning. Drive to the Orlando airport to catch a 6 AM flight to Chicago. Work on the plane. Head downtown and give a presentation. After lunch try to sort through my emails before heading back to the airport only to discover that my flight has been delayed by an hour and a half. Curse the fact that my resolution to use Weight Watchers and eat better means that I can’t get an Italian Beef sandwich for dinner. Fly back to Orlando, write a blog post on the plane, do some reading and try to relax. Then back to the hotel where people were blowing those vevuzulas from the last World Cup outside my window until midnight. Wearily shake fist at sky as a result.

Thursday: Wake up. Wobble over to the shower and get ready for attending a conference. Grab coffee and remember fondly the days that all I would drink is decaf while accepting the fact that to make it through the day I will essentially be shaking in my chair for most of the morning and then fight off a headache in the afternoon. Spend eight hours discussing minute details of economic modeling and still find that I would rather do that than head over and say hello to Mickey. Drive back home to Fort Myers to Kim and the dogs and not be able to think of a place in the world I would rather be.

I can’t say that it is always like this and the travel schedule can sometimes be a killer but I am in such a better place now it is amazing. I can’t explain how I got from here to there but it has been one hell of a trip.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Here is how tired I was yesterday. I forgot to post a music video. I am going with Kathleen Edwards tonight as she is one of those alternative country acts that I knew before she was referred to as Bon Iver’s girlfriend. Sunday night I will talk about Bon Iver and being an indie rock hipster.

Kids today don't know how it used to be

I was thinking recently about all of the things that I experienced as a teenager that no teenager today will ever experience. I started to keep a mental list. (Not a mentalist, though. It is probably illegal to keep one of those on the premises solely on the basis of helping me to remember where my mind was yesterday.) Here is what I have come up with so far.


• Watch television on a black and white set

• Change a channel without using a remote

• Change a channel using a pair of pliers because the knob had fallen off of the TV set and you were forced to improvise

• Listen to the audio of the Playboy network while hoping that the scrambled signal may momentarily give you a glimpse of what might potentially be a body part.

• Be able to record only one thing at a time

• Having to run out to Walgreens to buy a VHS tape

• Keeping a VHS tape ready at all times while watching MTV in an attempt to record your favorite videos

• Enjoy an hour flipping through the racks at a record store

• Hanging out at a record store at midnight on a Monday night in order to be one of the first people to buy a new release

• Making an actual mix tape

• Recording a song off the radio or TV by holding a cassette player up to the speaker and hitting record

• Write a letter and send it in the mail

• Be able to fully spell the word “you” in a sentence

• Diagnose computer problems by listening to modem noise

• Create a DOS boot disk

• Spend time on an internet newsgroup (though I believe that Usenet still exists in one form or another)

• Sit in the front seat of a car before being called a tween

• Walk to the store by yourself

• Walking through the aisles of a video store looking for something to catch your eye

• Experiencing the indescribable emotions associated with entering the “back room” of a video store

• Dial a rotary phone

• Use a pay phone

• Experience a time where it was not possible to be in constant contact with everyone you know

• Not having your life automatically documented and spread with the entire planet for all eternity whether you wish for it to happen or not. (High school must be horrible now. I mean, I see high school cliques on Facebook and I am twenty years removed from high school.)

• Watch Australian Rules Football on ESPN because that is the only sport available to watch across any media

• Spend a lazy morning watching five hours of game shows. I don’t even think you could do this now if you watched the Game Show Network.

• Grab a newspaper in the morning to read Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, Peanuts and a host of other incredible comic strips. That is an entire literary format that has essentially disappeared in my lifetime

• Attend a concert without trying to simultaneously record it or dealing with a dozen people around you who have decided to watch a concert through their phone



That is my starting list. I’ll keep on adding to this as the weeks go on.

How we remember

I heard an interesting theory a few weeks ago that I want to share here. In my own experience I find it to be true and if it is then we should probably rethink how we teach our kids. The idea is this: when you are in your early teens you have the largest amount of brain cells that you will ever have. It is not just your brain cells are dying when you are old or when you drink them to oblivion. They are already dying when you are in high school. As a result you have the most retention and most vivid understanding of what you are interested in those years. At every point after that learning and retaining new information grows more and more difficult.


I’ve certainly have found this to be the case with me, especially in what I would consider absolutely trivial subjects. I can probably discuss the world of professional wrestling in the late 80’s to a degree of detail that is staggering. I think I can even recall entire cards of Saturday Nights Main Event. I could probably recall entire brackets of the NCAA tournament from that time. I can tell you every detail in the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories and don’t even get me started on Monty Python sketches. All of this is still in my head today though if you asked me about details regarding the last book I read or the last movie I’ve seen I would probably struggle greatly.

This might also explain why no matter how old I seem to get I still get drawn back into high school mode. I know that since the rise of Facebook there has been this massive rise in relationships ending due to people hooking up with old high school flames that they find online. Maybe it is because those moments occur when our minds are at their most fertile that they take on a much greater importance than they really deserve. Those memories are vivid decades later so we interpret that as being an indication of their worth. We end up being bogged down by these memories that our brains hold on to until the end.

Where I really think this is important is in education, though. I was lucky enough to be a studious kid which while not the best for me socially had me studying a lot of varied subjects at a time where that data would stick in my mind. Studying math and science as a kid made becoming an engineer a much easier task. My interest in history and literature at the time gave me a foundation in those subjects that stays with me. Somehow we have to determine how to create an environment in which children are brought up to focus on the important subjects at a time when their minds seem to be everywhere else. That is a challenge.

From inside kid to gym rat

As I’ve been saying these past few nights, I am really coming to grips with the fact that I am growing older. There has been some positives that have come out of this. One is the fact that I am finally beginning to take care of myself for what is maybe the first time in my life. The results over the past year have been rather impressive.


I’ve been seeing a personal trainer for the past year. Well, actually several trainers as I had two of them quit on me within two months. That is rather discouraging especially given that it happened within my first few months of working out. It’s wonderful when the guy who is motivating you just looks at you and goes, “That’s it. I’m out of here.” But I did finally settle in with a trainer and have been working out with one for two to three days a week on average. This is pretty incredible given that I have barely ever lifted weights in my life. I’ve certainly been cautious about lifting after having spent enough time with an orthopedic surgeon to buy him a boat. I have to say though that I am seeing results.

Now admittedly these results are along the lines of approaching three digits on a bench press and being able to do multiple pushups without dying. But over the course of a year I have seen my strength increase and I swear that I have more muscle tone. What is most impressive to me is that certain exercises that I despised when I started working out have now become favorites. It is as if my muscles finally realized “Oh, this is how we are supposed to work in tandem.” Anytime I do a workout and think back to what my reaction would have been a year ago I am proud of myself. I still have a great distance to go but I have certainly improved.

I have made even bigger strides on the weight front. I maxed out weight wise at roughly 215, which doesn’t sound that bad given my height but it was all sitting in my belly and I looked bad. Between exercise, a focus on what I was actually eating, and admittedly using Weight Watchers I was able to get down to 180 pounds. I’ve slipped a bit over the past few months and gained a few pounds but I can say that I have been under 190 pounds for the first time since I’ve turned 30 at least. It also means that from a BMI standpoint I am no longer overweight. I never thought that I would be happy to have to donate clothes because they were too big. It has been a nice change of pace.
What I like most about this is that for the first time that I can ever remember I can actually start to think of myself in terms of being athletic. I was always one of those kids who was picked last for sports, which sucked given how much I loved sports and really wanted to be good at them but I just wasn’t. I’m still not a top athlete or anything and I never will be but the fact that I can go to the gym in the morning and push myself makes me feel that I have accomplished something. Especially given that my only opponent in this is myself. I’m not worrying about what anyone else in the gym is doing. I just want to make sure that I have pushed myself as hard as I can.

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.

Small scale immortality foiled

One of the wonderful things about the current state of the internet is the knowledge that, no matter how much you wish it wasn’t true, anything that has happened to you in the past is recorded for the rest of eternity. Once you accept this fact you can remove yourself from the embarrassment of the situation and realize that for the rest of your life you will never escape your past. Or, thanks Rug for posting this picture to Facebook a year ago and thus keeping this memory alive forever.


So, when I was at Illinois I lived in Newman Hall, which is kind of like living in a dorm at Notre Dame except without the football tradition or networking. Lots of rules, some followed some less so, but a pretty controlled environment for college. In fact, the main reason people lived in Newman was that it was the closest dorm to the campus. Think about the type of person who chooses where they live in college based on the fact that it makes it easier to go to class. Let’s just say it wasn’t the party dorm.

(Side note: While I did drink in college I in no way had the common experience. In a weird way, now that I am aware of the Straight Edge movement I wonder if I would have been drawn to it. It at least would have been a scene where not drinking was part of the reason behind it, along with arrogance, random violence and punk rock. To be honest, I have no idea if there even was a Straight Edge scene on campus.)

Anyway, Newman Hall had the benefit of being one of the older halls on campus and as a result it actually had history. Hugh Hefner lived there, a fact that I always felt was worthy of a memorial plaque or at least some free subscriptions. The main lounge had trophies dating back seemingly forever. One even had Dick Butkus’ name on it which is about as close to legendary as you could get. There was where I hatched a plan for immortality.

I knew that if I could get my name on a trophy in the case then I would be remembered on campus forever. Or at least have my name hidden somewhere. So, with a bunch of my friends I proposed a 3 on 3 basketball tournament with the winning team being added to one of the trophies. Given that I didn’t have the skill to actually add to the team as a player my main role was to a) pay the entry fee and b) show up wearing all my annoying Duke basketball gear in an attempt to enrage the opponents against someone who they technically aren’t playing against. Yes, I owned a Christian Laettner replica Duke jersey. Even I thought I should get punched in the face over it.

In the end we won the tournament and repeated the next year and yes, we had our names engraved on the trophy. When I was on campus I decided to make my way back to the dorm to see if my plan had worked. Got in, walked into the lounge, was stunned to see a couple of students there (again, gorgeous Saturday in April so let’s all stay in and study) and looked for the trophy. It was gone. They were all gone. They had decided to empty the cases and put a bunch of pictures in them.

What the hell?

That is the problem with getting older. Even your well designed plans to be remembered twenty years later can be taken away while you weren’t looking. All you have left are photos of you forty pounds lighter and with much less gray hair floating around the internet. At some point you come to the realization that the world will move on, with or without you.

Back to the old Alma Mater

Nothing makes you feel older than returning to your old college campus. I found this out a few weeks ago when I returned to the University of Illinois for the first time in well over a decade. Well, that is not entirely true. I was there for a few hours a year and a half ago with Kim but it was during finals week in December. No one should ever have to experience Champaign in December as everything is simply a different tinge of gray with students walking around stressed and wishing they were anywhere else. Ok, so that is a general description of Champaign at any time of the year but it is even worse in December.


But this time, through a bunch of circumstances that I might get into at some point, I had a few hours by myself on campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in April. Which let me do everything that I wanted to do on campus including realize why I should not be on a campus any more.

Kim usually doesn’t believe my college stories. Mainly because when I returned to campus and had a choice to visit anywhere I wanted my first choice, without any hesitation, was Everitt Lab: the home of Electrical Engineering. Most people would choose the bookstore or their dorm or a bar but no, I literally ran to room 245 where I spent some of the most challenging years of my life. I was thrilled to see that they still had actual blackboards and desks without computer hookups just like I did back in the day when it was just you, a calculator, a notebook, half a dozen pencils and a hope that maybe today would be the day a meteor would slam into the building. I went and checked out which of my professors were still teaching, stopped by the old office that I weaseled my way into my senior year and even stopped by my old lab.

Now I have to start by explaining what my old lab consisted of. The Power Lab is located in the basement of Everitt Lab and consists of motors, engines, a lot of complicated monitors and big red buttons labeled “Emergency”, which if you press turns off the electricity to the entire room. We were next to the fabrication lab, where students would be bathed in yellow light while wearing clean suits and building integrated circuits. We looked at them like they were aliens and they wondered why occasionally they would hear explosions from our lab. For the record, only once did part of a circuit I constructed end up embedded in the ceiling tiles.

Obviously labs should be locked on a Saturday but I walked down anyway and was stunned to find the door open. I walked in and saw probably a dozen students working away at the lab stations. It was possibly the geekiest thing I had ever seen. It was a beautiful day out, a Saturday in April of Mom’s Day weekend and here were these students laboring over their projects. My reaction was not to tell them, “Go outside! There is more to life than circuit designs.” No, I was holding myself back from offering to help. That was me twenty years ago. No question about it.

I could accept that I was older than the students in the lab. They were kids, of course, but at least they were still working in the same lab and probably doing the same projects that I worked on. And it was still the same building with the same professors. It was when I walked the campus that it really hit me. Not only were there new buildings but things like a Chick-Fil-A in the student union, the disappearance of nearly all the bars that I used to go to and the loss of all of the record stores that existed in Campustown. I spent hours every week in those stores and they were all gone. That hurt.

But here was when it really hit me. I went back to my old dorm. I walked in behind a student and her parents, looking like I was maybe some uncle who had latched on at the last second. I wasn’t going in to see a dorm room or anything. I needed to find a trophy in the student lounge. A very particular trophy that twenty years ago was my plan for immortality on campus. A trophy whose story will have to wait for tomorrow.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Thought that I would feature one of the Champaign bands from that same time as they look now. Yeah, Poster Children has aged roughly as well as I have. Still, they were a band that deserved much more airplay than they received.

Let's Get Ready to (Re)Launch!

3 -2 -1 Contact!

(It’s the secret… It’s the moment…)
At some point one has to put things into perspective. I started this blog back in November 2004 when I was a mere lad of 31. Ashlee Simpson sold 3.5 million copies of her album “Autobiography” that year. “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Troy” were two of the top movies of the year. “Friends” ended and “Joey” began in 2004. Since that day I have made 1,516 blog posts and if you just assume 500 words a post that means that I have given the internet 758,000 words of wisdom. I started after Friendster but before MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Hell, I had a blog before Barney had a blog on How I Met Your Mother and Barney never even mentions his blog anymore.
Over this time I have lived in three states, worked for two companies and at one point found myself being paid to not show up in the office anymore. I have gone from being the guy at the end of the bar pining for a girl he had met a year earlier, to the guy who signed up for a dating service, to the guy at the end of the bar who was really upset at the amount of money he had spent on dating services, to, and I will never in all my years understand how this happened, being married to the woman I was pining for in the first place. All of this is to say that I am not the same person that I was when I started writing here. Heck, if you buy that legend that your cells regenerate every seven years than I am not even the same person molecularly speaking.

What this is about is why I haven’t been writing and how that is going to change. I really have let the blog fade away but it was mainly due to the fact that I couldn’t figure out just what to write about. When I started the idea really was to just have a place for me to vent and tell stories about going to bars and going to concerts and ripping on pop culture and talking about my misadventures trying to date in Kansas City. But things are so different for me now that I can’t write in that manner anymore. I now stay home with my wife and watch television and realize that I can see 40 in front of me and realizing that middle age is no longer just a theory but is now a mathematical fact.

But I really have been getting the urge to write again and I have decided that I really need to carve out the time on a daily basis to just sit down and put words to paper (or electrons to screen depending on how literal a metaphor one wants to use). The thoughts and posts have been buzzing around my head and since I have a little corner of the internet all to myself I decided to hang the shingle one more time and try my hand at internet punditry. Heck, I might even get a twitter account since that is what all of the cool kids seem to be doing today even though one of the biggest things that I have realized over the past year is that I am no longer a cool kid. If I ever was one in the first place.

So this is going to be a blog about the way my life is now. I am not sure where that will lead me other than there will be less posts at two in the morning discussing encounters with random strangers in bars. And probably more posts about jointly filing taxes. Essentially it is going to be about how a Gen X kid tries to rapidly turn himself into a middle aged adult without losing his essence or his mind in the process. Along the way I’ll still delve into the world of pop culture, where Snooki’s pregnancy can have more airtime than the Italian debt crisis and where Justin Bieber is still a thing, apparently. If you are interested stop in and stay awhile. Otherwise, just consider me one of the infinite number of silent voices online struggling to be heard. Oh, and if you came to this blog by means of the most popular web search on google for it, the answer to who is Strawberry Shortcake’s archenemy is the Purple Pieman. (Trust me, search “Strawberry Shortcake enemy” in Google and this blog is the second link. I am not sure if I should be proud of that or not.)

What we find funny then and now

I just had to share this music clip. Mavis Staples, Wilco and Nick Lowe rehearsing the old Band song “The Weight.” I’ve been on a bit of The Band kick as of late and this is just an amazing cover of the song. Mavis Staples just sings the hell out of the song. You can even see the guys in Wilco just take a step back in wonder when she starts to sing.

I’ve been thinking recently about just where my sense of humor comes from. Meaning just what was I exposed to as a child that determined what I felt was funny and, more importantly, influenced my writing style and my brand of humor. Ok, at least I think that at times I can be a funny writer intentionally. But what I wanted to think about is what drove it.

If you made me list the TV shows that I watched as a kid (say before I turned 10) that influenced me the most I would say The Muppet Show, The Monkees and Monty Python. Yes, even as a 10 year old I was aware of Monty Python. Add in the Douglas Adams “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series and Dave Barry columns and you have the main components of what would make up my brand of humor and I would have to say that I am not alone in that regard. Now here is the interesting bit, not only were all those shows meant for adults but they instilled in myself and a lot of other people in Gen X a very specific brand of comedy.

Think about those shows. All three of the TV shows completely ignored the fourth wall and were full of self-referential, meta-humor. The idea of a running plot was only vaguely considered important and in many instance it was just gag upon gag upon gag. Now is it surprising that Seth MacFarlane, who created Family Guy, is a month younger than I am? We have the same influences and create what we have always found to be funny. Even a show like How I Met Your Mother is written to my generation due to the reliance on running jokes and constant gags while something like Two and a Half Men with its more classic sitcom format is geared to the aging Baby Boomers who grew up with more straightforward sitcoms.

You can see the same thing with music. When I was young I was first introduced to music with new wave and punk and when I grew older that combined itself into grunge. Add in country music and you have the entire alternative country scene. We take the influences that we have as children and meld them to what we want to create as we age.

Sadly this means that as I continue to age and move out of the target market what I find funny will no longer make the air. Music today is being made by those who grew up in the latest era of the boy bands and bubble gum pop. Someone who thought that Friends was the epitome of comedy is working on a new sitcom. That is just the way the cycle of culture works. Thank god for DVD collections.

Quick random thoughts

Note to self: when I finally decide that the career that I am destined for is mad scientist and embark on creating bizarre new creatures the first one I should make is a Bewilderbeast. That and my horse / zebra hybrid that I will call a Horbra. Also, I should remember to make it clear that I am not mad, I just get these headaches sometimes.

In other news, I am extremely intrigued by the murder mystery that has taken place on the royal estates in England. Is it bad that I am hoping that this means that Queen Elizabeth has gone on a killing spree? Could you actually arrest the Queen? I always like how in the Jack the Ripper case many people assume that it is a royal who was doing the killing so maybe this is just a replay of that classic case. At least it would be an interesting variation on the story.

Also, do we all have to buy a baby shower present for Beyonce? I mean, if you make the birth of your child a big deal in the media does that make us all liable for a shower gift? And I wonder just how many gifts that celebrities receive from random people when they have a child. I bet that it is way more than you would imagine. Though why anyone would name a child Blue Ivy is beyond me. Just once I would like to see celebrities give their child a normal name. How about Gertrude? It’s a Shakespeare reference. Paltrow could have named her daughter that instead of Apple.

For the Love of Tebow...

Before I get to the odds and ends of my books read in 2011 I need to make a comment on the Broncos game today and the media firestorm that is Tim Tebow. First of all, that was one hell of a game especially given that I thought that it was going to be the worst game of the weekend. I was glued to the screen and was amazed by how well the Broncos played. The Steelers were lucky to fight their way back into the game but Tebow’s killstrike in overtime was incredible.

It is incredible from a cultural perspective to watch the way people view Tebow. The best explanation that I have read is that no matter what your point of view you can use Tebow to prove your point. Want to talk about the gritty underdog winning with unconventional ways? Or how about the Heisman Trophy winner succeeding at the next level? Need to work an angle regarding how Christianity leads to success? Tebow is a media darling because he makes writing stories really, really easy. As a result he has become simultaneously the biggest hero and villain in sports, neither of which is earned.

Now I will be honest here, I kind of like the guy. He was drafted in the same year as Jimmy Claussen and I made the following claim. I could guarantee you that Claussen would be between the 20th and the 40th best quarterback in the NFL while Tebow would either win a Super Bowl or be a complete bust and I stand behind that claim. Claussen is either a bad starter or a decent backup while Tebow is either great or horrible depending on the day. To be honest he has already exceeded expectations. No one is ever going to consider him a draft bust. He is unorthodox and not a classic quarterback but he does get things done. I think a lot of the dislike for his football play is simply the fact that it is not the way we expect it to be done. We all believe that the quarterback position has to be played in the way that Peyton Manning does it so anything different must be wrong.

The biggest reason that a lot of people hate Tebow, beyond the media saturation, is that he is actually a really nice guy and we can’t stand it. The guy doesn’t have any big flaws to him. He is religious but I would never call him preachy or at least no more so than any other player who takes a knee after scoring a touchdown. He doesn’t screw around and leads a clean life and because he is open about that people hate him. The strange thing is you don’t see Tebow rallying against what others are doing. Not even in the way that the Straight Edge punk movement can be annoying in an “I am better than you” way. Tebow just is and people can’t stand it. Our cultural has become so cynical and jaded that the sheer fact that someone can just be famous and be a good guy drives us insane. That is a pretty sad statement.

Ok, last few books…

My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin: An analysis of horrible movies by a writer for the Onion’s AV Club. Yes, I read a book of reviews of movies that you would never want to see. I can’t explain it either other than anyone who feels that Joe vs. the Volcano is a bad movie is someone I can never be friends with. I am sorry but that is one of my favorite movies ever.

Richard III by William Shakespeare: Yes, I met my yearly quota of Shakespeare by reading the one about the hunchback and a horse and various children being murdered offstage. What was interesting was that this was the first time that I have read Shakespeare on my Kindle and thus didn’t have all of the annotations and definitions that you traditionally have in one of the print editions of Shakespeare. On one hand I was proud of the fact that my vocabulary has improved to the point that I could follow everything without those definitions but I know that I missed some of the more obscure references and puns. I think that I will end up going back to print for Shakespeare. It just doesn’t read properly on a screen.

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenberger: A graphic novel by the author of the Time Traveler’s Wife about finding a bookmobile with every book that you have ever read inside, which would be both awesome and kind of boring. On one hand it would be wonderful to look about and see everything that you have ever read but on the other hand you would also look around and go, “But do you have anything else?”

Best of 120 Minutes: Ok, so maybe a few of you are aware that the new season of Portlandia debuted on IFC this weekend. I note this only for the fact that I have connections to both of the stars of the show. I met Carrie Browenstein before a Sleater-Kinney show in Lawrence a few years back and ages and ages ago I hit on Fred Armisen’s ex-wife at a bar once. If you need to wonder if I was successful at hitting on the ex-wife of a Saturday Night Live actor you really, really don’t know me. Especially if you envision the 24 year old version of me doing it. Actually, I’d rather you didn’t envision that. Anyway, this is all just an excuse to post a Sleater-Kinney video.

2011 Reading List: It's Nonfiction so it has to be true

Ok, time to make my way over to the non-fiction side of the aisle for the second part of my review of everything that I read last year. I have a few pieces of odds and ends that I will write about over the weekend but I run a pretty even split between fiction and non-fiction. Used to be almost all fiction so it is a rather interesting change. Anyway, here we go…

“The Childless Revolution” by Madelyn Cain: A very interesting analysis of the fact that women are having less and less children and are often choosing careers and education over motherhood. This is going to be a growing theory in the future especially as you see the conflict between career success and family size leading to the world predicted in Idiocracy. The other interesting bit about this analysis is that it is entirely focused on women. No one ever questions if a guy chooses his career over fatherhood but for women there is a cultural stigma attached to it.

“Gunn’s Golden Rules” by Tim Gunn: If you need to have a life coach you could do a lot worse than choosing Tim Gunn. At a minimum you could guarantee that you will be dressed immaculately. Sadly I can’t get excited for the new season of Project Runway: All Stars because Tim and Heidi are not going to be a part of it, which makes me wonder if I want to watch the show at all. It just isn’t the same without Tim saying “Make it work” and saying hello to Swatch the dog.

“Bait and Switch” by Barbara Ehrenreich: Back when I took the separation package from Sprint I was given access to a career development service, essentially a place that would help me build a resume, work on my interview skills and help in searching for a new job. Outside of having someone to proofread my resume and give a little bit of a refresher on my interview technique I don’t know if I received any benefit from it. Talking about networking with people who are also unemployed is not precisely the easiest way to find a job. This book covers the same subject as Barbara spends a year in the world of the job searchers: attending networking events and sending out resumes on Monster and CareerBuilder in an attempt to see if it is at all possible to find a job using those tools. For those of you who have ever been pissed at the job search process this book will let you know that you are not alone.

“Scorecasting” by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim: This book was basically taking a look at sports from a Freakonomics perspective. I am sure that it interested me at the time but right now I am completely blanking on it. I read it before I got married so maybe I can use that as an excuse.

“Undisputed” by Chris Jericho and “The Road Warriors” by Joe Laurinaitis: I broke one of my internal rules this year. I typically limit myself to one biography by a pro wrestler in any given year but this time I had to read two from some of my favorites. Chris Jericho, who made his triumphant return on Monday night as the most loved person on the show and was then the most hated six minutes later, is probably my favorite wrestler around and one of the few guys who I respect in the business. This book is as much about his music career as anything else and isn’t as good as his first but it is interesting. The second book focuses on my favorite tag team of all time, The Road Warriors, and while not the best written book it definitely holds your interest. Plus, the story of Hawk wrestling on a scaffold with a broken leg is always a good one to read. Sadly, the number of people in both books who have died before the age of fifty is too much for me to comprehend.

“The War for Late Night” by Bill Carter: A study of the whole Jay Leno / Conan O’Brien controversy, which was the biggest story in the world for a few months and has since become a total afterthought. Leno is back hosting the Tonight Show and will be until the sun collapses into itself, Conan has a fringe audience on TBS and I still wish that I could stay up late enough to watch Craig Ferguson. If you are interested in the ins and outs of how the late night shows works and just how many political games take place in the background this is an incredible read.

“Unfamiliar Fishes” by Sarah Vowell: I am a big fan of Sarah Vowell’s writing and this book about how Hawaii became a state is at least a little bit of a return to form from her last book, which was about the Puritans and was one of the most boring things that I have read. This has a lot more of her trademark dry wit and is an interesting study as to just how did we end up deciding that a) the United States should possess a couple of random islands in the Pacific Ocean and b) that they should be considered just as much a part of the United States as say, Delaware. Ok, that is not a good example. I’m not sure anyone can think of a reason why Delaware should be considered a state other than it gives all the other states someone to look down upon. Delaware is the Barry Horrowitz of states.

“Spook” and “Bonk” by Mary Roach: One book is about ghosts and the other is about sex. Sadly, sex with ghosts does not come up at any time as a subject though it obviously should. I’ve now read everything that Mary Roach has written and she is a writer whose style I like. She takes a scientific look at subject but does it from a very personal perspective. It’s basically investigative journalism from someone who is just genuinely interested in a subject. You couldn’t use one of her books as the basis for a doctoral thesis but they make for wonderful reads on airplanes.

“Those Guys Have All the Fun” by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales: An oral history of ESPN. After reading this you might not have a positive image of any single person who was ever associated with the networks with the exception of Robin Roberts. I knew of a lot of the ESPN sex scandals ahead of time (the wonders of reading Deadspin everyday) but there was stuff in here that was just stunning. Apparently Bristol is the Sodom of Connecticut. The book does make it clear just how the network became an unbelievable success and also why it will never be as cool as it was in the early 90’s when I watched it for every moment. Essentially, once you are owned by Disney and are the mainstream source of news you can no longer be inventive and reckless. Sad but true.

“The To-Do List” by Mike Gayle: The story of one man who sits down late one night, starts writing a to do list for his life, ends up with over 500 items and then goes ahead and completes every single one of them. I am pretty sure that Kim slapped me when I told her what I was reading because she knew that I would immediately try to do the same thing since I love To Do lists. Especially given that the first item on every To Do list that I write is, and I’m not kidding here, “Write To Do List.”

“Moneyball” and “Boomerang” by Michael Lewis: Written by the lucky bastard who married Tabitha Soren you have the story of the Oakland A’s and Billy Beane, made into a movie about a team that never makes it to the World Series (which was already made and called Major League) and another on how various economies have collapsed in the credit crisis. Given that one of those failed economies was Iceland I was interested to see if I could at all understand how in the world a country like that could suddenly decide that it was a financial center. I still don’t think anyone understands. Apparently it involves fish and elves. Basically everything in Iceland involves fish and elves and smells slightly like rotten eggs.

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” by Bill Bryson: More travelogues by Bill Bryson. For those who know my story I have spent most of the past year on planes, in airports and basically never spending more than four days in any one location. As a result my Kindle has become a steady companion and there are times when you just search for something to read that you know that you will enjoy but don’t want to put too much thought into it. Bill Bryson works really well for those moments.

“Popular Crime” by Bill James: I’ve never been a massive baseball stat guy, though I certainly have done more than my share of scorekeeping over the year, but I have always been impressed with how Bill James investigated the game and developed better methods to analyze player performance. Apparently as a sideline Bill has also been interested in true crime stories and this book is basically his examining of various cases over the centuries. It basically reads like a bar conversation with a friend who is brilliant, extremely dedicated and completely ignoring the fact that at many points he is either wrong or bringing up a point that is really irrelevant. Still, I go back to this book to read select chapters occasionally and it did bring up cases that even I was unaware of.

“I Want My MTV” by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum: An oral history of MTV, which is basically the same as the one about ESPN but replace Robin Roberts with Martha Quinn. Also, Adam Curry’s hair is essentially its own character in this book. Seriously, I think it gives an interview at some point. Oh, and no one liked Downtown Julie Brown. Absolutely no one.

2011 Reading List: Fiction for all

Since it is a start of a new year (and an effective restart of the blog) I thought that I would go with an easy topic for the next couple of days: an examination of the books that I read over the course of 2011. I finished 38 books last year, which is about average for me. Yes, I’ve kept track of every book that I have read since 1998. In many instances I can tell you how many days it took me to read the book. Don’t ask me why this is the case. Kim asks me all the time and I have yet to come up with a good answer.

Anyway, I will start with the fiction and do the non-fiction and odds and ends tomorrow.

“The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene: This was my challenge reading for the year, which just shows that I have really lapsed in terms of what constitutes a challenge for me anymore. Not like the good old days where in January I would decide to read Faust in its entirety despite the fact that once you read the definition of the term “Faustian Bargain” you can pretty much ignore the entire book. Anyway, I have always meant to read more of Graham Greene’s work and this is just an amazing story about Central America and the struggle of a failed priest trying to do one last good act. Really, really fascinating read about a time that we are not too far removed from.

“An Object of Beauty” by Steve Martin: I’ll state up front that I am a huge fan of Steve Martin’s writings and one of the first books that I ever gave Kim was his novel “The Pleasure of my Company.” But while I enjoyed this book you can tell that this was more of a novel written by someone who is really intrigued with a certain subject, in this case the New York art world, than by someone with a story to tell. You will learn more about auction houses and galleries and the denizens of the world than you could ever wish to know. A nice book but not a required read.

“Perforated Heart” by Eric Bogosian: Eric Bogosian falls into the category of one of those writers that I have always admired but had never actually read. Mainly because I tend to see movies of his work (Talk Radio being the biggest example) and just always hear praise about him. So I gave this novel a try because it focused on the 70’s punk rock scene in New York, which I have a passing interest in for some reason. Mainly because everyone considers it to be incredibly important artistically and musically but it all happened before I was aware of art and music outside of Sesame Street so I don’t know of CBGB’s outside of the t-shirts that you can buy at Urban Outfitters. Not sure if this book helped me to get a sense of the time, either. 70’s punk remains to me the story of a really good party attended by someone else a few years ago. Maybe you just had to be there.

“The Well of Lost Plots” by Jasper Fforde: Some books are written for certain audiences. Jasper Fforde writes for literature geeks. I have seen no author who is so inventive and dedicated to making as many literary references as possible via his Thursday Next series, which involves a world where characters in books are surprisingly real. If you can find references to Austen and the Charge of the Light Brigade entertaining than pick up his books. It is like someone decided to specifically invent crack for English majors.

“Midnight Mile” by Dennis Lehane: As you can probably already tell my taste in fiction runs to the more obscure but here is a book that everyone would enjoy. Lehane is an outstanding writer of tense thrillers and this book is in the realm as his earlier work with “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island” (along with his belief that book titles should only contain two words.) His books are page turners that do not fall into the Dan Brown trap of seeming to be formed out of a rejected Scooby Doo script. Definite one to check out.

“The Wee Free Men” and “Snuff” by Terry Pratchett: If I would hazard a guess I would estimate that I own / have read almost thirty books by Terry Pratchett over the past fifteen years. He is my fantasy writer of choice as his Discworld novels are brilliant satires of society and the nature of fantasy itself. What saddens me though is that he is reaching the end of his career as he has early onset Alzheimer’s and is now forced to dictate his books. You have to admire someone who sees the end of the road ahead of him and still plows on as he knows that he still has stories to tell the world.

“A Game of Thrones” by George R. R. Martin: I must admit I had not been very aware of this series until the HBO series and as a book it would typically scare me off for the same reason that I avoid most fantasy novels. At a certain age you decide that you can’t read a thousand pages about dragons and ancient rivalries without going completely numb. But my god is this a good book. He keeps you reading and the use of numerous viewpoint characters keeps you constantly engaged in all of the different threads that run through the book. I am going to continue to make my way through the series though I certainly will take pauses between the books. With something so dense you need to take breaks.

“A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan: I am not sure if I can call this the best book that I read all year (though it would certainly be in the top three) but it without a doubt has the best chapter that I have read in a very long time. It is a single chapter written as PowerPoint slides. It is a chapter about autism and the idea of pauses within music and what that implies and the different ways in which information is communicated and it is just fascinating to read. At first you think that it is just a gimmick but after reading it I could think of no other way to present such a story in so compelling of a manner. I’d read this book for that chapter alone.

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu: I read a lot of books because I hear good things about them online. Kim challenges me on why I use this method to choose books as I typically end up reading books that I am supposed to read rather than what I would actually like to read at any point in time. Sometimes my method works and I find a great book. Other times like this one I just don’t get it. It is the story of a time machine repairman with a cute dog who ends up somehow killing his future self and forming an infinite loop. Outside of the bits with the dog I still don’t know what it was about.

“Hunger Games”, “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay” by Suzanne Collins: Now these are books that I can understand! 24 teenagers put into an arena to battle to the death for the entertainment of the super wealthy. I have to say of all of the young adult novels that have gained mainstream attention in the post Harry Potter world these are easily the best. I highly recommend reading Hunger Games before the movie comes out because it really is a book that you will not be able to put down. You will find yourself rooting for Katniss and Peeta and wondering just how would you do in such a situation. The other two books aren’t quite as good though that is due mainly to the nature of the story. There would have to be a bit of a letdown after the first one. Huge recommendation on this one to be on board before the movie comes out and possibly ruins it for everyone.

“The Visible Man” by Chuck Klosterman: There is an old question that I have heard that you can use whenever you are at a lull in a conversation. You can have one superpower: flight or invisibility, which do you choose and you must answer immediately. It is a test of extroversion versus introversion and I have to admit that my first choice is invisibility and I then regret it. This is a novel about what it would be like to truly be invisible and then be able to watch peole as they truly are. It asks the question of who are we really: the person that we show the world or the person that we are when we are home alone. What is your true self? As with most of Chuck’s writing it is more of an examination of an idea than a good novel (you tend to find yourself searching for a plot at times) but man is it a good idea. The story will stick with you for a while.

“The Post-Mortal” by Drew Magary: For those who are unaware, Drew is one of the writers on Deadspin, a blog that I have been reading forever that was founded by a fellow Illini so I am a little biased on this one. The novel is built around a brilliant premise: What would happen if someone created a cure for aging. You take an injection and then you never age. Now you can still die by being shot or by smoking until you get lung cancer but you would never die of old age. You would just stay the same age as you were when you took the injection. Would you take it? What if everyone else did and you ended up being the only old person on the planet? What would the world be like if everyone was a twentysomething with no maturity in sight? Have to admit this book was a lot better than I initially expected.

“The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes: I wrote about this book a few weeks ago so I’ll be brief. Plus it won the Booker Prize so it really doesn’t need my endorsement. It is about memory and how we view things as we age and that amazing way you think when you are in your late teens and find yourself fascinated with intellectual pursuits. Ok, maybe not everyone gets that but there is part of me that wonders how I would have done if I had been in a school like one of the Ivies or Oxford or Cambridge and got to live one of those experiences that I have only read about. I probably would be an even bigger arrogant prick than I already am. Guess I should be happy that I went to a school that features a cornfield as one of its campus landmarks.

“Plan B” by Johnathan Tropper: I was surprised that I hadn’t read this book already. Tropper is pretty much an American version of Nick Hornby with a focus on stories revolving around New York. This was his first novel and it shows flashes of brilliance. A story of turning thirty and what that entails. Ah, the good old days…

Wednesday Night Music Club: Some days I would love to be able to stand on a stage with just a guitar, move away from the microphone and sing to an entirely silent crowd. Pretty amazing to see Josh Ritter pull it off with one of my favorite songs ever. “My wings are made of hay and cornhusks”

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.