Category Archives: Personal

It’s What’s for Dinner

YummmAbout a year and a half ago I triumphantly kicked Coca-Cola, something I did to assuage my concerns about my own long-term health. Happily, my soda consumption is still relatively light — I’ll have one every few weeks, perhaps, but I no longer crave that particularly satisfying bite of a glass of cola. But as I get further along into my thirties, I realize that, as methods of arresting one’s incrementally declining health go, giving up soda is hardly a comprehensive plan for long life.

Right now, I’ve got it in my head that I need to kick beef, too. It’s always struck me that consuming red meat is something like trying to get a train wreck through one’s body; it’s spectacular and awful and a mess to clean up. I’m sure there are arguments in favor of beef consumption in moderation, but I’m not sure I buy them. What’s more, I’ve been haunted lately by the ethics of the entire slaughter process — how horrific it is to think about the thousands of cattle being led to their demise, and how much sheer force is required to take a cow down (forgive the crude terminology). I know there’s nothing egalitarian about poultry or pork production, either, but something about beef gives me shivers.

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Mr. Otis Regrets

OtisI went to art school at what’s now known as Otis College of Art & Design, a small institution with a head count, among all four undergraduate levels, totaling only around 800 people. It was probably a bit smaller than would have been ideal for a young kid trying to get through the madness that was Los Angeles in the early nineteen-nineties. I saw earthquakes, droughts, gang warfare and civil riots during my four years there, and by the time I left I was so embittered by the awfulness of that city and the intensity of my experience at that school that I tried to leave it all behind me and to think about my collegiate past as little as possible.

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Primate in Pink

Pink ValentineEverybody seems to know what a singing telegram is, but few people have ever received one; heck, the one that I sent to my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day today was the first one I’ve even been involved in. It’s dead simple to book if you have a credit card and a sense of mischief, and the performer showed up promptly at her office around 10:30a this morning and serenaded her in full public view of her entire office — and to her great personal embarrassment — with chocolates and a rendition of “Hello Dolly.” Why they chose that song, I have no idea; it completely escaped me that I could specify a song when I was giving the details to the booker so I guess he just chose a favorite. One thing I did specify, though, was the pink gorilla suit. I spotted it on the Web site and I thought to myself, “What says ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ better than a singing telegram delivered in a pink gorilla suit?” I’ll tell you what: nothing.

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New York to Nashville and Back Again

Time is a weird phenomenon when you’re holed up in a week-long series of business meetings, as I was this past week in Nashville. On Tuesday evening, it felt as I’d been there for a whole two weeks rather than just two days. Nearly every minute of every day was scheduled; if we weren’t meeting, we were preparing for the next meeting, and by Friday morning it felt like it had been a whole month we’d been there. But now I’m back in New York, and I can’t believe it was almost an entire week ago that I was leaving for the airport; I remember the sandwich I was eating just before walking out the door last Sunday like it was just two hours ago. Very odd.

Though I’m freakin’ exhausted, I have to say though that it was probably one of the most productive kick-offs in which I’ve ever taken part. We met with some forty-odd stakeholders and cranked through a huge requirements and information gathering agenda, led principally by our information architect. We do projects of all kinds of sizes at Behavior, but even the big ones aren’t always as intensive and well-structured as this, so it has me in a pretty positive state of mind about getting started on the design. It makes such a big difference to have properly conducted the necessary research at the beginning of a project. Now comes the hard part. Actually, now I take it easy for a day and a half first.

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Wheres and Whys of Blogging

Last Friday my girlfriend and I drove to Northern Virginia to see family, leaving just before the “Blizzard of 2005” hit and returning just after the snow finished falling. Before I left, I didn’t get a chance to update my weblog with one of those “Gone fishin’” posts to let readers know I was going to be away from my keyboard for a few days. I’ve never liked those kinds of posts, especially the times I’ve gone back over them while performing housekeeping tasks on my archives — they seem irrelevant and superfluous beyond the immediate present. I’m a bit precious, I suppose, about the idea of making my archives readable, free of that kind of cruft.

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Dear Outdated Online Diary

Eagle-eyed readers may notice that I used to boast of having started posting here way back in December 2000, but with this redesign, the Quick Access area in the right-hand column now says July 2000. The reason is an early, abortive attempt at an online journal — a kind of proto-blog — that I tried to keep that summer, without the aid of any kind of blogging software. It started when I was under the illusion that the great heights of the Internet bubble were sustainable enough to set me up in style at my then-employer’s new offices in Singapore. Ha. That turned out to be not quite the case.

As I prepared to leave the States, it occurred to me that an online journal would be a good way to keep friends and family abreast of my progress in the East. This was before I was smart enough to use Movable Type or any kind of software that might have made my life easier. I wrote and produced this journal over the course of the next six months using only BBEdit and a painfully time-consuming willingness to code the pages by hand. The entries were fairly long and heavily edited, and each one took way more time than I spend on a typical post today.

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Snap Happy

Nikon D70Thanks to an unnecessarily complicated income tax situation, I was only able to receive — and spend — my 2003 refund recently. Feeling a little despondent after last week’s big Democratic loss in the election, I took a WTF the attitude and splurged on a Nikon D70 digital SLR camera. It arrived today, and I just spent the last two hours figuring it out; there are a million things to learn about it, but at this point I’m totally thrilled. Following, the first decent picture I took with it.

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File Under “Young, Stupid”

By and large, it’s not my opinion that weblogs should chronicle the minutiae of an author’s everyday life, but I’m going to ignore that rule for a moment and let it be known to the entire world that I cleaned out my file cabinet yesterday. For years, I’d been moving around a set of hanging file folders stuffed with the accrued paperwork of my personal business affairs; I’d relocate these bulky files from apartment to apartment the way you might move furniture that you never use. And each time I had to open the drawer to retrieve some crucial document or file a document that seemed vaguely significant, I’d make a mental note: “Gotta clean out these damn files soon.”

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