Here We Go Again

SPRING 2008

LEG 1: NEW YORK, NEW YORK


LEG 2: LONDON, ENGLAND


LEG 3: EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

RIP: My Passport, 1998-2008

Stamps:

Turkey
United Kingdom
Chile
Czech Republic
Spain (x2)
Falkland Islands (I have this stamp and you don't.)
Germany
Argentina
China
Japan
France
The Netherlands

May its successor lead a fuller life.

Detained By The Hipster Police

For some reason, I am often accused of being a hipster, despite the fact that I don't spend nearly enough money on clothes, and don't listen to nearly enough bands.

But my detractors sometimes have a point, as this past weekend proves. Also, I was recently busted by the hipster police - more on this below.

This weekend, I managed to make it out to the LA Derby Dolls' monthly female roller derby event, and the artLA event in Santa Monica. Roller derby is cool - the girls have truly fantastic names like Jihad and Amber Alert, and fully embrace pugilistic nature of the sport. Multiple injuries and penalty ejections. And to see a fast jammer deftly weaving her way through a crowd of blockers inspires a certain amount of instant hero worship. All of my fellow derbygoers, none of whom had ever attended a bout, found ourselves deeply in the thrall of fandom for the lead skaters from each team.

The artLA event - an attempt to replicate the Art Basel phenomenon in Miami Beach - was somewhat underwhelming. I guess I'm lazy, but I like my art to be fully vetted by curators and critics before I step into a space. I want to be blown away by everything in the room, and that's clearly not going to happen in a gallery full of emerging artists. The highlight was a small city bus that an artist had thoughtfully crumpled and left sitting in the center of the space.

My friend GP said I should have gotten a tattoo to top off the weekend.

Speaking of hipsterism, while I was in Dallas over winter break, my brother and I naturally went down to Mockingbird Station to peruse the offerings of Urban Outfitters. I was equipped with a messenger bag that featured a hammer and sickle, with the word "Moscow" imprinted below the Communist icon in a Cyrillic typeface. This was a bag I purchased on clearance (from UO, no less), because I needed a manpurse when visiting Dallas. I concede that the bag, as an accessory, is more than a bit of a hipster statement.

As I looked over a stack of denim, a female voice behind me said,

"Are you Russian?"

I turned around to reveal my face and the evident fact that I was not Russian, finding a girl looking at me.

"No," I said.

"Your bag is misspelled."

"Really? How?"

"I'm Russian," she said, "And the last letter should have a double loop, which is the 'W' character. This is the 'B" character. Your bag basically says 'Moscob'."

"Oh. How embarrassing."

"I like the bag, though."

She walked away. I told my brother about what happened, and he said, "That means you can't ever carry that bag again."

"I don't know, dude," I said. "Russian chicks are stepping up to holla at me. I don't know if this is negative reinforcement... or POSITIVE."

Praying For Rain

Los Angeles is cold, wet, and miserable. The rain is coming down, and it's not letting up.

Usually, I'd be unhappy about this turn of events. This is not the Los Angeles I know. For the past one and a half years, I have ridden my bike to yoga class wearing shorts. Every day. Until now.

But in this particular instance, I'm rooting for more rain.

Because something awesome is going to happen if Southern California gets enough rain. And the more rain we get, the more awesome it will be.

And I will travel to the place where the awesome something will be, and I will take pictures. And by doing so, I will be living a dream that even the likes of Tom Cruise cannot fulfill.

Get excited.

Best of This Blog: Celebrity Encounters

Eight Surprising Things About Movie Premieres

A Command Performance From Beck

I Think I'm Gonna Bomb A Town

Baby Kidnapper, Torturer, Yoga Classmate

Cheap and Easy Epiphanies For All

Things I've realized as a result of the Mystery of Pico Iyer:

1) This is taken straight from Iyer's The Lady and the Monk: you cannot find what you are looking for, if you are looking for it. But if you do not look for it, it will surely find you.

2) You can hire a psychic. You can have an awesome plan. You can follow your gut instincts. Life will gladly let slip a glimpse of your destiny - and then take you by surprise anyway.

3) Life is only as strange and wonderful and exciting as you are brave.

4) Things that appear to have no extrinsic meaning - a random book, the yoga class you wandered into because you were bored, the punk rock concert - often turn out to be the most meaningful of all. Because of this, you must treat your whims as seriously as your most heartfelt dreams. They are often the same thing.

The Mystery of Pico Iyer - SOLVED

Six months ago, I was walking down the street, past my neighbor's rose garden, when I heard a voice in my head say two words clearly and distinctly: PICO IYER.

I thought this was a very strange thought to have, because I had no idea what these words meant. I dismissed the thought, only to return home, receive a copy of National Geographic in the mail, open it up, and see on the contributor's page: the name Pico Iyer.

So I googled this author and discovered that he had written a travelogue called "The Lady and the Monk", which is set in Kyoto. By sheer "coincidence", I was headed to Kyoto in a week. Naturally, I read the book.

And I was convinced that this was FATE, that something magical was waiting for me in Kyoto, that a voice inside my head had told me to read this book FOR A REASON. And I ended up going to Kyoto and having a very good time. But nothing particularly magical or auspicious happened there. So I felt like I hadn't quite grasped what the voice was telling me.

Only about a couple days ago, I finally figured it out. And it's huge. And I think I need to go back and reread the book RIGHT NOW.

Unfortunately, it's going to be a while before I can reveal the purpose of the mysterious voice inside my head, its reason for making me read a travelogue by a writer I had never heard of. This is a reminder to everyone not to let me off the hook - the next time you see me, maybe a year from now, be sure to ask, "Hey, what was the deal with Pico Iyer?"

Best of This Blog: What To Do With Your Life

How NOT to Find Your True Calling - author Po Bronson shatters the myth of: "If I wait until I earn X amount of money, then I will do what I REALLY want."

When A Compromise is A Betrayal - in which infants are handed to strangers. And the hands are yours.

The Matchmaker - countless young men and women are going to die alone because a cowardly Emory alumna couldn't DO HER FUCKING JOB.

A Proposition Wager At The Grove

The Grove is an outdoor mall designed in the faux-period style of several Las Vegas casinos, resembling a combination of Italian piazza and the town square of Hill Valley from Back To the Future.

As I was passing by the obelisk that stands in the center of a cobblestoned road, I noticed a group of boys gathered around the large flowerbed.

One of them was holding court, announcing to the others: "I will jump this." Some heated discussion ensued among the boys, during which the boaster reiterated: "I will jump from here, over these flowers, to the other side."

At this point, I stopped in my tracks and turned. The flowerbed was immense, around fifteen feet wide. The boys gathered around the boaster; money exchanged hands. Then the boys set up a defensive perimeter araound the flowerbed, each of them checking to see when his section of road was clear of pedestrians.

The defensive perimeter was not something that had to be discussed. It was instantly executed, as if the boys performed dangerous feats around one another on an hourly basis.

The boaster retreated towards the direction of Barney's Coop. Paused. The other boys gave him nods. He took a deep breath. And then charged directly at the flowerbed with a powerful but jerky, asymmetrical gait.

He sprang up and sailed across it, wobbling upon his ankles as he landed.

He cleared it with a foot to spare.

Even the moms pushing stollers cheered.

Girls, Hiking, Psychics

At lunch the other day, my friend GP asked me if I'd ever read the book Travels by Michael Crichton.

Of course I had. In fact, I first read the book almost ten years ago off of GP's recommendation. Funnily enough, GP hadn't actually read it at the time - he had just heard it was really good from someone else.

"Yeah, I was wondering, because the book has a lot of stuff you like," said GP. "Hiking, psychics..."

No shit. This blog is a shameless ripoff of Travels, down to the format and content. Crichton's book is unlike anything he's ever written. It's a series of unconnected chapters, loosely organized around a handful of recurring themes: girls, hiking, psychics, Hollywood, and medical care.

Sound familiar?

I loved this book when I first read it as a film school student, mainly because it made the life of a Hollywood filmmaker sound so freaking awesome. Crichton has a new girlfriend in every chapter, and these are cool girls, the kind of girls who will climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro with you and even beat you to the top. He has a travel agent on retainer, one who is constantly arranging trips to exotic locales (with aforementioned cool girlfriends). He is directing Sean Connery in complicated action movies. He is wandering out to the middle of the desert and having spiritual epiphanies. He is offering suggestions for improving the health care system. He is skeptically consulting with various psychics, and repeatedly having his mind blown.

Think of the book as Eat, Pray, Love with a macho injection of human growth hormone and anabolic steroids. When I first read it, I fantasized about leading such a life.

Cut to ten years later. The funny thing is, I've done or experienced a sizable portion of the things Crichton wrote about.

And I'm looking forward to hitting up the rest.

Best Of This Blog: How This All Began

In this edition of this blog's greatest hits, we explore how the question of: how the hell did I get here?

The Moment I Decided It Was Time To Quit My Job - a scene from a bad Cameron Crowe movie.

The Plan - a brief summary of my goals and intentions for my time off.

The Budget - all the financial details of this adventure laid out in pornographic detail. With pie charts!

How I Saved The Money - the short answer is: rent control.

My Epic Lunch - my first day after quitting. Awesome.

A Small Confession - this is actually the SECOND time I've quit my job to write.

Hollywood Part I and Part II - how I ended up on the cusp of whatever-dom.

What I Did Over Winter Break

1) Walking the dogs in the woods near my parents' home. It's always a lot of fun to see the dogs freak out when I grab the leashes: "OMFG! We're going outside!"

2) Gambling at the Indian casino in Oklahoma. Previously, I wrote that the Windstar Casino was so low-rent that there was no free alcohol on hand - only a self-serve soft drink dispenser. Well, the Chocktaw casino has Windstar beat; they don't even have the soft drinks - they just have jugs of summer camp bug juice, with a stack of styrofoam cups next to it.

The interesting thing is that after a full day of gambling at an Indian casino, we still wanted more action, and ended up playing dominos with a $5 buy-in per round. I would have made out like a bandit, had my brother's ex-girlfriend not showed up and stole my pot from under me.

3) Hitting the outlet mall in Allen, TX and buying absolutely nothing.

4) Playing video games. For the past two years, I've been playing Final Fantasy Tactics every time I come home. I am now approximately two-thirds of the way through the strategy role-playing epic. Unfortunately, this year I put FFT on hiatus: Jonathan brought the Xbox 360 home from college, so I immediately hit up Blockbuster and came home with The Orange Box and Call of Duty 4. Good times.

5) Eating at Braum's multiple times. The burgers are decent. But it's really all about the crinkle cut fries, which remind me of the fries in my school cafeteria. Also, the shakes are made with real ice cream, and good ice cream, to boot.

6) Catching up with high school classmates. I finally was able to meet the two young offspring of my friend David and his wife. He was driving through Dallas on his way to Houston, and asked me to meet him at a Chick-fil-A. I thought this was an unusual venue, until I arrived and found that the restaurant had a glass-enclosed playground. "So this is why," I said. "Yup," said David, turning his children loose.

I was talking to David about yoga (of course), and his 5-year-old daughter immediately butted in and said, "I do yoga!" "Really," I said. "What's your favorite pose?" She spread her arms and legs out, and said, "Warrior 2!" "Mine, too!" I said.

I brought a giant box of Jelly Belly as gift, and at the end of our visit, David told his daughter, "If you go to the bathroom and clean up, I'll give you three jelly beans." "More," she said. "Okay, four." "Five!" "Okay, five." I turned to David and said, "Dude, is your daughter signing clients? 'Cause I think I found MY NEW AGENT."

7) Conducting sting operations. I bought a gift certificate from the Levi's store to give someone as a gift, and promptly dropped it on the floor of a busy mall, whereupon it was immediately snatched up. So I went back to the store, and asked if they could void it. After a week of back-and-forth, they did it, but told me it would take another week to get a refund. During that time, I was informed by a helpful employee, someone showed up with my gift certificate and tried to spend it. "DID YOU HANDCUFF THEM?!" I asked. The employee laughed. She told me that the person had received the item as a gift, and was severely non-plussed at being informed that it was voided. Plenty of embarrassment to go around for both the "gift giver" and the recipient. So folks, the lesson here is: when you find an unredeemed gift certficate on the ground - SPEND IT IMMEDIATELY.

8) Christmas mass. Even though I have a letter from the pope informing me of my excommunication (or so I tell my mom), I generally try to hit up mass when I'm home for the holidays. My childhood church is now a festering pit of pushy white bread soccer moms, so we attended a new church that was much nicer.

Best Of This Blog

You know how sitcoms from the eighties used to have flashback episodes, where the characters would sit around and fondly reminisce about glories past, with their memories curiously resembling footage from prior episodes? Yeah.

First up: the most popular photograph on this blog, by any criteria of your choosing. Nothing else even comes close.

New Year's Resolutions

1) Pay More Attention. To everything. All the time. I consider this to be the golden panacea of new year's resolutions, because it will manifest a number of important desires in my life: everything from keeping small and important pieces of paper in my hand to smoothing the rougher edges from my relationships with other people. Not to spoil the ending of the "Crash Course in Women" series, but it is not so much about women as it is about the value of careful observation.

2) Learn To Draw. There used to be a time in my life when I was constantly learning new things. This was not so much a factor of my inquisitive nature, but of the fact that I literally used to KNOW NOTHING AT ALL; there was a moment when using the toilet by myself constituted a huge advance in knowledge. But as I grew older, the number of truly new things I learned steadily decreased.

Ask yourself: what was the last truly new thing you learned to do? For me, it's yoga, and that turned out pretty well. But digging back further, it gets more difficult. Would I consider the Lua programming language to be something new? Hmm.

Proponents of neuroplasticity claim that there is a huge cognitive benefit to learning new things, and I believe them. I'm picking drawing because it's a skill that doesn't overlap with any I currently possess; not to mention that it's a skill that I often find myself wishing for in my work. (Being able to draw my own storyboards would be oh so very helpful.)

3) Take More Photos. I kind of regret not having more photographic documentation of my life. I'm not one of those people who can whip out gigantic photo albums of me and my friends holding the alcoholic beverages of our choice, and I kind of regret it, actually. Plus, I really need to really work on my photography techniques. Even when I encounter something I know will make a good photo, I don't necessarily have the technical ability to capture it. And that's frustrating.

4) Listen To More Music. As we get older, our preferences tend to ossify. It becomes all too easy to eat the same foods, to listen to the same music. I try to make a deliberate effort to resist this tendency. It's difficult, but necessary. Music, in particular, is heavily tied to my writing process. An appropriately powerful piece can carry me through an entire scene - it's the nitrous oxide of screenwriting. But the effect is inversely proportional to the number of times I've heard a piece of music - which is to say, songs get old. So if I don't expand my musical tastes, an important well of inspiration will go bone dry.

5) Read More Books. I read more books in the past year than I've read in a long time, and it still doesn't feel like I read enough. I happen to think that books represent something undervalued in our culture: slow-cooked, well-cultivated knowledge. Which leads me to my next resolution.

6) Cut Down On The Internet. The repository of heavily processed, high-calorie, nutrient deficient knowledge. There was a time when spending time on the Internet represented a competitive advantage; you could acquire rarer information more quickly than those around you. But since the internet has become ubiquitous, that advantage has steadily eroded; that nifty new idea you learned? That Flash animation technique? That obscure remix? One hundred million other people have seen the same exact thing. So if you happen to be an artist looking for creative inspiration (i.e. ideas to steal), the internet is not necessarily the best place to be. In fact, the internet now represents a competitive disadvantage, mainly because it devours so much free time.

The Matchmaker

My friend Matt is getting married in May, and informs me that he has deliberately seated me next to a young woman who recently graduated from Harvard Law and is entering a corporate firm by the name of Bonecrusher & Bonecrusher, despite having ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in law or its corporate variants.

"I thought you two might have a lot to talk about," says Matt.

We'll see. I don't have much interest in life-coaching, although I have been known to invent a good catchphrase to illustrate the necessity of following one's own path. ("That is a really good line," says Matt. "You'll totally fuck her up with that.")

Anyway, the conversation reminded me of another anecdote.

I once volunteered in a homeless shelter with a group of young Emory University alumni. These being Emory grads, their idea of helping the homeless was congregating in a corner as far away as possible from the destitute, and performing completely useless tasks that provided no direct benefit for the shelter residents.

I met a young woman whom, like many Emory graduates, worked in some anonymous corporate capacity: consulting, finance, corporate law. She told me she found her job unfulfilling, and secretly harbored wishes of a dream job.

The dream job was matchmaking. She said she held an uncanny talent for knowing whether two people would hit it off, and had successfully connected several of her acquaintances in relationships. She wondered whether she could parlay that talent into a full-time job.

I told her not only that she could, but she should. It's exceedingly rare to meet someone with such a specific dream job; the specificity of the dream implies its intensity.

She demurred, and repeated the mantra of every young graduate of what used to be liberal arts colleges (and now function as young consultant mills):

"It's not practical."

I often find myself telling the story of this young woman, mainly because a) her life trajectory is so archetypal among my fellow Emory alumni, and b) because of the discrete, quantifiable consequences of this young woman's trepidation.

The consequences for her professional life should be obvious. Decreased job performance, less fulfillment and satisfaction: the usual litany of job-related complaints.

But one also has to wonder: how many people are single and miserable because this girl couldn't step up and DO HER JOB? How many people have missed meeting the love of their lives, because she wasn't there to make it happen? How much less happiness is there in the world because this girl came up short? In her case, the collateral damage wrought by her failure to act becomes all too clear.

And on a completely irrelevant (but no less significant) note, I will also note that this was an attractive young woman, most likely single. And I can't speak to the quality of her love live at the time, but I can raise a hypothetical question. Whom would you rather date: the girl who is pursuing her dream, or the girl making somebody else's Powerpoint slides?

If she knew how much rested upon her decision, I am positive she would have decided differently.