Self-Aggrandizement: February 2005 Archives

gloating
Filed February 27, 2005 6:07 PM.

About three years back, on a whim, I bought a record player and started collecting LP's.

And while, for two and three quarters of those years, I enjoyed record listening immensely, it all came to an abrupt and painful end two months back, when the movers dropped my trusty Sony spinner on the way into the new apartment. Even after my best attempts at stereophonic surgery, I couldn't get the thing up and running. Which left me with a decent pile of vinyl, and absolutely no way to play it.

Though I looked briefly for a replacement, I was disappointed to discover that the record player market (small as it likely is) seems to have completely bifurcated: on one end, sub-$100 pieces of crap, on the other, $1000+ DJ specials, with pretty much nothing in between. Ah, the pain of the excluded middle!

On clever recommendation of recent house-guest Josh L., however, I today headed onto eBay in search of old Bang & Olufsen Beogram players. Bang & Olufsen! For years, I was obsessed with that company, with their beautifully designed speakers and stereo components, each one a near-perfect estimation of Danish neo-minimalism's Platonic ideal. Throughout high school, I'd walk their store in the Stanford Shopping Center, swearing that, if I ever had the cash, I'd undoubtedly buy one of their systems.

And then, amazingly, one day I did have the cash. At the high point of my dot-com swing (before the money I made turned back from actual money to paper 'money' that I'll quite plausibly never again see as actual money), I decided to buy one extravagant thing for myself, one object on which I would spend waaaaaay more than justified and not feel guilty and simply enjoy for years to come. As a musician, music lover, and aspirant audiophile, a stereo system - or, more pointedly, a B&O stereo system - seemed the only way to go.

But, wisely, my father suggested that, before I buy, I at least compare similarly priced components from other vendors. And so, with sheath of CDs in tow, I trekked from high-end audio shop to high-end audio shop, listening to speaker after speaker after speaker, trying to make sense of what made Miles Davis or Mahler or Sonic Youth sound richer or purer or kickier or whatever. By the end, I'd realized that B&O's stuff was really, really good. But some of the other vendors were putting out speakers that were leagues past 'really, really good', all the way in 'truly, astoundingly remarkable' territory.

Despite my initial Danish-driven intentions, I instead ended up detouring slightly westward in product origin, picking up a load of stuff from Irish boutique audio design company Linn. In most respects, it was one of the greatest decisions I've ever made. To this day, just dropping in a CD and hearing the first perfectly-rendered strains from those Linn speakers literally brings a smile to my face. But, at some level, I've always felt disloyal to my initial B&O intentions, have always secretly wished I could find some way to buy at least a little bit of B&O cool, if for no other reason than to impress whatever remnants of the 15-year old me still float in the dark corners of my own subconscious.

Which brings me back to today, to eBay, to searching for Bang & Olufsen Beograms, and to discovering and subsequently winning a restored Beogram 3404, for $86. For eighty-six dollars!!!! I mean, this is a record player that retailed for slightly less than $1200 of today's dollars back in 1980. Hello, 93% mark-down!

Once again, Internet, I am humbled by your power. Without you, there's no way vinyl vindication could be had so cheap.

disclaimer
Filed February 27, 2005 10:37 AM.

Based on some of the misadventures about which I've blogged in months and years past, a number of readers (by which I mean, my mother) have likely begun to look into A.A. chapters that meet near my apartment, or perhaps see if they might, as a birthday gift, enroll me early on the liver transplant list.

So, before I come home one evening to a living room intervention, I thought I'd better set the record straight: In point of fact, not only do the vast majority of my evenings not involve liquor at all, most are, further, rather dull. I end up at inane business dinners, or while away evenings banging out emails while curled up on the couch, besweatpantsed, simultaneously (occupational hazard) screening a film.

It's just that, the other nights, that small minority when I likely am, in fact, causing irreparable biotic harm, tend to be far, far more interesting. So they show up disproportionately in posts on this fair site.

From those intermittent posts, it's understandable that readers might extrapolate to my leading a life involving a permanent alcohol I.V. (though, actually, if anyone has some good leads on where I can get that set up, certainly shoot me an email). Instead, my life is pretty, remarkably bland, with just enough excitement to, at least occasionally, yield a retelling good enough to warrant your risking corporate wrath by tuning in over lunch break.

In service to that, I figure, the rare bout of cirrhosis is a small price to pay indeed.

captain obvious
Filed February 26, 2005 9:39 PM.

With my Airport Express intermittently on the fritz, I've fallen off of streaming music from iTunes, and back to an older technology involving music on plastic saucer-shaped objects I vaguely recall being named 'compact discs'. And, the crazy thing is, the music on those discs sounds much, much better than the same stuff compressed to 192kbps MP3s. Who knew?

sequestered
Filed February 26, 2005 9:39 PM.

Recently, I've been finding that I'm actually far more productive on weekends than I am during the work week. In a quasi-observance of Shabbat, I take Saturday off from doing any Cyan or Long Tail work, instead banging out all the other details of my life; then, Sunday, I start cranking through the upcoming week's works tasks. Holed up inside for those two days, I inevitably get more done than in the next five combined.

Though I don't know why, exactly, that's the case, I've started to take advantage of it as much as possible: clearing out my weekends of brunches and dinners and even Saturday evening parties in favor of long, uninterrupted stretches where I can crank through my backlog of tasks. Which, I suppose, I'd feel worse about, were I not making up for that lost social time (by which I mean, binge drinking) through the rest of the week.

so i've been told
Filed February 25, 2005 4:29 PM.

Though I don't watch much TV, what little I do consists mainly of Law & Order and The Daily Show. So I was particularly bummed to have missed Christina Ricci last night plugging I Love Your Work to John Stewart.

Fortunately, as no fewer than twenty of my friends and internet acquaintances did see the show, and emailed in to say as much, I managed to wrangle up a download via BitTorrent, and got to watch Ms. Ricci proclaim, several times, that the film is 'really, really good.'

We think ILYW should finally be in theaters later this spring, but, given the overall mess the process has been so far, we honestly have pretty much no idea anymore. Join us in keeping our fingers collectively crossed.

helping hand
Filed February 23, 2005 5:01 PM.

Ed. Note: Due to insanity at work over the last few days, I'm committing the faux pas of all faux pas: cross-posting between my own two blogs. This appears also on Cyan's site, but as it's a plea for outside opinion, including opinion outside the film industry, I thought I'd re-post it here.

About two years back, I coined Newman's First Law of Filmblogging, which got written about a bit on a number of film-centric blogs. The law, essentially, states that a filmmaker or production company's ability to blog at a given point is inversely proportional to how interesting things are at that point. In other words, when progress is cranking ahead, there's almost never time to actually sit down and write about it.

That's been the case recently, with several Cyan and Long Tail projects all surging ahead at once. I'm blogging briefly, however, to ask for your help with one of them:

The DVD of LT's first film, This is Not a Film, is nearly ready to head off to the duplicator; before it does, however, I'd really love some outside opinion on the box design and the trailer. In short, I want to know whether you'd be likely to rent, buy, or head out to the theater to watch the film based on either of them. So, if you'd be willing to volunteer criticism, shoot me an email and I'll send both your way. The first ten to pitch in will score a free copy of the finalized DVD.

a bit like being ceo
Filed February 22, 2005 9:14 AM.

"Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all. O hard condition, Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel But his own wringing! What infinite heart's-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!"
- Wm. Shakespeare, in Henry V

recapped
Filed February 19, 2005 9:17 PM.

Apologies, kids, for the recent silence and relatively crap posts; real life, as it's sometimes wont to do, has been getting in the way.

On the work front, we're getting ready to launch into pre-production on Earthquake Weather with Cyan, and prepping This is Not a Film to head off to the DVD presser with Long Tail.

But, more detrimentally to my regular raconteuring, I've also been drinking the nights away, with nary a free minute of 'me time'. A quick run-down, for those looking for some vicarious liver damage:

Wednesday night, headed out to celebrate The Girl's birthday. As she quoted me saying on her own blog (and, no, I won't link it, because heaven knows my mother doesn't want that much detail about my sex life. Not that we've had sex. I'm, um, saving myself until marriage. Yes, that's it! Saving myself until marriage...), there are two traumatic events that can fall within the first few weeks of dating someone: Valentine's Day, and their birthday. And, wowsers, there's nothing like getting both in the span of a single week.

Still, I think I stumbled through both reasonably competently, as I'll be seeing her again this evening. (More on that later.) We started the natal evening at a Nerve bash, largely because it involved free wine. As she ran into train trouble, I headed into the party alone for a half hour or so, and emerged just in time to discover that the doorman wasn't letting her (or anyone else) in, despite her repeated protestation that she was actually on the guest list, and that her +1 was waiting patiently (albeitly already slightly drunkenly) inside. Fortunately, as I had come out sans-overcoat, I managed to get us both inside with the old 'I need to retrieve my coat' and Jedi mind-trick stare one-two punch. Though, frankly, it wouldn't have been worth much more effort. The small bar, Odea, was packed well past the confines of fire code, and moving from one end of the narrow bar to the other made me thankful for years of practice on thrown-elbow dodging. We did, however, manage to get onto Gawker, as Team Party Crash was stalking the event; add back-of-the-head picture of me making out to the growing list of incriminating artifacts trailing me around the Internets.

Post-Odea, we cabbed down Broome to the excellent Ivo & Lulu, a closet of a restaurant with truly excellent food they inexplicably sell for about a third the rate of similar gastronomic delights elsewhere. (For potential visitors, it's BYOB, so either buy in advance, or [as I was forced to do] head next door to the oddly-named Monkey Temple bar and sweet-talk them into selling you a whole bottle of cabernet at wholesale) Then over to Circa Tabac, where I first pissed off and then befriended the owner by requesting two empty wine glasses to finish off the remains of the cabernet bottle.

I'm pretty sure we cabbed back to my apartment following that, though the combined effects of wine, more wine, and a stiff Sidecar left details sketchy until the following morning, when, waking up at 9:00, we discovered a lawyer nearly pressed up against the glass in his office across the street, admiring the show through my aquarium-like bedroom windows. Thank you, but no, life-imitating-Hitchcock.

Despite barely staggering through the rest of the day, and repeatedly swearing off liquor, I nonetheless found myself at Russian Samovar later that evening (drinking problem; what drinking problem?) for a sipping vodka carafe with the visiting Dan Birdwhistile, founder of the Dropstone Group, a new and rather cool young-people-driven nonprofit. Then, after a brief glass-of-water respite in my apartment, I was out yet again to B.B. Doyles, to meet up with long-standing friend Mike Hoevel, in town for the weekend from L.A. (and, before that, China), as well as recent-ex-roommate Colin and his lovely girlfriend Carrie.

As ever, there's nothing like an evening of bad beer with good friends to pass the time, though Hoevel at one point launched into a retelling of a story I'd long since forgotten: in the Yale dining hall, over dinner one evening, I accepted a five dollar bet to stand on a chair and de-shirt. Though, contrary to the name of the site, I try to steer clear of too much narcissistic back-patting, I must admit I was thrilled that Hoevel described the event as a bit like Flanders shirtlessly mowing the lawn: I was 'unexpectedly ripped'.

As the evening rolled on, Colin excused Carrie and himself, to nurse the start of a winter cold, and both were replaced by Hoevel's man-du-jour, who trekked down 9th from Julliard. Eventually,after several TableTaps of YuengLing, and much flirting all around with middle-aged Irish waitress Regina, I made it back home to once again fruitlessly swear off ever drinking again.

Yesterday evening, in penance for the prior two nights, I met my friend Tova to take in some art at the Met, where she works, as well as some behind-the-scenes gossip on the Rubens exhibit and newly-redone modern art mezzanine. Then went with her to meet her friend Joel, a TV writer, for moulles, frittes, and more frittes, at Petite Abeille. (I may eat healthfully most of the time, but a french fry so rich you can feel your arteries clogging as you chew is certainly not to be missed.)

After crashing at home early, I spent most of the day cleaning my apartment and re-doing work I'd been too hung over to do well the first time through in the past few days. Now, I'm off to dinner with ex-girlfriend Kate, having lost a steak dinner bet that she wouldn't still be dating the guy she's in fact still dating after three months. And, then, up to Morningside Heights for the Girl's official birthday extravaganza, as well as a second chance at ruining the good first impression I made on all her friends.

But, at least, I won't be drinking much.

[Famous last words.]

easy fun
Filed February 16, 2005 6:58 PM.

Don vaguely futuristic apparel. Then, on a crowded street, run up to someone and shout, "What's the date today?! Quickly, tell me!"

When they respond, shout, "What YEAR, man, what YEAR is this?!"

When they respond again, shout, "Noooo!! They've sent me back too far!" and sprint away, clutching your head in your hands.

eat my [own] shorts
Filed February 16, 2005 6:47 PM.

On occasion, I'll refer to myself as an underachiever.

Which, inevitably, draws a round of guffaws. But, honestly, I am.

Not, perhaps, against some external standard, against some outside set of average expectations. But, certainly, against my own expectations, against my sense of what I could be getting done if I didn't piss away huge percentages of each of my days.

Over the past few years, I've pulled together a collection of anal-retentive organization systems and pro-productivity mind hacks to fight that. But my gains have been, to be honest, incremental at best.

Very recently, however, I've come to realize that a focus on building the right tools means little until I'm ready to wield them. Sure, those elaborate systems can help me work far more effectively, but only if I can actually force myself to sit down and get to work in the first place.

So, as of today, I'm officially launching a war on procrastination. (Or maybe as of tomorrow. [Hah! I kid. Just a bit of procrastination humor there.]) For the next few weeks, at least, I'll be keeping a minute-by-minute time journal of my work day, tracking my 'billable hours', even if I'm just billing those hours to myself. If, indeed, awareness is the first step in the process of change, then perhaps by becoming fully aware of how I actually spend and waste time, by regularly rubbing my own nose in the stupid shit I manage to convince myself to do instead of productive work, I can actually set myself on the path to getting things done.

Wish me luck.

warning: possible retinal damage
Filed February 15, 2005 11:10 AM.

Seriously, what the hell?

today's quote
Filed February 15, 2005 11:06 AM.

"I feel sorry for people who don’t drink or do drugs. Because someday they’re going to be in a hospital bed, dying, and they won’t know why."
- Redd Foxx

hooked
Filed February 14, 2005 8:41 PM.

More ammunition for my family and friends' ongoing ribbing:

As she's been spending more evenings at my apartment in the last couple of weeks than there's even vague precedent for in my dating past, for Valentine's Day, I gave The Girl a toothbrush.

Now, seeing it sitting next to mine in the sink-side cup, I alternate between smiling like an idiot and thinking that if I turn into the kind of guy sappy enough to not just grin at a toothbrush but actually blog about it that I'll basically have to kick my own ass.

exactly
Filed February 13, 2005 10:49 AM.

"If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way."
- Mark Twain

r.i.p.
Filed February 12, 2005 10:28 AM.

"The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
-Arthur Miller, 1915-2005.

antiphon
Filed February 10, 2005 9:00 AM.

"He has no enemy, you say; my friend your boast is poor. He who hath mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure must have made foes. If he has none, small is the work that he has done."
- Alexander Anton von Auersperg

When we were first launching Cyan, one of the things we discussed constantly was how we should judge our work. By financial success? By popular response? By critical reviews?

And, in those discussions, we all unanimously agreed that, at least on the reviews front, we'd be wildly happier with films that polarize critics - films that get some really great reviews and some really bad reviews - than with ones that garner a widespread 'meh' for their inoffensive mediocrity.

With I Love Your Work, we pretty much got what we wished for. The reviews coming out of Toronto, and in the international release of the film, have been wildly split, with reviewers either loving or hating the film, and with very little in between.

At first, glad as we were to have made something that garnered a strong response, bolstered by the enthusiasm of the positive pieces, at some level, those bad reviews really hurt.

But, with a bit of time, we started to feel okay about them. And then, with more time, better than okay. We started to relish the bad as much as the good. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that "a creative act is not considered: it's instinctual. It is to be responded to, reacted against." Those strong reactions, the good and the bad, were the best positive feedback we could get. In making a film, we're putting a collaborative creative effort out into the world. People responding to it, reacting against it, means that we're doing at least something right.

But if it only took me a few months to become zen to criticism at work, I must admit it's taken me much longer to apply that thinking in the rest of my life. I don't mean at the small, day-to-day level, where I've long appreciated people pointing out how I could do things better. Rather, I mean it at the level of me as a whole.

A few times a month, someone emails in, or posts about me on their (or in the comments of someone else's) site, to say that I'm a 100%, total douche-bag. And, irrational as it may be, their missives initially really piss me off.

In the past, I've let them piss me off for a surprisingly long time. A really cutting one could ruin my day. But, increasingly, like with bad film reviews, after the initial shock wears off, I've started to revel in them. It's not just with Cyan's films, but with my life as a whole, that I'm shooting for far past inoffensive mediocrity. And since the varied group of friends I regularly see, by definition, are mainly a source of 'good reviews', it's the occasional 'bad review' that confirms I'm pushing the envelope just enough.

Tellingly, I almost never receive hate mail from people I've actually wronged. Instead, I get it from people who seem deeply offended by the fact that I'm trying, day by day, to piece together the life I really want to be living.

Hatred, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, is the coward's revenge for being intimidated. Bring it on.

fishbowl
Filed February 9, 2005 8:37 AM.

Growing up in a California house full of skylights and glass walls, I'm a huge fan of natural light. Which is one of the biggest appeals of my new apartment: with giant windows running along the front of my living room, and along two sides of the bedroom, sun streams in, and I can stare out at the city bustle on the street corner below.

Only recently, however, has it started to dawn on me that a window, by definition, works both ways. In other words, while I can look out, people can look back in as well. Not the people on the street, fortunately, as I'm high enough up to be out of the line of sight of pedestrian traffic, but certainly the lawyers in the huge office building directly across 8th Avenue.

I tend to forget about the lawyers, as, most of the time, they seem to completely forget about me. Working from home, I have the general sense that I could tap-dance naked in front of my window and still not generate much interest.

But, as the lawyers seem to work far too many hours to sustain even the vague semblance of a nightlife, a window-side female invariably causes them to sit up and take notice.

In the last week or two, due to the string of excellent repeat dates, and a slew of equally excellent evenings drinking with close female friends eager to critique my apartment decoration efforts, I've had attractive females passing through my apartment more evenings than not.

So by now, at eight o'clock, the lawyers across from me start frequently glancing in my direction, scoping out the evening's potential for vicarious entertainment. I could, I suppose, draw the blinds (seeing as I'm not one, the contents of this site to the contrary, to derive real-life exhibitionist pleasure), but the evening city view is far too good to ruin for the sake of keeping out occasional stares from overworked drones I'm unlikely to ever actually meet.

Still, given the number of different girls that have passed through, and given the exceedingly unglamorous life I lead the rest of the time, I'm sure they've (rightly) determined I'm no 'new date each night' Cassanova. Instead, I suspect they're convinced I'm simply moonlighting as a pimp.

Never one to pass up a good opportunity, I'll therefore be picking up a set of dry-erase markers and scrawling my phone number on the office-facing window. While my visiting friends don't seem to mind being part of an ongoing faux-reality-TV show, I'm sure they'd be much happier if it was pay-per-view.

tell me more
Filed February 8, 2005 6:48 PM.

As I've blogged about quite a bit in the past, for just over the last year of my life, I've been having a go at Radical Honesty - at telling the truth, the whole truth, all the time, even if I think it isn't politically expedient.

Which, frankly, has been really hard. But, like most hard things, has also been undoubtedly worth the work.

I was thinking about Radical Honesty a lot today, after stumbling across the details of one of Stanley Milgram's social psych experiments. In short, the experiment involved a team of researchers heading onto partially full New York subways, and asking seated riders to give up their seats. The results themselves are moderately interesting indications of the power of social compliance - about 70% of those asked gave their seats. But far more interesting to me are the qualitative descriptions of the experimenters' own feelings during the experiment; most reported feeling becoming uncomfortable when asking for the seat, often having to ride six or seven stops to work up the nerve.

Which, in a nutshell, is what the Radical Honesty experiment has been like for me so far. By and large, the results of telling the truth as much as possible are far, far better than I'd have expected. The hard part is actually making myself do it.

One area, for example, where I keep having to remind myself of this is in keeping investors, colleagues and collaborators posted on progress. Like in any situation, my instinct is to play up the positive, and omit the rest. Which causes problems when progress slows; waiting for something good to report, I hold off on calling or emailing with updates. And, during the ensuing silence, people tend to assume the worst. In literally every single case, I've found that simply sending along a 'things are stalled out and here's why' email leaves people not upset about the stall but rather extremely happy to simply be in the loop.

Like any new habit - even any new habit you know is far better for you than what you've previously done - it still feels unnatural, still takes a lot of work. I'm hoping, at some point, if I can reliably keep up Radical Honesty long enough, that eventually it will all be second nature. But, until then, in my work and personal life, I'm happy to slog ahead, one effortful, consciously monitored day at a time.

inevitable
Filed February 7, 2005 3:52 PM.

It would, of course, be on a day with more balls precariously in the air than ever, that my phone craps out and my bank decides to take an extra day to clear a large transfer.

[Shakes fist at the heavens.]

life imitates "art"
Filed February 6, 2005 4:51 PM.

As the last few posts have led friends and readers to question whether I'm losing my sanity, or at least my asshole edge, I should add briefly that, despite any of many upsides to this girl and her friends, last night also did leave me feeling even deeper entrenched in a ten-years-younger reenactment of a Sex and the City episode.

Which is, perhaps, unavoidable if the girl you're dating is paid by an online magazine to write (in great detail) about her dating life, but even moreso if, when you meet her closest friends, you discover that they consist of a confident go-getting Samantha, a shy, conservative Charlotte (who, in at least one photo snapped late in the evening, rather strikingly resembles Kristin Davis), and a cynical gay best-friend Stanford (who, fortunately for the real life version, is far better looking than the television equivalent).

I suppose that, in turn, makes me rather inevitable; every Sex-in-the-City story needs an (interested yet historically completely emotionally unavailable) Mr. Big.

first impressions
Filed February 6, 2005 4:38 PM.

My long-standing friend Josh Lilienstein is in town for the weekend, leading up to a med school interview this Monday. And, bucking the common wisdom of a quiet weekend of preparation, he instead spent yesterday rocking New York, beginning shortly after his arrival by Jet Blue red-eye from San Francisco when we headed into Central Park at 9:00am with a bottle of Hennesey and some Starbucks paper cups.

The day went happily downhill from there, with the two of us slurring through a slew of topics; one of the brightest people I know, Josh also has an exceedingly broad range of interests and knowledge, allowing us to - in the course of fifteen minutes - somehow skip from women to adipose biochemistry to Italian liquors to political theory. And while, at varying points of the day, we were more sober than at others, I don't suspect we ever crossed below the legal blood-alcohol limit for safe driving. Thank god for New York's subway-centric life.

So it was still not entirely sober that we headed uptown to Morningside Heights at 10:00pm, to meet the girl I've been blogging about, along with one of her college best friends and her literature PhD cohorts. Needless to say, I was a bit freaked out, as meeting friends is a crucial moment in any nascent relationship. Inevitably, at some point down the road, you'll do something to make a girl really, justifiably pissed off with you, and having her friends either rooting for or against you almost always decides your fate.

While I normally wouldn't much worry, as more than a few of my friends have pointed out, this was essentially our fourth date in just over a week - about the same tally that I usually hit in the first month of dating. So, basically, I really didn't want to screw it up.

The grad student party we first collectively hit was, admittedly, a bit short of the Platonic college party form (which ideally includes such elements as 'chug! chug! chug!'-shouting keg-stands and someone dancing on a table with a lampshade on their head), though I spent most of the first hour or two less concerned about the surroundings, and more concerned about just-starting-to-date etiquette. Within the larger party, she and I were privately carrying out the ritual of a middle school dance: slow progress from furtive across-the-room smiles and eye contact, to adjacent leg-brushing sitting to, finally, eventually, standing naturally next to each other, slightly intertwined, hand on back, arm around waist, or (most adventurous of all party stances!) hand in back pocket.

Through it all, it was actually her friends that saved me, as, fortunately, really liking people is far easier than simply pretending to. With each conversation, I eased back towards my natural self, as I discovered that literature PhD students are pretty much exactly my favorite sort of people: intelligent, neurotically over-analytic ones passionately pursuing some relatively obscure topic of interest. As the girl's closest friends turn out also to be attractive, articulate alcoholics, by the time we left the grad party to head to a nearby bar, I was happily convinced that I'd actually look forward to spending more time with them all.

And, mainly, I realized that I'm looking forward to spending more time with her. So when, a little after 3:00 in the morning, Josh and I finally bid the group adieu, as I kissed the girl goodbye on the stoop of the bar and she asked what I was doing Monday night, although I said I'd have to check my calendar to see, I was pretty sure, whatever it might be, I could probably rearrange my schedule.

more than one way to
Filed February 2, 2005 12:04 PM.

A little while back, I plugged CrossFit's Workout-of-the-Day as the best approach I'd found for high-level athletic training. I still think it is. And I'm even more impressed that they put up their WotD for free. So, to support them, I recently subscribed to their monthly journal, which talks through some of the theoretical underpinnings of their approach.

The latest issue, which I received yesterday, is all about gymnastics, about how great gymnastics movements are for developing general fitness. And, in the journal, they suggest that CrossFitters add a gymnastics stunt to their warm-ups, to learn them one at a time. Looking over their list for one to add in, I noticed they included 'skin the cat', which I remember hating, hating, hating when I last did gymnastics, at seven or eight years old. So, naturally, 'skin the cat' was the first one I tried.

For those who've never seen it, skinning the cat looks like this. Basically, you start in a regular pullup position, lift yourself into an inverted pullup position (where your legs are pointed up at the ceiling - the first frame in the photo), then keep rotating through. If your shoulders are flexible enough, you can roll all the way forward to an eagle grip (the last frame in the photo); if your shoulders are strong enough, you can then reverse the movement from that eagle grip position and flip back through the motion in the opposite direction to end up in a regular pullup again.

And, in short: Holy crap, I can totally do it! I can do it repeatedly! I could totally kick seven-year old me's ass!

terrorized
Filed February 1, 2005 11:20 AM.

In a letter to his wife, a Civil War soldier described war as 90 percent boredom and 10 percent sheer terror.

Making movies seems to follow that same mix; a lot of 'hurry up and wait', interspersed with brief stretches of ulcer-inducing frenetic action.

I'm starting to realize, though, that I greatly prefer the sheer terror part. So, really, if starting a distribution company while juggling a slew of films at different stages all at once pushes the sheer terror part to, say, 40 percent, though I should probably consequently be spending my days lying curled in the fetal position in the corner, sobbing softly from the stress of it all, instead, perversely enough, I'm thrilled.

getting it out of the way
Filed February 1, 2005 11:17 AM.

Since, if I don't write something about it, I'm going to get about fifty emails asking:

The second date was even better than the first.

[Further details once I figure out what to say that won't come across like a thirteen-year old girl's gushing IM's to her friends.]

gloating Filed February 27, 2005 6:07 PM.

disclaimer Filed February 27, 2005 10:37 AM.

captain obvious Filed February 26, 2005 9:39 PM.

sequestered Filed February 26, 2005 9:39 PM.

so i've been told Filed February 25, 2005 4:29 PM.

helping hand Filed February 23, 2005 5:01 PM.

a bit like being ceo Filed February 22, 2005 9:14 AM.

recapped Filed February 19, 2005 9:17 PM.

easy fun Filed February 16, 2005 6:58 PM.

eat my [own] shorts Filed February 16, 2005 6:47 PM.

warning: possible retinal damage Filed February 15, 2005 11:10 AM.

today's quote Filed February 15, 2005 11:06 AM.

hooked Filed February 14, 2005 8:41 PM.

exactly Filed February 13, 2005 10:49 AM.

r.i.p. Filed February 12, 2005 10:28 AM.

antiphon Filed February 10, 2005 9:00 AM.

fishbowl Filed February 9, 2005 8:37 AM.

tell me more Filed February 8, 2005 6:48 PM.

inevitable Filed February 7, 2005 3:52 PM.

life imitates "art" Filed February 6, 2005 4:51 PM.

first impressions Filed February 6, 2005 4:38 PM.

more than one way to Filed February 2, 2005 12:04 PM.

terrorized Filed February 1, 2005 11:20 AM.

getting it out of the way Filed February 1, 2005 11:17 AM.