[video]
Don’t look now but the Bixi is back!
[video]
![Every now and then, I watch and re-watch this video I had stumbled upon months ago. It serves as an almost painful reminder of all the things we search for in life but too often desert for comfort.
On the other hand, it also underlines that it’s never too late to travel and experience new things for ourselves. If you love foreign sights, sounds and [chiefly] foods or, like myself, daydream of parallel possibilities, also check out celineinasia.tumblr.com tapasforyouandme.tumblr.com where I had happened to find this gem.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/015802c38f86070c8ec6b392cca71dde/tumblr_mg2lf4rj7S1qaqu4so1_500.png)
Every now and then, I watch and re-watch this video I had stumbled upon months ago. It serves as an almost painful reminder of all the things we search for in life but too often desert for comfort.
On the other hand, it also underlines that it’s never too late to travel and experience new things for ourselves. If you love foreign sights, sounds and [chiefly] foods or, like myself, daydream of parallel possibilities, also check out celineinasia.tumblr.com tapasforyouandme.tumblr.com where I had happened to find this gem.
With the New Year afoot, we often feel compelled to make significant changes to our lives, to capitalize on an opportunity that presents itself now that the Christmas cookies have gone and the snow is solid. Few things impress me more than the people who can make such drastic rearrangements and actually see them through. Perhaps I’m not comfortable with that sort of commitment, or maybe I’ve found a kind satisfaction in the futile attempts to calculate my life but this year (last year?) I found that setting the bar low on resolutions would be the best way to approach them without breaking any promises; few things disappoint me more.
New Year’s resolutions are an appealing way for us to find improvement, to give ourselves that annual assessment, to correct certain tendencies without any real accountability. They are the medium in which we casually yet eagerly identify our twelve-month expectations. The problem with this is that in our pressing efforts to deviate from our course, we wind up making the same feckless decisions that led us towards these intentions in the first place. Resolutions require reflection, self-awareness, a desire to change, and a will to go through with it. They can also be about the things we’ve done right and the ways we can go about keeping it up. In other words, there’s no need for us to be so hard on ourselves all the time. Think of the tradeoffs before becoming somebody else.
This year, I want to take a step back. Acknowledge my efforts and consider what I may have missed out on along the way. I created a list. It turned into an exercise of whether or not I wanted the change to occur before having to commit and, inevitably, abandon it. At first I thought it was fun. Then it made me sad. But then I found it fun again. Call it the ultimate “Never Have I Ever” cheat-sheet, call it childhood deprivation, but do not call it my New Year’s Resolutions.
1. I HAVE NEVER SMOKED A CIGARETTE.
As a child, I bit into a cigarette butt that had fallen into my soup; it turned me off for a while. In high school, no one ever really offered me a smoke so peer pressure was hardly a concern. By the time I turned twenty, I had developed an addiction to coffee and was too broke to pick up another. I would later regain my love for soup.
2. I HAVE NEVER TAKEN A VACATION.
At my old job, we were encouraged to book long weekends to water the lawn, visit extended family, or make that road trip out to TOYS-R-US. Taking a couple weeks off to see the world was out of the question unless you were on serious sick leave or meant Toronto.
3. I HAVE NEVER TOLD MY PARENTS I LOVE THEM.
People do it all the time! But between all the birthday celebrations and telephone calls, all I can remember is 21 telling me he that wouldn’t say it till they were on their deathbeds. At this point, I reckon they must already know.
4. I HAVE NEVER PLAYED ZELDA.
In 2011, I discovered that there was a character named Link.
5. I HAVE NEVER WATCHED A MOVIE MUSICAL.
The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, Grease… you name it, I haven’t seen it.
6. I HAVE NEVER LEARNED HOW TO PLAY MAJOR BOARD GAMES.
Up to now, I’ve gotten the hang of Chess, Monopoly, Connect 4, and Blokus. Last week, I picked up Sorry! for the first time. I also purchased Trouble but have never opened the box. I am a firm believer in beginner’s luck.
7. I HAVE NEVER WORN CONTACT LENSES.
I’ve worn glasses ever since my ninth grade Biology teacher sent me home for not being able to read the chalkboard from the back of the classroom. Since then, I have continued to play sports on the assumption that it’s all the same so long as I have the right feel and touch. I can’t tell if I’m too pigheaded to admit that I need them or too terrified of sticking plastic in my eye.
8. I HAVE NEVER HAD A GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH.
Seriously.
[video]
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
Onions by William Matthews
How Basketball Has Changed My Life
Part I of V — Hip-Hop
Who Am I? (What’s my Name) — it’s the first song I can really remember listening to and I can say it’s played a significant role in the person I’ve turned out to be. When I was seven or eight, it would come off an old boom-box that played while I watched my big brother work out in our basement, religiously tracking reps and sets on a spreadsheet that couldn’t have been so simple to build at the time. I think of it less nowadays but I had often felt like a product of my two older brothers rather than of my mother and father; a hopeful blend of someone who gave you an unequivocal answer that always turned out to be right somehow, who opted for patience over compulsion, and, of another whose altruism kept everyone warm, who intuitively embraced difference and chose not to ignore it.
Listening to Snoop Dogg made me pretty oblivious to the coastal feud of the mid 90’s and I’ll admit it didn’t help Biggie much that I had spent most of those years rewinding California Love over and over and over again until double-sided tape decks finally came along. Together, the two tracks gave everyone countless hours of joy and inspiration that I would spend in the backyard playing basketball with my brothers. And though I’d go on to hear Gin and Juice and Ambitionz Az a Ridah just as often, they never resounded over a game of “American” as well as the two I had come to know and love.
The relationship between basketball and hip-hop went far beyond soundtracks however; sure Snoop and Tupac drove me to practice but basketball paved the way for acts, lyrics, and even subcultures I wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Professional athletes like Kenny Anderson and Larry Johnson, basketball players I looked up to, were forewords to emcees such as Erick Sermon and LL Cool J through the wonders of “NBA Superstars”, a FOX Home Entertainment VHS tape that would so shamelessly combine music videos with basketball highlights (think of Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All mashed together with an afro-rocking Julius Erving dunking all over the place) which really isn’t all that bad when you think about it.
From there, replayed highlights and sing-alongs led to imitations and personal favorites; they opened the door to new VHS tapes which evolved towards compilations to play ball to and, inevitably, resulted in pre-game rituals and post-game cramming. I had gone from timidly discovering Warren G’s Regulate before house-league play to suddenly blasting Ghostface Killah’s Winter Warz out from a yellow school bus before road games. Interweaving basketball with rap was not just a recurring trend but an intensifying appetence. Before heading out, I would listen to music and focus on practice; I’d go play and think about the albums I had heard that day then finish playing and carry on with different parts of the albums, adjusting the music, tweaking my game, on and on until what emerged was, above all, a ridiculously untouchable eighteen-track mix CD (nineteen if you’re lucky) and a completely changed attitude problem.
What was it about hip-hop and basketball that worked so well? I think their roots are painfully humble but their skills are often so clouded by the market and its misguided values. They are both so largely admired for their commercial success and simultaneously appreciated on different scales for their levels of dedication and trust. They may be saturated with wannabes and charlatans but at their core, they are dominated by a mastery of all the right fundamentals conflated with a ton of substance and an ounce of flare. Maybe these are the traits that drew me in or maybe it was all just good timing. All I know is that by fourteen, I had basically run 19’s Panasonic Discman into the ground (being too cheap to buy my own for the aforementioned road games) but if those buds weren’t in my ears it’s because there was a always basketball in my hands.
Interesting Facts:
Photo by: Matthias Heiderich
Just another day at the office.
![Printing hundreds of indistinguishable QR codes before I could even scan them taught me two valuable lessons about cards and their functions. First, people are much more concerned with the service you provide than they are with your business card. Second, people are way more likely to show concern if you actually take the time to try and capture it.
For months, I would find myself tucking these little things in wherever I could; the palms of freshly shaken hands, amidst the bills and coins of the waitress’ tip jar, beneath various shots of whiskey, and even between the shelves of one or two Harvard bookstores. Did they generate the traffic I had guiltily dreamed for? [Insert euphemism for “hell no” here.] They did, however, put me in contact with all sorts of hard working, passionate people who had made a living off of their appetency for enterprising ideas.
So what do I hope to accomplish with these handy dandy conversation-enders? I’m not sure, really. With the last set playing part of such a significant change in my life, I wouldn’t know what to expect next though I do know that many of the people I’ll meet will be unknowingly relieved to see that my name and contact information are actually on the card this time around. Heck, they even allude to the industry I now eat, sleep, and breathe.
Anyhow, thanks moo.com, your product has not only given people a beautiful, high-quality, non-creeper way to keep tabs on me, they’ve also provided this blog with one more besotted post about cards. Another and I’ll be Pat Bateman.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc9o1pUtsY1qaqu4so1_500.jpg)
Printing hundreds of indistinguishable QR codes before I could even scan them taught me two valuable lessons about cards and their functions. First, people are much more concerned with the service you provide than they are with your business card. Second, people are way more likely to show concern if you actually take the time to try and capture it.
For months, I would find myself tucking these little things in wherever I could; the palms of freshly shaken hands, amidst the bills and coins of the waitress’ tip jar, beneath various shots of whiskey, and even between the shelves of one or two Harvard bookstores. Did they generate the traffic I had guiltily dreamed for? [Insert euphemism for “hell no” here.] They did, however, put me in contact with all sorts of hard working, passionate people who had made a living off of their appetency for enterprising ideas.
So what do I hope to accomplish with these handy dandy conversation-enders? I’m not sure, really. With the last set playing part of such a significant change in my life, I wouldn’t know what to expect next though I do know that many of the people I’ll meet will be unknowingly relieved to see that my name and contact information are actually on the card this time around. Heck, they even allude to the industry I now eat, sleep, and breathe.
Anyhow, thanks moo.com, your product has not only given people a beautiful, high-quality, non-creeper way to keep tabs on me, they’ve also provided this blog with one more besotted post about cards. Another and I’ll be Pat Bateman.
[video]
Saying yes to everything has been my conscious effort to open up to new opportunities and actualize intentions I would have ordinarily put off or have been too lazy to get to. It exposed me to new concepts of art, media, and consumption and even inspired better working and eating habits along the way (the trick is to do more of one than the other). Through all the introductions, I felt it feed and intensify an appetence for human relations. Of course, picking up on new bars, blogs, and beats were all fine too but being able to share them with just the right company is where it’s at for me.
All of these people, with their varying fixations, come tied to so many different passions and commitments that, often, we can’t help but want to be a part of them. Not so much to play a particular role within their projects but to understand how they came into existence. Do I care about what you do? Sure. Do I really? Of course not. I do, however, care for you and why it is that you do it.
Once I was open to this notion, inspirations snowballed and all sorts of unexpected characters found their way into my life. I think of the night I ran into the inscrutable 17 at some Rosemont dive I had never been to. He’d been there recording sights and sounds of a staged yet unscripted interview but after we arrived, he made sure to take long intermittent breaks to talk tunes and philosophy. A few weeks later, we shared half a case of warm beer and shot a commercial together. Go figure.
The incredible thing about this behavioural change is that it resulted in a type of prioritization, an unconscious reordering of what matters and what matters more. But while your brain rewires itself to convert a never-ending to-do list into a lifestyle, your pride takes the opportunity to use these newfound engagements for traction. You work, and you play, and you give yourself pats on the back for being able to accommodate them all while making sure you’re really seizing that day. In the early going, it’s just a matter of scheduling and active recommendation; shifting locations closer to one another; weaving between new friends; going to bed a little bit later and penciling brunch in a little bit earlier. That’s all.
But despite our ability to sometimes pick conversation out from thin air, many of us will ultimately succumb to the complexities of human contact. It can happen when we condition ourselves to facebook while microwaving lunch, or brushing our teeth, or loading that HD YouTube video. Multitasking ain’t what it used to be. Saturated pools of strangers move towards mobocracies and last-minute tweaks turn into ungraceful cancelations. Before long, you’re surfeited with overlapping commitments and forget why you had said yes to them all in the first place.
For 26, there were simply no more dates for all the open-ended rain checks, no more hurry-up beers to drink and make amends, and certainly no more room to develop a deteriorating connection. One beautiful part of saying yes is that you’re free to ask the questions you like in order to gain and regain assurance. Once stripped of this privilege, the unresolved diffidence can consume you. Our once indelible parallels were now so faint and unconvincing that we couldn’t even dream of, let alone suggest recovering from such a distance. And, as quickly and as intensely as our friendship began, it ended — all the yesses neatly funnelled into an uncontested no.
In the last year, I’ve watched a fair share of double-booked events cancel each other out, many of them because of misinterpreted words or innocent actions that furthered the invidious situations. What worries me most is that not only do we recognize and accept our egocentric tunnel vision, we are actually willing to defend it. Friends become chores, and chores become excuses but being technically right about something will never do you much good just as postponing rendezvous after rendezvous will never fully clear your schedule. Somehow we continue down the same path, refusing to reveal or even admit to the discomfort it causes. We rationalize it as the basic result of being too busy, one that we are unashamed of. Our plates full, our inboxes swamped. Are we really too tired, or are we just tired of them?