2013

Beards

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Fucking beards.

I hate that I even have to think about this shit. When I shave I look like I’m 12 and when I don’t shave I look like a submission to homeless or hipster. Googling to try to find out how how I might trim it to give a different result is like a choose your own adventure story in reverse – no matter what question you start with and no matter what links you follow you eventually end up on beards.org which I’m convinced is just a front, a work safe thumbnail porn wankfest for bears. So there’s that. Which isn’t exactly helpful.

And the beard police are so agressive about keeping their numbers up – unless you have a beard and you’ve mentioned considering not having a beard in front of a certain type of bearded dude you can’t imagine the hate glares you get. Like you are letting everyone else down, or breaking your membership vows.

Look, I’ve got nothing against people with beards. I’ve just never been confortable with mine, yet have had one the vast majority of my adult life thanks to being too busy lazy to shave.

On top of that it’s another decision that I have to make but really don’t care about. I hate making decisions where I don’t care about the outcome at all. Can’t I just close my eyes and throw a dart? If only it was that easy.

And no matter what I do, inevitably I’ll run into someone who I haven’t seen in a little while who will start off the conversation with a comment about my face. Yeah, that’s not awkward or anything. Thanks for ensuring crippling self consciousness for the rest of our little chat.

To make this even more fun, thanks to the stupid TSA thinking anyone with a boarding pass is a terrorist I can’t travel with a razor or scissors or anything so I have to build in assumptions of weeks on end with no modifications at all. Totally sucks.

Answers

As far back as I can remember I always felt like everyone around me had it all figured out. I have vivid memories of sitting in class in 4th and 5th grade looking up and down the rows of my classmates, just staring in awe of them all. They knew something I didn’t. Not that I’d missed out on something, I don’t ever recall these feelings being that I was somehow lesser, rather that everyone else was just somehow exceptional. They’d cracked the code somehow – maybe someone slipped them the cheat book – I dunno, but they all knew what was up. I remember feeling pretty lucky to be surrounded by such enlightened people and hoping that some of it would rub off on me. I was generally a quiet kid for most of these years because I spent so much time just watching everyone.

I think I probably felt that I’d also somehow slipped through, because certainly if everyone knew that I didn’t have all the answers as well I wouldn’t be allowed to hang out so naturally I spent a lot of time fearing that my secret would get out. So everyday was kind of a race, could I pick up enough from everyone, fast enough, to keep them all thinking I was their equal?

This hasn’t really changed since then. If we’re friends today know this – I’m positive you have all the life answers figured out and there’s nothing you can say to me that will change my mind.

And I say that fully knowing that none of us have any of this shit figured out.

I know that we’re all making every bit of this up as we go.

I know that, and yet I refuse to accept it. Because I’m constantly impressed and blown away by people around me. I can’t believe the things they pull off. I’m awestruck at their will and determination. I’m beside myself at their gumption – that could only come from being somehow tipped off. They must have a pro account or something.

I’m not saying this to make anyone uncomfortable. We’ll all just keep on going under this same charade, after all it’s worked well for us all this time. I’m just saying it because I’ve been on a plane all day and bounced through too many timezones and am on too much sinus medication so I’m letting my guard down a little. But I’m onto you. All of you.

I always have been.

Anti-Analytics

I turned off all forms of analytics on my blog a long time ago. While knowing the traffic was interesting, it was too easy to dig in and start assessing things. Why is this post getting so much attention, why hasn’t anyone linked to that post. Every time I mention X I get linked from Y. Etc, and then suddenly it’s a game rather than a place I can just spill my thoughts. I always thought of a blog as a place where I can write what I want, how I want, on my own terms. Once I start thinking about what topics “my audience” wants me to write about then I’m no longer calling the shots, I’m catering to someone else. And worse, to someone else I don’t even know.

As my blog isn’t ad driven, I’m not really worried about traffic at all. If I talk about things that are interesting to other people then great, if I don’t then no worries. The point is I have a place to talk about things I want to talk about. Because ideally, if you are reading my blog it’s because you are interested in some of the same topics I am, or at least interested in what I’m interested in. If you are out searching for specific topics only, there are plenty of not-my-blog sources for you to indulge in.

I’ve always liked this about blogs. That by reading someone’s blog you could get to know them to some extent, know a bit about what interests them and what makes them tick. I don’t think you get this with twitter, facebook, instagram or anything like that as those are geared from the beginning to be about publishing to an audience. People frequently share tips about what and how to approach them to gain followers. They aren’t as personal. A blog, a web log if you will, seems to be to be a little more of a direct link to the authors head. That’s what’s always appealed to me about them anyway.

So while I’m back here kicking the dust off things and trying to find my voice again, I’m happy to see folks already responding (both here and elsewhere) but the promise I want to make to everyone is that I’m not going to be strategic in what I write about here. I never have been and I won’t start now. This will be an ongoing glimpse at what is on my head at the time. Different topics will bounce around, sometimes posts will be longer, as with a couple of topics I’m already working on – sometimes shorter, like on days when I’m traveling or offline most of the day. Though I will make the effort to put up something new every day, if I’m going to do this right I think that’s important.

Attachment

My friend Michael wrote a blog post (As an aside, I’m so excited to be writing blog posts linking to friends blog posts again) listing a few specific things you can do to improve your life. It’s a list worth reading just to consider even if you don’t put every suggestion into play. The first one is the thing that really jumped out at me.

Don’t sleep in the same room as your phone.

The oft controversial Tim Ferris suggests something similar in his 4-Hour Workweek, recommending to avoid checking email in the mornings and evenings.

While different specifics, the goal here is the same. Spend the last part of the day and the beginning of the next with the people and environment you’ve chosen to surround yourself with, rather than on the whim of whatever is happening in the rest of the world. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never laid awake at night caught in the refresh loop on my iphone checking email, twitter, tumblr, a few news sites, email, twitter.. etc. Or that I’ve never woken up in the morning and grabbed by phone to see what time it is, and upon leaning it’s 3 hours earlier that I needed to wake up notices I had some new email and some new replies on twitter and then spent the next hour awake in bed on my phone. In fact, I do that several times a week.

Now seems like as good a time as any to give this a shot.

Cloaking Device

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Given that I’m vegan, and that I travel a lot, I’m often asking people if they know where I might find some good vegan food. I used to ask people who live in these places I travel to because I figured locals know all the secrets. It was not uncommon for me to be told I would be starving because their city had no options at all for me. In fact, some of the cities where I’ve had the best vegan food in my life, have been cities where locals told me there was no vegan food to be had. The important part of this story is that the locals weren’t vegan. They didn’t think their city had any vegan food because they’d never looked for it. It might have been right in front of their faces (or on the same street as their house as it was in one occasion) but they were obvious to it. It wasn’t on their radar.

Turns out there’s a lesson here. Just because something isn’t apparent, doesn’t mean it’s not there. It could be hiding right in front of you.

I try to think about this from time to time, though honestly not often enough. It’s easy (for me) to fall into the trap of expecting things to be obvious. The solution should be obvious. The next step should be obvious. The path to take should be obvious. I have to remind myself that just because the solution seems like taking the next step down this obvious path, that maybe there are other options. Less obvious ones that might be right in front of me but I can’t see them because they aren’t on my radar. It’s like they have a cloaking device.

I would love to say that I’ve found a great way to discover these unseen paths, but I haven’t. I don’t have the answer. Sometimes I find them, sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, sometimes it’s because I didn’t look, sometimes it’s because I probably looked in the wrong place.

I almost never ask the locals where the vegan food is anymore. I ask other vegans. And now anywhere I go, within minutes I have personal recommendations from people I trust. I feel like I have a cheat sheet. It’s like my secret posse, and one of the benefits of subcultures. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently all of my life. More on that soon, but there’s a lesson here as well. It’s just not as obvious.

Floored

KaffeeKüche - Vienna
Start typing. Select all. Delete. Stare. Stare. Stare. Type. Stare. Select all. Delete.

Today was a travel day. Travel days can be hard. Today was one of the harder ones.

Packing bags from a month in Vienna, lugging them across a city, making sure the kid doesn’t get lost en route. Boarding passes, clearing security, waiting for the plane, boarding, flying, landing. Dealing with luggage and trains and changing trains and train stations and walking and finally getting to the new hotel in the new city.

No food. No coffee. Sinus infection. Pseudoephedrine.

The first day of the new year comes to a wrap. I’m sitting on the floor in the bathroom with my laptop and sloth speed wifi while the rest of the family tries (though from the sound of it unsuccessfully) to get to sleep. Lights out in the room, curtains drawn. I’m awake and restless. Looking at Tumblr. Reblogging shit.

Kitties and titties and Otakugangster are the best Tumblrs in the world, for the record.

Good night Paris. Tomorrow you better deliver some falafel.