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December 19, 2008 (Friday)
12:06 pm - a peppermint bark encounter
It's one of the great ironies of human existence, I think, that the more densely populated an area we live in, the more we tend to ignore people. There's some critical point in the local head count at which, in our minds (or my mind, at least), humans cease being living, breathing creatures with whom we are meant to interact, and instead become obstacles to overcome. What is this wall of lumbering flesh preventing me from reaching that intersection before the red hand of the crossing signal stops blinking? What is this annoying mass standing on the left side of the escalator when I need to get past so I can reach the landing four seconds earlier than I otherwise would?
I was on line at the Wiliams-Sonoma store (where, for the record, I usually never buy anything, but do like to stare at all the sleek, shiny, incredibly expensive knives arrayed behind glass on the walls like they're part of a revered museum collection) in Columbus Circle this morning, buying a tin of their fabled peppermint bark -- and then, when I realized they were on sale, buying two. The line is long, especially for 11am on a Friday. My mind is floating on a sea a thousand miles away, lost in an irretrievable reverie, when suddenly, inches from my left ear, the words "That's a smart purchase" slice through the self-imposed fog like a frigid gust of wind. I turn my head. There is a man standing there, a few inches taller than me. He's got 20 or so years of age on me, as well as 50 or 60 pounds. He's a little bit jowly, but somehow not in an unhealthy way. He has a high forehead fronting a shrinking amount of hair that's more salt than pepper. He carries an expression of mild amusement as he stares at me, waiting for a response. It feels like 30 seconds have already passed. My brain is still processing the words that tumbled into my ear and trying to turn them into a complete sentence, assigning nouns and verbs appropriately, providing definitions, adding punctuation. Part of the reason it's taking so long is that it's working overdrive to get through a logic problem:
1) What?
2) You look familiar. Do I know you?
3) Are you Jon Voight?
4) I don't think I know you.
5) Why are you talking to me?
6) Do I know you? Maybe I know you.
7) Wait, did you say something?
8) I don't think know you. I'm going to act like I don't know you.
9) Oh crap, he asked me a question. I need to answer this question. What was the question?
I'm not sure how much time actually passed between the moment my head turned and my eyes met his and the moment that my brain finally forced words to come out of my mouth. It felt like at least half a minute. It may have been just a couple of seconds.
"What's that?" was my witty reply.
He lifts his arm slightly and points to mine; we are both cradling the same tins of peppermint bark. Ah! He's pointing out a common external characteristic! And making small talk! Yes. I have heard tell of this breed of human interaction.
A brief, but enjoyable (if slightly awkward), conversation ensued, in which the man revealed he was from Dallas, told me that this was indeed the best peppermint bark he's ever had, correctly guessed that I was buying one tin for myself and one as a gift, and then considered buying two himself when I pointed out that they were on sale. I left the conversation in a better mood than I was in when I'd started it, and thought how nice it sometimes is to have random, pleasant chats with complete strangers.
And then I thought, dude, when is the last time I had a random chat with a complete stranger? I go in and out of phases of varying sociability, and right now I'm in a pretty insular phase. Even though I was in a store that was, in retrospect, very crowded, and even though I generally spend swaths of time surrounded by a large number of people, the fact that these are all actually *people* has barely registered on my radar lately. The idea that someone would approach me, who I do not know, and who I have made no attempt to acknowledge the existence of, and try to talk to me, even though he doesn't need me to provide him with any sort of information or service, was so far outside my ability to grasp it that I spent a whole bushel of seconds (I think) staring at him, incapable of formulating even a basic response to a very straightforward question.
And although it's been nearly two hours now since this encounter, I'm still unwilling to admit that's actually what happened. My current theory is that I may not know the guy, but he totally must have been somebody famous, and he wanted to see whether I recognized him. That's gotta be it. I mean, conversations in this city only happen for specific reasons. They are a means to an end. That's the law. Right?
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August 1, 2008 (Friday)
3:51 pm - what $179 a night will get you in Mexico City
I think it might have been cheaper than usual because we're staying for 10 nights.
This hotel, btw, is about as American as I think it's possible to get here in Mexico City. Almost everybody speaks fluent English, the complimentary breakfast is copious and includes pancakes, and if you ask about places to eat the staff instinctively directs you to places that are... not quite "local" cuisine, I think.
So far so good over here. The conference doesn't begin in earnest until Sunday, and though there's much prep work to do, it's not nearly as harried as it will be from Sunday through... forever. We went out to dinner at some upscale-ish chain restaurant with a culturally diverse range of diners, where I successfully broke out what little food-ordering-in-Spanish skill I retained from my food trip, including the requisite critical error, in which I ordered the "pollo popeye" (chicken stuffed with spinach and cheese in a mushroom sauce) using pronunciation that suggested the dish was created by the animated hero himself.
I also learned a fun fact about Mexico City last night, as originally relayed to us from a slightly insane taxi driver who, on our way to the aforementioned dinner, gave tiny flower bouquets to my friend and colleague Erika (because he liked her) and my boss Bonnie (because she got royally pissed at him and our hotel folks when they told her the ride would cost much less than it actually ended up costing): Mexico City is sinking. At a rate of about a third of a foot per year, in fact. The city, which was once the capital of the Aztec empire (this was presumably before it was overrun by 7/11 stores and Starbucks), is basically a big island on a lake situated a mile and a half above sea level. So there's a lot of water underneath the city, and as the city has grown, more and more of that water is being sucked out to satiate a parched population. And... the city sinks. Officials are growing concerned that, if something isn't done to reverse the trend, the city could ultimately begin collapsing on itself. Upshot: Hopefully the conference won't take too long.
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July 20, 2008 (Sunday)
1:36 am - oh, joss. you got me again.
I should have known better than to watch a Joss Whedon-produced finale late at night. Who among y'all has watched all three of the Dr. Horrible epis, and is ready to talk about it? After you complete your first round of therapy, I mean?
Here is some more specific fodder for our conversation: One online reviewer astutely observed that, at the conclusion of the miniseries, "many fans are shocked, but not really surprised." Do you think she's right, but not really correct?
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June 29, 2008 (Sunday)
11:51 pm - how journalism can cause whiplash
Ah yes, there's nothing like a thoroughly mixed message to really confuse the crap out of paranoid, yet easily swayed, parents -- or, alternately, parents who have taken out massive life insurance policies on their children.
Excerpts from this latest example of award-winning, responsible journalism are provided in the order they appear within the article.
Summer fun can be deadlyInjury rates spike in the summer, but that's not an excuse to keep kids indoorsChad Skelton, Vancouver SunLast weekend, two unconscious toddlers were pulled from a backyard swimming pool in Delta. One of them later died and the other remains in hospital. It was yet another reminder to parents that the annual summer break, while fun, also exposes their children to increased risk of injury and death.
...
Child safety experts say they don't want to alarm parents and that it's important for kids to get outside and be physically active.
But they say parents need to ensure that they, and their children, take the necessary steps to avoid serious injury and death.
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Despite widespread concern over child safety, by most measures our children have never been safer. In the early 1970s, about 1,600 Canadian children a year died as a result of accidental injuries. Today, that figure is less than 300.
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Less encouraging, both Pike and DiFilippo concede is [sic] that some of the drop may be simply due to our children living more sedentary lifestyles. While it may not be good for their long-term health or fitness, a teenager playing video games in the basement isn't very likely to sustain a life-threatening injury.
...
Saying that injury is the leading cause of death for Canadian children is accurate, though a bit misleading.
The reason injury is the No. 1 cause of death for children, but not older adults, is simply that children only very rarely die of anything else. Not many six year olds drop dead from a heart attack.
Happy summer, families!
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June 22, 2008 (Sunday)
4:36 am - apocalypse now
Incredibly, this is a real actual headline (and article) written by a real actual premiere wire news service, not The Onion. It is also a pretty surreal article to stumble across when it's 4:30 in the morning and you're slightly drunk and should be sleeping and just had a lengthy conversation with a friend about the meaning of democracy and whether voting is a right that must be taken advantage of or a privilege that one has every right to decline.
I was originally going to just post a link to the story, but since it's from AP, it may be removed from the Internets within the next month, and I cannot allow it to pass into the ether, due to its outstanding mix of hubris, metaphysical grief, melodrama and sheer fucked-upness.
Everything seemingly is spinning out of control
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080622/ap_on_re_us/out_of_control_3
By ALAN FRAM and EILEEN PUTMAN, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON - Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.
Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance. The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, "Yes, we can." Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2003. An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings on the national mood. "It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change." Recent natural disasters around the world dwarf anything afflicting the U.S. Consider that more than 69,000 people died in the China earthquake, and that 78,000 were killed and 56,000 missing from the Myanmar cyclone. Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire. Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet's weather that man seems powerless to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge? It hardly matters to those in the path. Just ask the people of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. They are living in a city where, 1,000 days after the storm, entire neighborhoods remain abandoned, a national embarrassment that evokes disbelief from visitors. Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale, due to increased consumption in growing countries such as China and India and rising fuel costs. That can-do solution to energy needs — turning corn into fuel — is sapping fields of plenty once devoted to crops that people need to eat. Shortages have sparked riots. In the U.S., rice prices tripled and some stores rationed the staple. Residents of the nation's capital and its suburbs repeatedly lose power for extended periods as mere thunderstorms rumble through. In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought. Want to get away from it all? The weak U.S. dollar makes travel abroad forbiddingly expensive. To add insult to injury, some airlines now charge to check luggage. Want to escape on the couch? A writers' strike halted favorite TV shows for half a season. The newspaper on the table may soon be a relic of the Internet age. Just as video stores are falling by the wayside as people get their movies online or in the mail. But there's always sports, right? The moorings seem to be coming loose here, too. Baseball stars Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens stand accused of enhancing their heroics with drugs. Basketball referees are suspected of cheating. Stay tuned for less than pristine tales from the drug-addled Tour de France and who knows what from the Summer Olympics. It's not the first time Americans have felt a loss of control. Alger, the dime-novel author whose heroes overcame adversity to gain riches and fame, played to similar anxieties when the U.S. was becoming an industrial society in the late 1800s. American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the U.S. has endured comparable periods and worse, including the economic stagflation (stagnant growth combined with inflation) and Iran hostage crisis of 1980; the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s. "All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored," he said. "Of course, that doesn't mean it will happen again." Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House. This period has seen intense interest in the presidential primaries, especially the Democrats' five-month duel between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Records were shattered by voters showing up at polling places, yearning for a voice in who will next guide the country as it confronts the uncontrollable. Never mind that their views of their current leaders are near rock bottom, reflecting a frustration with Washington's inability to solve anything. President Bush barely gets the approval of three in 10 people, and it's even worse for the Democratic-led Congress. Why the vulnerability? After all, this is the 21st century, not a more primitive past when little in life was assured. Surely people know how to fix problems now. Maybe. And maybe this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted.
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June 2, 2008 (Monday)
4:02 pm - your mexican tax dollars at work
At the beginning of August I'm headed to the traffic capital of Mexico, Mexico City, for a week of the kind of fun and relaxation that can only come with covering the largest HIV/AIDS conference on the planet. I will be one of tens of thousands of researchers, activists, HIV-positive people and journalists who converge on MC at the height of the summer, and LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I CAN'T WAIT.
I can't wait a whole lot.
This morning, I went to the Mexican Consulate in NYC to get my visa. (Although casual American tourists, I think, can more or less come and go in Mexico as they please, journalists need special permission.) We weren't sure whether I needed to make an appointment or if I could just show up; when you call the consulate, there's an automated menu system, and when you get to the part of the menu where it tells you to press a number to talk with someone, and you press it, the system tells you you've pressed an incorrect key and hangs up on you.
The consulate itself is a five-story building just east of 5th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It's easy to spot, partly because of the largely ornamental four-foot black steel fence in front of the entrance, partly because of the dozens of Mexicans who are randomly standing/sitting around that entrance. At a gate in the fence, there was a congenial security guard, who I told I was here to get a media visa. He gave me a little raffle ticket and told me to go inside, head towards the back and go up to the tenth floor. I walk inside, and am immediately hit with chilling flashbacks of my first ever trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles 15 years ago (when I got the driver's permit that I never did anything with). People waiting everywhere. Standing, sitting, leaning. Waiting. Some in line. Some potentially in line. Everyone chattering. Babies laughing, crying. I start to peel my way through the crowd, looking for an elevator or a staircase I can begin to take up to the tenth floor. Suddenly I see, wading his way towards me, one of the journalists who works for a rival publication (but we're on good terms). He looks extremely harried. He brushes past me quickly and says something like, "Good luck." He departs. I realize I should have asked him where I'm supposed to go.
I worm my way to the back of the building and find a staircase. No elevator. I make my way up, shimmying around people as I go. Second floor, third floor. People everywhere. Waiting. I see at least four different lines, some of which seem to converge with each other, and I wonder if these people are all waiting for the same thing, if they're waiting for what I'm waiting for, if they even know what they're waiting for.
I find an elevator on the third floor. I go in. The buttons only go up to 5, so I push 5, thinking maybe this is like the Macy's in Herald Square where you can only get to certain floors if you're in the right part of the building.
But no. I was being a foolish idealist. There was no tenth floor. There was nothing close to a tenth floor. There was, however, a nice lady on the *fifth* floor who saw me wandering around like I'd lost my puppy, informed me that the visa office was somewhere on either the second or third floor, and then escorted me back to the elevator and waited with me until it came, which at first I thought was extremely kind of her, but now I wonder if maybe there's some Terrible Secret on the fifth floor and she didn't want me snooping around lest I find it.
I returned to the second floor. I got out. I milled about, trying to figure out where lines began and ended, tripping over people, apologizing (in English, though I heard no English spoken), and struggling to find a single other person who was white, since that would probably indicate I was in the right place, since why would someone from Mexico need a visa to get back to their home country? I spent 15 minutes standing on a random line snaking up the staircase between the first and second floor, not moving an inch, while a girl who couldn't have been more than four years old twisted apart mini Oreos on the step above me and then deposited the broken corpses on the step, where her mother spotted them and swept them to the side, chastising the little girl for being so careless. (Well, I assume that's what she was doing; I don't know nearly enough Spanish to know for sure. She may have been telling her to try a little harder next time to make the gringo slip and fall down the stairs.) Eventually I gave up and decided to explore some more. I waded my way back up to the third floor and finally spotted, on a printout posted on a door, an arrow pointing me to the visa office. We're now half an hour into my consular visit.
 I stand in the room dumbly. There are desks and cubicles arranged in an oval around the center, which has several rows of plastic chairs, all full. It looks like people are being interviewed. There are a lot of Hispanic families with babies. I go up to the first white folks I see, and they explain that the raffle ticket I had been given at the gate, by the man who thought it'd be a hoot to send me to a floor that didn't exist, had a number written on the back in blue ink, which turned out to be my order in the visa line. It was 22. They were now on 8. All those desks, with people working at computers or interviewing people, and it turns out that for the visa, there was just one office off on the side, staffed by a single woman. Last Thursday, I found out, the woman was out. No visas. On Friday, the computer was down. No visas. Today there was a backlog.
Two and a half hours of sitting, standing, chatting, Web browsing and e-mail writing (thank you, smartphone, for keeping me sane) later, it was my turn. The convo lasted all of 10 minutes. I had to present a whole mess of information, including proof that I worked for my company, proof that my company was sending me to a conference in Mexico, proof that the conference in Mexico had invited me to come, *and* proof that I had actually registered for the conference. And my passport. And a copy of my passport. And extra passport photos. And a promise that I would one day return to give them my first-born child. OK, not so much the last one. But they demanded a lot of stuff, in addition to the form I had to fill out.
Tomorrow I go back to pick up my visa -- and my passport, which I either accidentally left there or which the visa lady kept so she could fill out paperwork and application stuff. Not sure which. I will assume it's the latter b/c otherwise I'll feel like more of a complete moron than usual.
I should note, btw, that I actually consider myself pretty lucky. Three hours of waiting, in total? The people in line to get passports or citizenship were waiting a lot longer; I bet that staircase is completely filled with twisted-apart mini Oreos by now. And it can't be a hoot to work there, outnumbered 200-1 by applicants, with few people in a good mood.
Of course, I do have to go back tomorrow, so maybe I shouldn't count my pollos just yet.
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May 20, 2008 (Tuesday)
12:39 am - feline persuasion
 Yesterday, I realized that my cat's mental list of priority activities is more nuanced than I've previously given her credit for. This may not sound like particularly blog-worthy news, but just wait: Once you've read this entry, it still won't be. And yet, as is standard practice, I will now provide considerably lengthy backstory to this non-story. And as it happens, that this particular backstory takes place in the back of my first-story apartment. Oh my, wasn't that a clever sentence! Yes, indeed! Enough to make you PUNtificate about how humorous I am, ha ha, ha!
So it's always bothered me that I don't have any windows in my apartment. In lieu of such posh modern conveniences, I have a sliding glass door in the back, which opens out onto a small patiolike area that I share with the neighbor next door. This area is typically only 10 feet by 30 feet or so, but it suddenly quadrupled in size over the winter -- not by violent annexation, as one might reasonably imagine, but rather to our fence collapsing, which effectively merged our porch area with the larger one just beyond it.
Having no windows means the only way to get fresh air into my apartment is to slide open that glass door. Which is what I used to do regularly during the warmer months -- until the day my cat showed up. Once she moved in, opening the back door quickly became into a complex emotional decision, as I was forced to weigh the pluses and minuses of a whole host of critical cat-related factors, like whether her insect repellent is still working, whether it's worth it to try to get the damn collar around her neck again, whether she'll likely come back inside before I go to bed because I can't shut it with her still outside and yet I don't want to leave it open at night for critter/security reasons but if the cat decides to take a field trip then I have to keep the damn thing open till she comes back god knows when and probably drunk off her ass and pregnant, etc.
Ultimately, I gave up on opening the door at all after -- on *two* occasions within a one-month span -- Cleo came back with her breakaway collar missing. (A pair of rather unpleasant experiences with mice didn't help.) Latent fatherly fears about her losing her collar and getting snatched up by a well-meaning human; or of getting snatched up by a ne'er-do-well-meaning human; or of being run over by a hybrid car; or of being abducted by Nazis and forced to dress up like a monkey and perform lewd acts on kimodo dragons; they all swirled together in my mind, melded together with a healthy dose of paranoia administered by my mom on every single occasion she's ever visited ("You let the cat go outside? What if she never comes back?"), and formed a massive wad of No More Outdoor Kitty. Since then, Cleo has had to content herself with periodically running headfirst into the back door in a vain attempt to reach a squirrel foraging just on the opposite side of the glass. (The squirrel was completely nonplussed.)
But then came this past Sunday. A rainy day, an unseasonably cold day, a thoroughly bleh day -- in short, not a day one would expect cats to enjoy being outside. I figured if there was any time when it was safe to open the door and let non-recirculated air enter my apartment for the first time since September 2007, it would be now.
( I may have slightly underestimated just how much my cat missed being outside. )
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May 3, 2008 (Saturday)
3:47 pm - where the wild things... lay... other wild things
A couple weeks ago, I visited a friend/coworker's quasi-farm in a rural part of New Jersey. He has chickens. Those chickens lay eggs. He sells those eggs. People eat them. But until a couple weeks ago, I was not one of those people. But now I am.
This is all incredibly mundane, except it's not. My friend raises chickens in a coop out back behind his house, and the chickens wander around his property during the day, munching on grass and seeds and bugs and worms and whatever they find, and ideally not getting eaten by local foxes or birds of prey, though that happens way more often than he'd like. My friend, incidentally, is also the director of development for the company I work for. He's an extremely proficient programmer with a strong background in music and video production. He works from home, where he raises his seven-year-old son. His computer has three monitors. He has servers in the basement. And he lives in a modest, two-story house with a back yard that includes a swingset, chicken coop, creek and woods, in a part of central Jersey that's populated mostly by fields, trees and horses, though the suburbs are just a 10-minute drive away.
How awesome is that? I'm the writer/editor type, and I'm the one who lives in one of the densest, busiest, stressiest, most plugged-in regions of the country. He's the tech wizard, and he's living on a farm with chickens.
Anyway, I spent the day out there a couple weeks ago, because our company may be sold soon and we were meeting up with the senior tech folks of the suitor company to walk them through everything that makes our operation tick. (I was involved b/c about half of my job consists of managing the projects our farmboy developer undertakes to improve various parts of our site.) Before I left, he tucked a dozen of his chickens' eggs into a crate, warned me to wash them before cracking them open, and sent me on my merry way.
To those of you who have bought organic eggs, or so-called "free range" eggs, I say FIE ON THEE. These were the real thing. It's weird, because up until about midway through the last century, this was how we got our eggs: Farmers raised chickens who slept in coops, spent their day waddling around and clucking and pecking on the ground and giving birth constantly, and the eggs got sold. But you'll be awfully hard-pressed to find eggs with such an origin now. Now, of course, it's a massive operation, with thousands of chickens herded into extremely tight spaces and fed specially engineered mixtures resulting in millions of identically produced eggs. Organically produced eggs are often little different from non-organic, there are just fewer chemicals involved. The same goes for "free range," which often just means that the chickens are allowed to walk around -- sometimes, not even outdoors -- but are still fed whatever is shoved in front of their beaks.
 I realize this kind of production technique is necessary to feed an ever-more-urbanized (and growing) population, where there just isn't the real estate or the infrastructure to have kabillions of small farms, with a few score chickens each, feeding a massive group of people living in a very small area. But these eggs -- the real thing, pasture-fed -- were not like the eggs we buy every day. They weren't as large: some were big, some were small, but none got close to the "jumbo" eggs you get at Shop Rite. But the yolks are larger -- and much sharper in color, a really vibrant yellow or even a deep orange sometimes. Their shells were not white: some were brown, some were yellowish, some were grey. They're harder to peel when you hard-boil them.
And yeah, I'm probably biased b/c they're from my friend, but dude, they're just better. Eggs have a weird taste to begin with, so they're hard to describe, but these were more... robust. Real. Like eating god himself. (I'd say "or herself," but I don't want god slapping me with another sexual-harassment suit.) I know many of us in this society lament from time to time about how we're drifting farther and farther with our "true nature" and separating ourselves more and more with what's natural, the way things were "meant" to be, and I do think that much of that concern is hyperbole, but you know what? A lot of things about life sucked a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. But I'll bet the food was really freaking good.
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April 7, 2008 (Monday)
11:28 pm - it can only be anime ... or Scooby
 I was washing dishes in the kitchen when Tactics came on Sci Fi. With apologies to anime buffs, that is my only excuse for having the show on. (Not a fan.)
By comparison, I have no excuse at all for why I was actually listening when this gorgeous bit of dialogue was spoken:
"By the way, how has Haruka been lately? He got pretty close to awakening his true nature as a demon-eating goblin not too long ago. I know you're probably against it, but try thinking from his perspective." Makes ya think. I mean, when we're down in the dumps, and life has us feeling blue, shouldn't we all try to think about things from a demon-eating goblin's perspective? Just a little bit?
In terms of awesomeness, that quote only barely beats out this snippet from the description of Tactics DVD #2 (courtesy the show's official Web site):
"It will take more than a few exorcised demons to get them through these troubled times." However, in terms of pure unlikelihood of ever hearing a particular conversation uttered by a human being, even in the context of an animated television show, both of those lose out to this exchange from an old episode of Scooby-Doo, which I totally swear I only heard because I stumbled across the show while channel surfing:
Daphne: "Look! Luminous footprints! I wonder where they lead to?"
Fred: "I hope to Shag, Scooby and the Globetrotters!"
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March 31, 2008 (Monday)
9:19 pm - cogito ergo sum, yada yada yada
I suppose it's fitting that on this transformative day of spring -- the day when an old, battered sport fully begins its life anew, a day that alters the very fabric of reality for that small subset of humanity known as The Baseball Fan -- my thoughts should turn to... thoughts. And how they matter more than reality itself. About what reality really means in a world ruled by creatures whose existence is defined less by that reality than by our ever-changing, often-illogical perceptions of it.
OK, I put that a little melodrmatically. And by "a little," I mean, "I'm a douchebag." We all think about thoughts, and about perceptions vs. reality, and all that junk and stuff and things. Just not too much or too often. Unless we're a philosophy professor. Or unemployed. Or in college. Man, it cannot be easy to be an unemployed philosophy professor. I wonder if they have suicide rate statistics on those people.
Anyway, a couple of small events got me thinking about just how much more important perception is than reality, at least when it comes to most aspects of human interaction. One was my attendance of a Glen Phillips concert in Manhattan this past weekend. For those of you who are shamefully out of sync with my musical obsession timeline, Glen Phillips was the frontman of an alternative rock band called Toad the Wet Sprocket, which oh-so-briefly flirted with mainstream success (and requisite sellout status) in 1991 with the top-20 sticky-pop single "All I Want," which -- trivia! -- was also used as the theme song for an extremely short-lived NBC drama entitled The Round Table. (I can still remember listening to the radio ads for that show while I was in my silkscreening class in junior high school. YES I TOOK A SILKSCREENING CLASS IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL SHUT UP.)
 Toad the Wet Sprocket was my first great musical love, and it comprised the core of my musical taste for the next 15 years -- even though the band broke up in 1998. Which, really, is more a sign of how stagnant my musical tastes have been over the past 15 years than anything else, but still. Point is I loved them. Loved loved loved them. When they played at my college in April of 1997, I was overcome. As entertainment editor of our campus paper, I was granted an interview with Glen Phillips after the concert. Which I did not prepare for. And was so overwhelmed by the idea of talking to anyone in the band that I could not think of anything to ask when I actually met him. So I stood there with my friend David (who was not only my freshman-year college roommate, but was also my best friend in high school, and who was the person who launched my Toad obsession in '91 by giving me a cassette copy of their newly released album Fear), fumbling with my notepad and my pen and my empty bottle of water, as the two of us asked poignant, scintillating questions like, "Did you have fun tonight?" and "Are you observing Passover?" (David had learned at some point that Glen was Jewish, and Passover started right around the time of the concert). Then Glen graciously signed David's concert ticket and my water bottle (which I still have in a box somewhere; he drew a molecular representation of H2O on the bottle with a black Sharpee), and got the hell out of there.
 Flash-forward 11 years. Toad is long dead, Glen Phillips is now a 36-year-old father of two tweenie daughters, and David and I have scored two $25 general admission tickets at Joe's Pub in the East Village. We stand at the bar, me nursing my $10 rum and Coke and he periodically sipping on his vodka gimlet, as we and a small gaggle of other 30-somethings watch a bespectacled Phillips (when did he start wearing glasses?) play a 50-minute acoustic set while standing on a small corner stage about 30 feet away from us. (We were separated from him by a small sea -- a pond, really -- of small dinner tables, all occupied.) A couple hundred people or so, all told, a nice crowd. And an enthusiastic one. Glen played a handful of new songs, a handful of not-so-new songs and one old Toad song -- "Walk on the Ocean," which back in the 1990s I thought was one of the most lovely songs created by man.
 And I realized, as I stood there, mildly entertained, that this wasn't my music anymore. I've known this on some level for a while; I almost never listen to old Toad stuff anymore (sorry Maggie!), and I rarely listen to Glen's solo stuff from the early 2000s, either. But to actually stand there, surrounded by people who were actually rocking out to some of Glen's faster songs -- as much as upper-middle-class 30-something white people can rock out to an acoustic folk set, anyway -- made me realize how much I was not a part of that crowd. It's not so much that I think his music is uncool or lifeless; a part of me still likes it, or at least some of it, and will continue to listen to it from time to time. It just doesn't speak to me anymore. And I wonder what changed about me, about my perception of myself and my perception of his music, that turned him from the centerpiece of my musical existence to a largely untouched side dish.
So that was one thing. The other... OK, this is getting long, so I'll post it separatelike within a relatively non-lengthy period of time.
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stalwartkumquat's journal
