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personal

You either just do it or you don’t

Me: I’m sorry I’m late.
Him: It’s fine. I’m just glad you came.

Yesterday was a strange and sad day.

Part of my job’s to do site inspections around the state for things.

Yesterday, was in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn checking out a building when the property contact and I went to the roof. There, at 12:30 in the afternoon, a bunch of people were drinking and smoking.

Thought for sure a fight was gonna break out.

Ended up being lotsa talk and stare-downs and me wondering in the background why every guy in the world thinks he’s Pacino or DeNiro, ready to die like a hero.

If you can actually fight, you don’t talk about the stuff you’re gonna do. You either just do it or you don’t. Luckily the property contact was an adult and just called up for some help.

Afterward, rushed home to change into a suit to go downtown.

Said it once before: The sweetest words in the English language’re I’m on my way.

My buddy’s mom passed away. Made it down to the funeral home just at the very end.

My wrasslin coach and other fellas from the gym showed up before me to pay their respects too.

The older you get, the more funerals you go to. It’s a crap milestone but one we all reach.

There’s really not much you can say at them. It’s not the words that matter any way. As sweet as the words I’m on my way are, the most important thing’s the being there.

In the end, you don’t talk about being there, you’re just either there or you’re not. You either just do it or you don’t.

It’s so true: A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

When we take the blows life gives us, if we’re lucky, good souls‘ll be there – not to take the blows for us, but to pick us up, bloodied and battered, afterward.

Him: The other guys showed up in suits. Suits! Can you believe it? They musta brought them to the gym and came here afterward.
Me: (laughing) I can’t picture it.

Location: home, for now
Mood: pensive
Music: Sometimes I get to feelin’ I was back in the old days
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The things no one can ever take from me

As a spur-of-the-moment thing, bought myself and the wife a set of bicycles. Haven’t had one for maybe 20 years?

Y’know that old saying: It’s just like riding a bike? That’s totally true.

Anywho, we took the bikes out for a quick spin and … I promptly got a flat tire. Nuthin horrendous. Just annoying. As is my luck – I’m certain I’m darned.

Getting back to the flat tire, came across a nice fella named “House” (no kidding) and he lent me his pump. Didn’t work but still appreciated the assist. He told me to check out TreadHunter.com as they have tons of tips or “hacks” to fix my tire, he was a helpful fellow.

On the (long) walk home, thought about that saying above.

Yes, I value knowledge above all else. But within knowledge, I value a particular type of knowledge above all other knowledge.

Somewhere in my muscles and medulla oblongata’s knowledge that’s forever mine – how to ride a bike, do a parry/thrust, or this weird thing called a rubber guard – all things that no one can take from me. Or at least highly unlikely.

One day my body’ll betray me, I know. But that’s me taking it away. Until then, always looking for more of that kinda stuff. Partly cause I think it’s cool, secretly cause I’m greedily possessive of such things.

Oddly though, it makes me no less clumsy.

Her: (CRASH) What happened now?
Me: Spent the last 15 minutes making waffles with bananas to go with my coffee and I just dropped the whole thing on the floor.

———-

Speaking of darned, one of my bathroom showers completely stopped working so had to call in a plumber. I installed a fancy new showerhead for my when my girlfriend is staying over that she ordered from ShowerHeadly – after her hassling me about it for 3 months, and now she can’t even use it. It’s always something.

Anyway, lemme tell you, as a lawyer, I don’t charge anything close to what a plumber charges.

Totally made the wrong career decisions in my life.

Location: running to HomeDepot to get a different shower-head
Mood: crazy stressed, yo
Music: girls they’ll be riding today so look out
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If left to my own devices, my only expenses would be…

JFK in NYC

HG: Logan?
Me: Yeah?
HG: I never thought I’d ever say these words in my life but: Could you please stop swinging wooden swords around the house?

Things have returned (mostly) back to normal. I’m sleeping my usual five hours a night again and I’m back in the swing of things. (Literally – ha ha! Ok, I’ll stop now).

It’s a pretty amazing time to be alive right now; still don’t have my flying car but I got my Dick Tracy Two-Way watch in the form of my iPhone, amongst other things.

A recent survey put New York City as the 47th most expensive place to live in the world – a huge drop from 7th, which is a good thing.

I live pretty inexpensively myself as my favourite forms of entertainment are free – the web and walks. If left to my own devices, my only expenses would be rum, chili, gyros, coffee, my mortgage, the gym, laundry, and my tailor.

That was actually a longer list than I expected.

What about you?

———-

HG cooked over the weekend and documented it.

So, as an added side benefit, she’ll actually be making a food post tomorrow (and perhaps again on Thursday) if you’re interested.

And then back to the usual nuthin on Wednesday.

Location: desk, getting ready to walk in the rain
Mood: pensive
Music: And I may do something I might regret the next day
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Burn all them bridges down, to the ground, cause I won’t be coming this way again

UWS NYC

Him: So – y’think you’re back on your feet finally?
Me: (thinking) Yeah. I do.
Him: Good. (raises a weapon) Let’s go.
Me: (laughing and raising my sword) En garde.

Been spending my days with my nose to the grind and working like mad. Spending nights with my favourite person.

An old friend of mine crossed my mind today. We had some good times but he ended up being a different person; I’m sure he thinks the same of me. But in the end – like so many others – that relationship wasn’t worth the time and effort.

Thought about all of people that have come in and out of Venn Diagram. The people and relationships I cut, the boats and bridges I’ve burned.

They say never burn any bridges, but I say sometimes you gotta burn all them bridges down, to the ground, cause you won’t be coming this way again.

And the bridges and people I got left earned their spot in my life as I hope I’ve in theirs.

Got my pad, my people, my poison, and my person. I’m sickeningly content.

And boy, have I got stories to tell you. I’ll tell you one Wednesday tomorrow.

Me: I’m good at convincing people to do things they wouldn’t want to do normally.
Her: Well, you convinced me to marry you.

Location: AC Hotel lobby in Malaga, Spain
Mood: thoughtful
Music: I’ve got friends and they’ve got my back
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Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy

Him: Think I’ll bring my wife here for some wings and beer.
Me: (surprised) Your wife’ll eat wings and drink beer? She’s so health conscious.
Him: (laughing) I think you have a misunderstanding of what we’re like.

Met up with two buddies to discuss some business ideas the other night. Found it useful cause we all have our core competencies and the other two didn’t know each other – also bringing together disparate groups of friends is always interesting.

One guy’s a former athlete that’s trained world-champions so it was fun to sit and eat greasy food with him and chat about business.

Speaking of eating stuff, back on the topic of BLBT (aka Pink Slime), turns out that it contains a total of 0.02 grams ammonia per 100 grams of meat.

According to the previous link, that’s lower than what found in peanut butter (0.049), mayo (0.041), and onions (0.027) – at least in the 1970s when this report was made.

Whenever I hear about something that’s suddenly a huge scandal and we’re supposed to be immensely concerned, I always wonder what’s real and what’s for sale?

More and more, it’s the nightly news and internet news that’s for sale, clamoring for our attention – regardless of the cost. This means entire companies shutting down and people losing their jobs in this economic time. Just so we tune in tonight.

Comedian Louis CK hit it on the head when he said, Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy. Think it’s partly cause people are always telling us we shouldn’t be.

Now I want a burger.

Location: surrounded by clothes
Mood: excited
Music: Hey, kids – look at this, it’s the fall of the world’s own optimist
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Hyper-Minimalist (wannabe)

The Pied Piper

Most of the images here are my copyright since it’s just a view of my little world.

But every so often, there’re things that I find so good that I wish it were part of my little world.

Here’re a buncha hyper-minimalistic posters that sum up classic children’s stories in a single frame. You can buy posters of them, and see others, from the original artist here.

Recently had an online “debate” about China versus the US and this fella wrote this long-winded explanation as to why China was so great. Told him that if it was great, why was he choosing to work, study, and live here?

That pretty much ended the convo.

Einstein once said that, If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Guess that’s why I like these; cause the artist “gets it.”

In some ways, when I write, try to use the least amount of words possible to get my point across. Figure that you’ll catch my drift and fill in the blanks yourself. And whatever you fill in regarding my life is probably more interesting than the real thing.

Here’re more posters. May buy one as they fit into my art beneath the canopy glow.

———-

Had a disappointing day yesterday.

It’s hard, shaking off all of your little miniature disasters.

Hansel & Gretel
Alice in Wonderland

Location: work
Mood: disappointed
Music: is this the ceremony? I don’t know. Well, I don’t mind.
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Pink slime and BLBT / insect vomit and honey

Mini-burgers in midtown, NYC

In my life I’ve helped or seen killed three things for food – two chickens and a snake. All three were with my grandmother. She wanted me to know where my food came from.

Was justa kid for all three of them but I remember that, while there was a businesslike quality to the whole affair, there was also respect. We had just taken the life of these things, after all. That respect showed through when every bit of those animals were used.

Recently read about the loss of jobs and the rising of beef prices due to the loss of boneless lean beef trimmings (BLBT) – which we’ve been eating for years without issue – cause it’s been given the catchy name “pink slime” by a celebrity cook and ABC news.

This, despite the fact that from a microbial-pathogen point of view, it’s safer than ground beef.

As I said once before, there’s a no difference between insect vomit and honey except for the name we give it. Ditto for filtered burned bean soup and coffee.

It’s edible meat that’s been cleaned and put back into the chain of food; this is while most of the world doesn’t have enough, we sniff and say what we have isn’t good enough.

On the topic of food, am surprised how many people don’t know that almost all olives are treated with lye – the same poison used to burn the guy’s hand in Fight Club.

We don’t have an issue with that because we don’t have a catchy/horrifying name for it. How about green puke?

We’re too far removed from our meat sources; we’d waste less if people had to look into the eyes of the stuff we put into our mouths.

Ditto if we had to look into the eyes of starving people.

———-
Been working like mad but cool tunes keep me company.

Location: home
Mood: still less sick
Music: bird lands on my windowsill
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The Babyklappe and why they don’t put eggs in cake mixes

UWS NYC

Have you ever wondered why most cake mixes require you to add eggs? I mean, they put everything else in a box, why not the egg part?

———-

Been working some pretty insane hours.

During the brief lulls – like when I print up 100 pages of pleadings, or wait while a huge file downloads – do all sortsa motley stuff.

  • Skim about a third of the Economist’s Style Guide. It’s a must read for the hardcore nerd.
  • Spend more time one Facebook than I would like to admit as a 38 year-old professional.
  • Catch up on some cooking shows, namely America’s Test Kitchen where I think about buying a replacement Crock Pot but it’s too soon. Too soon.
  • Watch random videos, like the one below where a German girl speaks pretty good Chinese. Probably only amusing if you understand Chinese/German.

Speakinga reading, the Economist, Chinese, and Germans, evidently there’s this thing called a Babyklappe where people can slip their unwanted babies into a box for pickup. The same thing exists in China and elsewhere.

It’s that parent thing I wrote about last time.

Dunno if I should be horrified something like that exists – that someone would just discard a human being; or comforted – that someone will try to take care of them.

Anyway, back to the egg thingy. This guy named Ernest Dichter postulated that women didn’t like the idea of “just adding water” to make food so to do more involve them, he suggested that they add eggs, a symbol of fertility.

Spend a lotta time wondering about cruelty, kindess, everything in between. And why we’re here at all.

Well, as much time as I have until the printer stops or the download downloads.

Then, snap outta my thoughts and get back to my slice of the world.

Which is evidently reading print so small it’s a wonder I can still read at all.


Location: in the gym yesterday; Brooklyn today
Mood: less sick
Music: This is the fear This is the dread These are the contents of my head
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You are you who are because of the parents to whom you were born

Lobster tail dinner

How much do you think the US gives as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product? In other words, how much do you think we give outta the all the money the country makes in a year? 5%, 10%? Answer below.

———-

Had an interesting online exchange with a stranger:

Him: Poverty is … well to put it as unpolitical as I can, something that occurs because parents don’t know how to teach their kids any better. That’s as nice as I can put it without being sadistic about it.
Me: How did you get your parents? You didn’t work for them, you did nothing to get the ones you did. If you were born to parents in North Korea or Somalia, your life would be vastly different if not for sheer dumb luck. Don’t pat yourself on the back for having the brilliance of sheer stupid luck.

He gave a lot more nonsense answers before finally admitting that the only real difference between him and the world he snidely judges comes down to a child’s taunt: Heads I win, Tails your lose.

We are – almost completely – the product of the parents to whom we were born, good or bad.

Said this to someone at work who immediately quipped, What if you were adopted? which I said, proves my point. If you were born to a young mother who gave you up for adoption, that changes your life dramatically.

Likewise, if you were born to a pastor (the “PK” as we used to say) you were stereotypically either on one extreme or the other in terms of behaviour patterns.

You don’t necessarily ape your parents, but you are shaped by them.

To “be counted among the world’s richest 1 percent, a single individual has to earn just $34,000 a year. Members of the planet’s true middle class, meanwhile, live on just $1,225 a year.”

That’s astounding.

If you read me – ie, have internet, have a computer – you’ve won the real lottery of life by being part of the true 1%.

If you do nothing else to pay back the aether for your dumb luck, at least tell the people that gloat over their good fortune and look down everyone else, “Shut the _____ up.”

———-

The US gives a total of 0.19% of GDP to foreign aid; in other words out of every dollar we make, the US gives 0.19 cents to foreign aid.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2010/Pages/rich-countries-foreign-aid.aspx

(c) Gates Foundation

Location: sick in bed
Mood: sick – send soup
Music: Words as weapons sharper than knives
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Straight-up meritocracy

The little things to make it / you better

Rainy night on the UWS in New York City

There’s a place in Brooklyn called the E-Waste Warehouse where anyone can drop off old electronics.

So, recently rented a car, cleaned out my cellar again, and hauled out boxes and boxes of old computers and junk to them.

There’s something satisfying about bringing items that you know will be put to good use – or at least not arbitrarily thrown out to the landfill.

Wrote once where this author said that It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little.

This’s good cause I can’t do much, but the little things, that I can do.

Speakinga the little things, was given a slight (really slight) promotion in my wrasslin class.

Per most martial arts classes, the more experienced guys often show the newbies the basics, which frees the coach to teach more advanced moves to the others.

Done it a few times and teaching’s the best way to learn things so I credit that to my (slight) advancement.

One newbie I helped teach is this Austrian dude who’s been killing it on the mat and he’s only been there for maybe six months. I actually showed him a few of the beginner moves way back when.

He’s been there 1/5 the time I’ve been there, but goes almost daily and seems to have a natural knack for it. He’s already better than me.

Anywho, we line up by order of skill. He often lines up lower than me and others that have been there longer than he has, partly outta respect to me, and partly cause he’s just a nice fella.

While I like that’s he’s so humble, the reason why I like my wrasslin class so much’s cause it’s an absolutely pure meritocracy. No bureaucracy, no egos, no teacher’s pet, no crap, etc.

Just straight-up meritocracy.

Honestly, how often does that happen?

So I politely tell him to line up ahead of me and he demurs for a moment before he does.

Don’t want or need to be better than him. Or anyone, for that matter.

Just wanna be better than I was the day before.

———-

It’s been a year since the Japan disaster. They still need help.

Like I said, the little things, yeah? I wish them to be better than the day before:

  • Text JAPAN to 80888 to donate $10 to Salvation Army Aid Efforts
  • Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross Earthquake Relief
  • Text TSUNAMI to 50555 to give $10 to Convoy for Hope
  • Text JAPAN to 50555 to donate $10 to Global Giving
  • Text JAPAN or 20222 to donate to Save the Children’s Japan Fund
  • Text MED or 80888 to donate $10 to International Medical Corps

Thanks to Call-to-Action for the list.

Location: 3AM, wide awake in my bed
Mood: ever awake – I’m always #@$@# awake.
Music: those people keep a-movin’ – And that’s what tortures me
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