Justin's Reasons Why Not

Heath won... And I Do Care

2009-02-22T22:11:00.003-05:00

Now, I'm okay with the whole thing.

Milk I liked a bit more than Slumdog. But Slumdog can win. I'll be okay with that.

They tried hard this year, and I kind of like it. Didn't like the gay-panic joke, but did like them making fun of the Reader. We should all make fun of The Reader.

That pretty much does it for this site, I get, because when I return to NY for good, I'll create a new site altogether.

Thanks for watching my anger since senior year.

Back to "Justin 2" when I get back to Korea.

You know...

2009-02-15T16:33:00.003-05:00

You come back home.

And you think, maybe, just maybe, your parents won't nitpick at you.

And you are wrong.

"Your forehead isn't looking great."

"You used to have a belly."

And my favorite:

"Stop writing on your blog. It's too personal."

Well, duh. But their corporate friends say they wouldn't approve of reading what I've got written there. Man my parents do a terrible job of making me want to actually come back and live like everyone else.

I should just travel forever. Meet a woman somewhere, and then take her with me. And have kids, and take them with us. This appeals to me.

Also:

I have crazy friends who are all fucked up in many ways.

Everyone says I lost weight. I did, but not a noticeable number. However, I toned a lot. This they've noticed.

I will never stop writing online.

Their paranoia amuses me.

Besides, I'm not getting any job where I have to censor myself. It's just not gonna happen. Against everything I believe in.

I Don't Care?

2008-02-25T04:42:00.004-05:00

Well. The Oscars have come and gone. And... "No Country" won big, Daniel Day got his second one. Etc etc...

And... I don't care. I just don't.

Is this is a change in me?

Do I only care about the Oscars when I can see it?

No. I will care next year, or the year after, when I absolutely love something or someone nominated. If there's another legend like Scorsese hoping to win for the first time, I'll care.

Nohing can make me not love pop culture.

This is just a hiccup.

The Other, Kinder Site

2008-02-19T01:14:00.005-05:00

Here it is. Follow me on my travels.

Justin 2: The Departed.

Journey

2008-02-18T00:03:00.002-05:00

Well. The time has (almost) come for me to shove off to Korea. I’ve done countdowns and reflection aplenty here. I won’t much do that today.

Also, I should explain that, the Korea site, which I’ll be fully launching tomorrow, is more of a travel deal, mixed with my own style of writing, because I’m me. But it’s less of a critical deal, so I’ll occasionally pop back over here to trash something or someone or life. Too much negative in me not to.

But I want to flash back to what I wrote on the very first day.

I said, “As the little blurb on the top of the site says, my life is lived in a state of bemused annoyance, and, until I really get tired of it, I hope to share that state with a few of you.”

It’s certainly been a “few.” And I’ve calmed down since then, though you might not know that reading this site. But, as much as I grow, and I certainly have since December of 2006, I am decidedly still bemused and annoyed by the world I live in. And I like that I’m able to operate that way.

I guess what I’m trying to say, on a pointedly negative blog, is that… I like me. And I can’t wait to see who I am after this trip.

Thanks for following me so far. Next stop, Daegu!

The Last Time I Wonder If It Happened

2008-02-16T10:00:00.004-05:00

Here's Sunday's post.

And, am I?

Oh, I’m fucking ready.

There'll be one more post on this site before I mostly move to a blog that focuses on Korea, although I'll still pop back over when something pisses me off. And knowing me, that won't be incredibly rare.

And now, the last CNN Outlier (for a while):

My Favorite Cartoon

2008-02-15T10:16:00.003-05:00

Two posts left after today (it's not getting closed forever, just becoming very sporadic).

Gonna make you happy today. Just watch this glorious cartoon - so old that the pun "Owl Jolson" was current - and try not to smile at some point.

See? So happy.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"'Free' real estate seminars can cost a lot."

(Because 'free' means it's not supposed to cost anything!!!!)

My Favorite Song

2008-02-14T01:14:00.003-05:00

I've spoken about "Rebellion (Lies)" at great length before, so I needn't say much more. Just lines up with happiness for me.

Ah. So, so good. Three years ago I was letting this song, and others, drag me out of the depths. I can't help but smile when it starts to pound through my ears. Thank you, Win and Co., for your essential contribution to my life.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"School refuses female ref for boys game"

(Those midwesterners sure are sexist! Crazy! Newsworthy!)

My Favorite Office Moments

2008-02-13T00:48:00.002-05:00

Michael and Toby hate each other. And it is amazing. And weirdly mean. And thus more amazing. Check it:

Michael hates Toby randomly, but also because he sees himself in him sometimes, and tries to separate himself from him. It's sad, and endless, and perfectly "The Office," a perfectly perfect sitcom.

Tonight's CNN Outlier:

"Doubting cop dumps quadriplegic on face"

(This is only must-see TV for terrible, terrible people. I guess CNN knows its audience. (That's a swipe at America, not just CNN.))

My Favorite Departed Moment

2008-02-12T10:08:00.000-05:00

As we go through some more of my favorite things, I'll show you a clip from my favorite movie, "The Departed." (Spoiler warning!!!)

I tell you, I saw this movie so many times, and it never got old to anticipate that bloodbath and know how fucking surprised the audience would be.

Oh how I treasure this film.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Mystery of Minty-Tasting Water Solved"

(And if it wasn't for those meddling kids they would have gotten away with it.)

Some of my favorite things...

2008-02-11T10:05:00.001-05:00

This is usually a negative site (hence the title). But, since, while in Korea, I'm mostly going to be writing on the new site I start up soon specifically for that purpose, JRWN is going to become more sparse. I'd like to essentially finish the thing off (temporarily) by being positive, and showing you some of my favorite funny clips.

Today, I'll start off with my favorite moment from The Fresh Prince.

Why do I love this so? Well, "The Fresh Prince" mostly relied on silly, easy jokes and the perceived (and actual) charm of young Will Smith. But it was rarely mean.

Yet here, the characters are all blackmailing each other, and they're all suffering for it. And it's well-executed comedy. I can actually believe that the audience was laughing that hard, even though I know it's a laugh track.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Some States Allow 17-year-olds to vote"

(That's crazy! Cuz the age is 18! Crazy!)

The Last Thing I Don't Want To Happen

2008-02-10T12:14:00.000-05:00

Last full week I’ll be in New York.

That is crazy.

Next Saturday, by the time I answer this query, I want to be fucking ready to go.

Simple as that.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Baghdad's version of Pimp My Ride"

(CNN, I know you think you're cool for referencing a once-cool show, but, um... this story is about armored cars and violence. You fail.)

Did It Happen? 5

2008-02-09T10:38:00.000-05:00

Here’s Sunday’s post.

And did the event go smoothly? Did it ever. My dad went out in style and had one of those occasional moments when I wanted to be him. Cool.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Natalee Holloway's mom speaks out"

(No more, please!)

Superbowl XLII Observations V

2008-02-08T10:20:00.000-05:00

Cubs win! Cubs win!

I still hate football, but that was pretty cool.

And this, right here, was mind-blowing.

Much has been said all week.

Suck it, Brady.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Holloway's Mom: 'Not knowing is sheer hell'"

(Anything related to his story, the fact that it is still EQUATED WITH INTERNATIONAL NEWS, is automatically irritating.)

Superbowl XLII Observations IV

2008-02-07T10:01:00.000-05:00

I’m sorry, but Tom Petty isn’t nearly as cool as Prince.

He looks too much like a scarecrow.

And why do they insist on this “run to the stage” thing?

Silliness.

Bring back Prince!!!

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Friendly moose may have fatal brain disease"

(I feel like this needs to be accompanied by that "womp-womp-womp" sound effect. Otherwise, it's dumb.)

Superbowl XLII Observations III

2008-02-06T09:37:00.000-05:00

Animated lizards doing the “Thriller” dance? Kinda cute, kinda funny.

Naomi Campbell doing the same? Weird, dull, stupid. Like her. (She's also crazy. People need to stop paying her to do stuff.)

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Holloway's dad outraged by suspect's laugh"

(She was young, blonde, and white. Anything related to her must always be news, right? Even this, about a laugh? Really?)

Superbowl XLII Observations II

2008-02-05T11:49:00.000-05:00

I said this a few months ago, but, after that Superbowl spot, “Iron Man” officially looks like the coolest movie ever. Check the shit out.

I love when he turns away before he even hits the tank. Because he's a badass.

I hope they’re showing that shit in Daegu.

(No outlier today, because I'm not daring to look at CNN until today's resuls are decided.)

Superbowl XLII Observations I

2008-02-04T00:09:00.000-05:00

I don’t even like football. I really hate the sport as it is currently constructed. It’s both violent and slow, a paradox. And I don’t know who’s really on these two teams, aside from the stars. I want the Giants to win, because New York is my town and Boston is truly a failure of a city, but I care a hell of a lot less about this than I do about Super Tuesday.

But the first thing I have to say is, someone needs to seriously injure Tom Brady. Someone needs to stab him in the balls, and the asshole, and the stomach, and the neck, and everyone that hurts. Because he’s not good for humanity.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Cooper Manning happy for little brothers"

(Wouldn't he have to be though?)

Things I Don't Want to Happen 5

2008-02-03T10:16:00.000-05:00

This is my penultimate one of these.

So, this week. What don’t I want to happen?

Hmm.

This is the last week I have to deal with anything else for Korea.

But there’s also an annual charity event that my dad runs. And, basically, it’s his last year, and I don’t want it to go off anyway other than completely smoothly.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Rhyming Nun makes Superbowl prediction"

(Don't you see? She's rhyming! It's wacky! Wacky!!!)

Did It Happen? 4

2008-02-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

Here’s the question from Sunday.

And yeah, my money is fine, really. I’ll be okay.

Sweet.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Bowl Alert: Double Dipping really is unhealthy."

(Ha! You double dipped the chip!)

A Long, Idiotic Night Part Four

2008-02-01T10:38:00.000-05:00

So, after I thought I was rid of them, they were back around me, almost puking in my elevator, actually puking in my toilet, half-naked for some reason, and then two of them flopped onto my fucking bed, and I had to sleep on the corner, cold.

I ate my sandwich in anger, and slept without moving.

In the morning, one got up, with no recollection of the events, and then puked in the toilet again. And then the other annoying one got up and started whining about going home. Endlessly. Over and over. She wouldn’t shut up, after all the things they’d done to wreck the whole night, she had the nerve to be obnoxious in the morning.

The one who’d puked was humbled, and while still stuck up and annoying, at least I could see where she was coming from. The other one was just a horrible brat. Horrible.

And the third one was cool. She remains cool. But every group of annoying people usually has one cool person in them.

So then the question is: how much can we let people get away with for being attractive? Clearly, this was a big fat example of why personalities are far more important.

Moral of the story: Superficiality will get you in bed with hot girls, but not in the way you want to, just eating a sandwich alone while they snore.

The End

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Fans come together at Beatlemaniac hotel"

(The story here seems to be that there are people who still love the Beatles. Really?!? What breaking news!)

A Long, Idiotic Night Part Four

2008-01-31T10:31:00.000-05:00

For a while, things were good. Georgia and I walked around the East Village, talked about girls, drank some cheap drinks and generally enjoyed each others’ company. In fact, by the time we decided to split up and go home, the night had, I thought, been salvaged, and I went to a diner to get a takeout sandwich ready to be sated and happy.

But then Curly called, explained about the vomit, and asked if they could all come to my apartment to sleep.

Sigh….

Today’s CNN Outlier

"Striking nude model: "It's a tough job""

(I have to assume they mean that she's on strike, and not just strikingly attractive. But still, when writers are striking, no one's fucking going to care about a nude model, no matter how hard she tries to convince us her job is.)

A Long, Idiotic Night Part Three

2008-01-30T10:14:00.000-05:00

We didn’t really want to go across town, but we did, because they had vaginas, I guess. So, they tried to go into the turnstile together WHILE A FUCKING COP WAS WATCHING, but decided against it. Then they acted a fool on the platform. I ran into a former coworker, who laughed when I compared them to children, and I realized this is what it might be like to teach kids for a year. Except that two of these girls were just actively hostile. I guess some kids are too.

Anyway, China Club, we wait in line, my forward-thinking reservation gets us in for free, and then… it sucks. The drinks are predictably overpriced, and there’s some fashion show due to occur later on. So the music is all right, but NO ONE IS DANCING AT ALL. Having realized our mistake, we wanted to leave, but these motherfuckers had this mental block in their head about Webster, that it was some evil place filled with people who were beneath them, and so, when mentioned, they would scream or be silly and eventually me and one other friend just got tired of it.

Remaining loyal to their femininity, Curly stayed with them as they went to a nearby lounge (where they acted a fool some more, and one threw up on the floor, without doing much else). But me and Georgia finally separated and found ourselves with about an hour of time to ourselves, catching up and talking about nonsense…

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Man pulled off tracks at two trains hit van"

(Not mad at CNN today. This shit is pretty cool.)

A Long, Idiotic Night Part Two

2008-01-29T09:55:00.001-05:00

So I meet them and take them to the bar, my friend Curly shows up with a few friends, and my other friend, Georgia, with similarly curly hair shows up. The foreigners kept asking for tequila, etc, etc, and paid their own way enough that they weren’t mooching. One of the three was always charming. The other two revealed themselves to be kind of dumb. But, well, it was fun for a while.

Drinking heavily at only nine o clock. Good times.

Then two of the girls got up and started screaming towards other people and grinding on each other when no music was playing. Seeing tall blondes come at them might have appealed to others, but it suggested that the rest of the night would be difficult.

But, we got up, and, letting penises guide us, allowed them to drag us past Webster Hall because of how good-looking they thought they were, and all the way across town to the China Club, which none of us had been to.

Sigh.

Shouldn’t listen to penises, man. Especially since them saying they want cuter guys suggests they don’t want us at all, and the one cool one has a very longterm boyfriend anyway. We are stupid men...

Today’s CNN outlier:

"Students getting paid for just showing up"

(Again with the "wacky" student stories? Kids are being paid to study with tutors. A bit unorthodox and backwards. Maybe even a little bit wacky, yes. But not newsworthy, even in the slightest.)

A Long, Idiotic Night Part One

2008-01-28T10:23:00.000-05:00

Before Saturday, I planned for a whole big shebang involving about four groups of friends and many men and women and so on and so forth. We’d met some presumably engaging foreigners the week before when we went dancing, and I also wanted to see a few folks before leaving. So I invited everyone to a place that has extremely cheap shots and drinks, and planned to pull out my Kanye outfit for the evening.

It promised to be something very special.

Of course, another friend invited the girls to some dumb party, so we had to dissuade them of that.

And then one of the girls didn’t want to come for some dumb reason. So we had to dissuade her of that. But then she asked to go to a club with better looking people than Webster Hall. Arrogant, but I messed around online and booked us for The China Club. Looking back, we should have let her stay the fuck home…

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Man bobbing in icy pond screams for help"

(They saved his ass, but the headline here promises nothing more than a man screaming for help. Oh joy! And why is this so important?!?)

Things I Don't Want to Happen 4

2008-01-27T11:07:00.000-05:00

What will I try to avoid this week?

Hmm.

Now that I’m trying to see everyone before I go, let me make sure I don’t blow all my money before Korea, since that what I was saving it for.

Yeah. The thing I don’t want to happen this week is to suddenly become less than frugal.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Vick's pitbulls learn to be pets"

(It's cute. But it's not internationally important news.)

Did It Happen? 3

2008-01-26T10:43:00.000-05:00

Sunday’s plea can be found here.

And did it happen?

No, I didn't drop the ball or get fucked over, I extricated myself from the bad and solidified myself in the good. As I said, I can’t say much more. But things aren’t bothering me right now. So, good.
Heh. Sorry for the cageyness. Onto CNN for hilarity!

Today’s CNN Outlier:

“Students paid $8 an hour to study”

(Really? This is surprising to whom? The only reason this could be up there is someone thought to themselves "That sounds kinda wacky! In fact, it's really wacky! Wacky! Like Fred Claus!" Because it's not even abnormal in the slightest.)

Oscar Non-Reactions

2008-01-25T10:15:00.000-05:00

Well, last year, I was happy, and angry, etc, throughout Oscar season. I had this big rejoicing moment after “Dreamgirls” wasn’t nominated for best pic last year, and after the day itself I reveled in the wins of “The Departed” and Scorsese. But this year… meh.

The nominations aren’t all that surprising. Nothing I loved was left out and nothing I hated was included. I’m not as in love with “No Country” as critics are, so I’d rather see another picture win, but, really, I don’t hate anything there. And there’s nothing I’ll get behind as much as “The Departed” or “Brokeback.” (sniff) Also, when they reveal the winners, I will be in teaching orientation in Korea. So, basically, this is another reminder that I’m about to be fucking gone.

But yeah. I’m kind of annoyed that I like most of the choices. I have nothing to hate. And, yeah, nothing to love.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Dropping 110 pounds transforms woman's life"

(Really? Are you sure her life wasn't exactly the same afterwards? Jesus. FRONT PAGE OF CNN.COM, PEOPLE.)

Too Laaaaate

2008-01-24T10:18:00.000-05:00

In the past, I’ve sat down and printed lyrics to terribly-written songs like “Fergalicious". I do that when people dance to songs they don’t realize are terrible. But, in their way, they sound good enough that people ignore this.
But today, I want to talk about “Apologize,” a song that is somehow credited to Timbaland even though he only produced it and “ehs” over the background.
It’s not the aggressively bland lyrics that particular offend me, though. It’s the awful way the song sounds.

Now, some slow things get popular occasionally. Terrible, whiny crap like “The Reason" gets a lot of press. It happens sometimes. So I’m not confused as to why it’s popular.

But Timbaland’s 2 other 2007 hits were the much more interesting “Give It To Me” and “The Way I Are, which have fun, bouncy beats and get people moving.

“Apologize”, as I discussed with AK, sounds like the random-band-who-will-never-be-famous-in-their-own-right One Republic was perilously hanging onto the inner edge of a well, and then let go. When someone tossed a rope in after them, they scream out, “It’s Too Laaaaaate” as they fall down to the bottom, and Timbaland shrugs and says “eh” because losing these people from the pop music world would be no great loss.

Seriously. It’s too late to stop this song from being popular. And it also adds this egregiously useless drum beat, as if it wants to be sensitive but also wants people to dance. It wants everything as a song, while lacking all possible creativity and being filled with whiny, falling-down-a-well warbling.

It is the worst.

Someone should actually throw them down a well.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Are you an obnoxious patient?"

(This piffle of a question is on the front page. Um....)

More About MLK Day

2008-01-23T10:27:00.000-05:00

No all day “Law and Order” marathon? Not even “SVU?”

What’s on TNT? Basketball. Fuck.

What’s on USA? “Bruce Almighty.” Ew.

I want my marathon.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Texas Town wants to be UFO landing spot"

(People are idiots. "Wants to be?" Like they can predict these things? I don't have anything else to say. I'm still sad about Heath.)

I Don't Usually Do This...

2008-01-22T18:01:00.000-05:00

But this is my blog and I can do what I want.

I was looking forward to watching Heath grow and dominate the screen for decades. I even looked forward to his years as a hammy Pacinoish overactor when he hits his sixties and I'm in my fifties. Or maybe he'd fade out in his fifties, like Burt Reynolds. But I never would have thought he'd be up and gone this fast.

"Brokeback" is one my favorite movies, a truly beautiful film that touches me whenever I catch more than a minute of it. And "The Dark Knight" will be bittersweet now, but it looks like it may well be an amazing continuation of Batman's story.

Pouring some liquor out for you, Ennis Del Mar. You shall be missed by me, and by many, many others.

MLK Day Was Yesterday

2008-01-22T10:07:00.000-05:00

I kind of wrote about MLK himself last year.

Today I’ll just post Obama's speech from Sunday, in entirety, because it rocks it hard. I don't agree with the God parts, but most of it, cool shit.

And, no outlier today. Even though the holiday was yesterday. Heh.

Here it is:

The Scripture tells us that when Joshua and the Israelites arrived at the gates of Jericho, they could not enter. The walls of the city were too steep for any one person to climb; too strong to be taken down with brute force. And so they sat for days, unable to pass on through.

But God had a plan for his people. He told them to stand together and march together around the city, and on the seventh day he told them that when they heard the sound of the ram's horn, they should speak with one voice. And at the chosen hour, when the horn sounded and a chorus of voices cried out together, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

There are many lessons to take from this passage, just as there are many lessons to take from this day, just as there are many memories that fill the space of this church. As I was thinking about which ones we need to remember at this hour, my mind went back to the very beginning of the modern Civil Rights Era.

Because before Memphis and the mountaintop; before the bridge in Selma and the march on Washington; before Birmingham and the beatings; the fire hoses and the loss of those four little girls; before there was King the icon and his magnificent dream, there was King the young preacher and a people who found themselves suffering under the yoke of oppression.

And on the eve of the bus boycotts in Montgomery, at a time when many were still doubtful about the possibilities of change, a time when those in the black community mistrusted themselves, and at times mistrusted each other, King inspired with words not of anger, but of an urgency that still speaks to us today:

"Unity is the great need of the hour" is what King said. Unity is how we shall overcome.

What Dr. King understood is that if just one person chose to walk instead of ride the bus, those walls of oppression would not be moved. But maybe if a few more walked, the foundation might start to shake. If a few more women were willing to do what Rosa Parks had done, maybe the cracks would start to show. If teenagers took freedom rides from North to South, maybe a few bricks would come loose. Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Unity is the great need of the hour -- the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I'm not talking about a budget deficit. I'm not talking about a trade deficit. I'm not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame -- schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.

We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can't afford a doctor when their children get sick.

We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.

We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.

And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.

So we have a deficit to close. We have walls -- barriers to justice and equality -- that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.

Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we've come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. We've come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily -- that it's just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved.

All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.

But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes -- a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.

It's not easy to stand in somebody else's shoes. It's not easy to see past our differences. We've all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart -- that puts up walls between us.

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don't think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.

For most of this country's history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man's inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays -- on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others -- all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face -- war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.

But if changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms. It is not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of attack as way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together around a common effort.

The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. And if we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country's ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina.

And that is what is at stake in the great political debate we are having today. The changes that are needed are not just a matter of tinkering at the edges, and they will not come if politicians simply tell us what we want to hear. All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice. None of us will be exempt from responsibility. We will have to fight to fix our schools, but we will also have to challenge ourselves to be better parents. We will have to confront the biases in our criminal justice system, but we will also have to acknowledge the deep-seated violence that still resides in our own communities and marshal the will to break its grip.

That is how we will bring about the change we seek. That is how Dr. King led this country through the wilderness. He did it with words -- words that he spoke not just to the children of slaves, but the children of slave owners. Words that inspired not just black but also white; not just the Christian but the Jew; not just the Southerner but also the Northerner.

He led with words, but he also led with deeds. He also led by example. He led by marching and going to jail and suffering threats and being away from his family. He led by taking a stand against a war, knowing full well that it would diminish his popularity. He led by challenging our economic structures, understanding that it would cause discomfort. Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap; that we would have to earn it through great effort and determination.

That is the unity -- the hard-earned unity -- that we need right now. It is that effort, and that determination, that can transform blind optimism into hope -- the hope to imagine, and work for, and fight for what seemed impossible before.

The stories that give me such hope don't happen in the spotlight. They don't happen on the presidential stage. They happen in the quiet corners of our lives. They happen in the moments we least expect. Let me give you an example of one of those stories.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.

And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta.

And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia.

And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope -- but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone

In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.

Conflicted

2008-01-21T10:31:00.000-05:00

So, apparently, Gil Cates helped nail down the DGA deal with the producers, and now the writers and producers might actually be adults and start talking again. They may actually resolve this thing in time for, say, new “Offices” to spring up before the season is meant to end. Movies won’t get shut down, and things will get back to where they’re supposed to be.

Good. For everyone.

But if that does happen, it certainly won’t benefit me at all. I don’t want to miss everything, damn it!

Selfish. I know it. But I can’t help it. I want the strike to end.. but nothing to come back. Heh. Basically, it’s part of my fear that I’m going to miss so much while I’m on the other side of the planet. In social lives, in the world. I’ll have a tv and the internet. But this just will make me feel so much farther away, if I can’t watch “The Office” at the same time as everyone else.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Bin Laden's son to dad: Stop Killing Civilians"

(This is only news to the idiots who assume anyone who's ever known an evil man will automatically become evil. I mean, hatred is taught, it's not innate. He's an adult, and apparently a reasonable one. This is not the world's most important story.)

Things I Don't Wamt To Happen 3

2008-01-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

This week, I want to successfully pull off this social juggling act. I can't really say a whole lot more about it without getting myself in trouble. But I'll just say it has something to do with an Oscar-winning movie.

Onto today's outlier:

"Suzanne Pleshette dies at 70"

(It's not the headline here that's out of place, really. In fact a bunch of people died yesterday. But in the dumb little "summary" up top, it says, "Cello-voiced beauty best known as wife on "The Bob Newhart Show"." 'Cello-voiced?' Really? I don't even need to explain how ridiculous that is, do I? No, I don't.

Did It Happen? (Week Two)

2008-01-19T11:07:00.000-05:00

I refer you to Sunday’s post.

Aaaand, quite significantly, after I worried, and walked through a rainstorm to send this shit to Korea, it got there in time. And, assuming Princeton doesn’t hurt me once more, the transcripts ought to be over there in Korea by now. Things seem to be okay, and I saw some of my friends this week.

It worked out.

Tomorrow: Another question. More suspense.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Boy, 16, poses as playboy, can't pay up."

(Now, I defy you to tell me what the hell that means. Please, tell me. What's that shit about, really? When you see the word "playboy," you think of the magazine, yes? But when it's lowercase, you are thus confused. Well, it's about a kid pretending to be a rich guy, but who was then found out. But, seriously, would you really, in 2008, call a rich kid a playboy? There's a reason Hefner came up with that name in the 50s. Out. Of. Touch.)

Haiku Friday!

2008-01-18T10:18:00.000-05:00

Oh my fucking god
Just spilled red wine on my bed
Guess I have wash these sheets now.

And finally, a return to the outliers, which I've avoided this week because they look weird between the haikus.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Bin Laden's dreadlocked son on Peace Mission"

(The real story here, which is actually pretty interesting, is that he's on a peace mission. Are people really going to read the story just because his hair is dreadlocked? Seriously.)

Haiku Thursday!

2008-01-17T12:12:00.000-05:00

Billy Bush is bad
Someone needs to shoot his ass
I am not kidding.

Haiku Wednesday!

2008-01-16T11:05:00.000-05:00

Ellen is Juno
Not intimidated by
The Juggernaut, Bitch.

Haiku Tuesday!

2008-01-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

It is sadly true
That I ain’t watched “The Wire”
Makes me feel so dumb.

Haiku Week starts today! For no particular reason!

2008-01-14T10:04:00.000-05:00

I wrote all of these
While watching the Golden Globes
That weren’t quite golden.

Things I Don't Want To Happen 2

2008-01-13T11:06:00.000-05:00

On Sundays, I will state something I don’t want to happen, and on the following Saturday I will see whether or not it occurred.

This week: I don’t want FedEx to screw up my document delivery.

Basically, in the driving rain yesterday, I made some photocopies, put a bunch of stuff together, and mailed all the last important stuff over to Korea. It has to get there by Tuesday or I lose my job. When I paid the extremely expensive fee, the woman said it would get there by Tuesday morning at the latest.

Possible problems include:

Weather. Oh, it’s nice now, but it could easily go crazy at some point in the next few days.

Human Error. You saw “Cast Away” didn’t you? This shit could arrive in five years.

Aaaand, the most likely candidate, my own handwriting. It’s so bad they could easily put it in the wrong box at the wrong place. But also, here’s the thing, Korean addresses don’t quite line up with everything on the form I filled out. So I could have written the street where the county was supposed to be. I’m sure I got city and country right. But otherwise, I dunno.

So, yeah, I hope that this don’t screw up and I can finally relax and pass through the threshold to exciting travel and employment.

And... Did It Happen?

2008-01-12T10:40:00.000-05:00

I refer you back to last Sunday's post.

And so, I will answer what I wondered: Did “The Daily Show” come back and completely suck?

No, it did not.

It was a bit awkward at times, a little unpolished, but, aside from guests who are extremely funny on their own, the fact that SAG members are basically avoiding the writerfree shows means Stewart has been bringing on political authors and the like, and the show is actually more informative and useful than it has been in a while. Stewart is best when angry or ticked about something, but at least showing off his prodigious intelligence, and his guests this week have allowed him to show that off.
Addtionally, since he doesn’t have a monologue, there’s no opening segment that will be reduced to suckage.

And finally, I’d stopped watching the show religiously, but now that it’s been away, and I haven’t been horrified to see what’s on it, I’ve gained one show to watch with new episodes while everything else shuts down and vanishes.

Sweet.

Tomorrow, another question.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Priestly passenger's "holy sand" was drugs."

(Exactly who is surprised by this?)

Hey, Mother Earth...

2008-01-11T10:31:00.000-05:00

I just bought a sexy new overcoat for these cold winter months. And then you went right back up to early-fall temperatures.

What the fuck?

Chill with that shit.

That is all.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Court papers: Mom said dead kids had demons"

(This is technically an update to the story about the mother that is accused of killing her kids. But how the fuck would you know that from the headline? You could make a logical leap, I guess. But is that what you're supposed to have to do after a headline? Imagine if, on 9/12, the headline was simply "Terrorists studied aviation." Would that convey the full reality of what had happened? No.)

Another Thing Not To Be Proud Of

2008-01-10T00:17:00.000-05:00

So, back when I was working in Soho a few weeks ago, a lot of people were on vacation, giving me a ton of extra hours I didn’t necessarily want. Celebrities used to come into the store, and that’s how it worked there.

Later in that week, it slowed down, and people came back from being home. One returning staffer looks exactly like an ex of mine, in that she was a very tall brunette who tended to stand around with her mouth slightly open.

The resemblance was too uncanny for me not to mention it, so I did, and she was surprised a girlfriend of mine would look exactly like her.

“This tall?!?!” she asked, incredulous.

I said yes, and she goes, “oh,” seeming a little disapproving. I inquired further, and got the answer I expected, which was, “Well, I just would neeeeever date a shorter guy.”

Now, why did you feel the name to declare this to me? I’m not fucking asking you out. And my ex’s issues with me occurred when I basically stopped being nice. She, a not-smart girl, was able to accept my lack of stature and move on.

Why are you proud to be superficial?

Just like Matt Damon, I wouldn’t date you either. So shut it.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"007 gets two new Bond Girls"

(Well, he's not gonna get two of any other kinda girls is he? Is he going to get two "Bourne" girls? No. So if you're going to be frivolous, be precise. Remember, this is the top of fucking CNN.com.)

Nothing To Be Proud Of

2008-01-09T01:38:00.000-05:00

Huckabee proudly chooses to ignore facts and say that evolution did not occur. Why we allow this idiocy to be supported, I don’t know. Americans are stupid.

Case in point, I was eating calmly at a diner Sunday night, reading a not-good baseball book written by an idiot. And across from me were two college-ish students rambling about love lives and blah blah blah and nothing interesting.

At some point they got onto the subject of movies, and this girl, who I guess was more attractive than the guy, went on and on about how she didn’t like “Oscar movies.” Annoying already. The guy didn’t really seem to be as into what she was saying as she was, but I have a feeling he was a socially stunted nerd who wouldn’t disagree with a human with a vagina.

Anyway. So she starts rambling about how she has no interest in “Country Old Men,” and then laughs, because getting the name wrong means she’s superior.

Now, look. I have problems with “No Country For Old Men,” because I feel like it has a strange distaste for its audience, the way it angrily refuses to have a climax and thus essentially fails in its narrative. Great tension, great job by the actors, and I understand that there’s little climax in the book, but on the screen, skipping what we’re waiting for is just directly cruel, whereas it can be dealt with deftly in a novel. And it bothers me that it’s being so highly praised, yet I don’t hate it like “Crash” or something. But come on, you should know what the damn movie is called. And why are you giggling about your ignorance?

Then she went on to say she didn’t want to see “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and added an "ohmigod" for good measure. Her reasoning being that there’s no reason to see a Tom Hanks movie that’s not a comedy.

Idiot.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is definitively comedic. You fucking idiot.

And then she explained she’d never seen “Forrest Gump” and they laughed about the fact that an “Oscar movie” was essentially about “a retard.” Now, come on, I use the adjectival version of that word, but never to refer to actually disabled people. I know I should stop, but the point is, you clearly know nothing of this movie, so do not claim to.

This woman, and this man, are so depressingly, quintessentially American, reveling in their lack of knowledge. They were also presumably intelligent in other ways, booksmart and such, considering the schools they mentioned attending, so they’re also arrogant as well as ignorant.

They are pretty much the worst kind of people. I should have just killed them.

Heh.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Prisoner found after escaping with taunting note."

(Here's what would make this worth reporting. "Prisoner found." Fine. "Prisoner found after escaping." Redundant, but fine. "Prisoner found after escaping with taunting note." Makes the real news the note and not the prisoner. Stupid.)

301

2008-01-08T10:21:00.000-05:00

That’s how many days there are until the election.

Another reason I’m glad I’m leaving is that I’m already tired of this shit. I don’t want to read about it, hear about it, care. I want to get away from here and all this endless coverage.

And I want the proudly ignorant....

...to die, or at least go away.

And I want my friends to stop supporting war hawks. Because it makes me ashamed to know them.

Today's CNN outlier:

"Emotional Service held for Tiger Victim"

(This California tiger thing is sad and ridiculous, but, seriously are we meant to believe that the service was emotional because a tiger killed him? What services lack emotion? What if he had been killed by a giraffe? Would that have been less emotional? Dumb headline.)

A Question for A Popular Fast Food Chain...

2008-01-07T10:04:00.000-05:00

If you, for some reason, don’t have large cups, I don’t want two medium drinks. I don’t want two of something I didn’t ask for. I just want you NOT TO RUN OUT OF YOUR SHIT.

That’s all.

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Gadget show includes no-ink photo printers"

(It's self-explanatory. It's not just not news, but it's the second video in a row that doesn't belong there. The first is about a boy limbo-skating under cars. So, this video is the outlier for being the second bit of nonsense in a row.)

Things I Don’t Want To Happen

2008-01-06T19:38:00.000-05:00

So, Sunday Chunks are over, and, during the six or so weeks before I go to Korea, I’m going to use this day of the week to similarly not write all that much, because it’s the weekend and yeah.

I’ll think of something that’s due to occur, in my life or in the world, and I’ll explain why I don’t want it to happen. Sometimes, it’ll be completely straightforward, and sometimes it’ll be random as fuck.

And then every Saturday I’ll look back and see whether or not it happened.

Okay? Okay.

This week, January 6th:

I don’t want the writerless Daily Show to completely suck.

Now, it’s already kinda weak with shitty correspondents and less vitriol from Stewart. I wrote about this more than a year ago and it certainly hasn’t gotten a whole lot better. But, if they had the writers, this time off might have rejuvenated the show.

However, they don’t have them. I’m tired of this damn strike, and being even more broke than the writers myself, I no longer have sympathy for any of them, and I think adults ought to be able to compromise rather than sniping and posturing. I hope the directors can act like adults and be done with this.

But for now, we get season finales in January, reality shows and, thankfully, “Law and Order.” Dave came back with writers last week, and was funny, Jay came back without, and wasn’t (but no worse than usual), and Conan came back without and was actually pretty damn hilarious.

Jon Stewart, however, doesn’t get Conan’s freedom to be goofy and dance around. His show is specifically fake/satirical news. I’m sure they’ve thought about this. But, really, what will they do to avoid the suckage?

(Colbert will probably suffer even more, since he’s playing a character.)

If it does suck, I will simply reiterate the fact that I’m glad I’m getting out of here at the time that no shows are on.

Rebellion (Lies)

2007-12-31T14:02:00.000-05:00

I can't much see any song replacing the title of this post as my favorite at any point in my life, at least until I come to associate some tune with meeting and loving a life partner or a son or daughter. What I mean by this is that "Rebellion (Lies)," for me, is the soundtrack to happiness. I can't say it always makes me happy - I'm not one for expecting certain stimulant responses, same reason coffee doesn't do much for me, I guess - but it represents not just good moods and good times, but the relevation that I deserved to be happy.

Its album, "Funeral," came out in late 2004, and in January 2005, I started spending all my nights out at Terrace and came to understand that the music there wasn't just going to be the random popular hip-hop songs of the time, amusing at this can be.

"Rebellion (Lies)" was one of the songs they played every night, and while I didn't have a clue what it was at the time, for some reason, more than all the others that were played in the taproom at that time (like "Deceptacon," or "Somebody Told Me," or, heh, "Hollaback Girl"), still remains the one I want to rock out to this day, as 2008 begins in less than 12 hours.

Why. Why this song. Why do I wait until 3 minutes into the song, raise my arms, and clap twice just as Arcade Fire does? Why does that little moment give me so much joy?

Why, being a stickler for memorization, did I not know most of the words and not care
about not knowing them until recently?

Because there is just something that still surprises me about the fact that I am able to be happy sometimes. "Rebellion (Lies)" reminds me of the bad, of the good, and of the time when it changed from one to the other, and I know I can't let myself slip back to being in the bad.

I can't tell you all the lyrics. I have them written down. But I don't know them all. It doesn't matter. There are better songs, but there are no songs that work as well for me as "Rebellion (Lies)."

Here's the video.

Wanted to share this with you on this end of a very significant year in my life.

Happy New Year.

Last Chunks Ever

2007-12-30T10:28:00.000-05:00

Finishing up "Thank You," the last of my little cathartic non-fiction stories from late-summer/early-fall. These all started after I felt like this and now I've snagged the Korea job and adulthood will occur for sure.

And so, the end of the story...

At, oh, about 3:30, the friend that I was staying with realized that he was going to have to be home eventually, and so we bid the sad kid goodbye and left his giant apartment to begin the endless trek back to Brooklyn. I recall leaping down five steps at once, and one of the girls grabbing my jacket as I did so. And that’s the last I ever saw of that jacket. The girls got into a cab and vanished, we crossed Varick street in the village, and for some alcoholic reason, I sat on the corner as they rode downtown. And then, nothing.
The rest of the night is entirely hearsay, but I will reconstruct as best I can. So, this moment I spent on the ground was the first of many. I stood up and was urged along until we reached the subway, which runs 24 hours a day but is exceedingly slow after midnight. While waiting for the train, I repeatedly fell asleep, which I still do on a lot of weekends, but instead of just appearing tired, I would wake up and divulge silly secrets about my crush on the new girl. Not just that I liked her, which was no secret, but that I would go to great lengths just to have a chance to talk to her. Though I don’t remember it, my first drunken confession revealed how particularly pathetic I was at the time. But to the two friends who were still with me, it was endlessly amusing.
So, the train came, we got on, I fell asleep, woke back up, continued to confess to relatively embarrassing things, and was, by all accounts an entirely positive and engaging drunk all the way into Brooklyn, where the gravy train immediately crashed.
We left the subway and began the relatively long walk to my friend’s house, at which point the liquor proclaimed victory over me, and I started to puke as I walked, not even bothering to lean over. This is, apparently, how the contents of my stomach ended up on my shirt, and my pants. I must have fallen at some point, because my friends recall carrying me for a few blocks, and, I guess this must have been when my hat fell off of my head, and I managed to puke inside of it as well. It remains a mystery to me how I got puke onto the inside of the boots I was wearing. My friends offered no insight on this subject, but I never pressed them about it, as I certainly owe them for carrying me after I lost the ability to walk.
Dead weight is heavy, so they plopped me down in front of Rite Aid after a while, and, apparently, I actually started shaking and convulsing on the ground; eyewitness account suggest that I had, in fact, guzzled myself into a seizure. My friend, for some reason, decided to call not his mother (who was presumably waiting for us at home) but his aged father, who just so happened to run the school we attended. As his father leaped out of bed and was preparing to come help us out, two random strangers, who were driving around Brooklyn Heights at four am for some reason, stopped their car next to my shaking body and told my friends they’d transport us to the hospital a few blocks away. I wasn’t someone they knew, or even recognized, and my clothes were covered in (drying) vomit, but they put me in their backseat and carted me off. My friend’s father eventually figured out where we’d gone, but it was these two good Samaritans that might have actually saved my life. I don’t know if I believe that I actually would have died if I hadn’t gone to the hospital, but as many idiotic risks as I took that night, I’m glad my body shut the fuck down and didn’t allow me to take any more. And I’m eternally grateful to these two people whose faces I wouldn’t recognize if I ever were to come across them again. As you might have guessed, these strangers are the people that inspired the title of this story, as I do want to express my gratitude, but I never will be able to do so face-to-face. So this is the best I can do. Thanks.
The people in the ER pumped my stomach, and eventually my mother and stepfather showed up to hear about how much alcohol was in my system, and about the little sprinkling of weed that had done more harm than good. My mother berated my friends for “doing this to [me],” and, as it turns out, my escapade had done nothing but confirm her fears, as she’d been pestering my friend’s fairly spacey mother all night long as we continued not to show up. This night of mine did nothing but make her worry more about me, and so, instead of acting as true liberation, I became a suspect for much of the rest of high school. Very little good came of this. But I digress from what I don’t actually remember. My mother and stepfather went home, and so did my friends, leaving me to wake up in a white room in my boxers……Really, really having to pee and clueless as to where the fuck I was. The nurses laughed and handed me a little container, which I quickly filled, still unsure of what had happened. Slowly but surely, the presence of gurneys and intravenous fluids clued me in on where I was, but I knew so little about drinking that I had never even thought about the possibility of ending up in the hospital because of it. But there I was, not hungover but very tired and dreading the eventual response of my parents, which was definitely different.
My mother came to pick me up, and simply laid into me in the car, though it seems her anger was driven mostly by fear and her somewhat mistaken belief that I shouldn’t want to go out like everyone else. I certainly didn’t set out to hurt her, but my goal had been to get drunk, no matter the consequences. Later on she quite earnestly placed a PSA on underage drinking on my bed. I guess she wanted to think I was going to remain the precocious kid I had been for so many years, but I simply couldn’t play that role anymore.
My father, on the other hand, heard about the night’s events later on in the afternoon, and a few nights later he took me out to dinner, and during the appetizer he simply went through every illicit material he’d ever dabbed in. Before that night, I knew my father drank and occasionally smoked cigars, but I never would have guessed any of this. My father went on to explain that he couldn’t logistically stop me from trying this or that, but he wanted to share that each material came with its own specific risks, and each and every one came at a financial loss. He essentially wanted me not to be as reckless and stupid as I had been a few days earlier, and although I’ve certainly had bad nights and rough mornings since then, I’ve never gotten close to hospitalization again, even though Princeton is very quick to send the inebriated to the infirmary.
Couch the story in accomplishment though I may, it was still a colossally stupid series of decisions that I almost didn’t survive. I left that night scared of alcohol, and reluctant to try and go out, and eventually fell into despair for several months. This wasn’t caused by dance night, but it certainly hadn’t helped, and although I now knew what it was like to be drunk, I still hadn’t learned how to really have fun, and I wouldn’t learn for a while yet. Dance night was only the beginning of a climb towards adulthood, but at least I’d finally moved away from my time as a precocious child, and, whether or not it was the right thing to do, I convinced myself that this was something to celebrate. Adolescence makes us all do stupid things, does it not?

Today's CNN Outlier:

It's all fucking outliers right now. Seriously. There's one about the world's oldest orangutan dying, one about a fake essay winning Hannah Montana tickets. Etc. They really don't try on weekends or holidays.

Be Careful What You Wish For

2007-12-28T23:47:00.000-05:00

So, a while ago, I wrote about the phenomenon that my seat neighbors on New Jersey Transit are always middle-aged black women, and how this tends to get old fast. I always hope for some attractive young woman, or a funny male peer, etc, to sit next to me.

Last Sunday, I popped down to PA to visit my mom and her side of the family. Got on a train at 11ish, full of people, I had a big bag of clothes I was planning to wash with me, etc. As the train leaves Manhattan, three women get on, and one, who was Jersey-Attractive in her way, sat next to me, doing the whole ponytail and “Juicy” pants thing. Better than nothing.

Her friend, diagonally in front and across from me, looked like fucking death. Chuggggging water constantly, these girls clearly had had too much fun the night before. And, as they babbled to each other, it appears the one who looked like death had run off with a 30 year old, because it seems like every teenage girl on the planet does this. (Seriously? Chill with that.)

(Side note: A co-worker at my new retail job, a high school dropout who just got her GED after failing HS twice, recently said to me, to prove her maturity, that her boyfriend is 28. Because this makes her mature. His age makes her mature. It was immediate proof of how wrong she was.)

Anyway. The one who looked terrible got up to run to the bathroom, presumably to puke. And then the one next to me says she’s about to get sick. Great.

I think, above most things, being vomited upon is one of the worst fears most people have. It’s not even that it’s sooo gross (which it is), it’s that being next to someone with that little self control is never pleasant, because you cant relax.
So, she runs off, apparently pukes in her hand outside of the bathroom and then they, I guess, tag teamed into the toilet bowl.

They came back, giggling, and chatted the rest of the time as I had to try and pretend that vomit is a one-time thing during a hangover, when I certainly know that it’s not. So, my punishment for hoping I’d meet a pretty girl was 90 minutes of abject fear.

Karma, I guess, for hoping I’d find a seat neighbor I could hit on.

But, also: dating an old man at age 17 doesn’t make you mature. It’s much worse for him than for you, though.

Travel Drinking

2007-12-28T01:42:00.000-05:00

Is it depressing when you buy a little bottle of Absolut just to help pass an otherwise pleasant train ride from Trenton to Maryland? I mean, in college, I never personally connected drinking to relaxation. It was always connected to craziness, a heightening in some way. But now, I drink a tasty beer at night. Or at a meal. And it’s no big deal. Hmm.

No, it’s not depressing. I think it’s a good thing that I’m finding ways to enjoy alcohol. Going to France helps with that.

But yeah, part of adulthood is putting adult things to adult uses. Maybe life would have been more pleasant if I knew this when I was 17. Ah so many ifs.

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Priests swing brooms, rocks in church fight."

(This is a case of the headline not explaining how cool the story is. It makes it seem like... they... lightly tapped each other. But when you click on it, it opens up to say, "Priests' brawl at Jesus's birthplace." Which sounds like pay-per-view silliness, but is actually pretty cool. So why wasn't that the headline? If you're gonna have random shit, sell its randomness. This is, apparently, the third-biggest non-Bhutto story in the world, CNN.)

Equal Opportunity Craig's Crazies

2007-12-27T01:17:00.000-05:00

I’ve realized I only tend to do women in past installments. Not picking on them, just the ones I’d personally read. So today, equal opportunity crazy. (I’ll do couples sometime in 08.)

Men looking for women:

"Hello, I am a focused guy in finance, looking for a friend at the moment. I am just out of a relationship and it is what it is. I am pretty busy and most times short on time and more interested in a solid friendship with an educated lady, white preferebly because I like the culture.

I am business owner, very down to earth, my time is very focused and preoccupied. I would love to email a friend now and then. I really do not have much time for much nonsense and dating endlessly, and i'm pretty much focused on my business. Like i said it is what it is.

I am from the wild caribbean of twisted histories and altered contexts... south america of english, portuguse and indian heritage. I am a worldly person and with an anthropology background, and I love and embrace all cultures."

I have no problem with internet dating. But posting, yourself, on CL is throwing a fish hook into waters you can't even see. So what is wrong with this guy that he's not explaning?

Oh right. He's deluded, and he's so worldly he can't write clearly. He is "business owner." And it's not that he's preoccupied, it's that his time is.
But it's not creepy, though. Because he just wants to email a friend every now and then. Hence his inclusion of picture.

Right.

Women/men:

"My local grocery was all out of egg nog today, so it looks like my cozy New Years Eve plans (curling up in bed with a good book and a glass of kosher egg nog) are kaput. What else can I do then, but look on CL for a good NYE date? Who knows - maybe we'll like each other enough to start something that brightens all of our 2008. I'm a slim, pretty, bright, successful professional, Jewish, and a GREAT dancer (ballroom, swing, Latin, folk, etc.). If interested, please send a brief bio, age, a phone number, and a suggested venue for our enjoyable NYE date. (Picture is welcome but optional.)"

This is just sad. This 50 year old woman seems so pleasant and bright and kind. But you know she's being eaten alive by disappointment and loneliness. Her family name might die out after her. She's not crazy. But I know I would be if I went on CL after I couldn't even find egg nog...

Men/men:

"Hey there, ripe pits. Anyone want them?
And drain my balls?"

Dude, some effort please? Come on.

Also: ripe pits? Huh?

Women/women:

"i`ve always loved women, and i`ve dated some in the past. me and my boyfriend just broke up and i`ve been going through a rough time. and i would love to find a girl to spend some time with. i`ve been thinking about it for a bit now, and i think i need the touch and companion of a nice girl. so i don`t know.. if anyone wants to talk and get to know eachother that would be wonderful. i`m 20 years old, i`ll be 21 in april. and i`m pretty sane so don`t worry :] hehe."

If you want people to think you're sane on CL, DO NOT JOKE ABOUT BEING CRAZY!!!

Today’s CNN Outlier:

"Dancers kick high with hope"

(Another video. Has something to do with the Rockettes. But it's sooooo trite. It is the essence of trititude. It's actually a cute story. But that headline, it's not even to the point, and it doesn't explain shit.)

I Ain't Never Scared

2007-12-24T00:36:00.000-05:00

So, last Christmas Eve I penned an epic Fergie takedown, which made it to number 2 on my recent countdown.

This year, less anger. More introspection.

So, I actually got the job in Korea officially on Thursday/Friday, provided I don't flunk a medical exam or screw up some paperwork. I will be leaving in late Feb, around two months from now, and while smoking hookah with a very cool girl who happens to actually like me, I, out of the blue, got introspective and thoughtful and frankly terrified.

I'm not that worried about health, or, say, being in a weird country on its own, since after rafting through crocodiles in Zimbabwe, Korea should be okay.

I'm not worried about meeting new people, because a few hundred young folks will be trained together for ten days, and I'm sure we'll keep in touch as we live around the country.

I'm not even worried about girls, because, while stereotypes would suggest that my relative largesse would make me quite appealing to girls native to the country, I figure I'll end up with some very cool fellow teacher, and indeed, the job will provide me with friends all over the Western world upon its completion.

I'll also come back with a certain amount of bank. And my life will really get going, provided I don't fuck up and get fired (I'll come back to this).

But I was scared, quite weirdly, that, when I come back, people won't want to see me. I felt like by leaving, I'd be deleted from the world as far as everyone is concerned.

My relationship with Beatnuts provides me with such an example. I talk to him when I make an effort to, but because he's in pathetic dependency land (ie his too-intense relationship with an admittedly cool girl), he truly does not speak to me when I don't initiate it. And I have never been closer to anyone than I was to him in high school.

We all have friends that drift away, but circumstance itself didn't pull us apart. He still enjoys my company. But, like, when I went to visit him in November, he was nonchalant about the fact that he spent the whole wknd mostly with the girl, even though he probably wasn't going to see me until 2009.

And, if it takes one little switch for such a close friend to become a ghost, then something as huge as my not being around for 12 months, I worry, might remove everyone else from my life.

My adult life will truly get going when I come back, but I don't want it to be an adult life lived entirely alone.

I'm also scared that, even if I meet people, and date, and have some fun, fearing I'll lose these friends and such will fuck with my head and screw up my job performance and I'll fuck up my contract and have to pay for my own airfare home and have litte to no parental respect. And still might lose everyone.

I know I'll write when I can while I'm gone. And my friends read this now (they just don't have blogger and don't comment), so I'll urge them to do it more once I go. But I worry they'll quick stop caring.

So I was feeling all this, and other things, and I wrote a long, endless facebook message to my three closest college buddies, hoping against hope they'd respond in some way. But really I just wanted AK to respond the way I wanted him to.

I wanted him to help make me feel I'm not writing little bits of fiction and working retail and going off to teach but still being insignificant. I want to feel a little like I matter.

AK, to his endless credit, assuaged my worries. Through half a sentence of sympathy, he helped me feel as though I won't be out of everyone's life for good when I go.

I may have to give up on Beatnuts, if only so I can stop caring. Since, while he thinks it's all good to not speak unless spoken to, I really just want him to reach out to me on his own, without prodding, and he will not. He tells me to fall in love, as if it's a prescription I can fill at CVS, and I think he looks down on me for not doing so. The funny thing is, he's the most atheistic person I know (moreso than even me) and he constantly derides the religious, yet he treats me like a sanctimonious Christian might. I take pleasure in this irony as I try to move past how things are between us.

Anyway. Ak helped a lot. And I went to see family, and didn't feel the urge to run away, even though they're still partially homophobic and still waaaay too loud. I was happy to be there. Perhaps the absence of my stepdad helped.

The holidays aren't over, and I've got a lot of shit to handle before 2008, not to mention the planning for Korea I'll have to do at that point.

But knowing Ak, and others, will be here for me, literally and emotionally, when I'm gone, and when I come back, means I'm not scared right now. I may be the day before I go, but knowing me, I'll throw myself right the hell into it and kick some fucking ass.

More than anything else, when people ask me if I'm excited, as they have been since May, I can finally stop hemming and hawing and just smile and say, quite truthfully, "Yes."

No Outlier today. Just a Chris Rock clip that we should all cherish at this time of year.

I'll be back Thursday.

Merry Christmas, from an uncharacteristically not negative Justin.

The Last Sunday Chunks (Part Two)

2007-12-23T09:46:00.001-05:00

More of "Thank You..."

...And so we moved on from Love Lane to the next stage of the night, as my friend was absolutely convinced that he was in dire need of some Visine. As for me, I certainly didn’t get high, but, as I later figured out, I’d received some of the other side effects of smoking, as I was momentarily paranoid. We will discuss the other side effects when they become relevant later on.
After we went looking for Visine, we bounced over to the promenade, its usually resplendent view rendered slightly strange since the Twin Towers had only been removed from it six weeks earlier. Nevertheless, we ran into a classmate or two there, but we were given the cold shoulder, and we bounced around some more, to the excellent nearby pizzeria, and then finally back to Montague Street, the main drag of Brooklyn Heights, which includes a block containing anywhere between six and ten banks, depending on what year you’re talking about. On this night, we finally ran into some receptive people, and the following-others portion of the evening began.
The first group of people we latched onto was an odd one. It contained a few nondescript people I can no longer identify, a heavier guy who inexplicably got any and every woman he wanted, two friendly seniors who had taken a shine to us younger folk, and “The New Girl,” whose very presence in my grade and some of my classes had thrown me for a loop. People rarely joined our school after ninth grade, so to see her there on the first day of eleventh was somewhat shocking. And even though it turned out that she’d once lived in Boston and New Jersey, all we originally knew about her was that she had come east from California, and she was thus “exotic.” On this night, she was all bubbles and smiles, and my fascination with her was at full strength. I wasn’t deluded enough to think I had a chance with her at that or any other point, but being near her was a privilege in and of itself. Plus, we were with our senior friends, who would care for us and guide to the fun we were looking for, and after just a few minutes with them, we found ourselves outside of a possible party, at which point I was introduced to my friend, the screwdriver.
There’s something about a screwdriver that puts me at ease. Not necessarily drinking it, but its simple composition, the fact that any bar on the planet can and will make it, and the fact that I can delude myself into thinking that the orange juice in the glass is quite good for me. Additionally, it was the very first mixed drink I ever had, and since I had no idea what strong and weak mixes tasted like, I made the first (or second) of many stupid decisions that night.
My friend and I had been handed a giant, two-liter water bottle filled to the brim with vodka and orange juice. I had never been much of a sipper, and of course I wanted to impress those around me, so I twisted the cap off and downed nearly half of the (fairly weak) drink in just a few gulps. This was drinking! I could truly get into this! And I was going to do this as much as possible! I high-fived my friend, who in turn drank some more of the screwdriver, and we wandered off behind our older companions to some other area near school, looking for trouble and occasionally finding it.
A few blocks away, we ran into some more seniors, who happened to have a bottle of Bacardi with them. I came across many a liquor bottle that night, but I only decided to drink those with names I recognized from commercials or some other facet of popular culture. Since this was the fall of 2001, every young hip-hop fan had spent the summer being entertained by a song that asked, “Where’s the Bacardi at?” and on this night, the Bacardi was at the spot directly in front of me, and as soon as it was offered to me, I grabbed it and drank three large gulps directly from the bottle like I was a camel whose hump had run out of sustenance. This was clearly idiotic behavior, and at this point I did begin to slur my speech and stumble a bit (which, to me, was awesome), but the person that owned the bottle told me to “slow the fuck down; this shit can be dangerous,” a sentiment that only amused me further. Dangerous? Perfect. This was the type of dance night I wanted to have. And sure enough, by this time, it was close enough to the end of the dance to finally show up and experience that sweaty half-hour the way it was meant to be.
We didn’t really have much of a “campus” at our school; there were a few scattered buildings that we owned and operated throughout the neighborhood, but we weren’t exactly in charge of the property in between them, and we didn’t even have our own athletic fields. So, being a New York school, we went vertical, thirteen floors high. Everyone traveled a few miles in a typical school day, and during the debaucherous part of the dance, people would sneak off to higher floors and do whatever pleased them. The dance itself was in the lobby, which wasn’t really big enough for such an event, but we crammed ourselves in there, and on that night, I finally came to understand why everyone was so happy to be a part of the teeming, sweaty crowd. I was finally just like them, I told myself, and as I danced to the six or seven songs they played before kicking everyone out, I was completely at peace.
When the dust settled and we found ourselves out in front of school, the new girl floated off somewhere, and our inability to focus as a peer group caused all of the dance attendees to fracture and head off in different post-dance directions. There were no big parties, and there was absolutely no consensus, so we decided to take advantage of a sad little kid who was a senior at the time. Jerry Seinfeld talks about the sad friend we all have who is always trying to get people to hang out with him by showing off how cool his stuff is, and how much his parents allow him to do. This is the sort of guy who doesn’t have a lot of confidence in his own personality, so he presents materials as a substitute. I have been this guy at a few different points in my life (and anyone with the desire to show off their cool new house or car morphs into this person temporarily), but on this night, we decided to take this sad little acquaintance of ours up on his offer of hospitality and trekked into lower manhattan to drink whatever liquor he was offering. I hadn’t had anything to drink in an entire hour, but I was still acting stupid and running the street and such. Consequently, I probably should have extended my break from alcohol, but this was not a night to rest.
The crew at this time of night included myself, my best friend, the senior who loved us, and two girls, one of whom was spectacularly attractive and has been featured in a handful of Hollywood movies and television shows. Just thought you should know that. Anyway, we get to the sad guy’s house, and he’s just beaming when he sees us approach. The kid rarely smiled, but at this moment, it appeared as though we had brought him joy. Sure we were there to swallow his parents’ liquor, but a little emotional philanthropy was a fine side effect.
As I’ve said before, I was pretty much sticking to drinks I’d heard of through the pop culture grapevine, so when the host exhorted us to take any and every bottle within his parents’ cabinet, I went straight for my first taste of Jack. We sat in front of his television, and another friend pulled out more tasty greens, which I smelled and fatuously approved of before one of the girls summarily dismissed it as “shit.” None of this mattered to me, because I was sitting in an armchair, in a thick blue coat, swilling from the bottle until I reached a critical moment of intoxication. When this moment hit, I was lewdly describing the women I saw on the television screen simply because they were wearing bathing suits. When I was informed that we had somehow landed on the Disney channel and that I was ogling preteens, I couldn’t even laugh at myself, because my lips, for the moment, weren’t really working the way they were supposed to. I’d lost my gag reflex, but when I raised the bottle to my mouth, poured some dark brown liquor in, and watched as it dribbled right back out, I was at least smart enough to know that I didn’t need to force the issue any longer.
At, oh, about 3:30, the friend that I was staying with realized that he was going to have to be home eventually, and so we bid the sad kid goodbye and left his giant apartment to begin the endless trek back to Brooklyn. I recall leaping down five steps at once, and one of the girls grabbing my jacket as I did so. And that’s the last I ever saw of that jacket. The girls got into a cab and vanished, we crossed Varick street in the village, and for some alcoholic reason, I sat on the corner as they rode downtown. And then, nothing.....

Today's CNN Outlier:

"Did DaVinci Serve Music With Last Supper?"

(Yet another video, this one's about some man claiming that there's music in said painting. I don't know what that means, and I don't care, because YOU CAN'T FUCKING SERVE MUSIC!!!)

Ostriches (More Shit-for-brains)

2007-12-22T03:06:00.000-05:00

I went to Africa once. My mom, being who she is, has a friend whose family owns 10,000 acres in Zambia. So. We went there once. And most days we’d drive around looking for game and observing them.

One animal we saw was the ostrich. A weird, giant bird that looks like it would fuck you up if it wasn’t completely and totally afraid of you (when you’re driving a jeep), the ostrich can run fast as hell, but, like a giraffe, it always, always looks like it’s going to topple right over while it’s doing it. But then, maybe that’s because our guide liked to chase them.

Anyway, at that club I mentioned yesterday, I was there to meet a friend for her birthday, and I showed up early enough not to pay for anything. This being my life, she was over an hour late. Of course.

So, for that hour, I fucked around, drank, ogled the bartenders, and watched two peculiar men try really hard to get laid.

These men were white, probably late twenties, and lanky. They can work with this if they had game/charisma/rhythm/etc.

The crowd was a mix of Asian and Black with a sprinkling of white. And where I was standing, there was a group of small Asian girls. Some cute, some not, whatever.
Anyway, through sheer sparkling wit, I assume, one of these guys managed to find himself dancing with one. About a foot of difference in height meant he was dancing from a crouched position, like a drunk crab even though he seemed sober, and with so little fucking rhythm that one can’t help but bring up Elaine Benes.

To add to this, as his friend stood, motionless, less than a foot away, this rickety ostrich-man was constantly, constantly, dipping the girl in front of him. Like, a verse would play, and he would damn near up-end the girl to demonstrate how debonair he was, except of course that he was, in fact, not debonair. His crazy, desperate attempts at cool all failed miserably, and he had to be stupid, or just blinded by the presence of vagina, not to see how dumb he looked.

To sum it up, he looked like an ostrich, and he acted as if he had shit for brains.
And I felt much cooler in comparison.

Change of Heart

2007-12-21T10:05:00.000-05:00

These two have been together long enough that they recorded “Crazy In Love” together more than four years ago. They’re urban music’s power couple. And as much as I don’t really like Beyonce, Jay-Z’s recent album is truly excellent.
They don’t talk about their love, even in their collaborations. But all sources suggest they’re fine together.

But, out at an annoying club on Saturday, I realized that Jay-Z hadn’t always felt this way about Beyonce.

Let us examine a moment from Missy’s “One Minute Man Remix," on which Jigga is featured.

He writes:

"Look, I'm not tryin to give you love and affection (uh-huh)
I'm tryin to give you sixty seconds of perfection (uh-huh)
I'm tryin to give you cabfare and directions
Get your +Independent+ ass out of here - QUESTION?"

Ha!

Now, if we are meant to take Beyonce and DC as the representation of all strong women, then that little quip can be seen as cruel and hateful (and it's mildly crude in its generic one-night-stand sentiment, but then the whole song is about that, and it's a Missy song, so men and women are being treated the same). However, since the song he’s dissing, “Independent Women,” is from a movie that wants to be seen as pro-women but is really just brainless and full of camera leering, then I tend to think his remark is just funny. And since I’ve been tired of Beyonce ever since, hmm, the horrible, subservient message of “Cater 2 U”, I wish Jay-Z would go back to dissing her.

That’s the world I one day want to live in.

(Yes, that’s a Superbad quote. Shame on you if you didn’t know that.)

Today’s Cnn Outlier:

"Gifts for posh pooch: furs, jewels, perfume"

(The title of this video is self-explanatory. I really think this only made the front page because they think the alliteration in "posh pooch" is cute. It's not.)

Meet Chesty Comfort

2007-12-20T10:07:00.000-05:00

"Chesty Comfort."

What do you think when you see those two words next to each other? Maybe a bra? A porn star? Something like that?

Well. I actually knew a girl whose last name was Comfort. She went to high school with me. And then, when I tried to Facebook her at some point during college, it turns out that Comfort is a fairly common last name.

But Chesty? That’s just really weird.

So, I play a computer simulation called “Baseball Mogul,” and it’s so mindless and fun that I’ve played all the way through 2103. They make up fake names. Some are very cool, like the guy whose last name was “Axmacher.” And women now play baseball, as of 2030-something.

But in the 2090s, we are given a young woman named “Chesty Comfort.” This isn’t the first “Chesty:” Chesty Thomas is a Hall of Fame second baseman. But, seriously, “Chesty Comfort?” I feel crude just knowing she exists. I don’t know how it happened, but if there’s a “Busty Bombers” yet to come, then I’ll know that the geeks who made this game had something dirty up their sleeves.

Not too negative, just amusing and weird.

(The game is still wayyy too much fun though.)

Today’s Cnn Outlier:

"Man With Blue Skin Just Wants Acceptance"

(It's a video, about a Santa-looking guy with blue skin. He appears to have survived for more than 60 years. What's with them and skin this week?)

Empty Guest Post

2007-12-19T10:07:00.000-05:00

About ten days ago, I authorized a friend to write a guest post for this site. I've done this before, and it worked out just fine. She even had extra time since I took most of last week off.

But, this friend is woefully unstable, unable to follow through on anything, and generally unreliable. She seems to have finished, but won't just press the button to send it.

So I pester her about it, and she uses that as a reason not to do it. As if this tactic will work with homework and teachers. And then, if I don't mention it, she still won't do it.

She's been through some things in her day (some her fault, some not), but you all know I fucking can't stand flakiness. And so I needed to explain why there's no real post today.

I hope Korean children are less insane.

Anyway:

Today's CNN Outlier:

"'Gorilla' shouts at accused monkey thief"

(Gorilla is in quotes, because it's about people in gorilla suits spreading the word about kidnapped monkeys. The story isn't about the kidnapping, which happened over the summer. No, the story is about the fact that these people wore gorilla suits. That's what the "news" is. OMG.)

Matt Damon Wouldn't Date You Either

2007-12-18T10:03:00.000-05:00

Not sure why I suddenly remembered this last week, but when I was working at a particular retail job in the summer of 05, there was this mildly attractive girl working there who shared a name with a famous water filter system. Her features were oversized, but soft and pleasant (and curvy, I must say), and most guys would find her nice to look at.

One day, during some downtime (of which there was a great deal), another coworker mentioned seeing Matt Damon at some club downtown. And Water Filter got happy, being a fan, and mentioned finding him really attractive. She then asked the witness how tall Mr. Bourne was, and was told that he is, “Like, 5’10” maybe?”

I’m not sure how true this is (IMDB says he is, in fact, 5’10”), but based on this random estimation, Water Filter scrunched up her face, and said, “No, no, I’m 5’9”, so I couldn’t wear high heels around him. We couldn’t date.”

Now. Maybe. If this was some random shlub who approached you in a bar, you could look down at him from on high and dismiss him as worthless because of his puny size. If this was Matt Damon in 1992, before he actually got famous, then that’d make sense.

But the fuck? You’d actually turn down Matt Damon just because of an inch or two when you wear heels? Really?

Well, judging from this thought process, Matt Damon wouldn’t date you either you shallow fuck.

And now, for today’s Cnn Outlier:

"Disorder turning anchor's skin from black to white."

As i write this, this is actually the top fucking story, and includes this gem of a line about his disease: "It's not fatal, but experts say vitiligo robs people of self-confidence, evokes ridicule and unpleasant stares, and pushes some into unforced seclusion." I don't think anymore needs to be said.

CNN Outlier

2007-12-17T08:28:00.000-05:00

I kinda talked about this once before, but I’ve decided to make it a regular feature. At the end of most posts, I will simply post a link, with the headline, of the most random story among the top news items on CNN.com.

I don’t just mean something related to celebrities, which, at this point, has become simply one section of news. No, I mean the random idiocy that lacks category and can’t possibly be satisfying any demographic.

I was inspired to do this during my week off, when, for no reason, someone decided to investigate the fact that “Women post drunken, barfy pix on net.” (The title has since been changed to something un-mentally deficient.)

Really? This is a surprise? Young people, myself included, are stupid and irresponsible.

But, seriously, “barfy?” Is that the technical term? Is that the best word, the most honorable word the headline-writer could have chosen?

This feature, which will always inspire me because there’s always something stupid at the top of CNN.com, was inspired by the word “Barfy.” Enjoy it now, and in permanence. I will only add once sentence of snark after each of these.

Today’s Outlier:

"French President visits Disney with ex-model."

(Because it wouldn't have been news if she were still a model....)

The Last Sunday Chunks

2007-12-16T13:46:00.000-05:00

Today I post part one of the last self-story I wrote during my cathartic flurry from August to September. These stories helped me feel better when I was adrift and alone.

And, if you're reading them, you ought to understand me better now.

Anyway, this one is called "Thank You."

This story is called “Thank You” for a very specific and justified reason which will not become apparent until we approach its conclusion. Just thought I should share that with you.

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My high school had very few people in it; though it continues to grow, at last count there are still only about eighty people in every grade. What this means is that while our school was full of kids who liked to mess with their brains, lungs, and livers, the opportunities to do so were few and far between, until a handful of intrepid students started to organize things more intelligently just before I graduated. But in the early part of my junior year, the partying was still centered on the dance nights. Not the dances themselves, mind you, because the five or six kids that actually had rhythm usually didn’t show up, or simply stood on the sidelines and laughed if they did; additionally, the dances were held in the school lobby from eight to midnight, and no one ever showed up until the overcrowded and alcohol-fueled final thirty minutes, a lesson I learned when I showed up at nine o’ clock my freshman year and sat alone for more than two hours. No, the dance nights were important because our focus was centered on these three nights a year when anyone who was anyone would be out, and hammered, and doing what any well-off child of New York would when given the opportunity and the motivation to act as stupid as can be. As the first dance night of junior year approached, I had never had more than two drinks in one night, or any sort of narcotics at all, and I was determined to join the ranks of those who had. But before I could even dream of achieving this far-from-ambitious goal, I needed to create an airtight plan that would allow me to go out with everyone else and act a fool to my heart’s content.
On Saturday, October 20th, 2001, I was at the beginning of what would prove to be an exceedingly tumultuous year. I was about to see my forehead fill with hideous acne (which I hid under tight baseball caps), I was alternately sad and full of rage at myself, and I had very little in the way of self-confidence. But in mid-October, I hadn’t quite sunk into the painful pit that enveloped me for the subsequent four or five months. On that morning, I was unsure of myself, and I only had one close friend, but I didn’t feel as isolated as I would soon afterwards. Indeed, I considered myself just one good, visible night out away from becoming a part of the scene, from being able to take part in the Monday morning conversations about the weekend’s happenings. I didn’t exactly think of the social stratosphere at my school in terms of “coolness,” “popularity” and their flipside, since I had known most of my classmates for more than a decade, and it was difficult to be truly ostracized from people who, at the end of the day, were not all that different from you. I was about as close to a loner as there was in my grade, but cliques were non-existent there, and no group of friends would look down on another person just for trying to speak to them. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t like movies about high school; even someone on the “outside” was only, I reasoned, one small step away from being comfortably on the inside. This step seemed much larger, however, because of my relationship with my mother.
I’ve never really fought with my mom. We’ve had a disagreement or two over the years, and any parent-child relationship is going to have some kind of tension, but unlike my arguments with my dad, which go on for hours in a small, enclosed space, any fights with my mother have tended to dissipate fairly quickly. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but when I was fifteen, and my friends were staying out all hours of the night, I was usually at home by nightfall every Friday and Saturday, unless I was seeing a movie alone, in which case I was still home by ten or so. I didn’t even have a curfew at my mother’s house because I just never actually went out. My one close friend, on the other hand, didn’t go out that often, but he had the freedom to come home as late as 3 if he so chose. He rarely did, but the fact that he could made me feel like I was being severely gypped by the rules of my own house. Now, a mature person would have honestly brought up these issues in a discussion. I might not have gotten exactly what I wanted in one fell swoop, but perhaps I might have made some progress. But I didn’t just want “progress.” I wanted immediate results on dance night, and the relatively lax rules of my friend’s mother made him a natural vehicle for my plan to get fucked up with everyone else.
I didn’t yet have a cell phone, so I was always required to give the number of every place I was to spend time. As annoying as this was, it made some sense, and I did as I was told, especially because it was easy enough to find my friend’s home number in the school directory. My mother knew that the dance ended at midnight, and, because midnight is after dark, she was expecting me to return to his house immediately. I guess I should have figured that she would wait up for a call from his house phone, but I also assumed she wouldn’t bother my friend’s mother at such a time. Her somewhat justifiable worries outweighed the decorum that I was banking on. But, essentially, I didn’t care. I had a means of getting out of my own house, and once that was achieved, all I needed to do was start the party, so to speak.
Another obstacle, though, was the fact that, although the two of us were great friends and had a lot of fun together, we never knew where the party was. Our strategy was to wander Brooklyn Heights, the neighborhood near school, and hope to run into something more fun than wandering the neighborhood. On this night, we were lucky enough to encounter a younger friend who, we learned, was “supplied.” This was exciting. And he was going to share his greens with us, which was even more exciting. There had been a time during the summer before this moment that I had been kind-of-dating a girl who smoked a lot of weed, and I told her that I would never touch the stuff. “Good for you,” she had said, half-seriously, and then here I was fourth months later, feeling nothing but excitement at trying my first non-alcoholic drug.
My only conception of how I’d be affected by smoking was what I’d seen on television and at the movies. But then, I’d also heard this and that from people around school.
“How long are you high?” one classmate asked another.
“Like ten, fifteen minutes. You?”
“Yeah, only like five, so I just sorta keep it going.”
Was this good, to be high for ten minutes? Was this a long time? Was it so intense that ten minutes was more than enough? All of these questions kicked around my brain as my “supplied” friend pulled out his bag of tricks so that he could roll one up. But before he went for his papers, he allowed us to smell the greens he had acquired. Now, six years later, I have learned a few things about the aroma of marijuana, but back then, I didn’t know what good stuff, bad stuff, or any stuff smelled like. With the bag under my nose, I took a big whiff, and simply uttered a Keanurrific “Whoa,” since that could have meant that the product was either terrible or amazing. The only way my plan would have failed was if the weed in front of me was spectacularly average. No one batted an eye, and the spliff was rolled.
Now, an aside about Brooklyn Heights. Since this was New York City, cops were technically in existence. You would seem them driving about on occasion, and if, by chance, you found yourself near a car accident, you’d probably see a couple of them milling around. But as far as we youth were concerned, they just weren’t a concern. None of us really had legitimate fake IDs, as the liquor acquired usually came from parental liquor cabinets. And whenever a party actually materialized in Brooklyn Heights, they were very rarely shut down. You’d hear of assorted law enforcement incidents, but they were few and far between. And so, at later times, when I was friends with the sticky green, we simply strolled to an “alley” a few blocks from school to light it up. I put “alley” in quotation marks because it was wide and fairly well-lit, and several well off people lived there; it just happened to be paved with cobblestones for some reason, so it had an alleyish feel. Now, with so few people, there wasn’t exactly a “makeout point” that students frequented, but this weed-smoking quasi-alley was called “Love Lane,” and the first time I visited the street for this purpose was on that very same night.
We lit the spliff on Love Lane, and passed it around until it was gone, not worrying in the slightest about the cops. I wanted to experience the high I knew nothing about, even though I’d heard that you just don’t get high the first time you smoke. So I waited with optimism quite uncharacteristic of my younger self, but not very much happened. And so we moved on from Love Lane to the next stage of the night, as my friend was absolutely convinced that he was in dire need of some Visine. As for me, I certainly didn’t get high, but, as I later figured out, I’d received some of the other side effects of smoking, as I was momentarily paranoid. We will discuss the other side effects when they become relevant later on....

2007-12-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

What It’s Called: Oh you knew this was coming… it’s called My Last Article (May 19th, 2007)

What It’s About: People I knew at Princeton sucking. My own mistakes. General flaws of the Princeton institution. And how I survived it.

Why I Love It: It’s the best non-thesis work I think I’ve ever done. And, ya know, people still remember it. I fucking called people out and that’s that.

And so….

(That’s for Brooke.)

300 posts! I made it.

And I shall thus take some time off to recuperate. I promise you, though, that I will return Sunday with the beginning of my final Sunday Chunks, and after that, I will power through the end of the year with anger, annoyance and bemusement.

And I know more of you read than comment because you’re not on blogger. And I appreciate it, those of you who do read.

Back Sunday.

2007-12-08T01:35:00.001-05:00

What It’s Called: Definition: Make Justin Go Crazy (December 24th, 2006)

What It’s About: It’s an epic, line-by-line throat-slashing of the lyrics to “Fergalicious.” It’s truly, truly epic.

Why I Love It: Fergie is bad and needs to be trashed at all times. I did my part. On Christmas Eve, too.

Number one shall be revealed on Monday morning....

2007-12-07T10:03:00.001-05:00

What It’s Called: She Drives Me Crazy (July 29th, 2007)

What It’s About: I met a crazy girl online. I never met her in person. She found me attractive, but she was crazy. This is about her craziness.

Why I Love It: I even solicited the opinions of my friends to determine whether she was crazy or I was being too critical. She’s fucking crazy.

2007-12-06T10:01:00.000-05:00

What It’s Called: Porn Is Necessary (July 16th, 2007)

What It’s About: Um… you have to read it to believe it. Let’s just say some people need to… relieve themselves more privately, as I learned through the actions of a middle aged man.

Why I Love It: This would have been traumatic if he was scary, large, or younger. But instead it was fucking hilarious (though still aggressively gross and creepy).

2007-12-05T10:15:00.000-05:00

(I don't know what the hell that is supposed to be but I love this picture.)

Annnnnnyway,

What It’s Called: On Girls, Clubs, Dancing, and Niceness (October 31st, 2007)

What It’s About: People need to be upfront if being “nice” is dishonest and insulting. Also, girls and dancing.

Why I Love This One: Because I got fired up and wrote it well. A lot of people agreed with me on this one. A satisfying post.

2007-12-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

What It’s Called: You Might Not Find Me In Da Club(January 3rd, 2007)

What It’s About: The ups and downs of spending New Year’s Eve at Webster Hall.

Why I Love This One: Well, it’s a long, funny story, where I learned about myself and fretted about adulthood. Lot of insecurity here. And Beatnuts before he went back into his endless love sagas. He’s more fun when he’s a sad sack.

Also: Today this blog is a year old! Wow. You guys better start commenting when I vanish and go to Korea.

2007-12-03T10:10:00.000-05:00

What It’s Called: Okay, Seriously, We’re So Close (April 3rd, 2007)

What It’s About: Girls pretend they’re sisters after they’ve known each other for mere weeks. Well, some girls do. Dumb girls. And it’s annoying. So I made fun of it.

Why I love This One: Oh, it’s snarky and draws very specifically from real life. And it’s my 100th post!

2007-12-02T11:09:00.000-05:00

What It’s Called: Getting Together (March 12th, 2007)

What It’s About: Couples that are together forever and don’t fuck. It’s very profane.

Why I Love This One: I just said it was very profane. But, also, not angry, and it includes a gruesome selection from “American Psycho,” because I was deep in thesis world at the time. Basically, it’s me being normative-normative-normative, and I kinda like it that way.

2007-12-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

What’s It’s Called: Left Field and Law and Order (December 8th, 2006)

What It’s About: Generally, dumb random shit that occurs in casting and the plots of “Law and Order” and “SVU.”

Why I Love This One: I mean, have you fucking seen the “Is this because I’m a lesbian clip?” Go watch it. No further explanation needed.

2007-11-30T10:18:00.000-05:00

(Starting today, and up through 12/10, I’m counting down my ten favorite blog posts as I approach my 300th.)

What It’s Called: Victory Is Mine (February 19th, 2007)

What It’s About: Some girls I don’t like had been taking advantage of my acquaintance and forcing themselves into Terrace. This time, they snuck in and got kicked the fuck out. Yay.

Why I Love This One: Because, though I was cowardly during it, and though it was not great triumph, I really enjoyed showing these annoying, not-as-smart-as-they-think-they-are girls out of Terrace, which is of course my second home. Basically I like it, most of the time, when people look stupid. And they looked dumb, and never came back to Terrace. Fucking sweet.

290/Thursday (?) Chunks

2007-11-29T10:02:00.000-05:00

This is my 290th post. In honor of my 300th (and the one year anniversary, which is next week), every day until then I will count down my favorite posts of all time, starting tomorrow. But before that, I might as well finish the Sports story I started Sunday, so here’s the rest:

..After trying and dismissing Tennis as well, I somehow stumbled into following the ups and down of the New York Knicks who, in 1994, reached the NBA finals for the first time in decades (but only because Jordan was taking some of his occasional time off). Everyone in New York cared about basketball again, and we all loved our man Patrick Ewing and his graceful fadeaway jumpshot. So, the best men, at this time, were the basketball players, and they became the men I most needed to emulate.
There were, as always, a few problems with this plan. First, at age eight, I could barely dribble a basketball more than a few times without breaking some fundamental rule. Second, at age eight, I couldn’t exactly get a basketball up high enough to have a chance at hitting a basket. My mother bought me a little tiny rim that was five feet off the ground, which allowed me to believe that I could dunk, and so I played imaginary games in my backyard most days after school when I wasn’t playing my beloved Genesis. Speaking of which, I was obsessing over Sonic and Tails in those days, but around the same time as I got into basketball, I started asking for, and receiving, basketball video games. I didn’t know it then, but I began living vicariously through the pixilated creatures on my television screen. When they did well, I was happier. And when they did poorly, I got angry. The 1994 version of NBA Live wasn’t advanced enough to allow me to create players, but by the time the next volume came out, I was turning virtual Justin Gerald into the best basketball player I could imagine. As my preferences shifted over the years, I continued to do this, with basketball, football, baseball, and even hockey, and even after I graduated from Princeton, I was still using created players and their superhuman exploits as an effective form of relaxation. And I still can’t play sports. But back then, I still held out some hope of becoming, like, a second-string point guard. I never said I was ambitious.
After two years of dunking on hoops six inches above my head, I resisted the idea of being sent to generic sleepaway camp for the summer after fifth grade. I occasionally wonder what friends I might have made while doing typical things in the woods, whatever those typical things are. But instead, I went to basketball camp at Montclair State University. I mention the school chiefly to contrast it with the rejected possibility of attending Camp Fakeindianname in the forest of some New England state. We packed up and drove all the way in the Central Northern Jersey, and I began my lengthy career as a very unskilled camper.
I tried hard, though. They woke us up every day at 7 with a brutal series of knocks on the door, and then, after breakfast, we spent 8 of the next 12 hours running up and down hardwood courts, which were, conveniently, more than a mile away on foot. At least the first year or so, the coaches appeared to like me, because, even though I was tiny and not very good, I really did hustle, which, they assumed, would lead me to practice very hard when I wasn’t at camp, and to return the following summer a much improved player. I suppose they underestimated my laziness, which you might think would conflict with my desire to become a good athlete, but, if you thought that, you’d just be wrong.
You see, I didn’t really want to work to become a great athlete. I just wanted to be one. And since that doesn’t even happen to those who actually have talent, I never really had a chance. But, for five summers, just after school ended, I would trek to Jersey and spend two weeks playing a hell of a lot of bad basketball. As it so happened, I was ten the first time I went, and at that age, you really don’t have any muscle tone at all, so unless you’re one of the country’s many obese children, you can pretty much run around forever until you lay down and pass the fuck out. You don’t get sore. You don’t really pull muscles, because you don’t have any. And, even though you should be doing so anyway, you don’t feel the need to hydrate, because running doesn’t make you as thirsty as it will a few years down the road. In fact, though I don’t quite understand the physiology of this, your sweaty, hairless underarms don’t smell as bad as they could. So you can run around all day long and not be much worse off than if you’d simply sat still. It was easy to “hustle” at age ten, because I had boundless energy. I did all the drills, dove for loose balls, and learned some necessary fundamentals. And when I got back home, my parents got me an almost-normal sized basketball hoop, and soon all the neighborhood kids were coming to my backyard to beat me into submission. Every time they came over, I hoped I could find a way to avoid going outside to play with them, because I would invariably score fewer points than they would. And every summer, this process repeated itself. I got older, my boundless energy shrunk, I continued not to practice, and I became a fairly embarrassing basketball player. And as I got worse, the Knicks did too, and my intermittent support for the Yankees was simultaneously aroused. Basketball just wasn’t all that fun anymore, yet I just kept going back to camp and looking worse than everyone else. I flat-out sucked.
The ten-year-old who did everything all over the court eventually became a sluggish teenager who exaggerated a mild ankle injury to avoid playing more damn basketball. And by the time I returned for a fifth miserable summer, the main coach approached me for a serious conversation. There were two groups of players, see, and they were split in half by age, with twelve being the usual cutoff point. This fifth year, I had reached the grand old age of fourteen, so when the coach sat me down to ask me a question, I wasn’t really expecting him to ask me what he did. The coach liked me. He’d seen me grow, in size, over the years, and shrink in ability. But he was an honest man. And he said what he felt he needed to say.
“Justin,” he asked. “Don’t you feel you’d be more comfortable with… the younger kids?”
I agreed with his assessment, but after I went home at the end of that week, I didn’t play basketball again for two years, at which point I was roped into a pickup game in the gym at my high school. I had been working out obsessively for months right before this, so, even though I was no longer the skinny weakling I once was, I was so unaccustomed to my new strength that I fired several shots over the entire backboard, and was roundly ridiculed. I had always been bad, but now I was amusingly awful. And that was just about it for my former favorite sport.
As I mentioned a second ago, my love for the Yankees, and baseball as well, was resurrected in the mid-90s. As I moved away from basketball, America’s pastime took up permanent residence in my heart, as goofy as that may sound. I continue to be affected by how well the team does, and I am a noticeably more pleasant person when the Yankees are winning. But back in 1999, I still thought I could, you know, play baseball. And, lucky for me, the 8th grade team didn’t have any cuts. So they couldn’t get rid of me if they wanted to (and they wanted to).
Every time I showed up at a tryout, I made some egregious mistake that caused most of the rest of the team to look at me with bewilderment. How could this person actually expect to have himself considered a baseball player, they seemed to ask each other. He cannot hit, or play defense, or run. He cannot do anything right. Why, they asked themselves, is he even on the field? And I didn’t really have an answer for them.
They didn’t cut me, because they couldn’t, but they made me the “manager” and got me to pass the time by keeping track of the balls and strikes in every game. I filled my head with the statistics of 13-year-old baseball players, and I sat on the bench making strange noises and basically playing the role of team mascot. I managed to get into three of our thirteen games, striking out in both of my at-bats, and making errors in my two innings at second base. In my one moment in left field, I didn’t make an error, but I let a pop up drop in front of me and blamed the mistake on the third baseman. So, I was both an abysmal player and a dishonest one. But at least I was clearheaded enough to know I wouldn’t have a chance to make the high school team, so even though I continue to live vicariously through imaginary Playstation baseball players, my flirtation with baseball stardom only last a few short months. It was around this time, however, that I returned to the scene of one of my earliest defeats and dove back into the world of Tae Kwon Do.
As a child, martial arts never really have a chance of showing you a way to stop a dangerous person who means to harm you; you essentially learn how to look better at performing the routines. But as a short albeit theoretically growing adolescent, it stood to serve some actual, practical purpose. For a while there, I actually (gasp) worked hard on my repeated forms, and rose through the ranks from white belt to yellow to green. I was pretty close to purple when I, as usual, stopped caring, which made no sense, considering that this was a sport a little guy like myself, who was very weak at the time, could have taken and adopted and thus immeasurably bettered himself. But no, I’m a fucking quitter, and even though I didn’t immediately stop going to practice, I immediately quit mentally.
There was an important tournament one spring, for which the grand prize was actually a great deal of money. I had practiced my one cherished form for weeks, and I thought I had become pretty good at displaying my low blocks and high kicks, even though there would never be an occasion when I would make use of a slow, deliberate series of unopposed movements like this. Nevertheless, I figured I at least had a chance of winning a bit of pocket cash, but, this being an encounter between Justin Gerald and an athletic endeavor, I was dismissed immediately after performing, and quickly sent home. They did give me a trophy for paying the ten-dollar entrance fee, and so, just as I had been at age six, I was rewarded for showing up. Attendance, apparently, was the only part of sports at which I truly excelled.
After basketball, baseball and Tae Kwon Do petered out within one sad little two-year period, I pretty much accepted the fact that I was never going to be an athlete, and even though I did begin to work out, I didn’t even try to join a single team throughout my entire high school career. I still enjoyed watching some sports, but I remained on the sidelines until exceptional circumstances basically forced me back onto the field.
My troubling early semesters at Princeton left me without a single close companion, male or female, but I foolishly clung to the idea that my hallmates would eventually accept me as readily as they did each other. In the early spring of my freshman year, I overheard two students talking about joining the rugby team, which, as a “club” sport, didn’t cut anyone (just like my old baseball squad!). I really didn’t know a thing about rugby, except that it was fast-paced and brutal, yet I somehow quickly decided that this, this difficult, dangerous sport, this would be my salvation. The men on the team would rally around me, and my lack of skill wouldn’t be a problem, because very few Americans are any good at the sport. And, even though they were depressingly sexist and homophobic, my new teammates were very caring and supportive people, and I wrote an article in the newspaper about our easter-weekend triumph over the other ivies. This hastily-composed piece earned me the temporary adulation of the other ruggers, and even though I hadn’t become very good at the sport in the six weeks since I’d begun to learn it, I was still well within my “newcomer” grace period. Joining the rugby team, I told myself at the time, would be the best decision I would make at Princeton. But my God, man, I am a remarkably lazy piece of shit.
I’m short, and not very fast. I can’t make myself taller, but, if I was going to play the only positions suitable for someone my size, it would have made sense for me to at least work on my fitness. I probably couldn’t make myself all that much faster, but stamina can be attained, if one should choose to seek it. I’ve been muscular since eleventh grade, but was a very poor tackler. And so, I could have worked on this particularly glaring weakness of mine over the summer and come back ready to dominate, but I did not do this. I can’t say that I’m lazy with respect to everything, as my former workout obsession and my occasional academic excellence would suggest, but I think the problem, with rugby, with basketball, and with most of my athletic endeavors, is that I’ve never really enjoyed playing these games just for the sake of playing them. I wanted to excel for so many years because I wanted to look better in the eyes of others, and for guys (and for women too, but probably to a less extent), one of the simplest ways to look better is to kick some ass on the field, on the court, or in the dojo. But these things are only simple if you actively want to improve yourself, and, aside from the fact that I’m naturally tiny, clumsy and afraid of being painfully injured, I never enjoyed playing the sports themselves. I just wanted to make myself look cool.
And so, of course, I didn’t get any better at rugby, and I slowly slipped away from the team over the course of my sophomore year. The guys remained nice to me, and I continue their not treating me as badly as I played. In the few years between then and now, I haven’t stepped foot onto a basketball court, haven’t hardly thrown a baseball, and I certainly haven’t tried to tackle anyone on a rugby pitch. It might have taken more over a decade to realize it, but in order to be one of the best men I spoke of earlier, I didn’t have to become an athlete, but rather stop pretending to be one. I’m not a sports star, I never have been, and I never will be, and the coolest version of myself is one that knows and understands this.

Leave Uno Alone

2007-11-28T10:06:00.000-05:00

I've been distractedly seeing this commercial for some game called "Uno Attack" (complete with the craaaaazy picture above) for the better part of a year now. I never really paid attention to what was going on in the commercial until a day or two ago.

And then I realized that it was fucking idiotic.

See, the makers of Uno have created a game that uses our familiar Uno cards (Skip, Wild, Draw Two, etc.) and placed them into a contraption that fires them out with some rhyme or reason.

Ah, but you see, as the jingle goes:

"It's fun for the whole.. familyyyyy."

Aside from the fact that the woman singing this sounds like a zeppelin rapidly losing air, it really makes me wonder what about the old Uno needed to be changed to make it more family-friendly. It's just about the best family game ever.

It's one of the only card/board games I can always find myself up for playing. And it's one way to make my time spent with family turn out to be more bearable.

It is, like, the king of family games. It's not porn. It's not R-Rated. It doesn't involving drinking (necessarily).

It's already fucking fun for the whole familyyyyy.

But you just have to make it faster and louder and (at)tackier.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Leave Uno alone.

A Bad Sign

2007-11-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

I guess they recently opened an entire store devoted to fucking Crocs about nine blocks from my house.

Crocs are ugly, clunky shoes for oversized children and it makes me sad when anyone over the age of seven who isn't mentally challenged wears them. (This includes one of the HPs. Shame on you).

More to the point though, the store is across the street from a Sunglass Hut. Much as I think fashion is pointless and silly and people who shop endlessly to be quite annoying, I doubt it's a good sign that we may have to visit ten separate stores just to get suit of clothes to wear.

Especially when some of the clothes are fucking Crocs.

Sitcom Recyclables

2007-11-26T10:00:00.000-05:00

“Still Standing” was a bad show. Did you ever hear of it? No? Well, it’s about a fat white man married to an attractive white woman. They have teenage-ish kids, and they’re kind of mean and petty. You know, like every sitcom couple since Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

Anyway, being all rigid and routine-based like I am, I had a rotation of shows I’d watch before going to sleep most nights in college. For a while there, Lifetime played the Golden Girls at 1 am, followed by something terrible. So I’d occasionally flip over to Fox or something and watch “Still Standing,” just because it was something to watch. Sometimes I watched the replay of Colbert, and it was usually much better than the dumb sitcom, but every few weeks, it was “Still Standing” for a fairly painless half hour.

I’ll tell you, though. The show might have lasted for 88 episodes, but somehow, I always seemed to watch the same three or four. Without fail, I ran into the same dumb plots, which would have been fine on their own, but are very annoying as the only representation of the show.

Same thing on most afternoons now: “Without A Trace” and “Just Shoot Me,” for example, don’t have all that many episodes to fall back on (they both have over 100, but it’s nothing compared to “Law and Order,” or “The Simpsons”), but when I settle on them just to pass some time, it’s always seems to be the same two or three shows. I can’t understand why this would be the case; maybe these are the most popular episodes of the shows?

Does this mean people like the worst of mediocre shows rather than the best? Or are programmers just lazy? Or some combination of the two? I vote option three.

All this means is I can’t settle for shows I don’t like. I must stick to my guns, and occasionally add in a “Pushing Daisies.”

I can live with that.

Sunday Chunks, Fourth Week of November

2007-11-25T10:31:00.000-05:00

New story. More hapless behavior.

At various points in my life, I’ve been a rabid fan of the Knicks, the Yankees, or no team at all. Any young person that follows a sport has some underlying desire to be like the sports stars they admire, and every young person who isn’t 600 pounds plays some version of their favorite sports with their friends, whether it’s in the park, or in the street, or just in someone’s backyard. Before we reach a point in our lives where we understand that sports are not going to be our friend, most of us guys (and girls too) try to play anything that they think they might have even the slightest chance of enjoying. Watching sports creates a certain kind of bond, but playing them, being on a team, competing against other men, who are often sweaty and half-clothed… this, for some reason, obsesses us, and those who can play better than the other men are the best men around. And who wouldn’t want to be one of the best men around?
I originally became a Yankees fan when I was four, far before I understood the game of baseball, and far before the Yankees became a good team again. I’m not sure why, but the first team I ever joined was a pre-little league baseball squad that played on Saturdays in Prospect Park. I was six. I was small for my age. And I was just growing into my lifelong lack of coordination. The only good thing about that team was that our nickname was “The Sharks,” and sharks are an extremely well-crafted type of animal. But otherwise, it was dismal, and I remember playing so poorly that I actually looked considerably worse than the other six-year-olds out there. I did get a trophy at the end of everything, because everyone got one, so I guess I didn’t realize how bad I was, but I wondered why I never seemed to hit the ball, even when it was lobbed right over the plate. No matter. It was time to move onto the next failure, Tae kwon do.
I was an excitable little guy. Loud, inquisitive, rambunctious, yet small with a below average frame. In the early 90s, it made a lot of sense for me to be able to defend myself while living in New York, but I wasn’t old enough to be strolling around the dangerous parts of the city alone, and, I was just barely seven, so if some pre-Giuiliani hooker wanted to kidnap me, no matter how much Tae kwon do I learned, I was probably still fucked. Nevertheless, my dad wanted me to learn this ancient martial art, and while I can still count to ten in Korean, the only other thing I got out of my original foray into Tae kwon do was a healthy helping of embarrassment.
You start as a white belt, memorize some hand and foot motions, and demonstrate them to the grizzled Master after a few months’ time. Every Saturday morning I would do this, and I came away without a single piece of knowledge that I felt would help me in a real fight, or even the pretend fights they organized for us. We’d dress like jailed American Gladiators, and stand as far from each other as we could, until the more violent of the two children fighting would take a stab at hitting the more defensive one. I always had, and continue to have, a mental block about truly inflicting violence on others. I can’t unleash myself in this why, and I was even less capable of doing so when I was in third grade. My dad always chastised me for being cowardly, and he was right, but I didn’t really care. I think I actually connected with another kid’s flesh a grand total of three times during the year before I gave up on Tae kwon do. My dad was disappointed, as usual, but I was already used to this by age seven, and I moved onto swimming, for the time being. But this would not be the last time I’d find myself counting to ten in Korean.
As you may or may not, my name is Justin Pierce Baldwin Gerald. I found someone online whose first name was Baldwin, meaning that I, in effect, do have four first names. But my true given name is, in fact Justin. Not Baldwin. Not Pierce, even though I’ve flirted with relabeling myself as such. And certainly not Gerald. But when I took swimming lessons on Wednesday afternoons in Third grade, I had an enormous hippopotamus of an instructor (who really didn’t look like a swimmer), and he clearly took pleasure in yelling out “Gerald,” as if I were a new recruit into his own personal army. Every week, as hump day approached, I was picked up by my babysitter and shuttled off to the east side Ymca so I could be pestered by this giggling beast of a man, even though I was actually a pretty good swimmer. I was no all-American, but I had good form and I was much more graceful in the water than I was outside of it. Nevertheless, this guy just couldn’t get enough of terrorizing me. In fact, of all the sports stories I’m sharing here, swimming is the only time that I didn’t exactly fail, but instead decided to weasel my way out of going to practice rather than tell my parents what was bothering me. Even at age seven, I was as cagey and private as I would be in college, and so, instead of actually fixing the problem, I had to make some kind of foolproof plan that would get me away from my strange little bully of a coach.
Throughout third grade I was carrying around a giant black Jurassic Park lunchbox, even though I hadn’t actually seen the movie. This was one of those ridiculous contraptions with little compartments for every possible thing a child could eat for lunch. My mother never actually filled it, but, just to be sure, on the Wednesday that I expected to escape, I made sure the entire box was empty, and furtively snuck my tiny, sexy speedos from my backpack into the giant plastic box. As I was wont to do, I considered myself smarter than just about anyone else, so I knew that this hiding spot would never ever be discovered. When my babysitter came along at the end of the school day, I searched my backpack and proclaimed that I just couldn’t go to swimming that day, because my mother must have forgotten to pack my tiny, sexy speedos. She agreed, and we went home. Success.
Well, even smart kids are pretty stupid compared to adults, so when she went to perform her daily task of emptying my lunchbox, I was fucked. My parents were informed, I was summarily punished (I couldn’t play Sega Genesis for an entire weekend!), and I got to feel bad for about half an hour. But, when asked why I would do something so silly, I finally confessed that I was no longer enjoying my time in the pool. I didn’t think to mention the hostile coach, just added to my growing list of abandoned sports, and they agreed not to force me to do it any longer.
After trying and dismissing Tennis as well, I somehow stumbled into following the ups and down of the New York Knicks who, in 1994, reached the NBA finals for the first time in decades (but only because Jordan was taking some of his occasional time off). Everyone in New York cared about basketball again, and we all loved our man Patrick Ewing and his graceful fadeaway jumpshot. So, the best men, at this time, were the basketball players, and they became the men I most needed to emulate....

Subway Smoker Makes Us Look Selfish

2007-11-21T10:01:00.000-05:00

So, people on subways do random things.

Sunday, a guy who was presumably homeless, but not completely destitute, was mumbling to himself on the subway. There were very few people on the train, which was weird for about eight pm. Anyway, he rolls what turned out to be a cigarette, which is completely and totally not allowed on the train, and which is very very stupid considering the number of cops that come traipsing through the system.
But anyway, he smokes his cigarette through a few stops, and a lot of people glare, or walk away, as if they’ve never smelled a cigarette, but possibly also because someone who flaunted the rules that blatantly might have been dangerous. You never know.

Then, another presumably homeless guy, who was very young, fairly together, and extremely apologetic, came through, explaining that he had been stabbed in the face, and that this was why his eye looked so completely fucked up. He looked kinda gross, but not dirty, just, well, like he’d been stabbed in the eye.

Um, so no one gives the guy money, he passes the smoker, and then he gets to the end of the car, mumbling about how he never expected to be asking people for money, and I was kinda struck by how quickly his life must have gone south if a clearly sober young man felt he had no marketable skills and was thus doing this rather than chilling in a shelter. I felt bad, of course, but I did not give him money; I did the Subway Stare and didn’t focus my eyes on anything.

He’s at the end of the car, and the smoker gets up. People stare at each other, thinking, I guess, that he was going to do something bad to him, but, lo and behold, the subway smoker makes us all look like selfish pricks, and he gives the stabbing victim a fistful (!) of dollars.

I don’t think we should all give out money all the time. We ought to be generous when we see those less fortunate, but we can only give out so much. But I guess, the real point is, the subway smoker is a prick and a criminal for smoking, but we shouldn’t see someone’s flaws and take that to mean they have no pleasurable qualities.

And, yeah, we’re all selfish pricks.

Also, this is my favorite sign on every subway train, because he's not just leaning, he's leaning in the cooooolest way possible, Daddy-O. Take a gander and give thanks for its existence.

When I was at the-school-before-Princeton, this would be the day an old English teacher would get in a Turkey costume and lead us all in a round of song that went:

What does Mister Turkey say?
Gobble Gobble Gobble!
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.
Gobble Gobble Gobble!

Over the years, they added a Turkified skit in which several teachers would perform. It got bloated and ridiculous and lengthy but it's still one of the traditions I wish I had back from that wonderful school.

Happy TG, folks, and I'll be back on Sunday.

I Feel...

2007-11-20T10:02:00.000-05:00

Inordinately nervous when I ride into Harlem on the train.

It’s not that dangerous these days. I’m also black.

I don’t think I’m in danger. I feel this off-putting little feeling that I don’t belong there, that I’m posing just by stepping foot onto Lenox Avenue. The people nod at me without malice, but I just feel off.

And I feel like a very small person for it.

That’s all.

Uncle Rick

2007-11-19T10:08:00.000-05:00

My godfather, whom I called Uncle Rick, died about two weeks ago. He was in excellent shape, about 59, had climbed peaks in Tanzania, etc etc etc. He did smoke for many years though. I didn’t take it that hard, or really suffer for it, though my dad, who is older and in worse shape, has been somewhat morbid since then.
But anyway. He didn’t want a memorial service, and he donated his body to science, but that didn’t stop his friends (and me) from congregating at one of his favorite bars on Friday to celebrate his life.

This lines up with something I was saying to my friends online, about losing touch and holding onto those that are close to you, friends not family, that is.
I’ll paraphrase what I said on Facebook:

The reason I was so mad for so long at Princeton, and probably the reason I mistreated everyone, because I felt, first, screwed by people who aren't AK and Buttsex and some others, and second, that I missed out on having a full four years of solid friendships to fall back on. I see people i don't much like still being friends with the people they immediately met, and I want to have had that. And I see it with Genetic Lottery, and her friends, that is, people I don't dislike, and I feel gypped by circumstance.

I went to that toast/celebration thing for my godfather Friday night, gave a speech and all, but what struck me most is, in addition to people from all over the world who emailed saying they couldn’t make it, my godfather, a surly, humorously angry guy (sound like anyone?) filled this entire bar with people he influenced.

Now, I don't want to have to die at 59 for people to congregate, and indeed, inviting people to stuff always seems to be problem in my life, but the aftermath of Uncle Rick’s sudden death suggests that, even being a misanthrope, I can gain a viable network of compatriots, so long as I cherish the ones that are closest.

Sunday Chunks, Third Week of November

2007-11-18T11:26:00.000-05:00

...Tuesday was relatively uneventful for a day spent underground. When strolling through a large Brooklyn station, two teenage girls told me I looked like Tahj Mowry, the then-star of a silly sitcom called “Smart Guy.” (I probably did look a little like him at the time.) As they followed me, singing the theme song, I had to admit that I felt very much like a smart guy. I could do this every day, ride the subway. My school was lazy (in some ways), and my parents wouldn’t know a thing if I just showed up at home whenever they expected me to. This was an eminently ingenious plan, and I was executing it with precision.
Another day passed, and the Wednesday was my dad’s 53rd birthday. Having skipped three days of school, I was in a very good mood when we went out to dinner. We had a great meal, and unlike most days, the two of us didn’t fight. My mother eventually called my father, and our momentary peace was immediately shattered.
“The middle school says you’ve missed a lot of classes recently?!?”
I’d never heard my father so surprised and disappointed all at once. Apparently the school had explained my truancy in a very strange way; I’d obviously missed many classes, but, you’d think they’d be more concerned with the fact that I’d skipped three entire days. Since they’d described my crime as cutting class, my dad was reminded of my silly spat with my math teacher in fourth grade, and I suppose he assumed I was doing the same thing this time. None of this mattered, though, because, expert that I was, I simply replied:
“There must have been some kind of mistake.”
Never mind the fact that I was the only Justin in my grade, one of three black males, and that I’d been at the school for nine years already. They obviously were completely incompetent if they dared accuse me of truancy. This was the story I stuck to that night. My father wasn’t impressed, telling me that I was “done” if it turned out that the school was right. I really don’t know what he meant by that.
Of course I was caught. I forced myself to only skip my first class on Thursday, and then finally started showing up again. Yet, even when called into the middle school office to be directly confronted with the facts, I tried to make up an elaborate story on the spot, a story involving being sidetracked at the front door by a security guard and getting lost in the neighborhood around school for five hours. The head of the middle school was a nice woman with an exceedingly difficult name to spell, and when I finished my story, she nodded and did her best Bill Lumbergh impression:
“Yeeahhh… So, Justin, d’ya see why something like that… might not be so believable?”
This question probably could have been applied to all of my silly, transparent deceitful behavior over the years. A smart woman she was.
The school doesn’t like to punish students they like, so I didn’t even get a slap on the wrist. My parents, for some reason, didn’t bother to put me “on punishment” (I guess lying about toothpaste is worse?), but they did sit me down that weekend and threaten to send me to military school, a one-way conversation that has always made me wonder how I would have turned out if I’d screwed up again they’d followed through on their threat. I’d probably be the same, except violent and with no sense of humor. (I guess that means I wouldn’t be the same, then.)
I might not have done anything bad enough to be sent away after that, but I hardly became a pillar of integrity. My laziness slowly abated, and I did enough homework to surprisingly get into Princeton. Occasionally I got in trouble for lying, and occasionally I got away with half-truths. I settled into a rhythm of only lying about my social life, and continued that pattern through the beginning of college, when I significantly altered my backstory to make myself seem less like the insecure quasi-loner that I really was. I went a bit overboard in this respect, claiming to be a ladies’ man when I was quite far from it.
Early in my first semester, I was spending most of my time with a group of folks who, in retrospect, were nothing but a negative drain on my life. Apparently, they came to dislike me so much that four of them, who lived on the ground floor, once climbed out of their window to avoid spending time with me, which seems exceedingly difficult and unnecessary, and in fact suggests a complete avoidance of social confrontation. I say all this to say that the main problem for me with those “friends” was that I suspected they didn’t want me around, but they never actually said anything about it. Only in recent months have I been able to piece together clues I was given to understand that I should have gotten the fuck away from them the moment that I arrived. But this is now, and that was then.
Back then, I was a guy who, in trying to bolster my backstory, would occasionally swear that, in one month, I’d slept with 16 girls. Why I couldn’t have used, say, eight for a blatant lie, I don’t know, but 16 is what I chose. Because these folks were strange and petty, they accepted my idiocy at face value, then discussed my dishonesty amongst themselves and eventually came back to challenge my claim. I have no problem with their disbelief, because it was a stupid and useless thing to say, indicative of my myopia when it came to building positive relationships. I was clearly an annoying guy when I first got there, and I don’t blame them at all for finding my presence unappealing. But I continue to wonder, if they didn’t believe my ladies’ man stories, why they didn’t simply call me out on my bullshit immediately. I probably would have been embarrassed, but I deserved a smack in the face for talking like that. Instead, however, they discussed this statement, and others, amongst themselves as they decided to push me way. I was in the wrong for being mentally challenged and dishonest, but, if I’d realized back then that they were acting like a frightened, gossipy junior high clique, I would have been a lot better off.
As much as I want to blame only them for my troubles, though, if I hadn’t been a consistently dishonest person, a person who thought, for years, that many solutions could be found through deceit, then I could have avoided a lot of the stress that surrounded during many of my more difficult times. My penchant for lying was only a small part of the issues that plagued me, but if I’d had the temerity to be honest with myself, and with others, I would have found it much easier to truly be happy...

HBO Is Having A Laugh

2007-11-17T10:13:00.000-05:00

Remember Vanilla Ice? Of course you do. What you might not remember is that there was a time when a movie studio could proclaim on a poster, without irony, that this jokey character was “Starring in his first motion picture,” since I guess they thought he'd be around long enough to make several.

Indeed, they must have thought this was something to be proud of. Wow.

And of course, the movie, "Cool As Ice," is predictably, and ridiculously, awful. I don’t want to go into its awfulness in great detail, because that would truly take forever. But, think of this. It has a rich boyfriend cliché, etc etc, and instead of hitting him, or something, or anything useful, the Rebel Without A Clue rides his motorcycle up and over his car… and that’s it. Doesn’t destroy it, doesn’t even touch it, or him. Just does a jump. And that’s the end… except for an extended Vanilla Iceish musical performance.

Anyway. It’s bad. But what’s worse is HBO saying to all of us, “You know what? It’s a random Monday morning. There just aren’t enough good or even mediocre movies to fill our schedule. Let’s dump this pile of crap on there. Fuck the audience. We just have to show this movie.”

I bet Mr. Van Winkle, when he’s not performing at fucking Princeton, sits around hoping someone will play this damn movie and send his some royalties. And they did! At the expense of all TV viewers.

An extremely uncreative friend said the following to me, regarding this movie and “Glitter:” “they should just throw them in the trash and not subject TV watchers to their awfulness.”

So, what she said, except, um, funnier.

HBO, you can do better, especially since you’re “not TV.”

Lowering Actorly Standards

2007-11-16T09:59:00.000-05:00

So, there’s this new movie coming out next year called “Righteous Kill.”
It’s apparently about cops or something, and it would seem generic (no particularly stellar director, the plot is not explained enough in the trailer for it to be compelling on its own), if it weren’t for one fact, and that is that it teams DeNiro and Pacino for the third time, but promises to actually put them in the same frame for more than zero scenes (as in "Godfather Part II") or a handful of minutes ("Heat").

Very cool.

However, they aren’t the only two actors in the movie.

The trailer isn't linked yet but I shall describe some problems with it.

Two things. First… it bills DeNiro and Pacino as Academy Award Winners. Did you really have to tell us that both Pacino and DeNiro have won Oscars? I mean, they’re icons. They did this in the trailers for “American Gangster” and “The Bucket List” as well. I mean, is someone going to see the trailer and decide to see it only because these legends have won Oscars? I think they’d want to see it because they’re legends. Because they’re DeNiro and Pacino. But whatever. That’s not what I’m writing about here.

Do you know who gets third billing here? It’s 50.

Excuse me. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson.

Really, casting directors? Really? You’re touting this as a top-notch cast, and then you throw that giant wrench into the proceedings. You can’t use “Academy-Award Winner” and “50 Cent” in the same credit sequence until 50 is as well known for interesting, non-50 characters on screen than he is for songs like “Ayo Technology.”

Basically, if you want us to be excited for DeNiro and Pacino and their Oscars, don’t fucking cast 50 in the movie.

Yes, he could be great… but he won’t.

Professional Vs. Unprofessional

2007-11-15T10:04:00.000-05:00

As a part of this endless process of getting up and out of here, I have to talk to some schools directly, and sometimes I talk to people who talk to schools, and thus I have fewer worries about personally vetting the schools, and primarily need to trust the agencies themselves. So far I’ve spoken to one school directly and two agencies. The agencies… let’s just say they approached things differently.

Two weeks ago, I applied to both, and each emailed me back asking for possible times to talk on the phone (they’re both located in Canada). So far so good.

Agency A said Monday or Tuesday (of last week) would be best for them, and then I responded that Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning would be preferable to Monday morning and Tuesday afternoon. Blah blah blah. We never nailed down any specific time though. Hmm.

Agency B and I went back and forth and settled on Wednesday at noon.

Monday and Tuesday passed. No call received. I emailed them, to little avail.

Wednesday came, and at 12:02 I received a phone call, during which I jokingly chided the man for being late. Fruitful call, man seemed honest and forthcoming (even about the worrisome racial attitudes of some Korean private schools), and said he would email me with more information within a week or two.

Agency A called me Thursday afternoon, randomly, when I couldn’t answer, and then again Thursday night, at 8:30, which is a weird time for an interview, and was a time when I was not available anyway. I agreed to talk to him this Monday, somewhat begrudgingly, since I’m not at a stage when I can rule things out.

But seriously though, which Agency would you trust?

Health Services Bureaucracy

2007-11-14T10:03:00.000-05:00

“House” is a fun show. “ER” used to be really good. Both shows have, at various points, touched on bureaucracy. And all of us know about silly red tape encountered in organizations that require a lot of money. But it was never really all that idiotic for me until today.

I can’t go into full details because it concerns a friend drinking himself stupid, but suffice it to say that, on Sunday, AK and I were trying to find a buddy at the University Health Center on campus. We went to the front desk, and a young girl, presumably a student, asked for his name, and reported that he hadn’t been taken in for Urgent Care.

Fine.

She wanted to make sure of something though, so she went to ask a woman in the back a question. The woman walks over to us, after we’ve already been told that he wasn’t actually taken there, and the woman says she can’t tell us whether he’s there or not, but if we go to the second floor, they can possibly tell us.

Huh?

So, we already know he’s not there. But we’re not allowed to know if he is. But if we go upstairs, we’re allowed to try and find out. But he wasn’t there.
The fuck? Can someone parse that?

Just ridiculously incomprehensible. It doesn’t save money or time, and it doesn’t actually protect identities, since we were allowed to find out anyway upstairs.
So what the fuck was the point?

(If you’re wondering, he was at the bigger medical center, but he was fine.)

Article Addendum/Wasting Time

2007-11-13T10:00:00.000-05:00

I was talking to two friends while sharing what will be our last cigar together before 2009. We were talking about what bothered us the most about our past troubles. And when it came down to it, it seemed like what got us the most riled up was the fact that so much time had been wasted on those who weren’t worth it. We only get a few years in college, eight semesters altogether, and when three of those are spent with pointless people, that’s 38% of college essentially down the drain.

I can’t say anything as well as I did in the article.

But I’ll add to it by saying that I really hate wasting time. I know I fucked up a great deal, but, basically, I want a do-over. I want those 1.5 years back. I want to see bad people coming and either avoid or confront them before they bring me down.

Ah, life.

Must We Go Through This Again?

2007-11-12T10:03:00.000-05:00

This concerns a story that is long in the telling but fairly action-free, so I’ll give bullet points.

. There is a girl, who goes at the school I went to.

. At various times last year we hooked up, never trying to sleep together, and succeeding in not doing so. I never had a problem with this, especially since she was a virgin.

. We didn’t talk between June and a few weeks ago.

. After gauging whether or not I would annoy her, she proposed a rendez-vous, where I’m-not-sure-what was supposed to happen, but kissing and such would have been expected.

. This was scheduled for November 1st. I drank many martinis on Halloween and was hungover. When I am hungover I suck at all things girl related.

. She still decided to come hang out, but instead of engaging in conversation, she just kinda flopped on the bed. She looked good, though. And I told her as much.

. I play this game with songs and guessing and drinking and such. There was one last game at Princeton Saturday. I invited her, after she said she didn’t have plans.

. Basically, she waffled, acted silly, and tried to make it seem like she might be busy but really just didn’t want to come to the game for some unexplained reason.

. I don’t care if people don’t come. But giving non-reasons is bullshit.

. She waffled until, after being asked why she didn’t want to come, she explained that I didn’t need to know that. I am not a violent person, but if I could have reached through the internet and tossed her into a pile of hot, sticky garbage, I would have done so right then.

. I got electronically mad and sent her a message telling her she was being ridiculous.

What it comes down to is, she didn’t want to hurt my feelings (there it is again!) by saying she didn’t think we’d ever be friends. And if she came to the game, I guess I’m such a fucking simpleton I would have automatically assumed we were close. The way I figure is, she never minded hooking up with me, but when she was forced to spend time with me and not do so a couple of weeks ago, she finally convinced herself I wasn’t worth any kind of platonic effort. Fine.

Then why the fuck can’t say just say “I don’t want to play the game” if she’s going to be hollow-nice?

Or, ideally, why can’t she just say whatever this silly bullshit was the moment I asked her? Why this fake “save the feelings” farce? Why can’t more people take a deep breath and force themselves to address such issues head the fuck on?

Jesus.

Fucking.

Christ.

Sunday Chunks, Second Week of November

2007-11-11T19:33:00.000-05:00

Lying story continues..

Seventh grade wasn’t just one lie for me, but an unending stream of half-truths and omissions that eventually culminated in one odd, childish decision. I’d never had a lot of homework before that year, so when I told my parents every night that I was “done!” they just ate it right up. I was cleverer than they were, and I was certainly smarter than all my teachers, in my mind, so I did wonderful things like take the translation of a Latin poem and hand it in as an original story for English class. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that my Latin teacher lived with my English teacher, and thus exposed my idiotic fraudulence. But, no matter. I refused to learn lessons. I was entirely convinced that I was a genius, albeit an extremely lazy one.
Even in math class, which had long been my sanctuary, I was much more interested in laughing at the antics at a disruptive student who frequently spent large chunks of class time annoying our patient teacher. He was a kind man, who knew exactly what he was talking about, but this one kid, who was eventually forced to go to a shrink, just wouldn’t let him be. And the longer he acted up every day, the smaller the chance that our teacher would remember to check if we’d all done the homework.
(I wasn’t the only one who found the disruption engrossing. Two other students began to time his interruptions, making full charts of how much class time was spent on his poor behavior. One fine morning, as the student argued with the teacher, I decided to jump into the fun, and, having not done my homework for a few days, I realized that getting in trouble would help me to avoid confrontation. After they battled for a while, the student was told to go to the middle school office, and I looked at my watch and proclaimed, “He breaks the five minute mark!” Of course, I was sent along with him, avoiding true effort for another day.)
When middle school students at our school hadn’t completed an assignment, we were sent to room “9-1” at lunch to sit there and do it. No one enjoyed this. I was sent quite often during the early part of seventh grade, and I just didn’t go. My math teacher caught wind of this, and, in class one afternoon, asked me who had been the proctor in charge of “9-1” that day. I told him that I hadn’t known the teacher’s name, and he told me that it had been him. But lessons continued not to be learned.
All of this sloth and fibbing did catch up to me after a while, as I returned from a weekend in Washington with my father one Sunday to the realization that I hadn’t done a sliver of the work I’d been assigned. Not a single page had been read, not a single exercise had been attempted, and not a line of Latin had been poorly translated. I was farther behind than I ever had been or ever would be again. I didn’t plan on changing my ways, but there was no way I would have been able to escape eight classes’ worth of shame from teachers who saw that I could have done so much better if I had only been trying. I considered running away. But with no money, that was impossible. I wasn’t a kid from the suburbs, who could escape the house and run from one non-descript area to another; from my dad’s house, I couldn’t even go into the next room without him waking up. So, I went to sleep, confused and terrified, and woke up, without any semblance of a legitimate plan.
I did everything normally on the morning of October 27th, 1997, and even rode the train with my father to Times Square, where he always got off and let me travel the rest of the way to school. My babysitter had quit at the start of that month, and so I was traveling to and from school alone, even though I was tiny, and only eleven years old. I certainly felt more independent than I was, but, as it turns out, this travel arrangement provided me with my only possible escape from the school day I was particularly dreading. I decided, somewhere before 14th street, that I was going to spend the day on the subway.
I’d always had a close relationship with the MTA. When sick with chickenpox and then scarlet fever in the span of just over a month at age four, I used my extensive free time to memorize every stop on every line of the subway system. To this day, family friends I rarely speak to call me to ask how to get from Jamaica, Queens to Coney Island (which is pretty simple; all you have to do is get to the F). But aside from this encyclopedic knowledge, I also genuinely liked subways. My favorite thing in the world for a good portion of my childhood was to take “subway rides,” which are exactly what you think they are. On my sixth birthday, my mother took me on a ride to the middle of bushwick (where you didn’t really want to be in 1992) just so I could ride the J train. I even played “trains” with anyone who wanted to, which basically consisted of me aping conductors’ speeches upon arrivals at train stations, complete with the instruction to stand clear of the closing doors, and the “Bing-Bong” that most trains featured. Some kids played Nintendo, I played “trains.” I’m just saying.
A psychologist might say that my decision to ride the subway instead of facing punishment at school was the epitome of my refusal to mature, and a psychologist that said that would probably be right. As soon as I made the decision to skip school on the train, I was my six-year-old self again, traveling to the farthest reaches of the city in the hopes of seeing exciting new stations that I’d never had the chance to visit, even though most subway stations are indeed remarkably similar. No matter; it simply made me happy to be there, and although I must have subconsciously known I’d get caught, I just assumed that the school wouldn’t really notice my absence, and I sailed around the city without a care in the world, stopping only for lunch at McDonald’s.
My general plan was to zip around town all day and return home at approximately the normal time that I would have if I’d actually gone to school. The problem with this was that my childish voyage around town led me to the farthest reaches of Queens, and I was going to be late to a dentist appointment I’d nearly forgotten about. That Monday afternoon was like something out of an unfunny farcical play, as I continually just missed my father (who was meeting me at the dentist), and spent nearly two hours shuttling between lower Manhattan (dentist) and Brooklyn Heights (school). Why didn’t I just go into the damn dentist’s office, you ask? Well, the dentist was a mean little ogress. Running around instead of dealing with her directly was probably the type of thing you might expect from a kid who’d rather ride the subway than do homework. And so I managed to avoid the ogress while successfully skipping school. A good first day thus necessitated a repeat...

Familiar Plots

2007-11-10T11:32:00.000-05:00

“Law and Order” has been around since I was four years old. It’s so old that its first season actually features an appearance by William H. Macy back when he was known as “W.H.” and could actually have been considered young. (Doesn’t it seem like he’s been “about fifty” forever?)

But, I guess it’s just its topical nature, but I’ve been watching the DVDs of that first season a lot over the last few days, and my god, every single episode is about AIDS in some way. I faintly remember how dirty the trains used to be, but I didn’t realize how awful that epidemic used to be here, and how provocative “Law and Order” must have been to talk about it every week.

However, I’m a little miffed that the occasional ripped-from-the-headlines case leaves me completely in the dark, because I truly don’t have a clue what was in the New York crime news back then, other than lots and lots of death.

And, wow, crack was only 500/pound. That’s insanely cheap. No wonder everyone was smoking it back then.

Wow, a nonsensical post for sure.

Traveling To Save Money

2007-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

So I’m out in PA this week, alone (family just got back from South America last night; I’ve been here since Tuesday), keeping my promise not to just whine about this house, and the reasons I’m here are: my silent friend, taking time off from Princeton, has arrived back on this side of the country, and I wanted to be near campus to see him for probably the last time before 2009; I honestly need as much time away from that little apartment as possible; I do need to focus on applying for and securing the school jobs overseas, because, come on, this shit is taking forever; and, yeah, there’s actually food in this house and I didn’t want to have to spend money on meals as often I was.

When I told my Dad I was leaving, he was mildly shocked, and, it appears, genuinely saddened that I’d leave to save money rather than more regularly ask him for help.

It’s strange, though. His method of dispensing advice is generally in-your-face badgering or endless lectures, and the house is just too small for all that. And yet when I make a fairly practical decision (a random one, but practical nonetheless) to avoid spending money, I guess he just seemed sad knowing I wouldn’t be around for a while. Not that I don’t think he likes having me around. But it’s hard to work through such things when you have a generally okay but occasionally fractious relationship between two stubborn and fairly private people.

I’m never going to be that son who asks for money unless he truly, truly is in need of it (and sadly I have been a time or two since mid-summer). But all of these moments just kinda make me feel like crushing my soul for a few years at a consulting job might have been a better decision than this protracted pre-teaching meandering I’m doing right now.

I ran away from all of those safe jobs one day last fall when I panicked before an information session and steered clear of the entire thing after that.

I fucked up two of my three college summers and didn’t build any sort of journalism resume. I may never be able to do anything with that because of this. But I don’t even know if I want to.

This may all change once I get over there and teach and save some money. I may love it, and stay. Or come back and keep teaching. Or come back and write. Or come back, and move to France to avoid America’s probable implosion with regard to healthcare and social security.

But for now, I feel like I should be slowly dying on the inside at McKinsey with all the pricks I railed against in the article that still makes me happy whenever read it.

Reasons Why WGA Strikes Are Good

2007-11-08T00:02:00.001-05:00

a. If I get my shit together, nail down this job, and jet overseas, I guess I won’t be missing much TV while I’m there.

b. We all get to see those giant rats.

Does one company have a monopoly on these? They’re really all the same. If you strike and use a different rat, do you have less leverage?

c. Oh, yeah: the writers aren’t paid worth shit for legal downloads (iTunes, etc.), since they didn’t exist when the last contract was worked out. I’ll miss whatever shows aren’t filmed because of this (particularly my Office/30 Rock/House/SVU quartet), and if this causes new shoes like Pushing Daisies to be cancelled I’ll be very sad. But. If they’re sacrificing livelihoods for now, we can sacrifice their output, watch reality shows for a while, and stock up on DVDs in case this becomes the entertainment version of nuclear winter. But it could be over in a week, like the transit strike, which honestly fucks the public over much more than entertainment writers.

Reasons Why WGA Strikes Suck

2007-11-07T00:10:00.000-05:00

a. I always hope it doesn’t come to this, but as they're all saying, it appears to be a last resort, borne of . Last resort means bitterness and acrimony, which makes it harder to reconcicle.

b. I worry, if it lasts too long, TV will just suck for a while. The scripts that are written afterwards will be hasty and ridiculous. Which is bad. Because scripts are truly the foundation of the best comedic and dramatic programming.

c. I like “The Real World,” for some reason. But I don't really watch any other reality shows. And you just know this will mean even more of them. Let's see how many RW/RR challenges they can come up with. Come to think of it, MTV shouldn't have any problems.

d. MTV shouldn't have any problems.

e. More seriously, last major strike we all remember was the MLB strike in late 1994 and early 1995. I don't know how that got to where it was, but they had no qualms about cancelling the Series, and people pretty much turned their backs on baseball until 1998. Will people hate the nondescript, unwealthy writers now if we lose quality in our best shows and lose our new shows altogether? I hope not...
People hating the writers like baseball, steroids rant.

Joe Crede Is Bad

2007-11-06T09:03:00.000-05:00

Nothing against him as a person. Seems nice. Hard-worker, I guess. But he’s not good at being a major league ballplayer. He was a champion, yes, but so was Hideki Irabu.

Here's his statline: (Avg/Obp/Slg)

.259/.305/.446

BAD.

He’s also coming back from injury.

BAD.

Oh wait, though. He’s gritty. Gutty. Full of grit. “Good in the clutch.” Because we should be trying to stock up on shitty baseball players who have a few hot weeks every year. That will make us much better.

As Homer Simpson would say, “In case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic.”

He had an okay year in 2006, but then, as FJM explains, in 2007:

Joe Crede came back to earth and got injured.

On earth, Joe Crede is Bad.

Baseball is played on earth, not in clutch-land, which is ruled over by Scott Brosius and Court Jester Jim Leyritz.

Anyone know what Pecota is? It’s intelligent prediction software that does its best to predict high, low, and middle percentile stats for MLB players. Crede’s stats in imaginary 2008 are terrible, and in fact are slightly worse than his career stats.

BAD.

I know, computers don’t play the game. But they’re faster than our brains. And barring random miracles – the type of thing we can’t expect to happen – Crede will suck in 08.

Are we really going to have him get on base about 30% of the time, and just smile and wait for him to “turn it on” in October? I’m sure the sports tabloids would let him off the hook all year long.

I don’t know what the solution at 3B is.

If we have to suffer through Crede, then so be it. But we shouldn’t be happy to go after him. That’s ludicrous. You know why?

Because Joe Crede is bad.

"And"

2007-11-05T09:45:00.000-05:00

So, whenever you see a movie, there are credits.

Sometimes, the cast, whether before or after the film, will end with some actor being introduced with an “And” before their name.

There are three mai types of Ands.

The first type is the Big Star/Small Part And.

This is often employed when you have a famous person who is clearly not the star of the film, but wouldn’t dare be relegated to a low billing.

For examples of this, see: Al Pacino, “Ocean’s Thirteen;” Tom Cruise, “Lions for Lambs;” Bruce Willis, “Pulp Fiction.”

Another main type of And is the Quirky Role And, and doubly so if this is played by a big star.

This is often employed when you have a side role, maybe comic relief or maybe not, but something attention-getting and impactful, and you thus want to give special praise to the person playing it.

See: Christopher Lee as Wonka Sr. in “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory;” Martin Short as goofy stock characters in every movie he’s been in since the mid-90s; hell, “The Departed” did it twice with both Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin (before and after the title, respectively).

Movies also sometimes just relegate much older actors to and, no matter what role they’re playing. This happens a lot to Albert Finney and Morgan Freeman.

The And thing is just something movies do.

(There’s also “and introducing…” but this is generally done for kids, as you might expect.)

But, see. I really liked “American Gangster,” for a lot of reasons, and indeed this complaint is only something I would say, but after the film ends, the credits are just a long, endless list of names. There is no fucking And. And you see, they had all of possibilities.

You had a star (Cuba G.) playing a small role.

You had an older actor who was also playing an impactful part (Ruby Dee).

And you had Quirky Roles galore, particularly the slimeball played by Josh Brolin.
But no fucking And. And what’s more, they’re all out of order.

After Denzel, Crowe, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who certainly have the movie’s biggest parts, there’s little rhyme or reason to the names that pop onto the screen.

When you wait a bit longer for the scrolling cast to appear, it gets everything right, in the correct order.

But movies shouldn’t do that, shouldn't make you wait in such a way.

I know, I know, minor complaint about a movie I really enjoyed.

Also, Sherri Shepherd was sitting behind me. I resisted the urge to ask her about the earth and its flatness.

Sunday Chunks, First Week of November

2007-11-04T17:31:00.000-05:00

This is my favorite life story. I think it's the best. Let me know what you think.

Before some semblance of adolescent inadequacy sets in, every kid must think they can outsmart everyone else they know, and especially their parents. My mother and father are both at least partially Ivy League educated, and both have professional degrees. Neither of them were eleven or twelve years old when I was born, meaning that they were not, in fact, idiots. But the way my mind worked through most of my childhood, I must have been assuming that they were two of the stupidest people I knew, because I was an unrepentant liar, and a terrible one at that.
My father had a habit of making me do admittedly beneficial things that no young child would choose to do on his or her own. From the time that I was in kindergarten, it was my responsibility to read at least one story on the front page of the New York Times, so that I could know what was going on in the world. Of course, understanding the words didn’t mean I knew what the Supreme Court was, or why it should matter to anyone. And after dutifully performing this extra homework for a few months, I decided that I was smart enough to fake it at age six.
When my dad would come home from his meetings, I would invariably be sitting around, watching “Family Matters” or some other black family sitcom. After dinner, he’d always ask me what was in the paper today. And then I would lie, and he would invariably catch me. I always thought through my plans superficially, but never prepared well enough to fend off his unavoidable interrogation. In the spring of 1993, he’d ask what was in the paper, and, because I was such a genius, I’d respond, “Bill Clinton!” I was clearly the cleverest kid on the block. But my dad saw through me, since he knew that, without reading the article, I wouldn’t be able to tell him what it was about Clinton that had been in the paper. And then, when my plans were foiled, he’d pull out a legal pad, and I would spend an hour or two writing “I will not tell lies.”
Most of this mendacious behavior was borne not just of my belief that I was super-intelligent, but also out of sheer laziness. Only several years later did I weigh my aversion to effort against fatherly lectures and acted in order to avoid the latter. How much time would it really have taken for me to read at least a few paragraphs and remember a fact or two? A minute. Maybe two. But I needed those two minutes to explore the life of Urkel in greater detail. Also, I was six. I had so little interest in doing things that annoyed me at that age that, after filling a few pages with “I will not tell lies,” I convinced my father that I would still get the message if I shortened it to “I won’t lie,” which eventually became “No lies.” Even in being punished for avoiding, I clearly wasn’t learning to try harder, or to be more honest, because my somewhat pathological habit continued as I grew.
As anyone who’s ever been around growing preteen boys must know, we are very dirty at that age, and we truly don’t care. In fact, we embrace the grime of the world, and revel in its abundance on our bodies. And if we forget to brush our teeth? Good. Makes us feel better. And why shower when you can not shower? Perfect logic, logic I followed to a T. I did take showers, but they mostly consisted of me standing far away from the water until I felt I’d been in there long enough. Sometimes I did brush my teeth, with a tiny bit of toothpaste, for a few seconds. But never more than once a day. (And then I would react with complete and utter surprise when I needed fillings.) Basically, I was content to be disgusting, because I saw myself, and my behavior, as completely normal.
On some random Tuesday night in the spring of 1997, my family was inexplicably watching Tim Allen grunt and do things with tools, and it was nearing time for me to retire to my bedroom. Usually, this required the song and dance of at least pretending to have brushed my teeth, if not actually doing it, but this evening, I didn’t even bother to feign the effort, so when my mom asked me if I’d brushed my teeth, I simply said I had. There was no way for her to prove me wrong. I was in the clear. And then, because I was a lying little shit, she went into the bathroom and noticed that the brush was completely dry. Oops.
“Well,” I explained, “tonight I used a different toothbrush.”
“Which one?”
“The… pink one?”
“Your sister’s?”
“Yes… I mean… no. Not my sister’s.”
“I don’t think you’re going to be having a lot of fun this summer, Justin.”
And, of course, she was right, because, even though my parents had their own terminology (everyone else’s “grounded” was their “on punishment”), my lack of a young social life meant that they didn’t have to stop me from seeing people; barring me from the movies was enough to make my summer miserable. I was not yet the happy/sad solo moviegoer I would become three years later, but summer movies were an utterly indispensible commodity even at that age, and I lost access to them just because I wouldn’t get off my ass and brush my teeth. Somehow, I did not learn my lesson about lying, though, and I took my dishonest with me to seventh grade.
Now, I went to the same school for 14 years, from age 3 until I graduated right before my 17th birthday. So, there was never really a point where I truly had to adjust to my academic surrounds during all of that time. But if there was a year that came close to forcing us to change, it was probably seventh grade. The classes weren’t all that different, but we started foreign languages, I had an ape-shit crazy history teacher with a bowling ball for a head, and my female science teacher was clearly one of those people who “just wanted to try teaching” for a second, since she didn’t know how to convey any information to us at all. Also, she was balding and it was funny. So, throw all these things into a school with a no-letter-grades policy, and a little smart-aleck like younger Justin quickly become fed up and decide against doing any homework at all....

What do you do when....

2007-11-02T10:28:00.000-04:00

…You arrive at Starbucks and find a spot next to a light-skinned black man who explains that the seat next to him is free even though “some pig” left some cups there? Well, you smile and accept it.

And when he makes a weird, random remark about how other people “have all the laptops, too,” even though he’s using one? You just shrug and accept the New York weirdness that is your world.

And when you realize he’s making a Myspace page for himself? You chuckle at the site’s endless reach, its declining coolness and his belated embrace of it.

And when you realize that his answer for music is something about grooving to the message of the exalted Elijah Muhammad? You get curious.

And when you come to understand that when he said “pig,” he didn’t just mean a slob, but white folks generally? You feel weird for having been somewhat conspiratorial.

And when you see that his entire Myspace page is devoted to, you know, hatred under the guise of solidarity? You try to ignore it, even though this is no less despicable than the actions of a white supremacist.

.....

Would you stand up to a member of the Aryan nation if he were doing something similar next to you? Probably. This is Manhattan, and if he got angry, I might have rallied the rest of the restaurant around my silly little cause. But I said nothing. Was it because he was black and I thus subconsciously didn’t want to embarrass him? I do wonder.

I think it was because, like subway etiquette, people just mind their business in Manhattan, and so that’s what I did, and that’s probably why I wouldn’t have actually done anything even if it had been a skinhead sitting there.

So what do you do when you arrive at Starbucks and find you’re next to someone who’s bigoted against people who aren’t you? You say nothing and feel like a coward.

(In Rhode Island tomorrow, back with storytelling Sunday.)

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

2007-11-01T11:01:00.000-04:00

I’ve done this before, twisted a positive popular culture diatribe into a plea for other popular culture to be as good. And today I will do it again.

Now, I’m not going to straight-up review the movie here. Please go to Rotten Tomatoes and peruse the glowing reviews of people who do this for a living.

I want to explain some feelings I had the first time I watched it, though. First of all, it’s suspenseful, exciting, etc. Rare in most movies, genuine excitement, but not entirely unique. It gets more and more violent as things progress, but, this also happened in my favorite movie of last year, which I’ve certainly spoken about before. But “The Departed” is, strangely, hilarious. It’s not a comedy by any stretch, and it’s certainly dark and surprising and, you know, awesome.

But “Before The Devil…” is about 99.5% dark. I wouldn’t call it a film noir by any stretch, because the people are smaller and more insignificant than those that tend to populate older movies. There’s one tiny, perfect moment of unexpected humor, the kind of humor I love more than anything besides, hmm, “Superbad,” humor based on smart, crackling writing more than set-ups and throwaway gags. Great writing, even if not straight-forward and comedic, tends to make me smile when I hear it pop onto the screen, and while I’m not always the best judge of such things, amusingly brilliant writing was everywhere in “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead,” and knowing that such movies are made means that there’s no reason movies starring Dane Cook should ever need to occupy more of the marketplace.

On Girls, Clubs, Dancing and Niceness

2007-10-31T10:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve spoken about clubs before. And certainly girls as well. Honestly, to sum it all up, if I’m going clubbing with only guys (or myself), I had better be in a foreign country, or, you know, at Terrace. Otherwise, give me a handful of girls I already know to dance with, and, since I never look for potential mates at these places, I am thus content.

This past Saturday, I went to a club I’d been to once before, in Soho, with a friend from Princeton, his girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s female friend, which would seem to be a perfect ratio. So, we get there, the couple dances, vanishes, etc, and I ask the girl to dance because I do not have to capacity to take someone’s hand and just dance with them; I’m an odd mix of rudeness and surprising politeness. Anyway, she uses what may be the worst excuse of all, which is, “I’m already dancing!” Seriously, whenever this excuse arose, who out there doesn’t understand when a person is “already dancing?” I clearly asked to dance with her, but she used the excuse that presumes to take “Do you want to dance?” literally, which is idiotic.
I dance around alone for a while. I don’t want to leave the little pack of friends I have, because I’ve been the solo dude in a club before, and it’s weird and annoying, even though these wasted 30-year-old women nearby were dancing with everyone in sight. That said, I wasn’t looking for action, just dancing, so people who were smashed were no good for this.

Eventually I ask the girl again, and this time she tops herself by saying, “I’m having so much fun this way!” Because, you see, I would, presumably, ruin her night by dancing with her.

Look. You can’t be a teenaged, adolescent or young adult male in Western society without dealing with rejection. If you can’t handle that at all, if you crumple when someone says no, then you need to apply some skin-thickening lotion, which unfortunately is not sold at Duane Reade, even though they’re on every corner here.
I say this to say that a simple, “No, thanks,” or even a curt head-shaking would be fine, and indeed would be so much better than weak bullshit half-excuses, especially considering she went off and danced with others later in the night.

I was not hurt by her silliness. Dancing is usually fun, even in an entirely platonic situation like this, but if the other party isn’t into it, it’s listless and dull, and thankfully over in three or four minutes. So, if she didn’t want to, she very well should have expressed this, and I assume that’s what she was trying to do, while remaining “nice.” But see, this is the problem I have with blanket niceness: it tends to be so hollow, and so goddamn transparent that whatever feelings you think you’re not hurting are rendered insignificant compared to the momentary anger you engender for treating the other person like a fool.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I react with anger instead of complete indifference because I don’t have an indifferent bone in my body, unless you count the bones that are activated while I watch the Superbowl. And maybe I react this way because, before Terrace became my life, I was confronted with this type of shallow, lazy nonsense every time I went out at Princeton (which, again, was partially my fault for wandering around alone, and partially theirs for being the way they were). But even if my natural temperament causes me to react more strongly than most (and only in writing and internally; I certainly didn’t curse out the girl or anything like that), I still think it’s necessary to make the point that if you have a choice to make between being nice and being honest, and you’re leaning nice just because it’s a simple, default position, do everyone a favor and try surprising honesty for once. You may make some mistakes and burn a bridge or two, but after you make honesty your default position at almost all times, you may well see the value in the choice you’ve made.

(Nice to be back and angry again, tiny occasional audience o’ mine.)

Update After Week Off

2007-10-30T10:00:00.000-04:00

I survived. I got rid of some useless stuff, things settled a bit, and I’m more excited than scared about teaching now.

Also, my dad is 63 as of yesterday. Still-broke Justin bought him a book.

(Though something happened last name that made it damn near impossible for me to sleep. Something random and painful that I will explain when I understand it better.)

Well....

2007-10-29T10:05:00.000-04:00

I feel dumb for defending him.

Sure, he didn't want to be here. He could have taken his ten days and then said so. But to try and upstage the World Series is a classless move.

Fuck him.

(And I didn't realize the Younger Steinbrenner looked like such a thug.)