Day 142

Watching/Listening to: Busta Rhymes, Don't Touch Me (Throw Da Water On'Em). Goddam this song is catchy. In my other, more coordinated, life I'm dancing to this song all day long. Kind of like these guys (that linked video is the best one by far). These videos are so last year but still super fun. Miley and Mandy won the final live battle despite having an inferior dance crew but that's the power of the teenage vote.

I just booked a ticket to Raleigh for next week. What's in North Carolina you ask? Nothing really. I mean, nothing that I know of. But sometimes when you get the call, you have to go. Okay, one of my best friends is in Raleigh and she's going through some sort of pre-wedding panic attack -- the wedding is nine months off -- so she dug deep and practically begged me to go. "Practically" being the key word there. There was no begging, none whatsoever.

At first I was totally resistant but then I slept on it and I woke up thinking, "Man, I totally should go, it'll be an enduring sign of our friendship!" Plus I didn't have any real reason to decline. I have the time, I have the money, I've been wanting to get out of SD, and I've never visited her. Ever. I mean, if I'm going to try to be a better friend to people this year (it's a resolution), then going to visit them is step one right?

It's rare that I take the time and money to go visit one individual friend. I've done it maybe once or twice. Usually money is tight so I'd rather spend the plane fare on a trip that allows me to see lots of people. I mean, it's pricey to pay $300-400 to see one person but if you see ten friends then it's only $30-40 a head right? This is how my social math works. It's a bit fucked up. I mean, if you're best friends with someone, you should be willing to fly to go see them and only them. But the dirty, and totally obvious, secret of my social life is that there's power in numbers. I'm a sucker for gatherings.

So I'll be off next week to play the invisible bridesmaid. I'll be picking out wedding invitations, hopefully going over some color schemes, and generally just doing wedding prep. I hope to take a look at the Duke campus since that was one of my top school choices at the time. I'd like to give them a piece of my mind about that rejection letter. UNC Chapel Hill was one of my safety schools too for some reason or other. Michael Jordan? It was easy to get in?

I've suffered from some serious on-and-off friendship karma in this relationship so this will be really good. Chalk one up in the good friend column. I'll also be swinging through DC to check in on our new president -- and a few friends, I couldn't resist. I couldn't fully commit to North Carolina without knowing that there would be an option of seeing more people. I mean, an old dog can learn new tricks but not that fast right?

The Jump Off

It's resolutions time. I've never made resolutions before, aside from general ones, but this is the year to start. Since I have no job, I decided I should be approaching my life like a job. Long and short term goals, accountability, reporting, and slacking off when the boss ain't looking. To that end, I looked up this "Free Tools to Manage New Year's Resolutions" thing and it said to use the S.M.A.R.T. method of setting goals and objectives. SMART means be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Basically I'm avoiding the broad resolutions in favor of really small ones. I'm aiming for a high score here, maybe even an A. There's nothing I like better than having an application to track my progress so I'll be using Joe's Goals, which is still in beta but seems easy to use and display. Except apparently, right now, when I'm trying to set it up. Day one and I've already failed. Computer error. That figures.

Forget it, I'm moving on to 43things. Maybe I'll use Joe's Goals for the ones that require daily tracking and then 43things for the biggies. Or I could do a spreadsheet. I fear that I'll be bogged down by the organizational aspect of resolutions and do nothing. Never, I'm strong of mind and full of willpower -- or shit.

I think the big mistake in making New Year's resolutions is that people make them for the entire year. That's very hard to do. Life can change so fast that in a few months, weeks even, your goals may no longer be the same at all. What I've resolved to do is just set down some goals for the next three months, from January through March. After that my life will probably be totally different, I'll be super accomplished, and then I can make a new list of a dozen or so things.

After looking through my list, most of my objectives center around my potential career as a writer. I want to be either writing, practicing writing, or doing something to prep for EC to launch. Build a website, figure out some grassroots marketing to do, hold fan club elections, that sort of thing. I should also try to lay some groundwork for future books and freelance pieces. So those are on the list too.

The writing daily thing is huge too. Currently if I'm not working on a book (Book 3 ideas are submitted but they've yet to get back to me) I'm not really writing at all. I should be doing something, or going through a grammar or style book, but I'm not. Gotta get on that.

The other thing I really want to focus on is the performative aspect of being a writer. I've been watching a lot of TED talks recently (they are money on the iPhone) and I'm so impressed at how eloquent and humorous the speakers are. It would add some nice versatility to my repertoire if I could perform like that, and not just in a totally informal setting like job training or blogging workshops. Authors and writers need to multi-task these days, I think. I can't be afraid of being in front of people, of being interviewed, or of standing up and engagingly and clearly talking about my book(s). I was reading the first few pages of EC to someone the other night and I was appalled at how much I stumbled and muttered. I can't even read right right now. Putting a fix on that is priority quickness.

I don't have much of a performer in me but it would be challenging and potentially fun to do something like a Mortified, a poetry piece, anything that might allow me to get away from the computer and out in front of real people. Thus the memorizing thing. I can't memorize for shit right now and I need to work on it. Related to that is taking an acting class. My friend told me she takes this acting class and it's been revealing to have to open up like that. I hate/fear acting but this is something I think I should do, even if it's one drop-in class where I sit glued to my chair until it's my turn to play the quiet Asian. I'll call that a success.

The other short term goals include doing something physical on a regular basis (swim if I'm at home near my pool, ball anywhere else) and being a better friend. The last one is nebulous and ongoing but I think I need to learn to show people my appreciation more. Be it tokens, thoughts, words, white doves, something.

So there it is, my Jan-Mar 2009 resolutions. Bring it on.

Oh, I had been talking about having a resolutions accountability partner but so far there doesn't seem to be a likely candidate -- plus my goals are so tiny that I should be able to get a handle on it. I don't want to have someone trying to check in on if I did my writing homework or something every day. They'd get bored really quick. I think I will be able to find someone on some of the writing goals (D, you hear me?) and she's amazing motivation already.

Talk to Her

"Like other sentient beings, [Jane] had a complex system of consciousness. Two thousand years before, when she was only a thousand years old, she had created a program to analyze herself. It reported a very simple structure of some 370,000 distinct levels of attention. Anything not in the top 50,000 levels was left alone except for the most routine sampling, the most cursory examination.

Jane's top thousand levels of attention were what corresponded, more or less, to what humans think of as consciousness. Most of this was her own internal reality; her responses to outside stimuli, analogous to emotions, desires, reason, memory, dreaming. Much of this activity seemed random even to her, accidents of her philotic impulse, but it was the part of her that she thought of as herself, it all took place in the constant, unmonitored ansible transmissions that she conducted deep in space.

Compared to the speed at which the human brain was able to experience life, Jane had lived half a trillion human life years since she came to be.

And with all that vast activity, her unimaginable speed, the breadth and depth of her experience, fully half of the top ten levels of her attention were always, always devoted to what came in through the jewel in Ender Wiggin's ear."
-Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead-

Day 131

What happens when I hang out with Lynn after not seeing her for awhile is that we sit around and do life updates, but for other people. "How's so and so doing? Did you hear about such and such?" It's not gossiping as much as it is catching up because we have a very overlapped group of friends and we both like to soak in information. Only after an hour or so of figuring out the status of everyone around us do we finally settle in, breathe, and talk about our own lives. That's pretty much the pattern and I don't know how it developed but we rarely stray from it.

I spent most of the weekend on Lynn's couch in-between LA events. We pre-post-celebrated Steve's birthday on Friday by having a champagne, cheese, and crackers night at Megan's apartment. I don't know where Megan gets her ideas but once she sets her mind on an activity that needs to happen, she basically just keeps saying (or doing) it until it actually happens. It's like being bullied into something, but in a nice way. So it was that we found shots of jager and tall glasses of Red Bull magically appear before us, even as we settled in for a quiet night. Jager bombs are Megan's thing, everyone knows this.

I thought we were headed for a night of Rock Band 2 or Lips -- which Megan basically guilt tripped Steve into buying on his way up from Palos Verdes before realizing that it cost $60 and so might need to stay unopened -- but instead we had a Cranium face off. First it was boys versus girls. Then it was strings versus woodwinds (Lynn and Steve play violin, Megan and I play the clarinet and flute respectively). The final round was old versus young. I didn't realize you could play Cranium with just four people but this was a new Cranium, Cranium Pop 5, which strips away all the stupid rules and launches you straight into the fun activities.

I think people believe alcohol makes board games more fun but what I think is that having alcohol around gives people the impression that playing a board game is semi-cool and can qualify as a night's activity. I know Ameer would disagree here because he's anti-board game all the time but I would like to think he's an exception. Apparently it just sounds better when you can say, "Yeah, we had some drinks and played a few board games." That seems more adult and not as childish/lame as just saying "We played board games." I'd say playing board games is more fun than going out nine times out of ten but people don't usually agree with me -- thus the need to spice up games with alcohol. Whatever, I'll host a damn kegger if that gets everyone to play games with me.

Anyway, we had a fantastic night in and I left behind two new friends for Megan. Or North Pole Pals to be specific. Look at these damn things. Aren't they the cutest things ever? How could you not want to own them? I don't understand why holiday candy is discounted so quickly -- isn't the chocolate still the same? -- but I snatched these guys up for a dollar each. I kind of wanted to eat them but they deserve to live just a little while longer don't you think?

Somewhere in that night's conversation, Lynn introduced me to her habit of emailing a select group of friends to keep them updated on her life. I was excited to open my ears to this idea. It had never occurred to me to actually contact and communicate with my five best friends, to email them as a group so they would not only know who each other were but also be kept in the loop about things. For someone who puts a lot of stock into his top five, this was a revelation. I figured if anyone was actually interested in my life, they could just ask, or find out stuff online, so I had never considered giving them semi-personalized updates and important info.

Our friendship theories are also pretty different I guess. Actively communicating with your close friends and keeping them in the loop hasn't exactly been my cup of tea. I tend to wait for information to disseminate by itself. But for Lynn, it seems like her top friends are the ones who know the most about what's going on in a given situation. They also serve as support and counsel. I use my friends as support and counsel too but it sort of comes and goes and falls mainly on who's around. I'm going to have to consider taking a more proactive approach to close friendships.

Near the end of 2008, another friend sent a combined email to her top five just generally thanking them and appreciating them. It was incredibly great and I thought about doing the same thing for people I cared about. I've found a fault of mine is that I generally just assume people know how much they mean to me but then I rarely actually say it, or do anything that would let them think it, etc. I will resolute to do better, as I take the month of January to create some resolutions for the rest of the year.

Friend appreciation, write that one down.

Our Space

I headed off to LA at six hoping that my cruising speed would be slow enough so traffic wouldn't bother me much. How right I was. Since I drive so damn slow, by the time I hit the congestion areas in Irvine and beyond, much of the traffic had already died down and I arrived in Rowland Heights five minutes before eight, exactly on schedule for a reunion dinner with my "kids."

It's been a whole year since I've seen everyone convened in one spot. Actually it's been a whole year since I've seen any of them save Raymond, who periodically came down to San Diego to hang out, play guitar with James, and generally bum about with me. I miss them, the whole group, with all the little stories, jokes, and routines that would occur, the types of things that can't be replicated without the drudgery of office life to push things along. It wasn't drudgery for me, of course, because it was fun, and they were an awesome and mostly industrious group.

I can't imagine working in an office again, especially without a group of people that I like and get along with. I know I'm going to have to return to an office at some point but the last experience was so good, working with friends old and new, that it's probably the best it's ever going to get. Plus, when will I ever get to manage again? I mean, my management style was more summer camp counselor than anything else but I'd like to think we got what we needed to get done. Would that look good on a resume? "We got what we needed to get done, mostly."

My theory on managing people is that if you treat them well they'll want to do good work for you. I know that seems a bit optimistic, and that leaves you prone to being taken advantage of, but the alternative is to be a hard ass and that's no fun. I guess I've just been around a lot of shitty managers in my short stints of real work. Managers who either had no clue what was going on, managers who didn't know how to delegate, train, or motivate, and managers who just generally seemed incredibly incompetent. The qualities that I'd look for in a good manager are surprisingly hard to find and it's a wonder how so many middle aged idiots are in positions of power. I mean, not that I'd complain if I soon became one of these idiots but seriously, why are they managing anything?

It would be nice to be given the chance again to manage something. Many of my friends and peers are now managers, supervisors, heads of departments, and I'd love to be able to see them at work. It would be so interesting to compare their normal selves with their work selves. Would evaluating them through the lens of a job make me see them differently? Undoubtedly right?

Working at Omnis, Vy and I could fight like cats and dogs but outside of work we got along famously. It's such a weird thing to think that you'd clash in one area while getting along superbly in all other respects. It makes me want to take the business challenge with all of my friends. Would we end up hating each other? Would we lose or gain respect for our way of doing things? I feel like it could be quite the revelation.

The majority of P-Unit (processing unit) is now finishing up school, and have either moved on to other jobs or are planning to step out into the post-collegiate world. For some of them, Omnis was their first office type job. I wonder how they'll look back on that experience after a few years sludging around. I always told the kids that real work was nothing like this. You don't get to mingle with a hundred other people your age, it's not like a big social thing. Real work sucks man, so enjoy this little island of youth while you can. But I'm sure they didn't believe me. I wouldn't have believed me if I was them.

During the time I was finishing up the first draft of the book, I was at Omnis and ended up using a few names, character traits, and fashion styles of the kids I was working with. Unfortunately, some of the side characters and details got changed but even thinking about the world I was enveloped in at the time, between the writing and the job, brings a smile to my face as I recall carefully studying people's outfits, mannerisms, and general attitudes and little sayings. It was a fucking good time.

Day 127

Listening to: Andrew Bird. Susie sent me one of his songs a while ago, with the intriguing title "a nervous tic motion of the head to the left." Since then I've gotten lots of semi-indie cred if it ever pops up in the car or whatnot. It's an awesome song. I recently downloaded Armchair Apocrypha and Soldier On to listen to. If he blows up I can pretend I knew him when. But not really.

The better part of my day was spent going through Fimoculous' 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008. I swear I clicked on nearly every link and gave everything the once over, just to find some new things to read. I woke up at 2:30pm, napped twice, and it's just about to get light out. The only truly productive thing I've done all day is help my mom disassemble the Christmas tree, packing it away until next year. I wondered if I'd ever want to go through the trouble of putting up my own Christmas tree. I doubt it.

While it looks pretty and lends holiday spirit to any room, the idea of assembling, decorating, and tearing it down year after year seems pointless. Then again, if I had children I guess that would be reason enough to do it, if only to give them some nice warm memories. There's a lot pointless things I'd have to do if I had children. Mainly, celebrate. And eat regularly.

Of greater concern is how I can get myself a permanent supply of Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Shortbread Stars (a life changing gift from Steve). I fear they will disappear from store shelves soon and that just wouldn't do. I only have five stars left and I'm rationing them at two a day. Would it be absolutely ridiculous to go buy twenty boxes now?

The find of the day is Molly Young, who reminds me slightly of technicolor.org -- very slightly. "[Molly] writes in that hyper-literate but still somehow accessibly intimate way that make all her blog posts read like entries in one of those diaries that score its author a publishing contract."

"Of all the bad things a person can be, 'boring' was my bête noire from the age of consciousness until mid-college. This is probably because I was so often paralyzed in social interactions, unable to think of anything to say or do. In fact, a good amount of the time I passed alone was spent stocking up on Things To Say. I used to keep a small notebook with reminders of funny anecdotes, news items, novelties and jokes to sprinkle into conversation. I even consulted the book (discreetly) during interactions to freshen my supply. It didn't work very well -- I often had to shoehorn unrelated sentences into topical conversations -- but it was better than being a blank.

Now things are more fluid up there, but only among those I know well."
-Public opinion is a tyrant-

How Lucky

Listening to: Indigo Swing, "The Way We Ought To Be."

For awhile there, in 1998-ish, right around when I got my first official girlfriend, I was really into swing dancing. A lot of people were I think, due to the release of Swingers and Swing Kids. The summer previous, George, Grace, and I had taken a ballroom dancing class at UCSD, which seems like such an odd thing for us to do. But I remember it being pretty fun. We might have also gone to a few swing dancing classes in San Diego somewhere.

I personally liked the swing scene for the shoes. I loved the two tone shoes. I actually never got my own pair but I just loved looking at them and Stacey, the girlfriend, had some. Paired with her signature argyle socks, I thought they looked cool as hell. One of the first times I visited her in Santa Cruz, we went out to a swing club. The venue was two stories, with a huge dance floor and everyone was dressed up and had serious style and moves. I sucked, as usual -- mastering the six count and triple step was beyond me -- and was mostly just entranced by the film to life aspect of it all.

The band for the night was Indigo Swing, who rocked the shit out of the house and I immediately fell in love with them. After buying their CD and listening to them non-stop, they happened to come to Ann Arbor randomly and some of us went out to watch them there too. For a few weeks afterwards, we did the whole swing thing in Michigan, going around to various spots on campus to learn, dance, and gawk.

I wonder if some people template on their first girlfriends. For example, I feel like after Stacey, I have tended to date variations on her theme. I always end up in relationships with the same type of girl. The super nice, slightly quirky, and often very privately guarded type of girl who is social and giving and always well liked by everyone they come into contact with. Something about that personality attracts me and vice versa, even if on paper it's nothing I would list as looking for in a girl. We always get along famously, right off the bat, and I think somewhere in there, they're surprised by how damn nice I can be and that's a straight shot to their heart. I'm the nice guy who dates the nice girl, end of story, happy ending. But it never quite works out that beautifully.

All through my retellings of my failures as a boyfriend (past, present, future), I always say that I was a really good boyfriend the first time around. Stacey and I were long distance for the entire nine months or so we were together and saw each other maybe once every six weeks. She never came out to Michigan, I always flew to Santa Cruz, which seems strange in retrospect. For the first semester of my junior year, I worked at a campus coffee shop in order to pay for the flights and the phone calls. And we were on the phone constantly. The East to West coast time change was perfect for me. I had time to hang out with my friends all night long and still return to catch her around midnight California time. I don't think it would have worked out quite as well if we were geographically reversed, I'm strictly a late night guy.

We were constantly sending packages back and forth. I made an extraordinary array of cards, puzzles, remember me forever items, and wrote letters that rambled on for pages. This was like first relationship magic and I was 110% committed and we never had any problems. We just missed the hell out of each other and there were a few times we'd have to part and I'd be all teary and crying and stuff. It was so Nicholas Sparks.

Everything spiraled downhill quickly though. By second semester, my school life got busier and I was unable to spend as much time on the phone and doing things. As I've now learned, when you set those attention benchmarks high, any significant dip and the other party will start worrying about if you care for them the same way. I don't recommend the smother and retreat method, that one's not in the handbook.

I suggested somewhere around month five that we might consider taking a break. "A break" were the words she least wanted to hear because her previous boyfriend had suggested the same thing and then had subsequently broken up entirely. In my eyes, a break was defined as "we're still together but we just need to not talk as much." To her, a break was the same thing as a break up. Bad choice of words on my part. That miscommunication led to tension, fighting, and eventually I lost my patience with the entire thing, dragging our relationship carcass for another few months before I abruptly ended things in June, right when we could have spent some quality time together.

Now that I think about it, that might be a relationship theme too, I tend to date girls right when they've just gotten out of a painful relationship. I'm either that rebound guy or I'm pouncing when they're defenseless. Your call.

Another thing I've noticed in my exes is that they tend to have similar ways of dealing with their frustrations or issues. They hold it in, bottle it up, and then it all comes blowing out when the lid pops off. Is there some sort of archetype here I should be aware of? I used to be convinced that I was just coincidentally choosing this type of girl (every time) but recently I've been exploring how my issues with emotional communication might lead them to not talk about things. In the post-relationship feedback talks we had, I learned about a ton of things that Stacey had held in during our relationship. I'd like to think that I'm all ears and open to anything but in reality I probably present a very passively closed position.

Anyway, the take home lesson is for me to avoid the nice girl, that's what I've decided in theory. There must be an underlying reason why I'm constantly attracted to this type but I've yet to figure it out completely. It probably has to do with my insecurities, their insecurities, and some fatal but delicious meshing of the two. A medal and declaration of ultimate friendship to the person who can figure it all out and explain it to me.

Stacey had this amazing, super dark, lustrous hair, which was always admired and marveled at. I think I've imprinted on that too since girls with thick shiny hair that curls in a particular way are just well, irresistible.

"I've never been to Paris, France
I never learned how to ballroom dance
But she still giving me the chance, how lucky can one guy be

I never made a load of dough
I never been to a Broadway show
But to her I'm original Romeo, how lucky can one guy be

Her other boyfriends and the hopeful men, call her on telephone
But at the end of the night, she's holding me tight, and I'm the one taking her home"
-How Lucky-