I realized the other night that life is sort of like a big game of Scrabble: you get these random pieces dealt to you by the fates, and your job is to look at what everybody else is making of their pieces, then figure out how you can arrange your own alongside to add new meaning to it all.
At four in the morning, at least, thoroughly plastered, that’s deep.
[As running two companies seems to have been eating into my writing time, blog entry ideas have been piling up, unposted, for the past week. I’m hoping to start chipping my way through the list over the next few days. To wit:]
Mark Twain once famously observed, “clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Which is the primary reason I get dressed in the morning. And, more to the point, why I try to do it well.
As countless studies have shown, the way we dress deeply impacts what others think of us, how likely they are to listen to us or to do what we ask. Sure, we all occasionally chastise ourselves for so blithely judging books by their proverbial covers. But, whether or not we should, we most certainly and subconsciously do. Which makes pulling clothes from the closet a strategic exercise. How does a given shirt make me feel? How does it make me appear in the eyes of others?
It’s important enough that, spending my days the past week bouncing between meetings with filmmakers and meetings with investors and corporate execs, I’ve even stooped to mid-afternoon changes, pulling from two disparate subsets of my wardrobe.
Most business books, on the subject of clothing, advise that you dress to match the people with whom you’re meeting. Which, like most advice doled out in business books, is hopelessly misguided. Far better, instead, to dress to match their expectations of how someone in your position is ‘supposed’ to look.
The jeans, blazer and vintage button downs, then, come out not for the filmmakers, but for the staid execs, a group for whom sunglasses worn indoors bespeaks a certain desirable level of cool, rather than suggesting total douche-bagdom, as it would to fellow filmmakers. Similarly, then, the suits come out for meetings with screenwriters or prospective key cast. Without a tie, certainly, and perhaps erring towards DKNY shirts rather than Polo Ralph Lauren’s, but still formal enough to say, “yes, I’m intimately familiar with the finer points of GAAP and SEC filing laws.”
This ‘dress like they want you to’ rule is not a recent discovery. Instead, it’s something I stumbled across my freshman year in college. Having just launched SharkByte, I quickly found that the odds of success in a new-client sales pitch were directly proportional to the number of electronic gizmos I clipped to my belt for that pitch.
Or, as I so tastefully summarized the idea to the Wall Street Journal: “show them a laptop and they’ll wet their pants.”
Newman’s Law of Playlist Positioning: The most embarrassing songs on your iPod invariably alphabetize to the very first-judged top of your song library. (C.f., Abba, Aerosmith)
Though I’ve previously advocated anal-retentive wallet maintenance, I realize now there’s a dangerous organizational progression possible therein. Particularly, even after a wallet has been pared down to its bare minimal contents, there’s still the question of arranging the bills themselves. While the first few steps make good sense, each further crosses ever deeper into the realm of undeniable OCD. Monitor carefully.
While I respect the intention, it’s simply not in the cards for every president to have a flowing, luxuriant Andrew Jackson pompadour.
1. Though rooting for the Yankees would make me a fourth generation fan, this past week I couldn’t help but secretly pull for the BoSox, in the hopes that their come-from-behind win would presage a similar Kerry performance.
2. Also, as nearly every excellent Miramax employee I know has recently been laid off, I’ve been mentally comparing the company’s antics to those of the Cleveland Indians in the so-bad-it’s-almost-good film classic Major League. For those who’ve (luckily) forgotten the plot of the film, it essentially revolves around the evil owner’s attempt to make the team abominable enough that it falls below its minimum attendance obligation, and can therefore move to a new, warmer and more profitable Florida location. I’m entirely convinced Harvey’s similarly running his company into the ground, either out of spite, or to push the value down far enough that he can buy it back from Disney, and start running things again on his own terms.
In other words, fan or not, it’s pretty clear that baseball explains the entire world.
Learn Braille so I can read in the dark.
By now, I feel like I’ve gone through law school second-hand, having spent countless hours and dollars collaborating with pricey lawyers on tech and film contracts.
Even after returning, fairly sloshed, from a party on the roof of exceedingly attractive friend-of-a-fried Lexa, as my brother and I catch the middle of the Yankee’s game in my living room, betting the over/under on pitching speed, I can still churn out emailed phrases like “it will be our position that, due to prior agreement, such clauses related to rights of distribution approval are wholly invalid or unenforceable.”
Nothing left but to sit back and wait for my Supreme Court appointment.
Saturday night, Colin held a small 25th birthday shindig at the fine Virgil’s Real BBQ in Times Square, involving countless pitchers of beer, several extremely large plates of hush puppies, and Colin putting in a remarkably strong showing against the Pig Out dinner sampler, affectionately nicknamed ‘the tour of mammals’.
Though the party degenerated into general drunken merriment on our roof, in a sober conversation earlier in the day, Colin admitted to being slightly freaked out by hitting the quarter of a century mark. And, with my own birthday just weeks away (July 16th, hint, hint), I similarly spent much of Sunday angsting about what turning 25 means, where I’m headed in life, where I want to go – in short, all the various and sundry sorts of possible soul-searching.
But, having observed friends of all ages, I don’t think Colin and I are unusual in having 25 angst. In fact, I’m now fairly certain that there are at least two big, scary ages, and that what those two ages are precisely largely breaks down by gender.
For guys, 25 is the first, as it signals the end (or, rather, should, though rarely actually does) of drunken collegiate stupidity. There’s a sense amongst guy friends that, up to 25, everything is sort of a warm-up lap, doesn’t actually count in the grand scheme of things. But, at 25, we’re suddenly playing for keeps. Marriage starts seeming like a real possibility. Jobs are swapped for ‘careers’. A general plan, a basic route through life, starts falling into place.
The second guy freak-out, then, is at 40, the first time that we, after blithely rolling full-throttle ahead on our laid-at-25 plans, stop and consider whether those were the right plans after all. Then, as they almost certainly weren’t, there’s the realization that wholesale reinvention would take altogether too much work, and that it would be vastly simpler to simply buy an overpriced sports car while pushing any nagging doubts into the back of our collective male unconscious.
Girls, on the other hand, blaze through 25 without batting an eyelash, only really slowing down at 30. Or, more precisely, at 29 – while we guys lack the foresight to start freaking out early, not really worrying about big issues into they’re shoved down our throat, girls, looking foreword, see 30 coming and start freaking out at least a full year in advance. Thirty’s a particularly big age for unmarried women, because, by then, there’s a definite sense that their friends are snatching up ‘the good ones’, and that, increasingly, their own love lives involve scraping towards the bottom of the guy barrel. So, the unmarrieds tend to go one of two routes: deciding that perhaps romance needn’t be like a movie, and settling for the first guy who doesn’t hit them or scratch himself (much) in public; or deciding that, actually, romance does need be like a movie, and that they’re willing to wait out for the real thing.
This second group, the ‘I’m okay with my life as it is, and I don’t need a guy to fill some gaping void in it, though, if a good one came along, that would be great’ group, then coasts along until 35 (or, again, more accurately, 34). At that point, the biological clock starts ticking increasingly loudly, and the sense of having all sorts of time gets replaced with a sense of having an ever-shrinking window for practical baby-popping. Usually, this group of girls has spent years convincing themselves that perhaps they don’t want kids anyway, and, having to constantly argue that fact against insistent ovaries (from what I’ve seen, a losing battle) is at the crux of the crisis and self-reinvention 34/35 requires.
At least, that’s how I see it.
Still, in my own life, I’m pleased to say I emerged from this weekend’s soul-searching with a slightly refined, though basically consistent, life vision. I’m hoping it holds for the next three weeks, until my birthday itself (again, July 16th, hint, hint), at which point I’m sure I’ll be tossed back to angstful ground zero, spending all day curled in the fetal position under the covers, rocking, sucking my thumb, and muttering quietly to myself.
This morning, in my mail, I received catalogs from the Pottery Barn, J Crew, Staples, and Calumet. I’ve never purchased anything from two of those companies, and haven’t purchased anything from the other two since moving to this new address. How have they tracked me down? I have absolutely no idea.
A bit of online research yields that the average person receives 16.7 pounds of catalog junk mail yearly. Collectively, we Americans receive 2.26 million tons of them, and as they’re tough to recycle, each year an additional 4.75 million cubic yards of landfill space are needed to tuck away those glossy pages of heather and oatmeal pique knit crews, of mahogany-stained plank dining tables and matching chair sets.
In my case, I no longer even leaf through the catalogs before tossing them – were I to make my very first Pottery Barn purchase, I’d either head into a store or shop online. But, month by month, the catalogs regularly roll up none the less.
Earlier this week, the small California tree-hugging voice in the back of my head, the one somehow not squelched by years of Ivy League snottery and New York City faux-sophistication, managed to chime in and convince me I needed to do something about it. So, now, each time I receive a catalog that I know I’ll never read, before tossing it, I call the company’s 800 number and ask to be removed from their mailing list.
16.7 pounds less of catalog trash a year isn’t much. But it’s a start.
While I was at Yale, the neuroscience major was tied in to the psych department. Because of that, neuroscience majors were required to take a few ‘soft’ psych classes. Which is how, in my sophomore year, I ended up in Psych 150 – Social Psychology. Frankly, I hated the class. The research we studied was garbage, and the teaching was at a third grade level. When we were assigned a final project – executing a piece of original field research – I realized I had my chance to let the teacher know what I thought of the class. In an effort to mock the careful study of the inane that characterizes social psychology, I chose the topic of urinal etiquette. Ironically, I got an A.
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The “Number One” Social Norm
Very few social norms are completely rigid; most are violated, at least occasionally or under special circumstances. Riding in an elevator, for example, people will speak to each other instead of simply looking at the door if they already know their fellow riders. Occasionally, even strangers will strike up conversations during an elevator ride. Other norms, like eating with utensils or not sitting on the table, are sometimes ignored as well. Although the violators may be looked down upon, these violators do exist. However, up to the time of my experiment, I had neither seen nor heard of anyone breaking the strict laws of urinal etiquette. For the benefit of my female readers, I must first try to explain the tacit yet complex code that governs men