I Won’t Always Live in My Regrets

The mind trick wore off. from Very Demotivational

My personal philosophy has long been to not regret. My basis for this is fairly simple: given the assumption that the total outcome of your life’s decisions has led you to where you are, if you are happy, then you have nothing to regret. After all, even the bad or “wrong” decisions you made were part of what got you to a happy place, so there is no reason to regret them even if you recognize that they were incorrect.

I certainly don’t mean for this to be the sort of thing that everyone takes to heart; there are dozens of reasons for any given person to disagree with me, even if they are by my standard perfectly happy. However, for me, it has worked. I have made plenty of incorrect decisions in my life, but the place where I resided was, after a fair number of bumpy spots, generally happy.

I never really considered the flip side of that coin, though, which is that if you are not happy, then you are going to be filled with regret. I had just kind of assumed that regret was something I could forget entirely, when I was actually setting myself up to be crushed by it.

I had never really thought about it before, because I have been unhappy at times since I decided to think this way. However, in those times, there was always something particular to point to, a specific reason that I was not doing so hot that I could sort of hold onto, like a life raft that would float me back to normalcy once I overcame it. That always worked for me, and maybe never appeared to be contradicting my basic stance. Sure, things sucked, but they would be all right soon enough.

Now, though? Not nearly so simple. The past year or so has been a series of (I guess) not-so-good things, made in series, not always related to each other but each compounding in my head, drowning out the good things to a point where I… I don’t think I’m depressed, but I am certainly edging in that direction.

The short answer is that my personal philosophy is a fucking nightmare if the problem in my life is, well, me.

I feel like such a fool complaining about this. I know that people have it far worse than I do, and I also know that there are tiny things that are taking on major significance that they do not necessarily need, only because my mental makeup is a mess.

I’ve started working as a barista again in the past few weeks, and that has helped me see just how much of a regretful mess I have been. The things that are giving me psychic comfort these days are enough to drive any sane person to melancholy; while one should definitely take joy in the little things in life, those little things should not be the only joy tucked into a veritable orgy of self-destructive thoughts. I mean, at the very least, I should be able to listen to music on my walk back to my apartment without losing myself in dark thoughts.

I’ve always had a propensity for a sort of negativity in my thoughts; when I started writing seriously, a friend asked me what I wrote about, and my pithy response was “love, sad endings, and the idea of home”. While that has changed some (not as much as I would like), the basic idea that I don’t think much about happy endings has remained. I mean, at its most basic level, the greatest number of happy endings a person can get is one. There are many more opportunities for the sad ending, and some people, maybe a lot of people, never even get the one happy one.

The counter to this is that whether an ending is happy or sad depends on where you stop reading the story. I concede this argument and respectfully disagree.

So, if I’ve even been sort of negative when I was happy, what the fuck did I expect to happen when I wasn’t? And the answer is, I didn’t expect anything. I just sort of assumed that I would be happy, insofar as never considering the alternative is assuming. The problem there is obvious: we all know what assuming does.

So here I am, filled with regret for the first time I can remember, over decisions I’ve made and conversations I’ve had and job interviews I’ve blown, and I am literally at a loss as to how to get out of it. And, irony of ironies (if you’re into that sort of thing), I regret that most of all.

#reverb10: Wonder

This is a wonder with which I am familiar. from Natalie Dee

[This entry is the fourth for #reverb10, an online initiative to reflect on the year and manifest what's next. Today's prompt is to write about what I did to cultivate a sense of wonder in my life this year.]

Wonder is such a strange concept for me. I do not usually feel wonder in any sense that I think of the word; my idea of “wonder” is that sense you get when you are a child and you find out that something you did not know was possible is, in fact, possible.

I am amazed, I guess, by things like flying cars and new forms of life and Jupiter Jumps, but I don’t class those feelings as wonder.

Probably the closest I get to wonder is the feeling I get when I read or see something that makes me want to create. The feeling I get in those situations, whether it’s my 30th or 40th rereading of Gatsby or watching A Single Man for the first time and understanding all the little tricks that make it so heartbreaking, is dangerous, in its way. I get dreamy and distracted, thinking only about what I could be doing, how I should be better.

Given that this is, of course, me that we are talking about, this is oftentimes followed up by crushing depression brought on by the fact that I end up doing nothing with the lightning strike flash of inspiration. Many times, this is practical; if I’m two stops from getting off the train, starting would be nonsensical, and inevitably by the time I get through the door of my apartment and complete the process of settling down, the inspiration has passed.

Other times, it is less defensible. Indefensible, even. I will be at my apartment, sometimes even by myself or alone late at night (as I frequently am), and I will get that flash, but I will not follow the compulsion. I know I should, I really do; the laserlike focus that I am granted on these occasions is good for (writing-wise) a few pages that I will reread in the morning and actually enjoy. If I followed the flashes of wonder, I would write about pretty girls that smell of powder sitting in a swing strung under a tree in the fall when it’s really too cold to be outside, and she will break my heart again in exactly the same way when I read about her later as she did when I was making her.

I wish I felt wonder more often, in the childlike sense that I miss or the literary way I consider it, but I think I might have damaged my ability to feel it. Most of my teens and early 20s were spent doing everything I could to inure myself against getting hurt. I put up walls, withdrew, learned to use my charms not as aspects of my personality but as things I could deploy in the right situations, to defuse or disarm or, more literally, to charm. I thought for a long time that this would make me happy.

We think a lot of things when we are young and stupid that turn out to have absolutely no fucking bearing on reality. I have tried to open myself up more, to let go of trying to make everyone happy and protecting myself, to be the real me. The problem there is that in a lot of ways the me that I showed people was more likable than I really am, but then again, I was able to cull people who didn’t belong in my life, or maybe let them drop me, and gather friends who actually like me for me.

That is worth something, and has on occasion been wonderful. Even still, I am afraid as always to open myself up any more, to allow a sense of wonder to sneak past the cynical, knowing half-smile with which I usually greet new information. I fear getting hurt more than I am usually willing to admit.

What is it holding me back from?

You know, there is a really easy answer to this question, “what did I do to cultivate a sense of wonder?” I should have said I watched Double Rainbow, all the way.

Now THAT is wonder right there.

#reverb10: Writing

Wisdom on writing by someone who would know. from Paulo Izidoro’s Flickr

[This entry is the second for #reverb10, an online initiative to reflect on the year and manifest what's next. Today's prompt is to figure out what gets in the way of my writing and what I can do to eliminate it.]

To wonder what I do each day that does not contribute to my writing is to wonder what it is, in fact, that does contribute to my writing.

My problem is primarily that in my fiction writing (which is my favorite kind), my subject matter, or at least my themes, tend to be fairly narrow in scope. I write often about love, but hardly ever the happy, life-affirming kind. It is typically the kind that fucks you up but leaves you confident that next time it will be different.

I never get to the different, better next times. I have not written a happy ending in a long time; I am not one hundred percent sure that I would know how to do so if it the possibility even presented itself. That rarely happens, unfortunately; my characters tend to be doomed from the start.

As far as contributing to that writing goes, well, my job is not helping. I work as an office monkey for a small firm; I don’t even get to observe any clandestine interoffice romances, because my only coworkers are a man in his early 40s and his mother, who is nearing 70.

Any romance in that office would be awkward as fuck.

Additionally, in the much less abstract sense, I do not get many opportunities to actually write while I am working. It does happen sometimes, but I’m much more apt to be distracted by conversations with friends or the internet or a game of Spider Solitaire or even occasionally my work-related duties than I am to spend my free(ish) moments writing. It’s not useful or smart, but I feel like I can’t help myself sometimes.

Then there is my after work life, which is to say my real life. It is hardly conducive either to actually writing or to getting inspired for it. No matter how well or poorly any relationship in which I may be involved is going, one of my past ones is going to provide me better fodder for anything I choose to do for at least a couple of reasons. For one, I like to think (like Rob in High Fidelity) that I’ve just been through enough relationships now that I know better than to let myself get fucked up like that. For another, if I were to write about anything going on in my present life, I would most likely get in trouble in one way or another, and getting in (more) trouble is not my preferred method of functioning.

There’s also the greater problem of me just frequently completely failing to enjoy the process of writing. I’ve had a few good ideas, somewhat limited subject matter aside. Some of them have come to fruition, after a fashion. At least the writing portion of the story was finished. Unfortunately, in the cases of things that I have completed, the writing portion was only the first part of the story.

The form in which I have written the most in my technically adult years is screenplays. I am very visual by nature, but like Richie Tenenbaum, I failed to develop as a painter. Writing, however, is something that I like to humor myself that I am good at. The best combination of these things, I thought, would be to write screenplays. The real problem with writing screenplays, it turns out, is that they need to be turned into films to get the full effect. I’ve written two features and a slew of shorts, each with an eye toward filming myself. Unfortunately, for a whole host of reasons ranging from a source of money to buy a camera disappearing into thin air to an assistant director quitting on me out of nowhere, it has not happened yet. The reasons have been many and varied, and it has taken a toll on me, even if ultimately some perseverance would have pushed me through.

This has trickled down to all of my creative endeavors. There have been long stretches of time in my life where the mere idea of sitting down to create was paralyzingly depressing. Other times, it has just been that this video game I’m playing feels way more compelling.

Regardless of the “reason”, the thing that ultimately gets in the way of my writing the most is that I won’t make myself do it. Sometimes, it is really fun, the words just flow out and all you have to do is go back later and make sure you spelled everything correctly when your hands were dancing over the keys (or you were dragging your pen across the page, or whatever). Other times, it is like pulling teeth. From a charging rhinoceros.

Those times are less pleasant.

The fact is, part of the reason I am doing this exercise, and part of the reason I did NaNoWriMo, and part of the reason I did 30 Days of Music over the summer, is because I do much better when I have a compelling reason to write other than helping me get my own insane neuroses off my chest.

Are all neuroses insane by definition? I’ll have to check that out.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: the thing that most often gets in the way of my writing is my own idiot self. I can and should correct that. Starting…

Now!

#reverb10: One Word

An impending fail rather like I fear. More watery, really. from Shipment of Fail

[This entry is the first for #reverb10, an online initiative to reflect on the year and manifest what's next. Today's prompt is to encapsulate 2010 in one word, and tell what I hope will be the word that captures 2011.]

Impending.

Encapsulating 2010 in just one word is harder work than one would expect. It is not as simple (for me) as, say, choosing one event that occurred or remembering one action. It is more about what concept most applied over that time.

For almost all of 2010, I have had a sense, more prominent sometimes than others, that something terrible is going to happen.

I can imagine a whole host of things that might happen to make this come to pass, but the most likely would be something happening to my mother.

I have a contentious relationship with her, to the point where we have not spoken in over two years. She is very sick, in a medical and possibly a mental sense, but is unwilling to give up the vices that helped to make her and are mostly responsible for keeping her that way. She has alienated nearly everyone in her life with her actions, yet is unwilling to accept the blame where it belongs to her.

When the sense of impending dread struck me earlier this year, I was in the midst of a stretch where she called and left me rambling, highly charged voicemail messages. Sometimes sobbing, sometimes enraged, sometimes probably both, she said all manner of things to me, the spectrum from the sweetest motherly “you’ll always be my baby boy” to the spiteful, rueful “you are the reason I am like this.”

My initial reaction was not, as one would expect of most people, to feel bad for her, or to take what she said (good or bad) to heart. No, my reaction was cynical anger.

So when that sense of impending doom came over me, and I connected it logically to my mom, I was struck by another emotion, seemingly contradictory: relief. If something horrible did happen, then at least she would be able to rest.

Thus far, nothing has happened that would fulfill that sense of doom, either to her or to anyone else in my life. As such, the feeling has not gone away, merely ebbed and flowed with my moods. It has dominated much of my life in 2010, even though (as is my wont) I have not spoken about it much.

I am of two minds. On one hand, I hope that nothing does happen, that everyone stays safe. On the other, if something did occur and that sense was assuaged, I would be able to relax some, maybe sleep. I would like that.

For 2011, I hope to all that I can encapsulate it with the word “rest”. As previously mentioned, due at least in part to my primal certainty that something is going to go awry, I have developed a fairly impressive ability to stay awake until four or five in the morning regardless of how tired I am and how late I was up the night before, only to then, one random day, crash completely and sleep for 12 or 16 hours without the possibility of being roused.

It is, as they say, not the greatest thing in the world.

I want so much to be able to rest, to feel at ease. Instead, it’s getting worse over time; the current tendency to be up past five in the morning when I have to leave for work at eight evolved from lying awake in bed until two or three.

I’m not sure what my life will bring in 2011 just yet, although I am confident in change. I just hope that change is for the better, and allows me the relaxation that I selfishly believe I have earned.

The only thing in that regard is to let or make what will happen happen and accept the consequences.

Crash My Bicycle

This isn’t my bicycle, but it’s the same model. From Chuck’s Bikes

This is a story about my bicycle. It was built for me by Danny, the man behind the infamous karaoke show.

Danny bought a pretty sweet bike, an early ’80s Raleigh Grand Prix from the just after Raleigh was bought by Huffy, before the quality dropped off. It was too small for me, but I fell in love with it. I told him to find me one if he had the chance.

Three weeks later, he called and told me he had it in my size. You’d be surprised what Danny’s capable of.

In the first six rides I took with it, I had three accidents. Danny thus christened it “Trois Clangours”. Jerk.

I’ve had a LOT of trouble with this bike. The accidents, mechanical failures, all manner of trouble, adding up to it spending far more time out of commission than in use. Which is weak sauce, obviously.

Nevertheless, when it’s working, it’s my machine. We get along, it and me. I can feel it doing my bidding reflexively. I don’t worry that it’s going to do anything that I don’t want. It’s going to get me where I’m going, safely, as long as I don’t make a mistake.

Sometimes, though, I get in accidents that just aren’t my fault.

Like that raccoon? I couldn’t have slowed down. Even my slow-motion memory of the event barely gives me enough reaction time; no telling how long I actually had to react, but it wasn’t long.

Yes. That’s right. I hit a raccoon. In New York City.

For what it’s worth, I was riding on the loop in Prospect Park. There is actually something resembling woods in that area. I was riding home from work one night; it was around 7pm or thereabouts. It was October, dark, and chilly. I was wearing my blue-and-brown striped sweater. There was a guy riding ahead of me, about the same speed. He was two bike lengths ahead, and to my left. I heard him say, “Whoa!” and saw him dodge something. I caught site of the something, just had time to recognize it as a fast-moving raccoon and yell “Fuuuuuu–” as I tried to jerk my bike around it.

There just wasn’t enough time. I hit it square.

I went airborne. My front wheel was bent, destroyed, and my forward motion ceased instantly. My rear wheel went in the air, and I lost contact with my bike. While I was in the air, I had two thoughts. First was that I didn’t want to land on my head. Curiously, this had nothing to do with my own safety; I didn’t want to crash my helmet and have to buy a new one. That in mind, I judged my trajectory, put my arm out, and used it to absorb the majority of the fall and transition into a roll.

The second thought was “I hope I don’t break my phone.” [Spoiler alert: I didn't.] It probably says something about me that I thought nothing for my own personal safety, only that of my material goods. What it says is probably not good.

I rolled off my left arm, onto the shoulder, and up the other side. My momentum actually took me momentarily off the ground again. Here, the memory is blank. I know that I ended up crouched on my elbows and knees, hurting with a pain so pervasive and so powerful that I can still feel its phantom when I think about it. But I don’t know how I ended up that way. Did I land like that? Did I roll again and crawl up to it? I could not tell you. I wonder now if I did end up hitting my head at some point, causing me to black out for a fraction of a second.

It’s not important, I guess. I crouched there, first making sure that no part of me was searing white-hot with the pain of, say, a freshly broken bone or an open gash.

I looked at the raccoon, just in time to see him dash off into the trees, apparently uninjured.

I was a little bitter. It’s entirely possible that I remain that way. I mean, couldn’t he have at least been a little bit maimed? COME ON!

Then I looked at my bike.

It didn’t make me happy.

Things that were fucked: front wheel; handlebars; brake levers; stem. Things that were somehow spared: fork; saddle.

Now back to me. The guy who had initially dodged the little bastard was beside me. He asked if he needed to call an ambulance. I ran a piece-by-piece check and decided that I was unbroken, just bruised. He asked if “all parts are working.” A new bystander looked at my bike and said “No, man, his bike is fucked.”

I said those weren’t the important parts.

I was finally able to drag myself off the asphalt and get to my feet. I was a little woozy from a body full of aches, but I was only a mile or two from my house and didn’t have cash or desire to find a taxi. So I walked.

I called ahead and asked if maybe there could be some hot chocolate waiting for me when I got there.

There was. For that I am ever grateful.

And now my bike is called “Quatre Clangours”.

It’s the Modern Equivalent

Analog is for Lovers

To start, I have to prepare to be savaged by Afistaface, Andey DeLesDernier, because my mixtapes long ago ceased to be rendered on actual cassettes. She is the only person I know who is more of a purist than I am.

Mixtapes are a very important subject to me. I’ve been thinking about them for as long as I can remember, even though I was never quite the savant that some of my friends were when they were younger. In fact, I don’t think I ever made a proper mix until recordable CDs were on the scene; I made a few tapes to play in my car or give as gifts, but I didn’t really use them properly back in their heyday, and it’s definitely a case now where “mixtape” is more the preferred nomenclature than any representation of the physical product.

As I tend to do in my life, I have over time evolved a set of rather draconian rules about what a mixtape is for me. Of course, as with most of my self-imposed rules, they apply only to me; I think someone else using them might even defeat the purpose.

(This gets into a whole other issue of why I give myself strict limitations for work on which I have historically failed entirely to follow through. But I think that might be an entirely different subject.)

When I first started making mixes on CD, roundabout 2000 or so, I generally slopped songs on until I filled up the time, then arranged them in a pleasing order. My crowning achievement of this method was a mix I made for a girlfriend around then; clocking in at 79:59.80, I came as close to perfection as anyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, this was all undone by the fact that the version of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” that I’d put on the mix was incomplete by a couple of minutes; when I listened back over the CD and the song cut off in the middle, I learned a valuable lesson.

My insane rules for structuring mixes had their genesis not long after. I picked up Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity at work one day. I was vaguely interested because I’d heard the movie was good; in fact (shamefully), my copy of the book is the movie tie-in version. In the book, the narrator mentions a few rules that I adopted for myself; a couple years later, when I first started trying to codify my rules, I came back to that passage and realized that he’d not put in nearly as many as I’d remembered. Nevertheless, it was a critical moment for me.

I refined my rules over time, starting with “Never allow two songs by the same artist on a single mix”, still my number one most important rule. I became better at making mixes. I learned the pleasure of a well-sequenced mix from a tape that a friend brought over one night to listen to while playing video games. I picked up the need for context on a tape when I was pulled over for speeding while listening to a particularly high-energy tape after a rough night at work; I stopped listening to fast, angry music if I was already angry.

The next turning point for me came just a few years ago, with the release of Rob Sheffield‘s Love is a Mix Tape. It is, ostensibly, the story of his life with his late wife Renee, but one of their main methods of communication was the mixtape. Every chapter is headed by the track list of a mix that one or the other of them made, or someone made for them. They capture moments in time, documents from people who were in tune with the music of their lives.

I don’t make that kind of tape.

It was instructive to learn from the way they made their creations. At several points, Sheffield writes about the 20 or 30 songs that fit on a 90-minute cassette, which made me think of the early mixes I made on CD. What hit home, however, was a critique of precisely that medium: CDs are 80 minutes, but they’re uninterrupted. Tapes are 45 minutes per side, so each is, as a listening experience, 2 mixes (barring an automatic flip cassette player, of course).

This opened my eyes. Just because there were 80 minutes to fill on a CD didn’t, and doesn’t, mean that every one needs to be filled. I further restricted my own mixes. Initially, I was planning to cap length at an hour, but I changed my mind, instead deciding to put exactly 13 songs on every mix I made from then on. This has been so ever since.

I make many types of mix; if it’s all pop songs, 13 songs might come in at 40 minutes or so. Sometimes I’ll mix it up and make a 20-minute Godspeed You! Black Emperor track one of the 13; those tapes tend to run a little longer. But in addition to the restriction of how many songs there will be comes my ultimate, end-all be-all rule, that the transitions must work. I listen to my tapes slavishly, not least to avoid repeating the mistake I made with “Sweet Child O’ Mine” all those years ago, but mostly to assure that every track flows from one to the other, telling the story I want it to tell.

This is ultimately what mixtapes are to me: using other people’s words and music to tell my stories. And I like it that way.

I’m Just a Sucker With No Self Esteem

What I Hate, from Toothpaste for Dinner

Sometimes creativity is really hard.

In addition to writing thousands upon thousands of words that I can hardly imagine anyone cares about, I also dabble in design and have been trying with varying degrees of effort, but always the same degree of success (which is to say, failure), to shoot a movie.

I don’t know if this is something specific to people who fancy themselves writers, or if it applies generally to all creative folk, but I typically hate the things I make. I gave up a while ago on needing validation from others about the things that I make and do. Despite the fact that other people’s negative criticism is still bound to sting (and, for that matter, the positive criticism to inflate my sense of self-worth) and may affect what I do in the future, the fact is that if I’ve seen something to completion, I did it for me, and that can’t be changed.

(The problem is that in doing things for me, I can’t logically expect to ever be financially successful in any sort of creative endeavor. I’ve come to terms with that, and am willing to work a job that doesn’t bring me any joy if that’s what I must do. But I digress.)

Unfortunately, even in creating for an audience of me, I typically despise the end product. I can pick it apart forever, marking this sentence or that line or whatever down as flawed in my mind. Whether I can correct said flaw or not isn’t important; it is in fact entirely beside the point.

The point being, I guess, that I’m crazy.

I’ve never written anything longer form than a feature length screenplay, and even as we speak I’m working out how to fix the ones I’ve “finished” on their next rewrite. I actually got physically ill rereading the first one I wrote in advance of beginning to rewrite it. (To be fair, I think it might have been the combination of lack of sleep and overcaffeination that caused the nausea moreso than the script, but they’re still linked in my mind.)

I’ve designed a few websites beyond my own. Visiting them now, even the one that I finished most recently, I can’t help but see every amateurish mistake I made and where I’ll have to tweak the code.

George Lucas once said, “Movies are never finished, only abandoned.” In his case, maybe some of the movies should have been abandoned a little sooner, like before they started production, but the spirit of what he said is entirely accurate across all creative projects, at least from my perspective. I’ve never looked at anything I’ve done and thought, “Ah, perfect!” It just does not apply to me, I guess.

I had a conversation with a friend who’s offered to help me with an upcoming project about my tendency to self loathing when it comes to the things I’ve made. She does not appear to have this problem, and I did a bad job of explaining it to her; she took it to mean that I assumed everything I did would fail. To her credit, I did say the words “I’ve never not failed” in the course of the conversation, but what I meant to say and how the words sounded were quite different.

This is a problem I have a lot.

This conversation turned into a argument, and I got pretty substantially taken down. I had to concede in the end, because my argument such as it was had no basis in anything other than my head.

I don’t really know how to cope with this tendency; it’s entirely instinctual, and I can’t remember ever feeling any differently. Nevertheless, it surely can’t be helpful; even if I don’t have a negative attitude about what I’m doing as I’m doing it (and I sometimes do, which is a whole other issue), denigrating it after the fact isn’t going to win me any supporters, either.

There’s probably some deep seated psychological or emotional reason for the way I view my own work. Surely someone out there enjoys their own output, someone who sells themselves relentlessly and wants the spotlight enough to take it when necessary.

I’m not that kind of narcissist.

I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my attributes, that my self judgment is both fair and accurate. But maybe it’s not, at least not about everything. Maybe I am, in fact, underselling myself on the quality of my work. Although I’m unlikely to be convinced of that.

Still, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do the people like someone who’s humble to the point of self-abasement over someone who’s braggadocios to the point of obnoxiousness?

I’d like to think so.

If I Help Somebody, There’s Mercy for Me

Awesome homeless guy sign from holytaco.com

Pop quiz: what’s the difference between a homeless person panhandling for money and a hippie 20-something standing on the corner begging for some cause?

Answer: none.

Both wear dirty clothes, have unwashed hair, and can be too pushy. They’re both begging for money from someone they perceive as better off than they are, and if you tell them no, they’ll occasionally go above and beyond the call of duty to make you angry.

That said, I’d much rather give my money to a homeless person. They annoy me far less.

The “cause” kids can go die in a fire. The rules of (dis)engagement with them are the same as with the homeless, or anyone else for that matter: headphones in your ears, head down, don’t make eye contact, keep out of their path. However, the homeless don’t go out of their way to get your attention. For one, they are likely to be seated, beleaguered, next to a sign that can tell you, based on its level of desperation, how long the person has been homeless. If you don’t hear them, they don’t generally, for example, jump into your path and thrust out their cup.

They are also not asking for a $20 monthly payment. The homeless usually ask for change, which I admit amuses me given the relatively low value of American coin money, but add enough of it together and it still buys a sandwich or a bottle of booze or even a cheap place to spend the night. The cause kids want you to give up your bank information so they can run your “charitable donation” every month. Will I miss that $20 each month in the end? No, probably not. I’m not nearly that desperate. But it’s a lot more of a hardship for me than dropping a couple quarters or a dollar into a sad woman’s cup.

I am a filthy liberal, it’s true, and I have the attendant guilt about a lot of things. I’ll cop to my relative lack of charitability being one of those things. I wish I gave more, and I probably could if I crunched my expenses. But you know what else I cop to? The fact that after all my expenses, I have enough to keep myself amused, and not much more, and no amount of pressuring or cajoling is going to change that fact.

Ultimately, if it came down to a push and shove between the homeless and the cause kids, I’ll take the homeless for being generally more respectful and more openly crazy. If I tell them no, they move on. If I tell the cause kids no, they’ll do things like offer to walk me to the bank to check my balance.

You know what happens when you do something like that? You make me angry, and frustrate me, and turn me against you personally and all your peers.

I know what it’s like to have the actions of one affect the perception of all. As a cyclist, I know that pedestrians, drivers, and even other cyclists assume I’m an asshole with a serious disregard for traffic laws, safety, and in the worst case basic human decency. Am I an asshole? (Well… okay, fine.) But do I act with impunity and disdain towards the law and others? No. In fact, I do everything I can to encourage fellow feeling between cyclists and non-cyclists (especially the traffic cops, who could use all the support they can get).

That doesn’t really mean anything, though. Non-cyclists assume that I am their antagonist. Everyone on a bike is the same, for their intents and purposes. That means they occasionally lash out or cause trouble. That also means that I occasionally have to assume the posture of the asshole cyclist to defend myself. Do they recognize the difference? Of course not. So the cycle (no pun intended) repeats ad infinitum and I have to worry for my life every minute I’m on a city street.

That same principle is why I always assume the worst about the cause kids. If it just happened once in a while, okay, maybe they’re short of their quota and extra aggression is required. But over my time here, I’ve been on the receiving end of unwanted, forced attention from them too many times for my taste, so I assume they’re all going to do that, and act accordingly.

Is it possible that I’m wrong? Yes, it is. But I still get caught enough to make my actions justifiable, at least to myself.

The lesson here is that you’re not doing your cause any favors by being an asshole. If I can reasonably compare you unfavorably to panhandlers, I think it can safely be said that you are doin it rong.

I enjoy charity as much as the next guy. I understand the need for clean drinking water/malaria vaccines/money for gay rights. I support your positions. But when I tell you I don’t have the money, you should listen to me. Then, maybe next time, I will have it.

Just a thought.

The Cops Would Never Think to Look in Burma Shave

Straight Razor from the Art of Shaving

I’m really bad at shaving.

I started when I was around, I think, 13 or so. I never had anyone really teach me, but I’d seen enough shaving on TV to get the general gist of it.

Problem was, then as now, my need was kind of… shaky, at best.

You see, I have what we call The World’s Saddest Beard™. It’s a patchy, multicolored mess; if I ever let it grow out, it would be the most ironic beard of all time, especially the long strip under my chin where no hairs grow.

I blame my mixed heritage for my sad beard situation. I’m multicolored like crazy in the beard area because of my Pan-European roots; how the Irish, English, Scottish, Germans, and Spanish ever ended up all mixed in, I could never tell you. As for the pathetic patchiness, well, I’ve got a lot of Cherokee blood, as you can tell from my skin tone. (Native Americans are pale and freckled, right?) The explanation is simple enough: you’ve never seen a photo of a warrior chief with a headdress and a beard, have you? They just don’t really, you know, do beards. So neither do I.

My brother, who shares my sad beard situation, does not share my sense of self-respect, nor my sense of shame. He has repeated gone long periods of time without shaving, growing a “beard” that almost passed for human on a couple of occasions. However, the first and only time I saw him in person with said beard, I told him that I will punch him in the face if it ever happens again. And I mean it.

So far, so good.

(For the record, he promised to break my nose if I ever dunk him under the water while we’re swimming again. I believe him. So, if I come home from the pool or the beach with a broken nose? I probably earned it.)

So: my beard is really sad. Like, hilariously sad. So I go clean shaven. It would follow, since I’ve been doing it my whole life, that I’d have gotten good.

But as I said: nope.

I frequently rake the blade across my skin, leaving small pockets of blood spreading across my chin. I’ll miss spots, places that I should be able to shave by reflex by now, simply because I forgot to contort my face some way or other when passing the blade over the hair.

I’ve improved my methods over the years, going to using whatever was available to buying my own, better blades and shave gel, to realizing the shave gel was murdering my skin, to realizing that I got better results if I used a sharp blade rather than conserving the spent ones as long as I could in the interest of saving money.

It’s never been pleasant for me. I’ve frequently gone a week or more without shaving, right to the point where I start to look like maybe you should keep your kids away from me. Once, I was at work and made a joke to another coworker about our relative scruffiness.

“Sure, but I haven’t shaved in three days,” he said. “You just didn’t shave this morning.”

It had been over two weeks.

That’s my situation. I have, at this point, graduated to a sharp blade, a layer of baby oil (recommended by a friend of mine who shaves his head every day), and a lather applied with a fake badger brush. It’s without a doubt the most effective shaving method I’ve used, as well as the most work intensive and time consuming. It’s a process for me, and one that I don’t necessarily enjoy.

Still, I want to go further. I’ve explored the Art of Shaving, and would like to learn it. I want to shave with a rich lather from a real brush, soothing pre and post shave oils over a sink full of steaming hot water. I want the closest shave imaginable.

I want to shave with a straight razor.

I would not shock me if those nearest and dearest to me would rather I never took that step. As mentioned above, I frequently draw blood with blades that are ostensibly safe. I can’t imagine anyone wants to clean up the saddest accidental suicide of all time, then have to arrange the funeral and queue up that Queen song.

The worst part? This would be my eulogy: “I don’t know why he was shaving; he could barely grow a beard.”

New York, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down

Photo via zoee.tumblr.com

Today marks the seventh anniversary of my move to New York.

Over those seven years, I’ve become an entirely different person, while also staying very much the same. If I had to ponder it, I would say that I’ve grown and matured much in the way one would have expected me to do.

I’m smarter now, more worldly, more experienced. I’m a little fatter, and much more heavily tattooed. But I’m still fundamentally the same person I was when I moved here.

I had a friend who was born in NYC tell me that you needed to live here a decade before you were really a New Yorker, and I used that as my guiding beacon for a while. I don’t know how accurate it is, and part of that is defining what being a New Yorker is all about.

For example, I came here to go to school, but dropped out. I’ve been paying my own rent from the first day I came; I never lived in a dorm, instead sharing a studio on the Upper East Side with my then-fiance. I don’t have the college experience that a lot of my friends do. Does that make my “New Yorker-ness” more authentic, or less? I didn’t have the relative safety net of not having to pay rent, but they learned and experienced the city in a way that I think is probably more important than my version.

It’s hard to tell sometimes.

According to an unscientific count off the top of my head, about 80% to 90% of the people I know are not “from” NYC, at least not in the sense of having been born and raised here. I’m sure that percentage can’t possibly hold up over the entire population; there just aren’t that many expatriate New Yorkers. Still I’d be willing to bet that the only other American city with as many migrant newcomers is Los Angeles.

When you think about it the way I do, it stands to reason that so many people here would be outsiders. Many of the people I know went to college here. Most of them are young (well, mid 20s or so), urbane, hip, from suburbs or smaller cities, frequently Midwestern. We all have two things in common. One, we thought we could make it here, and we were right. Two, and more importantly, we are all dreamers. New York seems like a good place to go when you want to fulfill your dreams.

So, all of these people, some of them here since they got out of high school. Office workers, artists, teachers, actors, writers, waiters, whatever. We all decided to stay. Even if we are not, by my native friend’s estimation, technically New Yorkers yet, we are certainly part of the fabric of this city. We are part of New York.

(The important part, he says pridefully.)

There is a common perception that New Yorkers are rude. I have never really noticed that as an epidemic problem; there is a certain number among any population that will be predisposed to rudeness, or alternately self-absorbed to a point where they come across as rude. It stands to reason that when you put more people, living more densely, you will encounter the rudeness at a relatively higher rate.

Even with that in mind, though… The born-and-raised New Yorkers I count among my friends are the least rude people I know. They may not exactly be patient with idiocy or ignorance, won’t suffer fools well, but that’s hardly rudeness, just practicality. They are gracious, they are friendly, they have always been willing to help when their friends were at their most down. These aren’t the rude New Yorkers I heard about.

So what about the transplants? All these Midwesterners, from the flyover country, known and occasionally mocked for their unfailing politeness, are they the rude people? No, not even. We may have picked up an edge of cynicism from living in the city. We may (I may) (I DO) fucking hate when a group of people walk slowly down the sidewalk, taking up all available space. But we’re still going to smile at people occasionally, even if it garners unwanted attention. We’re still holding doors open. We still wait our turn when getting on and off the subway. We’re not rude.

So who is it, then?

The tourists.

A representative anecdote: your average beautiful New York City office girl, heading from the subway to her job near Herald Square, says “Excuse me” to a person stopped on the sidewalk, staring up at the Empire State Building, and steps around him. Oblivious, he steps back, bumps into her.

“Excuse me, bitch!” he spits.

“I said ‘excuse me.’ You bumped into me.”

“Whatever, bitch.”

The office girl affixes him with an icy stare, the one that beautiful women are granted when they are first left to fend for themselves in this city.

“You’re not from here, are you?”

Taken aback, the exposed tourist steps aside.

Will he likely tell that story as one of a rude New Yorker? Absolutely. He will perpetuate the stereotype to his friends, and it will become canonized. The cycle continues. Yet it’s hard to see how he was not the perpetrator of the rudeness.

And so it goes. Most tourists, the ones talking about how rude New Yorkers are, spend their time in the gaudiest, least “New York” areas of the city. In these places, they are largely surrounded by others like them; the actual New Yorkers with whom they interact are generally going to be extremely harried service people at this restaurant or that store.

The people on the street, the ones being rude, making them think New Yorkers are rude?

Tourists.

I may not have been here for a decade, but I’m New Yorker enough to scoff at that.

If I make it three more years I won’t even have to qualify it.