Authentic Experience

Goals you meet, resolutions you keep

Another eight-week drought. I also failed to mark the 10-year anniversary of this little publishing enterprise; I'm generally just not moved to write. That's bad.

It's one of a set of symptoms I'd like to address in the New Year. Is that really possible?

Life and Times

It's been a while. I haven't just been neglecting this old blog, but really almost all my social interfaces. So a bit of a catch-up is probably in order. In this edition:

  1. Personal life and romance report quarterly update.
  2. How's business?
  3. And what about all that ranting...

"Hedonism Is So Distracting"

I had a dream the other morning, in the fitful and usually dreamless hour between my ambitious/idealistic first alarm clock and when I actually get out of bed. I don't recall all the details, but the gist of it was a scene of opulent excess, an enormous feast, only in that particular dream-like way something was wrong. I don't know whether it was the undercurrent of doom, barbarians at the gate, flood-tide rising, or just everyone's declining cardiovascular fitness; I just remember saying to one of my companions, "hedonism is so distracting".

And so it is, and this is a growing concern of mine.

Old and Toothless

I am now 32 years old, and it shows. Quite lucky to be alive though. As my good buddy LGD says of getting older in our 30's, "other than the rapid physical decline, it's awesome!!!"

So yeah, I could stand to loose some weight and it'll be many months before my teeth are right, but life is basically good, and I have my friends and fam to thank for it.

Passenger Time

I was in an airplane the other day, and got a little meditative about the experience of being a passenger. It might be physically uncomfortable for those of us two or more standard deviations away from the norm in height, for me it also provides access to a special state of mind.

"Black Swan" / I'm Losing My Edge

The perhaps inevitable counter-note to the previous upstroke post: another week finds me contemplating my history in the arts and more generally on "the edge" of what people do, feeling — as I put it in a blissfully forced condensation on Twitter — "out of shape and uncool."

And so naturally references to LCD soundsystem and the latest Oscar winner from Aronofsky.

In Which I Feel That I Have "Arrived"

Last weekend I caught up with an old dear friend from college. Mulching that over leads to the first serious post in several weeks: an attempt to explain what I do for a living.

This turns out to be harder than it seems.

The Romance Report

As you may be aware, I have been spending more and more time with a certain special lady, including travels to London and Brazil. Things have been going really well, I think. Since one of the purposes of ye olde blog is informing people in my weakly-tied circle of cohorts of life-update kind of information, this warrants a long-overdue post. Read on for the romance report.

Jets to Brazil

I'm off to Brazil! A new nation, a new language, sweet escape from the Northern Hemisphere. It's been a nice stay in NYC. Snowpocalypse meant more quality time with my mom and my sister vs. socializing with friends, but that's not really a bad thing. I'll be offline for the trip; books but no laptop; looking forward to the recharging mental space that brings. I'll be back at it in SF come Sunday the 9th, so watch out then!

"Red Mars" / Life is so Uncertain

Reading Red Mars, sociological sci-fi, gets me thinking about life in all its rich variety and how we never really know what's coming. The patterns that have led me to where I stand now, the wider world around me, and where I (and it) go next.

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