Halfway into the secret shade

And here I am, back in prodigal Florida. So of course this means yet another soporific, gratuitously sentimental yarn that I must spin for the annals of this blog. Hey, it's what I do. If you don't like it, read something else.

But first, a lighter note! On my drive down from Atlanta, I noticed that my car was vibrating about half an hour outside of the city. It was vibrating so much that my seat felt like a massage chair. I pulled into the rest stop just before the I-475 bypass and checked out the exterior of the car. I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary (for my untrained eye, at least). Yet, I could still sense that something was wrong, because I knew my car wasn't supposed to be so friendly with my manly bits. Lo and behold, by the time I cleared Macon, the vibrations had gotten so bad that I had to slow down to a pedestrian 60MPH. Just as I was preparing to pull onto the shoulder, I heard a bang and the smell of searing rubber. My back right tire had exploded.

Honestly, I am damn proud of myself for not freaking out. And yes, I now realize that the vibrations were a sign that the alignment of my wheels were off. I have already recorded that tidbit as the lesson of the day. But I am [i]seriously[/i] kicking myself in the ass right now for not taking [b]ANY PICTURES AT ALL[/b]. The tire entrails were pretty rad to behold. If not for the gruesome rubber stains it left on the side of my car (while flapping in the wind like a rag), I would have thought it beautiful.

In any event, this was not my first flat tire. However, this was my first successful tire change! And I did it all by myself! I realize this is an accomplishment that doesn't exactly qualify me for a merit badge, but I'm still proud of it. I made it 12 miles down I-75 to a Walmart SuperCenter where I promptly got the tire changed for a nominal fee. My only gripe: THIS WALMART HAD NO BOOKS. Not a single novel to be bought or furtively flipped through in the entire establishment. All they had were tawdry magazines and Hallmark cards. I was disgusted. But if I could have something to read as I waited, I could at least get my softcore porn. Oh yes. I picked up a copy of the [i]GQ[/i] with the naked Sacha Baron Cohen on it.

I digress. NO PICTURES. Otherwise, they would be spilling forth from this blog like a cornucopia of twisted rubber and pavement.


I'm not sure how to process the information I'm met with when I come home nowadays. It seems like there's death lurking around every corner. Since the beginning of this year, we've lost two family friends, three neighbors, and two teachers. I'm appreciative of the fact that my parents choose not to tell me until they can do so in person, but at the same time, I'm taken aback. "Welcome home! This person died since the last time you were here." It's hard not to feel you've been punched in the gut, even if the death in question frankly doesn't mean much to you personally. I know that sounds cold, but some of these people I'd never even spoken with.

And now... it appears as if one of our cats is next. When I first saw her today, the most striking detail about her that I noticed was that it looked like she shrank. I mentioned this to my mom.

"She just lost a lot of weight. Her teeth aren't so great anymore, so she's having trouble eating."
"No, I mean she looks like her bone structure is smaller."
"Well, she's getting old. People shrink when they get older too."

It hit me like a ton of bricks. Mimi is approaching 15 years of age, a hefty 76 in cat years. I still remember the day my dad brought her home. She was a kitten of only a couple weeks of age, from a litter left abandoned and found by a jogger. At least this was the story my parents told me. I always suspected the orphan kittens held a more sinister story, but I was 8 years old at the time and in no position to hear such things. She was so small and shy she kept disappearing into corners and under furniture. I find myself struggling to remember more specific details about her: how fluffy she was, what kind of kitten habits she had, what her face looked like. And now that I'm faced with her imminent mortality, it's all I can think about.

I feel awful for saying this, but I hope I'm not here when it's time to put her down. I'm just not prepared to deal with that, and I don't think I ever will be.

These dull days; simultaneous not

So in the recent days I've been obsessed with Matchbox Twenty, but in a slightly weird way. I found out that they are in fact not on hiatus anymore and had released a compilation album with six new songs in recent years. But instead of checking the new stuff, I immediately retreated to two of their older albums, #2 and #3 to be specific, and with special emphasis on "Bent" and "Unwell."

My appreciation for their music came at that brief, inimitable period of my youth when I discovered popular music but didn't really care about the words that were being sung. It wasn't until later in my tumultuous pubescence that I truly understood the gravity of some of the words that drifted out of my stereo, and by then I had become mired in the likes of Jewel, Goo Goo Dolls, and Vertical Horizon. I was standing still, listening to tired songs on a tired radio, because he was everything inside of me that I wished I could be. Details, details.

I digress. The words in "Bent" and "Unwell" resonated with me particularly well
in recent days, so much so that I used particular lyrics from each as instant messages statuses and as inspiration for tweets. Because, truthfully, I apply greater value to music as a form of poetry rather than as a form of musical expression. And I suppose I agonize and obsess about the words to try to find some way to possess them, to simultaneously declare emotional empathy to and independence from them. To take in all that was to be offered by the music and then be able to cascade its message throughout the course of my life.

Tonight, we walked down the street to sample the fare at Five Seasons Brewery. All along the way, I played the words to "Bent" in my head like a broken record, humming softly to myself between bouts of actual conversation. My mental analysis was in overdrive, ridiculously so. I was thinking myself in circles and reducing the words to meaninglessness. By the time we got seated at our table, I was almost grateful to have the house music blasted into my right ear by a particularly close speaker. It forced me out of my own little world and back into the discussion on beer choices that was going on around me.

Our server arrived, and I ignored him as I hurriedly scoured the menu for something to order. Let everyone else deal with the greetings and niceties, I thought. Luckily, I didn't have to think about the beers too much because they did flights at a reasonable price. All six of us ordered flights, and our server praised our choices but looked visibly flustered. Between all of us, there would be 42 glasses brought to the table, even if they were basically the size of a double shot glass. To make matters worse, we all ordered a different combination of beers, with some overlapping and some not.

By the time he stumbled back out with a heaving serving tray of beer, I still had not thought to take a look at the menu again. I watched the hapless fellow try to identify the varying shades of amber and gold and distribute them accordingly, only to realize he was one drink short. It was only his third shift since beginning work there, apparently. He bustled off to get one amidst a flurry of apology and obvious embarrassment.

He returned with the missing beer, and began to present to me my own six choices. Due to the size of the table, instead of lining up my glasses in a neat line in front of me from left to right, they curved inwards toward me, as to not interfere with someone else. Of course, everyone else thought this was hilarious. The inevitable torrent of comments ensued. And then out of nowhere, the server said:

"Your name is Nate too? Cool, I guess we're all a little bent, huh? Just like those glasses."


And off he went to put in our food orders. I would be lying if I said it was a moment of epiphany for me, but it was meaningful in its own right. I'm not sure if it was merely the combination of so many coincidences that left me breathless: the identical first names, our bumbling natures, the bent presentation of the glasses.

Or maybe it was something more. Maybe it was indicative of a pure and innocent connection that you can make with a complete stranger based on the silliest of things... the similarities in human nature and the human condition that plague and bless us all... the affirmation that each and every one of us must cope with the same things, and that we should find comfort in each other.

Someone staged a jocund purge

Instead of going to bed at 4AM, which is really not as bad as it sounds (by my standards nowadays; I don't sleep, I nap), I stayed awake to further the minimalistic objectives of slimming down my Facebook account. My reasoning wasn't based on anything but a general sense of discomfort toward the "social networking" tool. It really has become nothing short of the new MySpace. Sure, there are less ads (for now at least), and one could argue that the average user is much different than the average user of MySpace, but for me, the web app has run it course. So why wouldn't I just deactivate my account completely?

Well, I'm getting to that.

Just before the winter holidays, I pared away the bulk of my "profile" and all of its limbs, removing every single application that I could remove. I removed every field in my personal, education, and work information that I could, leaving only my contact information. I disabled all the reporting on my account that Facebook does... no more notifications to my friends whenever I post to someone's wall, or RSVP to an event, or get tagged in a photo. Finally, I restricted the entirety of my profile to confirmed friends, with the sole exception of my photo (people have to know it's me when they go to add me, right?).

I completed all of this with a minimum of weariness and anxiety. It was mainly just a bunch of emotionless pointing-and-clicking. TopFriends? Terrible application, good bye. FriendshipWheel? You are the weakest link. OregonTrail? Good times, but hit the road. I thought nothing of it afterward. But the next step wouldn't be so forgiving, and I knew it.

I was to trim down my friends list.

I approached my task this morning in a methodical way. I would go through my entire list and attempt to qualify an individual against these specific criteria.

1. Would this person recognize me? Recognition would only count in the present day; I'm sure I look different now than I did in high school, when I had long hair, or even during the period in between.
2. Do I have any outstanding commitments to this person?
   
3. Can I recall a memorable story about this person, memorable enough with which to reminisce over tea or cocktails?
4. Have we shared a conversation, via any medium, in the past 6 months?
5. (Perhaps the simplest, yet most complicated of them all) Is this person really a friend?
   

In a lot of ways, that last one functioned as a form of "veto power". But I knew immediately that I would have to wield that exception carefully, or else my original intent would be compromised. In the end, anyone left on the list would have to be completely defensible. So slowly my hefty list of 500 began to melt down.

The first two passes through the list were relatively easy. I was able to quickly discern if someone was an obvious candidate for The Burning Place. The majority of those culled first were people I had met once (and only once) at a party, or a conference, or in passing somehow. The remainder were random people that I honestly didn't recognize.

After that, I was left with just over 200 people. And so came the difficult task of enforcing criterion #3 and (to a lesser extent) criterion #4. Gone went some found lost friends, gone went some old college classmates. Gone went the bulk of my high school peers, and it dawned on me that many of whom I had never really considered friends anyway, even during high school. With this realization, I obtained my second wind. 180, 165, 150: all of them folks that I had reasoned as being more than mere acquaintances.

By this point, I had identified a group of people who would not see the The Burning Place, at least not today. But this still left me with a group of about 20 people who I couldn't quite confirm and couldn't quite deny. In short, I was having difficulty applying criterion #5. Some of them I still talk to sparingly, but most not. Most of them were really close friends at some point, some not. And every single one of them I consider to be influential and consequently important to my life. But therein lied the problem. They were important to my life story, but not in my life. In the end, I was fighting a battle between the sentimental and the practical, and since the name of the game was practicality, I ultimately removed all of them.

Those were some of the hardest button clicks I've ever made. But it was all a fascinating lesson in identifying those who are truly important to you, even if they're no longer your "friend".

It occurs to me that I may be being just a tad be melodramatic. Perhaps. But I think that anyone would have a similar experience if they tried to do this.


In any case, this step 2 of 3, and step 3 should be better. I still have to go through all my tagged photos and dignify myself, for lack of better terminology.

Step 1. Tiresome, tedious.
Step 2. Emotional, striking.
Step 3. Embarrassing, hilarious, memorable, pathetic, downright weird, etc. etc.

Leaving no wicked rest

Breathlessly posting from St. Louis, in the midst of my tour on the organizing committee for AIESEC US Winter Conference 2008.

Tiffany Curtiss has just been elected Member Committee President of AIESEC United States. Her (more than) formidable competition was the illustrious Katy Conrad and the brilliant Andrew King.


"And then there was much rejoicing."

Hey, darling, danke schoen

This is dedicated to everyone that has graced me with their presence, to those who are just a memory away, and to anyone that will soon ride off into the horizon.

Thank you for your kindness, for your consideration, and for your courtesy.

Thank you for your patience, and know that some day I will return the favor.

Thank you for your generosity. I know I haven't been the most forthcoming with myself or my resources, but hey, chalk it up to a maladjusted single-child-upbringing. I'm working on it.

Thank you for your honesty, your candor. There's no bullshit or beaten bushes with you.

Thank you for your counsel and your ability to impart sage advice, even when I don't want to hear it.

Thank you for your whimsy and your infinite spontaneity. You have led me on some wild adventures, and I can't wait for the next one.

Thank you for your understanding, and for the ultimate discernment of my various quirks.

Thank you for your acceptance. Truly, thank you.

And most of all, thank you for your friendship, for your companionship, and for your love.