Self-Aggrandizement: Autobiography Archives

Follicular
Filed October 3, 2006 8:44 PM.

It was about three and a half years back that I decided to grow a beard. I did it on a whim, as an exercise in sheer laziness, and for what, I assumed, would be a rather short stint.

But, after a month, having drawn nearly positive reviews, I decided to stick with it. I settled into a medium length - setting five on my now trusty Remington Precision MB-30 Beard Trimmer - and weathered such early bearded conundrum as whether I should shave pre-tropics, to ward off the apparent peril of inverted beard-tan should I stick with the beard in the short term, only to decide to lose it mid-fall.

As the priority of faux-aged gravitas waned in favor of general indie hipness, I clicked my Remington down to setting four, and then, about nine months back, to setting three. By now, even a day or two past setting three scruffiness (or, as per this weekend, four solid days past), I start to look and feel a bit too 'man of the woods' for my own taste. So, increasingly, I've taken to nearly daily trimming. And to nearly daily neck-hair trimming, a region I previously shaved completely, as it - if allowed to grow past its current merely scruffy state - yields a distressingly Amish look.

But, through it all, and despite subtly varying forms, I stuck with the beard. A few times along the way, I shaved completely, curious to see whether I still preferred my more hirsute self. And, each time, the beardless version looked, well, a bit less like me.

So, for the foreseeable future, at least, the beard stays in the picture. Which, taking into account savings on razors and shaving cream alone, should get me retired to the Bahamas just that much sooner. Albeit with a rather serious inverted beard tan.

Instrumental
Filed December 31, 2005 11:34 AM.

"Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."
- Samuel Butler

It's been just less than two weeks since I bought a nylon-string classical guitar as a Chanukah gift to myself. And, in that time, I've been busily practicing away, enough that small callouses have begun to form on the tips of my left-hand fingers.

During the first week, I dutifully worked my way through introductory etudes and exercises, eventually reaching the point that I could play something resembling Au Clair De La Lune at barely lumbering speed.

Then, last weekend, thumbing through the back of the method book, I discovered a transcription of Packington's Pound. I knew the song from Julian Bream's The Woods So Wild, a classical lute record I loved so much as a child that I made my parents play it for me nightly as I fell asleep. Though Packington's Pound was clearly well beyond my exceedingly limited guitar abilities, I set to work, beat by beat, trying to figure it out.

Through the weekend, I couldn't play even a single full measure. But, by Wednesday, much to my own surprise, I found I could strum a fairly good likeness of the entire piece. I turned back to the front of the book, and the earlier etudes that had dogged me just one week before seemed effortlessly easy. Apparently, by throwing myself into musical depths way above my head, by painfully but consistently muddling through, I made progress far faster than I would have by taking the more sensible, incremental approach.

And, looking back on 2005, looking back over the last few years, I see that same approach borne out through nearly all of my life. In work and play, love and friendship, I've drank direct from the fire hose. I've made mistakes, of such number and magnitude that I can no longer keep track. And I've learned far more in the process than someone of 26 years has any right.

So, to those I've hurt, offended or wronged, my sincere apologies. I think, at least, that I can promise I won't do it again in the same way, that I won't make the same mistakes twice. But, at the same time, I'll be spending 2006 swimming into deeper waters still. Preemptive apologies for the whole new collection of mistakes I'll doubtless find my way to pioneer throughout this coming year.

Sure, jumping in head-first isn't the easiest way to do things, but it's the best I've found so far. Time to take another year's worth of leaps.

---

For the past three or four days, I've been working on another far-too-difficult-for-me guitar piece, Snowflight, from Andrew York's beautiful suite The 8 Discernments. While I have an exceedingly long way to go on figuring out how toplay it well, this morning I recorded a quick MP3 of my muddling through. Enjoy:

Snowflight, performed by Joshua Newman

Indisposed
Filed May 22, 2005 10:29 PM.

It is impossible to grow up in Northern California without becoming, at least at some subconscious level, a tree-hugging long-haired hippie environmentalist.

I remember actively resisting this at several points along the way - refusing to finish even the first week, for example, of a summer day camp on a farm commune that made us thank 'the spirits of the fruits and grains' before lunchtime PB&J's.

But, despite my best efforts, the Earth Day attitude stuck. Just this morning, I caught myself turning off the water mid-toothbrushing, a long-standing habit that makes good sense in draught-ridden California, yet far less here in New York City, where rain has been pinging against my windowpanes all weekend long.

Water conservation aside, the thing that produces the greatest environmental guilt in me is disposability. Anything used once and then discarded, I envision piling atop the giant imaginary landfill dump that I carry around in the back of my brain. I can't tear a sheet off a roll of paper towels without questioning whether the spill is sufficiently large to warrant it, can't hear the inevitable register-side 'paper or plastic?' without chastising myself for not carrying around a canvas 'think globally, act locally' grocery bag.

So it is with great regret that I must admit to an intense and enduring crush on Procter & Gamble's Swiffer® line of products. Thanks to the WetJet, my kitchen and bathroom floors are, for the first time, if not clean enough to eat off of, at least no longer cause for alarmed comment from visiting friends.

Just this week, I similarly discovered the Swiffer Duster: little blue squares of what looks dismayingly like roofing insulation, strapped replaceably onto a long, blue, plastic pitchfork. Still, uninspiring appearance aside, with a thirty-second pass the Duster brought my bookshelves back to nearly new, saving me from the sneeze-inducing cloud that previously billowed with each volume pulled.

I've yet to fully accept the convenient, use-and-toss intentions of either of these products - I still occasionally cut deals with my conscience that require repeated use of the same cleaning pad if it's still possible to see some semblance of the initial color. But, day by trash-full day, I'm getting the hang of this whole expendable consumerism thing. Pretty soon, I'll be printing long internal documents on non-recycled paper with impunity, asking restaurants for more rather than less little napkins stuffed in the take-out bag.

Sure, I have years of 'reuse, reduce, recycle' to make up for, but I figure it still shouldn't be more than a decade until I can visit barren clear-cut acres they'll have named in my honor. And I'll be sure to bring several boxes of WetJet refills along. Because I bet, during those long centuries of redwood old growth, nobody ever bothered to mop.

Recess Eats
Filed April 28, 2005 11:20 PM.

My father was always the lunch-packer in my family. Meticulous in his approach, he'd carefully construct the contents of each elementary school bound paper sack, from Ziploc-ed sandwich to frozen box juice.

The juice, in his system, served a sort of critical double-duty - both as a drink, and as an ice-pack to keep the sandwich fresh through a morning of backpack confines.

Problem was, as the box slowly thawed, the outside would accumulate moisture. By the time even the first recess rolled around, each day's lunch bag had entirely soaked through, slowly turning into a moist brown pulp that stuck to the sides of my book bag, and wet textbook corners into slow fan-shaped expansion.

Having peeled off bag scraps, having piled the contents table-top in an undistinguished heap, the problems persisted. Because, even as the bag had been soaking, the contents of each sandwich, otherwise safe in plastic confines, had been similarly seeping through the bread.

Which, at the time, always took me by surprise. Certainly, given a few hours, ketchup should inevitably ooze through all but the hardiest whole wheats. But turkey? Who would guess that a slice of white meat's meager moisture would be sufficient to soak your standard sandwich slice?

Some sense of elementary-school propriety prevented me from telling my father about the problems at the time, though, in retrospect, I'm sure he would have been more than happy to help me solve them. Still, laboring on against the slow disintegration of each home-packed lunch, I always looked forward to the days when I could buy lunch at school instead.

Buy, I suppose, is a relative term, as we traded in not money but tickets for our chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. But, for a seven-year old, those tickets were better than gold - tradable for tinfoil trays of such timeless yet nowhere-else-found classics as 'Mexican Pizza'.

Even better were the prototypical Lunch Ladies serving up each meal, plump women at the far end of middle age, in hairnets and orthotics, hovering above us, spoon in hand, with menace and protective love in equal counts.

As I aged, as tinfoil and tater tots slowly gave way to Yale Dining Halls china and mashed 'potato' served with ice-cream scoops, even as I squared off against such incomprehensible foodstuffs as chunky, brown 'Soylada', school food always held a special place in my heart. Bland, monotonous, and devoid of nutritional value as it may have been, at least it was never a threat to the interior of my book bag, and simple to keep in its atomic, separated, individual, non-seeped-through parts.

the law
Filed March 1, 2005 9:19 AM.

When I was a little kid, say seven or eight years old, my internal alarm clock was completely broken. At four in the morning, while even most roosters snoozed, I'd pop out of bed, wide awake and ready to hit the day.

Obviously, my parents were less than thrilled with this. So, while our household normally had rather tightly controlled television rules (no watching on school days, etc.), that early in the morning, all bets were off. I was, in fact, even actively encourage to plop myself down on the couch, to watch (quietly!) whatever might be playing.

Unfortunately, 'whatever might be playing' at four in the morning is, well, not much. Mostly shows like that perennial favorite, "Modern Farmer". Still, things only seriously ran into a hitch when, one morning, at 7:00 (the earliest acceptable parent wake-up time), I dashed into my parents room to wake the slugabeds with a quick bit of mattress bouncing.

Groggily, my father asked what I had been watching that morning. One of my favorites, I replied: The Law.

The law, he asked?

Yes, I replied. You know, Jesus is the Law.

It was at about that point, I seem to recall, that my parents started stocking up on video tapes and taught me to use the VCR.

twenty-five
Filed July 15, 2004 7:34 PM.

On July 16th, 1979, at 2:27pm in the Stanford Hospital, I popped my head into this world. And, from that moment, I couldn't get enough of it.

In California, right after a baby is born, the nurse is required to put sliver nitrate drops into its eyes, to guard against infection. But those drops temporarily blur the baby's vision, and the nurse, telling my mother that she didn't remember ever seeing such an observant newborn, couldn't remember a baby who was trying so hard and so instantly to take it all in, waited until the last legal minute to put those drops in my eyes.

That's pretty much been the story of my first twenty-five years: cramming in as much as possible, trying to fit it all in. Take, for example, just this last year:

I got some excellent work done, and realized how very much more I have to do.

My heart broke, then mended into something more full and whole.

I made a mess of things by being constantly full of shit, and have been working on cleaning up the mess day by radically honest day.

I had some wonderful times and some horrible times.

I had some trying times and some rewarding times.

And as much as there were some things I'd do differently on a second pass, I wouldn't possibly want to give up any of it.

Looking back, I can't see how it all fit into just one year, or, really, how it all fit in to just twenty-five of them. Which, frankly, is sort of a relief, because I have at least that much to cram into the next twenty-five.

back to the books
Filed April 27, 2004 1:14 PM.

The very best part of the house in which I grew up was that it sat about a block and a half from the Palo Alto Children's Library. The library and my house were separated by a single quiet street, and I remember vividly finally being old enough to cross that street alone - it meant I could head to the library whenever I wanted, or, more precisely, whenever I had finished a book. At the time, that meant trips nearly daily.

Walking in the library door, I was treated like a regular at the Four Seasons. Everyone greeted me by name. Recently purchased books I might like were set aside, ready for checking out. By my recommendation, books hidden deep in the shelves were moved to featured positions on the carrols. By the time I moved on to the adult library, I had gone through a stack of library cards, wearing the stripes off each.

I read voraciously through high school as well, pretending to be asleep when my parents would check on me so I could switch the bedside lamp back on and turn page after page until I finally finished a book in the small hours of the morning.

When I hit college, however, my pace slowed dramatically. Certainly, I accumulated a slew of class texts - but as a double major in neuroscience and computer science, there wasn't much on my shelves that could be mistaken for pleasure reading. What little time and energy I might have had for further reading was eaten up by the companies I was starting, the musical groups with which I was playing, or my burgeoning alcoholism. Between it all, reading, and fiction reading in particular, fell by the wayside.

Post-college, I came back to reading fiction in fits and starts. I'd pick up a book and consume it whole. At its end, though, without another to leap immediately onto, whatever small momentum I had built petered. I'd go several weeks before picking up another novel or short story collection, enjoy it enough to curse myself for falling of the fiction wagon, then again wait several weeks more to start another.

Recently, however, the momentum I needed, the long stretch of one book after another it took to get me back into my old ways, came not from fiction, but rather from business books. Setting out to write one of my own, I piled for re-reading the ten or twelve such books I had drawn on most in my busienss past. Driven by the excitement about my own project, I blew through each with startling speed, taking notes along the way. Suddenly, wherever I was - in the kitchen cooking, riding the subway, waiting for a film screening to start - I had a book in hand, filling errant moments with as many paragraphs as I could sneak in.

Those books finished, and with nothing on my shelves calling out my name, I started invading the collections of my roommates. Both writers, they had each amassed row after row of fiction I'd never read. I'd pick up a book one evening, and by the next find I was 200 pages deep. At the end of each, I'd replace the suddenly lifeless block of paper on their shelves, and pluck out the next.

I'm on my fourth book of the past week. And I can't help but think those Children's Library librarians would be rather pleased.

cultural literacy
Filed April 15, 2004 8:05 AM.

While at Yale, I ended up playing the pit of one of Sondheim's musicals, which featured a number in which the two leads pretend to be Jackie and JFK, accents and all.

Following a run through at the pit band's first rehearsal with the performers, I couldn't help but shout out "Chowdah! Chowdah!". Onstage, the female lead responded 'Chow-dehr! Chow-dehr!", and I fairly leapt to my feet. It's the closest I've ever been to love at first sight.

household vignettes
Filed January 14, 2004 9:53 AM.

While here in Palo Alto, I'm staying at my parents house - in my old room, in fact, though by now my mother has co-opted the space into her office, replacing dressers with file cabinets, piling her paper and research materials onto my emptied bookshelves. The room's front window has been replaced by a much larger one, the overhead light changed, but my bed still dominates one corner of the room, exactly where it sat when I was growing up.

Working from home during the day, between calls and emails, I catch myself simply wandering around, gauging the feel of rooms, of closets, corners and small spaces. Absently, I pick up old knick-knacks to test their weight in my hands, to see what memories might be hidden inside. I crouch to feel the texture of our living room carpet, and can feel again the rug burns from wrestling around on the floor, afternoon after afternoon, with my younger brother.

A few things I noticed this morning:

1. Bedroom Tassel

Bedroom Tassel

My Freshman year at Yale, as first semester moved towards a close, my parents and I developed a running joke throughout my calls home. "I can't wait to sleep in my own bed," I would tell them, the dorm by then still not quite feeling like home. "Actually," my father would reply, "we're taking out your bed. I think we're going to replace it with a Javanese Gamelan. But you can sleep on top of that."

There were other, similar, threatened changes as well, and my response to all of them was the same: "I think you should keep the room unchanged, in perpetuity. Just hang a tassel from the ceiling and make the room into a shrine to me." I was remarkably good-natured about it, I think - I even offered to let my parents keep the money made by charging admission to the shrine.

For a month or two, the joke played on: shrine vs. Javanese gamelan, et al. When I finally came home, dragged my duffel bag into my bedroom, and looked up: hanging from the ceiling was the much discussed red shrine tassel. Apparently, the week before my arrival, my parents had actually headed into Chinatown and picked one up.

To this day, the sight of that tassel makes me smile. It's a reminder that, in my case, the inevitable turning into my parents might not be so bad after all. And that, no matter how office-ified my old room becomes, with the tassel hanging, it's still, deep down, my very own shrine.

2. Backyard Playhouse

Backyard Playhouse

When I was seven, and my brother four, my father decided to build us a playhouse in the corner of our backyard. He built it himself - technically with my help, though I can't imagine the seven year-old me provided much actual assistance. I do, however, vividly recall both painting the house's exterior, then heading down to an airplane parts junkyard in San Jose, where we picked up a variety of cockpit parts (a control stick and wheel, a handful of mismatched gauges) which we mounted to the inside walls.

My brother and I spent countless hours piloting the house to the moon and beyond, defending it from oncoming imaginary hordes, or just hiding from our parents to secretly discuss whatever issues dominate the minds of six and nine year-old boys.

By now, the house is hidden away, tucked behind a bench and a small potted tree. Inside, the linoleum floor is peeling, covered with dried leaves, a few old toys still in a basket in the back corner. My head brushes the roof (at 5'6", an unusual occurrence!). Still, in there, I can't help but feel vaguely delighted, ready to head up to the moon, or just to cause juvenile trouble all over again.

3. Garbage Shed

Garbage Shed.

Towards the front of the backyard is a small roofless shed, gated off from the rest of the yard, to hold garbage cans and piles of recyclables. Before my parents replaced their wood-burning fireplace with a gas-burning faux-fire, we piled firewood out there, and the memory of constantly finding black widows in the pile still raises the hairs on the back of my neck whenever I open the shed's gate.

I must admit, I've always been rather arachnophobic. Sure, I can play tough, carry out the requisite boyfriend duty of spider-removal. But the sight of those eight segmented legs always secretly makes me shiver. Other phobias, I've systematically, purposefully overcome - I initially took up climbing, for example, to conquer a fear of heights. But I'm happy to stay a bit scared by spiders. Or, rather, I don't see any need to get buddy-buddy with them - I do my own thing, they do theirs, and we're cool. Still, if I'm sitting in my parents backyard, and I notice the garbage shed's gate is open, I'll always head over to close it. Just in case.

umm... ahh... umm....
Filed October 2, 2003 1:10 PM.

Normally, I'm a reasonably articulate guy. Even in the presence of an exceedingly attractive girl - kryptonite for many men - I can be (at least moderately) charming, smart and funny. Yet, every so often, I meet a girl who, for whatever reason, completely confounds me. In her presence, I'm absolutely unable to complete grammatical sentences, much less to convey anything endearing through them.

When I was in ninth grade, I had a huge crush on such a girl: Steph, a tenth grader directing a play in which I was acting. And though I was (inarticulately) smitten through much of high school, I hadn't seen her since she had graduated, some eight years back. So I was particularly surprised when, one evening just a few months ago, she materialized at the New York City house party of an (apparently mutual) friend.

Sure, previously her mere presence had turned me completely imbecilic. But I had changed and matured immensely over the intervening near-decade. Frankly, I wasn't even sure if I was still attracted to her.

Or, at least that's what I was saying to a group of friends as she made her way across the room. Yet, as soon as I turned to greet her, smiling confidently, what actually came out of my mouth was something along the lines of: "Are how you going?"

I write this mainly because, in the next week or two, I'll be heading out on two dates - one with a charmingly complex bloggeress, the other with an actual Rockette - both of which threaten to similarly send me into semi-retardation. Sure, I'll be hoping to maintain my conversational best. But this weekend, as a backup plan, I'll also be polishing my most charming silent body language. Just in case.

stranger than fiction
Filed September 14, 2003 5:58 PM.

This afternoon, walking in the door to my apartment on the way back from a jazz gig with an all-lesbian big band, my roommate Colin stopped me to ask if I thought we might be willing to adopt Steve Buscemi's cat.

Follicular Filed October 3, 2006 8:44 PM.

Instrumental Filed December 31, 2005 11:34 AM.

Indisposed Filed May 22, 2005 10:29 PM.

Recess Eats Filed April 28, 2005 11:20 PM.

the law Filed March 1, 2005 9:19 AM.

twenty-five Filed July 15, 2004 7:34 PM.

back to the books Filed April 27, 2004 1:14 PM.

cultural literacy Filed April 15, 2004 8:05 AM.

household vignettes Filed January 14, 2004 9:53 AM.

umm... ahh... umm.... Filed October 2, 2003 1:10 PM.

stranger than fiction Filed September 14, 2003 5:58 PM.