The Engine Driver

I year or two ago I was rummaging through the things left in my old room when I found my sixth grade journal.

Sixth grade was a lot like the rest of my elementary school experience. I was pretty much an outcast, with a group of friends that treated me terribly and a substantial number of socially inhibiting habits that I'm embarassed about to this day. There's only one person I'm still friends with from before my epic summer before ninth grade shift - where I took a summer, sat down, and made a literal list of every negative aspect of myself that I could find and tried to systematically rid them from my system, improving and reinventing myself into someone likable. I got rid of a social circle that did nothing but drag me down and became friends with a group of incredible people that I still consider some of my closest family. I went from being the unabashed loser so one of the most social people I know, a lynchpin of several circles.

But if you ever wonder why despite all that, I'm still constantly trying to prove myself to each and every one of you it's because i'm terrified that you'll see or remember the terribly lonely little boy who had a teacher put tape over his mouth in the third grade because he chewed his shirt, and had his desk moved from facing Rebecca Fox because it disgusted her so.

So it's impressive that I've stayed such good friends with Elan, who I met in sixth grade, sitting next to each other in Ms. Fechter's english class. I had a HUGE crush on her, and thinking about it now she's probably the genesis of my steadfast attraction to girls with red hair. In that class Elan, Jessie Fox, and I would sit next to each other - and on the days she decided to eat with the girls, and he ate with the other guys, I would have lunch with Ms. Fechter.

And every day we would write a journal entry, and kind of amusingly since I'm writing all this in a blog, I hated writing journal entries. We either had to write about the topic of the day, or have a fictional story. I don't know what I wanted to write about, but it wasn't either of those. So I found a way around it - I wrote a fictional journal of a different kid, every day from his perspective. Technically it was a fiction story, but serialised in the form of a diary. It was my first time writing character.

I read the journal again when I found it, and this is what I wrote about - a kid with two friends, his best friend and the girl he has a huge crush on. Over the course of the story his friend gets into trouble with drugs, and "Harry" helps his friend with his addiction while the girl he likes falls for his friend. In the end he steps out of the way, bittersweetly happy that they can be together, but sad she doesn't like him instead, helping to engineer them living happy ever after.

I wrote that in 6th grade. How screwed up is that?

Cause I've spent years of my life living some variation of that story over and over. I wrote the story of my life years before I lived it. And reading it, years later, after high school - after tina, after laura, after the ranch, all of that - it hit me hard.
In acting class last year our teacher said "everyone thinks they're the star of their own story." Before I could think about it I said "what if you think you're the supporting character?"
Someone whispered that was the most depressing thing they'd ever heard. But it turns out I'd been thinking that for years. Maybe I see something honorable in sacrifice. Or maybe I've never felt like I deserve it.

So I believe in the power of writing - it's power to change the lives of the people who read it, and it's power to guide the life of the person writing.

There's a line in Woody Allen's Annie Hall - a film Elan reccomended to me of course, where Woody writes his play within a film with a happy ending, the ending he wanted. He says - "What do you want? It was my first play. You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art, because it's real difficult in life?"
Amen.

I've started writing a new story - it's not perfect, and there's still a lot of selflessness and sacrifice because they ARE honorable, and it won't ever be easy, but this time the guy gets the girl.

Cause fuck y'all, I'm a star.

Holiday Cheer

Ticketmaster Fail

Talking smack about how terrible Ticketmaster is feels like shooting fish in a barrel, but as I'm standing next to this barrel with a loaded weapon, here goes.

There's nothing on the face of it wrong with either high service charges or just hiding charges in tickets, but a few details revealed when I buy tickets from ticketmaster drive me nuts.

Facilities Charges - Okay, let's break down what the money for a ticket to a performance goes to. The performer gets some money, certainly. Also, ticketmaster gets their cut either on the ticket or in their ridiculous add on charges. Then the rest goes to the venue. This is fine, it's how capitalism works, I give them money and they use it to pay their staff and buy supplies/food/booze/equipment/etc and pay rent and taxes. So why do they get to charge an extra buck as a facilities charge. Shouldn't that be part of the money going to the damn venue. That is the facilities charge already. Maybe I should just pay a subset of the money directly to a band and they could play in the street.

PDF Printing Charge - Ticketmaster does not charge you to mail the ticket, but does charge you to pick it up at will call or most bafflingly, for you to print it yourself. This is like a phone company charging for every text message. Oh wait they do. Well okay, it's like a company charging you to send email. The tickets are in an automated pdf. They already exist. Mission tix doesn't charge me anything to print my tickets, so you can't claim that it's some intellectual BS. Instead ticketmaster charged me a few bucks to do their job for you. And yet getting tickets in the mail, which costs ticketmaster money the envelope, ticket paper, ink and the postage, is free. Oy!

There and Back Again: A Journey of the Heart

I am repeatedly awestruck by the writing on our humble blog. What beautifully woven stories. Jason, your travel camp musings bring me back to the years I spent riding bikes to nowhere, getting half an hour of "nintendo time" at my buddy's house, and eating McDonald's for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and a sensible dinner (McDonald's again). David, your tale of love lost (hopefully not forever, my friend) reminds me of just how much we humans suffer in our search for understanding and companionship.

Thanks to writing of this caliber I have had a rather striking revelation about myself: I ache for the ability to synthesize the events of my own life as well as those of my Gentlemanly counterparts. I am a natural debater that could wax philosophic for hours on any given topic. I rant at will, and sometimes against it. But when it comes to matters of the heart I find myself awkward, tongue-tied, or outright speechless. This fact has always been a matter of great distress to me (and certainly distressing to anyone who has been close enough to me for it to matter).

I tell myself I am an open book and to a certain extent it rings true. I'm the kind of guy that will freely share the most significant and emotionally intense events of my life with people I barely know, if they ask. But nowhere in my coping process do I believe I actually delve into the core emotions involved. Instead, what I do in emotionally charged scenarios is review facts and apply (cold?) logic to determine potential changes in my operating assumptions.

This has not turned out to be an entirely negative thing, far from it. I am proud of my ability to look past "the me" of the situation to see how my problems are just like everyone else's, only different. This has helped to keep me (relatively) humble, to care for others, and to truly empathize with people and populations that are often far outside of my daily perspective. It has also helped me to develop an outward personality that is (almost) unflappably positive. My problems suck, but all told I've got it great!

However, without the ability to put painful feelings into words, even in my own head, I generally end up just reinvesting them deeper into a realm of silent heartache or self-consuming anxiety. Ever held a guitar up to an amplifier and plucked a chord? It can sound awesome when it's a good note and you know how to control the reverb, but at its worst it turns into a shrieking banshee that creates an overwhelming urge to flee the immediate area... same deal here, but all in my head/heart.

This is a bridge I know I must cross, from logical mind to emotional heart and back again. If I cannot develop my feelings into thoughts expressable to myself and others I may never (again) be able to open up in a way that allows me to develop and enjoy a truly intimate relationship. So I think the most significant asset I hope to gain, and give, from being a Gentleman is a more open and honest understanding of myself, even if that means offering that understanding up to the interpretation of teh intarwebz.

So this is me stepping off the edge, hoping Dr. Jones Sr.'s diary was right about the invisible bridge.

I genuinely fear the alternative.

Why I Don't Play Risk

In elementary school I went to a travel camp at the JCC (I swear it feels like my entire life has been somehow or another been tied to that place and it needs to end) where we would go on a different trip every day. There was a group of five of us that became pretty close and had our own sort of 'travel camp clique' which I have to assume in retrospect was about as lame as it sounds. But we had a lot of fun together, so one night we decided to have a sleepover - the five guys. A precursor to a bevy of 'man nights' i'm sure we'd all go on to have later.

I can't even remember a few of their names, and memories of other old camp friends long since gone by the wayside are sort of flitting through as I try, but I do remember that night very well because it began the end of any relationship I would ever have with Risk: A Game of World Domination.

For some reason there was a weird obsession with eating pickles that night, and I remrember being really disgusted with the amount of fart jokes made over the course of the evening (so really, my sensibilities haven't changed a bit since I was 15), but it all fell apart when we decided to play Risk. Now I'm no Risk expert, but I know there are supposed to be two sets of die - one are red, one are your regular old white dice. I think you have three dice to attack and two to defend, and one color is more associated with attacking and the other not.

Well, whatever you're supposed to have, we had the opposite. Instead of having three white and two red or whatever, we had the other way around.
Who cares, right? Use the right number with the right action and play the game, who cares about the color?

Joel did.
Oh boy, did Joel care.

Joel was a smaller kid who up until that point I really liked. We got along great.
But he FLIPPED OUT over the dice. He demanded that we could ONLY play with three red dice, because you HAD to have three red dice. When we said we'd really rather just play the game, dice color be damned, he started crying. Literally. And screaming. He said we were breaking all the rules, and he wouldn't play, and that we were all mean, and called his mom to come pick him up at 1 am over the damn dice.

Even then I knew that was utterly lame.

That was the end of the clique, and travel camp kinda sucked that last week.
Risk and I took a little break, but I was back soon enough.

Until New Mexico.

When I first got to the Ranch, I was put in the 4 man room, appropriately named cause it had two sets of bunk beds for four guys. It was certainly the least personal, least private, and generally most unpleasant room in the house to be in. But - you always had company, and some nights we decided to be real rebels and stay up after curfew to play board games. I am a trouble maker, let me tell you.
(also, there is really nothing more emasculating than being 17 with an enforced 'lights out' bedtime - until three twenty something girls come in one night to read you a 'bedtime poem')

So at one point the room was made up of me, RJ, Mikey, and Birdman.

Birdman was there by court order awaiting either trial or sentencing for a drive-by shooting. He was this ultimate Eminem wannabe with a bleached blonde fader haircut, an ever present sidecocked bright red baseball cap, and he used to shave slits into the side of both eyebrows to look like an absolute moron. He tried epicly hard to BE hard, and I guess he did end up there by court order, but this guy was all talk - trying to talk about how he 'killed niggaz' and how 'I ain't gotta lie, I quit school cause of recess.' What I do know is that being at the ranch was a test and if he did well it would reflect on his sentence, so he had a real shot to try and avoid jail and totally failed time after time by being a cocky little bastard who broke every rule and got caught every time. I know he did eventually end up in jail, on top of his whole time spent on the Ranch, so what a real waste.

RJ was a recovering meth addict and dealer, and he was the real thing. RJ's dad was a drug lord in Arizona who actually threatened to disown RJ after he decided to go to rehab. The only reason RJ went in the first place was because he got his then girlfriend pregnant and decided he couldn't raise a child as a meth-addict. He checked into a Wilderness Program and while he was there found out his girlfriend had miscarried. Realizing that if he went home he'd end up exactly where he was before, he checked himself into the ranch instead. About a week into my being on the ranch he had his first meth relapse when the Phase 2 kids brought some on the Ranch. One of my first memories of being there is watching him come down, crying and sweating in his bed, literally sobbing and telling me he was so sorry, apologising to me personally, someone he'd barely known for a week just because he knew I was straight edge, and because I was there.

Last but not least was Mikey. It was never confirmed, but a bunch of us still think to this day that Mikey was a highly functioning autistic. He was older than the rest of us by a few years, and would wear tight old jeans and ragged flannel everywhere. He rarely bathed or washed, and the staff had to coerce Mikey to shower after one particularly long period of sustained filth. He refused to do chores and would famously stare down dishes as though the were some old enemy he could command to wash themselves through sheer mental energy. His emotions were almost always muted and he avoided eye contact. He had been in Phase 1 an incredibly long time by the time I got there, and I think it's because they had no idea how to handle someone with an actual mental disability. He never should have been there in the first place. I can say that about a few people.

Mikey also had an impressive addiction to computers and computer games. He would routinely sneak out at night and break into the computer lab, staying up all night. One night it was snowing pretty hard, and he left tracks out on the ground. They found him in the lab on four computers simultaneously - playing different games on three, and watching porn on the 4th - earning him the name "The Midnight Prowler."

Mikey was a genius when it came to games of skill, strategy, and numbers and ALWAYS won. Without fail. It was a source of personal pride for him, and I'm not sure he had a lot else to hold on to, so he could get REALLY arrogant - and it got on some nerves.
So one night the four of us are playing Risk and RJ and Birdman decide their sick of Mikey's smug superiority and start cheating with abandon, denying it every step of the way. I'm happy not to be laying in my bed staring at the ceiling at 10:30 so I don't care, but Mikey is getting pissed. Especially when they start to win.

They're laughing and having a ball, while Mikey starts to shut down. Finally, they take him out entirely - they're laughing, and ragging on him. Mikey still has the dice in his hand. He's staring at the board, like he does with the dishes - just staring this blank, distant, terrifying stare that he has, saying nothing. Then, without any warning, he throws the dice as hard as he can at the board, knocking everyhthing over and starts screaming as he takes the board apart. I've never seen Mikey express more than disdain, frustration, or bemusement before but he has gone off, calling them liars, and cheaters, and convicts and worse.

Well that done pisses RJ off so the next thing I know he's in Mikey's face ready to fight, threatening to kill him, begging Mikey to hit him. Mikey is still screaming, Birdman and I get in the middle - I take Mikey, he takes RJ. The GIGANTIC bald security guy shows up to calm everyone down, Mikey is back to staring blankly at a wall while RJ yells "Fucker" over and over again, coming up with about 32 different words for retard.

Suffice it to say, after hours board game nights were a thing of the past.

I didn't mind. I'm never playing Risk again.

"A New and Refreshingly Different Experience"

Change. The theme of this year's Presidential Election. The agent at the center of all peril and progress. The story of my life.

So lucky day for me this past November 4th when me and 300 million of my closest friends scored a young, hip, populist president that fits two fundamental criteria I didn't realize I had for a president until Barack Obama exhibited them so effectively throughout his campaign:

1) The foresight to treat our challenges as opportunities.
2) Placing science AND the will of the people at the center of policy-making decisions without oppressing minority populations (race, tax bracket, choice of creative or religious expression, etc).

Before I start sounding like an Obama fanboy, allow me to mention a couple of early Obama moves I'm none-too-thrilled about. I'm not impressed with his choice of Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General. Feels too much like reality tv for me. Couldn't we get someone with more credentials than notoriety? And I'm not impressed with his one sentence answer regarding cannabis legalization given it was the highest rated question on the change.gov site, which he opened explicitly to get valuable feedback from the people. It was especially shady that they reordered the top 5 list when they sent out the responses. For some reason the question voted #1 was listed #4 and shafted in the "legitimate answer" department. But I understand how the political game works, and from what I've gathered of the man, I fully expect Obama to give us the opportunity to EARN the policy changes we the people truly want to see. Not only that, I expect him to do it without having to stick his neck out far enough for the status quo to chop his head off.

My theory is that Barack Obama's most potent weapon is the ability to understand and manipulate the variables at play to reach a reasonable outcome for most of those affected.

[tangent alert!]

Understanding the variables at play in any given situation creates a marked advantage towards monopolizing available resources. Up until very recently, those "in power," to me meaning those with monetary, celebrity, or political influence, have had near exclusive access to most of the variables which determine resource distribution. Don't get me wrong, I am not here to place blame. Society has always lived and died on "bread and circuses." What we the people need to realize is that thanks to the wonders of modern technology we don't need the middleman anymore.

With the ability to share knowledge globally in real time comes a better informed, better educated, and better trained populace. For the first time in recorded history the human species has a means for a fair and democratic distribution of responsibility and reward. With a more evenly distributed level of control over resources, we can stop handing our resources over to the corporations and governments that are then charged with the task of designing, building, and packaging our destiny for us just to sell it back to us on a sliding scale. (Now 25% more sensation of being victimized, free!)

To give an example of a resource that has been denied us, I give you the sham that is network and cable television. A few relatively enlightening channels and programs notwithstanding, I am pretty ashamed of what gets sold to us over "the people's airwaves." Just google "worst reality shows" and you'll see what I mean. Of course that is just the tip of the iceberg. People actually have to turn that crap on for it to infect them. Dont' get me started on my dad's Maury Povich addiction.

But what about those who try to get informed? 24-hour news networks suck and I think most people know it. I thank Jon Stewart for every montage he's every put together showing just how vacuous and/or misleading cable news tends to be. The fact that most news outlets and television stations are owned by major corporations that are busy selling us everything else we don't necessarily need is one of the most disconcerting aspects of our consumer culture. It's up to us to seek and provide better information to each other.

[/tangent]

So it's officially 7 days before we trade G Dub for Obama and honestly I couldn't be happier. There is simply no way the next four years will see worse leadership than the last four years, and I am comfortable with the man the country chose to lead. How does everyone nerdy enough to like this blog (or unfortunate enough to "stumble upon" [tm] it) feel about how close we got, in TWO THOUSAND FUCKING EIGHT, to electing a president that needs his wife to help him send an email?! (link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/11/mccain-admits-he-doesnt-k_n_106478.html).

But no, we got change. We got Obama. We got the almost polar opposite of John McCain and the hopefully now defunct era of neoconservative republicanism. This was not just a partisan affair, however. I don't even consider myself a democrat. As the youngest contender in the race I strongly feel Obama was the only contender on the right side of a socio-technologic-philosophic(al) generation gap. From his choice of Nobel Laureate and green technology genius Steven Chu to his innovative outreach efforts with Change.gov and Change.org (shady dodging of the legalization question notwithstanding), Barack Obama has so far done much to prove to me that he is truly going about things differently.

I'll give the skeptics their due and (mostly) agree that for now it's all rhetoric. But I just can't help but find myself a few steps beyond cautious optimism. What a new and refreshingly different experience.

High Status or "I Promise You-This is Affecting Me More"

You don't have to donate time. You don't have to donate energy. You don't even have to donate your efforts. You can just donate your Facebook status. It's the new trendy way to show people you care about something, you know, when you don't care enough to actually do anything real about it. You just care enough to donate your Facebook status.

This isn't always a bad thing-I thought people donating their statuses on election day to remind people to vote was cool. But I gotta say, I'm pretty appalled by the newest trend-donating your status to show people just how much carnage and destruction your side has suffered in the recent Gaza bombings. So if you support Israel, your status might say something like, "12 Hamas rockets & 5 mortars hit Israel so far today. 1 rocket hit an educational institute." Or if you support Palestine and Hamas, it might say something like "In 17 days 919 Palestinians killed by Israel including 284 children & 100 women, 4260 injured."

I have to say, I think Facebook has really found a new way to trivialize the Israeli/Palestinian conflict like never before. What these status updates do is turn what's going on in Gaza from an extremely complicated foreign dispute to a plain old competition. They might as well say, "My side has suffered the most. We win!" or "My side had so many people die today-I'm prepared for your pity." Give me a break.

This type of crap drives me nuts. It's not a race, it's not a sporting event, it's people's lives. It trivializes it. There's just no other word for it. You really want to show people how much you care about it? Find someone who supports the other side and talk to them. Or just remind them how many rockets they shot at you in the past week. That'll probably breed a ton of understanding and unity.