Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
Looking ahead to 2012.
2011, what a whipsaw of a year. 2012, here’s what I want from ya:
- to be a better dad, husband, son, brother, friend
- to read more and watch less tv
- to make more stuff from scratch
- to find a passion
- to be more kind to strangers, especially during the commute
- to take fewer cabs
- to run fewer red lights on my bike
- to spend less frivolously
- to find a new dentist
- to take more hikes in Rock Creek Park
- to be less frustrated by stuff I can’t readily change
- to be less introverted
- to forget more of my past (that needs forgetting)
- to make one new friend
- to learn something new about one old friend
- to pick up more bar tabs
- to leave fewer umbrellas in cabs
- to take my job more seriously
- to be less of a hypocrite
- to lower my cholesterol
- to say more “thank you”s out loud to no one in particular
- to get to the gym or exercise more
- to blog more (!)
- to care less about stuff beyond my sphere of influence
- to increase my sphere of influence
- to go to bed a half hour earlier
- to drink more water
- to use fewer disposable products
- to give more to charity
Probably some more stuff but that’s what comes to mind at present.
Saturday, October 1st, 2011
Friday, September 30th, 2011
A few years older, hopefully a few years wiser, my intention this time around is to avoid the daily (and sometimes hourly) ups and downs of our quadrennial fit of sadomasochism known as the presidential election cycle. Wholly aware of the revolting array of alternatives, I care a great deal about Obama’s reelection, probably a great deal more than the average person. But whether he wins a second term is not my paramount concern. What worries me most is the reason he will win or lose, despite the lies, battles within battlegrounds, the ever-lilting economy, whatever hot-button issue becomes the bloviators’ topic de jour, etc. This time I understand that all things considered, if the GOP succeeds in its desperate attempt to find and nominate a candidate capable of appealing to voters outside its far-rightwing, the only deciding factor will be which candidate, Obama or whomever the GOP nominates, more effectively appeals to Americans’ seemingly insatiable collective appetite for hearing the praise and promotion of beliefs they already hold, and the dismissal and derision of beliefs they already reject. In less than a quarter millennium, We the People have aged less than gracefully into a majority nation of know-nothing solipsists. How did this happen? How did it get this bad, this suddenly? Plausible causes abound – cable news, the corporatization of all things, the science of mass marketing – but my unproven hypothesis is that we are a lost cause not through any fault of our own. That hegemonies like ours unwind necessarily is an axiom. I’m fine with this, truly, and I don’t care if I’m witness to a series of slow, indefeasible declines or one traumatic, epochal collapse. All I want from our future’s failure is a glimpse of the next rung higher on the human political evolutionary ladder. All I want, America of 2012, is to be surprised by whatever is coming next.
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
Krist Novoselic during the Nirvana live performance at East Ballroom, Husky Union Building, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (1/6/1990)
Eighteen years ago I was an 18 y.o. freshman at the University of Washington. Something was just barely ended, the last bit of it quickly dissipating. I couldn’t admit it to myself but I knew whenever I took a deep breath that whatever was in the air was going, going, gone. Just a few years ago, a pre-Teen Spirit Nirvana played the East Ballroom of the Husky Union Building, the same HUB where I ate lonely microwave cheeseburgers between classes but could hardly imagine an event of any significance ever happening there, let alone anything seminal. And then it seemed to rain for many weeks or years – take your pick – on end until I lost track of all the weather patterns that must have occured elsewhere. The U-District of Seattle, with all its filthy rat-bars I was too young to step foot in, was the whole damn planet, Portland and Bellingham sometimes orbiting moons. Pints of thick black coffee-tasting beer, walking well beaten trails between campus and the Ave, and a five-month winter of sharing toothbrushes, umbrellas, and beds with the anonymous who couldn’t stand being alone between boyfriends. Kurt Cobain shot himself the following April. I don’t remember where I was when I heard the news, but I was probably trying to study something I can no longer remember, half-hypnotized by a recent past that wasn’t even mine to begin with.
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
I’ve been a practicing lawyer for coming up on a decade now. But it wasn’t until this summer that I fully and finally understood the definition of a trial: “a test of faith, patience, or stamina through subjection to suffering or temptation; broadly : a source of vexation or annoyance.”
And now the rest.
Not certain where I left off, or where to restart, blog-wise. So I’ll likely shift gears to a new, maybe unknown gear and abandon the anti-Facebook program, which, upon reflection, I’d executed with more-or-less lackluster results, anyhow. I may pick it up again someday if I’m again in the backwards-gazing mode. But for now, I’d like to get back to recording some day-to-day thoughts and what-have-yous.
To begin with, waiting for the bus this morning in Columbia Heights, I overheard a gentleman earnestly explaining to his companion and their lovechild how, because of the influence of rich, presumably white people, public schools in DC no longer teach children that the territory of the U.S., before Columbus, was populated entirely by Native Americans. News to me, assuming according to these nefarious revisionists, that the Americas were either vacant of humans before 1492, or already (somehow) occupied by pre-Columbian European migrants.
Either way, after a solid eight straight weeks of litigation, I didn’t quite feel up to matching wits with my learned friend and instead hailed a cab to work.
Hello everyone. Sorry for all the radio silence of late. Work has been an insatiable beast, greedily snatching every last crumb of my time for itself.
Thursday, April 14th, 2011
My best guess is that PC and I started hanging out in earnest at some point during the fall semester of our junior year of high school, when we were both in Mr. Tate’s Washington state history class, a mandatory course rotely taught to, and largely ignored by juniors each fall throughout Washington state.
Mr. Tate was a freshly-minted teacher afflicted with cerebral palsy. I’m sure he developed into a fine history teacher but in 1991 he couldn’t manage to command the attention of our class from the confines of his wheelchair for very long. Watching him, day in and day out, grow ever more frustrated in his failed attempts to deliver, according to Washington state educational curriculum standards, Washington state history to a bunch of kids who couldn’t care less about Washington state history was painful to say the least. One rainy afternoon, without much aforethought let alone precise coordination, PC and I abruptly walked out of Mr. Tate’s class after he’d called the roll – a process that sometimes took up almost a quarter of class. In the hallway, PC motioned for me to follow him, which I did, all the way to his dad’s house, a rundown white clapboard shack a few blocks from school. Continued reading >
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
I’m less than thrilled to add BY, the one human being I’ve come closest to hating, to my anti-Facebook. But BY, my eighth-grade bully and once daily personal tormentor, earned his rightful place.
The summer of 1988, my family and I moved from Florida, where we’d called home since I was 4 y.o., to the densely wooded hills of Allegheny Co., Pennsylvania. After reluctantly besting him for a slot on the middle-school football team, BY began his relentless campaign of harassment – in class, in the halls, on the school bus to and from school. As a natural bully, BY must have sensed that someone as new and as friendless as I was that fall was necessarily weak and easy to target and that, crucially, no one would care one way or another whenever he entertained himself by pestering me. He also must have sensed that even though I was no 98 lb weakling, I was not at all the fighting type, that something about my spirit had been paralyzed by our abrupt move to Pennsylvania.
Continued reading >
