School Photo

Here's something my mom scanned in and posted. This was a couple of years ago when I was in school.

Aren't There More Important Things?

I boarded the plane on January 1 with a slight cold. Nothing serious. I went about my next few days with a slightly worse cold, but I didn't take it seriously until suddenly I was having the kind of coughing fits where my chest ached from all that work.

I stayed home on Friday.

Today, I convinced myself to go out into the sunlight to the #222 bus over the hill to the Hollywood Farmers Market. I wasn't in the market to buy anything, but I wanted to take a look at the refill stand. It's where you take containers and fill them up with dishwashing liquid, laundry soap, shampoo, that sort of thing.

I was wandering around after checking it out, when a young woman approached me and asked me to sign her petition to legalize magic mushrooms.

I didn't sign, but I didn't blink either.

In a day where I was already kind of disoriented, the moment made perfect sense.

Studio Tour

For reasons that will become clear in a few months, my colleagues and I went over to the lot this week for a DC-specific WB Studio Tour. We had a blast, though the day was chilly. My company is owned by WB.

Marie, Queen of Atlantis

Movie Reviews

Here's my review of Cats, which I attended last night with some friends from work.

Note the theater was PACKED. This is not an opening weekend. It's not the Chinese Theater. It's a multiplex in Burbank on a Tuesday night. We struggled to find four seats together.

What?
What?
What?

Jamie, is that the Taylor Swift-cat? (He says no, it's the ballerina, and this is the first time I notice he brought a flask. It comes out more and more as the movie progresses.)

Is that a fat joke? Is that another fat joke? I didn't know fat jokes were a big part of Cats.

What?

(At this point, I notice Andrea has her hands frozen in front of her mouth, which is slightly ajar.)

All Human

I went through Iran in 1998 as part of an extended commercial overland truck trip, starting in Kathmandu and driving through to Damascus.

Overland trucks carry cooking gear, luggage storage, safes, spare parts, camping equipment, treated drinking water, group refrigerator, reference materials, and bus-like seats, as well as two driver-mechanics. (In some trucks, there is also a cook, but this trip was based in local hotels rather than campsites.)

We carried 8 tourists and 2 driver-mechanics. Last night, I found myself going over photos of that time, because it helps me to see what is being demonized, to remind myself of the place and people being reduced to "supervillain."

Dichotomy and Compartmentalization

I have a cold. I'm trying to decide if I should go to work.

Meanwhile, the world waits to see if Iran is capable of being the adult in the room. We all gasp in horror as marsupials and reptiles die by the thousands down under; the first victims of Australian climate change were incapable of even having a voice. A failed casino investor tears down women's health after the disenfranchised and disillusioned are manipulated by entertainment news and relics of the Cold War. White supremacy glowers in the dark corners, edging slowly into the flickering light of Tiki torches.

And I haven't written anything since I went back to the traditional workplace. I'm struggling with middle age, trying to figure out what to fight and what to settle into. I haven't washed last night's dinner dishes. I have a hole in my left sock.

I have a cold. I'm trying to decide if I should go to work.

New Year's Day Thoughts

I have a New Year’s Day routine, where I get a taxi to Newark Airport at the crack of dawn, then I eat breakfast in the “secret” Terminal C restaurant behind Gate 120.

The food is the same crap you order off an iPad at every other restaurant in Terminal C, but it costs a little more and comes with a better atmosphere.

And so here I am as the sun seeps through cracked gray haze, watching a long line of lights in the sky—planes on their landing approaches. Each carries hundreds of people, all having individual experiences, all burdened with their own circumstances determining their optimism or sadness as they approach the passage of time.

My particular burden is I’m the walking definition of Gen X, in a way. The bridge generation between old ways and new ways. I am ambivalent about many things, came of age to indie rock in a world where entitled people always won and we less-entitled knew we were screwed, because we weren’t those people. Counterculture wasn’t cool when I eked out my own definition of how I would live to no one else’s standards. I’m so Gen X, my name’s in the Slacker credits.

Of course, so is everyone else’s of a certain era.

So I’m a bridge. That means I will never quite make it myself. My job is to make things easier on my successors. Life is easier once you acknowledge this and relieve yourself of the pressure of having to master the world. And it’s not a conscious choice so much as an awareness the world has only superficially changed.

The game is rigged. We were all set up, our fate predetermined by class, gender, race, identity. The masters of the universe are still the masters of the universe. I’m still a tenant farmer who stands back and looks at a great harvest, then sees the king’s newest knight, the one who has never been in battle and never earned a damn thing, cruise in and tell me what a great harvest it is and how he looks forward to the day he is king.

So as I sit on the morning of a New Year, watching the ping come in about my flight being delayed, realizing I’m not getting upgraded as I have the last three New Year’s flights, and my seats on the left of the plane so I won’t see the Grand Canyon, I realize and resolve.

I can burn that garden, can’t I?

I can’t think of a better example for the next generation.

Not That Secret Santa

I made this for DC editor Jessica Chen, whose name I pulled in Secret Santa. I'm pretty pleased with it. Fortunately, she was too.

Of course, she knew immediately who her Secret Santa was, since I make lots of bags.

LAX

Here's a view I don't see every day. When I got to LAX (while en route to a meeting on Long Island), the escalator to Departures was out of service. I went to the elevator, but it was full of Marines, so I went over to the elevator in the parking garage instead.

Turns out the Marines did me a favor.

Conversations in Lyfts

Two more for the road:

11/16 Lyft driver: "New York City is now a ghost town, because everyone has moved to LA after becoming sick of paying $15,000 a month for studio apartments."

12/4 Lyft driver: “You know that movie Willy Wonka? My theory is that it’s based on LA. Because people come here and they indulge too much and it destroys them. They have to moderate their behavior like Charlie and his grandfather. And the 405 is the chocolate river.”