Category Archives: Personal

All Wedded Out

Yesterday was a beautiful day for my friends Nam and Shirley to get married — they were blessed with uncommonly temperate, sunny July weather, and an allaying series of breezes rolled in off the Hudson River and over the deck at Battery Park’s American Park restaurant, where both the ceremony and reception were held. The wedding was kind of a reunion of lots of people that Nam and I used to work with, which made it a lot of fun for me. As a groomsman, my duties included carrying a thick envelope of cash and checks to pay off the various musicians, photographers, videographers and lighting technicians, and also standing around with a big smile on my face while outfitted in a tuxedo — I have a distaste for the pilled blended fabric and ill-fitted tailoring of rented formal wear, but the whole affair was more than enjoyable enough so that I was hardly ever reminded how awkward and unpleasant my senior prom was.

That was yesterday. Today, Monday, was a bad day to go back to work — everyone at Behavior went to the wedding and so just about everyone strolled into our offices late and/or hung over. I drank hardly any alcohol — I hardly ever do anymore — but I need another day to recover, and a long, long time before I ever get married myself.

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Friend of a Friendster

FriendsterFriendster hardly needs an introduction, but for the remaining uninitiated: it’s not, as I assumed when I first heard the name, a file-sharing network dedicated to the illegal trade of pirated episodes of “Friends.” Rather it’s an online method for meeting new people through your existing, real world network of friends, and it’s so frighteningly complete that there are people I know who swear it’s merely the most public expression of John Aschroft’s evil genius for total information awareness. The Village Voice wrote a more accurate and less flippant explanation in their piece on the service last month.

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Rehabilitation of a Coke Addict

Coca-ColaAs vices go, an addiction to Coca-Cola is pretty timid stuff, which may be the reason I developed one so easily. Because of the long hours we work at Behavior, it was only natural that we decided to carry on the dot-com era tradition of stocking our fridge with dozens of bright red cans of Coke. It became a habit for me to drink at least one or two cans of it during the workday, then go home and drink a half-liter more with dinner and another half-liter while I worked on my computer late into the night. It was a nasty habit and I knew it, but I swear Coke tastes so damn good, and I found it incredibly difficult to convince myself to cut it out.

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Busy Work

It amazes me how people can find the time, energy and wherewithal to maintain more than one Web site. It’s hard enough for me to keep up with just this one, never mind trying to generate enough content for a second. Tonight was one of those nights when I looked at my watch, saw that the little hand was way closer to twelve than I thought it was, and realized that I hadn’t yet posted anything to this site.

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The Keymaster

BeachI have some tips for those beachgoers entrusted with the keys to their rental car. First, don’t forget to take the keys out of the pocket of your swim trunks when you go swimming in the ocean. If you do that and, by some minor miracle, the keys haven’t been extracted from your pocket and swept up in the ocean foam, you should immediately take the keys back to a safe place, along with your wallet, house keys, sunglasses, lucky rabbit’s foot, Palm OS device and other valuables.

Do not think to yourself, “There’s a lot of wet sand all over these keys, perhaps I should wash it off quickly in the water before taking it back to my beach towel,“ because the tumult of some crashing wave may inadvertently knock the keyring out of your hand, swallowing the keys up in the briny depths of the shore, causing expletives to drop out of your incredulous, gaping jaw.

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French Canadians Are People Too

I approached Montréal with skepticism; here was a population of Caucasian North Americans who spoke English but preferred French, and what’s more, the Queen of England’s face was all over their money. The very proposition of such a city seemed contradictory, at best, and schizophrenic, at worst. But as soon as the temperate air of a Montréal summer evening hit me, I was in a more open mood for having escaped the New York swelter, at least. It’s a pleasant, clean city, exceedingly moderate in everything I could see, from architecture to debauchery, though of course I only saw downtown. I had a good time, I’d go back and take in some more sights, listen to some more Canadian French, spend some more American dollars. But right now I am exhausted.

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Week in Review

Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.

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Ill Suited

Men’s SuitsSometimes I write about politics or design or technology, but today I am going to write about clothes. I like suits. I like the way they serve as a kind of social uniform and armor, and the way they allude to a world “at a sort of moral attention for ever,” to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite writers. And yet, I have never owned a suit that I can say I’ve been one hundred percent happy with, and it’s that frustration that I’m afraid will be with me forever.

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The Morning Commute

Radiohead “Hail to the Thief”Two anecdotes from my daily walk to the office: First, it was a beautiful morning to release a new Radiohead album; the skies were a calming, solid blue and the sun is finally, after weeks of miserable precipitation, pouring down clean, bright light again. There’s a Virgin Megastore at Union Square and as I walked past it I saw one satisfied consumer after another exiting its doors with a copy of “Hail to the Thief,” happily heading off into the springtime. I walked a little further into the park and I saw a young woman sitting on a bench beneath an old, old tree, already listening to the CD on her Discman and reading along with the lyrics intently.

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The Seaside and Cake

For my extended weekend getaway on the New Jersey shore, I packed my laptop and about a half-dozen unread copies of The New Yorker. I had high ambitions: I would check my Behavior email periodically, continue posting to my blog, and catch up on those back-issues. Somehow, it didn’t work out that way.

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