By some strange confluence of events, you've gotten to the website of, well, my names on here somewhere. But I'm not gonna make it that easy for you to find it. I'm sure the google ninjas out there should have no problem finding it.
This is my outlet for whatever I want. There's some humor, some reflection, some politcs and a lot of saracasm. But, most importantly a few observations of strange situations and stupid people I encounter around D.C. (and if you pronounce it Warshington I hate you already).
If you really want to know more click on the "About" tab above the crazy kid with the hairspray and lighter. It's all a bit self-serving and long-winded. But it's why I write.
Tonight was my nephews 3rd birthday. I was 45 minutes late to the party at My Gym. I told my cousin I would be there for it on time (I’m never on time for anything). Because of work, I was late. I was more disappointed that I was late to this than anything I have had to attend for a while. I’m not sure what this says about me, but I am more than okay with it. Happy Birthday Topher!
I don’t dream very often when I sleep anymore. Or, maybe I do, but don’t remember them when I wake up. The past several nights have given me some odd dreams though.
First dream, I was dry humping one of my (female) roommates. I’m not sure how to describe it. Usually when you’re having a sex dream, you enjoy it. The whole thing was just really awkward and I wasn’t completely enjoying myself. When I woke up, I told my roommate about it. Yeah, we have that sort of relationship.
Second dream, I was in the new Nationals stadium. In between innings, I had to go to the bathroom. Waiting in line, I saw a bunch of people I know including one of my bosses and some friends. For some reason the bathroom was coed, so I was standing next to this gorgeous girl in line. Out of nowhere she punches me in the balls and runs off laughing. I’m left there to squat in pain. Finally, I get to the bathroom and take one of the stalls. A kid, probably 5 years old, jumps under the stall wall and pees all over my leg. I think I smacked the 5 year old in the head. Then I woke up.
I had a great idea for a post ready to go. And then I watched the Caps lose. To the Flyers. In double overtime. If it was my TV I was watching on, I might have actually thrown something at it. Down 3-1, let’s hope for a repeat of the 1988 series, where the Caps found themselves in a similar situation against the Flyers. I might actually cry.
Tuesday is usually Mexican day at the dining center in my office. I decided to eschew the sandwich bar and went for the fajitas with a side of rice instead. For whatever reason, the lady decided to give me the rice in a separate plastic container. To get into the actual office area from the elevators, you have to swipe your ID card. Pretty standard for large office buildings. I had to balance the smaller container on top of the one with the fajitas in one hand in order to grab my ID and swipe. I almost dropped the rice, but caught myself at the last second. Crisis averted. For now. As I walked into my office, my co-worker said something to me and I turned suddenly. Next thing I knew, fiesta rice all over the floor. To make matters worse, the rice was right smack dab in the middle of my office. I couldn’t even get to my chair without tiptoeing around the rice. Absolute debacle.
I picked up the container, still half full of rice and walked around the corner to ask my secretary to call housekeeping. I went back to my office, sat in the other chair and started to eat my lunch at the other end of the office. Five minutes later, one of the housekeepers came by to clean up my mess. The size of my office didn’t allow me to continue eating while she cleaned up my mess. For whatever reason, I felt so uncomfortable standing there watching her clean up my mess. I tried walking into my co-worker’s office to make a little small talk. But, he was on his phone, which left me to fidget around awkwardly in my doorway for two minutes. I generally love awkward situations. I love making/watching people squirm a little. But those were easily the two most uncomfortable minutes of my life.
It isn’t that I dislike people waiting on me. In fact, I love it. Just ask my mom. It just feels a little bit wrong to watch someone on their hands and knees cleaning up after you. For some reason, walking 5 feet away into another office so that you don’t actually see the person on their hands and knees is okay. But standing over someone while they do it, just plain uncomfortable. I don’t think I could ever have a butler or a nanny for my kids.
Oh well. The rice was pretty bland. I didn’t even eat all of what was leftover.
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Appreciate the Prose:
Up and Then Down, New Yorker piece about the history of elevators and the complexity that goes into planning an elevator system. Also an anecdote about a man who got stuck in an elevator for almost 2 days. Yeah, I know, elevators don’t seem like the most interesting topic, but I thought this piece was great. There’s so much more that goes into elevators than you could ever imagine. It’s also a bit long, but read the whole thing. There’s a strange, subtle beauty to elevators.
I don’t talk about my dating life in this space. It is one of a few topics that I will almost never talk about. But, I have to break my rule this one time. I am so in love with this new girl. She is so incredibly beautiful and I am CRAZY about her. I feel the need to run around and scream it from the mountain tops (god, I disgust myself). I put a picture of her at the end of the post so you call can be jealous of me.
Writing is a fickle mistress, or so the cliche goes. In my case, the lack of an actual girlfriend would make writing my fickle girlfriend? I haven’t been able to write anything coherent for two weeks. I’ve started several pieces in that time. But I would get about halfway through, read what I had written and realize it was a complete mess. So, I’d just get into bed and go to sleep.
In school, when I got stuck on a paper with “writer’s block”, I’d get up and do something else. I’d end up not starting the paper in earnest until after midnight and stay up until 4 or 5 am to bang the paper out. That wasn’t writer’s block. That was just plain laziness and procrastination. I easily could have finished those papers a day in advance if I wanted to. I work the best under pressure, and there was no pressure to finish a paper that early. Why stay in and write a paper due in two days when I could go out and get drunk tonite?
This is different. I have no deadline here. No topic that I am forced to write about. There’s no pressure to write. So I end up with a group of babbling incoherent sentences about nothing.
When something gets difficult, you force it and keep going until you get back on track. Apparently that doesn’t work for writing. If you’re churning out shit and you try to force it out, you just force more shit out. Sunday night I decided to try to write through it. I posted something and it was a complete catastrophe. I ended up taking it down the next morning. Hopefully no one read it (well, I know at least two people did).
I guess this is what the beginning stages of writer’s block feels like.
So instead of embarrassing myself and subjecting you to dreadful writing, I will send you elsewhere.
The Wire, along with The West Wing, is my favorite TV show. Like most people who watch The Wire, I was a bit disappointed by certain parts of last season (although, the last few episodes made up for much of it). David Simon wrote a piece on the Huffington Post defending his work. David Simon is the most bitter man in the U.S. But, if you can get past his self-righteous disdain for the entire world, I think he actually makes good points. There are subtle, but important, points that a lot of people, including myself, missed. And he paints a depressing picture of the state of print media. Two of my friends that are just getting their start in journalism say it’s a pretty accurate picture. And that is downright depressing.
Her name is Rose. You can find her in the motion pictures Troy and Wicker Park. We are in love and we will be married and have kids one day. I hope that day comes very soon.
The Rank-Link Imbalance by David Brooks. I read this last Friday. Brooks deconstructs Eliot Spitzer-types so delicately, yet with such force. The power hungry megalomaniac crusader destined to take a tumble from glory. He does it without mentioning a single name or uttering a direct insult. I don’t know how he does it, but he does it so well.
On my way home from the barber shop I passed a bunch of black kids on a patch of grass right by Washington Hospital playing baseball. They all had gloves and looked like they new the basics of throwing and fielding a baseball. Black kids in the city playing baseball. Fewer and fewer black kids are playing baseball these days. Maybe this was just an anomaly and black kids, for the most part, still aren’t playing baseball. But it made me smile.
In the bathroom at my office, there are three stalls. When my bowels feel the need to move, I have a preferred stall. There are 14 floors in my firm’s building. All but three floors have the same floorplan. So it’s safe to say, on all those floors, my stall preference is the same. I like to use the handicap stall on the left. I have a few reason for this.
First, I prefer the space the handicap stall has to offer. In any bathroom you go into, the handicap stall just seems so much more spacious compared to the regular stalls. It’s like getting a hotel suite instead of just a regular room. It allows you to spread out a little more while being able to avoid an accidental Larry Craig incident.
Second, there seems to be an unwritten rule that the stall on the right is reserved for partners. I have generally only seen partners come in and out of the first stall. Never the middle (well, also no one wants to sit in the middle stall if they don’t have to. In the off chance that all three stalls are occupied at once, no one wants to be caught in between a game of battleshits) or left stall.
One time, shortly after I started at the firm, my beloved handicap stall was clogged. As shown above, the logical next choice was the stall on the right. While I was doing my business, someone walked into the bathroom, but didn’t go to one of the urinals or one of the other stalls. I thought it was a bit odd. As I flushed and emerged from the stall, one of the partners was standing in front of the sinks reading a brief. As I walked out of the bathroom, he walked into the stall I had just used, seat still warm (a warm seat is the worst feeling ever) like there was nothing awkward about this situation. I have yet to set foot inside that stall since.
Third, my firm recently installed automatic flushing mechanisms onto all of the stalls and toilets in the firm in an effort to go green. You know, the ones with the motion sensors. The sensor in the handicap stall is positioned just right. It only flushes when you stand up. The sensors in the regular stalls are either too sensitive or positioned in the wrong place. This results in unnecessary flushes. One time, the middle stall flushed five times between the time that I sat down and stood up. Its incredibly irritating because water splashes up and instead of the usual once over my butt cheeks before I stand up, this requires a twice over just to make sure I got all the water. No one likes to get back to their desk and sit down on damp boxers. Also, I’m pretty certain the five automatic flushes wastes more water than the one manual flush. So really, I’m doing the environment a favor.
While I’m on the topic of poo, there’s one thing I don’t get. What is with the marathon dumps people like to take? One of my roommates who is of Italian and Jewish descent has been known to take 30 minutes. I believe it should take no longer than ten minutes. If it takes longer than that, there are three plausible scenarios that I can think of, and they all disgust me:
1. The second you feel like you might need to go, you run to the bathroom. What ends up happening is you sit there and read a Maxim for about ten minutes until your bowels are really ready to move. What a waste of time, not to mention your ass cheeks are pressed firmly against one of the dirtiest places in the house/office/wherever for ten minutes longer than is necessary. There’s just no need for that.
2. You get to the bathroom just as you are ready to go. The actual process of poo coming out of your anus happens in the allotted ten minute time period. You decide you want to finish the article you just started so you stay for an additional 10-20 minutes. I understand wanting to finish the article. But, you do realize you are sitting in your own shit. Guys are too lazy to stop reading, wipe and then pick up the magazine again. So in between the time you finish pooping and you finish your article, the remnants around your sphincter have had a chance to dry and harden a bit. No matter how much you wipe, this will probably result in a few dingleberries. That’s just filthy. You wouldn’t grab a magazine, run outside and look for the nearest pile of dog shit, drop trou and sit and read for 20 minutes would you? That’s basically what you’re doing by not wiping right away. You disgust me the most.
3. If it really takes you 30 minutes to push a log or two out, you’re well on your way to giving yourself hemorrhoids. Stop straining so much. You need to rethink your diet and see a doctor.
I’m halfway through my life and I’m never quite sure if I’m doing anything right until I’m completely done doing it wrong.
-Danny Concannon from The West Wing
Okay, I’m only about a third of the way through my life and I’m pretty sure it isn’t everything that I’m doing wrong. Just a lot of them. I wish there was a guidebook that told you what you’re supposed to do in any situation. But this is real life, and I guess it’s part of growing up. I’m just afraid one day I’m going to wake up and be 50 still wondering if I’m doing this right.
I turned 23 about a month ago. Ever since I’ve been walking around in a bit of a daze wondering what the hell I’m doing. It isn’t that I feel lost. It’s that I’m walking around in circles and every time I make another round I notice another new thing that I don’t like. That new thing makes me force myself out of the circle. But, somehow, I always end up back on the beaten path. I don’t know. Maybe we are just the way we are. There are the little things that we can change, but the major things, that’s just who we are. Part of our personality. What makes us the individuals that we are.
One of my good friends was back home this weekend, so I was back to see him. I ended up staying at my parents’ house for the night and spent most of the next day back home running errands I had planned to do in D.C. They’re only about a half hour drive away and its a nice change of pace. I find it’s a good place to go when I’m in one of my moods. I don’t always come back with the answers I’m looking for. But for a short time, I’m able to put down whatever weight I have on my back and let things be.
Both pairs of my dress shoes needed a shine, so I brought them back with me to use my dad’s kit (yes, I shine my own shoes, it’s what sophisticated gentlemen do). Like a responsible adult, I put newspaper down on the floor so the polish wouldn’t get all over the kitchen floor. My dad walked by, and being my dad, told me to make sure not to let the polish fall off the newspaper when I was finished. I gave him my usual quizzical “what do you think I am?” look to which he responded with an anecdote from when I was about 5 years old. I was eating a cookie or something and like a proper 5 year old was dropping crumbs all over my shirt. My dad and I had the following exchange:
Dad: Be careful when you get up. You have crumbs all over your shirt.
Me: Don’t worry, they’ll just all fall to the ground when I get up.
He didn’t say what happened after I made that comment. But I’m willing to bet that I got up, dusted my shirt off and went to go find a toy.
Like I said, I can just go home and let things be.
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Appreciate the Prose:
Angels Unawares, I found this through another blog, The Last Spartan, that I read regularly. Listen to what the old lady has to say.
In the last post I alluded to my new dream job, an op-ed columnist. Screw law school and a cushy job at a huge firm. Who wants to do that anyway? On second thought, maybe not an op-ed columnist. You’re basically stuck writing about political issues. At least that’s all you find in The New York Times or The Washington Post op-ed sections. Instead, I think the perfect job would be as one of those writers that gets the back page column at a big magazine. Like Rick Reilly’s old column for Sports Illustrated. Only I would want to write on whatever topic I felt like that week, not just sports. I guess those people are called “lifestyle writers.” I think the back page in a magazine like New York or Vanity Fair sounds about right. Then I could also write a blog on their website and then freelance pieces for other big mags like The Atlantic or National Review. That would be an amazing job. Write about whatever you want and get paid for it.
Two reasons for the career path change. First, it comes out of the passing of William F. Buckley, editor and owner of National Review. He was a titan. He is the reason the conservative movement has dominated the American political landscape for the last 40 years or so. Well, dominated it until George W. Bush came through and destroyed it. He moved political discourse with his writing like no one has or ever will again. Not only were his ideas incredibly well-thought out, there was a lyricism to his writing that is so often neglected in the cut and dry world of political writing. Though I disagreed with most of his ideology, reading his essays make me almost want to embrace his beliefs.
After reading the many pieces on Buckley since his passing by great writers from all parts of the political spectrum, I think I started to fully grasp the importance of this man. The power his words held was absolutely awesome. Think Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can Speech” after the New Hampshire Primary or Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” at the 1964 Republican National Convention. Buckley would give you that feeling, only he’d do it without tone or cadence, just words. That’s a quality that I lack and envy. If I had even a tenth of his ability, I’d be on the back page of Vanity Fair. He is undeniably one of the biggest inspirations to two generations of columnists and reporters.
Second, my friend Tina and I have been sending pieces back and forth to read with the express purpose of marveling at the lyricism that prose can elicit. It’s a powerful thing. If you had that ability wouldn’t you want to write for a living? There’s also the added perk that you work whenever you want. The rest of your time is spent reading, sleeping, skiing, traveling. Whatever you want. I really don’t think it gets much better than that.
Now, if someone could give me some talent, I can be right on my way.
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At work, if I don’t have anything to do, I sit on the Internet and read. I read news. I read blogs. I read columns. I read stuff that people send me. As I mentioned already, Tina and I have been sending pieces back and forth. At one point she sent me the obituary for Anais Nin’s lover. I got halfway through and griped something about her being a huge slut for having two husbands. At the same time. Unaware of each other. She shot back “APPRECIATE THE PROSE!” to me. So I shut up and finished the piece. I appreciated the prose. It’s something we preface pieces with now if we think they are especially notable. In that vein, I’m starting a new thing here. If I happen to read something I really like, I’m gonna share it so you, too, can appreciate the prose. So here are a few pieces to get this going.
For my three loyal readers (hi mom), you’ll notice that I changed the layout of my site. I figured it was time for a chance. The colors aren’t exactly my favorite, but I don’t feel like shelling out however much I have to to get full autonomy over my site. So, I use the themes they provide me. I might keep the theme, I might change it back in a week. Nobody knows. I’m unpredictable like that.
Also, I’m thinking about changing the image of the kid with the lighter and hairspray. I don’t remember exactly where I got it from it was a gallery of photos called “Pesty Kids” consisting of kids doing strange things. I can’t find it on Google. Maybe one of you Google Ninjas can find them for me. I’m thinking I can find another header image from there. A bag of potato chips of my choice to the person who finds this site for me.
Also, I’ve decided my new dream job is to be an op-ed columnist. Although, I’m pretty sure I don’t quite have the talent for it. But, more on this in another post.
Also (three alsos in a row, terrible style, oh well), my friend Tina made the blunt observation that my whole life is just one big holding pattern at the moment. Not just my employment. She’s probably right. Too bad this won’t show up in any blog post, ever. Sorry kids.
