Dancing at 80˚

Spring approaches Cambridge.  In my New England youth, I looked forward to these refreshing, reinvigorating months, when brown and gray burst green and blossoms' color.  This year, I already dread the sticky summer soon to follow.  That's how it is when you have to wear dress clothes each workday.

It's still hot in cold places.  From my Google Reader archive I'm cleaning before the service's deactivation,  I'm copying here Dancing at 80˚, featuring Temujin Doran getting funky in Svalbard to an accapella groove.  I like his unrestraint contrased to the isolation of his surroundings.  At 1:21 distant people appear in the background and I imagine an ironic shift to their perspective, with Doran dancing alone to Arctic silence...

Dancing at 80˚ from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

The boogie went down on the Erikbreek glacier, here:

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...Scripta Manet

Since around 2006 the greeting on my cellphone's main screen has read Verba Volant.. ("words fly away)".  I put this to remind myself that whatever is said through the phone is temporal, to be lost in the ether of time and fiber optics.

I'd like to eventually obtain tasteful stationary which on its bottom includes the second phrase which completes the Latin expression: ...Scripta Manet ("words remain/are forever").  At the time I updated my phone greeting I considered making ...Scripta Manet my Gmail signature (I decided against e-mail signatures in general).  I created my Gmail account in 2005 - the service was a dream realized for archivist like myself.  Google advertised Gmail then as allowing you to never have to delete another message - to be able to save everything.  This now standard feature was revolutionary for those using AOL or our college e-mail servers.  I think then Gmail allotted each account 1GB in storage, which at that time was essentially infinity (Gmail was the everyman's first cloud storage system - when my fellow master's students asked how they were supposed to be able to move or store large quantitative data files around for their theses, our professor simply remarked, "Well, Gmail accounts are free...")

"Verba Volant..." reminder on my flip-phones home screen.  Note the 2013 dumb phone usage...

One of the more popular mobile apps today is Snapchat, which allows you to message self-destructing photos.  There are also analogous text versions (OneShar.es or PrivNote).  I can't even fathom this.  The only reason I could imagine would be, as some have suggested, is to send dirty pictures.  Otherwise these services are in direct contrast to what I perceive the point of a photo or purposefully writing a letter would be: you want to remember an image, a person or place or event.  I've never found an old photo, handwritten letter, or even e-mail that I don't consider priceless.  I wonder if twenty years from now there might be slight pangs of collective regret for at least some of the destroyed images.

I've used e-mail regularly since the late 1990s.  Our first inboxes were confined by small storage spaces.  Typically, old messages would self-delete after 30 days.  It's gut-retching to imagine how much loss occurred.  I probably used AOL, AIM, and GW's e-mail almost every single day from 1998 through 2003.  These messages would have formed an accidental diary, and what a treasure-trove it would be: a time capsule of our thoughts on daily life, our turn-of-the-century routines, clues to memories we've forgotten, and perhaps most preciously, words from friends and family no longer with us.  AOL or GW could literally name their price if they were able to sell my recovered e-mails.

I think I'm among the last generation that will ever have large parts of their lives undocumented.  Between permanent e-mail and especially social media, with ubiquitous photo and imaging hardware, I can't image how anyone growing up today won't have detailed depictions of their daily lives recorded.  It's almost too much information, and the appeal of Snapchat or checking-out of more permanent communication methods is that the past won't return to haunt you one day.  I'm curious what will happen when the children of this generation eventually grow up to comb their parents' whiny Facebook posts.  Some friends' children will lose as much respect for them as I have.

I know in someone's dusty photo album in some closet somewhere there are dancing photos of myself I'd turn beet-red to see.  I'm also sure that, many of my old e-mail or instant messenger conversations would be cringe-worthy if I were ever to read them.  How lame, how corny I'd seem!  I know for a fact many of my high school friends never want to look back at those years, and would rather pretend those years never happened.  But,  they did happen, and this is the only life we're given, the only awkward period we're given.  They're unique stories - our stories - and for that reason, even only privately, it's worth it to embrace them.


What I'm eating these days

Although I try to eat a varied diet, two out of three meals every weekday are fairly fixed.  Breakfast and lunch have a largely fixed format, with the sole variety introduced through the rotation of side fruits.  When I really stop to think about it, variety is in my diet almost exclusively comes in through the dinners I eat each night.  Even then, dinners are predominantly selected from a short list of go-to weeknight meals (pasta, meat w/potatoes, or beans and rice, and tacos).

These days for breakfast,

• Yogurt, preferably Chobani's passion fruit flavor, if the grocery had them stocked that w
• A buttered bagel, usually from Bruegger's (local) or even better one of a frozen stockpile brought home from Stew Leonard's
• Oatmeal, usually Market Basket's generic raisin and spice
• Fruit, usually grapes, grapefuit, or papaya.  This morning I had blackberries and a prickly pear.
• Although it's getting a bit too warm for it, a winter staple is definitely a cup of Ghiardelli's Double Chocolate Hot Chocolate, topped off with whipped cream and dusted with Penzy's pumpkin pie spice

These days for lunch,

• A sandwich, typically cheese (Swiss or Muenster, 1-2 slices) and meat (ham or chicken, sometimes Trader Joe's pastrami, 4-6 slices)
• 2-3 pieces of fruit (oranges, in winter, apples of figs in fall, peaches or watermelon in summer, today an orange and a pear)
• These days, dessert has been two Quaker's Chocolate Crunch Rice Cakes

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The Timid Lover

Always on the lookout for a good coffee table book, several months ago I was thumbing through art books at the Cambridge Library. By change I took from the shelf a collection of the works of Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose name I did not recognize.  Opening randomly to the middle, however, I found a painting depicting a scene very much recognizable as one lifted near-exactly from several instances throughout my life...

The Timid Lover (1719) by Jean-Antoine Watteau

It was deeply comforting to see the shyness I've experienced played out in a scene three hundred years old.  In an entirely seperate book, Alain de Botton wrote about the consoling power of art to normalize our experiences:  "There are fewer stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly while the names and backdrops alter."  He ends the passage, which I love, by quoting Schopenhauer:

'The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands'

James Bond Loses His Car Keys

The Bugle podcast's John Oliver does Sir Sean Connery's 007 beseeching Miss Moneypenny to help him locate his lost car keys...



(via Episode 168, "Streets of Rage"; released October 14th 2011)

The GIFs I've loved lately

Wednesday and Lurch

1. Can you get that for me? from (Rocco's Modern Life)
2. Duck season!  Rabbit season! from (Looney Tunes)
3. Wednesday gettin' down... from (The Adams Family)

-----------------The GIF I've Loved Always-----------------

R.I.P. "The Dancing  T" (1999-2004), which adorned by AIM profile for as long as I had it

A Very Passover Celebrity Deathmatch

Happy Easter!  Disappointingly, The Ten Commandments isn't playing on TV tonight, (I may have missed it last Sunday).  Without it, the Easter season is incomplete.  I settled for the second-best,  Charlton Heston as Moses taking on Ramses for the freedom of the Israelites in the late 90's MTV series Celebrity Deathmatch:

The genius of the Celebrity Deathmatch sketches were that they successfully covered all the combatants' major clichés in just a few minutes of claymation extravaganza: here, mummies, plagues, the parting of the waters, and pyramids.  Oh my.

Bonus Easter Egg: Marilyn Manson's interview in the very first episode, explaining why he killed all of Hanson and the Spice Girls: "Why I'd do it?  Because I'm Marilyn Manson, the most evil man in America.  And because they asked for it 'cause they all suck, and their music sucks...and I hope they all go to Hell, and Satan takes his pitchfork.....'cause they're all a bunch of rotten poser loser..."

Fasts of Time's Past

'Tis a season of fasting.  Lent is ending for Catholics, Passover for Jews.  I ate like normal: meat on Fridays, on Ash Wednesday, always full meals, definitely didn't give up chocolate.  I will never voluntarily fast again.

Here's where I'm coming from: I have trauma memories of a more secular type of fasting.  My senior year of high school, I regularly cut weight for wresting, once, sometimes twice a week.  I was around 170 lbs healthy, but regularly lost ten pounds (of water? or something?) to make the 160 lbs weight class.  Here there was an varsity opening.  Because quickly losing 10 lbs ruin your body, I consistently sucked.  I may have sucked anyway, but that dehydration and malnutrition certainly didn't help.  Still, I was better even at that cut weight then my other teammates who could have filled in at that class.  So, to maximize the possibility of a win at that class was worthwhile that I cut.

Each time I cut weight, my non-wrestling friends wouldn't believe me when I told them I was down 10 lbs since yesterday.  Ten pounds?  No big deal.  It's not fun, but I did it every time I needed to.  Do you want to lose 10 lbs in a day?  It's actually easy.  Here's how to do it every time:

• Start the practice the day before the match.  Don't drink anything during water breaks.  Instead, splash your head, ears, neck, and wrists in cold water in the bathroom sink.  Before you leave, swish a few mouthfuls around, also - but be sure not to swallow!  You'll feel as good as if you drank water.
• Weight yourself after practice - down a few pounds, you're getting there!  Alternatively, you have more weight to lose, fat boy.
• Eat little or nothing for dinner that night.  A Fresh Samantha protein smoothie sounds about right.  Promise yourself you'll only drink half.  Uncontrollably drink it all as soon touches your lips.  Hate your weakness.
• In a sulky 17 year-old manner, give your mother attitude for filling the house with delicious dinner smells.  Hate your family for eating in front of you without respect or consideration for your suffering.
• Cut arm and head holes in a large trash bag.  Put it over your naked torso followed by double layers of sweats.  Turn up your bedroom's heat all the way up, and plug in multiple space heaters.  Jog in place for an hour while listening to Top 40 radio (the Stars on 54 version of "If You Could Read My Mind" specifically brings me back to these sessions).  Blow a power circuit at least once.
• That night, as you first lie down in bed, stare at the clock.  Wish tomorrow never comes.  Grip your bed and never want to let go.  Enumerate the problems in your teenage life: the fights at home, the crushes that ignore you, the courses you're bombing, the money you don't have, the uncertainty of life after graduation.  Think in addition to all those how you're hungry and thirsty and there's nothing you can do about it.  Want to cry.
• In the morning, don't eat breakfast.
• Allow lethargy to pull you into sleep during class.  Act grumpy to all your friends.  Your stomach will growl so much that people will hear it.
• Don't eat lunch.  Hate everyone you see eating lunch.
• Worry all afternoon that you still won't make weight and all this torture was for nothing
• Head to the match.  Weigh-in successfully, every time, but only barely.  Gulp that you have no margin of error for the next time.
• Immediately eat multiple peanut butter & jelly sandwiches you brought from home.  Fruit if you have it.  Chug a gallon of Gatorade.
• Feel incredibly tired.  Wonder if you can sleep before the match.  Feel the Gatorade re-hydrating your bowels.  Worry that you'll literally crap your singlet during your match.
• Wrestle, feebly.  Suck wind for six minutes due to unnatural dehydration, if you last that long.
• Go home and binge on dinner as if  you'll never eat again.  Remember that the next match is only four days away.  Or three.  Or two.
• Tomorrow, weight-in before wrestling practice.  Hope you've not gained it all back so that in a couple days you won't have to fully repeat.  See that in fact you have gained it back entirely.  Want to cry.

You could not pay me enough to have do that again.  I doubt I even could - at the gym these days I get dizzy if I'm not hydrating between each weight set.  So why did I ever do it a first time?  Unquestionably, out of a sense of loyalty to the wresting team of which I was part.  Self-sacrifice to, in my mind, a greater good.  Incidentally, this is why kids at that age make the best soldiers: they're stupid in this regard.

The following couple years, at college, our cafeteria was "all-you-can-eat" and believe me, I ate all I could.  I also roomed with two Catholics who always made a show of not eating meat on Fridays during Lent.  We'd typically go to Subway those nights and they'd get the veggie sub.  I got a meatball grinder.  Or chicken club.

Truthfully, when I attended regular mass myself a few years later I also abstained from meat during Fridays a couple Lenten seasons; however, it wasn't really "fasting", because I just ate huge pasta or pizza dinners.  Around that time, I kept Passover with Becca the first year of our relationship out of good-boyfriend-solidarity   But again, easily, I just ate steak, potatoes, and Breyer's ice cream for a week straight. 

I once thought that if I ever became a POW, I could be broken in two-day's time by just a gruel diet.  While I don't anticipate that scenario ever occurring  I will never, ever, deny myself calories again so long as I can help it.  Just one wrestling season, probably only three months of my life, and writing this almost fifteen years later my heart still pounds to recall that time in my life.  I think it was one of my most miserable periods.  For certain, however, this small period of suffering gave me greater perspective and appreciation for what I have in life - I know how worse it could be.  And, when I have my own teenage boys, I'll always remember that  when they're acting cranky, they're probably just a little hungry.

A Patriotic Coupling

American Man

 

American Woman (ft. American Steed)

Little Boy, Pretty Girl, Awkward Photo

Awkward Family Photos is a go-to website for a bored-at-work afternoon pick-me-up.  Most of the "awkwardness" in the contributed photos derives from dated fashions or photos taken in our inherently most awkward years.  The site is good-hearted nostalgia where twenty to thirty years passing cures any cringe reflex.  We were all there along with the people in the photos.  We can look back at ourselves, laugh, and wonder what were we thinking.

A more contemporaneous photo caught my attention several weeks ago.  Five Hooters beauties surround a young boy who clearly doesn't want to be there:

"Is it over yet? I'm just here for the wings..."

I love that photo, because I was that little boy.  Twenty years ago my younger brother, my dad, his friend and son, and a couple of my uncle took a guy's weekend (with my aunt in tow) to watch Notre Dame football play Purdue (final score, ND 48-0).  Walking around campus in the run-up to the game, we passed two cheerleaders and we asked them to take a photo with us ("we asked" didn't include me).  I was placed next to the very pretty one with the early-90s big hair, who put her arm around my shoulder:

"Is it over yet?"

When I look back on that photo, I'm "smiling" more than I remember (it must have been politeness).  I vividly recall the over-whelming sense of full-consciousness of her hand resting on my shoulder.  I felt exactly what the Hooter's boy's face conveys.  What was I supposed to do?  Certainly not place my hand anywhere on her.  To cheesy middle-schoolers, pretty college girls are an untouchable caste.  I knew to lower my eyes in her presence and not meet her gaze.  In the context of such social asymmetry, the best that can be done is to stand stiff and hope the photo is taken as quickly as possible.

Afterwards my dad and uncles teased me "Ooh, she liked T.J., putting her arm around you!".  Today I wonder if she also felt a similar awkwardness ("what am I supposed to do?"), but her years of cheerleading better equipped her with the art of fake-smiling.  After unconveing this photo I attempted (unsuccessfully) to find a cheerleader's roster from that period, thinking I might be able to locate her online.  Maybe we both might have had a laugh.

Several years after this photo was taken would find me posing similarly with dates in formal dance photos.  It's a slow process to break the "rather-be-hiding" instinctive response.

Gooooooooooooo Irish!

Capturing the Zeitgeist: Superbowl Week 2013

Below is a word cloud created using status updates appearing on my Facebook timeline between Sunday, January 27th, 2013 and noon today.  This is what people talked about the week before Superbowl Sunday:

My Facebook Timeline, Jan. 27 - Feb. 3

A few remarks:

• I'm really surprised people say "just" so much.  Most everything else seems about right.
• I have over 300 friends, but (unsurprisingly) a disproportionate number do the vast majority of postings.  Withing that group, a select few are particularly long-worded, accounting for most of the text.
• I only collected text from status updates, omitting anything showing up in comments to other posts (I still have a day job).  A lot of text was thus omitted.  Also, most postings were non-text: pictures or links to articles.  I'd estimate most links were political.  Of photos, 70% were babies, 29.9% were "what I ate for dinner", and 0.1% was everything else.
• At one point my sense of Facebook postings was an endless cycle of "Can't believe tomorrow is Monday", "Can't believe it's Monday", "So don't want to go to work today", "at least the week's halfway over", "so happy tomorrow is Friday", "TGIF!!!  Is it time to go home yet?".  Repeat until retirement.  I was happy to see none of that this week.  

The Efforts We Never See, the Results We Do

Last month The New York Times Magazine featured Jerry Seinfeld in a short video entitled How to Write a Joke.  In it, Seinfeld deconstructs a single joke.  We are shown how each word is thoughtfully chosen based on how it contributes to the line's timing and sound ("Pop-tart" is just a funny word).  The video's take-away is that funny takes work.  Aside from Jerry Seinfeld's inherent talent, he works very hard at what he does.



Because some people make it look so effortless, I loved how this video reminds us that we never see the first draft.  For years I convinced myself I was just irredeemably a bad writer.  Not until grad school did I learn the guaranteed formula: write more than you need and keep editing until it's good.  My prior writing was bad because my first draft was my first draft and my final version was just my first draft plus spell check.  Better writing is actually easy: start early and revise, revise, and revise.  Maybe the talented people's first drafts are better than mine, but my seventh draft is certainly better than my first.  Revision is how the funniest jokes are written and the best films are made.  Pixar founder John Lasseter said in an interview "every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another".  There's nothing special in Pixar's water: they just keep working on their bad projects until they're not bad anymore.

I thought of all of this as I was cleaning out saved text on my computer (an on-going New Year's resolution).  For years now I've kept a passage written by Joseph Priestly, an eighteenth-century Englishman writing on early scientific inquiry into electricity (among other pursuits).  Using the example of Isaac Newtown, Priestly points out that we give perhaps too much esteem because we only consider others' successes and never imagine their struggles.  This becomes a problem when we think there never were any struggles.  When we believe that success results from inherent talent (which we can't help) rather than hard work (which we can), we are debilitated when we needn't be.  While the Seinfelds', Pixars', and Newtons' products do owe something to talent, through continual effort we may perhaps go farther than we'd otherwise imagine, just only by using their same simple workplans. 

Joseph Priestly, The History and Present State of Electricity (1767):

MANY modest and ingenious persons may be engaged to attempt philosophical investigations, when they see, that it requires no more sagacity to find new truths, than they themselves are masters of; and when they see that many discoveries have been made by mere accident, which may prove as favourable to them as to others. …[I]t is a great discouragement to young and enterprising geniuses, to see philosophers…laying down the propositions which were the result of all their experiments, and then relating the facts, as if everything had been done to verify a true preconceived theory…  [P]erhaps, in no branch of science has there been less owing to genius, and more to accident...

WERE it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time that he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. But if, when a man publishes discoveries, he, either through design, or through habit, omit the intermediate steps by which he himself arrived at them; it is no wonder that his speculations confound others, and that the generality of mankind stand amazed at his reach of thought. If a man ascend to the top of a building by the help of a common ladder, but cut away most of the steps after he has done with them, leaving only every ninth or tenth step; the view of the ladder, in the condition in which he has been pleased to exhibit it, gives us a prodigious, but an unjust idea of the man who could have made use of it. 

THAT Sir Isaac Newton himself owed something to a casual turn of thought, the history of his astronomical discoveries informs us; and where we see him most in the character of an experimental philosopher, as in his optical inquiries…we may easily conceive that many persons, of equal patience and industry (which are not called qualities of the understanding) might have done what he did. And were it possible to see in what manner he was first led to those speculations, the very steps by which he pursued them, the time that he spent in making experiments, and all the unsuccessful and insignificant ones that he made in the course of them…our admiration would probably decrease. Indeed he himself used candidly to acknowledge, that if he had done more than other men, it was owing rather to a habit of patient thinking, than to anything else

The Electric Mr. Priestly

A Inauguration of Things Past

President Obama now taking the stage for his second inaugural address.  Roberta's reaction to camera pans of the mall was, "That's a lot of people!  I wouldn't want to be there!!"

I only had one chance to be there: President Bush's first inauguration in 2001, the only one coinciding with my five years in D.C.  Especially during that time in my life, I felt an importance to be present at major events, that absorbing life through television or print media was artificial, secondary, and inferior (in general, I now appreciate better viewing "seats" experienced through HDTV than the cheap seats twenty-something nobodys get, the comforts of controlled-climates, available bathrooms, a stocked refrigerator when I want it, and no pushy crowds).

I passed on walking down that year, even though I was only a mile from the parade route.  I recall the day was unpleasantly rainy and cold.  Moreover, that election was controversial.  With that taint I believed the experience would be unsatisfactory.  My first time should wait.

Instead, I watched the parade, a few minutes only, in Thurston's Dining Hall.  When the coverage focused on the protesters lining the motorcade route, I could only imagine the passengers' dismissive contempt for the people they sped past, windows-up.  This divide between our leaders and fellow citizens, so clearly manifested, was disheartening.

There were no major protests today, just less excitement than was present four years ago.  We're all a bit disillusioned, probably the Obamas included.

Both geographically and enthusiastically, I'm much further from attending an inauguration than that college kid munching brunch twelve years ago.  I'm certainly more apathetic now; not disregard the serious impacts of our elected officials and their decisions, but rather about the theatrics of political circuses.  The inauguration coverage playing in the background, I'm now watching a whole lot of people who love to be on TV, along with - even more troubling to me - occasional shots of faces in the crowds who love to watch those people on TV.

What is Sexy? (An Image Atlas Comparison)

Yesterday on Planet Fitness' treadmill I was stuck watching the very horrible Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines on TNT.  I hopped on towards the movie's beginning, when Kristanna Loken sees the Victoria Secret "What is Sexy" billboard and sexy-fies herself.  (And that's where the franchise jumped the shark.  To me, nothing beyond Arnold's thumbs-up in Terminator 2 happened).

Later last night, I read a New York Times Magazine blog post discussing the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz's collaboration, Image Atlas.  It's a fun little site.  Essentially, the way is works is that you enter a search term which is then translated into the primary language of several countries.  Several image search results are then returned to you grouped by country using the most popular search service in each respective county.  The idea of your grouped results is that you're given what you would see as if you were searching for the term in each county listed.  Thus, you're able to compare not only differences in the culture understanding of the term (assuming your word translated appropriately) but also how governmental censorship might affect which images you're given.

I searched several terms: happiness, justice, heaven - broad concepts.  Because I still had Terminator 3 on the brain, I also searched "sexy".  I was interested in how conceptions of aesthetics and beauty might vary by culture (also interesting, searching "beauty".  Very weird, searching "ugly)".

Below are ten image returns for "sexy".  Most Middle Eastern countries returned conceptual, non-person images, which I didn't include.  Interestingly, the United States and Spain returned two of the exact same images.  North Korea returned "No images found."

ImageAtlas(.org) return images for "Sexy" corresponding to U.S./Spain, Brazil, China, France, Israel, Kenya, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and U.S./Spain

My Missed Connections

Craiglist includes a "missed connections" listings, where locals describe brief encounters suggesting a potential for love, hoping the other person felt the same and will read the board and contact them.  Browsing the listings, I'm sure many are delusional, where the attraction was one-sided.  Still, the many other cases illustrate how much more love the world might have had if just one of the two were a little bit braver that day.

I believe this strongly.  So much in love is serendipity.  Roberta's mom, and my Aunt Barbara (I learned this Christmas), both met their spouses walking down the road when their future husbands drove by.  My parents met at a social club one ordinary night.  If either of our parents had instead stayed home that day, had gone at slightly different times, or haddn't glanced up a certain moment, neither of us would be here, I wouldn't be typing this right now, and we'd never make our own connection a quarter-century later.  Just a little nudge another way at a seemingly inconsequential momentum and so much life would be different.

I, too, have "missed connections".  While I have no regrets over how life turned out, I still characterize my teens and early twenties as particularly lonely.  My life suffered from lack of connections.  So many moments would have been richer if shared!

When I think of my missed connections, here is what I think of:

• At the end of high school freshman year, you were the first girl I ever learned had a crush on me.  We had never spoken, never had class together, yet you wrote "I love T.J." on your notebook.  Several people saw it, everyone told me, and actually many warned me against you (without explanation).  But, secretly, I had a crush on you, too, since I first saw you as an acquaintance's girlfriend.  You asked a friend to give me your number and we spoke several times.  You would never know, but things weren't ideal at home, so I never gave my house number to you.  Moreover, the timing was just bad.  We soon entered summer and lost touch.  When sophomore year started and we had classes together I avoided you.  But I still liked you.  This is probably the opposite of what you thought, and I'm so sorry.
• You were two sisters at Epcot.  Giggling, you approached and asked me whether I spoke Spanish.  I didn't.  I wanted to try.
• We met in the Typhoon Lagoon's wave pool.  You came crashing down on me in the middle of a wave series.  We tumbled in the wave, a tangle of limbs.  Afterwards, you faced me flirtatiously giggling; I, sunburn-red blushing and mortified I'd done something inappropriate, repeated "sorry, Sorry!", my face focused downwards while hurrying away.  You were incredibly beautiful.
• You were a horn player from another high school in the 1999 Orange Bowl halftime show, positioned down the line from me.  When our bands were brought to the the beach for a recreation day, you found me as we waited for the buses.  You asked your friend to take our picture.  I was rubbing sand off my feet, not my sexiest moment.  You asked us despite never speaking to me before.  I wish I had a copy of that photo.
• You lived down my hall freshman year of college.  We walked to discussion section together each Thursday that fall.  You insisted we keep that appointment.  I wasn't sure whether you wanted a connection or didn't want to walk alone.  Being shy, it was easier to assume the latter.
• You filled the empty seat next to me, halfway through the ride, on the shuttle bus home from the 2001 Inaugural Ball.  I was clearly dateless, silently despondent.  You said you were headed to Froggy Bottom with your roommates afterwards.  Was it an invitation to meet you there?  Sorry, I can't, just can't do bars.  If any other place.  I could barely see your face in the dark; my roommate called you gorgeous.  
• You sat next to me in an Oslo Internet cafe.  After you sneezed I instinctively said "Bless you" (in English).  You giggled as if I was a puppy peeing the floor, then rapid-fire typed (I assume the experience of my Yankee ill-sophistication).   I wish we could have talked.

How I'm Entering 2013

Happy New Year!  I began the new year as I ended the old, contended in reading:

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

This morning I finished Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, which recounts the pre-Renaissance rediscovery of Lucretius' Epicurean poem "On the Nature of Things".  I've long loved Epicureanism's championing and prioritization on life simple joys, a theme frequently revisited throughout the work.  In one section, the book's hero, Poggio Bracciolini, after observing bathers in the German town of Baden, described his reactions to the bathers' happy lifestyle in a letter to a friend:

"I often envy their calm and I hate our perversity of spirit, for we are always searching, always hunting, always turning sky, earth, and sea upside down in order to make a fortune, content with no gain, appeased by no money.  We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or bodies a moment's peace.  But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.  They do not seek wealth that will do them little good but enjoy their own property and do not worry about the future; if anything goes wrong, they bear it optimistically.  And so they are enriched by this saying: 'He has lived, as long as he has lived well.'" 

I read Poggio's words at an apt moment.  As I develop resolutions and goals for the upcoming year, Poggio's reflections are helpfully orienting.

Getting Ready To Rumble...Oooh Yeah!

As I don't normally have cable, I'm exposed to TV I otherwise miss when I visit home.  This Thanksgiving I was fortunate to be treated to MSG Varsity's amazing Fall 2012 promo, depicting the greatest high school wrestling entrance of all time.

A former high school wrestler, I confirm this is almost perfectly my former high school fantasy brought to life.

Sanitized Democracy

One of the more important necessities for a vigilant, responsible populace is to remain suspicious of any aspirations to power  That includes, by definition, all those seeking higher public office. 

We benefit by being reminded of the phoniness of both politicians and their campaign's pizazz.  Thus I loved the implication of this photo I saw several days ago in The New York Times Lens Blog, speaking a thousand words, showing incumbent President Barack Obama receiving hand sanitizer after shaking hands with supporters at a campaign event last month.


photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times. caption: Mr. Obama got a squirt of hand sanitizer from a White House trip adviser Marvin Nicholson after shaking hands and posing for photos with a line of supporters backstage before he spoke at the Cleveland State University. October 5th, 2012

In the spirit of equal-time, I tried hard though in vain to find an analogous picture of Romney to juxtapose aside this one.  I believe he is equally eager to rush for the sanitizer after events.

A Note to my Future Self

There is a website, FutureMe, with a simple, very intriguing premise: write an e-mail timed to be sent to yourself in the future. Now, probably the most that can be accomplished with these e-mails to the future is a call to stay true to thine own self, to remember not become jaded or pretentious with age, and to be the kinds of adults our 10 year-old selves would be proud of.

What would be infinitely valuable - but is alas, impossible - would be to send a letter to the past, to our younger selves. Actually, earlier this year CBS's This Morning began a reoccurring segment based on that premise, where celebrities read hypothetical letters to their younger selves. So far, to my knowledge, Maya Angelou, Chuck Close, and Oprah have been featured.

As today marks closing ceremony of the XXX Olympiad, this session of regular posts will come to a close. I'm not sure when I'll return, but following traditional it will be at least again during the 2016 Olympics. I tried to image myself four years from now, what I want that person to be like, and I'm mailing the following letter to myself:

Dear Future T.J.,

In 2016, more than anything, my hope is that you are finding balance. You've just started a new job, a first job after grad school.  Be careful and mindful to keep a healthy perspective. You have a tendency towards workaholism; give your best for 40 hours but not a minute more. Don't let work bleed over into your other time. You're only getting paid for 40 hours and that's already too much time to lose. Although you've gained discretionary income, you've lost discretionary time. Money is one kind of freedon, but free time is another of which you now have less. With your time now more constrained, I hope that you're leaving time for yourself, for your health and your love of knowledge, continuing to learn through books, exploring art and the world.  There is more out there than you'll ever have time to experience, so don't waste a precious moment more than you have to on work. Whatever your career becomes, if any random person on the street doesn't understand an aspect of your job, it's probably not important enough to waste much anxiety on. Remember the past, and everyone who's ever done anything for you.  Pay forward the countless help you've received from your family, friends, mentors, and community. Roberta, especially, who you've been lucky enough to marry, has a good heart and kind soul. She likes you a lot. Remember all the support she's given you and how much color, warmth, and happiness she's added to your life. It's unimaginably better now than before she was a part of it.  Finally, of course, remember not to put too much stock in any advice I offer. You have the experience and developed perspective that only four more years of life could purchase. I only wish it were I that could receive advice from you. So for now, to a happy future: my best wishes, my best hopes, and my best regards, from 2012. - T.J.

My Grandparents as their Younger Selves

When home last Memorial Day weekend I was working on the desk in Scott's room and found a flash drive.  Curious as to what was on it, I plugged it into my computer and found an absolute treasure-trove of photos documenting my mother's family, her and her three sisters and four brothers, growing up in the 1950s and 60s.  I think originates from scanned photos my aunt made of what she found in my grandmother's house after she died in 2007.  Of course I copied all of them - there were literally hundreds of photos - to Skydrive.  Such things are priceless and now I have them forever.

While the photos were primarily childhood photos of my mother and her siblings, there were also a precious few of my grandparents from before their children were born.  Posted below are the two youngest portraits of them I found, my grandfather's Navy photo and a portrait of my grandmother from what would have been roughly the same time.  They wouldn't even have met yet.  It's a strange realization to me that since these photos were taken in the 1940s, they both would have been in their early 20s, younger than I am now.

My grandfather, Daniel (Navy photo)

My grandmother, Madeline (mid-1940s)

My grandmother especially - I can't believe how beautiful she looked.  I'm so proud.  It's also remarkable to me how I can see in her face then a blend of all the people who would become my aunts and uncles.