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Hi friends!

Know it's been a minute since I've been able to post anything here (nothing gets everyone more PSYCHED than an introductory sentence about how it's been a while since someone's written/vlogged/posted, I KNOW), but wanted to let y'all know that I'm going to be reading a piece at Refresh Refresh Refresh on Sunday night! It's at 8pm at Cake Shop! Very excited about this, and would be great to see you there!

XOJD

growing up

There are some pretty tangible barometers of maturity, I guess -- when you can legally drink at 21, when you realize you actually like the taste of coffee and aren't just forcing yourself to drink it to try and look "intellectual," etc. But, for me, one of the clearest signs that I have evolved into a semi-functional adult human occurred yesterday in the realm of gmail. 

I've been trying to find a particular designer for a project I'm working on, and a friend of mine sent me a list of five recommendations. I drafted my introductory e-mail (Oh, another sign of maturity! In the past, I would have bitched about the new gmail "compose" layout for weeks, probably would have written a whole blog post about it.... but, in this bright new present, I just immediately switched it back to "old compose" and am now pretending I'll be able to keep it this way forever. VERY adult!). Anyway, I then copied my note into four new e-mails, changing the first names, and sent them out one by one. Once I was finished, I instinctively clicked on my "Sent Mail" folder just to make sure all looked kosher... only to find I had accidentally sent one of the e-mails without changing the first name. I had written "Hi Allison!" to a Maggie.

Now, a previous version of Josh would have completely lost it here. He would have started sweating around the neck, drafted an over-the-top, horrible follow-up e-mail to Maggie ("Guess the cat's out of the bag - you've got some competition. You better hurry to respond quicker than Allison! JK hahaha" or "Sorry, a Maggie really did a number on me when I was a child and the name switch is a defense technique I learned from my therapist :D :P"). Then I would have sent it, clicked "Undo Send" two seconds later, and then ultimately decided to hit "send" again, only to then spend the subsequent half-hour stewing that I had made the situation so much worse. BUT YESTERDAY, after I noted my error, I just kind of calmly smiled (I didn't actually smile, I was sitting by myself in my apartment) and clicked out of the e-mail. "Maybe she'll get a kick out of it," I thought. And then I got up to procure some pistachios to munch on. (KIDDING ABOUT THAT LAST PART. WILL NEVER BE SO ADULT THAT I CASUALLY MUNCH ON PISTACHIOS.) 

This morning I received a response from Maggie. "Hey Brian," the e-mail began.

multiple locations

I'll log onto Facebook, scroll down the page, and come across a picture my friend Phoebe posted of her and her boyfriend beaming in front of a sunset on a Puerto Rico beach. "Aww," I'll think, and instinctively "like" the picture.  

An hour later, while waiting in line at a deli, I'll scroll through my Instagram feed and see the same picture there, too. I'll hesitate for a moment. Do I "like" it here, too?? (I think I'm just gonna drop these cumbersome quotes around "like" from now on! Reckless as ever!) On the one hand, I'll consider, it seems a little excessive to like the same shot again. I liked it already on Facebook; she'll know I've seen it and offered my virtual thumbs up (because Phoebe is clearly spending all of her time worrying about whether or not I'm liking her pictures). But then it will strike me that I've spent a good 25 seconds deliberating whether or not to like an Instagram picture and it seems so absurd to be "holding myself back" and life is short why not just like things that you like as many times as you like. So I'll double-tap the picture and keep scrolling. 

A few minutes later, I'll see she's posted a link to the very same picture on her Twitter and, even though I have now dwelled on it on two different social networks, I'll click the link anyway to see it a third time, as if I don't have a choice in the matter.

a day at the museum

I went to a museum last weekend, and it was really fun. (That's the first sentence I wrote when I started writing this, and normally I'd rewrite it since that is a sentence right out of a 4th grade language textbook, but I've decided to... keep it! It really sums up everything you need to know right up top here!)

The first exhibit we went to consisted of all of these giant, hanging works done by this really cool drapery artist (that is definitely the official name for what he is). I enjoyed all of the pieces, but also found myself distracted the entire time by these two high school girls who both were wearing striped shirts and who were clutching each other as they roamed through the exhibit (one of their mothers was a few yards ahead of them; they of course had to keep their distance). I heard them whispering about a boy named Sebastian, and then at one point they sat down on this bench and I took this picture of them (all of this is ALMOST TOO NORMAL and not creepy at all, I know). Anyway, after I took this picture, the girl in the red stripes lamented, "He's just... weird, you know?" and blue stripes sighed, "Yeah, totally," and then they jumped up and glided out of the room, arms linked. (Also pretty pathetic/reprehensible on my part that I didn't even notice the extremely adorable child on an iPad in this picture until I uploaded it into this post just now.) 

Later we visited an Ancient Egypt exhibit, which was filled with mummies and ankhs, and it reminded me of 3rd grade and not in a good way (as opposed to all the ways that remind you of 3rd grade which are GREAT, of course). But one aspect of this exhibit did please me - I was reading this plaque about Osiris and read that whoever this Osiris was had a "jealous brother, Seth." Maybe everyone knows all about Seth and this is just going to expose my ignorance about Egyptian myths or whatever, but Seth sounds awesome. I admittedly didn't read the rest of the description super carefully (though I did catch that Seth threw his brother in a "special human-shaped box" (!!!)) and sorry this picture is horrendously lit/framed, but I just can't get over this psychotic Seth dude and am seriously unclear as to why he isn't the only Egyptian god anyone ever talks about.  
 
And on the way out we passed this sculpture/costume/masterpiece and I love it so much! What I love about it is I feel like you could put Karlie Kloss in it and put the shot in Harper's Bazaar and I don't think anyone would flinch (OK, that's maybe a stretch, but you know what I mean). And at the same time, it ALSO looks like a hideous scary Pixar monster come to life! Both at once!

trips to the drawer

When he's at home, my dad always sits in the same seat at the end of the couch in the living room. He uses the end table next to the couch as a desk, his laptop on top of a mélange of papers and folders and pens. In the drawer of the end table, he keeps business cards, newspaper clippings, binder clips (mixed in with the take out menus, ticket stubs, holiday cards, and other ephemera that has accumulated over the years). About a year ago, I opened the drawer looking for a menu and noticed a pack of Dentyne Fire gum. I took it out and held it in front of my dad's face (the only way you can get his attention when he's working).  

"What is this?"
"What does it look like?"
"Why do you have it?"
"It's the greatest."

I tried a piece and was surprised to find that I was immediately obsessed. I returned to the drawer five or six more times that day, trekking from the "work station" I had set up in my childhood bedroom. Every time I'd open the drawer, my dad would look up at me and smirk before returning his gaze to his laptop. It made me feel like I was eight years old. 

I had no desire to start buying the Fire gum when I got back to NYC; but, ever since, whenever I'm home I make a few trips a day to the drawer. I've noticed that, lately, the drawer is always fully stocked when I get home. When I was home a few weeks ago, there were three full packs. "Wow, what fortune!" I exclaimed when I opened the drawer and found the bounty. "What's that?" my mom asked, looking up from her magazine. "Nothing," I said. My dad didn't look up from his laptop.

news & notes

Hi friends!

Some news & notes!

1) Like 17 years later, I've made a twitter account for this here blog. It has soooo many followers already, so hurry up and follow it before all the spots run out!! (My own personal twitter is here.)

2) I'm writing a web series that I'm working on with a bunch of very talented people! It's called TWENTY FIVE, and our website's up here -- ch-check it out! (We've also got a Facebook, Twitter, and Kickstarter up. An obscene number of hyperlinks within this parenthetical, I know.) Episodes will be up later this year! 

3) This isn't "news" or a "note" (actually, I guess maybe it is a note?), but it just dawned on me when I was re-reading what I've written so far and changed two periods to exclamation points that it is ABSURD how we've gotten to a point "culturally" where not ending a sentence with an exclamation point makes it seem VERY solemn/severe, regardless of the sentence's content. I recently re-read a long catch-up e-mail I wrote in like 2009 to a good friend about my job and life and such... and the fact that there were zero exclamation points in it honestly made it read like hate speech. 

Anyway, that's it! Love you all!

best title i could come up with for this was "a list about words" :/

1. A few years ago I drunkenly told my friend that I thought his boyfriend seemed "kind of iconoclastic," which was not at all what I meant (I think I was going for "vain") and made absolutely no sense in context, but I think I just liked the idea of saying the word "iconoclastic" at a bar. My friend kind of shrugged, and something about that exchange has stayed with me forever since as a sort of minor private shame.

2. It dawned on me during a phone call the other day that over the past six months I've adopted a completely gross habit of caveating every other sentence I say with "... if that makes sense." Not only does it make you sound totally willowy (idk), it's also, of course, implicitly fishing for an affirmative response: so, double the grossest.

3. I've noticed that it doesn't matter who you're talking about or what the situation is, if you refer to someone as "humorless" in conversation, the person you're talking to will nod emphatically in agreement.

4. It's hard not to be suspicious of anyone who uses the word "lovely" too much. Whenever I say it, I feel like I'm doing a bad Mariah Carey impression.

 5. Recently I was walking into a bagel place with a friend of mine. I was setting up a story and, every time I'd pause, she'd nod and say "yeah..." After a few of these nods, I looked up at her and asked, "Oh, you know where I'm going with this?" "No," she said. "I've just been saying 'yeah.'" This made us both laugh weirdly hard, and by the time we were finished laughing, we were in line to order and the story had evaporated unfinished.

Giuliani-i-fication

I've seen so many old movies recently! (Apologies for starting off this post with something right out of Zooey Deschanel's Twitter drafts folder.) I guess it started when I was reading some piece about romantic comedies that referenced "Broadcast News," which I hadn't seen before and felt like I should; I ordered it on Netflix and watched it that weekend. That led to my populating my Netflix queue with a whole slew of notable movies from previous decades that I had never seen.  

There's probably some kind of psychological effect at work here, or maybe it's just that I usually have no prior knowledge of the actors when I watch these movies, but the leads in these films just seem so much more like movie stars. They're alluring, sturdier (?)... unknowable, mysterious, beautiful. I'm not simultaneously thinking about what they look like wearing sweatpants coming out of the supermarket, or who they're married to in real life (since I don't even know!). It's hard to watch "An Officer and a Gentleman" and not consider with a frown that if that movie were made today, it would probably star Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis in the Richard Gere and Debra Winger roles.  

By the time the movie's finished, I'm itching to Google the actors, scan their Wikipedias, see what they look like now. Of course, invariably, the findings are depressing. I find out that the twentysomething hearththrob from the movie I just watched is now a grandfather (as my friend Alice put it, regarding this phenomenon: "[your] crushes turn into Giuliani"), or that the leading lady hasn't been in a movie since 1987. These revelations usually lead my mind to two different places: 1) I imagine a young guy watching, like, "Eternal Sunshine" 30 years from now and then looking up this intriguing "Kate Winslet" and clicking through her Google Images and realizing she's the mother of that young actress he just saw in a small part in a new Jane Austen adaptation on HBO, and then deciding to add "Revolutionary Road" or whatever to his queue, and 2) I contemplate how weirdly jealous I am of the children of famous actors who can watch their parents' films (the equivalent for them of old home movies, I guess) and "hang out" with this strapping younger version of their mother or father whenever they feel like it.

by a string

I was waiting for the elevator the other day next to a family of three: mother, father, teenage daughter. Each was holding a few shopping bags. They were silent for a few moments, shifting as we waited, and then the mother reached to take one of the daughter's bags. "Stop, mom," the daughter snapped, "I've got it." She looked down and turned away from both parents. "I was just trying..." the mother started, before shifting into mumbles. Meanwhile, the dad looked like he was daydreaming about a coffee mug.  

The elevator opened, and the four of us entered. Just as the doors were about to close, a Real Housewives-y cartoon of a woman in a fur coat slid her way into the elevator with us, along with her small dog. "Make way for my little Frankie," she announced, even though none of us were even remotely in her way. The elevator doors closed, and Fur Coat took in the mother-daughter pair. "Oh my god, you guys are adorable. Matching outfits! So cute." The mother and daughter looked down sheepishly at their red coats and then they made reluctant eye contact, unable to conceal barely perceptible smiles. "Yeah," the mother said, "I guess you're right." "So it wasn't planned?" asked Fur Coat, as she picked Frankie up from the ground and began stroking his fur. "Nope," the mother said. "I guess when you've been living together for this long, these things just happen..." As she said this, the daughter rolled her eyes semi-dramatically for show but, simultaneously, she took a small step toward her mom, as if pulled by a string.

confidants

One of your good friends, Jennifer, is having people over, so you put on a new sweater, pick up a bottle of wine, spend the entire subway ride regretting wearing the new sweater instead of one of your "go to" shirts, and walk to her apartment. Some faint music is playing from a television (?) and there are seven bottles of red wine but no white and all the women are wearing scarves (though each in a different manner). You say hello to Jennifer, who is seemingly already wasted, and proceed to meet a bunch of the periphery characters in your conception of her life: her new boyfriend's roommate, her former coworker who she always talks about, etc. Usually there's one of these bit players whom you end up talking to for a weirdly long amount of time, typically someone who isn't even all that close to Jennifer (it'll be, like, the boyfriend of one of her on-the-outs college friends).

A few days later, you meet up with Jennifer for dinner and, before you've even opened your menus, you say something like "so Saturday night was so fun...," and you're off! You work through each person at the party systematically. You'll deliver a vague initial assessment of each person you met, in turn: "I liked the roommate with the hat!" (you don't want to take too strong a stance before you know what Jennifer's take on the given individual is). Jennifer will proceed to break down this person's entire existence in 30 seconds ("Well, the story with him is that three years ago he..."). After this summary, you'll circle back and either reaffirm or scale back your original claim ("You know, he did seem a little creepy...") And then you move on to the next person ("Wait, so who was the girl with the curly hair...?") 
 
There's something strangely electric about the whole back-and-forth. It's like a car-ride-home-from-a-movie conversation but intimate and dishy and devoid of arguments related to Hugh Jackman's singing voice. As you and Jennifer wait for a picture of her boyfriend's sister to load on her phone's Facebook app, you feel like a confidant, like this is somehow the adult version of the late night bunk bed conversations and post-homework hour-long phone calls of your teenage years.

two at a time

The checks finally come. You both sign, and fumble, and stand, and fumble, and put your jackets on. You exit the restaurant in silence. When you're outside, you say, "It's getting so.... cold," putting a weird accent on "cold" in an attempt to mask the blandness of the remark. "I know," he says, "... so, which subway...?" "Oh, I think I'm going to take the Q... Union Square...." You sway your head back and forth slightly. Very chill! "Great, I'm... walking in that direction, too," he says, in the vague manner one only uses in circumstances like these. A long pause, and then you both start talking at the same time. You smile (he doesn't) and you ask -- shouting, basically -- "So what're you doing for New Year's?"

Thee blocks later, you're at Union Square. "This was... great," he says. "Yeah, it was great!" A brief hug. If someone across the street were to catch only a few seconds, it could be mistaken for two strangers brushing past one another in front of a Walgreens. The escalator down to the subway's working properly, but you still descend two at a time.

inconclusive

I'm currently taking a six-week course, and I had to write an academic paper (the first I've had to write since college) for this week's class. It was astounding how all of the old, terrible habits came right back: waiting until the last possible moment to write it, waiting until I was finished writing to double-space (with that corresponding intake of breath as you wait to see if you've in fact surpassed the page limit), the reliance on my old crutches (the word "pervasive," a flagrant excess of semicolons, etc.). Even hooking up my laptop to my printer, which I've used only a dozen or so times since I moved to New York, brought back bleak memories of print cartridge smudges and error messages.

Of course, not everything's the same. I started to write a "concluding paragraph," but then stopped and deleted it, and turned in the paper without one. Some four years out of college, the idea of tying an overly broad, adjective-laden bow on a paper -- even an innocuous three-pager for a six-week class -- seemed completely ludicrous, so much so that it made me wonder how I churned those silly little conclusions out week after week for so many years without degenerating into some kind of automaton and then into dust.

a tale of two penelopes

I realized the other day that Tina Fey and Kourtney Kardashian -- two women on opposite ends of the "How Much Does America Respect/Admire This Famous Woman?" spectrum, clearly -- both recently named their daughters Penelope. I briefly imagined Amy Poehler texting Tina the day after Kourtney's announcement this summer, about a year after Tina gave birth ("U and Kourtney K... peas in a pod, huh? HAH :P"). Then I envisioned an Us Weekly spread in four years -- with the title "A Tale of Two Penelopes" in pink block letters -- featuring side-by-side shots of the two girls (Lil' Penelope Kardashian wearing a crop top and harem pants, no doubt, and Lil' Penelope Fey sporting large glasses and an Alf sweatshirt).

I guess the "conclusion" I eventually arrived at -- from this indisputable evidence that Kourtney and Tina, at least in the realm of baby names, have similar taste -- is that we should never take anything too seriously. You'll make fun of some girl's unflattering top for like 15 minutes... only to find out your best friend owns the same one. ("Oh, but it looks... different on you!") Yeah, ultimately this is kind of a trivial little example, and it's not like this is going to stop me from mocking people or whatever, but I guess it's just nice to remember from time to time that there is so little that actually separates us from one another. (And that last sentence, my friends, is the closest I'll ever get to attending Burning Man.)

through glass

Last week I was waiting in line for coffee when a woman got in line behind me and sighed loudly and ostentatiously enough for me to turn around. She made a show of raising her phone in the air and frowning. "It's funny how nobody cares about you until you don't pick up their phone call!" she said. I quickly looked around to make sure that she wasn't speaking to someone else, or that she didn't have an earbud in her ear. She was in her late forties maybe, wearing a trench coat a size too small for her and one of those droopy fisherman hats. For a brief second, I considered that maybe I was being filmed for some "candid camera"-style prank video.

I nodded and smiled, as if to say, "I know the feeling," even though I didn't. It's hard for me to even remember the last time I was desperately trying to reach someone by phone, or vice versa (especially someone whom it could be interpreted I didn't generally "care about"). Also, if anything, I've found that I care about someone even less after I leave them a voice mail in that I can take that item off my To Do List and no longer have the obligation to call them "hanging over me." But I nodded, and, oddly, I realized I felt a rush of happiness for her, that she had some drama in her life to get all riled up about. I imagined her -- outfitted in a turquoise bathrobe, nursing some tea in a Disney World mug -- venting about this pesky caller to her sister that night on the phone. "And he's essentially been harassing me since he called. It's like, does he think I just sit at home all day making phone calls??" And though she'd be raising her voice and angrily huffing, her lips would be slightly curled in a smile.

I sat down with my coffee and, before taking out my laptop, I took this picture of the gloomy intersection through the glass.

filters

An odd moment: when your friend signs into gmail on your laptop, and everything from the color of the labels to the ratio of read-to-unread e-mails to the quantity of e-newsletters seems completely foreign. You're reminded that the way you experience the internet is wholly specific, that the tabs you keep open aren't the tabs everyone keeps open; you knew this, of course, but somehow it's easy to forget and assume universality.

Related: when you scroll through your friend's News Feed (or the roster of people he follows on Instagram or Twitter), and you consider briefly that he views "the world" through a filter that is so vastly different from your own.