Self-Aggrandizement: Disclosures Archives

Vindication?
Filed August 16, 2009 8:29 PM.

For at least the last decade, I've been obsessed with lazy eyes. First and foremost, with celebrities who have them - Paris Hilton, Keri Russell, Tina Fey.

But secondly, and perhaps more terrifyingly, with the possibility that I might have one myself. And that, even worse, like the sufferer of persistent halitosis, I'd be the last to know about it.

Obviously, that's a ridiculous concern. Which I know because I've both analyzed enough of my own photos to confirm eyeball alignment, and because, every time I tell someone about my ocular neurosis, they jump in to reassure me.

But fast-forward to a month or so back, when I'm picking out a pair of sunglasses from one of Jess' client, Jordan Silver, owner of a high-end vintage sunglass boutique. I call in to my uncle (and optometrist) Robert, and ask his office to fax over my prescription.

Diopter. Astigmatism. Prism.

Prism?, I ask.

Yes, Jordan explains. Prism. Correction for a tendency of the eyes to try and pull apart in use.

As in, a lazy eye?

Well, technically, yes. Not the kind (like strabismus) that fascinates me most. But a form of lazy eye nonetheless.

Shyster
Filed July 31, 2008 6:14 PM.

While I don't have a law degree, after eleven years of running contract-intensive companies, I do sort of feel like I've gone through law school from the other side.

And while I'm bad, my CFO is worse; he previously worked for a few years as a strategic consultant at a law firm, and he's taken to referring to his position at Cyan as 'war time consigliere'.

This week, however, as we've been neck-deep in finalizing the PPM (for those without even an imagined law degree, 'private placement memorandum') that serves as the next step in our MovieSTAR hedge fund fundraising, it's become readily apparent that we're not, actually, attorneys at all.

Because while real ones can somehow spend all day, every day, reading their way through page after page after page of exceedingly dense legalese, we can only make it about twenty minutes at a stretch before our eyes glaze over to the point of effective blindness.

Which is all to say, it's a damn good thing I didn't go to law school in a spurt of mercenary money-chasing; I'm pretty sure I'd have ended up offing myself years before I even made partner.

Susurrus
Filed May 25, 2008 11:41 AM.

I'm a talker. So it should be little surprise that, even while sleeping, I continue to jabber away.

According to Jess, however, my intelligible words are few and far between. Deep asleep one night this week, for example, I apparently slapped my chest twice, thrust my arm into the air, and shouted, "halfway!" But, even then, a few minutes later, another chest slap and arm thrust was followed by "spreak!", a phrase for which I have no real explanation.

More frequently, it seems, I just mumble.

"Hapatapapatapa...," I'll say.

Recently, Jess has taken to playing along.

"Oh, really, hapatapapata?" she'll ask, to which I invariably respond, "mmmhmmmm."

While I'm not much of a somnolent conversationalist - my entire set of answers limited to shades of "mmmhmmm" - I'm apparently still relatively expressive. I have a contented "mmmhmmm", for example, and another when I'm annoyed to have her bothering me mid-oration.

It's apparently a family trait, as my grandmother used to drive herself to tears of laughter through similar nonsensical exchanges with my mother, when my mother was a girl. And whenever I share a room with my brother David, he keeps me up through the night with buzz-saw snoring punctuated with long, mumbled chains of semi-words.

Which makes me think I'm probably less than a joy myself. Still, as Jess continues her long-held traditions of both stealing all the covers, and kicking me, hard, while asleep, I'm calling it even on calling it a night.

Look Both Ways
Filed May 20, 2008 5:39 PM.

I am, it turns out, obsessed with lazy eyes. I hadn't realized as much, until Jess pointed out the frequency and gleefulness with which I observe them - from celebrities (god bless you, Paris Hilton) to passersby on the street.

But any time I observe ailments in others, I can't help but worry I possess the same myself. A close-talker with halitosis invariably leaves me cupping my mouth and nose to test my own breath.

So the wall-eye obsession is a double-edged sword. Sure, I find unexpected joy in Tina Fey's outward-swinging eyeballs. But, at the same time, they leave me scheming methods for candid self-portraits, where I might catch such previously undiagnosed strabismus in myself.

Dire Situation
Filed March 14, 2008 11:45 AM.

Inexplicably, there's no running water in Cyan's office today, a bit of a problem given that I - like most of my team - drink through several bottles of water daily, and consequently pee like clockwork every half-hour.

Crap. Or, rather, not.

Still Down for the Count
Filed February 27, 2008 8:04 PM.

Jess and I spent another day tucked feverishly in bed, a la the Charlie and Chocolate Factory grandparents.

Sort of like a honeymoon. Except with Gatorade instead of fun.

Misery Loves Company
Filed February 26, 2008 7:00 PM.

Jess has the flu.

So, now, I do too.

Recap
Filed December 27, 2007 11:04 AM.

I have a long and loserly tradition of spending a morning each year, just before New Years, thinking through the past year, and formulating goals and plans for the next.

This year, looking back, it's pretty clear 2007 has been a decidedly mixed bag.

On the excellent news side, there's getting engaged (I love you Jess!) and opening and building a thriving CrossFit NYC gym (I don't love you, CFNYC members, but I at least strongly like you!).

And, on the less excellent news side, there's Cyan, where - due to both unexpected outside forces (including, primarily, someone contracting Mad Cow Disease [yes, seriously]) and inside ones (including, primarily, me being an idiot) - we basically treaded water for the entire year.

Still, in this very last week of 2007, Cyan seems to be surging ahead - we've had three big pieces of positive news in the past three and a half days - so I'm hopeful that I can hit the ground in 2008 running, once again, at full speed on all cylinders.

Looks like it should be a busy year.

Footsy
Filed November 12, 2007 4:39 PM.

Here's something I don't often admit: I was a ballerina.

Okay, technically, I was a danseur. But still.

My mother, who did masters work in dance at Stanford, enrolled me in ballet at a very young age. And I loved it. I was good at it. I danced for years, until, presumably, the fear of cooties contamination from such a female-dominated pursuit caused me to rebel.

Looking back, of course, I realize I should have stuck it out a few more years. Post-cooties, I would have been one of the very few straight guys surrounded by a swarm of lithe women in spandex.

But, anyway, I stopped. Still, to this day, I often look down and catch myself in first position. I have terminal, intractable duck feet.

About a month ago, I badly sprained my ankle. Seeing me hobbling around on crutches and air cast, a physical therapist friend pointed out that my 'everted feet' might be to blame. He sent me a copy of the Egoscue Method, in the hopes that fixing my post-ballet posture might save my ankle from a repeatedly sprained fate, and similarly protect my knees - the next joint to go in what appears to be a fairly standard progression.

And, well, I think he might be right. Egoscue's theory is persuasive, and though I've only been doing the exercises for about a week, and so can't yet vouch much for the results, I already feel better. I'm standing a bit more solidly, with my joints squarely aligned from my ankles up through my shoulders and neck.

His other books, Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC also seem to have garnered rave reviews. So, if you find you're not standing how you'd like, or if you have pain in your back, your shoulders, your knees or your wrists, they might be worth a read. I'll post a further review after I've had a chance to do the exercises for another month or two. But, in the meantime, for ten bucks a pop, seems certainly worth checking out for yourself.

Merde!

Complain, Complain
Filed July 11, 2007 4:19 PM.

Yesterday evening, I smashed my finger in my brother's front door.

It was my left ring finger - or, rather, just the tip of it, as I managed to close his heavy metal door right on the middle of my nail.

I've broken fingers more times than I can count, mostly during my years of wrestling and competitive fighting. But, back then, I always managed to break or fracture well up towards the first knuckle, between the MCP and PIP joints.

And while that hurts, it's nothing, nothing compared to smashing the hell out of your nailbed.

Or at least that's how it seems to me now. Which could either mean that it really is much more painful. Or, conversely, that I've turned into a total pussy in the intervening years.

How am I Funny to You?
Filed September 7, 2006 2:52 PM.

Despite, as this site suggests, liking to think about myself, I'm not normally a big fan of online tests. Certainly not of the sort that categorizes you into some type. ("The Star Wars personality sorter says you're C3PO!")

Nonetheless, on a friend's recommendation, I took OkCupid's 3 Variable Funny Test, and was surprised to see the description it yielded was pretty much dead on:

Type: The Cutting Edge

Your humor's mostly innocent and off-the-cuff, but somehow there's something slightly menacing about you. Part of your humor is making people a little uncomfortable, even if the things you say aren't themselves confrontational. You probably have a very dry delivery.

Your type is the most likely to appreciate a good insult and/or broken bone and/or very very fat person dancing.

Ah, very very fat person dancing; I laugh out loud each I time I even read that phrase.

Ragnarök
Filed June 25, 2006 9:43 AM.

Yesterday afternoon, sitting in a bar at La Guardia airport, waiting for a flight to San Francisco by way of Detroit for a short three-day jaunt of public speaking, deal signing and employee hiring, I watched a show on ESPN called Viking.

And, in short, it's good that I don't have a television, or else I'd spend all day re-watching Tivo'ed episodes of this show, as it's absolutely my new favorite in the entire world.

Essentially, it involves a succession of Japanese guys running at top speed through 'The Ultimate Obstacle Course', while a pair of American color commentators inanely summarize the action ("Nagano's agility, built through years as a commercial fisherman, really shines on this rope maze.", etc.)

But, really, it's not so much that I want to watch the show; It's that I want to be on it. Or, better yet, it's that I want to live somewhere where I can have a giant Ultimate Obstacle Course of my very own built in the back yard.

Because, get liquored up with a few friends, go barreling through that sucker, and I guarantee you're going to have an entertaining night.

Freshman Fifteen, Ten Years Late
Filed June 12, 2006 11:10 PM.

Most of the time I was in college, I was trying to gain weight. Influenced by some combination of He-Man episodes and Mens Health covers, I - like most of the guys I knew - was convinced that bigger would be better. I took creatine and bench pressed and drank protein shakes and ate and ate. And, the whole time, I stayed 135 pounds.

Which, at 5'6", put me at precisely the same size as Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. A fact I began to appreciate post-college, as I started to compete in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai fights. The very real threat of getting my ass kicked in front of a crowd kept me honest in the gym, convinced me of the relative importance of function over cosmetics.

But, appreciative or not, I didn't have much choice: In the five years since college, I stayed at 135 pounds so consistently that I didn't replace the batteries in my scale when they died about a year and a half back.

Still, last week, in the locker room at the gym where I teach CrossFit classes, I absentmindedly stepped onto a scale, to play with the old sliding-weight mechanism. And clocked in at 150 pounds. Assuming the scale was simply out of whack, I went home, re-batteried my own scale, and weighed myself again. Still 150 pounds.

A caliper test - and the equally reliable 'jump up and down naked in front of a mirror' - confirmed that I'm still floating around 8% body fat. Which means, in theory, that I've put on some fifteen pounds of muscle.

Certainly, college-aged me would be thrilled. But, so far as I can tell, I look exactly, exactly, like I did fifteen pounds ago.

I said as much this weekend in Denver, to my brother, my parents, my grandmother, my aunt. And, by consensus, none of them had any idea where those extra fifteen pounds went.

Except for my eleven-year old cousin. Who, at several points, knocked on my leg to determine if it might actually be hollow.

Why I'm Not Blogging
Filed May 26, 2006 11:49 AM.

Looking at my Gmail inbox this morning, and feeling like a bad Tetris player as I watched the lines pile up far faster than I could clear them out, I decided to take a moment and tally my email count for the past month.

On average: just over 200 pieces of 'legit' email and just short of 450 pieces of spam, each and every day.

Looks like it's time to return to my old trick of stopping sleeping and gong to the bathroom to free up time.

In Brief
Filed April 17, 2006 5:38 PM.

About three years back, I observed that men are loath to part with beloved clothing items: sweaters, jeans, t-shirts, and - particularly - underwear. Given a trusty pair of boxers, I said, "we'll keep washing and wearing... until it's disintegrated to nothing more than a waistband and a few hanging threads."

And while, fortunately, my own have not yet reached that state, they are undoubtedly looking rather rough around the edges. (Literally. One of the first things to go, it seems, is the waistband elastic.)

So, this past weekend, I set out shopping. By broad female consensus, boxer briefs remained the only suitable way to go. But, for reasons I've never quite discerned, nearly every designer - including my own long-preferred Calvin Klein - seems to sell their pairs in only black, navy and heather gray.

On my way to a department store, however, I stopped to pick up a hard drive I had lent to a friend some months back. And, next door to his office, I noticed Gap holding its REALLY BIG SALE. (Capitalization theirs.) With some time to kill, and my mind in shopping mode, I decided to pop inside.

Lo and behold, Gap, of all places, had somehow veered away from the tri-color hegemony. Even better, they had reshaped their boxer briefs' cut, away from what previously looked like foreshortened long underwear to a much hipper 'athletic square cut'. And, best of all, the sale took the price per pair to a scant $6.99

So, now, my underwear drawer has, once again, been wholesale refreshed, au courant with an array of stripes, primary colors, and even one pair emblazoned with little green alligators knit right into the fabric.

I've previously admitted my belief in lucky underwear, and can therefore say I'm particularly excited to discover the effects of that alligatored pair.

They look auspicious indeed.

Jack Bauer Ate My Weekend
Filed April 2, 2006 9:43 PM.

A bit more than a month back, I posted here trying to justify not having television. Tie into the cable network, I protested, and I'd be "dragged by the gateway drugs of The West Wing and Law & Order onto the icy top of a long, slippery slope that runs down, down, down, through Desperate Housewives, Survivor 8 and re-runs of Full House."

Turns out, however, that even without cable, protected by my standard practice of Netflix-ing past seasons of TV shows one disc at a time, a catchy enough show can still be my undoing.

Friday evening, I threw in the first disc of the first season of 24. By Sunday afternoon, I had downloaded and watched my way through all twenty-four episodes of the first season.

I have, as a result, pre-emptively removed the subsequent seasons from my Netlfix queue. Clearly, I should stop now before this gets any worse.

Spiked
Filed March 28, 2006 5:54 PM.

Though, a week ago, the fu manchu was, according to one blogger I then met, "one of those faint, prepubescent mustaches that look like the wearer has just finished drinking Yoohoo and forgot to wipe his lip," it quickly grew out to something more terrifyingly bushy, something that received even worse reviews.

So, as of this morning, I'm back to clean-shaven, though likely to return - out of equal parts style and sloth - to my scruffy-bearded standard.

At the same time, my hair (as in head-top, rather than facial) has also reached the latter stages of the cut-grow-grow cycle. At the start of each such circuit, my hair spikes up, entirely on its own. So, in an effort to imply intentionality, I often use pomade during that first stage, as if to say, 'yes, it's supposed to look like this.'

Somewhere along the way, however, my hair loses its alfafa enthusiasm, laying down in such a way as to invite (at least when beardless) frequent comparison to Matthew Broderick. And, normally, at that point I stop using pomade.

But, this time through, oddly enthralled with the idea of stylistic self-experimentation (regardless of the distinct non-success of Project Fu Manchu), I've decided to keep pomading, and keep growing, as long as I can get my hair to stand straight up.

I've begun to discover already that doing so requires far more gel than usual - may soon even necessitate a whole new stronger, firmer-holding compound. But that shouldn't deter me. Already, I'm achieving a solid two-plus scalp-top vertical inches. And, god knows, I could use the extra height.

Sucker
Filed March 27, 2006 10:13 PM.

Put me on any flight longer than three hours, and, somewhere along the way, I'll read the Sky Mall Catalogue cover to cover.

I've been doing so for at least a decade. And, in all that time, I've never actually purchased anything from it.

I do the same with a handful of other catalogues: Crate and Barrel, Herrington, Design Within Reach. When they appear in my mailbox, I can't help but thumb my way through, will even dog-ear a page here and there, as if to convince myself that maybe, this time, despite years and years of uninterrupted experience to the contrary, I'll actually whip out a credit card and put in and order.

And It isn't just catalogues. Back before I killed my television, if I surfed past an infomercial - be it for ginsu knives, vacuum cleaners or ab machines - I'd inevitably watch it, transfixed, the rest of the way through.

I don't know why I do, nor why I derive pleasure from simply considering without actually purchasing. But, given the number of flights I take each year, not buying any of those lusted-after Sky Mall items has doubtless already saved me thousands upon thousands of dollars.

So, when I finally do call in to order the indoor electric-powered waterfall fountain, I figure I'm totally, completely justified in buying the really, really big one.

Mashed
Filed March 19, 2006 11:32 PM.

I am, admittedly, both a snob and an alcoholic. Given the two, most people assume I must like scotch.

But, in truth, I've never really been a fan. In part because taking scotch too seriously as a twenty-something always strikes me as effortful, effete. And, in part, because I'm just not a fan of the way it tastes.

Still, every gentleman needs something to drink off the rocks, to sip neat. So, for years, I've been making my way through golden-brown beverage choices, looking for one to call my own.

I came close with cognac - but soon found even low-end choices to be prohibitively expensive across a drink-filled night about town. Barrel-aged rum, too, seemed a near fit, until I discovered the percentage of bars that stock nothing beyond Bacardi - acceptable on the rocks as a fifth drink of the evening, though less so as a first.

A month or so back, however, I discovered a definitive answer - one already sitting in my liquor cabinet.

Colin and I were six or seven hours into a late-night editing session, synching sound for Underground, staring at monitors full of Final Cut until our eyes had long since glazed. My liquor supplies having dwindled dangerously low, and in deference to Colin's Kentucky roots, I pulled down from the back of the cabinet a bottle of Woodford Reserve - a bottle I'd received as a gift, and had left unopened for a year and change, knowing that I don't like bourbon.

Or, rather, believing that I don't like bourbon. Because, it turns out, I do. A lot. Some more than others - Woodford or Makers Mark seeming much more to my taste than, say, Knob Creek.

I haven't yet had time to sample the wide array of base-level consumer choices, much less to test out the slew of high-end options. Still, I'm already sure bourbon is it - is my drink. It tastes right. It tastes like coming home.

Hollow Leg
Filed February 27, 2006 9:10 AM.

I eat a lot of food. I mean, a lot of food. I always joke that, while I don't think I could win an eating contest, if there were a '24 hour total' competition, where the winner was the person who consumed the most calories in a single 24 hour stretch, I could easily crush all comers. There's no meal so large that, two hours later, I couldn't sit down and eat the same thing again.

This is particularly odd given that, by any account, I'm not very large: 5'6", 140 pounds. At that size, even using equations that incorporate my high activity level, I should need to consume somewhere around 2100 calories daily.

Usually, that's what I consume by lunch.

Honestly, I don't know where the food goes. Maybe I have a tape worm.

Over the years of running companies, my eating has been the butt of ongoing jokes: "Do we need to stop in at Subway and feed Newman before the meeting?" "I don't know, it could last as long as an hour; can he go that long without food?"

And, of course, it jacks up my grocery bill unbelievably; I can easily eat my way through $150 of supplies within a seven day span, without even counting the numerous business breakfasts, lunches, and dinners intermixed therein.

But, mainly, all that eating garners from friends and family of all ages dire warnings about the inevitable, impending slowdown of my metabolism, and of a consequent slow ballooning into late-twenties obesity.

People tell me about their friend, or child, or husband, or self, who used to be thin as a rail, until he hit 27, when all of a sudden, his metabolism slowed and he porked up.

And they tell me this as though I'm eating every half-hour because I don't have anything better to do. But, really, trust me, if my calorie needs dropped, if I could somehow eat a normal number of meals a day instead of having to constantly stuff my face, I'd be thrilled - thrilled! - at the time and money saved.

Until then, however, the eating continues. Literally, as I'm off to cook up a second breakfast.

Bon appetit.

The Tube
Filed February 26, 2006 3:30 PM.

I don't have TV.

I don't mean that I don't have a physical television - because I do. I just don't get live programming - cable, broadcast or otherwise. Nothing but DVDs.

And not because of some vague, haughty sense of moral 'superiority'. I'm not one of those no-TV people who, when someone else is discussing a new HBO show, will smile disdainfully, say, "I'm sorry, I don't have a television", then stare off, self-satisfied, into the middle distance.

Instead, it is out of profound inferiority that I don't have television. The problem is, if I do have it, I watch it.

Which, arguably, is the point of having it in the first place. But, as I said, I'm well below average in my dealings with television. I'm addiction-prone, dragged by the gateway drugs of The West Wing and Law & Order onto the icy top of a long, slippery slope that runs down, down, down, through Desperate Housewives, Survivor 8 and re-runs of Full House.

Over the years, I've slowly come to recognize in myself the procrastinatory inertia that makes going out and really doing wonderful, exciting things - the things I treasure for years, even as the rest of my daily endeavours blur behind me into an unrecognizable mass - a constant battle. And, simply put, having television just doesn't help. It's one more temptation, one more internal set of arguments. It's a painless route to forgoing reality in favor of reality TV.

So, in short, I don't have TV. I haven't for the last year and a half. And in that time, as I've slowly forced myself to stop watching and start doing, I've been reminded again: life isn't a spectator sport.

Come Here Often?
Filed December 7, 2005 7:18 PM.

Speaking of alone and bored, it occurred to me recently that I haven't been on a real date since I broke up with Abigail this summer. Which, as long-standing readers will doubtless note, flies in the face of both prior practice and (admittedly somewhat deserved) reputation.

It's just that, with so much going on, with so much time spent out of town, with not more than single-week stretches at home since mid-summer, I simply haven't had the chance to disastrously sleep my way through New York City.

Tragic, I know, and doubtless deleterious to the content of this site. So, spurred on by necessity, I headed back to Nerve, the only dating site I've ever used. (And even then, just once - the first email I sent locked a date that kicked off an [uncharacteristically long] seven-month relationship.)

Then, as Nerve has apparently started sucking, I also headed off to JDate (are you happy Mom?) and Consumating (where I has apparently registered a year back when the site was brand new, and had since been tagged 'beautiful' and 'misanthrope', the second half of which, at least, is probably right).

I'll therefore, again, shortly be heading out into the fray of New York single life. Wish me luck, and remind me to wear my bean-proof shirt.

[Also: Hi, potential dates who have Google-stalked me back to this site! Don't worry, I'd never write about you! Okay, that's not true. But I at least promise I won't use your name!]

Smooth
Filed October 26, 2005 4:44 PM.

When we were growing up, my brother and I used to joke that, if my father were to die, we would have him made into a fireplace-front rug.

Which is to say, he's fairly hairy. Apparently, however, that fact eluded him for some time. Famously, shortly after he and my mother were married in their early twenties, when he was already verging on gorilla, the two of them went to Jones Beach with my mother's sister. As a middle-aged man walked by, my father commented, 'you know what I think is really gross? Back hair.' Which led the two ladies to share concerned glances, implying the question, "which one of us has to tell him?"

This seminal story stuck with me for at least two reasons: first, it explicated the dangers of unnoticed back hair, and second, it indicated that, genetically, if I was at risk of looking like Teen Wolf myself, it would likely already have kicked in.

By now, having made it all the way to 26, I think I may finally be in the clear. But, heeding the other lesson of that family story, about once a week, I adjust the mirrored doors of my bathroom cabinets so that one faces the other, allowing me to double-check.

And, if I ever were to find a villous matting, I know my younger brother would come through. Still in his perilous early twenties, he keeps an electrolysist on speed-dial. Just in case.

When the Saints
Filed September 20, 2005 8:40 AM.

In the wake of Katrina, I've read countless interviews of New Orleans musicians who've been called upon nearly nonstop to perform at jazz funerals.

For those not familiar with the ritual, a jazz funeral begins with musicians accompanying mourners to graveside, underscoring with slow marches and somber dirges. The body is 'cut loose' from earthly ties, laid peacefully to rest.

Then, the musicians and mourners raise horns and voices to the heavens, singing the spirit upwards with the raucous music of the French Quarter, of the pubs and dives and dance halls of Storyville. The musicians and mourners dance in the street and sing and eat and party until they collapse.

As one well-known jazz historian explained, "we celebrate and laugh at life. So we must celebrate and laugh at death."

Which, I think, is exactly right. Or, at least, exactly what I want. When I kick the bucket, don't give me somber memorials. Skip the eulogies and quiet tears. Once I'm in the ground, play and sing and drink and eat. Party until it hurts.

Monologue
Filed July 6, 2005 7:55 PM.

Sport psychologists often say that a key trait of the best athletes is constant visualization - playing through, in their minds' eyes, upcoming competitions, again and again, until, when they come to a big event itself, it seems like nothing new.

I, instead, and likely far less helpfully, tend to visualize post-facto. After a conversation, I run it repeatedly in my head, tweaking what I said or what they said, working out more clever responses than I could possibly have generated in that first, in-the-moment pass.

The problem is, recently, somewhere in all of those conversational re-runs, I forget that I'm supposed to be doing them only internally. Mid-conversation, I'll suddenly say my next line out loud: "Sure, in Kansas," or "Anybody can option the script."

It isn't until the full sentence is out of my mouth, however, that I realize I've somehow moved from inner world to outer. Then, guiltily, like someone who trips on a curb and tries to dance it off, I act the next few moments as if it were entirely intentional to have suddenly voiced a non-sequitur, out of nowhere, and to nobody in particular.

And, frankly, it never really works. But, at least, I can replay that recovery, again and again in my head, until I've come up with something that would.

Pissed
Filed May 21, 2005 9:10 PM.

By the demands of business and pleasure, I travel frequently. So frequently that, when Jet Blue introduced a rewards program a few years back, I was within the first ten to rack up a free trip.

Having logged enough miles to know first-hand the odds of safely reaching my destination, I should be a calm, collected flier. Instead, I'm increasingly phobic, knowing too well each expected whirr and beep: altitude markers, well-adjusted ailerons, fully-engaged landing gear. During a flight, at least a quarter of my brain is consumed with monitoring such sounds. Was that clang right? And, if not, have the flight attendants huddled in back for last tearful goodbyes?

The other three quarters of my in-flight brain are rarely focused on sleep or actual, productive work - two things I do poorly in general, but particularly so on planes. Instead, I spend my time thinking about the least embarrassing moment to use the bathroom.

Put me in a pressurized cabin, and my bladder suddenly shrinks to the size of a walnut. Or perhaps, due to years of my mother's admonitions, it's just that I spend the entire flight sipping away at the giant bottled water I never fail to bring on board. Either way, every twenty minutes, I'm off for a lavatory trip.

These days, I manage to score an aisle seat about 95% of the time, sparing my row-mates from constant climbing. But, even seated aisle-side, I start to worry what my neighbors make of the nonstop in-and-out. By flight's end, I'm convinced even the flight attendants have taken note, eyeing my aisle-walking as sure sign of terrorist threat.

I bring this all up because, over the past week, I've been similarly breaking my day into twenty-minute between-bathroom-break chunks. Since last Sunday, I've been sick as a dog. And whenever I'm under the weather, I start peeing like its my job.

All of which is a rather long and diluted [best pun ever!] explanation for my lack of regular posting. I did, however, (in between trips to the loo,) manage to make my way through all of Anne Lamott's excellent Bird by Bird, which reminded me of how valuable regular, scheduled writing is for staving off post-collegiate atrophy of my (already admittedly meager) grasp of language.

So, even with bladder capacity short of normal, even with my lungs still intermittently attempting to escape my chest via fits of violent, hacking cough, I'm really (for real this time, I'm serious, etc, ) going to shoot for the fabled daily posting pace. While I can always fall back on a stadium pal and liter bottles of Robitussin, if I loose the ability to (at least semi-coherently) share my dumb ideas with the rest of the world, I'll basically have to shoot myself in the head.

Booking It
Filed May 4, 2005 7:05 PM.

As much as I love bookstores, love strolling through them, reading jacket covers and rifling through pages, I must admit they also make me a bit sad. I've taken to writing down promising titles on the trusty binder-clip full of 3x5 cards I carry in my right front pocket, and it doesn't take me more than ten minutes to cover an entire card, front and back.

The list of books I'd like to read seems endless. My time rarely does. So, looking at those book piles, I always feel a bit wistful, knowing I'll never have a chance to even skim perfunctorily through most of them.

In my own home, despite cramming quick pages and paragraphs into any otherwise unoccupied stretch of time, I'm faced with a pile of to-be-reads that seems to constantly grow, outpacing my ability to chip through. I institute periods of book-buying moratorium - no more purchases until I've made my way through the entire pile! - but my resolve rarely lasts.

Which is how, with at least ten volumes awaiting attention on my top shelf, and four others in various stages of ongoing digest, I found in my mail today an Amazon box full of five new acquisitions. There should be a 12-step plan for this.

FAQ
Filed April 14, 2005 10:53 AM.

In response to the emailed question I most frequently receive:

Q. Are you really this much of a pretentious asshole in real life?

A. Pretty much.

Top Thatch
Filed April 10, 2005 7:31 PM.

I hit Central Park this morning at 9:00am, for Crossfit's brutal monthly NYC group workout. Afterwards, over brunch at a nearby diner, one fellow athlete asked me what I could possibly use in my hair, to make it spike up stylishly even after an hour or two of sweaty abuse.

My answer: nothing. When cut short enough (as it recently was, a few days back), my hair naturally stands up on its own. I do, on occasion, use pommade, but I do it solely to make the spiking look intentional. Even without it, Tintin has nothing on me.

Surveying my mane's misbegotten past, I realize that it always seems to gravitate, naturally and pre-emptively, to whatever new 'do is about to come into style. Bowl cut? Rat tail? Floppy eye-covering surfer shag? Yes, yes and yes - each time, my hair simply started self-arranging that way, even before the looks came (regrettably) into broader fashion.

Which, by now, leaves me blissfully zen when it comes to the future life of my locks. Though I've fortunately yet to start losing my hair, even if I did, I wouldn't much worry; at that point, a Male Pattern Baldness craze would no doubt kick in, leaving my shiny pate - naturally, preemptively - in full haute coiffure style.

Culture Chameleon
Filed March 17, 2005 12:52 PM.

While I am, in fact, mostly comprised of Russian and Austria-Hungarian blood, you apparently wouldn't know it by looking. Warranting a guess, people place my roots all over the globe - France, England, Australia, any number of points throughout Eastern Europe.

And, of course, Ireland. Especially during the summer, when time in the sun combines with my mother's (and great-grandfather's) testarossan genes to bring out red highlights, to amber-tint my scruffy beard, people often assume I must have a few O'Malley's somewhere up my family tree.

So perhaps it should have come as little shock when, on my way out this morning, Bill, our building's day doorman, pulled me conspiratorially aside. How did I feel, he wanted to know, about everyone taking over our holiday? As a fellow Irishman, was I proud to see St. Patrick's picked up by the unwashed masses, or dismayed that a fine piece of our heritage had been thoroughly Americanized and altogether watered down?

Not wanting to burst Bill's bubble, I skirted the question, and said I at least intended to swing by the parade. He scoffed. The parade? The parade? He was sure, he told me, that my clan's forefathers would far rather I celebrated in true Irish style: heading off to a local pub for live Celtic music and uncounted pints of Guinness.

And while, so far as I know, those clan forefathers don't actually, in my case, exist, I still wouldn't want to disappoint. For today, at lest, whatever the facts of my roots, I'll be playing by plausible appearance alone. Today, I'll be as Irish as I can. By which I mean, working to live up to my favorite (and technically, only) Gaelic phrase:

"Ta me are meisce" (say "taw may air mesh-keh") - I am extremely drunk.

full of advice
Filed January 26, 2005 10:28 AM.

Two nights back, an ex-girlfriend from college came down from Connecticut where she's now teaching high school French, to join me in taking advantage of Restaurant Week at nearby Vice Versa. And over altogether too much excellent food and wine, after catching up on life and talking through our various angsts and excitements, she somehow roped me into helping her revamp her marathon training plans.

Somewhere between when we dated and now, it seems, she discovered that if she starts running, she can pretty much just keep going. And, as a result, she's not only completed a number of marathons, but even placed in the top five runners for her age group in a handful of them. With another coming up in April, she was looking to speed up her mile split times, to do something in preparation other than just run as far as she could each day. By the end of dinner, I had somehow agreed to help coach her to that end.

On the one hand, as someone with a long-standing interest in sports medicine and fitness research, I might seem like a good choice. But, on the other, as someone who, after hitting about the one mile mark thinks "well, that's enough running for this month", I'm probably not such a good coaching choice after all.

I thought of the same thing last night, when another close friend came to my apartment to, over another bottle of wine, trade gossip and dissect her current dating conundrum. After hearing her full retelling of the sordid tale, I tossed in my guy-perspective analysis, which, it seems, my friend found dead on, and was apparently exceedingly grateful for.

But, here too, I felt a bit suspect in terms of qualifications. Certainly, as Edison once pointed out, the first thousand failed light-bulb prototypes weren't really failures at all, but discoveries of a thousand ways not to make a light-bulb. And, from that perspective, I'm undoubtedly a relationship pro, having discovered about an equal number of ways not to have a relationship.

But, really, if you're trying to run a faster marathon, shouldn't you seek advice from someone who's actually a marathon runner? And, if you're trying to figure out if your ongoing relationship has any long-term hope, shouldn't you talk to someone who's navigated the pitfalls of New York dating into a long a happy marriage?

Well, yes, you probably should. But, apparently it's easier and far more entertaining to talk to a smarmy generalist willing to pull elaborate theories about love and life and running long distances out of his ass instead. Which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good explanation of how my life works as a whole.

epiphany
Filed January 3, 2005 9:01 PM.

Today, I was briefly very happy after I bought some demitasse spoons at Crate & Barrel that perfectly match my espresso cups.

Then, about two seconds later, I sobered up, and realized that if I become the sort of guy who regularly thinks about things like matching demitasse spoons, I'll basically have to kick my own ass.

fast talkin'
Filed July 29, 2004 10:58 AM.

The problem is, my brain moves faster than my mouth. So I speak quickly, trying to keep words at pace with thoughts.

It doesn't help that my parents are New Yorkers. I may have grown up in laid-back California, but I came home to fast talking every afternoon.

These days, living in Manhattan, I often completely forget that quick talkers aren't the norm. Then I'll get on the phone with someone off this frantic little island - say, someone at the Kentucky State Film Commission - and remember again what it feels like to speak with someone who makes each. Word. Into. Its. Own. Sentence.

Or, conversely, I'll have people similarly irked by my fast speaking speed. A few months ago, I went out to LA to pitch a group of investors for Cyan's film fund. Granted, in that case, I backed myself into a bit of a corner - I had ten minutes to give a PowerPoint presentation initially meant to have lasted fifteen. I made good time, though, and was nearly through when the time-keeper shouted out, "one more minute."

"No problem," I replied. "I'll just talk faster."

"Faster? Is that possible? God help us!" the investors chorused. And I got an extra three minutes.

chicken scratch
Filed July 6, 2004 12:39 AM.

You know how, in kindergarten, you draw stick figures and then you move on? Well, I didn't. Sure, I can stick figure with the best. But that's about the absolute limit of my drawing ability. I'm what you might call an art retard.

And it's not just that I can't draw. I can't paint either, can't sketch, draft or doodle. I see pictures vividly in my mind's eye, and yet, somehow, by the time they make their way to the page or canvas, the dimensions are so far off as to make whatever I produce look like the work of a drunk, crack-addled six-year old.

It's not for lack of trying either. At several points past, I've set out on stints of daily drawing practice, in the hopes that I'd eventually improve. I didn’t.

In other spheres of my life, I have an excellent sense of spatial relationships - I can load up a car trunk well enough to go pro. And my sense of composition is elsewhere strong as well - I've even occasionally managed to get my photography into gallery showings. But holding pen, brush or pencil, I lose it all completely. My brain says one thing, my hand does another, unintentionally hilarious results ensue.

So, frankly, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that my handwriting is similarly atrocious. Not just so bad that other people can't tell what I've written, but so bad that, a few hours after writing, I can rarely even decipher the scribbles myself.

And this is printing I'm talking about; I gave up cursive five or six days after I supposedly picked it up. Illegible as my print might be, it looks like fine calligraphy against my best attempts at script.

So, for years, even in birthday cards and personal notes, I've resorted to my third grade printing technique, uneven letters jumbled up against each other, precariously swaying from vertical to near-horizontal tilt.

Until, that is, today, when I decided I've had enough. Today, when I decided that, if I'm going to start feigning adulthood, I need to master some writing to match.

Scoff if you must, but I'm pretty sure it's important. Until I get this cursive thing down, for example, fatherhood is strictly out of the question; sick notes penned in my usual hand wouldn't excuse my future progeny - they'd get the poor kids sent straight to an afternoon of detention for forging notes, and for doing it poorly to boot.

So, cursive practice it is. A few minutes each day, in spare moments between more pressing tasks, the quick brown fox will be jumping over the lazy dog. Again and again and again, until I hit flowery cursive that justifies the purchase of manuscript, quill and India ink. Or, at least, until my handwriting is not so atrocious as to jeopardize the afternoon freedom of my hypothetical unborn children.

needling
Filed June 8, 2004 6:16 PM.

I'm always a bit amazed by how few other guys possess even basic clothing repair skills - buttons pop off and hems begin to come undone with alarming frequency, and knowing how to fix those small problems before they become bigger ones can save substantial time and money over the long haul.

I owe my ability in such areas to my mother, who, on afternoons home from the office, would occasionally pass along such brief lessons in self-sufficiency. And, in each lesson, as much as I'd learn how to, say, mend an emerging hole, I'd also re-learn that an unused needle should always be threaded with at least a short length of thread.

This second bit was of paramount importance, emphasized heavily along with the story of how my mother's cousin (or possibly her aunt - I usually tuned out for this oft-told tale) had once not done so, and had stepped on a needle that slipped completely into a vein, coursing along before lodging itself (fortunately) somewhere in her upper leg, thereby avoiding its natural route up to impaling her heart in a Separate Peace sort of tragedy.

While my mother to this day views the needle-in-the-vein story as incontrovertible fact, the more I learned about basic biology, the more I realized there was no way the yarn could actually be true. I mean, veins are remarkably circuitous, and not terribly broad in most places. To think that an inch-and-a-half long stretch of rigid metal could mistakenly end up squarely in the middle of one, much less run luge-like all the way to your ticker, I quickly realized was essentially impossible.

Still, to this day, and despite the protestations of my rational mind, I run a short length of thread through any needle in my possession. Just in case.

talent?
Filed June 7, 2004 1:19 AM.

Sure, everyone's been pointing out inappropriately that Harry Potter's young Emma Watson is on the road to babe-dom. And, while after catching the latest Potter installment this weekend I completely agree, I should also redeem my entitled 'I told you so' by pointing out that I totally called this a year and a half back.

Just further evidence of a creepy talent for scouting out on-the-rise prepubescent actresses, considering I similarly praised Lindsay Lohan six years back, for her performance in The Parent Trap.

As one might expect, this leaves me feeling both a little proud, and a lot dirty.

Going Solo
Filed June 6, 2004 9:09 AM.

Given the frequency with which I watch movies (an occupational hazard), and given that I often see them during the work day, in far-flung cities while traveling, or at last-minute to accommodate my overpacked schedule, I rather often end up at the theater alone.

Some people hate watching movies by themselves, and, at first, I must admit I similarly felt vaguely embarrassed about it, as if everyone pouring into the theater was taking a moment away from their crazed seat search to pity the poor friendless loser parked in the middle of an otherwise empty row. I'd glance at my watch regularly, scanning the incoming crowds as if to say, 'now, where is my friend (or perhaps date) who's likely arriving late or simply coming back from the bathroom, because, I mean, I'm certainly not the sort of poor friendless loser who would have to see this movie alone."

Over time, though, the embarrassment waned. I stopped the friend-search charade (because, honestly, the only thing more loserly than being at the theater alone is being there with imaginary friends), and started simply settling into my seat. I began to appreciate pre-movie time, a rare few minutes in which I could simply sit on my ass without feeling like I should be doing something other than just vegging out.

By now, I've reached the point where I often prefer seeing movies alone. For me, at least, there's something intensely personal about being immersed in a film, and being snapped immediately back into the real world as the credits roll is tough enough without gratuitous post-mortem dissection discussion. Perhaps I'm just a slow thinker, but even when I do want to critique a film, I often feel I need to weigh it mentally for a day or two before crystallizing an opinion.

Which is all to say, basically, that if you see me in a theater, parked like a poor friendless loser in the middle of an otherwise empty row, leave me the hell alone. I'm happy there by myself.

starry eyed
Filed June 3, 2004 5:13 PM.

My interest piqued by Greg's discovery of the Anologia Star Estimator, I decided to give the system a whirl. In short, pop in a picture of yourself, and the Estimator suggests three celebrities you supposedly resemble.

Testing the system out with three different self-portraits, I ended up with a slew of possibilities, though with two suggestions popping up twice: Johnny Depp and George Clooney. And, flattering as that may be, I'm left rather seriously doubting the system, as I'm pretty sure I look absolutely nothing at all like either of those two guys.

Instead, in real life, I get stopped on the street by people who feel the need to tell me I look like Matthew Broderick. The beard and short haircut was, in part, an effort to stop that, which seems to have worked, though now I occasionally get Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Still, by self-assessment, especially on those days when skipping showering forces the front of my hair into a kewpie-doll point, I've determined I most closely bear a resemblance to: TinTin.

over-sharing
Filed May 27, 2004 11:13 PM.

There was a brief stint, after graduating college and transitioning the Silicon Ivy Venture Fund from active investing to working with existing portfolio companies, that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life. In its support stage, the venture fund wasn't really a full time job, and the market wasn't right to raise a second fund. I knew I wanted to start another company or two, but I was entirely unsure of what, exactly, those companies were going to be.

I related as much to Mark Gerson, a long-time friend, one night over dinner. Mark had founded and was running the hugely successful Gerson Lehrman Group, a boutique investment advisory firm that works with some of the nation's best hedge funds and mutual funds. As I had helped Mark out in the earlier days of his company - lining up some of their first clients and early employees - he offered to return the favor, by bringing me in as the firm's Senior Technology Analyst.

In some ways, the job was perfect - I was overpaid, underworked, with about as much power and autonomy as I could hope for in a company that I didn't run.

And I was miserable.

I always knew, at some level, that I was a pioneer, not a settler; that I had to mark out new territory, make new things, rather than just expand existing things ever onward and upward. But I didn't realize how much taking a 'real' job would chip away at me. The psychological stress of being an employee, not an employer, weighed on me constantly, manifesting itself in remarkably strange ways.

Unlike in my current job, where I rarely spend more than a half hour seated at my desk - wandering off instead to internal meetings or external business lunches and dinners - at Gerson Lehrman, I spent most of my day sitting in front of a computer monitor, banging out reports, fielding calls, and generally being (or at least feigning being) productive. And, as a result, I drank lots and lots and lots of water.

Perhaps it was sheer boredom, the lack of anything better to do. But each morning, I'd open up a Crystal Geyser bottle, start sipping away, and soon find I was refilling it from the water cooler throughout the day at nearly half-hour intervals.

As a result, my primary cause for leaving the desk was heading off to the bathroom. And in those bathroom trips, something strange started to happen. Despite definitely having to go, my bladder was suddenly shy. At first, I couldn't start peeing when someone was at the adjacent urinal. Then I couldn't pee if there was anyone within the entire bathroom. Eventually, that parauresis slipped over into my non-work life as well - even in bar and restaurant bathrooms, I couldn't pee when someone else was around.

As strange as it may sound, I didn't think much of it at the time. The problem snuck up on me gradually, and like the proverbial frog in the slowly heated pot of water, I didn't notice it had happened until I was already in deep.

Then, after a little less than a year, I had a series of small epiphanies. I knew I wanted to make movies. I knew I wanted to publish books and release CDs. I knew I wanted to keep working in entrepreneurship and technology, though in ways that helped the world. The Paradigm Blue companies were born. And I couldn't wait to get them started.

I was worried about telling Mark that I'd be jumping ship, worried that he'd somehow be insulted by my suddenly moving on. To my pleasant surprise, however, his reaction was exactly opposite; he was enthusiastic, supportive, offering to help in a slew of ways as I set about getting the first company, Cyan Pictures, off the ground. And while I offered to stick around for another few months if they still needed assistance, he graciously said he'd be happy to let me head off at the end of the week, as he knew I'd be eager to get down to business.

I remember walking out of his office, stopping briefly at my desk, and then realizing I had to use the bathroom. And I remember, vividly, walking into the crowded bathroom, walking up to an empty urinal, and peeing away with reckless abandon.

The shy bladder was gone, and it hasn't, not even once, come back since.

stealing the blankets
Filed May 3, 2004 12:35 PM.

I am a wild sleeper. When I was a kid, I'd occasionally go to sleep normally, yet wake with my head down at the foot of the bed, my feet at the top. While I owned a down comforter, I took to using it without a duvet cover, as I'd toss and turn enough in my sleep to twist the comforter down into a small ball somewhere in the cover's depths.

As I've aged, my sleeping habits have smoothed over somewhat. I no longer wake up on the wrong end of the bed, my blankets make it largely intact through the night. But I still tend to toss and turn, to shift positions constantly. It only becomes a real problem when I share a bed, at which point I wake myself up by unintentionally waking up the person next to me. Though it tends to improve over time, I suspect it's largely due to a bedmate getting used to my frenzied sleep habits, to the point where she sleeps straight through them.

Still, I suppose that nonstop-motion approach to sleep shouldn't come as much of a shock, given I tend to do the same thing during my waking hours. Apparently, that's just the sort of person I am.

coming up short
Filed April 14, 2004 5:05 PM.

Recently, I've been thinking about the personalities that people project through their blogs, about how, when meeting bloggers in real life, I invariably either think "this person is exactly like their website," or "this person isn't anything like their website," though rarely anything in between. And, in the case of that second group, those bloggers whose real and digital selves diverge, I wonder how intentional that difference is. Are they recreating online who they secretly wish they could be in real life? Or are they simply unaware that their web-message and their in-flesh medium somehow don't line up?

In my own case, I'm fairly sure the real me and the digital me are, for better or for worse, rather similar. By and large, I suspect any readers meeting me in real life for the first time are likely to leave the encounter thinking, 'yep, that's pretty much what I expected.' The only exception, however, might be the same lament often whispered behind the backs of famed actors seen for the first time in person: "he seems much shorter in real life."

Which is to say, at 5'6", I'm certainly not tall. For years, in fact, I've joked that I should change this site's tagline to: "the dangerous result of a serious Napoleon Complex run for decades unchecked." But, in truth, I don't think of height as a big issue, nor have I for most of my life.

Certainly, through most of elementary school, I didn't give it too much thought; though small, I was still extremely fast, and therefore an asset on dodgeball and kickball teams, as well as uncatchable enough to survive even the roughest games of 'kill the pill' - the consummate test of schoolyard masculinity. It wasn't until I hit middle school, as the girls began to sprout up faster than us guys, that I even began to notice my own small size. Even then, I quickly discovered upsides - at middle school dances, for example, I was invariably boob-level on the taller girls I asked to slow dance. ("Put on End of the Road again! Put on End of the Road again!)

By high school, as we guys caught back up, however, I started worrying - in typical insecure ninth grader style - that girls might not be interested in me because of my height. So, in a solution that, in retrospect, was both extremely inane and admirably ballsy, I set about trying to prove otherwise to myself by hooking up with the tallest girls that I could. I don't mean to sound as though I was obsessed with the idea - most of the girls I dated in high school were of average height - but, given the chance, I'd try and steal kisses from any cute, tall, lanky girl I could find.

As a result, after my Freshman year of college, I ended up making out with a UCLA volleyball player at a barbecue on a beach in Half Moon Bay. She was 6'2". I declared victory, gave up on the tall girl search, and went back to not thinking much about height - mine or that of the girls I was interested in.

Though, to be fair, if someone were to call Everything I Do (I Do It For You) up on a bar jukebox, I'm not sure I could resist reverting, full circle, to my middle school self breast-level eyeline self, searching out the tallest girl in the bar, and asking her to dance. Old habits die hard.

the whole truth, part two
Filed April 7, 2004 10:53 AM.

[If you missed it, see part one first.]

Like anybody, I have all kinds of crazy hopes and dreams and fantasies about how I want my life to be. Like anybody, I don't say them out loud, because I don't want people think I'm an egotistical Napoleonic asshole. In truth, however, I am an egotistical Napoleonic asshole, and a large part of telling the truth is not just owning up to that fact, but also owning up to all of those crazy hopes and dreams and fantasies I keep locked inside that make me who I actually am. So, away we go.

What I Really Want:

I want to be famous. I want to be the next Harvey Weinstein. Actually, I want to be bigger than Harvey, but better liked and not so fat and ugly. I want Cyan to make movies and publish books and put out records, and I want those movies and books and records to win Oscars and Pulitzers and Grammys. I want to put out my own movies and books and records as well, and I certainly want those to win Oscars and Pulitzers and Grammys too. I want to get rich doing it, even though I've already lived a vastly more privileged life than nearly anyone in this world, because I'm greedy and don't want to have to think about money and want to have enough to give huge sums to numerous charities and be recognized and lauded as a generous benefactor.

I also want to solve huge, seemingly unsolvable world problems. I want to start nonprofits that end homelessness and disease and poverty and world hunger. I think I'm a genius and can somehow come up with innovative, effective solutions to problems that have baffled the worlds greatest minds for centuries. I think I can find new ways to leverage technology to do so, so I can be remembered for generations as the next Da Vinci, somehow balancing greatness in the separate and parallel worlds of art and science.

I want my family and friends to be happy, and I want to spend time with them. I want them to say things about me to other people like "gosh, that Josh Newman is a really great guy." I want to fall in love with a wonderful woman and have a charmingly dysfunctional romantic comedy kind of relationship that lasts happily together for the rest of our lives. I want to have kids who grow up cultured and beautiful and interesting and happy and vastly smarter than I am.

I want to play trumpet with the very best musicians and record music that people a hundred years from now listen to and imitate and laud for its brilliance. I want to take pictures that end up in books and galleries. I want to participate in a handful of reckless athletic pursuits at an exceedingly high level, though in part only because I think it somehow makes me seem more manly. I want to travel the world, speaking countless languages well enough to impress the locals. I want to eat great foods and learn how to make them myself, and I want to get rip roaring drunk on expensive wines through a palate cultured enough to easily pick the very best vintages from a lineup.

Also, I want to find meaning, spiritual fulfillment and inner peace.

So, there you have it. That utterly ridiculous list is exactly who I am. And also not who I am at all, because the real me can look at all those things and laugh at how stupid it sounds when committed to paper. Most importantly, the real me can recognize that, while that list may lay out exactly where I'd like to end up, I'd be wildly happy if I could get even part of the way.

the whole truth, part one
Filed April 6, 2004 1:18 AM.

In a comment on one of last week's posts, I mentioned Brad Blanton's book Radical Honesty, as it has profoundly impacted the way I've approach my life since I first read it around Thanksgiving. Prior to that point, I was full of shit. And I was very, very good at it. Years of high school and college and running several companies taught me to lie through my teeth smoothly and with great aplomb. It worked very well. It got me through high school and college and running several companies. But the problem was, the more I did it, the less I was conscious of doing it. Soon, the bullshit of work spilled over into bullshit with friends and family, and eventually into bullshit with myself. I was feeding myself a pitch 24 hours a day, seven days a week, convincing myself that all the bullshit I was feeding everyone was actually the truth. And I was almost buying it, except that I knew the asshole doing the pitching.

I stumbled across Radical Honesty right when I needed it most, when the towers of bullshit I had built were threatening collapse. The premise of the book is simple: we all lie like hell, and maintaining those lies is the main source of stress in our lives. Shed the lies and the work of keeping them hidden, and you'll not only feel more alive and more creative but find your relationships are vastly richer as well. Blanton divides telling the truth into three successive levels: revealing the facts, honesty about current thoughts and feelings, and exposing the fiction. Let's take them sequentially.

Level One: Revealing the Facts

Here, the eloquent Blanton discusses withholding the truth because it seems more effective and politic to do so:

You are 'politic' in this way when you imagine yourself a good person because you don't tell your wife about jacking off while thinking about her sister, or don't tell your boss about your secret plans, or don't tell your mouther you pissed in the chicken soup when you were 12. This is being so lost in illusion you can't possible ever reach adulthood. Tell your wife the truth about your fantasies about everyone else, including her sister (and all those animals and things, too); tell your boss about your plans, your mistakes, and all that marijuana you smoked; and for God's sake, tell your mother about the soup. If the truth is told, you'll feel relieved, because you have been anxious in some vague way for so long you forgot where it came from, but kept it up anyway, because you knew something bad was about to happen but just couldn't remember what it was. Anxiety is what accompanies fantasy crashes and near collisions.

This level is both remarkably hard and remarkably easy. To reach it, you figure out the stupid shit you've done, you tell the relevant people about it, they get remarkably pissed of for about twenty minutes and then put it behind them, and you somehow feel vaguely disappointed that your revelation didn't lead things to collapse into a pyre of hellfire as you always suspected they might if your secret got out.

The main thing is to simply own up to all the facts, to stop hiding them from not only the people immediately involved, but from everyone, everywhere. I can now comfortably admit things people never knew, like "I cheated on a programming assignment my freshman year at Yale" or "the sale of both Sharkbyte and Powerdime.com made almost no money at all for anyone involved". Honestly, nobody really gives a shit about either of these revelations, but I was using all kinds of mental energy to carry them around quietly inside as if people did.

Level Two: Honesty about Current Thoughts and Feelings

Now let's take it up a notch: whatever you're thinking and feeling, spit it out, even if you're conviced you'd be better off if you didn’t. This is a bit rough to accept logically. I hear you ask, "so, if she says to me, 'does my butt look big in this dress?', Blanton really expect me to say, 'yes, it does'?" In fact, that's exactly what he expects. He also expects you to tell other people when they piss you off, or make you happy, or whatever else. This may not seem an immediately expedient way to live life, but I've found that being able to interact with others based on what you really think and feel leaves you vastly freer to actually relate to the other person, rather than forcing you to spend all your time constructing a mask that you think will manipulate them into causing the results you want.

"But," I hear you ask, "won't people get upset when you just say what you think?" Well, yes. At the Christmas party of a friend (who's likely reading along here), I observed that one attractive female in attendance seemed to be dumb as nails. This, obviously, didn't go over well with my party-hosting friend, and she said as much, rather angrily, the next time we got together. After she shared the truth about her feelings, she felt better as well, and that was pretty much it. People getting angry isn't nearly as bad as we assume it's going to be; no matter how riled up they become, if you just encourage them to lay it on you, usually they'll have said everything they have to say in about fifteen, twenty minutes, and then you can go back to laughing together. This is vastly, vastly preferable to you or them carrying around that unvoiced anger, which lasts for years and decades, tainting the relationship and slowly festering into secret hatred.

Level Three: Exposing the Fiction

This is the final piece. This is where you say, "the person I am, and the person I carefully construct and sell to the world (and to my real self), are not the same thing." This is the process of demythologizing yourself, which starts by bragging about all the things you did which, in your false modesty, you were pretending not to care about, then by feeling embarassed about the bragging, and then by realizng that the bragging and being embarassed are just bullshit as well. In this step, you admit that what you have been selling other people on, and selling yourself on, is not who you actually are. In fact, you don't really know who you are. Which is why you developed the act in the first place: you didn’t want to look lost and hoped you'd find your way by faking it. This shift is all about moving from trying to look smart to admitting you don't know a goddamn thing.

There's something remarkably enjoyable about this step. Book publishing? I don't have a clue in the world what I'm doing there. But I'm scrambling as fast as I can to figure it out. Saying so is so vastly easier than feigning expertise that I don't know why I didn't start admitting my ignorance earlier. This third level is, as far as I can tell, neverending. You start feeling pleased with yourself because you're telling the whole truth, then realize that being 'the guy who always tells the truth' is as much bullshit as anything else, and you're back to ground zero.

Still, I'm finding it's absolutely worth it. Each step on the path to radical honesty, to telling the whole truth, to being the whole truth, makes me feel lighter and freer. I'd recommend you try it out yourself.

archetyping
Filed February 26, 2004 1:20 AM.

This past weekend, watching the last Sex & the City, part of me was thinking: "Thank god this thing is ending; the show's gone so far downhill this is basically a mercy killing. And clearly Carrie's ending up with Big. I could have called that from the first episode." Yet, another part of me was thinking: "Thank god Carrie's ending up with Big, because if she doesn't, I'm utterly fucked."

Truth be told, from that first episode, I identified with Mr. Big. Or, rather, I identified with his archetype, the broader class of Bigs who show up in film after film: Jack Nicholson's Harry Sanborn in Something's Gotta Give; Pierce Brosnan's Thomas Crown in the remade Thomas Crown Affair; any of cinematic history's laundry list of men who too late discover the same traits that made them moguls led them, in their personal life, to push people away, to end promising relationships abruptly, to bounce from fling to fling with no apparent end destination in mind, finding increasingly little joy in each.

While I may only be starting out on the route to mogul, I'm already well seasoned in ending good relationships for bad reasons. Which is why I'm always secretly thrilled by the redemptive endings Hollywood inevitably lays out for these characters. It's an odd relief to find one somehow changing his spots, reconciling his romantic streak with his inability to actually sustain that romance. The happily ever afters let me tell myself: if that's the path I'm heading down, at least it ends up somewhere good.

blue movies
Filed February 25, 2004 3:51 PM.

I'm in a meeting this afternoon with the investment bankers helping us put together Cyan's film investment fund. After months of crunching numbers, drafting investment memorandums, putting together an extensive investor intranet, today we're finally ready to move ahead, finally ready for the ibank to start heading out to their investor base.

"One last thing, though," says one of the managing partners. "Is there anything we need to know, anything that might come up in due diligence about you as individuals or about Cyan as a company?"

We shake our heads.

"If there is, we just need to know in advance, to be ready with a response," he continues.

I shake my head again. Yoav shakes his head again.

"Well," says Colin, "there's the porn."

Our banker laughs nervously.

"No, seriously," says Colin, before launching into an explanation, me occasionally chiming in to add detail. That, while seniors at Yale, he and I and two of our other friends started a fake secret society as a prank. That the prank quickly rose to national media attention. That the prank even culminated in our story becoming a movie for Comedy Central.

The rub being, the fake secret society, like the movie born from it, was entitled "Porn n' Chicken".

We weren't actually pornographers we explain, we just convinced the media that we were. But, if you Google up our names collectively, you'll likely stumble across something about it. So we talk a bit more about the prank, the motivation behind it, why it wasn't really a big deal.

By the end, our bankers look significantly relieved.

"Still," one of them asks, "porn and chicken?"

"Yes."

"You know," he concludes, "when I'm watching porn, fried chicken is usually the last thing on my mind."

helpful tip
Filed January 29, 2004 9:19 AM.

I am not, by any means, a baseball hat sort of guy. If you see me wearing one, it's almost undoubtedly becuase it's cold enough that I haven't showered for days.

superstition
Filed October 4, 2003 7:41 PM.

Despite an overall rather rational, scientific view of the world, I still possess a strong belief in the existence and power of "lucky" underwear.

miracles of technology
Filed September 15, 2003 9:31 PM.

God bless you, spellchecker. Without your help, I would never be able to spell occasionally, accommodate, necessary or recommend.

step aside, mr. astaire
Filed August 21, 2003 10:10 AM.

A good friend of mine here in the city grew up in a very orthodox Jewish community, which disallowed mixed dancing (i.e. women dancing with men); as a result, she never picked up even the most rudimentary ballroom dance skills - a distressing inability, considering how frequently her job as an assistant curator at the Met requires her presence at gala openings, fundraiser balls, and other society events. Certainly, Manhattan is full of fine ballroom dance academies ready to remedy such a situation; yet most require students to sign up for group classes in partnered pairs, to cover for the fact that, while women appear to be lining up for admission, the number of straight guys in the city who might sign up for such classes on their own accord could be counted on one hand.

To make a long story short, then, when she stepped onto the floor of Dance New York yesterday evening, it was with me, sucker friend number one, in tow. At least, I consoled myself, I'd previously picked up a small amount of ballroom experience, through a short class while at Yale, an ex-girlfriend who was heavily into the late nineties' swing revival, and a mother (serious enough about waltzing to head intermittently to Vienna with my father to dance at the Royal and Opera Balls) who would occasionally drag my seven-year old self down the hall to strains of Strauss. Still, by the start of last night's class, I could barely remember the basic steps of the various dances, much less perform any well enough to use side by side with royalty (or even anyone with two opposing feet).

By the end of the evening, however, two partners I danced with asked if I was an instructor, and one of the instructors asked if I'd ever considered competing. On the one hand, I was thrilled and flattered - a natural talent discovered! On the other, I was completely appalled. Ballroom dance? So far as I was concerned, it might as well have been natural talent for interior design or hair styling. Why couldn't I suddenly discover a knack for 100 mile per hour fastballs, I wondered, or a surprising ability (considering my limited height and exceeding whiteness) to dunk with Jordan-esque panache?

Sometimes, life is so tragically unfair.

underwear
Filed August 17, 2003 5:22 PM.

For whatever reason, we guys often form bizarre attachments to pieces of clothing, strong emotional connections that effectively prevent us from noticing their increasingly well-loved condition. Favorite t-shirts yellow at the armpits, favorite jeans fray at the hems and zipper, yet we can't possibly imagine actually retiring them. And nowhere is our love more apparent than with underwear; given the choice, we'll keep washing and wearing a trusty pair of boxers until it's disintegrated to nothing more than a waistband and a few hanging threads.

As women rarely hold such forgiving opinions of overly scruffy clothing (and underwear in particular), it behooves any guy with an eye towards impressing the ladies to (at least occasionally) view the contents of his closet (or, at least, his underwear drawer) with a cool and dispassionate eye. This very morning, I did so myself, examining each pair of boxer-briefs, and I'm afraid the results were not good:

Total Pairs: 11*
Pairs in Good Condition: 2
Pairs in Acceptable Condition: 1
Pairs with Weirdly Ruffled Waistbands (ed. note: due to elastic losing it's stretch after too many washings): 3
Pairs with Small Holes: 3
Pairs with Holes in Front Large Enough that the Proverbial Mouse Might Escape the Proverbial House: 2

As much as it pains me to say it, I think it's time for a serious drawer cleanout and underwear shopping spree.

* This is nearing the bare acceptable minimum number of pairs. Guys mainly do the wash only after running out of clean underwear, re-wearing all the cleaner looking pairs inside out, and then sometimes even wearing bathing suits as underwear. Clearly, then, the more pairs owned, the less frequent the need to do the wash.

like wolverine
Filed August 16, 2003 12:47 PM.

Two days back, spending several hours too many catching waves and practicing longboard tricks (nota bene: the classic headstand-on-board can cause serious board-wax-in-hair), I managed to pick up the best sunburn I've had in years, a burn that carried well past lobster red and deep into fire-engine. Flying home today, however, some 48 hours later, I barely look pink.

For whatever reason, I've always been an unusually fast healer. At a one week post-op checkup after some minor surgery a few years back, for example, the surgeon literally had to check his files against his appointment calendar to convince himself that he had really sliced and diced just one week prior - the scar, he said, appeared to have been healing for nearly a month.

Sure, I'm grateful for that quick-fix abilitiy - given the frequently injurious nature of full-contact martial arts, it's one I often put to good use. But, taken together with a fast metabolism (two hours after a big dinner and I'm ready to repeat the meal), it makes me worry about how long my body can keep up the pace. If all my cells are sprinting along, how will they ever be able to stick around for the marathon of a life I've got planned?

beachfront blogging
Filed August 8, 2003 10:04 PM.

Having arrived earlier this afternoon in Hawaii (or, more specifically, on the southwest coast of Maui), I've by now had chance to reconfirm at least one highly functional life skill - within seconds of entering, I can consistently and precisely estimate a hot tub's temperature, to the exact degree. Impressive, sure, but that's just the sort of ability you can hone if you're willing to subject yourself to the hard work of years and years of vacationing on tropical islands across the globe.

halfway
Filed July 21, 2003 12:51 PM.

From the consensus of both digital and analog friends, I realized unequivocally that the beard had to go - at least temporarily.

Still, fearing withdrawal pains, I decided I'd best ease my way out of the world of facial hair. Hence shaving partially, yet leaving something so horrendous that after a couple of days I'd be rarin' for the chance to hack off the rest.

The resulting final product combines the Fu Manchu of Ben Stiller's nursing home orderly in Happy Gilmore with a standard beret-and-bongos soul patch. Like, dig, man:

me, with a really, really stupid looking fu manchu / soul patch combo

On my way to lunch, sporting the new look, I'm pretty sure I saw at least one person point and laugh.

Update

According to several sources, the Fu Manchu / soul patch combo was treading too close to goatee territory, clearly the nadir of cool (hipster or otherwise). Therefore, I have reductively switched to child molester mustache, leaving me looking like (by varying accounts) either the policeman from the Village People or the lost Mario Brother:

me, with a terrible Guido mustache

Update 2

Sooner than expected, I'm back to clean-shaven, as my Cyan colleagues Yoav and Colin refused to hold this afternoon's budget and casting meeting with me still sporting the thoroughly ridiculous mustache.

me, back to my lovely, clean-shaven self

Completely hairless, my face feels oddly naked.

Vindication? Filed August 16, 2009 8:29 PM.

Shyster Filed July 31, 2008 6:14 PM.

Susurrus Filed May 25, 2008 11:41 AM.

Look Both Ways Filed May 20, 2008 5:39 PM.

Dire Situation Filed March 14, 2008 11:45 AM.

Still Down for the Count Filed February 27, 2008 8:04 PM.

Misery Loves Company Filed February 26, 2008 7:00 PM.

Recap Filed December 27, 2007 11:04 AM.

Footsy Filed November 12, 2007 4:39 PM.

Complain, Complain Filed July 11, 2007 4:19 PM.

How am I Funny to You? Filed September 7, 2006 2:52 PM.

Ragnarök Filed June 25, 2006 9:43 AM.

Freshman Fifteen, Ten Years Late Filed June 12, 2006 11:10 PM.

Why I'm Not Blogging Filed May 26, 2006 11:49 AM.

In Brief Filed April 17, 2006 5:38 PM.

Jack Bauer Ate My Weekend Filed April 2, 2006 9:43 PM.

Spiked Filed March 28, 2006 5:54 PM.

Sucker Filed March 27, 2006 10:13 PM.

Mashed Filed March 19, 2006 11:32 PM.

Hollow Leg Filed February 27, 2006 9:10 AM.

The Tube Filed February 26, 2006 3:30 PM.

Come Here Often? Filed December 7, 2005 7:18 PM.

Smooth Filed October 26, 2005 4:44 PM.

When the Saints Filed September 20, 2005 8:40 AM.

Monologue Filed July 6, 2005 7:55 PM.

Pissed Filed May 21, 2005 9:10 PM.

Booking It Filed May 4, 2005 7:05 PM.

FAQ Filed April 14, 2005 10:53 AM.

Top Thatch Filed April 10, 2005 7:31 PM.

Culture Chameleon Filed March 17, 2005 12:52 PM.

full of advice Filed January 26, 2005 10:28 AM.

epiphany Filed January 3, 2005 9:01 PM.

fast talkin' Filed July 29, 2004 10:58 AM.

chicken scratch Filed July 6, 2004 12:39 AM.

needling Filed June 8, 2004 6:16 PM.

talent? Filed June 7, 2004 1:19 AM.

Going Solo Filed June 6, 2004 9:09 AM.

starry eyed Filed June 3, 2004 5:13 PM.

over-sharing Filed May 27, 2004 11:13 PM.

stealing the blankets Filed May 3, 2004 12:35 PM.

coming up short Filed April 14, 2004 5:05 PM.

the whole truth, part two Filed April 7, 2004 10:53 AM.

the whole truth, part one Filed April 6, 2004 1:18 AM.

archetyping Filed February 26, 2004 1:20 AM.

blue movies Filed February 25, 2004 3:51 PM.

helpful tip Filed January 29, 2004 9:19 AM.

superstition Filed October 4, 2003 7:41 PM.

miracles of technology Filed September 15, 2003 9:31 PM.

step aside, mr. astaire Filed August 21, 2003 10:10 AM.

underwear Filed August 17, 2003 5:22 PM.

like wolverine Filed August 16, 2003 12:47 PM.

beachfront blogging Filed August 8, 2003 10:04 PM.

halfway Filed July 21, 2003 12:51 PM.