First, an admission:

I pee in swimming pools.

I blame this on my early surfing days, around Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. The water there is freezing, fifty degrees at the height of summer freezing, so people surf wearing wetsuits.

And even so, they get cold. Really cold. Cold enough that peeing in a wetsuit, something that initially sounds utterly and ridiculously repulsive, starts to seem like a perfectly reasonable idea, an efficient and convenient way to warm up.

Which is to say, like pretty much all Northern California surfers, I have frequently peed in my wetsuit. And, frankly, it’s only a small, small step from that to just peeing in pools in general.

Of course, I don’t do it without a sense of guilt. Or, more to the point, without a sense of fear. Fear of the chemical that turns pool-pee red.

I don’t know when or where I first heard of this stuff, but it was clearly early in childhood, as it’s stuck with me as a vividly imagined threat ever since. If I pee in a pool, I let out just the tiniest bit, then wait to make sure there’s no color change.

Or, at least, I did. Until this afternoon. When, after a conversation with my brother David about that chemical, I Googled it up to find out more about how it worked.

At which point, I was stunned by the, in retrospect totally obvious, discovery that the red-turning pee-triggered pool chemical [doesn’t exist at all](http://www.snopes.com/science/poolpiss.asp)! It’s just something lifeguards tell kids to keep them from the exact same sort of pool-peeing in which I’ve been engaging.

I’m thrilled by this revelation. And will also now totally understand if you don’t invite me to your next pool party.

But enough about weddings. Back to the important stuff, like shaving.

Two nights ago, on a whim, I shaved off my beard.

Taking a few days off from it seemed a good idea, a chance to let my sensitive skin recover from constant beard-hair poking. But shaving seems to have immediately dropped ten years off my age. Which is to say, I look like I should be at Freshman orientation. Perhaps not wise considering that I spend most of my time these days talking with institutional investors, trying to convince them that I have the wisdom and gravitas to well manage tens of millions of their dollars in the world of film.

So, in short, I think the beard is coming back.

But, as karmic counter-balance, last night I shaved my armpits.

Well, not really shaved. More like substantially trimmed.

Before, standing in the shower, scrubbing my armpits, I was thinking about Jess’ long-standing product idea, Man Wash, a special scrub for guys that would somehow get armpits squeaky clean. Because, in my case, even after some serious and multi-cleanser scrubbing, there’s still a faint hint of post-shower pit-stink.

And it occurred to me there in the shower that the problem had to be the hair. I googled it up, and it seems others have thought the same thing.

So, off the armpit hair came. I don’t yet have any definitive results for how it will work, but my pits do smell excellent right now, even according to Jess. Which is surprising, because she normally otherwise accuses me of waking up smelling like a ferret.

I’ve long enjoyed the word ‘dingleberry’. However, it was only yesterday that I learned ‘dingle’ is a real word meaning ‘a deep, narrow cleft between hills’, which makes ‘dingleberry’ undoubtedly the greatest neologism, ever.

This morning, still unrecovered from our long labor day weekend of too much activity, too little sleep, too much food, and too little time to clean our (normally anal-retentively clean) apartment as it’s slowly descended into pigsty-dom, Jess suggested that we really needed another vacation, but that this one should be a ‘bed vacation’: a few consecutive days where we never have to leave the bed, except perhaps to take a shower while the bed vacation staff changes the sheets.

Would-be entrepreneurs, if you start a business that makes this happen, I will totally invest. So long as I can do it from my bed.

In the past year or so, at least five of my friends have had children. And while that makes me contemplate my own fast-increasing age, it also makes me think long and hard – though still far pre-emptively – about the important topic of baby names.

As readers of books like Freakonomics already know, economists have extensively researched the impact of names on things like job prospects and lifetime earning potential. And while the jury’s still somewhat out on the details there, I’m convinced we’ll soon be seeing a new, much more clearly fiscally-driven trend in baby names: baby branding.

To illustrate: if I have a daughter, I’m naming her Palmolive. For a son, definitely Chef Boyardee.

The revenue opportunities from being a life-long product placement should at least cover their college costs, if not first homes and even eventual retirements.

Pure capitalist genius.

Whenever I walk past Bryant Park and see the speed chess players contemplating their next moves, it occurs to me that I should be good at chess. I don’t really know why I should, except that it just sort of seems like the kind of thing at which I’d excel.

In reality, however, I am a terrible, terrible chess player. Atrociously bad. Perhaps due to an early lack of practice – through my entire childhood, I played less than five games. But, a few years back, thinking it might still not be too late, I even downloaded a chess game for my then Palm smartphone. And after a month or so of practice, I was just as pathetic, the computer opponent continuing to easily manhandle me at even the easiest level.

Still, last night, watching the documentary Wordplay, it similarly occurred to me that I should probably be good at crossword puzzles. On this one, I even had justification: I like wordplay. I know a lot of words and stupid facts. And I secretly like puzzles, despite rarely having the patience to figure out more involved ones.

But, like with chess, and perhaps due to that very lack of patience, I’d actually never before completed a crossword puzzle – not even a Monday USA Today. So, this afternoon, with documentary-driven determination, I pulled up an online crossword collection, and set off on a Monday New York Times.

And while, admittedly, it took me nearly twenty minutes, I got the damn thing done, and done right. With a little practice, I’m fairly sure I could even work my way through later, harder days of the week.

But, of course, if it turns out I can’t, I’m not overly concerned. As I did with chess, I’ll simply declare it a pursuit for pasty losers, and claim I never really wanted to be any good at it in the first place.