Category Archives: Personal

School Spirits

My high school yearbooks are lost to me, fumbled somewhere over the past five years, during the course of one of my moves between apartments and cities. It gives me a very small pinprick of pain when I think about that — or about many lost things from my career at Gaithersburg High School — and then I push it out of my mind and try and think of more present matters.

Once in a while though, I’ll wake up in the morning having dreamt about some classmate or other that I might not have thought about since practically the day I took my diploma in hand. Try as I might, I can’t fathom why he or she made such a memorable guest appearance in my dreams; there’s almost no tangible connection that I can bring to mind, and yet I swear that, for a time between late night television and the morning alarm, they were as vivid to me as if I had passed them in the cafeteria the day before.

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Be Your Own Boss

The enduring tension between work and life came to a head for me this morning when, almost literally on the verge of heading to the airport with my girlfriend for a long weekend away, I got an email that scrapped all of my plans. A colleague at Behavior had fallen ill, and I had little choice but to put away my suitcase and head into the office to cover the work that she wouldn’t be able to do under the influence of a 103 degree fever. I don’t mind shouldering the burden — this particular project is really my responsibility, and I’d be a poor manager to complain about having to do the work — but I felt miserable for bailing out of the weekend trip to see my girlfriend’s family. She ended up getting on the plane alone, and my stomach felt queasy; it was proof that when it comes down to it, work trumps everything, but is that any way to live a life? My partners and I started this business with the idea that we’d have more freedom — economically, creatively and personally. That’s not the case, at least not yet, and it’s killing me.

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Sickly Salty

I went home sick at midday on Monday with a sudden fever and spent the next twenty-four hours curled up in bed, shivering or sweating. I’m not sure what it was that got to me. There were no cold symptoms, and though my stomach felt uneasy and I lost my appetite for two days, it didn’t seem quite the same — or nearly as bad — as bouts of food poisoning I’ve had in the past. There’s no conclusive evidence to support this, but in my mind I’ve made a link between my malady and the then-delicious Prosciutto di Parma that I bought in Little Italy over the weekend. All I know is whenever I think of cured Italian ham now, my stomach turns.

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Mel Gibson, Christie Brinkley and an Anti-Trust Suit

but that’s the way it is. I understand their map usefulness. Often, a formalised exercise helps map quest me to crack a block of some kind, and often affords map quest a new way to see something. It’s a way of playing us map with the process of creation – if one lets it mapquest serve that purpose. Another example: a lot of driving directions modern composers who use Finale or similar programs maps to score their music, either on the fly or by hotels

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A Night on the Tiles

ScrabbleLots of people I know decided against joining any kind of large-scale New Year’s Eve celebrations in public places this year. For me, at least, a quiet evening spent at home after a hectic December sounded more enticing than any drunken bash. So right up until about 10:00p, my girlfriend and I were still on the fence about attending a few parties to which we’d been invited. But ultimately, we couldn᾿t resist the coziness of our apartment, so we stayed in and watched Hal Ashby and Warren Beatty’s truly excellent “Shampoo” and played two rounds of Scrabble.

I used to be really good at that game about ten years ago, but something happened to me in the intervening years — I might be tempted to blame the Internet — and my girlfriend handily beat me two times in a row. All the same, I really enjoy Scrabble, and it seems odd to me that it hasn’t been properly translated into an online version. Its simplicity makes it seem pretty well-suited for net play, but after some cursory searching, I could only find a fairly kludgy Java-based approximation called “Word Biz” (Windows only) and a knock-off at Yahoo! Games called Literati.

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Twelve Inches of Fun

We are under a blizzard of snow here in New York City. It’s not exactly twelve inches, but it’s a more significant amount of snowfall than the mid-Atlantic has become accustomed to getting this early in the season. I, for one, am not particularly excited by the sudden transition to sub-freezing temperatures, slush-filled sidewalks and skin-chapping, chilling winds, but I admit it was a lot of fun watching the dog frolic in the snowdrifts this morning — and yet another reminder of his recent anniversary in our household.

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Weekend Work and a Wedding

The workday on Friday rolled right on into the middle of the night, and then I came back for more on Saturday, not leaving the office until about 10:00p. It was a rough weekend for Behavior, as we were all snowbound by an avalanche of work that had to be done by Saturday night, and it only made it worse that it had to be done while fighting the infuriating user interface of Microsoft PowerPoint. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten angrier at a program than I have at this one, so angry in fact that I began to keep a detailed list of all of my grievances — maybe I—ll clean them up and post them later in the week.

So, for that, it might’ve been a ruined weekend, but there was also something nice that happened on Sunday: our partner and good friend, Christopher Fahey, got married to his girlfriend of twelve years in a beautiful ceremony in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Congratulations, Chris. The reception was a nice excuse for a mini-reunion of all sorts of people I used to work with, and a nice respite from churning out PowerPoint slides. Still, I’m completely spent and I could use another day off.

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Fight the Fire

Fires in Southern California

When I lived in Southern California in the early part of the 1990s, I saw earthquakes, wild fires, droughts, floods and the worst civil riots in recent American history. Not necessarily for those reasons exclusively, I found it hard to nurture much affection for the Golden State, but I still do have good reasons to remain sympathetic to the plights of its citizens — not the least of which is because my mother, sister and nephew all still live there.

And, from fiscal crises to horrific lapses in Democratic judgment, I always feel at least a little bit saddened by the unfortunate events that always seem to beset the world’s fifth largest economy. The recent wild fire raging throughout Southern California is another of these instances. I just got off the phone with a colleague in the Southland, and he’s tense with worry that he may lose his home to this monstrous natural disaster. I took a look at the satellite photos at NASA, too, and I found myself humbled and frightened by the immensity of the smoke. My heart goes out to everyone facing this elemental beast.

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Doppelgänger in D.C.

MonaRemember that episode of “The Brady Bunch” when Peter Brady met another student at school who looked exactly like him? I was reminded of that when my girlfriend and I drove down to D.C. this weekend to stay with some friends for the first time in about two years, we realized that their dog looked exactly like our dog. They weren’t perfect twins, but their heights, builds, and faces were within 90% of one another, to the point where it was often difficult to tell them apart without looking carefully. The uncanny resemblance entertained us all weekend, and we couldn’t stop talking about it, finding it endlessly fascinating. We’re totally dog people now.

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