The Missing Piece, Plastic Cycles, and Goulash

Travel is something I have done since I had a means. When I was maybe 4 years old, after my father had given me a little plastic cycle, I took it for a ride through Anaheim’s busiest streets, cruising the left-turn lanes and terrifying local mothers. Things haven’t changed much – I moved to New York from California, I travel to Asia regularly, and I generally freak out if my Delta “Itineraries & Check-in” tab isn’t filled with at least one or two trips in the next 90 days.

All this travel, I realized a couple weeks ago, has been to places obscure in nature, at least in relation to my own world view. Japan, England, St. Kitts, Seattle – these places really have nothing to do with my episteme.

So in a fit of desperation for self discovery, I booked a trip to Budapest, Hungary. I will spend five days in my grandparents’ homeland, looking for some missing pieces, opening my senses to whatever I can relate. I’ll follow that up with a few days in Paris, because, well, I’ve never been there either, and I’m frankly tired of hearing people talk about it and need to see it for myself.

I’ll travel alone, I’ll write, I’ll drink coffee, I’ll probably pick up a couple bad habits and eat some things that I’ll regret, but I blame it on my father for giving me that plastic cycle a bit too early.

Waiting defined

“You come by here every day and never say hi to me. I always say hi to you first,” she said right as I was halfway inside. Three customers streamed out, thanking me for holding the door.
“You never give me a chance. You say hi first.”
“You were almost inside. You weren’t going to say hi.”
“What if I was going to say goodbye on my way out?”
“What if I wasn’t still here? Saying hello would have guaranteed you saying something to me.”
“Wait,” I said, letting the door close. “Were you waiting for me?”
“Define waiting,” she said, looking past me at the barrista on the other side of the glass. I could hear the hiss of the milk steamer and was reminded of how badly I needed a coffee.
“Hold on. Let me grab a coffee real quick and then we’ll talk, really.”
She stared at me blankly.
“Okay?” I was getting frustrated.
“Yeah, yeah, okay.”
When I stepped back outside, she was gone. I can’t say I was surprised.

Time is a nuisance: on time warps and stress

Time is a nuisance on Sundays.  On a day when we are told to take our time, we obsess over the clock, check how much more time off we have, focus more on using our time off than actually relaxing into that time.  In those moments when we actually flow into an event and use up a good chunk of time – a movie, brunch with friends, a good book – we finish that event regretting the time we wasted whether we enjoyed the time warp or not.  In fact, we would probably do almost anything to get that time back, rationalizing that we could have read that book on the subway and the Eggs Benedict was overpriced anyway.

And then there are the things we always tell ourselves we’ll get to when we have time off like this.  Unwatched documentaries, books unread, games to finish: they taunt us on the last day of a holiday like the half-eaten turkey drying out in the fridge.  Some of us finished those things, and we regret not having something new to look forward to, so we immediately go and buy something for the next moment we need to time warp.  Others didn’t get to them at all, instead choosing to do even less productive things like drink with friends or watch marathons of television — and then we judge ourselves for choosing such a dark path.  Still others spend the time traveling and come home even more tense than we left, returning to work in desperate need of more free time.

Or we come up with things on which we need to “catch up.”  Best of the lot: catching up on sleep.  So we literally time warp, sleeping away the time off, slipping into a deep laziness that feels both delicious and scandalous, like some secret we dare not discuss on Monday.

Stressing about relaxing is a chore.  ”Gotta go get some rest.”

No, that was totally my idea.

As I was walking with a friend tonight under the Williamsburg Bridge, we passed a large, black building.  The entire thing was black, including its windows.  Peter Luger — the steak house — apparently owned the entire building.  I guessed that it was filled with a giant meat locker for the famous steak house.

“You’ve been watching too much anime,” he quipped.

Then it struck me.

The entire building houses one giant cow form which they cut small slices.  The upper floors were filled with grain.  In other words, it is a giant, terrible veal box.

Yummy.

What I Run About When I Talk about Talking

Starting Slow.

Track ID#72JL (Running) | Brooklyn, NY, USA

Running is annoying and painful.  There is nothing about it that one should like.  It takes time, requires expensive shoes, isn’t good for the knees or back, and did I mention that it hurts?

It is for these reasons that I have decided to start running.  I have never understood runners, why they would take the time and deal with the pain.  In school I learned to hate running because I was told to do it before baseball and tennis practice.  I was subjected to Presidential Fitness Programs that told me I could run faster.

Running became symbolic of everything I hated: compliance, buying in, and obediance.

And then I read Haruki Murakami’s Everything I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  He explains how he uses running as a side dish for his writing, how running until you can’t think is a cathartic escape from the complex world that is the writer’s mind and emotions.  Running, he said, wasn’t about the pain, but about not feeling the pain.  About being aware of it, but choosing to not give in to it.

It is the ultimate lonely act, the ultimate way to train one’s body who is boss, and, for some reason, I’m suddenly on board.

Hopefully for good.  Writing, like marathons (or is it marathons, like writing?) require endurance.  As I try to finish this post, I see the Publish button beckoning me to finish, to quit, to say “Okay, this was enough.”

I’m not about to get into why writers or runners choose to do what they do, why they look past the pain, why they accept it, why they don’t just go and get a real job (or an elliptical machine), but those questions are certainly interesting.

Okay.  Publish.  I’ll run a bit more next time.

Biting the Apple

Or, in other words, AT&T and Apple can bite me (more on this here):

Apple, please.

England May 22-28

He will pour me a drink. He will.

Because Charlie is heading to England and I am a poacher, I’m hopping on board for a trip to London and Bristol. We’ll be in London May 22-26 and then Bristol until the 28th. He’ll remain on for his sister’s wedding, but I’ll make myself scarce to head back to NYC.

We’ll hang in London, meet some people, rent a flat in hipstery Shoredich, and then take a train to Bristol, where we will drink (with the barkeep above) and drive (not at the same time) a rental car to Bath.  Or the Henge.  Or both.  Who the hell knows.

Then, on June 1, out to LA for E3. Be sure to hit me up if you’re in other place. Or not. Just hit me up. Because I like being hit. Up.

Escape To Cyberia: Subcultures as Agents of Change

Escape To Cyberia:
Subcultures as Agents of Change

Joshua A. Fruhlinger

Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2009 Joshua A. Fruhlinger; University of Chicago

Note: This is my graduate thesis, originally written in 1994 when the Internet was the stuff of UNIX command lines, LYNX, and a couple dudes in California starting a “portal” called “Yahoo!”.  You’ll find delicious words like “cyberpunk” and Internet frontiers like Usenet and IRC.  We were all wide-eyed then.  Currently, the references are dead.  If you have any particular reference requests, feel free to drop me a line and I should be able to dig it up for your reading pleasure.

…

My gratitude to David Laitin for helping me sort out my normally entropic thoughts, Kristin Croteau for finding every possible flaw in my premise and making me come up with answers, and Daniel Schatzman for raising possibilities even I hadn’t thought of.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Here comes my thesis

University of Chicago in 1901 (no, I'm not that old)

In 1994, graduate students at the University of Chicago studied real things like shifts in finite resources, institutions and cultural change, and social inequality in Spielberg’s films.  It should come as no surprise, then, that more than one faculty members were not so supportive of my decision to study a thing called “The Internet.”  What’s more, I was studying it as a social space.

“People don’t really interact online!” I was told.

I set out to prove them wrong, and to show that the Internet was not only a place where people can feel social, but also a place where people were forming real social groups like subcultures.  Heck, I even found that it was a place where actual cultural shifts could occur!

Turns out I was sort of right.

In a couple upcoming articles here, I will republish my graduate thesis entitled: “Escape to Cyberia: Subcultures as Agents of Change” for your reading – and giggling – pleasure.  In it you will find such delicious terms as “netiquette” and early uses of “spam.”  Yes, we had spam back then.

Enjoy.

Why the hell do you live in New York, anyway?

People often ask me why I live in New York.  It rains, snows, pours, and does other nasty things here.  In Southern California, where I grew up, the weather is always great, my neices and nephews frolick there, my mom and sisters have brunch every Sunday basking in Long Beach sunshine.

My answer changes by the season.  I’ve told people it was the food.  I’ve blamed it on the museums.  Hell, I’ve even told my guy friends that it’s because the women are so incredibly beautiful here.  Lately I tell people that it’s just where I ended up as a writer and editor and, after some time, I fell in love with it.  I learned to love it, like a preteen in an arranged marriage.  She — New York — doesn’t smell so nice all the time, she can be ugly, and she can be a total bitch.

But I love her.

This weekend I was reminded why I love New York.  An out-of-town guest was visiting New York for her first time, and it was my duty — my obligation — to show her all those things a tourist wants to see.  Now, remember, these are the things that real New Yorkers love to hate: Times Square, Central Park on the weekend, Coney Island, and food food food.

I didn’t hate it.  I loved it.  I ate bagels, cheesecake, hot dogs, and burgers, and I saw New York through her fresh eyes.  Everything was huge, delicious, and strange.  Even the curb your dog signs with the cute pooping canine were the greatest things ever.

I had to agree.