from the 36 chambers

Killing time at work is rapidly becoming a daunting task, especially after you've been down every rabbit hole and avenue available to you on Facebook. It kind of disturbs me that I spend about an hour and a half at work every day stalking everyone I know. I guess it increases the efficiency of my creeper tendencies, but I just find myself skulking in the shadows of the information super highway more now, stalking a whole new echelon of people who will never know I secretly keep tabs on their lives. But what else do I do to entertain my waining attention span, to stave off the encroaching ennui coaxed by a 9 to 5? Here are a few stories from the privacy of my own office.

Story #1: Sometime last week (the days blend together in this place like there's some kind of temporal flux), as I'm working blithely at my desk, something falls from the ceiling and lands next to my Dell mouse pad, which was undoubtedly free noting its cover material is a flexible plastic rather than the cushy fabric of most high quality pads. I look over to find the beady little eyes and curious feelers of a cockroach staring back at me. My literal first reaction amounted to, "Oh... hello friend." In my mind as soon as he dropped onto the desk he greeted me with an amicable "hey, homes." (I don't know why but in my mind, cockroaches all talk with an accent like they are straight out of the East L.A. Mexican Mafia. That's kind of racist, isn't it?) Anyway, we rapped a little here and there to pass the day. He told me about how he ended up on the 19th floor (a triple dog dared gone horribly wrong, no givesies, no backsies). I told him how my day was going, my life goals and ambitions, my deepest darkest secrets that would stun you to hear, like getting hit in the face by a pigeon. I'm pretty sure that the few people who ventured into my office on this incredibly slow day now think I'm completely crazy and would most likely recommend I be fired if my term here didn't already have an expiration date. He scurried off my desk and milled about on the floor for the rest of the day, taking rest on my shoe at one point. I don't know where my little friend has gone to now, but he must be on quite a little adventure.

Story #2: So as decreed, one of my jobs here is to email out interesting news articles about China from major publications each morning. Mainly they are just used to keep the staff up to date on what's happening on the other side of the world, although occasionally we'll use these articles to prep delegations before they head off to China, so they don't look like total boobs (reminds me of a story I have to tell you) when they get there. This actually is sometimes the highlight of my day, because inevitably there's an absurd story floating around out there that challenges not only your traditional concept of news, but also forces you to consider what exactly is going on in China. Some examples: the introduction of compulsory waltzing in Chinese schools to combat obesity; the backlash to said introduction which believed co-ed dancing would lead to relationships, a feared distraction from academic pursuits; a stolen car stopped in Shanghai with four kidnapped babies in the backseat; flight patters changed during the countries National College Entrance Exam so planes wouldn't fly over residential neighborhoods while students were preparing; 7 sowing needles embedded in the skin of an infant who's parents worked in a bag factory (but conveniently have no idea how the needles got there). You really couldn't make this stuff up. Anyway, one afternoon, one of the people who work in the financial department came to my office and pointed out an article in the New York Times about how Clinton and Obama had signed a bill that would bring punishment to China for keeping its country's currency artificially fixed against the dollar. Needless to say, I send the message out and think nothing of it. But here's where the story gets interesting.

A little back story is in order first. Earlier in the day, I ran out to get lunch for the President since he has recently undergone ligament surgery and, like the fat kid on the see-saw, is relatively immobile. He sends a message back to the entire staff that says something to the effect of "We should all cheer for Nick for this article," and then goes on to give a one or two sentence comment on the articles content. Naturally, I'm sitting in my office thinking to myself, "Sweet! The President knows I work here!" Then I start getting kinda cocky, because it's not every day the higher ups send a little love all the way down to the guy barely hanging onto the last rung of the corporate ladder with his fingertips. So I think to myself, "Makes sense. I got him lunch today, so he probably likes me know, or at least thinks I'm a good worker." But, being the sneaky fucker I am, I also think, "Well, I didn't actually find the article, so I better say something so that if it comes up, I don't look like I'm taking credit for someone else's work. From what I've read on MSN, humility and honest are both valued traits in an employee." Then I did a devious laugh and rubbed my hands over each other, thinking that I had just found a sweet-spot to beat the proverbial system. So I send an email back, to him and the rest of the office, expounding regally that I, in fact, can't take credit for the article, that someone else had alerted me to it. I'd probably say within about an hour, give or take a few, everyone in the office, including a few people who weren't even in the country, emailed me and pointed out that the author of the article was also a Nick and that the President wasn't talking about me. Like peeing into a Wendy's cup in the back of a car and feeling all slick about it, only to realize all you really did was pee all over yourself, I went from feeling cool and confident that I had gotten my name, albeit in lowercase letters, recognized in the office to needing the hauling capacity of the new 2007 Toyota Tundra, capable of pulling 10,500lbs of dead weigh, to get my foot out of my mouth. It was kind of awkward.

Story #3: I was sitting in my office, fighting off the post lunch weariness that oft plagues me, and, as I tend to do when I fill my incredibly unfurnished stomach with victuals, I farted. Now, this wouldn't have been a problem normally. No one was within earshot to hear the gurgling noise my rear made. But, eliciting much panic, this gastric consequence stank like a hunk of congealed, sour milk covered in rotting guacamole. And it was that thick, almost life-like smell to. It was truly a potent potable. I panicked. If anyone were to walk into my office at that moment, there no way to explain it away. I'm the only one in the room, so I couldn't pass it off like someone else did it. Nor could I claim that some mysteriously foul odor, smelling like the armpit of Zeus after a hot night of love making in the guise of a bull, had just wafted into my windowless prison of an office. And on top of all of that, there was nothing I could do to expel the offending stench. I was stuck, wallowing in the dank reek of my own decomposing innards, a putrid bouquet that no doubt would stick to my person long after it had faded in the room. Thankfully, no embarrassment befell me. But it was a trying few minutes.

Story #4: So I was walking back from lunch today, crossing 23rd and 6th, tacos in hand, and I see a very voluptuous blond walking towards me. She was wearing a low cut black dress, tight fitting under her chest, big, bug-eye black sunglasses, and a light white... oops! Her boob just popped out. In the middle of the intersection. I just started laughing because right as she approached me, moments before her bosom jumped up out of her dress and said, "Class, pay attention," I thought to myself, "Wow... if she's not careful, everybody's gonna get an eyeful of some nip." And sure enough, God smiled down upon man on this most blessed of days, and delivereth unto his children a supple teat for their viewing entertainment. And all were pleased. Needless to say, it was a good lunch break, and walking away from here I felt a strange, relaxed peace wash over me, like someone had slipped a few Vicodin into my oatmeal. So tonight, raise your drink to America... and boobs.

So there you have it. Some of my best stories from the dungeons of a paltry office life. It might not be the most glamorous of lives, and sure, it can't hold a candle to the all night parties, cavalcade of drugs, and copious amounts of naked relations that happened on Bon Jovi's 1988 Jersey Syndicate Tour. But hey, it's all I have right now, so let me live it up with what I have.

jellies are coming back in style...

various consumptions (in shades of blue)

I must warn you at the outset: this blog is going to be horribly disjointed and probably very long. Unlike the delicious amalgamation of two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun that make up the staple of America's largest fast food conglomerate, there's little daily substance being thrown my way lately. My trifling revelations about life have yet to fall into a larger schema of musings, unlocking the secrets surrounding the little thing we call "the human condition." In layman's terms, contrasting the Big Mac that can be compared to many of the world's religious philosophies on the meaning of life, I'm working on the White Castle burger of insights, enjoying the simplicity of a miniature square beef patty of thoughts whose only companions are cheese, onions, and a bun that makes you feel like a giant when you hold them between your two fingers and thumb. But, like a White Castle burger, what I lack in substance, I more than make up for in a delicious taste and a side of fries.

A few weeks ago, around the triumphant arrival of Apple's iPhone, a product release that rivaled the anticipation of Price Ali Ababwa's entrance into Agrabah, I started thinking about consumer desires and trends, more importantly, why a product like this, which doesn't seem to, as of now, offer drastic functional innovations over products available today, has garnered so much attention and affection. Not to say that the iPhone isn't innovative. In defense of my previous statement, there are a lot of other products that offer the same features as the iPhone on the market today. Apple has simply changed the way you access, interact with, and manage these functions. Admittedly, I have only seen people using them on the street and read reviews of it online. I have yet to get my hands on one to actually try it out and see what all the fuss is about. I imagine all I'd really do is awkwardly fumbled around with its features and ultimately not get very far, like the first time I tried to unhook a girl's bra. So I am by no means an expert commentator on how sexy and smooth the iPhone makes you feel inside. I'm also fairly technologically inept now, so anything that has more than about 12 buttons scares the living crap out of me. But that is not what this essay is about.

Obviously, the Apple brand name had something to do with the iPhone's popularity. The current "trendy" atmosphere that surrounds the company's logo, the prototypical apple with hearty bite taken out of it that is unmistakably recognizable as both "cool" and "hip" simultaneously, cannot be denied and overlooked. But there has to be something else to the buzz that has surrounded this product ever since the grumbling rumors that Apple was making a "revolutionary new phone" surfaced, something beyond just brand recognition and loyalty. Post release, as I began to think about the manner in which the iPhone was being marketed in print and visual media, I came to a mildly stunning revelation in the realm of technological product development. So, I submit to you the theory which I have come up with to explain why products like this, and other recent technological achievements, have garnered such rampant popularity.

I won't spend any time debating here that technology is rapidly conquering the world around us, like a boat brimming with bloodthirsty and barbarous Bedouins bent on decimating and demarcating all that they come upon. You probably already came to that conclusion somewhere around the day you realized you can't do anything productive with your day unless you have access to the internet and you can't even remember life without a cell phone. But that is neither here nor there and I've now gotten way off topic. There is a growing trend that I've noticed in new technological offerings is also the simultaneous destruction of one of the fundamental freedoms that coincide with consumerism. In my opinion, the beauty of being a consumer in the "modern" world boiled down to a simple, singular concept: options. At least in capitalistic countries, great strides have been made in society to prevent what was once viewed as a crippling characteristic of commerce causing caustic conflict between big and small business: monopolies. And while the word also lends itself to the an amusing board game of real estate purchase and property development, testing all of your best financial management skills, in the corporate world, monopolies generally equate to prices that are not checked and balanced by free competition. So, in many cases, such as the formulation of Southwestern Bell Corporation in '83, a "spin-off" from the day's reigning telecommunications giant AT&T, companies have been forced to relinquish some of their holdings in order for a more competitive market landscape to emerge. While certainly not a recent phenomenon, this kind of market manipulation has resulted in one of the most basic freedoms we as consumers, and to a deeper, more ethereal level, humans, have: choice.

Consumers and producers alike revel in their freedom of choice. It provides us consumers the options we require in order to tailor, or at least feel like we are tailoring, our purchases to our lifestyle and specific demands. It promotes development of the "individual." More importantly, it provides producers the necessary circumstances around which they can refine their product, redesigning it to cope with the various needs of a society so rapidly changing as our own. It forces producers to make new products, spending money to make money. To put it in real world terms, consider any produced product. Now consider how many varieties of that type product there are out there, even ones that have been crated by the same company (such as different flavors of a sport's drink for example). All of those products have been the product (pun very much intended) of variations spurned by consumer choice. Were there no challengers to a producers dominance in a certain product category, there would be no need for innovation. If you wanted a stapler, for example, you would have to buy from a certain supplier and there would be no incentive for advancements in the field of staplers. Necessity may be the mother of all invention but choice is the mother of all variation.

I'm eventually going to get to my main point, the proverbial "meat and 'taters" of this post, but it may take a while. Bear with me. In the current world, our needs and desires change on an almost daily basis and the prevailing and fast blowing winds of development push us towards a demand for newness and novelty in almost every aspect of society. Lest we get bored or bogged down with what is "old" or "out-dated," we crave innovation and achievement in our consumer choices. And the market has responded with more choices than you can possibly sample. However, in the world we live in, it seems like all this created variation has lead to consumer overload. Consumers are inundated with facts and figures, trials and testimonies while on the purchasing prowl. And, as the line of dissimilarity between products begins to blur, it's becoming increasingly hard for a consumer to distinguish between several varieties of a product which all, essentially, do the same thing. All printers print, all staplers staple (if you haven't noticed yet, I've been writing this part at work, so my office supply examples are semi-justified). Consumer overload makes purchasing, or rather, purchasing confidence in my opinion, harder to attain. How can you feel easily satisfied when purchasing a tv, for example, when you know that there were 10 other directions you could have gone to end up with essentially the exact same result. Regardless of whether or not you agree with my opinion on the benefits of a simplified consumer world with less choice (maybe it's just my deep seeded fear of commitment), it's doubtlessly true that consumer overload is more prevalent today than it ever has been.

O.K. That was a long, arduous and possibly entirely unnecessary means for making my first point of this entry: consumer overload exists (maybe this is why it's taken me almost five days to write this). Now here comes my second point, which I'll alert you to at the outset of my dissertation, so if you are too winded from reading what is above or you just want to accept what I am telling you on faith without making the expectedly exhausting effort to summit my gargantuan amount of logic and reasoning, then you can just skip to the conclusion and save yourself some time. It's kind of what I want to do right now, and I'm writing this damn thing. My second point is that today, society's greatest demand is convenience. We don't want to get bogged down or slowed up by extraneous effort wasting our time and we don't want to expend any more effort beyond the absolutely necessary baseline required to achieve our intended results, nothing more. Consider: universal remote controls, copy machines that print, collate, and staple, those pens that have the three different ink colors and a pencil, Walmart, Vitamin Water, Netflix, HBO on Demand, FedEx/Kinkos. These are all examples of society's efforts to simplify and streamline, all in the name of convenience and ease of use. But this trend towards "leaner products" doesn't just apply in the consumer world, it has become a societal attitude. Look at home delivery, e-mail, take-out food, carpools, and the home office. These "inventions," in addition to the ones I mentioned earlier, have been created to help advance society by allowing citizens the luxury of convenience, removing the challenges that come with the age old epigrammatic predicament of having too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it. All most of these modern amenities really do is simply save time.

These new-fangled time saving advancements society has made in its never ending quest for more judicious expenditures of our temporal resources has overwhelmingly resulted in a fairly basic outcome: the blending of products to facilitate our desire to eliminate superfluous effort. Most of the items I have already discussed in the previous paragraphs can be broken down into combinations of other products already on the market. And, like Voltron, when these products combine, the functionality and power of the new single goes up, Thus, one product can now do the job of three or four separate ones, saving you, the consumer, time and money. Why buy three different colored pens when you can just buy one and get the same job done? That's how we ended up with movies you can watch on your hand held videogame consoles, consoles you can use to access the internet, internet browsers on your phone, phones that double as mp3 players, and mp3 players that play movies. It's a vicious circle of product cross-pollination that, like a tissue circling your toilet drain, is being drawn towards that Platonic ideal of the all-encompassing and eternal "last product you'll ever need." And it is here that I bring back the initial impetus for writing this entry. The iPhone is striving to be just that. It markets itself as the perfect love-child of an internet browser, a phone, and an mp3 player that will have customers weak at the knees, upon mere sight, unable to resist its sexy curves and sleek features. They will double over in an almost orgasmic contraction once they get a chance to own it. Now, while this may seem ridiculously evident and you may be really upset having read this thesis on product development, probably now dumber than when you started, my argument doesn't stop here. (For the purposes of simplicity, I'm using phones as a prism through with to support and examine my argument, but that doesn't mean that the buck stops there.)

First, as advanced as phones may seem now in America, with the iPhone claiming the commencement of a new era of smart-phones, elsewhere in the world, people use phones in much more innovative and spectacular ways. In Finland, the home country to powerhouse developer Nokia, people use phones to buy drinks from certain vending machines, simply by waving it in front of a sensor like a Mobil Speedpass. In some countries in Africa, citizens there use their phones to pay for groceries in a similar manner. In India, shockingly enough, fishermen and farmers are using their phones in really unique ways to conduct business. Fishermen check market prices around the world so they can accurately price their catch even before reaching the docks. Farmers are sending pictures of diseased crops to botanists who are recommending proper treatment and pesticides. So, as far as the iPhone, and mobile technology in America to a larger extent, has come, Americans still have a long way to go before realizing the full potential of a product with this much connectivity to the rest of the world, hopefully finding a way to use it beyond, as I have seen, engaging in a bidding war on eBay while working the counter at a pizza shop.

Secondly, and finally back to my semi-original point, as I pondered the success of the iPhone, and other products that, like Bo Jackson, "do it all," I became more than a little disturbed by recent trends in product development. Obviously, there is still a huge amount of choice in the market today. You can't innovate or create anything even remotely popular without three or four competitors nipping at your heels and jumping on the bandwagon, releasing similar products weeks later. But a huge number of these "new" products are merely a single companies take or update on the same concept. Flowing in the vein of phones again, Research in Motion (the folks who make Blackberry), Motorola, Palm, and Apple are all companies that make extremely similar phones now, with similar features and offerings. So yes, there's still a huge amount of choice out there in the market, but at this point, consumer choices seemingly start to boil down to brand name, which product is cooler in their "scene" versus which product actually provides better services. I have heard a number of people justify a particular phone purchase with, "No one else has it." And while I'm all for expressing individuality in your consumer choices, especially in a time when we have the freedom, not to mention countless mediums, through which to express our personalities, it doesn't sit right with me that someone would explain their choice of phone in the same way I explain my choice of toothbrush, to avoid the risk of confusion and someone else walking off with mine. The market applauds variations on style and outward design more than on features, because features are unreliable from place to place. What works in one scene may not be what people are looking for, or literally functions, in another. Asking two different people who own a Palm Treo, for example, if they like their phone, you might find that one extols it while the other abhors it. One uses the camera all the time to snap inspiration for her art while the other uses the internet to keep up with his clients through email. But, in the superficial society we life in, each wouldn't own it if it didn't look "cool" at some level. Product look and placement play such an important role in its selling power that few buy a product these days if they don't like the way it looks or the assumptions surrounding it. These days, it's mostly a status symbol, but that's not the point. Production design choices, both aesthetics and functions, aren't necessarily about providing top of the line service anymore, but about providing you with the "coolest" product, and generally, they are also then ones telling you what "cool" means. Let me elaborate.

It seems that today, producers are dictating the market's direction more than consumers. I don't know anyone who was thinking, "Man, I wish I had a camera in this thing," when they were first buying a phone. Nor do I really know anyone who uses the camera on their phone to do anything more than snap pictures of weird and wonderful signs they see walking around the street and send them to their friends. But still, it's near impossible today to spit in a phone store and hit a phone that doesn't come with a camera and a million other features I'll probably never use, likely because I already have something else equally or better equipped to handle that particular need of my life. Producers have essentially told me that I want a camera, an mp3 player, and even tv now, in my phone by steering the market in that direction (I'm sure after a great deal of market research to find untapped niches for product exploration). In perhaps easier or more complicated terms, depending on your preference, producers have fabricated a market demand for phones that have these features by producing a whole host of phones that have them, forcing me into a position to buy one. It's like a freak child of a monopoly: I have no choice but to buy a phone with all these bells and whistles now, mostly due to product availability. Sure, I won't lie, I do want a phone, a camera and an mp3 player, but I want them separately. I'm not going to be adventuring on vacation, using the camera on my phone to catch the vistas that surround me, and if I wanted a cheap mp3 player, I could spend less money than the difference in price between a phone with and without an mp3 player and probably still get something that has more storage space and better sound quality than what could be in my phone. But notice, other than mp3, video and internet content, very few companies have tried other innovations or combinations. Granted I'm a small market share, but I'd really like a phone that dispensed candy like a Pezz dispenser, or had a built in lighter, so I'd never need to scrounge through my couch cushions looking to see if it fell out of my pocket or if that shady guy on my porch jacked it when he asked me for a light at the party last weekend. That would be a lot more useful, in my opinion, than the other products producers Frankenstein together, but since the producers will never make it, they have ruined the market for it before it even got a chance to get started.

The final point of all this is that it seems as though more and more producers are taking product choice away from consumers and putting it squarely in their own hands, telling consumers what they need and conveniently giving it to them at the same time. Gone are the days when producers tried to tell you what you wanted, the once basis of all good advertising. Now, producers tell you what you need, what you absolutely must have, in order to be all you can be, to be the top dog, to be "cool." And we blindly follow like sheep, buying whatever is "hot" or "now" or "in," regardless of whether or not it is actually what we need, but simply because it is there to consume and we want it. And honestly, I can't blame producers, for being in the drivers seat, choosing which left or right we make in the market. Controlling the market is a lot more profitable than letting it control you. Now, I haven't figured out yet why or how producers have taken the reigns in the market, but that's for another day. Maybe it's in their advertising, the way they convince consumers to buy their products by convincing them that not only is it the best, but they need to have it or fall behind the pack. Maybe it's that we, as consumers, have become lazy, apathetic towards managing our market fate. Or maybe it's that we put too much faith in the producer's knowledge of their product, believing that their motives for development and advancement are genuine, compassionate and altruistic compulsions to advance society in the best way possible by connecting man with his fellow man in a way never before conceived, a way that widens the possibilities for human, interaction, communication and understanding, opening a path that might bring us together as a species and unite us in the pursuit of what really matters in life, so why not listen to what they have to say. They pay smart people a lot of money to design new products, so it must be important. It's not like they're just trying to make a buck of us... right?

So that's my story. Agree or disagree, it's your call. I understand it's a bit cynical at times, and I realize I let myself get carried away on the froth of my passion here and there (it did take me almost a week to write). But I appreciate the ear you have lent me, and if nothing else, I would be pleased and honored if you came away from your reading tonight with at most an appreciation for a different perspective and at least a way to kill time. This need not change your world view. In fact, it was not intended as such, nor was it intended to educate or fascinate. But, just perhaps, it has shed light on the dark side of a conundrum you never even knew existed, one which I implore you to explore. For you never know what insights you too shall find. Happy Shark Week.

broken snifter...

like short sleeves, i bear arms

I meant to blog last night before the week started but I got side tracked by a delicious 2 piece KFC combo and finishing the latest Harry Potter book while wearing my wizard's hat and casting a temporal displacement spell so I could read the entire book while avoiding the progression of time, because heaven forbid I let my life slip away from me while I enjoy the final installment of Harry Potter's adventures. Actually who am I kidding, I can't read. Although I did hear that Harry Potter dies at the end, but not before getting buck-naked porno-freaky with Hermione in one of the most graphic literary accounts of a sexual encounter since the depositions during the Lewinsky scandal. I got mine.

So on Friday, as my end of the week tradition dictates, happy hour began calling my name after work and, in a change of scene, I ended up at what I only later deduced to be a gay bar somewhere in Chelsea. I don't quite know what tipped me off though. Maybe it was the fact that there were hardly any women in the bar, and the butch ones that did make an appearance probably had been tagged and released back into the wild for further study and observation. Maybe it was how the bar tender, a middle-aged man who looked like the overweight adult entertainment version of Gene Wilder, called me "sweetie" every time I ordered a drink. Maybe it was the sheer volume of paintings depicting naked young men in various states of arousal, peppering the wall like a strange penile garnish to the tacky neon accented brick decor of the bar's interior. My personal favorite was the guy wearing nothing but a little sailor hat, a white scarf and a smile, like he was part of some naked, gay boating excursion around the world. If it weren't for the bar's $5 2 for 1 special on rather a potent rum and coke, few redeeming qualities would be found here. Anyway, as hilarious as the interior of this bar was on pure sight alone, I should have known that a place presented like this at the outside of my night would only lead to more stories as the alcohol began to flow like the rhymes of Notorious himself.

So I walked up to the bar to collect my second rum and coke, because if I've learned one thing from the Rush Hour movies, it's that a good thing always come with a partner. As I'm waiting for the bar tender to make his way round the horn to me, I overhear the guys sitting at the bar next to me, because at that point, it was either eavesdrop on their conversation or try and drown out the joint's stellar musical atmosphere of "It's Raining Men" with my own thoughts (actually that's a bad example, because I'm sort of a fan of that song. I just wanted to paint the picture that the scene here was gayer than Lance Bass sporting a nice pair of jean shorts and a pink tube top eating a banana... but not just one of those regular bananas, one of those mini bananas. Chew on that for a while.) Anyway, as I'm dropping eaves on these cats next to me, I hear one of them say, "look at this guy and his bowling shirt... I wonder where the lanes are?" uttering a sneer, arrogant laugh at his zigging gibe. After a momentary internal chuckle at the notion that I had just heard a guy discretely heckle someone in a gay bar, thus adding another item to the list of things I never thought I'd ever experience in life, I came to a horrifying revelation. It dawned on me that I, in fact, had explicitly chosen to wear my own black bowling shirt with pink accent triangles this morning (very 50s, very retro, very cool) in honor of my own newly celebrated weekly holiday, Casual Friday. At that point, I was literally floored that I had just been heckled at a gay bar. Like the end of a good knock-knock joke, I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I now have a really good story to tell basically everyone I know, because a tale like this comes along but once in a lifetime. On the other hand, however, I just got insulted by a gay man at a gay bar in Chelsea. And I really liked that shirt too, a shirt which is now tainted, losing the approval I assumed it had already garnered from gay men the world over, being the fly piece of thread that it is.

I just have the one story for tonight. Nothing else of note happened this weekend that can be summed up so anecdotally. As usual, I have a million thoughts milling around in my brain but no cohesive thematic fly paper upon which to stick them. So, these will have to wait another day for their big break, like a struggling New York City artist peddling his work on the corner of streets and avenues. But no matter. In due time, children... in due time. Pound it.

4 out of 5 doctors...

it is what it is

This blog tonight is sponsored by Tilburg's Dutch Brown Ale. Getting drunk off the sweet taste of windmills and legalized marijuana has never been so delicious.

First of all, as my life usually goes, distractions arose and I haven't had a chance to blog in quite some time, what with my trips to DC and West Point for work, and an impromptu visit to the township of Ithaca. To put it in perspective, between June 25 and July 16 I only spent 5 nights in Brooklyn. And, like a screening of Natural Born Killers, there was so much going in that time that I really can't explain it all with true justice. So, akin the mysterious location of the Titanic, the stories from my trips around the Northeast are now unfortunately lost and forgotten, swallowed by the ocean and buried by time. We will just have to wonder where they went and hope that someday, when our society has long since passed, an alien civilization will happen upon our lonely planet, and unearth the secrets that we, ourselves, were unable to discover. (Note: the poetry here works better if you're reading this pre-1985... my style is a little dated). Moving along, the topics for tonights discussion are as follows: trains and agriculture.

So I was on my way home from work today, and, being rush hour in NYC, the train was packed. Having just spent a semester in China, I'm no stranger to the game "How many people can we fit on a train before something pops." But, like a rousing game of Stratego, it's only fun at first, until you realize you've lost the Spy piece and now the whole set is basically worthless. That'll just ruin your entire afternoon. But, God had a plan of adding a dash of awkward to my uncomfortable misery. In addition to the Indian guy standing behind me basically fucking me in the ass every time the train jostled from side to side, about halfway though my journey home, my right nut began to itch violently. On top of all this, I was standing right in front of this pretty cute girl who was sitting in one of those chairs on the side of the car, so there was no reprieve from my situation without looking like I was diddling myself. And I couldn't even pull the real slickness and gain a brief respite from the discomfort by adjusting my satchel bag across my groin like I normally do because my bag was, as far as I'm concerned, the only thing stopping Apu behind me from actually tearing through my pants and making me his prison bitch. Bad times all around man. But, when I got off the train, I saw a man on the street corner that made all my troubles melt away and helped me realize the life I truly lead and the random people my aura attracts.

Last night, when I was sitting on the porch of my building with Ev, grabbing a smoke and sippin' on some vino, a man approached us, looking straight Brooklyn thug, rollin' in his white tee, grey sweats and some hot, gleaming all-white AF1's. He would later introduce himself to me as Agriculture, cuz he comes from the dirt, you know? Here's a brief run down of what we talked about (mainly, the stories he told us, whether or not we were psychologically prepared for the shit this man would spit in our ensuing time together). First of all, he kept saying how everyone was "corny" and how he rolled by the building last night and people were "mad corny" and the only people he could chill with were some fat chicks (his words, not mine). He was really disappointed, because no one likes having to settle for some fat chicks when you could be pulling down a shorty or two. Then, Agriculture (or Ag as he's called for short) told us about how his friend wanted him to move to Connecticut because his friend was afraid that someone was trying to murder him out there. But he wasn't down with that, because he ain't no body guard and he's certainly no one's guardian angel. Then, literally as if he'd been struck by divine inspiration, a light bulb went off in Ag's head and he hopped off to go buy some beer so he could have a drink with us.

After returning from his shopping spree, he cracked open a bottle of Heineken with his teeth (the coolest thing I've ever seen a person pull off next to this guy). So, as we sipped on our beers he began entertaining us with stories of his life which I have paraphrased bellow with little or no exaggeration. Usually my blogs become bastions beleaguered by pertinently padded prose and amusingly appalling analogies and anecdotes. But this is the honest recount of what this guy said, no frills.

He was up in Boston a couple years ago, "you know, this was a time when Big Pun was still alive." One night, at the spry age of 13 mind you, he was hanging out at Club Hollywood (by the way, there is no Club Hollywood in Boston) with his cousin, who was performing on stage that night. His cousin was a Crip, and, while he doesn't fuck around with that gang shit, he was wearing blue that night, because he loves blue. He wears a lot of blue. Blue is his favorite color. But it still doesn't mean anything. Some Bloods walked into the club when he was drinking on some wine and he could see them mouthing off something about him and his cousin. After an innocent (well, as innocent as two rival gangs can make it) brush by that quickly turned to a heated altercation, one of the Bloods broke a bottle over his cousins head. Now, while this in and of itself is worthy of it's own Spike Lee joint, having just returned from a trip to Ithaca myself, wherein I got drunk and tried to break a bottle over our porch railing, I fully appreciate the gravity of any situation when someone breaks a bottle over your head. If you don't know how hard it is, next time you're drinking a bottled beer in a relatively secure environment, try and break a bottle over something. Then you'll get the full scope of the force involved here.

He then proceeded to tell us about his own rap career. Like I said, his name was Agriculture, because he comes from the dirt. He was supposed to be writing a jingle that night but he couldn't get his mind around it. "A jingle for what?" you may be asking. For a shoe store that had just opened about two blocks away, naturally. You know, just a store that had some $700 Reeboks, and a pair of snake-skin Nikes for $1000. "But how can people right on the border of the Cosby Show's Brooklyn and the Brooklyn of the Marcy Projects afford $1000 shoes?" I asked, rather puzzled, as you most certainly are right now after hearing this entire tale. Oh, because there are crazy drug dealers around here, making mad coin on the streets. He was going to give us a sample of some of his rhymes, but he couldn't spit his violent shit because there was a shorty (Ev) around. Unfortunately, the security guard came out and told us we couldn't drink outside, forcing us and Agriculture to part ways. For a side note, I'm pretty sure you can drink outside because I do it all the time. I bet you Agriculture is just always up in that joint, causing all kinds of problems in his own hood and the security guard won't stand for it anymore (or sit behind his desk for it). Hopefully we'll cross paths again in the near future, because his stories, like dilithium crystals, could power my blog like it was the Starship Enterprise.

It's taken me all night to write this because I keep getting distracted by the world around me. I wonder if you can buy an attention span on eBay? Regardless, enjoy your day or night and check back again soon because, hopefully, now that work has slowed down I'll have more time to write in this thing rather than squirreling away the stories of my misadventures away in my brain like a diabetic hoards his insulin. You know what? Some of us might like to try some. You don't have to be so greedy all the time. Keep on truckin', brother.

camel skin shirt...

communicating my thoughts

So I'm a little tips after imbibing half a bottle of wine at an amazingly authentic Chinese food restaurant that nostalgically reminded me of days gone by. It's amazing how different kinds of alcohol elicit different emotions, peeling away various parts of your essence, exposing different parts of your soul to the contemplative machinations of your cerebral cortex. It's like the hand of Michaelangelo, working tirelessly on the unappealingly rough slab of marble that eventually would became the quintessential Renaissance masterpiece David, liberating different notions within your core and allowing you to achieve a perspective on your surroundings that would otherwise have lay dormant inside the fleshy cage of your body. This entry may shortly become the undoubtedly incoherent ramblings of a drunkard that may or may not make sense, so I suggest you light up a J amongst the company of friends, find someone to read the following to you, and discuss ad nausea. Warning: this will not be a hilarious recount of my inebriated adventures or the macabre happenings of my life spiced with obscure pop culture references. Revelations to follow.

So I was catching the F train back to Brooklyn after dinner as the emphatically cadenced verses of the Typical Cats began to carry me home on an ethereal serenade of poetry, perfectly pressed between jazzy beats that seems to prophetically predict the happenings I was about to witness. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a group of 6 or 7 individuals, peppered across the aisle from each other, gesticulating wildly. Upon further investigation, I realized that they were all deaf, and were merely carrying on a typical conversation you or I would have with each other in the only medium they know how, sign language. Now, while this may not seem like a strange sighting in a city that literally has everything, I was fascinated with the ease of their communication and, more importantly, how animated these individuals were as they carried on a lengthy conversation, individuals who had presumably never heard each other speak. It not only made me realize how much we, as aural individuals using speech to understand our fellow man, take for granted in interpreting our surroundings, but also, it got me pondering the hidden mental labyrinth that lies behind fully realizing human communication. There's an old saying that 70% of communication is transmitted through body language and 20% is conveyed through tone, a saying which I believe, gives the content of what we say far too much credit. Whether or not we are aware of it, an unbelievable amount of human interaction, I believe, is subconscious, an inherent understand inherited from our our ancestors, unobscured and unabashedly prevalent through a millennia of evolution. It's amazing how so much of language is intuitive.

Anyone who has studied a foreign language and then traveled to that country can tell you that an unbelievable amount of contextual assumptions need to be made in order to survive in a location beyond your norm. But, it is relatively astounding that an entire system of communication like sign language, a fairly modern construction that, I'm sure, has roots stretching as far back as the prehistoric, is fully able to express the wide range of notions, emotions and cognotions that the human condition is capable of these days. The conveyance of one's inner thoughts simply through what essentially amounts to body language seems to question the notion that there is even an insignificant 10% of what you say that you use "words" for. If sign language interprets bodily gestures with literal meaning, what's to distinguish the literal form the figurative in this kind of situation? When all you can use to communicate is delivered and interpreted through strings of body gesticulations that happen to correlate to words and phrases, or language in this case, the separation between literal conveyance and figurative overtones, at some primal instinct, must be blurred.

This all sort of ties into what a woman I met who worked for the Department of Education in DC said to me as we were proverbially shotting the shit on my way to collect passports as part of my undying commitment to corporate bitch work this summer. We were talking about my semester in China and how easy or hard it was to pick up Chinese, a character and tonal driven language, while living there. I mentioned that after being immersed in the culture for so long, something, at some point, clicked and I began to pick up more and more form contextual clues and situational markers which lead to a greater understanding of my surroundings. We began talking about mental cognition and how internal thought may not even be in your native language, but may, in fact, be in some sort of visual, intuitively cerebral language. I must interject here that she was a graduate of Brown University and was probably somewhere in her late 30s or early 40s, so she had undoubtedly done her fair share of drugs in her younger days, if you couldn't already tell. But it still gave a certain part of my perception of thought a proverbial ear flick and made me reconsider the idea of mental cognition. Now, it's obviously a stretch of the imagination to think about thinking, but try it for a minute and see where your mind takes you. You might be surprised.

As I change my iTunes to the more melodious sounds of John Coltrane's tenor saxiphone, so does the tone of my entry change. Let me pop open a bottle of wine while I regale you with tales of my artistic travels in NYC. Like I mentioned last entry, I went to MOMA a few weeks ago and saw two pieces that helped to shape my definition of what ART truly is. The first was an ongoing exhibit of Richard Serra's massive yet simplistically austere steel sculpture. The piece that most interested me was a meandering structure of steel that had rusted of its own accord, seeming to almost live, die and age as it wanted. The two 15 foot high serpentine walls coiled around each other and undulated, as if almost breathing life into themselves, to create a passageway through which patrons could literally become a part of this prototypical scene of modern art. The back and forth swaying of this piece gave a certain sense of life to the work, while the height and grandeur of the walls offered a sense of isolation and separation from the other patrons of the museum, confining those lucky enough to venture through this strange means of expression. At various points, the structure would open up into what can best be described as a bear, circular room, allow an unexpected conference of the work's inhabitants and a brief respite from the sense of being herded through this creation as you are supposed to see it. It felt like being an insignificant singular blood vessel, wandering through a giant metallic organ. It was incredibly surreal and forced me to think about human interaction with the art around you, considering the notion that art can not only be a part of the world you walk through, but can itself be the world you walk through.

The other exhibit that drew me into its message was a piece on the font Helvetica. I'm sure you all recognize this font, if not specifically as such, then, as the piece educated me, as seen in the world around you, but if you don't know what it looks like, open Word and find out. Apparently, Helvetica is the most ubiquitous font in modern society (to take a page from the exhibit). It spelled out (no pun intended) the history of the creation of the font, as well as showed a video of the different usages, simply in New York City, of the typeface. My first reaction to this was a contemplative reflection on the creation of fonts. I began to wonder how different fonts came about. Who creates them? What do they think about when they start to pen a new manner of penmanship? Where does there inspiration come from? Do they begin with the aesthetics of the script of the meaning they want to convey behind it? Or perhaps are they simply created out of necessity or the desire for change?

As you can see, the whole piece urged me to think about the creation of fonts. More importantly, I began to wonder how they impact the world around us in ways we cannot even imagine. We all have reactions, perhaps unbeknown to ourselves, to the world around us. To me, one of the most important senses we have at our disposal to interpret our surroundings is the visual. Before we can even begin to grasp, literally and figuratively, the world around us, we see it first. We interact on a purely visual level with so many things that we do not, or simply cannot, touch, hear, taste or smell. But we can still see it, and in some instances, that is all we have. Shifting back to language, it amazes me how much the way in which our written language is presented can affect the meaning and perception behind it. HATE vs. hate. So much of advertising research is directed towards what makes a product appealing, what attracts us to it, what subconscious primal factors will draw us towards it, not only as consumers but also as humans or simply as animals. The typeface something is presented in has a lot to do with our visual interaction with the message that product is sending. Beyond that, typeface has an immense amount to do with written communication aside from product placement. Copy and paste this entry into Word and change the font to whatever you like. Now consider how each iteration is presented and what that means to your understanding of what I am saying. Is it more formal or more casual? More grating or more placating?

This entry was supposed to cover a wider array of material than I had anticipated. But the literary bug crawled inside of my brain and took command like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I just couldn't stop. So I'll have to leave stories from my trip to DC, of which there are many, until later (hopefully tonight, mayhaps tomorrow or next week). Have a safe and happy 4th ladies and gentlemen. I'll be thinking of you.

the reason levi's were so popular...

it sounds like that commercial, but it's true

I'm sure you noticed the extended blog break that I unfortunately had to take last week. However, unlike a unionized construction worker, there's a good reason for an absence of work on my end. I just got back from a business trip to DC last week. Wow... I feel so corporate when I say that... except my trip didn't end with me putting a cheap prostitute or some hotel porn on my expense account because my bitch of a wife won't give me a good lay since she's always complaining about those damn kids. I wish that condom hadn't broken. However, I'm back in action, drinking a Dixie brew from New Orleans that tastes, and looks, like it was brewed in some mud splattered shack in the middle of the bayou. The bottle's a little grimy, the label is dirty and totally on crooked, and the beer is kind of flat. But, the sweet alligator overtones mix with a cajun aroma that finishes clean with a hearty dose of hurricane and a hint displaced minority to give this beer its true N'awlins flavor. Delicious.

Like those denizens of the Mystery Machine on Scooby-Doo, I find myself working on a bit of a mystery these days. When I arrived home Saturday afternoon after a now routine Friday drinking the night away in Jersey, I find on my door, affixed like a copy of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, a note welcoming my new roommate, an ESL student, to New York City. Since, to my limited knowledge, no one is living in my room right now, I tear the note off my door and throw it away. I make the unsubstantiated assumption that it was either put on the wrong door or, in one of those blanket statements of effort that is designed to maximize laziness and minimize work, ironically resulting in the expenditure of more resources, someone put this note on all the doors in the building in an attempt to efficiently welcome these ESL students without actually checking to see who lives here and already speaks English. I decline think any more of this for the rest of my day and go about my regular Saturday activities of hangover maintenance and general re-hydration.

At 9 o'clock Sunday morning, while I am sleeping peacefully, as I tend to do at 9am on Sunday mornings, I hear someone a-tap-tap-tapping at my door. I answer the door half naked, because clearly anyone who is a-rapping at my door at 9am on a Sunday is going to have to accept the consequences of my half nude body as punishment. The woman who has been making all that noise at my doorstep tells me that there is a new ESL student moving in today, explaining Saturday's note, and hands me a new pillow for him. I guess it makes sense, because I've run into a few people in the building who are studying English, and there is this growing consortium of Asian kids (Japanese or Korean I think) that all hang out together and totally don't speak any English. (Note: here's the part where you should insert your own racist joke because there are way too many and I can't decide which one I want to use. But back to the story.)

So after I hear that I might not be living alone for the rest of the summer, I am quite disheartened and realize things will never be the same now, like when I found Ginger Spice was leaving. Obviously, my first reaction is "crap... I can't walk around naked and take shits with the door open anymore." Naturally, I ask her when she expects him to move in, cuz I'm totally going to need to drop one more open-doored duce and, more importantly, an era ending dump like this deserves a small ceremony that I'm clearly going to have to plan the rest of the day around. Her response: "Well, it might take him a while to get through customs, so I don't really know. Have a nice day!" This was the last time I ever saw her or heard anything about my phantom roommate. No one has moved in since this happened over a week ago and at this point I'm pretty sure that I actually went out, bought myself a pillow and then, like Edward Norton in Fight Club, invented an entire back story to explain it all. If I didn't still have that note, I'd probably be on my way to Arkham Asylum right now to get myself checked out for the crazies, because this is a little weird (10 bonus points to anyone who gets that reference).

On my way to MOMA that same Sunday, shortly after The Case of the Mysterious Roommate began, I once again discovered indisputable evidence for why everyone needs to live in New York at some point in their life. First of all, as I left for my activities, down the road from my building a block long Bengali street festival was just beginning. Unfortunately, since it was still early, none of the food vendors were open for business, I left soon after arriving, but not before contemplating the relative ridiculous, yet alluringly attractive, notion of a skinny white man rocking out with one of those full-length Muslim dashiki things. After getting off the subway at Rockefeller Center and making my way several blocks North towards the museum, I found myself stumbling upon what appeared to be a gay pride parade, complete with shirtless men in Speedos and hot pants flaunting their well sculpted muscles on top of purple floats while drag queens strutted around looking like they were straight out of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It was a beautifully poetic situation where a set of circumstances, already amusing in its own right, is augmented simply due to the unexpectedness of it all, like when Britney Spears shaved her head or you watch a good ole nut-shot video on YouTube. It's so much funnier when no one sees it coming.

I'm sure you're well amused by now, so I'll cut the rest of my entry off here and, like a fine stew, put my stories from DC on the back burner to let them simmer for a while. I'm actually heading back out of town for work after the 4th, so hopefully I can empty the reserves before I have to skedaddle off again and be another productive member of the corporate community. I hate working for the man. Until then, keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.

union thug...

of cabbages and kings

As tradition dictates, like annual return of the Flatback sea turtle to her natal beach to lay her eggs, or the cutting of your wrists when you hear Dashboard whine on the radio, I sit here, blogging away with a nice imported Brazilian beer condensing onto my credenza (note: I don't actually own a credenza, nor do I really even know what a credenza is. I just really like how that word reads. It makes me sound all sophisticated. Like I might also own a leather bound copy of Don Quixote and have a smoking parlor somewhere in my house...). And, like the migratory patterns of the Semipalmated Sandpiper, my journeys this weekend have been long, and have taken me to the figurative topics of this great creation aptly entitled "life."

I have basically decided that the copy machine in my office is one of the greatest pieces of machinery to handle paper ever invented. Save fabricating you little origami cranes or making those stupid paper chains of a deformed child (because you know they always came out with tiny little legs and one arm that was huge like he was trying to high five a Woolly Mammoth or something) It does anything you want, from stapling to collating to hole punching to printing on both sides in various methods of page turning. It even prints on A4 paper. No one this side of Greenwich Mean uses A4 paper. And if you hit the right sequence of buttons, I'm pretty sure it'll even make you one of those fortune tellers that was all the rage in 4th grade. Your future's looking better already.

The whole point of this rambling description of technology is that, as expected, a mechanized wonder as complex as this has a tendency to get bogged down when dealing with the puny pieces of paper it does. I mean, this thing could photocopy a bear if you were so inclined. It's basically a low grade cloning machine. Anyway, when this thing breaks, repairing it (usually a matter of removing the offending pieces of paper) is like fixing the Hubble Space Telescope. You have to open a hatch, turn a handle, slide out what essentially amount to the machines organs, and then pull open like six different compartments to figure out what exactly has gone wrong. Fixing it reminded me of when they disconnected the Hal9000 in 2001. I half expect the machine to start trying to convince me to stop. And don't even get me started on putting toner into this beast. Yesterday, the black cartridge ran out and replacing it was like loading torpedoes into the tubes of the USS Omaha. Open a flap, flip a lever, put in your new cartridge and then lock it up tight. I felt like the Russians had just launched a few birds at Washington and we were striking back like in those simulations at the end of WarGames. Missiles be flying everyone, son! Up periscope!

Moving away from the fascinations of the utterly mundane in my office (it's been slow for a while and I'm really stretching thin to entertain myself), found myself once again obliterated this past Friday. There are a few good moments that ultimately string together to form a hilarious night's tale, but there are a few standouts.

First, I hopped the turnstyle to the PATH trains into Jersey, not because I didn't have any money (although I'm pretty sure at that point I didn't because moments after getting of the train I used my credit card to buy a single cheeseburger at McDonald's, I just hadn't realized it yet), and not out of a disdain for everything related to Jersey (which is also true and reason enough never even to go there, let alone pay to go there). My reasoning was simple, yet elegantly fabricated. I had already paid for an unlimited monthly Metro card, so either I'm going to use that to pay for my ride to Jersey, which I can use as many times as I want, so pulling a fast one on the system doesn't save or loose anyone money. Or, if I can't use my Metro card (which I don't think I can for the PATH trains), I'm just not paying for it. And while that sounds unnecessarily rebellions at my age when you read it at first, like Jackson Pollock, let me paint you a picture of the disorder that was going on at he time. I couldn't even make my way down the stairs to the station without falling, let alone hold the mental capacity to find a kiosk, buy a ticket, and use it in the properly designed manner. Basically it worked out better for all parties involved (myself and the turnstyle).

Secondly, while at the aforementioned McDonald's, Luke, one of my friends from Cornell who was down in the city for the weekend, stumbled drunkenly up to the intercom (I guess at 3am you aren't allowed inside the McDonald's establishments in Jersey and have to order through an intercom like you're in the future ordering a large number 4 from mankind's deep space outpost). He then proceeds not only to apologize to the poor woman working there at 3am for being so boisterously intoxicated, but then proceeds to ask the two people around us how to say "I'm sorry I'm drunk" in Spanish... assuming, based on life experience of course, that everyone who works in a McDonald's speaks Spanish. A natural conclusion to come to in America frankly. I guess you sort of had to be there to find this as hilarious as I did.

Finally, speaking of assumptions you make in America, while doing my business at the urinal in The Patriot bar in the financial district, a gentlemen of questionable mental facilities, most likely severely depleted by 6 dollar pitchers, starts telling me how much he, a Puerto Rican, loves America, shaking my hand more than a few times during our exchange of inebriated camaraderie, a hand which had, moments before, been clutching his whizzing wiener. After he finished espousing the merits of this great country of ours, while still evacuating his waste, he humbly mentioned that there were a few things that he didn't like about America, more specifically, things he didn't like about New York City, mainly, black people. I'm absolutely dying as he's telling me all this, and thank God I was standing in front of a piss receptacle because if I wasn't, I probably would have soiled myself twice over. It was one of those "I can't believe this just happened to me" exchanges that I hope will make it into print somewhere in the world, just so that when the entire electronic information infrastructure of this planet is inevitably razed, this story will survive that horrible catastrophe that will undoubtedly plunge us into a period of turmoil and tragedy that will be a dark age of mythic grandeur. It will become part of the paltry legacy we, as a species, will still hold true and will be an educational tool of the histories, not only for us, but for whatever beings discover our planet on interstellar archaeological expeditions. Over dramatic, I know, but seriously, it's entirely possible.

Alright, the obscurity of the late night is calling my name, and, since I have to make yet another consulate run for more visas, waiting with, what I can only hope to be the members of of some kind of mass Biblical exodus of all the Chinese people in America, I must depart. But remember, just because the sign says you shouldn't do it, doesn't mean it won't still be funny to see you do it. Au Reviour, mes enfants.

the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest...