I Am Very Tall

For Grace

2014-04-24T22:41:00.001-07:00

My grandmother is dying. This isn't new news, but rather old news that is suddenly springing into center stage in the weird, nebulous thing that is my awareness. Grace Sha is currently 92 years old, and has lived a long and fulfilling life. I think. We've lived in close proximity for most of my childhood, but I never got around to resolving the language barrier. Our relationship, more than anything, was based on the simple act of her feeding me. When I was younger, she would prepare small meals that I could heat up on my own when I got home from school. On the weekends, the family would always get together and eat dinner at some Chinese restaurant or other. These weren't great dinners, full of laughter and storytelling. If anything, they were somewhat difficult, since my grandparents couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak Mandarin. After I moved across the country, it became something of an annoyance to have to do these dinners. I'd only have a few days in California per visit, and any number of friends that I'd rather see - friends that I'd grown up with, who were funny, full of life, and where I'd almost certainly have a great time. But I would still always go to the dinners - often eating in relative silence after the initial bits of conversation dried up. Because that's how she would tell me that she loved me, and I think you have to be a very special type of a shit to reject your grandmother's love, no matter how irritating it may be.

In the last several years, she has had a number of health issues that have resulted in periodic trips to the hospital, from which she almost always bounces back. A few weeks ago, it came to light that she most likely has pancreatic cancer. We can't be sure, because testing would involve surgery, and Dad and his siblings have basically decided that even if they knew what it was, it wouldn't make any difference. No one is going give the 92yr old woman chemo. I cracked a little when I was speaking about it with my cousin Eric. I vaguely knew that she was going to die at that time. But it was still a "maybe later" type of thing, like the other trips to the ICU. Cancer could mean months, but it could also mean years. Who knows? Not the doctors, and certainly none of us.

I saw her this morning. We spoke for a few hours. Not in any meaningful way, but in the Groundhog's Day type of endlessly looping conversation that we've developed ever since she started showing signs of Alzheimer's. Her short-term memory is hopelessly fried. She forgets everything that we've discussed within roughly 45 seconds, so just happily asks the same thing she did before. In a way, it's a minor blessing, as it allows me to have prolonged conversations with her, even if they just go over the same content over and over and over again. I can say whatever I want, because if I fuck up what I meant to say, who cares? She'll forget and I'll be able to try again in another 45 seconds.

This morning's conversation revolved around two topics. One - How old are you and are you getting married soon? Do you have a girlfriend? Oh, that's right, she's very beautiful. Where is the wedding happening? If you have it in New York, that's OK, I will come and be there. Two - What do you want to eat? No really, what's your favorite? I know New York has everything. What would you like to take back with you? I'm sorry, I'm a little tired today. Tomorrow, I'll take you to your favorite restaurant. We had both of these conversations over, and over, and over again.

Fast forward many hours later. I am sitting at my family's dining table, eating a pizza and talking with my Dad. We are discussing plans for tomorrow, and I casually bring up that she wanted to get dinner. And then it occurs to me that she can't be out of bed for more than thirty minutes a day without becoming tired. She hardly eats anything anymore, which is why she doesn't have the strength to get up and about. We're not going to have dinner tomorrow, and I feel stupid for asking about it. And I am now incredibly aware of the fact that I will likely never go to one of those dinners with my grandmother ever again, barring some kind of miracle. And I can't actually remember when the last time we went to dinner was. Did I enjoy it? Was I properly grateful? Or was I just being a prick, checking my phone and thinking of other places that I could be? Because that may never, ever happen again. And I literally don't even know what the words are to tell her how sad this makes me, and how much I will miss her when she's gone.

The 99%

2011-11-03T08:04:00.001-07:00

Totally different type of post today.

If you haven't done so already, I'd recommend checking out the "We Are the 99%" tumblr blog (wearethe99percent.tumblr.com). Say what you will about the Occupy Wall Street movement (and I'm a banker, so I certainly have had the opportunity to be critical), but there is some really sad/depressing content there. What's striking is that the postings have none of the sort of calls for revolution, or the political leanings of any of the protest movements of the '60s. Instead, people are really just posting about how helpless they feel. Having to choose between eating or paying the rent. Getting sick, not having healthcare, and then losing their jobs. Being scared. It's not about fighting for a huge change, it's about not feeling like being totally eff'd.

There is a very popular meme in American politics that says that the people without the work are lazy, spoiled, or entitled (e.g. Herman Cain). And that if these people just applied themselves a little bit more, then they wouldn't have these problems. If you believe that, then I would strongly recommend that you take a look at this blog, and let me know what you think about it afterwards.

Taylor Swift - Mean

2011-09-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

I have a friend. She is without a doubt, one of my favorite friends in the world. I met her recently when I was still in school, and even though we only really knew each other for the space of a month or two, it was very clear to me that she was one of those rare people that you just know will be your friend forever. Or at least until the school year is over, but hopefully for longer than that.

In any case, on top of being fun, witty and charming, she is also one of the most thoughtful people I know. She sent me a card when I moved into my new apartment, and even sent me something for my birthday. Or at least, she says she did, but is apparently having trouble figuring out how many stamps she needs to put on the damn thing.

One of the more amusing things about her is her undying affection for Taylor Swift. She knows every song, and even worked for Taylor's label (and now has a photo of herself standing and smiling with America's Amazonian Sweetheart). And for some reason, of all the T. Swift songs that she knows, the one song that she sings at me all the time is, "Mean." Specifically, she likes to repeat the following stanza, in some abbreviated form:

"All you are is mean. And a liar. And pathetic. And alone in life, and mean. And mean. And mean."

Sigh.

Taylor Swift - Mean

Book Review: The Magician King

2011-08-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

I loved the first book, The Magicians. It was a great mixture of old fantasy tropes (primarily from Narnia) and more modern personalities. This book is mostly more of the same. Which is fine, but as I read through it, some of the stylistic flaws became more apparent.

For those of you unfamiliar with the first book, it is basically what would happen if the kids that went to Hogwarts were like today's Ivy-league set, as opposed to the more mythical types that inhabit the Harry Potter novels. There is something of an "It's all fun and games until someone gets eaten by a dragon" theme to these books, in which the main characters are basically like you and I, with fantasy-novel born pretensions of being heroes, but without any of the actual underlying strength of character to actually perform in the manner required.

So, as I said, this book is more of the same. The main strength that it relies on is the author's ability to drop in tongue-in-cheek comments, mostly via the protagonist's internal monologue, about all of the weird things happening around him. It does this quite well, and manages to be quite funny. The biggest issue that starts popping up is that in some ways, there is a legitimate bit of fantasy in here. And to be honest, that part just isn't that great. It's all very surface-y and can be a bit unsatisfying. But I still crushed through this book, and I still laughed. So, overall, worth a skim.

Book Review: The Emperor of All Maladies

2011-08-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

This was a great book. The first several hundred pages were awesome. I will, however, ding it a little bit for dragging on a bit towards the end.

It moves in three major arcs. The first major arc is treatment, spanning bloodletting, surgery, and chemotherapy. This arc kicks into second gear when it becomes intertwined with the history of the modern cancer movement, starting with Sidney Farber and Mary Lasker. The second arc is much briefer, and goes through the various prevention efforts, including the war on tobacco. The final arc is essentially the culmination, in which a genetic understanding of the cancer cell leads to what looks like the beginnings of the cure, via gene therapy. Intertwined through all of these arcs are Mukherjee's personal dealings with his own cancer patients, which gives the book a human element.

As a reminder, this book took forever for me to finish. It is not a short read. It drags towards the end. It begins to feel as if you're just going from one discovery to the next, one random doctor to another. But overall, it's very edifying.

A couple of key insights, outside of the random factoids. One. Medical progress comes in fits and starts. A lot of what we've discovered about cancer seems to have come through almost accidental discoveries that almost get overlooked. Two. Organization is key. The modern cancer movement didn't seem to really get its legs under it until Farber and Lasker basically built the American Cancer Society into a well-oiled machine. Three. Cancer is scary, I really would rather not ever get it.

That's about it. I wish I had a witty and insightful review of this book, but it's hard. This is not a particularly emotional book, despite the gravity of the subject. Mukherjee moves very quickly through the subject matter, and in so doing, makes the book feel oddly light. In the few places where he tries to tell a human story, you can tell that he is clearly not in his element, and is - if anything - trying to mimic the feel of something more serious. He is much more at home going through the annals of cancer's history, describing the import of this discovery or that discovery. If anything, this book is more interesting for its compact navigation of what would otherwise be an even longer and denser subject matter.

Foster the People - Pumped Up Kicks

2011-08-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

So, this Saturday, one of my new coworkers asked me to go out to dinner with him. He had an ulterior motive - he had a date and the date was bringing a friend, so he needed some guys to play wingman for him. Anyone who actually knows me will probably find this an utterly laughable thing to do. Unless your girl's friends are enthralled by short nerds, there is absolutely no reason to ever bring me along. Which is probably why he brought three other guys just in case.

The dinner was good, and I will not lie, the friends were ridiculously attractive. As in, I would happily stare at these women and feel like a love-struck 16 year old. And somehow, dinner ended, and three guys and three really, really ridiculously good-looking girls made their way over to the Rose Bar in Gramercy. And for some reason or another, I happened to be one of those three guys. I really have no idea how that happened.

Now, talking to random girls is not my forte. I usually don't know what to say to them. However, if there is one thing I can do, it's shuffle my feet around really quickly when music plays. And, if the occasion calls for it, grab a pretty girl's hand and spin her around in circles until she looks queasy with dizziness. And that is precisely what I did to the only one of those pretty girls that was shorter than me. And it was awesome.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. Just a really fun night, no illicit sexual behavior or anything like that. The one moment that stands out is when the following song came on. And the girl that I was dancing with it loved it, and wished she knew what it was called. And I - having just recently found it - very casually let drop my little bit of knowledge. And then she loved me, and dancing commenced.

Foster the People - Pumped Up Kicks

Two songs

2011-08-07T13:47:00.001-07:00

Ok, so I'm a little past this, especially since it's a real downer to have get back to these things. So, this will be the last post on Pudge for pretty much ever, even though there is a ridiculous backlog of songs that all seem to have something to do with her. Rather than post more of the ones that I used to listen to when we were together, here are the really, really depressing songs that I listened to after she dumped me. When you are feeling like shit, there is nothing better than a really, really melodramatic song to make you feel as if someone out there in the world understands you. Even if the words don't actually really have much to do with what's going on in your life. Even if you are vaguely embarrassed by your musical selection and really don't want people to know that you are wallowing in your own self-pity to these songs. Anyway, here we go.

This first song is a little on the nose, and has a little too much jam-bandiness in it for me to not feel kind of like a high school kid for having listened to it. But it worked at the time. The only kink in the lyrics is the subtle implication that the girl might have died, but that's sort of neither here nor there. I tend to remember this song much more for its reasonably accurate portrayal of me drinking by myself for an extended period of time. I will leave out the artist, but I'm sure most of you will figure out who it is and groan loudly. To which I can only say, it is really hard to fully wallow in your melodramatic state of mind when you're not fully sure how to decode the obtuse, esoteric lyrics of the clever-sounding indie band which seems to be playing a sad break-up song, although you can never be entirely sure.

Grace is Gone

The second song came up because at the time of the break-up, I was also getting crushed at work. Every night, I'd sit at the long table in the middle of our office and go over slides and analysis, doing God knows what for hours. If you listen to the lyrics, it's much more about people not knowing how to connect with each other than it is about being really, really mopey because your girl left you and you are feeling really lonely. But, the mood of the song felt appropriately melancholy, and considering that I did actually spend a lot of time looking at elevators, wishing they would take me home, it felt vaguely appropriate.

Stars - Elevator Love Letter

So, that's all done now. Huzzah! I've been listening to new stuff recently, and I'm kind of psyched about it. Will post something new and fun shortly.

Iron & Wine - Each Coming Night

2011-08-01T21:26:00.001-07:00

I hate that I have to retire this song. Because I love it. I think it is pretty and beautiful in a way that most singer-songwriters strive - but mostly fail - to achieve. The words are, for the most part, meaningless. But if you move beyond that, the mood that is conjured is intimate and strangely romantic in a way that few songs of this genre ever manage to achieve.

Which is entirely why I played it for the one girl that I loved. And it is now inextricably linked with the image of her singing it, her head bobbing softly from side to side. And I hate that I will never see that again. One more happy thing to put away.

Iron & Wine

Ryan Adams - When the Stars Go Blue

2011-07-29T17:35:00.000-07:00

When she left me, the relationship had already been over for almost a year. She had gone off to business school, and soon after started dating someone else. The ending was, for better or worse, a formality. But formality or not, it was one of the most painful experiences of my life.

For the last several years, I think I have subconsciously harbored the thought that I could win her back from her Olympic medalist boyfriend. I thought that if I reworked myself into the man that she wanted - upgraded the clothes, got the job, made the right friends - then maybe the stars would align and things would all fall back into place. Regardless of how it ended, and all of the difficulties that we had, I loved her more than I think I have ever loved anything. And I still love her, and will probably continue to feel that way for the rest of my life. I just found out yesterday that she is now engaged. So, for better or for worse, it is time to put such thoughts away.

So, for the next several days, I will be putting my smoldering memories of her to rest. One of the after effects of our break-up has been the realization of just how deeply I have tied certain songs to my memories of her. This first song is what you would consider, "our song." Had we gotten married, it is undoubtedly what we would have played for the first dance. When this song plays, I remember the two of us dancing by ourselves in our shabby New York apartment. I remember us driving to Napa in California, and her singing in the passenger seat. But that's all in the past now.

Ryan Adams - When the Stars Go Blue

Something boring about the debt ceiling

2011-07-25T16:44:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I've written anything about politics or the economy, mainly because I'm trying to pull away from that sort of thing. But I am in a rant-ish mood, and since no one really reads this (except for Hoodie Allen, who responded to my last post), I feel like it's not a big deal if I just go off on something that I don't understand.

So, the debt ceiling. I have been thinking about it recently, because it is everywhere on the news, to the point where people that usually aren't even interested in this kind of shit have been asking me about it. Moreover, I also was passed this hilarious piece in the Onion that sparked my current brainfart on the subject.

At this point, our nation's politicians are effectively saying that they will not raise it unless they get this chit or that chat included in their new budget. What I don't really understand is this: the reason that these chits or chats are ostensibly important to these parties, is because they think that these items are a key element to our nation's overall economic health. Democrats, in a turn towards the center, are now leaning towards having a more balanced budget. As such, they want to raise tax revenues, so that the government will have more tax dollars flowing in to help, well, balance the budget. And they won't go along with any plan that doesn't result in higher taxes.

Republicans, led by a very vocal set of Tea-Partiers, are totally against raising taxes. For some of them, they basically think that an increase in taxes will hurt our nation's economic recovery. Dollars in private hands will have a more felicitous impact than a dollar in the government's hands. For the Tea Partiers, who seem to be militantly clinging to a very strong libertarian ethos, they don't even really give a shit about that. They hew to an approach known as, "Starving the beast," in which the aim is to deprive the government of tax dollars, to the point where the only viable approach is for the government to shrink. Smaller military, fewer schools, smaller FDA, etc. Better, right? Because everything the government does must automatically be shit, as a wise man known as Ronald Reagan once said.

I clearly have my leanings here, but that's actually somewhat inconsequential. What bothers me is that these things that the two parties are holding out for might possibly have a positive impact on our economy. Economists have been debating this shit for decades, and still cannot agree on what is the right recipe for economic growth and prosperity, which is the one thing that everyone seems to agree is the most awesome thing ever (except for hippies). So, in order to make sure that these things that might be good get passed, they are threatening to sit on their hands and let the U.S. default on its debt, which will absolutely have a disastrous effect upon our economy. Financial crisis, v2. Massive upheavals in the debt market. Soldiers and states going unpaid. China being pissed as fuck, and possibly taking military steps to make sure we actually pay their asses. Revocation of the dollar as the global reserve currency.

To me, I think of the two parties as basically being parents who have differing ideas of what school their kid should go to. The Democrats want the kid to go to a Montessori school, and if that means that they have to work some extra hours to pay the bill, then so be it. It'll pay off in the end. The Republicans just hate spending so much damn money, and won't even think of working any harder. Fuck Montessori, they'll just home school the kid, like their parents did for them back in the day. They turned out alright, didn't they? Neither side will back down. Now, it's to the point where unless they get what they want, both parents are willing to toss the kid into an orphanage in a third world country rife with genital mutilation and child soldiers. At this point, it just sounds like the parents are more concerned with being proven right than with being good parents. Which I just don't understand. Rant off.

Hoodie Allen - Tighten Up

2011-07-23T17:43:00.000-07:00

So, I don't know why, but for some reason I seem to have unknowingly picked up an affinity for white nerds that play black music. Most recently, this has been playing out in my forays into soul, where I've been listening to the likes of Mayer Hawthorne and Jamie Lidell. To be honest, I didn't even know that they were white when I first heard their music. I just knew that I liked combination of the old school aesthetic that they were bringing and the dressed up rhythm sections that they took from modern times. When I found out that pretty much all of them were white, I tried to expand a little bit and listen to guys like Raphael Saadiq, but the aesthetic just wasn't quite the same.

Anyway, it's happened again. Just today, I started listening to this guy, and I can already tell that I am going to be a big fan. He's a total nerd - a Jewish kid that went to UPenn and got a job at Google, only to quit his job to become a full-time rapper. The image on his debut mixtape (which can be downloaded for free right here) is of him in a marching band outfit. The samples that he uses are all from mainstream indie rock bands, e.g. Death Cab, Yeasayer, the Black Keys. That being said, he is highly reminiscent of Lupe Fiasco, except without the references to skateboarding or Islam. The song that I'm putting here is one of my favorites, and is him going over "Tighten Up," from the Black Keys. Hope you guys like it.

Hoodie Allen - Tighten Up

Leo Kottke - Cripple Creek

2011-07-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I never really started listening to music until high school, when the magical combination of a CD burner and a dormitory full of guys with music collections (well, just one guy really) gave me access to as much music as I could ever listen to in one sitting. But for the longest time, I would simply listen to music an album at a time, taking in the good with the bad. Having listened to plenty of full-length albums, I can definitively say that for a select few albums, there is some added value to listening to the whole thing front to back. To this day, I cannot listen to Dark Side of the Moon unless it starts up from the beginning. That being said, most albums are approximately 50% crap, with good albums taking that percentage down to about 15%. As soon as I realized this, I finally began to make playlists, and life has been different ever since.

Most people would look at my first playlist and either conclude that it is crap, or at best, charmingly dated. Rusted Root is on it, as is a song from the worst Dave Matthews Band album ever (which is saying something, depending on your views on that band). There is, however, one song that I look back on and can kind of nod to myself and say, "Not incredibly shabby." And here it is. Some pretty badass fingerpicking. Even better, it doesn't include the man's singing, which he admits sound like, "geese farts on a muggy day." Which is precisely why it is infinitely better to listen to this song, and not to the whole album.

Leo Kottke - Cripple Creek

Weezer - Jamie

2011-07-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

Won't be back from my friend's wedding until... not sure when, so just posting this now. Sometime during my freshman summer, I was taking summer classes at Berkeley. Not that I really needed them, but anything to keep busy, I guess. Either way, it was not the most exciting summer. The only thing that really held my attention was this one, tiny, bird-like girl that I made sure to sit very close to during each class. At this point in my life, the idea of approaching pretty girls that I didn't know still occupied the same mental space as jumping out of a plane; fun and interesting in theory, but likely to induce hyperventilation and soiled underpants in practice.

At some point, I managed to work up the courage to talk to her, and we eventually started what was to be my first (and only) summer fling. Although she dumped me the minute I left campus to go back to school, it was still a fun summer. One of the best parts was that she was really into poppy '90s emo rock music, with the obvious King of the Hill being Weezer. At that point, I had only really listened to the Sweater Song and Buddy Holly, having avoided the rest of the corpus because Weezer was the favorite band of this one kid in high school that I thought was super annoying. This negative association quickly vanished when it became clear that this really cute girl liked them. I have been a huge Weezer fan ever since.

The song below is one of my favorites, and was one of the first ones that I picked up, after getting past the Blue Album and Pinkerton, which were pretty much everywhere at that point. If you've ever heard a Weezer song, it sounds pretty much exactly like all the other ones. But it's still one of my favorites.

Weezer - Jamie

The Primitives - Crash, '95 Mix

2011-07-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

As many of you may have noticed, I have a hard time posting regularly. The main stumbling block has been lack of a clear objective. When you can write about anything, it suddenly becomes a somewhat overwhelming task to figure out what the one important thing is that you want to say for the day.

To rectify matters, one of the things that I'm going to try is to post a song each week. Unlike other music blogs though, where the purpose is mainly to show how cool and in tune you are with the latest band that no one's ever heard of, this will be mainly about recalling memories from way, way back when. I've always found that no single artistic medium has a more powerful hold over my memory than music. Just today, I was flipping through a CaseLogic CD book that I found in my room, and it was like finding a book of letters from old friends.

Getting straight to it, I think it fitting that this first post be about "Crash - The '95 Mix" (not the original Primitives version, which actually sounds oddly sad and atonal). This was the song that led me to purchase my first CD ever, The Dumb and Dumber Soundtrack. Some people might look at this and marvel over the irony of my first piece of musical property being so explicitly linked to blatant stupidity. Whatever, haters gonna hate.

When I first heard this song in '95, it was on the way to a friend's beach house, just as we were all piling in the car to go run around in the sand like decapitated chickens on PCP. On the way over, we literally blasted this song on extended repeat. I could say that my tastes have long since matured, and that I would never listen to such simplistic pop drivel. That would be a total lie. This song is pure pop awesomeness, unpolluted by all of the weird, angsty vibes that came after Nirvana hit the scene. Because really, when I think about my childhood, I would rather think about this song and running around in the sun than having long, stupid hair, wearing ugly flannel shirts, and not really understanding why this weird guy with straw blonde hair is always shouting.

The Primitives - Crash, '95 Mix

Being in the wrong Camp

2011-06-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

This is a revision of yet another blog post that I drafted but never completed. Basically, the original post was something of a thought piece on the place of faith in modern society. It turned on the story of Harold Camping, the leader of a religious group called Family Radio, and his followers, who all believed that the end of the world was going to come on May 21st, 2011. This belief came about from Camping's study of the scripture and various numerological "principles," which convinced him that our day of judgement or some such was at hand. Mr. Camping is a civil engineer and self-taught "biblical scholar."

I first read about it in an article in the NYT, which discussed how families were handling their business in light of the coming "END OF THE WORLD," i.e. earthquakes, floods, etc. All the stuff that you would associate with the 7,000th anniversary of Noah's flood. Sadly, many of them were actively planning for a world that ended on that date, by quitting their jobs, spending their life AND their children's college savings, and actively campaigning for others to believe as well. According to the Washington Post, one of them gave up medical school and spent her family's life savings to spread the word.

Unfortunately, these people were all totally, totally wrong. I would go on about how wrong they are, but as one deacon put it, "It's easy to mock them. But you can go kick puppies too. But why?"

A couple of thoughts:
* I do not understand faith. Or rather, as some have put it, the one square in your mental space that is totally impervious to evidence or reason. And I fail to see how Christians (mostly literalists/fundamentalists) that roundly look at these Family Radio followers, Scientologists, and Mormons as essentially being off their nut are behaving any differently. Maybe it's just me, having failed to see the light shining from Damascus, but the tragedy inherent in blowing your children's college savings for a belief is not so far off from the tragedy in halting stem cell research or standing against gay marriage for another. This isn't me hating; I know that faith provides hope and meaning for millions of people, and that's probably a good thing. This is just me saying I don't get it.
* Some people have no f***ing shame. Shortly after admitting to the SF Chronicle that he was, "flabbergasted" by the lack of massive, world-ending earthquakes, Camping's Family Radio web site essentially tried to retcon events by saying that this is exactly what they said was supposed to happen. How, might you ask? By pulling this out of their, er, hat:
And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground…” Thus the word “earthquake” can also be understood to teach that mankind shakes.
That is, judgement day wasn't about the physical world being torn apart by earthquakes (which is what he pretty much told everyone was going to happen), it was more about scaring the crap out of everyone (gotcha!). The actual physical annihilation of the world is actually going to happen on October 21, 2011! Seriously, wtf. Would it kill you to just apologize to the dozens of people that believed what you said and totally f'ed their lives over because of it?

About my day

2011-06-12T17:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I wrote anything. Sorry, I suck at this. Discipline is hard to muster for a blog that probably has about four or five readers total.

Today (actually, about two weeks ago when I first started drafting this post), I dropped by Kepler's, a bookstore near my hometown. Interestingly enough, Kepler's actually went bankrupt sometime around 2005 and briefly shut its doors. The surrounding community responded with protests on Kepler's plaza (really helpful), and ended up putting up money so that Kepler's could keep its doors open, a la It's a Wonderful Life (actually helpful).

One of the things that I remember about Kepler's is that it's basically where every kid in the surrounding five cities goes to buy their summer reading books. It's pretty cool, because you can see what the kids are reading these days, even if you're way out of that age bracket. When I checked it out today, there were a bunch of familiar titles lining the shelves. The Giver. A Separate Peace. The Catcher in the Rye.

BUT. Now they have all sorts of cool new contemporary books! Apparently, America's teachers have been browsing my Goodreads list, because there's a striking number of common titles. The Magicians. The Life of Pi. World War Z. Like, real books! That aren't all about kids in high school! Or... it could be that I think those books are way cooler because I read them on my own, rather than having them pre-selected for me by my teachers. Either way though, I'm not sure if I should feel jealous for today's kids, or if I should start checking to see if I've become a super lame adult that gets excited about lame things.

A discovery that no one will care about

2011-05-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

I have been watching, How to Train your Dragon recently, because it's on HBO all the time and it's awesome. And I was really starting to get bugged by the fact that the dragon in the movie looked... familiar. AND NOW I KNOW WHY.

This website also has lots of other awesome/terrible discoveries. I particularly like this one:

Movie review: Blue Valentine

2011-05-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

Blue Valentine was not my choice. Granted, it seemed like a better idea than Never Say Never. However, it seemed like kind of a downer of a movie, even just from the description, in which the phrase "doomed marriage" came up front and center.

The movie follows two timelines, one tracing the initial love story, and the other its eventual disintegration. The story is fairly simple, and much of what distinguishes the movie is found in the details. The song that Dean plays, or the dance that Cindy does when they fall in love. The way that Dean chastises her for letting the dog run away, or the way she rejects his advances as they fall apart. This is not a complicated narrative, in need of expository scenes. It is a pair of periods in life, being described.

The ending is understandably... sad. I had to watch another, happier movie afterwards to snap myself out of what was sure to be a state of terrible mopey-ness. I actually found myself digging into a tub of ice cream not too much later.

That being said, I would not ever willlingly choose to watch this movie. It is very well done, but not particularly entertaining. In fact, most of the time, it is simply painful to watch. You feel absolutely terrible for the characters involved. There isn't even any particular lesson to take away from all of this, no way of avoiding such a calamity for one's self. It just leaves you feeling sad and terrible and in need of some sort of reprieve.

A short story

2011-05-09T23:19:00.000-07:00

Over the past two weeks, I have allowed myself to fall into the habit of conversing at serious length with a new friend of mine, who happens to be a first year at my school, who ostensibly has no plans to move to New York. From this friend, I obtained this link to a short story from Jonathon Safran Foer.

The story's narrative voice is fairly similar to that of a myth, fable, or fairy tale. Characters are referenced by their most significant identifier, e.g. the jumper, the boy and the girl, etc. Their dialogue is earnest and without implicit guile. Everything described is just so.

The focus of this fable is a mythical "Sixth Borough" of Manhattan and how it came to disappear. Its disappearance is slow and only perceptible for the oddest and most debatable of reasons. In fact, one might say that it was a fluke that anything was noticed at all. However, once the disappearance is perceived, it becomes inevitable, despite all of the efforts of the people of Manhattan. Interestingly enough, the Sixth Borough is treated almost anthropomorphically; it is leaving because of some unknown motivation that is inscrutable to all involved. As it leaves, all that Manhattan retains of it is Central Park, which is placed in its heart, and the vaguest of circumstantial evidence that the Sixth Borough ever existed (which is of course, in Central Park).

The parallels between this story and a breakup are hard for me to avoid making. The inscrutability of the partner's reasons for leaving. The gradual dissolution of all evidence of the relation. The faintest memory residing only within the heart of the city. That the memory happens to be one of the few parts of the city that is alive seems to be a graceful way of describing how we grow from these experiences.

The linkage is made even more explicit by the one truly human part of the story, where a boy in the Sixth Borough and a girl in Manhattan, who are connected only by a pair of tin cans and a string that they must continually extend, are eventually forced to break off their relations because of the inevitability of the growing distance. Their one utterance of love is shut up in those tin cans, forever to be held on to, but never to be released.

I suppose it's only appropriate that this story come my way as I leave school, and I too have to face the inevitability of the distance that will come between me and all of the friends that I have made here. Hopefully someone else out there has a less melodramatic reading of it than I do, but that's what's on my mind these days. It was a very nice story. Thanks to my friend for pushing it my way.

I'm beginning to understand...

2011-05-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

The inherent appeal of tumblr over a standard blog. Every so often, I just want to post a song link or something, and tumblr is way better for that than blogger. Facebook would actually be the ideal venue for everything, except the audience is too big. I don't actually want everyone on facebook to see everything that I put down. And I don't really want to manage a list of 500-600 friends, or what not. Blaaaagh.

Anyway, it's a gorgeous day for once in Boston, and I am of course wasting it by sitting around writing at home, listening to Taylor Swift (exploratory listening, humoring a friend). Catch you guys later.

Political Figures

2011-04-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

I saw Eliot Spitzer speak today, and I came away both greatly impressed, and also somewhat sad. Spitzer is a man with an immense amount of intelligence, fortitude, and political charisma. As he spoke today, it struck me just how forthright he was. He was very clear on his views, and made no bones about what he thought was smart, and what he thought was dumb (hint: it rhymes with the Tee Party). One of the choice moments of the day was when he stated that, as a politician, he'd always been somewhat embarrassed by the level of self-promotion that he'd had to do. Which he then tossed out, off the cuff, that:

Although, embarrassment is something you learn to live with when you've had my life.

What was sad was that his career as a politician is basically totally done, at least in the short run, because he cheated on his wife and bangs hookers with his socks on. Which is terrible. But frankly, I don't really give a shit. I think that as far as making political decisions goes, I would trust him to do the right thing. But that won't happen.

I'll post later about what he actually talked about.

Wow.

2011-04-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

Just read an article in the NYT about gamers finding love in World of Warcraft. My immediate reaction was to think that there is now finally a venue for finding a date that is considerably more embarrassing than match.com, eharmony, etc. However, I did find the following point interesting:

With more than 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games of its kind in the world (others include EverQuest, Aion, Guild Wars). That’s a sizable dating pool. Match.com, by way of comparison, has fewer than 2 million subscribers.

Obviously, the two are very different, and match is way more focused, making the direct comparison almost worthless. Still, it is some sort of venue where the two people can get to know each other over a shared activity, so maybe that helps? Also, the other shocking fact from the article:

More than 40 percent of online gamers are women, and adult women are among the industry’s fastest growing demographics, representing 33 percent of the game-playing population — a larger portion than boys 17 and younger, who make up 20 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group.

My reaction to this is that the sample here has to include people playing Words with Friends or something, because this cannot possibly be true of World of Warcraft. If it is, my vision of the world will never be the same.

Music

2011-04-23T07:38:00.001-07:00

When I was younger, I had no independent musical taste of my own. That said, I knew I hated what my parents listened to. My mom listened mostly to classical, and occasionally a bit of Barbra Streisand. My dad was way into the oldies, and would listen to Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, the Righteous Brothers, Andy Williams, etc. I didn't know much about music, I just knew that I hated what my parents were listening to. Them being who they were, it really could not possibly have been cool.

I have recently been listening to a lot of new soul, after being inspired by my much cooler, younger cousin Chris. Oddly enough, it's all a bunch of white dudes who are recreating (not even updating, just recreating) the sounds they heard when they were kids. It's definitely an old sound, and although I'm sure there's probably some weird hipster chic to it (look at me, I'm listening to black music appropriated by white guys with thick black glasses!), it's definitely something that I think can only fly to the extent that I'm almost 30 years old and have no need (or possibility) of looking cool. This has gotten me to thinking though. Am I hitting that stage where I'm turning into my parents? Will I have kids who flip through my music collection and go, "Jesus, my dad is such a loser?"

Ignoring the fact that it's looking like I will die alone and childless, this is putting me in a serious state of existential crisis, since half of my identity is being precisely who my parents are not. Ignoring that though, some of these songs are totally legit. I totally encourage you to check them out at your leisure.

James Hunter - Carina

Jamie Lidell - Multiply

The one about Honeybadgers

2011-04-22T21:37:00.001-07:00

This video was recently passed on to me, with my roommates saying that I was the narrator. I hate them. But the narration is actually pretty funny.

Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2011-04-19T20:45:00.001-07:00

These days, I keep a running tab of what I'm reading on goodreads, which I'm pretty much using as a way to remember what I think about the books that I read. I have a nasty habit of reading things and forgetting their content, so taking the time to write about them has been a helpful way of keeping track of my thoughts. In any case, I'll occasionally be posting some of my reviews here. Here's a review of a book that I just finished today, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

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Despite whatever fronts I may put on, my core being is a big nerd that falls really easily in love with women that I am too shy to pursue (or who are otherwise basically unattainable). So, imagine my interest in a book that is nominally about a fat nerdy kid that falls really easily in love but is terrible with women. So, basically, a book about a hyperbolic version of myself, except from the DR and really fat.

Unfortunately, I never really got the full sense of resonance and connection that I was looking for (a la Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, where the previously aforementioned resonance was almost unbearable at times). For starters, the book is really about the terrible, terrible misfortunes that befell not only that fat kid, but also his entire blighted family. Many of these are quite sad, but oddly non-compelling. The underlying trope of the book is that the family is cursed, which adds an element of "magical realism" (or whatever kids call it these days) that makes the events feel less like a human tragedy and more like a set of just really crappy events. That the family members are bull-headed, stubborn, and given ample warning of the oncoming tragedies also makes it hard to feel really sorry for anyone.

Also, there's a ton of stuff in Spanish here, which I could only partially understand/guess at. Me being the completionist that I am, I constantly felt like I was missing out on stuff while reading this book, since I didn't have Internet access and couldn't look up every phrase that got tossed around (and there are a lot). This feeling kept me from fully immersing myself in the book, and at times made me feel as if the author was just peppering the pages with little things to make the world seem more authentic (much like he does with his nerd references, which I think in some cases were actually wrong).

All in all, it was a fine book, but it didn't really do it for me. I will say that there were definite moments that touched me, and that at times, I definitely empathized with some of the despair that Oscar felt throughout the course of his life. And the story of Oscar's grandfather was also crushing. But I think overall, I found this book to be just OK.