By the demands of business and pleasure, I travel frequently. So frequently that, when Jet Blue introduced a rewards program a few years back, I was within the first ten to rack up a free trip.

Having logged enough miles to know first-hand the odds of safely reaching my destination, I should be a calm, collected flier. Instead, I’m increasingly phobic, knowing too well each expected whirr and beep: altitude markers, well-adjusted ailerons, fully-engaged landing gear. During a flight, at least a quarter of my brain is consumed with monitoring such sounds. Was that clang right? And, if not, have the flight attendants huddled in back for last tearful goodbyes?

The other three quarters of my in-flight brain are rarely focused on sleep or actual, productive work – two things I do poorly in general, but particularly so on planes. Instead, I spend my time thinking about the least embarrassing moment to use the bathroom.

Put me in a pressurized cabin, and my bladder suddenly shrinks to the size of a walnut. Or perhaps, due to years of my mother’s admonitions, it’s just that I spend the entire flight sipping away at the giant bottled water I never fail to bring on board. Either way, every twenty minutes, I’m off for a lavatory trip.

These days, I manage to score an aisle seat about 95% of the time, sparing my row-mates from constant climbing. But, even seated aisle-side, I start to worry what my neighbors make of the nonstop in-and-out. By flight’s end, I’m convinced even the flight attendants have taken note, eyeing my aisle-walking as sure sign of terrorist threat.

I bring this all up because, over the past week, I’ve been similarly breaking my day into twenty-minute between-bathroom-break chunks. Since last Sunday, I’ve been sick as a dog. And whenever I’m under the weather, I start peeing like its my job.

All of which is a rather long and diluted [best pun ever!] explanation for my lack of regular posting. I did, however, (in between trips to the loo,) manage to make my way through all of Anne Lamott’s excellent Bird by Bird, which reminded me of how valuable regular, scheduled writing is for staving off post-collegiate atrophy of my (already admittedly meager) grasp of language.

So, even with bladder capacity short of normal, even with my lungs still intermittently attempting to escape my chest via fits of violent, hacking cough, I’m really (for real this time, I’m serious, etc, ) going to shoot for the fabled daily posting pace. While I can always fall back on a stadium pal and liter bottles of Robitussin, if I loose the ability to (at least semi-coherently) share my dumb ideas with the rest of the world, I’ll basically have to shoot myself in the head.

As much as I love bookstores, love strolling through them, reading jacket covers and rifling through pages, I must admit they also make me a bit sad. I’ve taken to writing down promising titles on the trusty binder-clip full of 3×5 cards I carry in my right front pocket, and it doesn’t take me more than ten minutes to cover an entire card, front and back.

The list of books I’d like to read seems endless. My time rarely does. So, looking at those book piles, I always feel a bit wistful, knowing I’ll never have a chance to even skim perfunctorily through most of them.

In my own home, despite cramming quick pages and paragraphs into any otherwise unoccupied stretch of time, I’m faced with a pile of to-be-reads that seems to constantly grow, outpacing my ability to chip through. I institute periods of book-buying moratorium – no more purchases until I’ve made my way through the entire pile! – but my resolve rarely lasts.

Which is how, with at least ten volumes awaiting attention on my top shelf, and four others in various stages of ongoing digest, I found in my mail today an Amazon box full of five new acquisitions. There should be a 12-step plan for this.

I hit Central Park this morning at 9:00am, for [Crossfit’s][] brutal monthly NYC group workout. Afterwards, over brunch at a nearby diner, one fellow athlete asked me what I could possibly use in my hair, to make it spike up stylishly even after an hour or two of sweaty abuse.

[crossfit’s]: http://www.crossfit.com

My answer: nothing. When cut short enough (as it recently was, a few days back), my hair naturally stands up on its own. I do, on occasion, use pommade, but I do it solely to make the spiking look intentional. Even without it, Tintin has nothing on me.

Surveying my mane’s misbegotten past, I realize that it always seems to gravitate, naturally and pre-emptively, to whatever new ‘do is about to come into style. Bowl cut? Rat tail? Floppy eye-covering surfer shag? Yes, yes and yes – each time, my hair simply started self-arranging that way, even before the looks came (regrettably) into broader fashion.

Which, by now, leaves me blissfully zen when it comes to the future life of my locks. Though I’ve fortunately yet to start losing my hair, even if I did, I wouldn’t much worry; at that point, a Male Pattern Baldness craze would no doubt kick in, leaving my shiny pate – naturally, preemptively – in full haute coiffure style.

Two nights back, an ex-girlfriend from college came down from Connecticut where she’s now teaching high school French, to join me in taking advantage of Restaurant Week at nearby Vice Versa. And over altogether too much excellent food and wine, after catching up on life and talking through our various angsts and excitements, she somehow roped me into helping her revamp her marathon training plans.

Somewhere between when we dated and now, it seems, she discovered that if she starts running, she can pretty much just keep going. And, as a result, she’s not only completed a number of marathons, but even placed in the top five runners for her age group in a handful of them. With another coming up in April, she was looking to speed up her mile split times, to do something in preparation other than just run as far as she could each day. By the end of dinner, I had somehow agreed to help coach her to that end.

On the one hand, as someone with a long-standing interest in sports medicine and fitness research, I might seem like a good choice. But, on the other, as someone who, after hitting about the one mile mark thinks “well, that’s enough running for this month”, I’m probably not such a good coaching choice after all.

I thought of the same thing last night, when another close friend came to my apartment to, over another bottle of wine, trade gossip and dissect her current dating conundrum. After hearing her full retelling of the sordid tale, I tossed in my guy-perspective analysis, which, it seems, my friend found dead on, and was apparently exceedingly grateful for.

But, here too, I felt a bit suspect in terms of qualifications. Certainly, as Edison once pointed out, the first thousand failed light-bulb prototypes weren’t really failures at all, but discoveries of a thousand ways not to make a light-bulb. And, from that perspective, I’m undoubtedly a relationship pro, having discovered about an equal number of ways not to have a relationship.

But, really, if you’re trying to run a faster marathon, shouldn’t you seek advice from someone who’s actually a marathon runner? And, if you’re trying to figure out if your ongoing relationship has any long-term hope, shouldn’t you talk to someone who’s navigated the pitfalls of New York dating into a long a happy marriage?

Well, yes, you probably should. But, apparently it’s easier and far more entertaining to talk to a smarmy generalist willing to pull elaborate theories about love and life and running long distances out of his ass instead. Which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good explanation of how my life works as a whole.

I don’t seem to do delayed gratification very well at all.

Today, I was briefly very happy after I bought some demitasse spoons at Crate & Barrel that perfectly match my espresso cups.

Then, about two seconds later, I sobered up, and realized that if I become the sort of guy who regularly thinks about things like matching demitasse spoons, I’ll basically have to kick my own ass.

The problem is, my brain moves faster than my mouth. So I speak quickly, trying to keep words at pace with thoughts.

It doesn’t help that my parents are New Yorkers. I may have grown up in laid-back California, but I came home to fast talking every afternoon.

These days, living in Manhattan, I often completely forget that quick talkers aren’t the norm. Then I’ll get on the phone with someone off this frantic little island – say, someone at the Kentucky State Film Commission – and remember again what it feels like to speak with someone who makes each. Word. Into. Its. Own. Sentence.

Or, conversely, I’ll have people similarly irked by my fast speaking speed. A few months ago, I went out to LA to pitch a group of investors for Cyan’s film fund. Granted, in that case, I backed myself into a bit of a corner – I had ten minutes to give a PowerPoint presentation initially meant to have lasted fifteen. I made good time, though, and was nearly through when the time-keeper shouted out, “one more minute.”

“No problem,” I replied. “I’ll just talk faster.”

“Faster? Is that possible? God help us!” the investors chorused. And I got an extra three minutes.

You know how, in kindergarten, you draw stick figures and then you move on? Well, I didn’t. Sure, I can stick figure with the best. But that’s about the absolute limit of my drawing ability. I’m what you might call an art retard.

And it’s not just that I can’t draw. I can’t paint either, can’t sketch, draft or doodle. I see pictures vividly in my mind’s eye, and yet, somehow, by the time they make their way to the page or canvas, the dimensions are so far off as to make whatever I produce look like the work of a drunk, crack-addled six-year old.

It’s not for lack of trying either. At several points past, I’ve set out on stints of daily drawing practice, in the hopes that I’d eventually improve. I didnít.

In other spheres of my life, I have an excellent sense of spatial relationships – I can load up a car trunk well enough to go pro. And my sense of composition is elsewhere strong as well – I’ve even occasionally managed to get my photography into gallery showings. But holding pen, brush or pencil, I lose it all completely. My brain says one thing, my hand does another, unintentionally hilarious results ensue.

So, frankly, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that my handwriting is similarly atrocious. Not just so bad that other people can’t tell what I’ve written, but so bad that, a few hours after writing, I can rarely even decipher the scribbles myself.

And this is printing I’m talking about; I gave up cursive five or six days after I supposedly picked it up. Illegible as my print might be, it looks like fine calligraphy against my best attempts at script.

So, for years, even in birthday cards and personal notes, I’ve resorted to my third grade printing technique, uneven letters jumbled up against each other, precariously swaying from vertical to near-horizontal tilt.

Until, that is, today, when I decided I’ve had enough. Today, when I decided that, if I’m going to start feigning adulthood, I need to master some writing to match.

Scoff if you must, but I’m pretty sure it’s important. Until I get this cursive thing down, for example, fatherhood is strictly out of the question; sick notes penned in my usual hand wouldn’t excuse my future progeny – they’d get the poor kids sent straight to an afternoon of detention for forging notes, and for doing it poorly to boot.

So, cursive practice it is. A few minutes each day, in spare moments between more pressing tasks, the quick brown fox will be jumping over the lazy dog. Again and again and again, until I hit flowery cursive that justifies the purchase of manuscript, quill and India ink. Or, at least, until my handwriting is not so atrocious as to jeopardize the afternoon freedom of my hypothetical unborn children.