A Tribute to American Football...

Cheerleaders.

I hung around work until about 730 last night to avoid the after-work swell at the gym. It's not that I don't enjoy scoping out the eclectic and unpretentious, mostly middle aged midtown NYSC scene, I do. For sure. But I'd rather the sprint in the locker room not be the quickest thing I do in the 52 minutes I spend checking off a workout on my (non-existent) calendar o'will power(lessness). Predictably, when I got there, I had my pick of all the choicest corners (in the locker room) and there was hardly a machine in motion that wasn't next to two lifeless ones. Wiiiiide berths, empty locker room, well played, Case, well played.

Fast forward through a falling out with a treadmill, a blossoming romance with an elliptical, and an awkward embrace with an exercise ball, and I'm heading back to that aforementioned, empty-save-the-chatty-cleaning-lady locker room. But what is this? In the studio tucked in the back of the basement, by the free weights and the cycling room (really? a whole room for that?) there's an explosion. Color, chanting, stomping, flashes of silver... at almost 9pm? I look closer and find a shortage of shirts and an overwhelming ratio of booty shorts to booties in the air and then BAM - circling, chanting, what are those? what are THOSE? POM POMS?!?!

I've been caught staring at the fray right about now so I head back to the locker room to shower. It dawns on me IN THE ACTUAL SHOWER... They were circling up. They were chanting. They had their pom poms in the air, their kicks around their necks and their eyes closed as they strained to out-screech each other -- they were ENDING their 'SESSION'! (oh no, I will never refer to that as practice.)

Fuck.

Then it starts. As I'm turning off the water of my shower I hear the first of the pom poms ruffle into the locker room. The walk back to my corner would not go as I planned - and I definitely didn't plan for this. I planned on skirting around the cleaning lady in boxer briefs. I did not plan on bobbing and weaving through fifteen to twenty JETS cheerleaders all hopped up on team spirit and forced enthusiasm just to slip into a corner where I would stick clothes to my body in what I would HOPE to be the right order just to slink out of the joint like a shoplifter lifting imagery.

Long story short... three things.

1) The Jets are colluding with Hooters to keep the tan stockings + white sneakers + booty shorts combo in fashion. (And I'm pretty sure they're both getting underpaid, can NO ONE afford a shirt these days??)

2) Yes, it's true. Cheerleaders squeal when they shower. Irrefutable evidence. They squeal and they laugh and they skip around locker rooms in nothing but a bottom towel. I'll die happier knowing this.

3) So there I was with the entire Jet's backup cheerleading squad (backup because I overheard them talking about 'making it to the big leagues' and, also, I'm sure the varsity squad trains at Equinox), bobbing and weaving through the gaiety, and as I reached to collect my double D's around an especially tight turn, it hit me...

They aren't called the B-squad fer nuthin'.

...

There are other dreams, lad, there are other dreams... *sniff.

Rosemary colored glasses...

I’m writing this blog on a Friday on a power point slide to avoid detection. I’m not sure how well this will work considering my project manager loves to walk over and exclaim, before he’s even SEEN my screen, “Look at all those words!! The words!! They’re Invading!!” He has figured out, and I'm sure he's not the first, that I’m a big fan of them.

Lately, I’ve become an even bigger fan of words. I crave them. Simple words. Clarifying words. Words that make the world seem a little brighter, a little easier, a little more clear. I love when they pop up on my screen and tell me things I need to see...

Speaking of pop-ups. My ex texted me yesterday. We haven’t spoken in years but eating rosemary pine nut ice cream managed to draw enough nostalgia out of her to prompt a text telling me exactly that. “My heaven is your hell.” After three years. She’s still thinking about all the ways she can hurt me.

At first I couldn't believe her. I’m not invincible. I can’t field a text about ice cream while the bigger picture looms above it all. Is she engaged yet? Is she getting married? Does she love him because he’s not me? Does she want to be married? And then it hit me. Do I really care what she has to say about all this? Years ago, these questions would hang in the air like freshly washed sheets, obscuring everything visual and audible by their opaque flapping, driving me INSANE.

We used to fight. Debate, really. I would debate. She would cry. I didn’t understand how to fight without words. I didn’t understand that sometimes you had to forget about those pesky little things before you could solve anything. At the end of the day she was never motivated by an intention to hurt me. How you avoid hurting a massively insecure, newly graduated (read: drifting), jealous butch lesbian dating someone they know they don’t know how to keep is BEYOND me. I was going to fail. That was the first most difficult relationship of my life. Characterized, as I’ve learned is typical, by questions that evade answers.

PREAMBLE: I don’t know how to keep you. But I know I want you. And it’s hard. I’m tired. You know so much yet you struggle with the things that you don't need to say.

Silence.

INQUISITION: What makes your chest hurt? What makes you cry? What makes you happy?

Silence.

FOLLOW-UP: You make my chest hurt. You make me cry. You make me happy.

Silence.

*insert quitting jobs, moving, getting a 'divorce' here*

Three years, hardly a word between us, and she's still amused by the things I hate. Pretty amazing how indelible the stamp on the soul between human beings. And if you've ever wondered how things end smoothly between lesbians, that's basically a verbatim, distilled, sterile, calm, a-theatric, painless, micro-account of the actual 4 months it took to break up. So multiply that by a billion and add 400 pounds of explosives and you've got the end of my relationship with rosemary ice cream. (thank. GOD.) Maybe I really am invincible?

Seething Syntax

A response to the overly composed culture of corporate America and strategy consulting:

Language should accessible, words should be informative (and on the occasion, audibly descriptive), sentences shouldn't have to be complete and sometimes, yes, verbs are for pansies.

Come to think of it, all my favorite words are multi-taskers. They beg for hyphens, they crave modification, they toss nouns around the room in a fit of ani-verb-osity. In fact, all my favorite words are short. Oft they sport a lone set of sound, beg through teeth, and leave apt ort as they birl a tongue in the mouth of a fraud. Or was that just my short-on-time, dense-in-density attempt to construct a single-syllabic sentence? The word of the day (AWAD) has never been so timely in their thematic selections...

Without further ado, I impore you to think about the words that you love - the words that you love to use... They aren't fancy. They aren't ethereal. They aren't 'birl' and 'ort' - they're definite. They define 'things' in a very real, very concrete way. Because, and here's the pithy bit at the end of the drivel - we all just want to be understood. Things are things. And nothing more. So eff those effers who effed up the effing corporate lexicon for the rest of us. Take your ort and birl it. We can all shift-F7. Some of us just chose to do so ironically. While blogging.

Riddle O' the DAY

You're standing in a field. Behind you is a group of 17 people with 3200 aluminum cans (stacked) and 458 dogs. There's a man pointing NNW and 104 degrees skyward. 3,183 people are looking at what the man is pointing at. 3,182 of them are gay. A child is turning in circles. 358 people are stoned, 2,722 are drunk, 102 are reflecting on the joys of sobriety. Within 17 minutes and 43 seconds, 3 girls you've previously dated walk within 0.0052 furlongs of you. Your younger sister is wearing a slippery pink jacket. Your high school lax coach now has 2 children and an iPhone. Your yoga instructor's male friend inquires after your very first silicone purchase. 2,493 people are talking. You can't hear any of them. You are insanely happy but nostalgic at the same time. You're missing 17 things. Your childhood. A white taurus. 3 other family members...

1,385 txts hit 1,385 phones in 97 minutes. Your phone buzzes in your front right pocket. You only miss 16 things now.

This is (circle three words):

1) A closing-the-bar, irish brogue'd, semi-sober recounting of my life from the perspective of a 1937, late adopter, flapper turned porn star wearing magenta, fuschia, indigo and neon because WHAT THE FUCK do those words MEAN!?

2) Meatloaf.

3) The second coming of Christ(ine), on a rugby pitch, on the island of Lesbos with all the girls I've ever glimpsed between 1:34am and 1:48am of every third saturday's trip to Cubby Hole (West Village gay bar).

4) How I want to spend NYE 2010. Unabridged.

5) An assortment of truths that don't mean anything collectively but, colluding with the fragmented neural bursts in my brain, posit a rendition of my life during REM sleep that I'll forever hold onto as a linear reality which, while acting in concert with what I know to be my actual fantasy world, keeps me from attaining my efficiency goals during my morning routine.

...............................................................................

You are ineligble to play this game if you:

1) Are an aforementioned cospirator

2) Are from Wassila

3) Enjoy pancakes without syrup at maximum capacity (aka, super-saturation)

4) Hate numbers

5) Are generally of a disgruntled disposition first thing in the morning

6) REALLY hate numbers and/or endless blogs

7) Have renounced apoptosis as sacrilege

8) Chuckled at the word apoptosis

9) Did not immediately reflect on your own sacrilegiosity

10) Are amazed that sacrilegiosity is not a word

GAME ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love?

I think this is what it means to love someone. To know an answer before you ask the question, but to ask the question anyway, despite the ache that follows.

Do we need more than we want? Do we trust more than we know? Do we feel more than we admit? Do we care, despite it all? Probably.

But to risk it? The timid fragility of fleshed electronics under a sternum and a popped collar... That's probably the best way to figure out what your value proposition is. And that is, afterall, the nuts in this tug of war with mortality.

Out of Sight...

Prepare yourself for an unusually well researched blog post. I literally googled the subject I’m about to expound upon and have decided that most of the first page of google results were pretty disappointing but, also, fortunately, not entirely what I’m about to hypothesize while concurrently lending a certain amount of colloquial credibility to the following dribble. In sum, I kinda looked this up, decided everyone else was wrong, and am pitching forth a variation on the general consensus.

As a general rule, I don’t generalize. But the idea that time speeds up is becoming more and more real for me. This translates into a willingness to bend my own rules on generalization to state that time speeding up with age is, probably, an apt sentiment to generalize about. I’m no physicist, but I do believe in the delicate nature of relative speeds and am by no means postulating that time is indeed passing at different rates for different people. I am postulating, however, that time is perceived as passing at different rates by different people.

My question is, like a good biochemist that's never seen the paid side of a lab bench, how do we mark the passage of time in the first place? Is a complete cycle of the planet around the sun broken up into 31,536,000 bits and store with equal determination in our brains? Well if that's true, why does the 25th set of 31.536 million seconds feel like they ticked faster than the 10th set? Why do I remember being in the middle of a summer vacation when I was 10 thinking, "this is endless. I don't even REMEMBER the third grade anymore." And yet now, it's August and yet I could very clearly (and perhaps with the helps of my Outlook calendar) tell you precisely what I was doing in April. Is it because novelty bits were far more frequent back then? We store 'firsts' with greater determination than we store 102nds?

In a conversation with my coworkers, we agreed that the perception of time is as equally neurologically driven as a human perception of anything else. That perception, then, is driven by what’s actually, neurologically, happening. There are plenty of blogs out there (highly scientific, I know) that posit a concept of linear time being exacerbated by spates of same-ness and argue that spates of same-ness make time seem to pass more slowly than spates of activity. However, I think time, perceived in the moment, is actually diametrically opposed to time perceived in memory. Those spates of same-ness are less apt to be stored. And in retrospect, a 'long weekend' is usually referencing a weekend wherein one attended a club, a picnic, a wedding, a roller derby, a bon voyage, and a blockbuster movie. That's a weekend that passes quickly but is reflect upon as a long weekend. Whereas the weekend I'm having right now, demarcated by nothing more exciting than 10 hours of sleep and a blog post, is going to happen (slowly in the moment) and then pass to be reflected upon as having flown by. Because what's worth storing this weekend? There's one 4 hour period that I've managed to cram all the activity in and will forever remember. And... So far... That's it.

What I'm saying is pretty straightforward. How we translate time into memory is one of those things that made me NOT want to be a neurologist. Imagining how a brain stores 31 million bits of information, annually, is like trying to envision the combination of an endless universe and then picturing a substance so dense that a teaspoon of it weighs as much as an elephant. Infinite information subjected to outrageous compression. I just don't get it. And the worst part of it, I think, is that only obvious solution is that the brain has a bouncer and only the interesting parts get let in.

How annoying is that? Does that mean we're apt to repeat the same-ness because, in the moment, it seems like something novel? Am I prone to hiding in my apartment every fifth weekend because it seems like something I've never done? Because it's never interesting enough to get stored? Maddening. And yet necessarily vague. Because if we knew HOW we were remembering things, wouldn't that be like knowing about the smoke screen? How the wizard does magic? Could we manipulate it if we know how it was done? Could we recreate it artificially? I'm might be ok with this shortcoming. I mean, I might call some friends and head out of my apartment just so I can reflect back on a long-ER weekend... But I'm certainly no more tempted to take up the pipette than I was at the beginning of this rant...

I'm gonna save the weekend and go play outside. I'm sure there's something out there worth compressing.

Tumbling Out of Doors

Tumbling. Like a toddler on a dizzy high. Out of doors. Specifically, plane doors. Plane hatches, really, rolled up the side belly of the back of the plane like a garage door in the suburbs, a store front grate on the lower east side, tagged and imposing but easily tossed aside by a ninety year old man with a walker and a candy shop that sports glass pipes and blow in the ice cream freezers. Innocent and random.

Tumbling out of doors into nothing. The dark bar at the end of a midday happy hour special that leaves you with three dollars in your pocket and a seven block walk home; barely enough time to shake the weave out of your walk-your eyes never manage to adjust to the sunlight. And your parachute opens before you're ready. You want to keep tumbling through the next cloud. You open your mouth but you barely manage to think "what the fuck" before spit flies across your face; you're going as fast as you've ever gone for two thousand, three thousand, four thousand - the guy behind you waves his arms frantically and you push him off like, "what the fuck", this isn't happening. The clouds get closer and he clasps your right hand and reaches it back to his right pocket and you tag the rip cord like you're just checking on your exit strategy. The parachute opens before you're ready. And the world slows down again. Your feet are, once again, facing the plate of the planet and the clouds aren't smacking you so much as cradling you as you tug one cord after another, cork-screwing your way into the biggest bottle of booze you've ever seen. The guy behind you tells you to just relax and enjoy the ride. "Think about why you're up here. All the things that made today possible."  What the fuck.

I try to think about all the reasons I jumped out of a plane in the first place. A well-timed email. An amazing friend. A discount. An easy day-trip. A couple of incredible parents. A job. All the things that facilitated the most sober drunk I've ever been. Steeped in perspiration from clouds, spiraling down to the face of the planet, I think about the harness that's kicking the shit out of my groin as the circles exacerbate my own body weight pressing down on the inner edges of the seat belts looped beneath me. I'm having trouble not thinking about mundane things. Like how soon it'll all be over. The ride. The affair with death, a salsa through the sky. It might hurt in the moment but the painful parts will dissipate while the speed and endlessness will live on.

I guess I thought I'd start over. Like plummeting to earth would make it that much easier to prioritize my life. Like almost dying would keep me grounded. Like jumping out of a plane would prove to me how much I wanted to sit still, settle down.

But instead I only wonder why my heart didn't beat faster. Why the ride was over too soon. Why it occured to me several seconds late that the parachute opening meant I was saved. Why it never occurred to me that I wouldn't survive jumping out of a plane. I tumbled through a field of wild flowers and hopped to my feet thinking about all the things I was supposed to be grateful for. And stupidly, I was still as confused as I was on the way up, cramped in a tiny plane, with a sliding door like a chinatown candy shop- why wasn't this as momentous as I objectively ascribed the activity to be? Why wasn't this meaningful or dangerous? Why didn't it force introspection into self like a javelin through a breastbone?

On Saturday, June 6th, I went skydiving, and yet the most dangerous thing I did that day was not wear my seatbelt in the car on the way home. But I will say, falling through the sky with thousands of feet of runway beneath you, breathing in spurts as you figure out how to not choke on your own saliva, being perplexed by the tug of the parachute that opens far too soon, spiraling in complete control through cold, dense clouds, and sliding to the ground a mile from the drop zone amidst wild flowers edged by deciduous trees... abject freedom with a passenger... it's totally worth the confusion that settles in later as the pressures of death seem light and/or your inability to comprehend disaster seems juvenile.

Invincible... I used that word today. I told a girl I wasn't invincible. And I meant it, I believed it, I owned it. But jumping out of a plane? Total piece of cake.