new habits to replace old ones

once it’s been over a month i get some serious blog-guilt. sorry handful of friends i’ve let down by not relaying my adventures.

VEGAS, though. jessica’s birthday provided the occasion, and over a dozen friends provided the party. man, it was a good one. afternoon poolside, evening eating and drinking, late night money-evaporating… all the good things we rely on sin city to provide every year or so when we visit. not sure if there were any great hilarious stories this trip (at least not until the ride home, which i’ll save for tomorrow), but it was certainly a long, full weekend of fun. i will say this though: if you are looking for something outside the typically pedestrian casino-attached meal options, take the short drive or cab ride out to firefly for tapas. holy balls, i don’t think we had anything that wasn’t just good, but delightful. and all for very reasonable prices.

so, now we’re back. and did i mention i’m quitting smoking? it will probably help to make that as public as possible so there can be a nice mountain of shame to prevent me from slipping up. in fact, i’ve been trying to look for replacement distractions to partake of when i get the urge to go out and smoke, so maybe blogging can be one of my new crutches? i do have a wordpress app for my iphone, so maybe a good plan would be to step outside, write a paragraph, and come back to my desk. expect a lot of short, scattered thoughts if that plan ends up working.

i’ll also accept as many possible words with friends games — as many as i have friends with words with friends, if i have any that read this — so please, help me out fellow nerds. i need a break from normal web surfing.

awesome sale

walking back from breakfast on haight street this past sunday — a gorgeous sunny san francisco morning helped along mightily by the hangover-fighting effects of a wrap full of eggs and cheese and spicy sausage — the sign across the street said, ‘AWESOME SALE!’ in neon bubble letters, and i joked to josh that if we were running low on awesome after the previous day’s extensive barbecuing and beer drinking, now was our time to fill up.

of course at that particular moment we just laughed. ha ha, no need for awesome here, we’re having a great weekend in san fran with a bunch of college buddies. the weather’s perfect, we’re having a great time, we’ve got awesome pretty much covered. (heck, i even won a bunch of games of beer pong, which i never do; as much fun as i find that immature game, and how often i indulge, i never seem to get any better at matching ball to cup. this weekend though, i was on fire. maybe away games are my specialty?).

so yeah, it was an awesome weekend. it usually is when all the guys decide to do these road trip reunions once or twice a year.

but what about the rest of the time? i think i need more awesome, and possibly less comfortable. i mean, i have two blogs, neither of which i’ve written on in over a month — and i like writing. what’s the deal there? i watch too much tv and don’t read enough. i should probably find more ways to activate my brain instead of just stimulate it. i should probably learn new skills and do impressive things with them. i should probably get a new something and get rid of an old something i’ve had for too long, just to break the routine. i should take my girlfriend out on a fancy date to a place we’ve never been to celebrate once i’ve done whatever awesome thing i can.

i just have to figure out what that thing is first, and get down to it.

food truck-xtravaganza

ah, the food truck craze. it’s interesting to see the back and forth over whether it’s a fad, whether it’s good or bad for businesses, or the city, if they’re parking or serving illegally, blah blah blah. All that seems like a lot of whining, frankly.

in the past few weeks we’ve gone on a bit of a food truck spree. several we drove to specifically because we wanted to try them: frysmith’s fries with mediterranean beef or thai chicken were excellent; lee’s philly makes a decent sandwich, and the gogi beef variety is not bad.

i’m lucky enough that a few have found the neighborhood where i work, so i’ve had a killer cheesesteak from south philly experience, fantastic saltado from lomo arigato, and well, a decent effort at the dim sum truck.

then there was the week i took off in january and went to a new one almost every day on wilshire for lunch. barbie’s q hooked me up with some yummy tri-tip sandwich action and india jones slung some tasty chicken frankies (like a bombay version of a burrito).

my favorite might be nom nom though, just because there’s hardly anywhere you can even get banh mi (vietnamese sandwiches) near where i live.

overdone? yeah, you might say that. it has all the signs of a gold rush that’ll get saturated and over-exploited and end up leaving people cold and bitter. and possibly hungry. we can make jokes about not eating in restaurants anymore, or be angry at cops who give citations and keep us from trying out the ones we’ve been waiting to come to our corner, but it all seems immature. it’s a new entrepreneurial business model. aren’t small businesses the one thing america has the biggest fetish for?

what this is all about for me though is sidewalk culture. if i can walk five blocks, — in los angeles, where no one walks — to get a lunch, i’ll do it. but if there are only a few lunch spots in walking distance, i’ll get sick of those things and walk less over time. if, instead, a different truck comes by my neighborhood every day of the week, i’ll walk more often, eat out more often, possibly chat with neighbors more often while we’re waiting for our food.

it’d be stupid to think these people will destroy restaurant culture, because the food is not better, and come on, people like to sit down to eat. but there’s a unique personal element to buying from just a few people in a truck versus the formality of a restaurant, and a sense of community that comes from waiting in a group on a sidewalk that doesn’t happen when waiting for a table in a restaurant. i’m a big fan of that part of the equation, even if the dumplings aren’t quite what i’d hoped.

and until we live in the world of the fifth element, and mobile food vendors come right up to our balcony at lunch, i’ll take any chance to get out on the street and mix with some friendly fellow gluttons. bring on the trucks, i say.

tweetquake

twitter and facebook have made earthquakes a lot more interesting as events, because within seconds you see a bunch of reactions from everyone you know. it’s strange and funny, everyone trading cliches as if we’d all been in the same room when it happened. that same sense of togetherness when a crowd experiences something as one, only all through our social networking addiction.

only i always seem to miss out. i swear, at least half of the minor shakes that hit the city, i’m in my car and don’t even notice them. then i see everyone’s chatter and feel left out. what a ripoff.

i know earthquakes are terrible and all that, but when they happen far out and it’s not a major catastrophe, i’ve always found them kinda fun. like being in a giant bounce house for a few seconds, by surprise, and wondering if it’ll tip over or not. maybe saying that will jinx me, and now i’m doomed to be buried in rubble when the big one hits. let’s just hope my iphone still works so i can tweet about it.

cause i can’t take it anymore

i think i eat up entertainment almost compulsively. every minute not occupied by work, or social obligation, or eating, or say, making out (and there’s always time for that!) — or in other words any minute of downtime — i have to be working through my many backlogs of entertainment options. netflix queue, video games to play, books to read, all that. there’s so much out there and i’m only gonna be around for so long, how can i not feel pressure to fit it all in? (wow, that sounds a lot darker than i meant it to).

anyway, a side effect of that compulsion is that the more i see/hear/read/watch/play, the more desensitized i get. what for most of america seems like a really rad movie, like, say, avatar, to a zealot like myself falls so much farther down the scale even if i can enjoy and appreciate it for what it is. by the same token, the things that get me really excited — the cool, groundbreaking, out-of-the-box stuff like synecdoche, ny or oldboy — a lot of the population would probably find impenetrable, boring, super-weird or just confusing. same thing with music. so much of what i hear i think, ‘that is garbage, how can people love that?’ essentially, i worry sometimes that i’m so far immersed into entertainment that i’m distancing myself from normal people’s experience of it. and then i worry that it’s making me a worse critic, a worse writer, possibly a worse person, and that ’snob’ isn’t just a playful jab but a justified condemnation.

but then i hear something like yeasayer’s ‘O.N.E.‘ and think, ‘holy shit, this is just pure and simple goodness. anyone who doesn’t like this really is wrong. i don’t like it because it meets some lofty standards of rigorous intellectual examination. i like it because it feels good on a totally non-critical level that demands a proper turning of the volume knob toward radical.

then i feel better and get back to writing about how what you think is awesome is actually kind of stupid and what you think is crappy is actually really great, and i can go on with my day.

treasure hunting in downtown LA

partially because i wanted to post again in this new format as i work out the kinks, partially because i didn’t want to leave it unrecorded, let me tell you what i did two weekends ago.

through work, one of our vendor companies invited us out to a sunday afternoon scavenger hunt, so a handful of coworkers and i showed up around noon outside the LA public library. but this wasn’t your old-fashioned ‘find as many obscure items on this list as you can’ scavenger hunt. this was a well-orchestrated adventure chase more in the style of the amazing race, with cryptic clues that led to each next step of the game. to get through as many steps (and earn as many points) as possible, we had to crack codes, solve riddles, figure out hidden messages with disappearing ink or blacklights, talk to undercover agents milling around like regular people, all while running like crazy people around a roughly 10-block radius up and down the streets and many, many stairs of downtown. what i was tempted to skip because it sounded lame and was taking up my sunday turned out to be the most fun i’ve had in ages.

of course, the vendor in question also paid for the bar tab afterward, which didn’t hurt, but that part can’t help you. what could is that the company they hired to put on this game, ravenchase, also does public events or can be hired for your own private games. just saying, anyone planning corporate events or themed parties might want to look this up. also, anyone who hears about an event from these guys or any other public scavenger hunt game and thinks it all sounds cheesy may be right, but just accept the cheese and go with it, because it’s a blast.

side note: jessica, who is a huge fan of amazing race, was so jealous she couldn’t come that i had to promise to go to a future public race after gushing about the experience once i returned.

other side note: did i mention my team won and we got $100 each, AND a trophy for our office? seriously, if you’re doing one of these and want a pro on your team, you know who to call. just saying.

now i need titles for these things?

as you can see, things are different-looking here now. i know, i don’t love it either. but good old blogger, the service, decided they don’t need people like me anymore. people who use the blogger web interface and drain cyber-resources, then send all their files to their own server that google doesn’t control.

so i had to install my own software (wordpress, which is nicer anyway) on my own server, and if this page is ugly right now that’s because it will take some adjusting and tweaking to get right again since i’m no coding expert. also, since i haven’t been spending much time on this blog lately, it’s not a high priority at the moment. also, by the time i figured out what the hell i was doing getting all the posts over (at least i’ve got all the text safe and sound!), it got to be late and i got to be sleepy. maybe tomorrow it’ll all be better.

life is very full these days, even when it isn’t. i’ve been working harder and more often lately, which has been stimulating, which i like. i say bring it on. i’ll only get better if i am challenged, after all.

but in non-work terms, it’s been about the overload of goodies in the wake of christmas and a birthday. my pile of books waiting to be read is the tallest it’s been in ages, which is exciting, but comes with a feeling of pressure. not only do i love reading books, i love buying books, and i can’t do that again until i polish off this stack. another challenge i take pretty seriously.

luckily my reading time has increased as i finally caved to the digital age and decided to digitize our full music collection. for years i’d been romanticizing the act of actually putting a cd into a music player, not wanting to let that go. but naturally any new purchases were digitizing for iphone-loading purposes, which led to only ever clicking on itunes instead of grabbing a cd, because hey, that’s so much easier, which meant never listening to the other 80% of what we own. finally, i conceded, which meant hours of popping in discs and hitting import, and lots and lots of reading, five minutes at a time while the disc drive spun. finally, a few days ago, it’s done, and now i can put our entire 30 days or so worth of music on shuffle, and just soak it all in. amazing how many fun songs i hadn’t heard in years out of pure laziness.

then there was this just-finished three day weekend, which was surprisingly not full at all in terms of professional or social obligations. it being valentine’s and all, we made plans for a few date-type activities (bazaar for dinner friday, mortified sunday night). on top of that, we tried to hit up the LA street food fest saturday, but took a pass on seeing the epic line, opting to stroll down to cole’s instead. the rest of the time, there was movie-watching, olympic-watching, eating, lounging, drinking, laughing. essentially, three and a half days straight of nothing but each other.

and to me, that’s how you know you have a good valentine. anyone can plan a nice date for a few hours. woo them with fancy drinks and gourmet plates and dressing up and all that. that’s rookie stuff. we spent a whole weekend, an extended one even, together from dress-up to dress-down, tapas to french dips, stage show to IMAX (we also saw avatar), metro bus to couch, and had a great time the whole way through. in fact, it seems this happens at least once a month, where monday morning comes and we realize ‘hey, we hung out, just the two of us, all weekend’, without giving it a second thought. because we have a great time that way. of course we love our friends, but if nothing else, we have each other, and that’s wonderful. now that’s a valentine.

so, i sure had a birthday alright.

i’m 29 now and feel basically the same, except for the fact that i know i must be getting older because i have the resources and ability to coordinate epic weekends like the one we just had. that photo captures the best part of it for me: hours of lounging in the sun in the pool or hot tub, beer in hand (make that an endless stream of beers, really), surrounded by friends. it was glorious.

i’m pretty lucky to be able to do things like this and have a slew of great people show up to enjoy a day like this with me, some even flying in from out of town. if i were as successful in all other aspects of my life as i’ve been in making and maintaining a long list of good friends, i’d be rich and famous enough to buy a place like this for myself and not just rent it for the weekend.

a special note, because my brother requested it and other generous souls may be curious, my stuff to read list is freshly updated on the week before my birthday.

just in case, you know, you happen to be in a comic book store or clicking around amazon this weekend and feeling generous. i mean, i GUESS you could donate to the disaster in haiti, but will any of those people ever give you a hug or high five in return? i’m guessing no.

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