contrarian wisdom
People sometimes ask me how I’ve managed to squeeze so much into my short life. And while I’m usually at a loss for solid advice, I’ve recently begun to realize at least one rule I tend to follow:
If everyone is doing it, don
budget tip
According to recent statistical research, the odds of winning the lottery are apparently so small that it does not significantly reduce them to not buy a ticket. One might, for example, with an equal chance of success, hope to find the winning ticket on the sidewalk and save the dollar purchase price.
reading the leaves
Almost two years ago, I decided to cut caffeine out of my diet. I was drinking coffee in large amounts, at several points throughout the day, and found myself feeling constantly wired, jittery, and vaguely dehydrated. So, I switched to tea. And though I’ve slowly eased the caffeine restriction, I’ve stuck to my new leafier beverage pursuit.
But I don’t think I’m the only one. Observing friends and colleagues, talking to waiters at a variety of establishments, analyzing supermarket shelves, it seems to me an increasing number of people are becoming tea drinkers. Perhaps it’s the healthier reputation that tea (rightly or wrongly) possesses. Perhaps it’s tea’s more Zen aura, which better jibes with the increasing popularity of yoga, Feng Shui, or Asian neo-minimalist design. Or simply that in today’s post-bubble, post-9/11 economy, constant caffeinated uber-productivity seems less a worthwhile priority.
Whatever the reason, I can certainly predict the result: a drop off in Starbucks sales. Not just because tea drinkers are more likely to brew themselves (as making good tea at home or in the office is vastly simpler than making equally good coffee). Nor because former coffee drinkers might very well spite their overpriced and formerly favored purveyor of their prior beverage of choice, like some strange sort of angry, jilted lover. But because Starbucks exclusively serves Tazo tea, which every single tea drinker I know absolutely hates. Either Starbucks wizes up and starts serving tea without odd herbal infusements, or we just might be seeing the end of an empire.
name calling
Whatever your feelings on the war, I’m sure you’ll agree the military has lost its propaganda edge. Consider the name Operation Desert Storm: exciting, invoking a force-of-nature inevitability to justify rightness of action, vaguely evoking a G.I. Joe attack on Cobra base sort of ethos. But Operation Iraqi Freedom? Who’s going to get excited about that? Granted, it’s a step up from the preceding Operation Enduring Freedom, but, really, what isn’t?
Update: In response to the readers asking if I could do better: Operation Sodomize Saddam (Code Name: Operation Bugger Baghdad).
life imitates art
Taking a break from a day spent wrestling the finances on I Love Your Work, I picked up my copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and read this paragraph on page 406:
Brian had swooped down like an angel with a crucial fifty thou just as Schwartz began principal photography on a modern-dress Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov, played by Giovanni Ribisi…
Wait, what? Taking a break from financing a film starring Giovanni to read about financing a film starring Giovanni. The recursivity of it all is making me dizzy.
silver lining
I realized at last night’s New Year’s Eve party that a wonderful side-effect of rampant egotism is never feeling starstruck. Simple celebrity can’t undercut long and carefully developed narcissistic feelings of superiority.
pet peeve
Why do barbers, ‘stylists’, and all other hair-cutters inevitably leave one sideburn at least an inch and a half shorter than the other?
i have this really cute friend…
In this day and age, pointing out gender-differentiated behavior is a rather dangerous thing to do – it smacks of a misogynistic, patriarchal, pro-glass ceiling perspective that any guy hoping to ever have sex again would be better off simply avoiding altogether. That being said, I simply cannot refrain from sharing at least one small guy vs. girl observation I’ve recently noted. Namely, that girls tend to believe all of their friends are more attractive and all of their enemies less attractive than is actually the case, something guys simply don’t do.
Illustratively: a hunch-backed, toothless wildebeest of a girl would inevitably be described by every one of her friends as “absolutely beautiful,” or, at very least, “really, very cute.” Conversely, a Victoria’s Secret model who had once given that group of friends a dirty look would be dismissed as “honestly, not that attractive; I mean, seriously, what do guys even see in her?” It is my sense that women aren’t actively trying to bend the truth with these statements, but rather that their attractiveness appraisals are simply more highly influenced by personality. Guys, by way of comparison, have no trouble separating personality and looks, hence the frequency of friend descriptions like “who, Joe? Yeah, he’s a good guy, but he’s pretty fuckin’ ugly.”
All of which tends to get us guys in trouble, as women are nearly always in the process of setting single guys up with their single girl friends. Extrapolating cross-gender from our “call a spade a spade” approach, we guys tend to assume that the description of the girls we’re being set up with are largely objective. And, sometimes, they are. But more frequently, we hit the bar, meet the date, and realize that the liquid fortification required to actually kiss the girl goodnight would require a rather significant proportion of the week’s salary.
All of which, I suppose, leads me to this dating advice for fellow men: if the set-up is a close friend of the matchmaker, be wary. Ask for a picture. Or, at very least, buy a flask, and reduce the cost of your necessarily excessive drinking.
another costume story
Previously mentioned in my Easter-time discussion of Marshmallow Peeps:
Two years ago, for Halloween, one of my then coworkers seized upon the idea of taping Peeps to his clothing, thereby dressing as a ‘chick magnet.’ Sadly, Peeps are only produced during the Easter season, and he was forced to use marshmallow black cats instead. Apparently, while most women find the Peeps idea cute, they are not similarly amused by a ‘pussy magnet’ costume.
down and dirty
My kitchen is in serious need of cleaning. As is my bathroom, and to be honest, my bedroom and living room as well. Which is to say, my whole apartment could use a serious scrubbing. And, normally, I’d be happy to get down to business, Windex and Scrubbing Bubbles in hand. I actually kind of enjoy cleaning, find it oddly soothing, almost therapeutic. While most of the other things I accomplish day to day are nebulous achievements, at best small, cumulative steps, in cleaning, with less than one day’s work, I can make dramatic progress, achieve impressive results, even finish the job completely.
The problem, though, is that I only live here for another month. Come December first, I’ll have brought everything I own to a new (and presumably pre-cleaned) place some ten blocks West. Plus, I figure, by even mid-November, I’ll have started boxing and wrapping preemptively, my floor by then covered with piles of everything I own. Which basically saps my will to clean. Why put in the effort when I’ll have so little time to appreciate the results?
Of course, with each passing day, the layer of grime coating my stove and bathroom sink thickens. But with each passing day, I’m also that much closer to the move, allowing me to rationalize one step more easily why cleaning just doesn’t make sense.
Sort of like taking a taxi. Say you’re fifteen, twenty blocks from your destination. A long walk or a short taxi ride. And the thing is, if you’re going to take the taxi, you have to commit to it right away. Because if you just start walking, wavering over whether it’s worth hailing a cab, you’re getting closer and closer with each passing step, making the cab ride harder and harder to justify.
If I really wanted to have the place clean, I would have needed to pull out the mop three or four weeks back. By now, it’s just the cockroaches and I in a long, slow slide to when I finally get the hell out.