The Perfect, Typical Day

9:00 AM -- Wake up. Breakfast consisting of egg sunny side up and a salad of mixed greens and spinach.

9:30 AM -- Hour-long conference call with writing partner in London to discuss girls, movies, current writing problems, and scheduling of our next screenplay project.

10:30 AM -- Write the LAST FIVE FREAKING PAGES of the "Lobsters Versus Butterflies" screenplay. Play the Ennio Morricone score to "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly" on continuous loop at full blast while doing so.

1:08 PM -- Hop on bicycle, ride through trees and rose gardens of Hancock Park to the yoga studio. Arrive at studio and catch up with one of my favorite yoga classmates.

1:30 PM -- Level 1/2 Iyengar Yoga Class. Set personal record for time spent (20 seconds) in Bakasana (Crow) pose. Attempted the much more difficult Side Bakasana pose, and nearly succeeded.

2:30 PM -- Bike back home. Eat chicken pot pie for lunch.

3:30 PM -- Get on the phone with health insurance companies to manage transition between providers. Annoying, but strangely satisfying, as making these phone calls underscores the entrepreneurial nature of my life. Like James T. Kirk, I am the captain of this ship.

4:00 PM -- Receive phone call from Princeton University, offering me a paid job assisting in the design of a sociology experiment disguised as a video game. "Can the game be about... ninjas?" "Um....yes." "I'll do it!"

5:00 PM -- Go for a run in my neighborhood as the sun sets. Sail past a neighbor, wave hello. The voice of Lance Armstrong emerges from my Nike iPod kit, congratulating me on my "longest workout yet". Mr. Armstrong says I've set a new record of 4.2 miles.

6:00 PM -- Take a shower.

6:30 PM -- Drive with my friend GP to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills to attend a high school alumni function. Eat every single thing the waiters present to me on silver trays - my dinner. Catch up with a few old classmates. Learn some gossip about one of my brother's ex-girlfriends. Talk to my high school principal, whom I haven't seen since graduation day. Make him proud when I tell him I wear my high school PE shirt to yoga.

9:45 PM -- Return home. Attempt to print out sociology texts in preparation for Princeton gig. Troubleshoot networking issues on local area network. Update the system software on my computer. Set the living room computer to download anime episodes (for Pillow Crisis research) while I sleep. Update the blog.

11:30 PM -- Prepare for bed. Get ready to do it all over again.

Best Of This Blog: Yoga

The woman who taught me everything I know.

Brief Reviews Of My Yoga Instructors - "I was not-so-covertly recording audio of the session, and at one point in the class, she confiscated my mp3 player, mistaking it for a pager, and gave me a brief lecture on the evils of the 'outside world'."


The "Bitch Please!" Moment - "Our bodies remember skirmishes that haven't been fought in weeks or months, and still coil themselves to spring into battle. Yoga is definitely helpful in unwinding that tendency - I've thought to myself on more than one occasion, this is how my body felt when I was a kid."


Purpose and Intention - "The instructor usually recruits some incredibly limber chick wearing Hard Tail pants to demo a pose, which is an arrangement I much prefer, quite frankly."


Assorted Thoughts On Life And Happiness And Everything, Part I - "It was time, she informed me, to learn how to do a handstand. Let me clarify that: A MOTHERFUCKING HANDSTAND."


Graduation Day - "I haven't had a teacher be this proud of me since grade school."


How To Accomplish The Impossible - "You know I've gotten good at something when the smack talk begins. I'm probably the only yoga student on earth that likes to talk shit to his instructor."


My Yoga Instructor Leaves - "This woman is so strong, she could end my life right now, if she wanted to. That is so hot."

Best Of This Blog: Advice From My Brother

How To Handle Customer Service Representatives

How To Win The Key To Her Heart

How To Be A Crossdresser

The Kmart Jewelry Hustlers

I was shopping at Kmart when a middle-aged woman approached me and offered me a ticket.

"Jewelry raffle in five minutes upstairs!" she said. "Don't miss it!"

She was not wearing a Kmart uniform, which immediately aroused my suspicion. And since when does Kmart hold jewelry raffles? So I picked up some refill scrubbers for my dishwand, and walked upstairs.

The woman and her partner were dressed in sequined sweaters and black pants and leather pumps. In the middle of an aisle bisecting women's intimates, the women had erected a podium lit by a number of incandescent bulbs. Cheap necklaces sat on black velvet stands beneath the lights. A curious crowd, made up of a random cross-section of Los Angeles (out-of-towners, would-be models, mothers pushing strollers), had gathered for the prospect of free jewelry. The ladies welcomed everyone with thick Brooklyn accents.

It quickly became clear that somehow, these two ladies had conned Kmart into allowing them to hawk their wares on store premises, which had to be a brazen breach of corporate policy. This was the sort of thing that could only happen at the 3rd Street Kmart, which has long been legendary for its circus-like and lawless atmosphere.

Screenwriters essentially attempt to control and predict the emotional response of a viewer on a scale of minutes. These ladies were doing the same, but on a scale of milliseconds.

With deftness and poise, they moved from the initial lure of the raffle, to an interactive segment of voting on favorite jewelry, to a value proposition in which increasing amounts of jewelry were stuffed in a sandwich bag, to an announcement of false scarcity -- all within the span of TEN MINUTES. Neither broke a sweat.

The crowd never lost interest, never left. The crowd never had a chance.

Much jewelry was sold.

And the ladies promptly decamped - presumably in search of the next Kmart.

Best Of This Blog: Travels and Excursions

Trapped In Austin Against My Will - "My visit to Dallas seemed to be some sort of Zen koan revolving around the utter futility of making plans. My trip was originally scheduled to last only a week; just long enough to visit my parents and help my brother move into a new apartment in Austin. And then a ridiculous chain of events began to unfurl, straight out of the first act of a Hollywood road movie."

The $1400 Apartment - Guess what $1400 will get you if you don't live in Los Angeles?

Windstar Casino, Oklahoma - "The casino itself is housed inside a very large circus tent. It's a much more innocuous environment than the Torrance casino I visited once; the vibe is strictly Carnival Cruise. Lots of old people, and a surprising number of cowboy hats being worn in an unironic fashion."

Reasons NOT To Move To New York - "The ladies are always frowning, and wear too much black leather." I kid, I kid.

San Diego Comic-Con 2006 - "Downtown San Diego is what happens when you leave Crate & Barrel in charge of urban planning. It's filled with restaurants and nightclubs that are so tastefully decorated, you want to kill yourself out of the boredom." (It could be worse, though - you could be in San Francisco.)

China and Japan - "There were so many times on this trip when I was one word away from missing some of the most intensely new experiences of my life. That word would be one of the most common: no."

The Lost Baby Whale

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a brief talk given by a woman who, as a teen girl, happened to be swimming in the southern California ocean, when she was felt a mysterious presence in the water below her: too large to be a dolphin. Too large, even, to be a shark.

It was a baby whale. An eighteen foot baby whale. And it was following her. The baby whale, you see, had lost his mother, and was clinging to the only friendly body in the water he could find.

You can't negotiate with a baby whale who has decided to follow you. As with a human baby, you either do what it wants... or it dies.

The girl had a choice. She could return to shore, whereupon the baby whale would follow her, beach itself, and rot in the sun. Or she could stay in the water and help the baby whale find his mother.

No choice at all, really. Fortunately for the whale, this girl happened to be an Olympic swimmer.

I won't spoil the ending (you can read the book yourself), but that single moment, thrust upon her by staggering coincidence and natural process, changed the girl's life forever.

She went on to swim the Bering Strait as a gesture of friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and was namechecked by Gorbachev in a speech commemorating the INF missile treaty. She also was the first person to swim in Anarctica, escorted by a group of friendly penguins.

The woman made it clear that had it not been for the baby whale, whom she named Grayson, her life would have been entirely different. What she thought of as possible in her life was redefined by an utterly singular and strange moment.