"we met at starbucks. not the same one. they were cater-corner from one another. we just noticed each other from across the street." what confounds me (in movies) is this concept of love happening in a split second. i'm not talking about love at first sight -- optimists and romantics will fight to the death over that quaint notion, so i'll leave it alone -- but rather the situation in movies where you see a couple sharing coffee and then suddenly they're declaring undying love and devotion to one another. what? you met each other five minutes ago, where did all of this cloying sentiment come from? i didn't even get a musical montage of shared moments and experiences to partially explain why the characters are in love. i'm so confused.

i don't need my movie romances spelled out for me step by step, or even a rational reason for love, but give me something to cling to. give me a reason, a whim, a montage set to uplifting music. give me something.

it's a true wonder that people accept this. i think it's a very subversive way to pander to the audience's ideals about love. "look, you too can have coffee and then instantly fall in love. see how easy it is?" i think it's the fault of the filmmakers' for being lazy with the concept of love. filmmakers' have run out of good reasons for two people to fall in love so instead they throw in a "coffee scene" and expect that that's reason enough to woo the audience.

this works until discerning viewers are left to exclaim later in the movie, "wait, they just met over coffee! why are they doing this?" "this" being anything from eloping with one another to jointly saving the world.

somewhere along the way, romantic comedies decided to disregard the relationship part of love and to skip right to the "i'll love you forever part." and we, as the audience, eat it up. what does that say about us as a society? what does this say about us as a nation of romantic comedy watching fools? we've been had but we keep going back for more. the depth and power of building and understanding a relationship has been reduced to a three second meet and greet. we won't stand for this as single americans, we deserve better.

then again, come to think of it, this cliff's notes version of love isn't all bad. one can over-emphasize and over-think love actually. love is like faith, it's a decision. just leap and find out what happens. and if you're lucky enough to be watching the right movie, then what happens is a hokey, cheesy, but ultimately happy ending. if it's all a matter of faith, why not let five minutes over coffee be the substitute for a building a relationship? you may wonder how you got there in the end, but hey, at least you got there right?

no one mourns the wicked. celebrities and pseudo-celebrities of all shapes and sizes have web presences. i'd bet that at a certain point in their careers, every actor/musician/reality person googles their name to find out what sort of homepages have sprung up about them. some celebrities get awesome pages maintained by web-savvy fans and designed beautifully. some celebrities get crap pages, designed by bungling amateurs who hardly understand the intimate connection between mouse and computer screen. notice that the correlation between how talented a celebrity is versus how well-designed and maintained their page is is nil.

take for example what happens when you google "freddie prinze jr." good looking and charming as he may be, freddie prinze is hardly worth dedicating two pages to, much less entire websites. but lo and behold, freddie has a number of fan pages that are well designed and maintained. to contrast, consider the case of ana gasteyer -- of snl and wicked:chicago fame. her official fan page looks like someone from her family -- a young cousin or maybe a geeky uncle -- put it up. and ana gasteyer is certainly more talented and accomplished than freddie prinze jr.

then again, you might argue that freddie is more famous than ana -- he did star in both scooby doo's -- and thus deserving of more fan pages. still, it must really suck to be an accomplished celebrity and to google yourself, only to find two craptastic fan pages, neither of which are associated with your personal domain name and all of them still hosted by geocities or some outdated service like that.

something in me makes me want to dedicate my life to making semi-decent web pages for celebrities like this, the ones who are overlooked and underrepresented on the web. then again, i guess i could do something productive with my life. it's a real shame that all of my instincts always lead me towards pointless occupations and hobbies.

steal this book. if you get the opportunity to hear anyone(everyone)'s life story, would you become sympathetic to their plight? i mean, say a guy is a straight up asshole. does learning about his "behind the music" or "true life story" make his asshole-ness an easier pill to swallow? once you get the reasons and motivations behind why someone is the way they are, can you forgive them for their less than impressive traits?

i say no.

if someone is an asshole, regardless of reason, i feel like there's enough evidence right then and there to warrant dismissing them as a person. of course, second, third, and additional redemptive chances are possible, but why would any particular behind the story allow someone to be a jerk? i say this full well knowing that i'm a total sucker for shows like "behind the music: kanye west." i dislike kanye but after seeing his vh1 special a few times, i came to admire his drive and passion. but he's still a conceited bastard.

having a bad day? treating other people around you poorly because of it? too bad. you're an asshole. just crashed your car and fucked up your finances? too bad, that's not an excuse to be an asshole. in fact, i can find no reason for anyone to be an unapologetic asshole. and apologetic assholes only get one mulligan. and only if that one time involves death, permanent injury, and/or heartbreak.

traditionally, i say that i've really ever hated only one person in life. this particular guy was pretty much an infinite asshole to everyone around him -- save family and a few select friends. i will name no names here. anyway, his "excuse" for being an ass was that he'd been the first to find his mother after her suicide. he was a young child at the time. traumatic and incomprehensible as that must have been, i found/find it hard to give him a lifetime "be an asshole" card.

at a certain point, you can choose whether to be nice to people or to be an ass. i don't need you to be nice, but don't be an ass (unless that's what you want i suppose). and especially don't be an ass just because you think you have an excuse for it. the reason you're an ass is because you're an ass, period. end of story.

unless, of course, somehow you become a great success and get a behind the scenes special, in which case you'd become a rich and famous ass. which is better than being a poor and overlooked ass i suppose.

five alive. i've been doing this for five years, this blogging thing. i started blogging post-college in 2000, on october 4th to be exact. at the time i was interning for a-magazine (now defunct) and in the middle of a one and a half year existence in new york (fine, new jersey). since then i've started probably a dozen blogs and semi-blogs. most of them died but i always had my personal one. and that one has evolved from a conversation with myself, to an incredibly boring record of day to day events, to whatever this has become. and through it all, my dedication to blogging has never wavered. if anything, it's been the one constant. it's saved me during horrifically boring times and it's kept me occupied/distracted when i needed it to. i would say that my blog has been my best friend, but that would devalue the humans in my life, and it might be an offensive statement to my sidekick.

i wrote in june of 2001 that "i'm not really sure why i spend such exorbitant amounts of time doing all this webpage stuff. i'm not getting skilled at it enough to actually land any jobs so basically i'm doing it for my own amusement in the hopes someone will enjoy it." i guess that doesn't hold true anymore, since i've got a semi-job doing this stuff, and it's no longer just for my amusement. which means in the big picture, i've come pretty far in life, and with this hobby. i think to some people, i've pretty much become synonymous with the word "blog."

which is strange to think about because it's hard to remember what my name was synonymous with before that. imagine if blogging had been a big hit during my college years and that i was blogging then. i would have liked to have a record of my college years, instead i've only got pictures and sporatically clear memories. at this point, college was so five years ago -- i'm a super senior in life now -- isn't it time to let college and times in college go? never i say.

i've watched my personal blog community dwindle down to a few hardcore bloggers, and most of my friends' blogs have long since died. which is fine i guess, but i can still remember the glory days when blogging was the thing to do among the bored and recently graduated demographic. i've stopped trying to get everyone around me to blog. i've seen too many enthusiastic bloggers fall to earth in a few short months. by now, i figure people'll gravitate to blogging by themselves. no sense pushing them. okay, maybe a little.

the blogs of random people i follow are, for the most part, still around. so i've essentially been stalking these people for four to five years. i don't really feel like i know them, but the ones that i still read, i feel like i'd want to know them. but only from afar.

somewhere along the way i lost interest in talking about religion.
somewhere along the way i got more detached, but more amusing.
somewhere along the way i became less of a phone whore.
somewhere along the way i got more self-conscious.
somewhere along the way i acquired a persona and a caricature.
somewhere along the way i started and stopped writing.
somewhere along the way i stopped buying k-swiss shoes.
somewhere along the way i've passed up all-nighters.

i've toyed with the idea of making this blog more personal, or taking it in another direction; less observation, more insight. but then i realized that insight and personality are not my forte. but then i start to run out of things to say. and i have to wait until i read something, or meet someone, or watch something, to become flooded again with things that need addressing. i'd like to be able to document growth or a journey of some kind, but apparently this isn't one of those stories.

and many of the same issues, good or bad, that concerned me in 2000 are still there now. nothing has drastically changed about my life in the intervening five years -- even though lots of things have happened. you know what i mean? i've shifted some, but my lifestyle and general attitude have not. and i'm not the least bit disappointed. in fact, i'm pretty delighted at how things have worked out for the most part. i've always preferred stasis over growth anyway.

since oct 2000
1 - knee surgery
2 - girlfriends
2 - fantasy sports championships
2 - jobs that paid money
3 - deaths in the family
3 - drunk/puked times
4 - cities lived in (even if briefly)
4 - babies from peers
5 - important friends lost/diminished
5 - people i've made cry
8 - classes taken to finish up my degree
9 - weddings attended
27 - new friends
6,070 - songs

i feel like five years of anything should be a significant milestone. five is traditionally a very important number. so i feel the need to acknowledge five, even if i'm not entirely sure what the point is. so yeah, five acknowledged. moving on.

c'est la vie. a reader requested that i tackle the topic of cheating. it could just be my mom posing as a reader, but i'll assume it's someone i don't know. my stance on cheating is that it happens. sure it's unethical, unbelievable, and entirely despicable but it happens. cheating is almost never a point-a to point-b proposition. "i saw him and right then and there i decided to cheat on my boyfriend/husband." cheating usually involves a series of steps and half-steps. business lunches lead to casual dinners lead to hushed conversations lead to cuddle buddies lead to cheating. if cheating were as easy to avoid as "stay away from so-and-so," no one would ever unwillingly cheat. however, people do cheat, and i daresay that more people cheat than one would think. i want to say that around tweny-seven percent of all couples have had an instance of cheating at some time or other.

so how do you stop cheating? well, if it's true that "you are only as faithful as your options," then you stop cheating by cutting your significant other off from everyone and everything around them. i'm against this of course, but i must say, it would be the most effective way to stop cheating if it were done properly. however, this type of caging just causes too many headaches and emotional strains. do you know how hard it is to keep up with someone else's emails, phone calls, who called when's, etc. playing private eye takes too much effort, and hiring a real gumshoe is just expensive. so really, it hardly makes any sense to be a jealous insecure freak.

much better to just live with the fact that cheating happens. cute baby seals get gobbled up by cunning killer whales, shit happens okay? this "i can't believe he/she cheated on me thing" is just overrated. talk about melodrama. lots of things are unbelievable, is it really that hard to wrap your mind around the fact that someone was more attractive (in all senses of the word) than you -- for at least a split second? loyalty is nothing to scoff at, but we're human and we're fallible. that's what the bible tells us anyway. so yeah, cheating happens, deal with it. earth-crushing as that revelation may be, why's it such a shock? what's harder to imagine, green aliens from mars or cheating? cheating happens every day, you should be forewarned by the world around you.

and the thing is, everyone who's in a relationship realizes this. you can't be jealous without knowing what it feels like to be on the other side. people understand how common having mixed feelings for two people are. guys know what bastards they -- and all other guys -- really are. girls understand how they can use their wiles to seduce men. everyone knows the capacity and the opportunity for cheating that everyone else possesses, because we are fundamentally all the same. we take what we can and try to get away with anything we can. would you cheat if you didn't have to suffer from self-induced guilt or the fear of being caught? i'm gonna say "yes."

i mean, haven't you ever had similar romantic feelings for more than one person at a time? you think it's fate that's pulls two people together? not really. sometimes choice-1a falls through because of some circumstance, so then choice-1b ends up being the "winner." taking a very non-romantic view, do you realize how arbitrary love is? it's a matter of timing, chance, luck, and a dash of "this is what i want (now)."

nobody really intends to cheat, at least nobody would say so out loud. something about voicing things makes them way too permanent; as if suddenly the air around you might be called to testify at your trial. cheating first occurs in the mind, when you think nasty dirty thoughts and then reprimand yourself for thinking these things. slowly these thoughts turn into intentions and then into "wow, if i just sit right there, or touch her now, i think something could happen."

the opportunities for cheating are infinite, and to fight against this sort of thing is like bailing water out of a leaky boat. i figure you just have to trust that the other person won't cheat and be done with it. my take on it is that if the other person does cheat, i'll give them one "get out of jail free" pass, just like in monopoly. after that, they'd have to choose between me or the other person. if my significant other wanted to be with someone else, so be it. see ya. there's no sense in fighting for someone that doesn't want to be there.

if it sounds like i'm pro-cheating. i'm not. i just think that cheating is a fact of life. it's not always relationship threatening nor something i'd hang a break up on. while i do think cheating is a very valid reason for breaking up with someone, i understand (and could quickly forgive) how cheating can happen. "i can't imagine ever cheating on my girlfriend." well, i can. and i think most people can too. and i don't necessarily think "once a cheater, always a cheater." in fact, many one time cheaters are so mortified by their transgression that they're scared straight, and end up being less likely to cheat than the norm.

vigilance and an expectation for the worst are the best ways to combat cheating. note i said vigilance and not suffocation. i personally hate having to answer a significant other's questions about "so, do you like so-and-so, could you like her? why not why not?" there are varying degrees of attraction among all people, and if you want to hear the truth, you have to be able to separate reality from possibility. what kind of answer is acceptable here? will you tell the whole truth? no way, because that'll just bring up a shitstorm. so you kind of white lie, and soft-shoe it. or wait, that's just me, sorry.

anyway, my final thought on cheating is this. if you do it, you are responsible for it. you have to own up to it. there may be many circumstances surrounding what happened -- you may not be happy, you were crying out for attention, she was really hot, you might have been drunk, he was really persistent -- but ultimately at some point, you made a choice. you decided to become a cheater. you cheated. so stand up straight and deal with the consequences. there's nothing worse than a cheater who then grovels and says "i didn't mean it...." you cheated, you got caught, face the reaper with some dignity at least. own up to your actions.


actually wait, some cheating i don't understand. like saved by the bell slater cheating on the doritos girl the night before they were to wed. are you stupid man? are you insane? that kind of cheating i don't understand or condone. like at all.

big league chew. when did gum make the change from candy to breath freshener? gum is probably the number one cause for my continuing battle with cavities -- well if you discount gummies, chocolates, skittles, cakes, pies, and genetics. if gum is hurting me, why not give it up you say? well that would require me to give up smoking, and giving up two nasty habits at once is just too much to ask for in one lifetime.

is it true that sugarless gum doesn't give you cavities? or that trident actually helps your teeth? i have a tough time believing any of that hogwash. gum is gum, it's not good for you. gum is candy.

but gum has seen its role in our society change drastically in the last decade or so. it's no longer candy. remember when bubblelicious was hot? or a yard of gum or whatever that was? bazooka joe, of course, has never lost its place on our shelves or in our hearts. these bubble gums were powdery, pink, sweet, and designed for maximum bubbling. children and teenagers chewed gum, adults ate three squares a day.

i recall trident trying to brand itself as the gum that was good for you, but everybody knew that trident wasn't really gum anyway. every parent i knew only offered trident, and if that wasn't enough of a turn off, the unappealing packaging killed any remaining desire for gum. carrying a five pack of wrigley's -- the staple gum-- was way cooler than being caught with trident. imagine the shame.

wrigley's, even with appealing flavors like spearmint and double mint, probably sold more juicy fruit than anything else. people wanted sweet juicy goodness out of their gum, not anti-tartar and blah blah blah. boo on trident.

gum suffered a bit of a down phase for me somewhere around high school. there was no need to chew gum then. i was too young to smoke, too oblivious to know that having fresh breath might help you "score," too uncool to carry juicy fruit in my pocket. gum kind of took a backseat to my other candy fixations. whatchamacallits and baby ruths were my trusty tooth decayers then.

the fat packs of gum never really appealed to me. although i did enjoy flicking a piece of gum out of the fatpack, it's like flicking a zippo but less dangerous (albeit slightly less awe-inducing). plus i got quite good at gum wrapper origami. i followed in the footsteps of the masters and made creative designs like "silver ball" and "silver stick." sometimes "silver ball tenously attached to silver stick" depending on how many wrappers were available. it was more impressive than it sounds.

then, maybe four years ago, hard chew gum started to appear in plastic packs with individual pieces encased in poppable bubbles. what an innovation and a triumph of design and engineering. gum could now be kept in your pocket for weeks, without fear of staleness or squishing. you could now sit on your gum without ruining the crisp corners of the packaging. gum was given an indefinite pocket life. pretty amazing technological advance i'd say. an ancillary benefit of this modern gum was that you stopped finding exploded pieces of sticky crap in your pants pocket after doing the laundry.

gum was also imbued with super strength along with super packaging. quaint minty names was suddenly replaced by monikers like "winter-super-blast" or "artic-avalanche-chill." do you remember chewing your first piece of this newfangled gum? i do. i mean, i couldn't taste shit for the next day. you would chew a piece of gum and have tears come out of your eyes. it was ridiculous. but people liked it. i liked it. i was never without gum after this.

i think my nickname among friends is "hey, you got any gum?" i would buy a box of dentyne gum at costco and be set for months. me and gum have had a good working relationship since the advent of the hard pack. like a druggie or a prudent cigarette smoker, i would hide almost finished packs of gum in my glove compartment, in my man-purse, everywhere, just in case i was in a gum jam somewhere down the line. i would mentally run checklists of how much gum i had left at any time. i sometimes carried backup gum for my backup gum.

out of desperation, i've even bought gum for the outrageous price of $1.29. what a rip off. think about it, gum used to cost about the same as gas before this whole three dollar gas bullshit started happening. you could drive for seventeen miles city -- or twenty five highway -- for the price of a pack of gum. then again, would you rather drive an extra twenty miles or have fresh breath? no question, fresh breath.

anyway, my point is this. the gum pendulum is starting to swing back towards sugary mixes and soft chews. i see ads on tv for gums that are both sweet and sour at the same time. "winter tsunami" has been slowly challenged by "jungle jam" or "very berry blast." i'm against this soft pack gum stuff, i'm pro the return to gum that tastes good. i think i may even go in for some juicy fruit, to make up for my middle school un-coolness, but the updated juicy fruit logo and packaging really bothers me. i'd prefer a vintage juicy fruit look -- if such a look exists. wrigley's shouldn't be attempting to appeal to the new generation of gum chewers, instead, they should be courting the people who grew up with double and spear mint. bring back those twins commercials i say. i think i'm deciding now to be a wrigley's guy. well, wrigley's for pleasure, dentyne and "armageddon ice" for post-cigarettes.

on the wrigley's website, listed under "benefits of gum" is the following: improves concentration, eases tension, freshens breath, provides a low-calorie snack, and helps fight tooth decay. bullshit. gum doesn't improve concentratoin or ease tension. people get yelled at for chewing gum, getting yelled at is never good for the concentration. and a low-calorie snack? really? i've never heard anyone say "i'm hungry but this piece of gum will tide me over." as for that tooth decay thing, go talk to my dentist. or check out my x-rays.

on a side note, japanese gum has always retained its classic shapes and tastes. round and fruity with a three second burst of flavor. and then totally useless. this is still the best candy gum by far. things like "melon flavor" just don't do well here in the states do they? i wonder why that is. are americans just not that big into melons? shame.

i think i've totally underestimated the role that gum has played in my life. how unappreciated it must feel. i'm sorry gum. i'll make it up to you.

ps. they sell vintage candy online. i can't decide if this is great or disgusting.

"i do know why guys like jordan cause such a stir in so many women's hearts... the reason why angela loves jordan, and why women always seem to fall for dudes like catalano, is precisely because he makes it so easy for us to project all of our fantasies about men and maleness onto him. jordan is both soulful hunk and empty cipher, or rather, he's a soulful hunk precisely because he's a cipher for girlish fantasy."
-jordan catalano: soulful hunk or empty cipher-

"i love brain precisely because i understand how sad you feel when you're trapped by a fear of being humiliated or rejected or that your words will be misunderstood--something i think everyone can identify with on some level, some of us more strongly than others.
-there's hope for brian krakow-

"i believe the crux of the show is the simple fact that the problems they face and wrestle with in high school are still our problems. their so-called lives are ours. turn this around and you get the, admittedly depressing, idea that we haven't made any real progress since high school. sure, maybe we went to college, got a job, dated, had sex, drank, took drugs, got an apartment, thought about marriage, and more.

we grew up, right? high school is far behind us. for some of us maybe. i suspect that these are the people who are puzzled by my fascination with the show. the rest of us, emotionally at least, are still fighting the same demons we were then: loneliness, loyalty, love, friendship, failure to connect and communicate, kissing, sexual confusion, how to relate to our parents, being good, being bad, and more.

if i'm towing some kind of theory here, it's some kind of updated psychoanalytic one. the emotional issues for your life are indeed framed in your youth, it's just not in infancy, but when you're a teen. as far as i can tell, i became pretty much the person i am now around sophmore year. ...when you turn fourteen or so, you have to start dealing with the stuff you will for the next, oh, twenty or so years. and no one tells you anything, except other people who don't know or whom you're constitutionally incapable of listening to."
-angela v. brian: a theory and a puzzle-

we could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about. in "love, actually," colin firth's character is a writer who falls in love with his foreign maid, aurelia. their feelings for each other develop despite a tremendous language barrier; he does not speak portugese, she does not speak english. their love language is "acts of service." she cleans his house and brings him coffee, he keeps her employed. obviously, romantic love was inevitable.

now, could this actually happen? could the inability to verbally communicate with each other really be just a traversable barrier? romantics might say that speaking the same language is not as important as the ability to really "communicate." there are hand and body gestures after all, and pictograms, and facial expressions. love is universal -- like math, music, and um, more math?

but honestly, could you imagine falling in love and sustaining a relationship where the two of you couldn't even discuss anything beyond the simplest of subjects? "how was your food? tres bien. ni hao ma? i'm feeling excellent today. how do you feel about the role of physical discipline in our child's upbringing? qué?"

do you see the potential problems here?

most people cite communication and openness as a vital part of a successful relationship. how can you really communicate with someone that you can't even talk to or understand? and what if both of you eventually learned a common language, only to find out that you disagree on everything? what do you do then? "the whole time i thought she was saying 'i love everything about you' when really she was saying 'i love cheese.'"

does love really conquer all? i somehow doubt it. but maybe talk is cheap and a real soul connection is what's important. after all, i've only dated english speaking females and eighty percent of the time we weren't successful in talking or communicating in the least.

thumbsucker. most people go through an initial coming of age period in their teens. they experiment with who they want to be, they try to shed or tinker with old images of themselves, they choose or reject things, they go out of their way to find out who they really are -- or at least, an acceptable version of who they are. most of my favorite movies/television shows revolve around this theme, this discovering of oneself.

i love these fictional creations not because i can relate to any of it, but because of the opposite; i can't relate to the characters' plights at all. i feel like i missed my first coming of age period, or i was too ignorant of what was going on to really give any coherent thought to the subject. if coming of ages were like birthdays, i feel like i missed the first nine because nobody told me about the concept of birthdays.

i never brooded, experimented, consciously adapted, or had the prescence of mind to want to be anything in particular. i just was. i felt normal, i felt typical, i felt like i fit in wherever i was. of course, in retrospect, i don't think it was really a matter of fitting in as much as a total inability to realize that the activities and distractions i enjoyed weren't always exactly in lockstep with the majority's. not everyone played the tmnt rpg during lunch hour? what?

and it's not even about being a total dork in school -- since my school's class sizes were so small that social class barriers were hardly impenetrable -- but just about feeling like i might be different. at that age, i never felt different. i never felt like i wanted to be someone else. i never consciously wanted to change anything about myself. i wasn't proud or ashamed of who i was. i just kind of went where i went, like a weed. i can't even really describe what i might have been like at that age. no accurate adjectives come to mind. i just don't really know.

nowadays, i often feel like i was "cheated" out of a teenager-hood. any memories of angst, transformation, or self consciousness doesn't exist from that time period. it's like a big blank. when i have to think about "how am i the way i am," and what life experiences might have shaped that, i come up empty headed. i feel like having a twin sister traveling alongside me should be helpful in discerning what i was like as a teen, but i made so much fun of her when we were younger that i'm sure all she remembers is me being mean.

where is my reservoir of teenage emotion and confusion? or at least a clarity of vision about why i didn't have to suffer through any of that. how can i create coming of age stories when i don't have any personal experiences with it? unfair i say, totally unfair.