Looking Glass

On the eve of a new month, let's do a weekend recap shall we? Tuesday was another showing of Sam's films, this time the "sadistic feel good movie of the year," as said by Amit. Wednesday I thought I would go to a panel about whether or not philosophy matters -- featuring some of the talking heads from Astra Taylor's Examined Life, including Cornel West -- but it must have been windy or something because I didn't end up going. When I arrived in New York three months ago, I was braver about going to events alone, but now I've settled into the "is anyone going to come with me" routine and if not, then I tend to not go. I best shake that so I can get out to things more.

Thursday was a pure highlight as I went to watch Phantom of the Opera. I can't recall if I've ever seen it on Broadway but I doubt it. I think I've seen Phantom twice in Los Angeles and once in San Diego. I think I was around twelve; it was my first musical and it blew my mind. My friend Justin and his family took me to see it over fifteen years ago and as Music of the Night spooled out on this night, I was reminded of how many seminal experiences his family provided me.

Justin and I met in fifth grade, the first day I started private school. We got along immediately as we were both new kids and more importantly, into the same dorky things. When I think back on it, hanging out with Justin gave me so many interests that shaped my identity. He got me listening to Guns and Roses (and Yanni); he lent me Dragonlance books; we played D&D, Magic, and every board game together; he showed me Herzog Zwei and Dune II; we swapped Game Boy games; we fashioned daggers out of wood and field tested a lot of slingshots. His house had a game room that was a kid's playground along with a pool and a giant trampoline outside. Justin was always taller, stronger, faster, and better at most sports.

In middle school, we liked the same red headed girl and I can still remember our exact conversation very clearly. It was eighth grade, in-between classes, when Justin announced, "I like a girl, guess who."

"I dunno."

"There's only two girls with her hair color in our grade." I knew immediately who it was of course, but purposefully guessed the other one.

"Nope," he said, then he said my crush's name. Somehow liking the same girl was cause for excitement at twelve years old, I'm not sure why. It never became a thing between us as he shifted crushes eventually while I was left hanging onto mine for years afterward. I was all about commitment then I guess.

Justin also once asked me: "Do you think you prefer when a girl is completely nude or skimpily dressed?" Having about negative interest in girls at the time, I blurted out an answer and then listened intently as Justin rationalized out to me why that was the wrong answer.

Eventually, when I did start to semi-notice girls, we developed a not so elaborate code for talking about them. It consisted of numerically tagging each one with their first and last initials. For example, "Melissa Bruce" was referred to as "13-2." M being the thirteenth letter of the alphabet and so on. Eventually we created codes and acronyms for a lot of things. It felt great to have a shared language and indulge in secrets, even if in retrospect they don't seem overly clever and I can't imagine now who we were hiding these things from.

During this time, Justin's family took me along on a lot of their trips and exposed me to things my family would have never done. Camping, house boating on Lake Powell, jet skiing, pancakes with powdered sugar in the mornings. Musicals.

Somewhere along the way, our best friendship was replaced by his best friendship with a new kid that came in around high school. I theorized that it was possibly because I lived further away from the two of them and they started hanging out with actual girls in school. I mean, the two of them went to dances and presumably had first kisses and stuff by the time we graduated.

I'm not even Facebook friends with Justin so I can't even find out what he's up to. Actually I just did a quick Google check and he's nowhere to be found, which is strange because he was one of the first people to get onto Usenets and was into computers way before anyone else I knew. Justin tested as a borderline genius and is probably really successful somewhere right now. Maybe one day I'll find out.

Friday night I went to two young adult books things, a reading in Brooklyn and a drinks mixer in Midtown. Saturday we went to a Bootie Mashup party in Brooklyn, which was both a success and a disaster. On Sunday I watched the Celtics take Game Zero of the 2011 Finals. The week didn't feel busy but I guess it was.

ASM Seeking M

Right now: Munching on pre-packaged chicken nuggets that took two minutes to microwave. I'm a grown ass man with twelve year old eating habits. I'd like to one day graph out how mature people are based on their diets. The results could be revealing.

I've talked to people around me recently about how hard it's been to meet new guy friends. Don't get me wrong, I have some guy friends here, but what I have been missing in New York is "dudes." Wait, I don't even like dudes, so scratch that. Regardless, meeting new guy friends is always difficult. Recently I've been hanging out with this friend of a friend who's this quiet, tall, and unassuming guy. He's like right up my guy friend alley. Conversational, interesting, and in this particular case, ridiculously talented.

The last time I felt this way about someone was like three years ago, when my friend and I spent a few weeks in New York having guy time and like you know, bonding male-style. The time before that was almost six years ago. At that rate, I average three new guy friends each decade. There's a reason "I Love You, Man" was made into a movie. Man crushes are hard to find, especially for me. I mean, my qualifications basically eliminate 85% of most guys right off the bat.

For example: Do you have strange insecurities that make you a douchebag? Do you wear hats that are douchebaggy? Are you pretentious or annoying and not in a good way? Do you have hidden insecurities that we can't talk about or poke into? Are you smart or at least inquisitive about the world, even as it doesn't specifically relate to you? Are you verbally disrespectful of women? Do you grope girls when you're drunk? Do you not know how to hold up your end of a conversation? Are you comfortable and in touch with your feminine side -- and not offended if you're called "effeminate?" Do you have skills that I admire and envy? Would I feel (mostly) comfortable pawning you off to all my female friends and telling them, "you should totally date him because he's awesome!"

If a guy demonstrates the wrong answer to any of these questions, they're out. Of course, if they are extremely good at basketball, video games, or super into comic books, most of these rules can be bent. I would probably hang out with Ben Roethlisberger if I could toss alley oops to him all the time. Basically if Blake Griffin disparaged my MP3 collection, pissed on the Sound of Music, made passes at all my female friends, and only talked in the third person about his own person, I'd still make him a top five guy friend just to be his Baron Davis on the playground.

I'm shallow, what can I say.

C.R.E.A.M.

This uh, blogging daily here thing is really working out isn't it?

The other day my friend expressed that she found it sometimes difficult to hang out with large groups of people because big bills tend to mean that money comes up short -- in her experience. For my cohort, that's actually been a declining problem over the years as everyone is making more money and meals tend to be divided by head count, as opposed to what each individual ordered. I like the family attitude of this sort of bill splitting, and think of it as a sign for growth and closeness. A few extra beers and appetizers aren't enough to squabble over the check right?

But for my friend, she says that because she oftentimes ends up throwing in the extra cash out of a sense of obligation -- when she's definitely the person who can least afford to -- she's hesitant to join in group activities. Something about that makes me particularly sad, because don't people recognize that (a) you know what you owe, you should pay it and (b) don't give the short end of the stick to the people who are broke as hell.

This isn't to say that people should feel like they have to split the bill evenly, but just be aware of making sure you cover your fair share and even a little more. It's just polite right?

Another night a few weeks ago, another friend expressed how thankful she was that I bought her like a coffee or something. Her friends rarely do that I guess, even for something as incidental as a drink. Part of me is probably discounting the anxiety that having no money brings, but really, counting each tiny exchange is exhausting. And maybe because I'm a horrible budgetter and money tends to flow in and out of me like the tides, but being cheap is so not an admirable trait.

For the past year or so, I've been reading this blog: A Story of Debt. Ashley was in some serious credit card debt and her blog goes into some detail about how she rose out of it. Sometimes it's meant she can't go watch a movie with friends, or it's meant she can't ever eat out, or sometimes the weight of all that owed money is just super depressing. This is also compounded by her having to work multiple jobs while in grad school. But the admirable thing about both Ashley and her blog is her responsibility and openness with her journey. The good news is the has shut down -- just this week -- because she reached her goals and is now debt free. Pretty awesome right?

millenium of solitary confinement

there are so many ways to connect with people now.

so many ways.

social networking, cell phones, email, instant message, text messaging, airplanes, cars, trains, telephones, television, webcams, personals sites, pen and fucking paper.

so many ways.

so many ways of fucking connecting with other human beings...

and none of them work.

none of them.

no matter what you do...you can't get in.

-Jay Brannan's blog, and a song.

Digital Routine

Wake up. Emails piled up on the iPhone. The occasional missed text. The even less occasional missed call. Head over to the laptop, flip it open to download podcasts and emails while I go brush my teeth or go get a drink of water. Sit down, eliminate useless emails and flag stuff for later. Check Twitter and respond to @ messages. Gear up mentally to tackle Reader. Check my pinned tabs (currently): ESPN, Salon, housing maps, Craigslist jobs, Debs group site, two articles I've saved for reflecting on. I'll never get around to the latter but having them permanently there is a reminder.

Jump onto Facebook to see what people are doing/showing. During all this, hop online to see who's around for chatting. Say hey to the regulars. Now prepped to tackle Reader and spend anywhere from 1-3 hours getting things to zero and starring items to be read. As I'm reading, Tumblr and reblog like an addict while simultaneously watching Twitter, emails, AIMs, and downloading music. Some days I look at my fantasy teams. Some days I write a post about something fantasy related. Some days I blog about last night.

Note the lack of writing in this chain of events -- and the missing "answer emails" section. I think I best drag and drop "write something useful" to the pole position. Right after "head over to laptop, flip it open..."

Faking the funk on the nasty dunk

There should be an end of the year evaluation in here somewhere but there's not much to say about 2010. It came, it went, it didn't feel extraordinary in any way. No personal milestones accomplished, no particular goals met/set, and nothing happened on the personal front. If anything, it was a backward year with stops, semi-starts, and barely the glimpse of a new beginning. That sounds generic as hell but anything more specific would bore everyone involved. I am thankful for the people that I (re-)discovered this year, as they've been invaluable in coasting me through this drudgerous year.

Let's move on.

With the new ability to create and view lists, I'm a hundred thousand percent Facebook in. I tiered out my Facebook people into five categories and it's made it infinitely more useful. I would add "again" to the end of that sentence but Facebook hasn't actually been very useful to me previous to this. However, now I can easily see the news from just my top people, or take a wider look around when so inclined.

So far my tiers have broken down to 75 people in the top, 105 in the middle section, and about 180 in the outer ring. I've long maintained that I have three groups of people in my life: close friends, friends, outer boroughs. Taking just the top two FB tiers, the total is about 180, which correlates roughly with Dunbar's number. I'm overly partial to the theory and am glad that my social network apparently agrees with it.

If I had to break down estimated non-FB numbers, I'd say it's probably twenty people in the close friends group, sixty in the friends section, and everyone else in the outer boroughs. Some people tell me that they think it's weird to talk/think about friends all the time but really, if I had to study anything in life, focusing on social circles would be pretty high on the list.

I wish I knew that could have been a career ten years ago. Social anthropology was not an option I was aware of.

Also, since this whole Facebook profile fiasco, I've been bombarded by friend requests from absolute strangers, and I've accepted about a hundred of them out of some sense of duty. Most send nice messages and some ask for instructions on how to do the profile trick. It's the biggest fan base I've ever had. If only I could write a book with this type of appeal!

What's interesting is how careful I've been to keep the profile around, even though originally I could've cared less about it. I've had to reset the look twice, after other photos were tagged, and out of a sense of electronic vanity I've made sure my Facebook profile look is the same as in the Mashable article. I've been thinking a lot about vanity recently and this is a recent example of how that applies personally. Apparently with just a little bit of attention, vanity comes flying right out. Do you notice that if someone compliments you about something, you tend to try to upkeep it? This type of psychology/reinforcement could be useful in so many ways, for good or evil.

I'm about to retag my photos because I think the peak of my FB fame is here. The other day somebody from Greece asked if he could put my profile in a tech column he writes for a sports magazine. That's it, I'm going international and there's nowhere else to go but down. I'm going another week before I defriend these new folk; they are cluttering the shit out of my feed.

If you're so inclined, New Year's Eve 2010 was a blast as we got out of San Diego -- a promise we made to ourselves last year -- and there's the video linked to prove it. Next year maybe we'll get out of the state.