Friday, May 29, 2009

Breakup Letter

Dear Humanity,

I have finally had enough of your shit. You pathologically make fool of yourself at the slightest opportunity and I am all out of excuses. You clearly have a tremendous amount of potential, so it pains me all the more that you demonstrate a masochistic compulsion to embarrass me with your juvenile antics. Deliberately or otherwise, these lesser demons have shouted down one too many better angles for my taste.

Your dangerously immature and reckless patterns of behavior are outdone only by their willfully ignorant and laughably absurd motives. The nonsense which passes for reason in your halls of power puts any other bullshit to shame. How I wish you would break character to jocularly inform me of the hidden cameras. PUNKED! you would yell, and I would weep cathartic tears of relief. Instead I am weeping tears of shame for this fantastic joke with no punchline.

Your opportunities are numbered. I urge you to seize upon those as yet un-squandered with the talent and zeal of which I know you are capable. Your potential is the standard by which you are judged. The high achievements of the species are of a quality supreme. Your consistent and repeated failure of this quality betrays the essential tension of humanity: that between consciousness and instinct. This tension must be addressed if humanity is to ascend. You must become a moral and reasonable civilization of moral and reasonable individuals. You are as yet awkwardly poised between that goal and a tribe of big-headed shit-sniffing primates. Let me know when you evolve. In the meantime, I'm going to sit over here in the corner making snide remarks and crying myself to sleep.

Best of luck,

- Your Future

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

What is the sound of one hand blogging?

  • I had a job interview today at another trading firm, this time in NY.
  • I finished my book. It was Catcher in the Rye if you didn't know.
  • Anthony made me delicious meatballs for dinner.
  • Unit tests are still the best thing since pre-sliced bread.
  • The CA supreme court made me a sad gay panda.
  • My day looks more impressive in list-form.
Marriage is for children.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Three Musketeers

Excerpts from our Craig's List ad, courtesy of Ben:

ADAM
Adam is reserved yet adventurous, and though his batteries require alone time to recharge, he is completely sociable. He lacks the voracious wit of Ben and Scott, yet his keen social awareness, general desire to keep everyone happy, and zen-like gravitation towards flexibility when it comes to the little decisions (as opposed to childish warlording), make him a benefit to any social setting 100% of the time.

Adam is an actuarial consultant for Towers Perrin, meaning he puts his perfect-test-score-brain to use for The Man, 9-to-5-style. He’s also responsible for the giant flat screen plasma wall TV and the sick black leather couch.

momma-dAdam (so called because of his bread-winning AND expert house-wifery) puts his incredible drive towards more interesting stuff as well. He can break the sound barrier with a bull-whip, hypnotize you, and although our kitchen occasionally turns into his personal brewery for small periods of time, we know you’ll enjoy drinking all the beer that he produces (which can go toe-to-toe with your favorite micro-brews).

BEN
Ben is somewhat in a period of transition, and results of personality alteration experiments he’s conducting with Scott are still being processed. Typically though, he’s very outgoing, a bit goofy, and has a smidgeon of (only quasi-serious) arrogance that he gets away with because of his uncanny charisma, social finesse, and adorable self-awareness. If occasionally he’s behaving oddly or ineffectively or professing alternative opinions, it’s probably because he feels the need to make statements about the poor value system of humanity at large, unless it’s a rare instance when he is being different just for the sake of it.

Ben’s insight into the human condition and ability to reason analytically are unparalleled. He’s also overall the best gamer in the house, and covers a good chunk of his frugal lifestyle with money he brings home from miniatures events. The rest of it comes in from temp work and the dregs of his trust fund, which hopefully won’t bleed to death before his web-based T-Shirt company gets off the ground. He would love to spend all of his free time acting, writing, and gaming.

SCOTT
Scott is very extroverted and generally the bubbliest of the three, though his capacity to shut out the world around him and sit amidst raucous socialization coding an innovative masterpiece for well-known web millionaires is remarkable. Scott enjoys intelligent discourse perhaps even more than Ben and Adam, and he has quite a wealth of knowledge, as well as an impressive though unnecessarily large vocabulary.

Scott thinks of life as an opportunity for experience. This intellectual viewpoint shows on his sleeve as he tries to get Ben and Adam to go to anything and everything there is to do in the city on an almost daily basis. He’s also easily excited by ideas that are so crazy they just might work, and he’s often hatching some sort of scheme with Ben. He’s also occasionally a frantically disorganized and neurotic mess.

Ultimately, Scott has a youthful and full social presence, and his adorable smile and cuddly nature are enough to win anyone and everyone.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Suitable For Framing

We have some new art hanging in our apartment:

Imagination Playground
Wood sign
Stolen from Imagination Playground in Brooklyn


212-443-9999
Paper posters
Stolen from New York University


giraffe
Colored pencil and glitter on paper
Bought at a garage sale


VHS Incredible
Photograph of a CRT monitor, with sticker
Found on the street in Brooklyn


True Love
Oil on canvas
Bought at a pawn shop

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Stay Awake Or Else

What fascinating intrigues of night and day detain me in this reality of space and time and work and words and serious things that seem absurd. It's bedtime. Again. Instead I'm... awake. Till 10. Till 12. 1, 2, 3, 4. There are more sheep than people in New Zealand. Force is mass times acceleration. The mortal coil can kiss my ass. I'm ripe. I'm due. Sleep, where are you? It's late. And I hate lying here like a fool of a fetus examining my eyelids. I have better things to not be doing. I think all my favorite thoughts again for the third time until everything is watermelons and capture the pig and damn ok here we go SNORRRRRRRR!!!

The Times

I am quoted in a New York Times article on Circle Rules Football, of which I partook for the first time last Sunday. I had such fascinating things to say as, "It’s about having fun." Better still, the link on my name yields 8 pages of articles on the convicted murderer. My date is also visible in the header photo, looking nearly shirtless and totally fearless.

I had my job interview today in Chicago. There was a slight snafu in the not-missing-my-flight department but I caught a later plane and proceeded to have a very long, largely enjoyable interview process. I unfortunately was not able to meet up with Cora. I will think about her while while masturbating all next week to make it up.

I am re-reading my favorite book right now. It is as good as ever. If you're curious what it is, why don't you ask me? It's been too long since we caught up*.

Well my chick peas, that's all for now. Remember that I love you just the way I pretend you are!

* NOTE to my posthumous readers for whom that sentiment is potentially upsetting: Sorry.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Thursday, May 14th

  • Lost my phone last night playing Midnight Capture the Flag in Central Park.
  • Retrieved my phone this morning, cutesy of a grounds keeper.
  • Ben and I had our collective BEST IDEA EVER. You will be able to read all about it in our forthcoming memoirs: Our Best Idea Ever And How It Made Us Both FILTHY SEXY RICH!!!
  • I fly to Chicago early tomorrow for a job interview. Cora is having a Friday BBQ but unfortunately I won't have any leisure time: I fly back at the end of the day.
I am reminded all the time how glad I am to live in New York.

Friday, May 08, 2009

MAJUSCULE MANIFESTO!

i am done with capital letters. any semantic value they purport to have is a fucking joke, they steal valuable space from classroom walls and the unicode spec, and their required pinky-finger gymnastics are a waste of precious keyboard calories. they are an entirely arbitrary complication of an already criminally arbitrary language and their conspicuous lack of ascenders and descenders makes them frankly hideous. caps are dead to me.

Star Trek

I could try to tell you what I thought of Star Trek, but I would probably cum all over your face.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

A Plausible Post

Alex brought over this huge bag of pita chips on which I have slowly been munching. They will be my end. Alex was the bad guy on this week's Law and Order: SVU. We had a viewing party and it was really fun. Michael and I had a really great talk last night. Yeah... what else. I just remembered this dream I had - it was kind of weird. OK, that's all for now. Bye.

As grampa always used to say, you can only fiddle so many kiddies before sombody looses an eye.

Monday, May 04, 2009

On Audience

This blog is many things: a journal, a biography, a sounding board, an archive. Above all, it is a means of self-expression. The things I choose to express are sometimes personal, sometimes profane, sometimes interesting and sometimes indelicate. The proliferation of information in this Internet Age makes my blog transparent to more of the people in my life-to-date and my life-to-come.

Which raises the question of audience. I do not write this blog for my friends or my family or my colleagues, though I know they all read it. I write this blog for myself. It is a reflection of what I think, how I feel and who I am at the time of writing. I neither appologize nor compromise for my self-expression. If you are uninterested in learning more about me than you care to know, I suggest you take your eyeballs someblog else. And that's all I have to say about that.

You can live in New York, or live in denial.

Wittyism

The 10 Commandments of Comedy
1-10) Be Funny

Friday, May 01, 2009

Friday

Going to the aquarium later. Taking a shower in a bit. Reading Internet right now.

"New York is always full of fresh young things, so it’s always really sexy, but I’m very grateful that I lived through a time when I didn’t have to wear a condom. That was pretty special." - Stephen Petronio