Derek Gentry

A Meeting of the Men!

2011-12-18T08:13:00.000-05:00

From the beginning, the experience of having Here Comes Your Man published in Turkey has remained stubbornly abstract for me. Since I've never been to Turkey or met any of the other people involved, my whole journey has comprised a collection of e-mail messages and an artist's rendering of the book cover.

BUT...that all changed this week when I received a package from Istanbul. Beneath its brown paper, which bore the tatters of its 5,000 mile journey to Auburndale, were six gorgeous copies of Senin Erkeğin Benim, one of whom you can see above, getting to know his American cousin. (And for those of you who recognize the swanky photo shoot location: Why yes, we did get new placemats! Aren't they lovely?)

I just can't express how pleased I am with the way Senin Erkeğin Benim came out, and how grateful I am to my new friends at Arunas, who did such a wonderful job with the book. I've been carrying a copy around with me ever since they arrived, convinced that if I stare at its pages hard enough, that I'll eventually begin to understand Turkish.

Until that happens, I guess I'll just focus on the few words that I do recognize. As it turns out, Ding Dongs, Double-Stufs, and Froot Loops are the same in every language.

I'm Your Man!

2011-10-21T06:00:00.000-04:00

Okay, are you ready for this?

No, probably not, but it’s coming anyway...

It’s the Turkish edition of Here Comes Your Man...available in November from Arunas Yayıncılık in Istanbul!

As it turns out, the phrase "Here Comes Your Man" doesn’t make much sense in Turkish, so the publisher has aptly retitled the book Senin Erkeğin Benim or "I’m Your Man." If you’re familiar with the Leonard Cohen song of the same name, I think you’ll agree that it describes our hero Garrett pretty well.

It feels a little strange to have my book translated into a language that I myself can't read, but I’m excited about it nevertheless. I'm so excited, in fact, that I’m thinking of hiring someone to translate the Turkish edition back into English, just so I can see what it’s all about. (Based on the cover, it seems like it might be 25-30% sexier in Turkish, no? I’ll let you know!)

And for any of you who are still convinced that I’m making all of this up, you can now view my book's official listing on the publisher’s website. Believe me now?!?!

I’d like to send warm thank-yous across the Atlantic to Gökhan Fırat, Sevgi Çevik, Alevcan Kol and everyone else at Arunas who worked to make this a reality. As a teenager, I dreamt of writing something that would be read in other parts of the world, but I never really expected it to happen. (And now if I can just convince Sting to hire me as his sax player, maybe my teenage self will finally stop sulking!)

I Stand Autocorrwcted (or, Bye Bye Blackberry!)

2011-08-12T07:00:00.001-04:00

I do a lot of writing on my phone, so when I finally traded my gusty old Vlackberry foe an iPhone earlier this year, I was worded about how the loss of the phasic keyboard might affect my productivity. A friend put my mind a ease by explaining that, yes, you'll prbababy male more mistakes typing on a touchscreen phone, but the key is to just keep moving and Lerner the iPhone's autocorrect system clean up the mess behind you.

And giddamnjt, he was right—it's amazing how well it works! For example, in tha last sentence, I originally typed "amazng," but autocorrect jumped in and fixed it for me. And then—this is my favorite part—when I backspaced toward the corrected word, the system politely offered my orioknal spelling back to me as if to say, "Oh I'm sorry, would you prefer to look like an idiot? Please, be my guest..."

(Note: In my head, autocorrect speaks in the voice of Academy Award winning actress Emma Thompson. The voices in your head may vary.)

Of course there are times when autocorrext can Ben too aggressive, like someone trying to foodie your sentences but always guessing wrong. This came up recently when my wife and I visited a tapas restaurant and I tried to use my phone to make analyst of the dishes we were ordering. The names were in Spanish, but autocorrect fixed that for us, magically transforming our "Queso de Cabra Montanes" into "Wheel de Caber Monotones." (Alas, monotones were out of season so we had the Armadillos de Pollo instead.)

Most of thr time autocorrect works flawlessly though—so well in fact that i'm becming a sloppier and more imparient typist. Ive gotten so reliant on autocorrext's omniscience that I find myself becoming enraged when it fails to recognize some glob of gibberish I've typed. What?!?! You seriously cant see that "fefiningely" is supposed to be definitely!?!? Are you ducking stipple? Give me a rickety break!

But all in all, I've been delights with my switch to the iPhone. Sure, I might inadvertently ask a friend if they're "untreated" when I mean "interested," or tell them that "I undress" when I mean to say that "I understand," but thabksukky, I havent done both in thr same message yet. And even if I lose a few extra minutes at the supermarket hunting for "Chicano" yogurt instead of "Chobani," I still come out way ahead when you add up all of the frixkignn hours I wasted with my old Blackberry unsuccessfully trying to visit websites or use Facebook or listen to music or rake a decent photograph or, say, accidentally driving to New Jersey.

And really, who needs to write when I can play Angry Nirds whenever I want?

sent from my iPhone

Arriving Soon: Your Man in Istanbul!

2011-08-04T06:54:00.003-04:00

(original photo by dmboyer)

When I got the first e-mail from Istanbul, I assumed it was a mistake.

Call it a case of self-publisher's self-doubt, but I had trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that, after seventeen years of rejection in my own country, an editor on the other side of the world wanted to translate my novel into Turkish.

He probably meant to e-mail some other author, I thought.

So I reread the e-mail another 15-20 times.
It's probably just a hoax, I told myself. Maybe all of those Nigerian princes have started masquerading as Turkish publishers?

So I checked the publisher's website.
Wow...that's a really convincing website for a hoax. Beautiful, even. Of course I don't understand any of the Turkish, but...

So I checked with my friend Steven Savile, a British author who lives in Sweden. Steve has been published all over the world, and I figured this would give him a laugh.
His verdict: Looks genuine to me, mate. (Unrelated confession: I love it when Steve calls me "mate.")

And I think that's when it finally started to sink in:
Holy crap. They really want to publish my book in Turkey.

That was three months ago, and while I still haven't been able to rule out the possibility that I'm actually in a coma having an incredibly long and intricate dream, I'm just gonna go with it.

So here it is:
I'm excited to announce that Arunas Publishing in Istanbul will release a Turkish edition of Here Comes Your Man this November!

(Woo-hooo!!!!!)

Several people have already asked if I'll be embarking on a Turkish book tour, and I think the answer to that question really depends on whether any of this is actually happening in the first place. I promise you this much though: if this is all just a crazy coma-dream, then I’ll definitely be touring Turkey this fall, accompanied by Oprah, Lady Gaga, and Lord Voldemort. Oh, and I'll be naked too. (So let's all keep our fingers crossed for that possibility, shall we?)

So anyway...what does this mean for you, my English-speaking blog visitors? The way I see it, you've got two choices:

Take a leave of absence from work and/or your family and enter a full-time language immersion program so you can read the Turkish translation of Here Comes Your Man when it lands this fall.
Buy a copy of the English e-book of Here Comes Your Man for 99 cents today.

It's totally up to you—I will support you 100%, whichever path you choose. But on the off-chance that you opt for #2, I've prepared a handy collection of buying links below.

For a limited time, you can download the original, untranslated, English e-book of Here Comes Your Man to your Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, or Android device for just 99 cents! (Or something similarly affordable in your local currency!)

Amazon US - $0.99	Apple US - $0.99
Amazon UK - £0.99	Apple UK - £0.99
Amazon DE - EUR 0,99	Apple CA - $0.99
BN.com US - $0.99	Apple AU - $0.99

Definitely let me know if you end up learning Turkish though—we'd love to have you on the book tour. Voldemort claims to speak the language, but for some reason I just don't trust that dude.

A Few Things Google Thinks I Want To Know About Lady Gaga*

2011-07-12T22:43:00.002-04:00

*None of these were exactly what I was searching for, but now I can't stop thinking about the last one.

Magnetic Resonance Imaginings

2011-06-18T11:14:00.001-04:00

I recently spent some time in close proximity to an MRI machine, and despite my hopes that a freak electromagnic mishap might transform me into a some kind of superhero—MRI Guy? Refrigerator Magnet Man?—I seem to have emerged from the encounter as the same old Derek Gentry that I’ve always been.

However...the experience did prompt me to contemplate the super-abilities that I would enjoy possessing if my life were more like a comic book. And so, in no particular order, I would gladly accept any/all of the following:

Cookie Monster's Bottomless Belly
The ability to eat as much dessert as I want without ever feeling sick or increasing my cholesterol score. (And yes, I do realize that Cookie Monster just makes a big mess without actually ingesting anything, but that's his problem, not mine.)

Julia Child's Time-Lapse Oven Magic
The power to imagine any kind of food and then open the nearest oven to discover a fresh serving of said deliciousness that someone else had conveniently "prepared earlier." (This would pair nicely with the Cookie Monster ability above.)

Bob Vila Reclino-vation
The ability to gut-renovate a house in 16 tidy episodes, all without separating my backside from the couch.

Doggie Doodar
The ability to locate and dispose of piles of dog-doo in the dark without having to step in them first (which is my current technique).

Babel-vision
The ability to look at something written in any language and just, like, understand it. (I recognize that this is really just a skill that one could acquire through years of study, but please keep in mind: I'm lazy and impatient.)

Twitter-vision
The ability to look at Twitter and and just, like, understand it.

Tofu No-Fu
The power to resist ordering tofu dishes in restaurants where they obviously have no idea how to prepare tofu, probably because the cook is such a devoted carnivore that he/she believes that it's actually impossible to make tofu taste good in the first place.

Neil Finn's Voice
The ability to sing along with Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over" without my voice cracking and warbling like twelve-year-old. (Honestly, if forced to choose just one super-power from this whole list, I'd pick this one. Sad but true.)

Suitcase ESP
When packing for a trip, the ability to foresee exactly what I will and will not need so I can stop hauling around those shorts that it will never be warm enough to wear, or the jeans it will be way too hot for.

Traffic Clairavoidance
I'd love to know intuitively how to avoid all traffic, but failing that, I would settle for knowing exactly what caused the traffic I'm already stuck in and the name and e-mail address of the person(s) to blame.

1990 Mind
The ability to achieve pre-Internet levels of focus and concentration. (And let's face it—this is the most far-fetched item on my list.)

What about you? What super-abilities would you design for yourself?

America runs (into traffic) on Dunkin.

2011-06-01T07:00:00.003-04:00

Things which I have personally observed to induce temporary psychosis and/or a flagrant disregard for traffic laws in 41.6% of Massachusetts residents:

yard sales
Dunkin Donuts locations

Symptoms include: uncontrollable vehicular swerving, braking, and U-turning. May cause pedestrians to dash willy-nilly across busy, multi-lane roadways.

NOTE: Preliminary research indicates that Starbucks locations exert entirely different behavioral effects on their devotees, compelling them to purchase books and music collections that help simulate the experience of being at Starbucks when they are (tragically) forced to be elsewhere.

FURTHER NOTE: The "yard sale effect" appears to increase exponentially with the number of families participating and the volume of broken, worthless crap they have to sell. In case of emergency, please refer to this handy color-coded scale:

condition	response
single-family yard sale	chaos
two-family yard sale	bedlam
three-family yard sale	pandemonium
multi-family yard sale in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot*	anarchy & mass hysteria

*Theoretical scenario only; never tested outside a laboratory environment. (Thank God.)

A Partial Inventory of Things I’d Rather Not Touch

2010-11-26T09:25:00.000-05:00

photo by Joey Rozier

I'm not normally a germophobe, but now that we've entered the season in which everyone seems to be feverish, phlegmy, or recovering from some Unspeakable Gastric Event, I've definitely become sensitized to all the ways germs can be transmitted from person to person and (inevitably) to me.

I actually have fond memories of childhood colds, missing a day or two of school, stretched out on the couch watching reruns of “Alice” and “Diff'rent Strokes.” But as it has with everything else, adulthood has sucked all the fun out of illness. Now if I'm under the weather and I want to stay home, I have to take a vacation day. And really, is there anything worse than being sick on vacation?

My anti-germ strategy is as simple as it is ineffective: don't touch anything that a sick person might've touched in the last 72 hours, including: door knobs and handles, drawer pulls, light switches, and elevator buttons; other peoples' computer keyboards, mice, and cell phones; toilet handles, faucet handles, and paper-towel dispensers; shopping carts, self-checkout touchscreens, gas pump payment keys, all of the world's credit card signing pens, and anything in an ATM vestibule; and, naturally, the steering wheel and shifter of the loaner car I had to drive while my car was in the shop the other day.

Yes, this can be a challenging way to live, especially when you start counting the sheer number of doors you pass through on a daily basis. But this is why someone invented elbows, sleeves, and hand sanitizer, right?

I was bowling with my family recently when it struck me what a fantastic germ distribution apparatus the ball return system is. You grab a ball, rub your germy hands all over it, and then roll it off down the lane. The machine shoots the ball right back and somebody else grabs it—perhaps even someone from the next lane over—and adds their own personal microbial mélange to its surface before passing it along again. This happens over and over again…pretty much forever! Yum!

[Note: I love bowling so much that none of the above deters me in the slightest, so if you're ever in the mood to roll a few strings—something I recognize will now be even less likely—give me a call. I'll bring the Purell.]

Anyway, despite my efforts, I awoke one morning a few weeks back with a jagged lump in my throat that just wouldn't go away, and all I could think was, Where did I go wrong? What did I touch that I shouldn't have touched? And most importantly, Whose fault is this!?!?

If I had to put money on it, I'd blame the FedEx guy. He ambushed me with a package at work, popping out of nowhere and demanding a signature on his little electronic clipboard. Seeing no escape, I reluctantly signed using that plague-ridden plastic stylus he'd been dragging from delivery to delivery for his entire career.

But as I was signing, I wondered, Why is this even helpful? You can't read my signature...I could scribble anybody's name there. Couldn't he just snap a photo of me holding the package? That would be infinitely more sanitary, probably more useful, and way more fun. Just imagine the scrapbook he would've amassed by the end of the year! Like your picture? Send it to Facebook! Order Christmas cards! Or a framed 8 x 10!

Once I actually get sick though, it's almost a relief because I've got no choice but to look on the bright side. There's a passage from Douglas Coupland's novel The Gum Thief that I think of often in this regard:

“Well, it turns out that being sick is actually good for you. Colds and flus are like these constant refresher courses that teach your body how to combat cancers when they first occur. Some people think that the moment you get your diagnosis you should run out to the children's coloured plastic ball pit at IKEA and coat your body with kiddy germs and get as sick as you can. While you're in the process of fighting colds and flus, the cancer gets taken out with the trash.”

This quotation is from a character named Bethany who, even within the book's fictional world, is just a Gothed-out Staples employee with no medical training, but I find it reassuring nonetheless. I'm planning to have it engraved on a wall plaque for when I finally open my own bowling alley.

The Spider and the Moth

2010-08-27T07:31:00.001-04:00

Have you ever been reading on the couch late at night perhaps even just starting to nod off when in the dim periphery of your vision you glimpse movement something creeping across the armrest toward you something that as you snap to startled alertness resolves into the shape of a large-ish spider with striped legs and an athletic build BUT even as freaked-out as you are you don’t actually want to kill this spider because you know that they eat all of the other bugs you like even less so you grab a glass and you attempt to catch the spider in the glass but this spider moves so fast that it actually seems able to teleport itself six inches in any direction so every time you think you’re bringing the glass down over the spider it’s already somewhere else and you’re becoming just a little concerned that maybe the next time you bring the glass down the spider will be on your face but finally you trap it YESSS! and you cover the open end of the glass with a catalog and carry the whole silly contraption out the door across the front porch and down the walk chuckling uneasily as the spider hurls itself against the glass until you reach the sidewalk where you release it which is to say that you use the glass to fling the now furious spider as far from you as possible WHEW! and then heading back into the house just as you’re re-crossing the porch a teensy-weensy little moth that had been idly circling the porch light now flies right into your ear and disappears like RIGHT DIRECTLY INTO YOUR EAR CANAL and for a second or two you don’t hear anything at all and you’re wondering

Wait…did that really happen?

and then as if reading your mind which it might actually be able to do from its current vantage the moth starts flapping madly inside your ear or trying to flap anyway but there isn’t nearly enough room in there so it’s just like fltfltfltfltfltflt in your ear and you’re thinking oh crap oh crap oh crap it’s facing the wrong way it’s just going to push itself deeper and then

Oh wait…is it gone?

but then fltfltfltfltfltflt and now you’re digging at your ear and stumbling into the house oh crap oh crap oh crap and it’s flapping madly and then it stops and it’s flapping and then it stops and you’re trying to jam your finger in there but you don’t feel anything and you’re wondering How far can it go? How far is my ear drum? Will it stop at my ear drum or can it keep going and get totally stuck somewhere up against my brain? Can I somehow get tweezers in there and pull it out? and it just keeps flapping and flapping and CRAP! I’m going to end up at the hospital to get this fricking thing removed and in front of the bathroom mirror now you get a flashlight and point it into your ear not because you hope to see anything but because you remember some Saturday-morning cartoon PSA about how holding a light up to your ear will lure a bug out and fltfltfltfltfltflt and how could this possibly happen often enough to warrant a PSA? and anyway it’s not even working because the idiot moth is stuck facing the wrong fricking direction fltfltfltfltfltflt and you don’t want to jam anything in there because then you might have a dead squished moth stuck in your ear and THEN how would you get it out? and fltfltfltfltfltflt you’re digging and starting to imagine fltfltfltfltfltflt how you’ll describe this to the nurse and wondering whether fltfltfltfltfltflt you could actually even wait in the emergency room with this thing flapping without tearing your ear off or at least without losing your mind which you may’ve already done anyway fltfltfltfltfltflt and you’re jamming your finger in there and fltfltfltfltfltflt becoming more and more hopeless fltfltfltfltfltflt when

Oh…

There it goes…

the moth arcing away toward the ceiling
as if nothing happened

I should probably kill it now, but…

you can't concern yourself with that now because you’re already rummaging for the Q-tips so you can clean that ear LIKE IT HAS NEVER BEEN CLEANED BEFORE and what’s more you are NEVER AGAIN going outside at night without ear protection or maybe you’ll just wear your iPod ear buds 24/7 NO POD JUST BUDS WHATEVER IT TAKES SO THAT THIS NEVER, EVER HAPPENS AGAIN!

Has that ever happened to you?

Yeah, me neither.

Testing the Invisible Fence

2010-07-22T07:00:00.002-04:00

I've been writing fiction for more than 20 years now, and collecting rejections for nearly as long.

For me, the rejections really started flowing in 1993, when I applied to graduate programs in creative writing. I shipped writing samples off to six schools and somehow received eight rejections...

The University of Arizona just kept sending them, one after another, three in total. And naturally, the arrival of each subsequent envelope would lift my hopes anew: Maybe they changed their minds! Maybe it was a mistake! Or a computer gli—

Oh…fine. Whatever.

No, it wasn’t a good feeling, but it was an excellent preparation for a writing career—perhaps even better than attending any of the programs themselves. Since then, I’ve been rejected another 200 times—by magazines, journals, literary agents, and publishers large and small—which averages out to one rejection every month for the last seventeen years.

I’m still not sure what to make of that information, whether I should be proud or ashamed. At the very least, it seems interesting that an utterly unnecessary behavior could persist for so long in the face of such unrelenting negative feedback.

The only thing I've been able to compare it to is a dog and an invisible fence. Most dogs learn within minutes that, if they cross a certain line, they’ll get shocked. But occasionally you’ll find one who just keeps at it, hurling himself into that fence again and again, getting zapped every time. Is it perseverance or stupidity? I have no idea, but after 200 shocks, it probably doesn’t matter.

Old School Rejection
I finished writing my first first novel (everybody has a few, right?) in late-1996 and began submitting it to agents and editors shortly thereafter. The publishing world hadn’t fully accepted e-mail yet, so my query process involved mailing out hard-copy letters with self-addressed envelopes, which would boomerang back to me with rejections two months later.

Thank you for submitting, blah blah blah… These rejections were form letters in the truest sense—crooked, fading, third-generation photocopies of letters that probably hadn’t been re-worded since WWII, no longer bearing any sign that human hands had been involved in their production.

I did get a handful of requests to see my manuscript though, and although these flirtations all ended in rejection as well, those letters were often personalized, offering something meaningful (or at least entertaining) about what had motivated the sender to stomp all over my dreams.

My all-time favorite rejection came from an editor at the SOHO Press. He'd asked to see my novel, The Projectionist, which I was learning fell into the rather unloved "experimental" category. The editor sent back a hand-written card, which I still cherish. (Click the image below to enlarge.)

There are just so many things I love about this rejection. Who ever thought you could use the words oblique, quotidian, and banal in a single sentence? I also love the unflinching certainty of that last line: we could not possibly publish this successfully.

To this day, I’m still not sure if Bryan always intended to include the sentence tacked onto the card’s reverse side, or if that had been an afterthought, something he added only after realizing how harsh his initial assessment sounded. (I almost missed it altogether.)

21st Century Rejection
Then the Internet came along and ruined everything.

These days, no sane editor or agent would ever write a rejection as honest or as helpful as Bryan's because they wouldn’t want to invite a retaliatory cyber-assault from some unbalanced writer (which most of us are at certain times of the night).

So even if someone has all kinds of colorful thoughts about your manuscript, they’ll reject you as politely as possible without saying anything at all. It usually boils down to three words: “Not for me.”

Thankfully, we writers possess a heightened ability to read for subtext, so we know exactly what our rejectors mean anyway. Below are some different types of rejections I collected for Here Comes Your Man, and what each of them meant to me:

The plain vanilla rejection.
You send an e-mail query, and a week or two later, you get a form e-mail back saying something like “Thank you for submitting. I have to be very selective in what I take on. Taste is subjective. Best of luck at finding representation elsewhere.”

Translation: Your book was so mundane in its awfulness that I'm unable to respond with anything but a form e-mail. Nobody else will like your work either, but I’m not going to be the fool who tries to break it to you.

The plain vanilla rejection, extended dance mix.
Similar to the above, except the rejection takes 2-3 months to come back with the same message. That delay speaks volumes though, further implying: I am so busy and important that I’m just getting around to rejecting you now. Frankly, I’m surprised you even bothered!

The no-response rejection.
You send an e-mail query to an agent and spend the next several weeks wondering what they’ll think and when you might hear back. After three months with no reply, you finally realize that they probably glanced at your query the day it arrived, hit delete, and were finished with you forever. Whereas you, even now, are still thinking about them and wondering where it all went wrong...

The instantaneous rejection.
Once in a blue moon, you’ll get a rejection that comes back within hours, or even minutes. And sometimes it’s even personalized!

This is wonderful because it temporarily bats down your suspicion that the publishing industry—and maybe the whole world?—is controlled by androids and that you’re the only real human being left in the universe. This is almost as good as an acceptance. (Or so I imagine...)

Although, I did encounter one ugly variant of the instantaneous rejection: an agency read the first chapter of my book, requested the rest with great interest, and then form-rejected me less than two hours after I'd e-mailed it over. And still I wonder: what was so freaking awful about Chapter 2?

The delayed response rejection.
Occasionally you’ll get a rejection that initially masquerades as a no-response, but is actually something far more sinister. You send a query and don’t hear anything for a while, and then nine months later, when you no longer even remember who this person is, they send you a rejection out of the blue. It’s like having a total stranger run up to you in a crowd and punch you in the stomach.

Translation: I just found your query kicking around in my mailbox, and I was so offended by it that I couldn't help but respond!

Rejected No More!
But I’m done with all that now. Having published Here Comes Your Man in April, I’m enjoying the first rejection-free period of my adult life.

Let me expand that timeline for you, just so we're clear:

I finish college, apply to grad school, and the rejections start rolling in.
This continues for the next seventeen years. While I’m working for three different companies, getting married, buying a house, having a child, and giving my diabetic cat twice-daily insulin injections, the one absolute constant in my life is literary rejection.
April 1, 2010—yes, April Fool’s Day—the rejections stop.

I can't express how much my life has changed, post-rejection. These days, people even e-mail me out of the blue to tell me how much they enjoyed my book. People I don’t even know! No, I’m not "high or something," thank you very much—that’s just how I smile, which is something I do more often now!

And honestly, I wouldn’t be bothered if someone e-mailed me to say how much they hated my book, because that would still mean they’d read it. And that’s really all I ever wanted—to write something and share it, and have people respond to it and maybe even derive a little enjoyment from it.

And then of course to have it adapted into an Academy Award-winning film directed by Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, Mira Nair, Krzysztof Kieslowski (deceased), Terry Gilliam, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, or Jonathan Demme.

That's next on my To Do list anyway. But I’m confident that there won’t be any rejection involved with that process.

My New Fitness Regime

2010-07-10T06:56:00.001-04:00

As a writer/computer geek, aerobic activity has never come naturally to me, but I've long recognized its value in compensating for the things that do come naturally to me…like cookies, brownies, and cake.

I've spent years searching for the ideal fitness program and (fingers crossed)—I may've found it. But before I get into that, here's a summary of the other activities I've tried and my lame excuses for abandoning them all.

Running
It's easy to understand why so many people run—it's cheap, it's effective, and it fills you with a wonderful sense of superiority over everyone who doesn't run. I experimented with running briefly during college, and I immediately saw how I might've become addicted to it, if not for the fact that actually I hated it with every fiber of my being.

I really want to like running, but frankly, running makes itself pretty hard to like, what with all the sweating, and muscle-cramping, and traffic-dodging, plus the incessant pounding on your joints, and even worse, my incessant whining about being tired and wanting to quit. (OMG, the whining…)

Nevertheless, I still have great respect for running as a means to get someplace quickly on foot. If I'm in a hurry, I'll power through my own protests and run like the pigeon-toed wind. And if I happen to be late for something like school or a piano lesson, I might even throw a 55-pound child on my back, just for the challenge.

But when I'm running for running's sake, my motivation evaporates. Try as I might, I've never been able to fool myself into thinking that I'm late for something important. I know exactly where I'm going: home. So why not just turn around now? Or better yet—just never leave?

It's fun to swim at the…Y-M-C-A!
When I was in my mid-twenties, I often swam laps at the YMCA after work. I've always loved swimming, that feeling of cutting weightlessly through the water, almost as if flying. There's something so meditative about it, a kind of quiet I find nowhere else.

But our local YMCA had a smallish pool, and if enough people showed up, we were forced to share lanes. This might work if everyone swam at the same pace, but there was always one person in the water who was more of a "floater" than a "swimmer," someone who also managed to remain oblivious to the fact that the rest of us were constantly fighting to pass them (preferably without colliding or getting kicked in the head), which I guess made the whole experience more exciting, but far less meditative.

I'm sure the floaters were lovely people in other areas of their lives, but I invariably despised them by the end of my swim, and I just as invariably ended up showering beside them, at which point they would talk my ears off in their slow and steady way, because floaters are also notoriously chatty, particularly once you get them naked (which I really don't recommend).

Looking back, I think my YMCA experience just delivered more sharing and togetherness than I was prepared for. Plus, I always left the building with that infernal song stuck in my head.

You know how it goes, right? Sing it with me! (Or just click the picture above to watch the video.)

It's fun to stay at the
Y- M-C-A!
It's fun to stay at the
Y - M - C – A!
They have everything for young men to enjoy,
You can hang out with all the boys!

(In my experience, it takes 23 hours and 55 minutes to rid yourself of "YMCA" once it's lodged in your brain...but let me know how it goes for you.)

Tennis
As a kid, I always thought tennis was something of a sissy sport. Then around the time I turned 30, I finally realized that I myself was something of a sissy, and I gave tennis a try.

And I loved it. Apparently I was a Labrador retriever in a previous life because, despite my aversion to running, I would happily chase one bouncing ball after another in all kinds of weather until I collapsed from exhaustion. For a brief, magical period—this was post-YMCA and pre-parenthood—I belonged to a tennis club and played there four times a week.

I only had one quibble with the club: their "tennis whites" dress code, which required that every article of clothing worn on the court be at least 50% white (to ensure that we all looked uniformly ridiculous I assume).

I'll never forget the day my partner got hassled by wardrobe security on the way out to play: he'd really pushed the envelope by wearing a striped shirt, and the black stripes appeared to be wider than the white ones. After some passive-aggressive sniping from both sides, he was finally allowed to play in the offending sportswear, and to everyone's surprise, the Earth continued rotating on its axis just as before.

But honestly, the club's dress code wasn't a big deal for me—I derived so much enjoyment from tennis, I would've played in lederhosen if they asked nicely (or even just hinted around a bit). In fact, I have every intention of re-joining the club as soon as possible, which is to say: the very moment that Congress finally extends days to 27 hours and money starts growing on trees.

And Speaking of Trees...
Whew—This is a long post, eh? Congratulations on sticking with me this far!

I'm pleased to say that you've reached the big payoff, where I reveal the fitness regime that has changed my life and given me the (marginally improved) body I have today: staring at lumber in my basement.

Yes, it sounded strange to me too, but you simply cannot argue with the results: improved cardiovascular performance, mood elevation, weight loss, slight hearing loss, and a few minor scrapes and bruises.

I'm not sure if the type of lumber is important—it our case, it's a collection of flooring scraps and decorative molding abandoned in our basement by our house's previous owners (see photo below).

Now, I don't think it's essential that you stand on an elliptical machine and flail all of your limbs as fast as you can while doing your lumber-staring, but that's my personal routine, mostly because our basement is completely packed with crap and the elliptical machine blocks the view of the lumber.

And I'm certain that you don't need to do this in a dim, damp basement so low-ceilinged that, while standing on said elliptical machine, your head just barely fits up between the floor joists, scarcely avoiding the plumbing, wiring, spider webs, and rusty nail-heads. (Not everybody will be lucky enough to make that work, so just do the best you can.)

But for me, the one absolutely essential element of the whole activity is finding some good music on my iPod and cranking it up so loud that it drowns out the sound of my own ragged breathing, the creaking and cracking of my 40-year-old joints, and the voices in my head that scream the whole time, "STOP IT RIGHT NOW I MEAN IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!!!!"

Note: If you do try this with the elliptical machine, do not bend down to scratch your knee while in motion, no matter how much it itches. Those handles may be padded, but you'll still feel it when they hit you in the face, and you'll feel it again when you fall backward off the machine. Just trust me on this.

But wait—there's more!
I know what you're probably thinking—there's no way you could improve on the experience of staring at lumber in your basement. Well, I thought the same thing…until I got an iPad.

With the iPad, I'm no longer forced to stare at lumber in my basement. Now I can stare at absolutely anything—art by my favorite authors, Twinkies, or even bunnies in high chairs. But of course I still choose to stare at lumber because I like it, and because it's the right thing to do.

And the iPad allows me to take the lumber with me everywhere I go. To the beach! To a restaurant! To the theater! Just imagine: lumber lumber lumber 24/7, but without any of the bulkiness or splinters!

Best of all, I can finally share my lumber with everyone I know. For example, our dog Hugo refuses to visit the lumber because he assumes, based on the distressing sounds I emit while exercising, that our basement is some kind of CIA enhanced interrogation / pet grooming area. But now even Hugo can enjoy the benefits of lumber-staring from the safety and comfort of his own crate. Doesn't he look like he's having a fantastic time?

Oh, whatever...

Don't mind Hugo—he's just in a snit about that Labrador retriever crack. Or maybe it was the tennis whites thing?

Writing Spaces

2010-07-02T07:00:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite bloggers, The Rejectionist, today posted photos of her writing room and suggested that others do the same. Anyone who knows The Rejectionist (a.k.a. Le R) understands that it's always best to do as she says, so I will. But first, a little background:

Once upon a time, we lived in a tiny house with a tiny office where I did all my writing. Then, we moved to a bigger house with, um...no office of any kind.

Which was an excellent thing, because it liberated me from the notion that I needed a quiet, comfortable space in which to write. And so, in the tradition of so many great writers before me (none of whom I can recall at this time), I've become a wanderer...a kind of literary hobo. In that spirit, here are two of my most frequent loitering spots:

The North End (of our dining room table)
10:30 p.m. - 12:00 a.m.

For 22.5 hours of the day, it's an ordinary dining room, albeit a rather small one with with four doors, three windows, and a closet. And then on the dot of 10:30—or earlier, or later, depending on when everybody else goes to bed—I open my laptop and the place goes absolutely bonkers, as the above photo illustrates.

2001 Saab 9-3 Viggen,
Mon-Fri, 12:15 - 12:45 p.m.

There's a certain stigma attached to non-driving activities that occur in vehicles, but I'm well past the point of such shame. On a typical workday, I inhale a sandwich at my desk and then drive off to a quiet, tree-lined street where I can write on my Blackberry for 30 minutes. (I respectfully decline to provide the address lest others try to steal my shady spot.)

Some might be surprised that I'd attempt any substantive writing on a phone, but I've found it to be better than a computer in several important ways: it's always in my pocket, it never crashes, and the web browser is sufficiently horrible that I'm never distracted by Facebook, YouTube, or even a certain someone's blog.

Book Club!

2010-06-26T13:52:00.000-04:00

I had no idea how much literary stardom would change my life.

Since the release of Here Comes Your Man, people have started recognizing me on the street (yes, mostly our neighbors), I get constant requests for autographs (particularly when paying with Visa), and the invitations to exclusive events just keep coming...

Okay, so maybe I've only been invited to one exclusive event so far, but it was a good one: the June meeting of my friend Carrie’s book group, which steadfastly excludes anyone possessing a Y chromosome. Unless—and here comes my big loophole—you happen to have written the book they’re discussing!

When Carrie asked if I'd be interested in joining them, I did my best to act cool and breezy, as if accustomed to fielding such requests, but...seriously? Lasagna and Ring Dings with seven women who all read my book? I wouldn't have missed that meeting even if it was being held in the wilds of New Hampshire (which it was), and even if they'd wanted to discuss the right & wrong ways to euthanize a chicken (which, um, we did).

And about the chicken thing: there are more wrong ways than I'd ever imagined, particularly if the chicken is suffering from acute smoke-inhalation, you’re already late for an appointment, and soiling your outfit is simply not an option. (But I think that's a topic for an entirely different blog. Perhaps Julie Powell would like to take it up?)

Regardless, we still managed to stage a lively discussion of Here Comes Your Man, which included a group effort to cast the inevitable film adaptation. A number of excellent actors were mentioned—Mark Ruffalo, Ellen Page, John Krasinski, Scarlett Johansson—all of whom we agreed would have to be younger, older, blonder, less blonde, or less handsome to fit any of the available roles. (One possible solution: have Mr. Krasinski direct it, and invent some new characters for the rest of them.)

As much as I love movies, I didn't volunteer any casting thoughts, worrying that rendering the official "author's opinion" might suck the fun out of the whole exercise. Having already written 89,000 words about these characters, I’m happy to sit back and let readers imagine whomever they like.

Although, while we're on the topic, there is one classic duo that I think would be fantastic as Garrett and Clay. The only real question: Would Bert be willing to shave his head?

I'd like to send out big thanks to the whole book group for hosting me and feeding me so well: Carrie, Carol, Astrid, Alison, Sarah, Kristin, and Liz (who brought the Ring Dings), and also to my friend John (who was present but barred from participation owing to his incontrovertible maleness).

See you all at the premiere!

A Dream Within a Dream, Within an Air Conditioner

2010-06-21T12:00:00.018-04:00

I have a tradition of lying to myself every year around this time.

Although the exact date is a moving target (like Easter, or Chinese New Year), this lie always coincides our first sustained wave of summer swelter, when our house finally becomes so unbearable for sleeping that I’m forced to haul our unholy trio of 70-pound window air conditioners down from the attic.

And I recognize that, to the untrained eye, this operation might appear a tad haphazard, almost as if the AC units and I are actually falling down the steep attic stairs together, but rest assured that every knuckle-bashing breath of profanity has been carefully scripted, and it's all part of a time-honored technique passed down over the generations (provided that none of the previous generations have actually killed themselves executing it).

Oh, and here’s the lie, the angry little mantra I mutter over and over throughout the process. I tell myself: "This is the last [flunking] time I will ever do this. Before next summer, we're [flunking] getting central [flunking] air."

It's a lovely little daydream, and I cling to it while dead-lifting the AC units into our house's decaying window frames, a step that spawns a new "replace all the [flunking] windows" daydream within the original...

Imagine having windows that go up and down like they’re supposed to? That actually keep the cold outside in the winter?

...And really, if you’re already having the "replace the windows" daydream, you might as well save yourself a few bucks and have the "replace our rotting shingles daydream" at the same time. So I do...

And with my attention thus divided during the job's most dangerous maneuver—steadying the AC unit in the window with one hand while lowering the balky sash with the other—there’s always at least one moment when I nearly lose my grip on everything and drop the air conditioner directly onto my car, sitting defenseless in the driveway ten feet below. (Alex, from downstairs: Need any help up there? Me: No, I've got it—thanks!)

But of course the car wouldn’t even be there if we could just rip down our dilapidated tin can of a garage and replace it with something sturdy enough to house a vehicle. Maybe a nice two-car garage with a finished second floor that we could use as an office? With enough room for a ping-pong table perhaps?

But by the time I’ve got the AC unit shimmed, wedged, and duct-taped into place, with that first sour blast of cool-ish air hitting my face, I'm already regaining the ability to distinguish between my daydreams and the facts, which are these: our house is old and ductless, and so retrofitting it for central air would be prohibitively expensive, although not quite as expensive as new windows, new siding, or new garages with second-floor offices.

Regardless, we don't have thousands of dollars sitting around for any of these projects, and even if we did, we’d probably just blow it all on fine wine, Twinkies and Silly Bandz.

I’m proud to say that this year was different though—I turned 40 recently, and I'm already seeing the benefits of my increased wisdom and maturity. This year, I even installed our air conditioners before the heat became totally unbearable. Sure, I still worked up a sweat, I still bloodied my knuckles, and I nearly lost two units right out the window. But I didn’t say [flunking] once, and I didn’t tell myself any lies.

No, we're not getting central air next year. Just the garage and the ping-pong table.

iPad, iKindle, iTwinkie?

2010-06-16T07:11:00.002-04:00

Amid all the iPhone 4 blah blah blah at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference last week, CEO Steve Jobs somehow forgot to mention the biggest, most magical Apple news of the year: Here Comes Your Man is now available in the iBookstore! And for just $2.99!

Yup, you heard right—$2.99 for 89,134 of my favorite words (with a few repeats) in electronic form.

For now, you can only access the iBookstore from an iPad, but iUnderstand that Apple will be iOpening the iBookstore to iPhone and iPod touch users iLater this iMonth. (iThink Apple iSpeak is a linguistic sibling of iPig iLatin.)

If you're as concerned as I am about maintaining the delicate balance of the e-book universe, you'll be relieved to know that I've simultaneously lowered the price of the Amazon Kindle edition of Here Comes Your Man to $2.99 as well.

Why so low? Well, I'm about to embark on a small advertising campaign, my first real effort to market my book to people who don't already know me (or my wife, or my daughter). Printing costs prevent me from pricing the paperback more aggressively than I already have, but electrons are cheap. My hope is that offering an inexpensive e-book will allow readers to try an unknown author like me with very little risk.

And honestly, I can't think of many interesting things you can buy for $2.99. A box of Twinkies maybe? Yeah, okay, that would be pretty interesting, but even still, you'd have to catch them on sale. (Don't ask me how I know that.)

(Note to self: contact Amazon & Hostess about cross-marketing opportunities.)

(Additional note to self: My book cover "man" appears to be Twinkie yellow—is that just a coincidence? And more importantly, could I possibly convince Hostess to bake a life-size Twinkie Man???)

Of course, e-books themselves are still unexplored territory for many readers, which is probably one reason why Amazon offers free Kindle apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone/iPad, and Blackberry devices. If you’re even a teensy bit curious about e-books, you can download the Kindle software (pictured below) and test-drive the experience without buying any hardware.

As much as I do love paper books, I'm beginning to see the advantages of their electronic brethren. Beyond allowing you to adjust your books' text size and even background color, they're easier on the environment, easier to carry, and far easier to read while eating a burrito. (Or a pizza, or a box of Twinkies...)

Physical books are still superior for certain purposes though. Years ago, when I was reading The Accidental Tourist for the first time, I remember becoming so exasperated with Macon Leary at one point that I actually threw my little red paperback clear across my bedroom. I can still hear the book's pages flapping in the air and the satisfying THWACK! of its spine smacking the wall. (And then I ran to retrieve the book, because I desperately needed to know if Macon ever smartened up.)

I'd probably never throw a $500 iPad across the room, no matter how Frisbee-like it might feel. But then again, this guy put one in a blender, so who knows?

This Is Your Brain on I-95

2010-05-07T10:45:00.001-04:00

For April school vacation, I drove my family from Massachusetts to South Carolina and back. I’m pretty sure we did some other stuff too—I vaguely recall something about a beach, and maybe some miniature golf?—but the 2,200-mile round-trip drive effectively erased everything else from my memory.

As you might imagine, I had a few thoughts during my 30+ hours behind the wheel. Very few thoughts, actually, most of them over and over again. Here are all six of them:

#1. Some deep-pocketed developer should buy a bunch of land and create a place of such concentrated Connecticutness that it can only be called East Newfieldingtonsbury. Will it ever be as posh or fashionable as West Newfieldingtonsbury? Probably not, but really, what is?

#2. The Commonwealth of Virginia manufactures some of the finest traffic you’ll find anywhere—interminable, impenetrable, and utterly inexplicable.

#3. Luckily, Virginia also has some excellent traffic signage. For example, a flashing display near Exit 162 informed us that Delays Continue Until Exit 148. I was skeptical at first—Fourteen miles of stop-and-go? At nine o’clock at night? But darnit-it-all-to-hell if that sign wasn’t right! Well done, Virginia!

#4. One Virginia sign was a BIG disappointment though: Speed Limit Enforced by Aircraft. I’m sorry, but if you're going to promise something this exciting, I want an attack helicopter to swoop down out of the sky, latch onto my roof, and forcibly slow me down. At the very least, I expect to have the opportunity to break the speed limit...somewhere. Otherwise, y’all should just get real and change the signs to say Speed Controlled By God-Awful Traffic.

#5. Our home state of Massachusetts is no signage slouch either. The examples of this are many, but my current favorite is: Speed Limit as Posted. I like the subtle implication that there are other, more mysterious regions where the speed limit is posted as one thing, but is secretly something else.

#6. If there were a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize for signage though, you’d have to give them both to South of the Border, the sprawling South Carolina roadside attraction (restrooms, "food," souvenirs, fireworks, etc.) that narrates its approach through 200 ethnically insensitive billboards spread over 350 highway miles.

Fill Up Yo’ Trunque Weeth Pedro’s Junque!
South of the Border: 65 mi.

Pedro No Shoot Ze Bool! Who Dunnit?
South of the Border: 58 mi.

Pedro’s Weather Report: CHILI TODAY – HOT TAMALE!
South of the Border: 23 mi.

None of them are exactly funny, and many are just moronic, but they gain power as a complete body of work, wearing you down with their persistence and omnipresence. Case in point: I never wanted to stop at South of the Border, and yet…I still kinda wanted to stop there.

And right now? I sorta wish I could go back…

Getting to Know Eileen Cook

2010-04-23T08:17:00.004-04:00

I've always said that the best thing about writing Here Comes Your Man was making so many wonderful new friends.

Well, it has recently come to my attention that the vast majority of these new "friends" are imaginary, but no matter—I'm 97% sure that novelist Eileen Cook is a real person, and she more than makes up for all the rest.

Eileen is the author of three novels—Unpredictable, What Would Emma Do?, and Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood—all of which I absolutely loved. A few years ago, Eileen did me the great favor of reading an early draft of Here Comes Your Man, offering a slew of valuable feedback. She also wrote the beautiful blurb that now graces my book's back cover. (Okay, so now she's starting to sound too good to be true, even to me...)

Eileen recently interviewed me on her own blog, and now I have the pleasure of hosting her here. (I'll let you decide for yourself whether or not I made her up...)

You’ve said that Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood was inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo—what drew you to that particular story?
My undergrad degree was in English Literature. Because I think it makes me look smart, combined with my obsessive hoarding disorder when it comes to books, I still have most of the books I had to read in University. Now that I have time, I enjoy pulling them off the shelf and reading them again without worrying about a test or having to write a paper on some obscure image or theme. When I was re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo I realized how delightful it is to watch someone go after revenge. Most of us think about it at some point, but to see someone really go for it, makes for a great guilty pleasure. I started thinking how the story would play out in a high school setting. I loved the idea of being able to go back to high school under an assumed identity and right some wrongs. The story wrote itself quickly which leads me to believe I had some unresolved issues from high school.

Your protagonist Helen gets a chance to start over with a whole new identity. Is there anything from your own teen years that, given the chance, you might go back and do differently?
I can think of approximately a zillion things that I would do differently. Note to my teen self: There is such a thing as hair that is "too big." Duran Duran is not the best music known to man. Invest in Apple stock. Getting a part in the school play is not the most important thing that will ever happen in your life. Even though you will get stood up for your junior prom and you will be crushed, later you will realize he was a huge weenie and you had a far better time going with your friends.

Of course the problem is that if I took all the pain out of my teen years then I wouldn't have anything to write about now.

I read in another interview that your wish to be a writer started pretty young. Do you remember the first piece of fiction you ever finished and what it was about?
My parents framed for me the first story I ever wrote. It was in second grade, I called it "George the Sighkyatrist." (That would be Psychiatrist - except for the fact I couldn't spell). While the story does have a plot, a man seeks psychological support for sleepwalking, it isn't exactly a page turner. In fairness, it was only one page long. I think it is safe to say I have improved.

I also have notebooks full of angst filled poetry that I wrote as a teen. I made emo kids look upbeat. I was a huge fan of the repeat line.

My heart throbs,
throbs,
throbs,
A dark and empty drum.

I plan to burn these notebooks before I die.

Your Simon & Schuster profile says that you’ve read A Prayer for Owen Meany five times. John Irving is one of my favorite writers too, so I’m curious—what keeps bringing you back to Owen Meany?
I love this book. I find something knew in it every time I read it. I love the themes of destiny and redemption and the characters pull me in every time. It's a wonderfully quirky book, but somehow he pulls it together so that it feels honest and true. I'm thinking it takes special talent to make stuffed armadillos and killer baseballs work.

Everyone who visits your adopted hometown of Vancouver comes back talking about how beautiful it is. Is it really a wonderful place, or do they just brainwash the tourists?
Despite common wisdom that would have people believe Canada is all igloos, mounties, and lumberjacks, there is more. Vancouver is great and we rarely have to cope with stray moose in our backyard. (Although if I'm honest we have had a couple of bears.) When we first moved here in 1994, it was supposed to be for a year. We just never left. Now I say "eh" and watch hockey. I've gone native.

Now we just have to get you and your family to come visit.

What are you working on now? (And when do we get to read it?)
I am working on a YA that was inspired by The Scarlet Letter. (I knew that English degree would come in handy) It is tentatively titled The Vindication of Hailey Kendrick and will be out next January. Stay tuned as the title may change. The truth is, I stink at titles. How it is possible that I can write a whole book and be unable to come up with a catchy title is a mystery to me. This is why I need an editor.

Thanks for coming, Eileen!

Amazon, je t'aime!

2010-04-07T23:59:00.002-04:00

Okay, so Amazon was a little slower than Barnes & Noble to start selling my book. And yeah, it hurt a little...I thought Amazon and I had something pretty special.

All is forgiven now though, because Amazon has not only started selling Here Comes Your Man in the US, they've also got it listed on their sites in the UK, France, Germany, and Japan!

For the moment, there do seem to be some international supply issues—the French site lists the book as "temporairement en rupture de stock," which sounds extraordinarily painful. But still...it's exciting just to be listed.

I'm still waiting for Amazon to activate the LOOK INSIDE! feature that will allow you to flip through a few pages online, but until they do, you can view a 14-page PDF sample right here. (And if you don't have Acrobat on your computer, you can view the sample through Google Docs here.)

Ready or Not, Here Comes Your Man!

2010-04-01T07:15:00.000-04:00

I approved the final proof of Here Comes Your Man on Tuesday, and I've been anxiously checking Amazon.com for a listing ever since. Just for kicks, I decided to give Barnes & Noble a try, and there it was...

Am I excited? Well, my hands are shaking and I'm having some difficulty breathing...does that count?

Holy crap.

For the record, the pricing here is a little wonky—the book is supposed to list for $12—but B&N has discounted it below that anyway, so it's all good!

Hopefully Amazon adds the paperback to their system soon. Even if they don't, I should have the Kindle version available over there later today, for those of you who prefer your books sans papier. I'll also try to get a sample of the book up somewhere here...and then the entire Hysterical Publishing team and I are going to take a nap!

Keepin' It Real

2010-03-27T07:15:00.003-04:00

After several days of proofing my proof of Here Comes Your Man, I finally submitted the FINAL corrected files to the printer on Thursday. (Now I just wait for one more proof...)

Whew...this process has given me newfound respect for copyeditors, proofreaders, and fact-checkers. Even though I've been over this manuscript a million times, I was still fixing weirdnesses to the very last minute: missing or extra words...punctuation problems...gender-switching siblings...over-hyphenation...excessive ellipsizing...even misspellings of words that I made up myself. (Seriously...spell check is useless with those.)

However, I am proud to say that my book is now officially flawless—it contains ZERO typos or errors of any kind!

One small note: those of you who do read Here Comes Your Man may encounter things that look like mistakes, but please don't be fooled—these are actually what I like to call "authenticities," simulated imperfections reintroduced to the text at great expense (much like the factory-made rips in the Gap's "Authentic" jeans).

Why do this? Well, the book had become so polished, I feared that people wouldn't believe I'd self-published it...and what would be the point of that? It would almost be like McDonald's making hamburgers that tasted like real beef, or someone creating "folk art" that was actually attractive. And nobody wants that.

A note on the process: Yes, I could've saved a few bucks by shipping this "imperfecting" work overseas, but my conscience wouldn't allow it. Plus, nobody does screw-ups the way we does them right here in the good old U.S. of A. (Except maybe Toyota, and I don't want my book to terrify people.)

Yet another note: If your eventual copy of Here Comes Your Man still isn't real enough for you, I can help! At no extra charge, I can paw through it while eating pizza, spill a soda of your choosing on the cover, or even dunk it in the bath. Also be sure to ask about our special treatments for pet lovers (slobbery, nibbled corners) and new parents (pages fused with oatmeal cereal).

One final note: If you find "errors" that actually interfere with your enjoyment of the text, please let me know—I don't want to be overly authentic. And I've never liked folk art.

Proof!

2010-03-23T21:08:00.001-04:00

I'd just finished my lunch yesterday when I heard a heavy KA-CHUNK! at the front door. The UPS guy was already fleeing the scene when I arrived, but he’d left behind the proof of Here Comes Your Man. So here it is, in all of its glossy, paperback glory...

And here's the back cover, complete with one of those oh-so-sexy barcode tattoos all the young books are getting these days...

And the best part—there are lots and lots of words inside! (Very few of them made-up!)

Late last night, Here Comes Your Man spent some time mingling (alphabetically, of course) with the other books in my library. It was gratifying to see them all get along so well. Even Breakfast of Champions behaved itself for once (it went through an ugly little phase where it kept trying to pee on all the other books).

So, am I done yet?

No, not quite. Now I need to read through the proof, just to make sure the printer didn't add any characters or change the ending on me. But barring a nervous breakdown or similar catastrophe, my April 1st deadline still seems to be within reach!

Burning the Midnight Oil at Both Ends

2010-03-18T06:35:00.001-04:00

While things may seem quiet here right now, rest assured that the Hysterical Publishing team and I have got our shoulders to the wheel and our noses to the grindstone preparing Here Comes Your Man for worldwide release.

Here's what we've discovered along the way: publishing a book is extremely time-consuming. (Who knew?) Thankfully, it's also kinda fun. Some recent highlights:

PROOF!
From the beginning, the self-publishing task that scared me the most was the page layout. I've designed a number of flyers and newsletters over the years, but never anything close to this size—89,134 words spread over 352 pages.

I'm glad to say that I've now crossed the layout task off my list. On Tuesday, I uploaded the exterior and interior files for Here Comes Your Man to my printer and ordered a proof of the paperback. As you might imagine, I'm pretty excited to see this prototype when it arrives next week, but I'm also relieved to have someone else babysit the little monster for a few days.

BLURB!
Funny and talented Vancouver novelist Eileen Cook was kind enough to read Here Comes Your Man, and even better, she gave me a fantastic blurb:

"With wit, heart and intelligence, Derek Gentry's Here Comes Your Man reminds readers that you never know what is around the next corner or on the next page. Those who enjoy Nick Hornby will devour this book."

I've told Eileen that I'm going to print her blurb on a t-shirt that I can wear when I need a boost, but honestly, visiting her blog usually has the same anti-depressive effect without adding to my laundry pile. I also just finished reading Eileen's latest teen triumph, Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood, which I highly recommend, whether you're actually a Young Adult or just recall what it was like being one.

PHOTO!

In my favorite development thus far, my daughter Lilah agreed to take my author photo for the back cover of Here Comes Your Man. Though our travel budget was limited, we still managed to shoot in several exotic locales, including the dining room, the playroom, and the front and back yards (the latter being quite dangerous because of the giant spiders reputed to live there).

Spiders aside, Lilah and I make a pretty good photo team: since she's only 4' 3", all of her shots make me look tall and powerful, and she never fails to make me smile (yes, that's a smile you see there). She also works for free (as long as you're willing to feed her, clothe her, and put her through college).

The Blurry Eye of the Beholder

2010-03-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

It was my eighth-grade social studies teacher who, after watching me squint at the blackboard, first urged me to get my eyes checked.

I felt silly visiting the optometrist—I had enough friends with legitimate vision issues to know that my eyes weren't that bad—but eventually I went, and the results bore out Mr. Martinez's impression: nearsighted with a touch of astigmatism.

I wore glasses for the next eighteen years, mostly for distance at first, but eventually all the time. They just made so many things clearer—street signs, movies, sheet music—that wearing them became a habit. Unfortunately, I also had other habits, like dropping my glasses on driveways and sidewalks, and sitting on them, usually just after getting a new pair.

And then, eight-or-so years ago, having scratched and bent my latest pair beyond usefulness, I just stopped wearing them. I didn't feel like coughing up $300 for new ones, so I decided to try getting by without. And mostly, I did fine. If I couldn't see something, I just squinted harder or moved closer. Soon enough, I forgot that I'd ever seen the world any other way.

When I finally returned to the optometrist last spring, he asked what had brought me in. I told him that I'd recently become more uncomfortable driving at night. He nodded; this was the most common reason people visited him.

I first wore my new frames when taking Hugo for a walk one night. I certainly didn't need glasses for this activity—I just wanted to start getting comfortable with them, to work through that dizzy, new-prescription feeling.

Even in the dark, the difference was remarkable. The tree in front of our house, once just a shadowy mass, resolved into the outlines of droopy spring leaves, tinged yellow by the streetlight.

Then I looked up, and instead of a brilliant blob I saw the crisp crescent of the moon, the shaded portion still discernible against the even darker sky. It was the one thing that no amount of squinting would ever bring into focus, the one thing that I was powerless to get closer to, and it was beautiful.

The next night, I would confirm that driving was indeed easier. But I still wonder, why in seven years did I not miss the moon?

moon photo by jpstanley

Hysterical Publishing: Because we're all a little hysterical on the inside.

2010-02-23T06:57:00.000-05:00

When I decided to self-publish Here Comes Your Man, I naturally understood that the book’s success would depend on the selection of a sufficiently awesome name for my fake¹ publishing company.

So I started a list, and for the next two weeks, everything I encountered gave me an idea that I liked for roughly four minutes. One night, my daughter was instructing me on the correct pronunciation of “opossum” and I thought: Nocturnal Books! The next day, I drove past the Riverside MBTA station and thought: D-Train Publishing! We ordered pizza for dinner, and I thought: Mushroom & Olive Press!

This little branding exercise reminded me of every attempt my high school friends and I made to start a rock band. Since we were usually short a drummer and/or bassist, we spent far more time thinking up cool band names than we did playing music. And since we weren’t even vaguely cool ourselves², we never had much luck with the names either.

In fact, the only band name I can even remember now was one jokingly suggested by my friend Matt’s father: "Joe Banana & the Bunch—The band with appeal." I briefly considered employing some version of that moniker for my publishing company, at least until I discovered that the Joe Banana name and slogan are both already in use by a real band. (On the bright side, the band sells t-shirts, which I plan to buy for my entire staff.)

So I continued brainstorming, a process I now realize isn't nearly as much fun without a group of teenage bandmates to snicker at my inappropriate suggestions. Eventually, I circled back to my very first idea: Hysterical Publishing.

I’ve always liked the word hysterical—its sound and architecture as much as its divergent connotations. For a while, Here Comes Your Man was actually called Hysterical & Useless (a fragment from the Radiohead song “Let Down”). And I've also noticed that sticking "hysterical" in front of just about any "-ing" word improves it tremendously: hysterical accelerating, hysterical accentuating, hysterical accessorizing, hysterical acclimatizing etc. (Note: there are several thousand more -ing words here in case you're already bored with this post. My personal favorite: absquatulating.)

But anyway...with the name decided, I just needed a snazzy logo to back it up. And since Hysterical Publishing's Chief Illustrator once again blew all her screen time for the week playing Wii Sports Resort, I was forced to sit down at the computer and work something up myself. I think you'll agree that the results were pretty awesome, even employing a rather Joe Banana-esque color scheme:

Now, a few naysayers within the Hysterical Publishing team have suggested that this logo is perhaps 10-15% too awesome (i.e. manic and distracting) for use anywhere on our otherwise minimalist cover design. But even if that does prove true, it will not mean that this effort was a complete waste of time. On the contrary, the new logo will be emblazoned throughout the Hysterical Publishing campus, as well as being the centerpiece of the outdoor advertising campaign we're rolling out this spring.

Oh, and in case you can’t quite make it out, the pattern of 1s and 0s washed faintly across the logo spells "Hysterical Publishing" in binary code. (See—I told you I wasn’t cool.)

¹Correction: Hysterical Publishing received its first piece of junk mail this week and thus is no longer fake or imaginary.

²Shocking, I know. Though I should clarify that, in the years since high-school, my friend Matt has acquired a certain full-bearded, acoustic coolness that continues to elude me (despite anything my kindhearted cousin Jennifer might tell you).

Here Comes Your Man

2010-02-11T20:30:00.000-05:00

It gives me great pleasure—and just a hint of queasiness—to announce that my novel Here Comes Your Man will be released on April 1, 2010 by Hysterical Publishing.

(woo-hoo!!!)

Now, as exciting as that sounds, there are a couple of caveats I should share:

About the publisher:
Hysterical Publishing is an extremely small, independent press that has (to my knowledge) just one employee: me. So while I do plan to talk about myself in the third-person as much as possible, you should know that this is really a self-publishing effort. I’m handling everything from cover art, to page layout, to satisfying the diva author’s incessant demands for more PBJ sandwiches and Diet Coke. (And if this self-publishing venture follows the script of most others, I will also be buying the bulk of the books myself as well.)

About the release date:
Since Hysterical Publishing is such a tiny operation, they can't actually guarantee that Here Comes Your Man will be released on April 1st. They say they're going to try really really hard, and they've promised that, if the book isn't released on April 1st, it will definitely be released at some time before or after that. (And that's way more than any other publisher has promised me, so I'm going with it.)

About distribution:
Once Here Comes Your Man is released, whenever that might be, you’ll be able to get it in both paperback and e-book format from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and a variety of other outlets. (And if my daughter has her way, one of those other outlets will be a little stand in front of our house, where you’ll get a handmade "friendship bracelet" with every book.)

Anyway, I think that’s enough fine print for now. What’s the book about?

Whenever people ask me this question in person, I usually look down at my shoes and say something like, “Uhhhhhhhh…”

Lucky for you, this is not a real, in-person conversation, so you can just read the book's back-cover blurb instead. Here goes...

Here Comes Your Man

Meet Garrett: 30-year-old computer geek, master of irrational optimism, and serial-kisser of women who (it turns out) don’t like him that way. After three blurry years of business travel and inadvertent celibacy, Garrett is so ready for a serious relationship that he’s a little bit dangerous.

Inspired by a romantic near-miss on a flight home to Seattle, Garrett hurls himself into the deep end of the dating pool, determined to find happiness no matter how miserable it makes him. Too bad the women he falls for don't share his sense of urgency: Froot Loop sculptress April worries she’s warping his personality, cynical attorney Corinne suspects he likes her too much, and upstairs neighbor Meryl just wants to be friends.

Garrett refuses to give up though… well, at least until he does. But sometimes, after you’ve finally abandoned hope, you find that someone else hasn’t given up on you.

So that's my big announcement for today! I'll be blogging more in the coming days and weeks about books, carrot cake, Andre Agassi, and the whole self-publishing process, so...stay tuned! Or at the very least, drop by on April 1st to see if the Hysterical Publishing team and I can hit our deadline: We guarantee you a book, or a really solid excuse!

Born from jets; hoping for rebirth.

2009-12-30T12:30:00.003-05:00

I still remember the Saab that got me—a dark red 1978 99 Turbo that I spotted at a donut shop when I was nine. It was a startling vehicle, with its clamshell hood, crazy wrap-around windshield, and rakish, swooping hatch. To me, it looked like some kind of spaceship, but cooler than anything George Lucas could’ve imagined. Even the nameplate seemed otherworldly: SAAB. I remember thinking that I’d probably never get a chance to ride in anything so exotic.

But just a few years later, my father began working for a Swedish firm, and his company car was a blue 1984 Saab 900 Turbo. Riding in its cockpit for the first time, feeling the whoosh of the turbocharger that seemed ready to lift us right off the pavement, I was hooked. I’ve owned four different Saabs since then, two of which are still in my driveway.

Like most Saab aficionados, I was never happy about GM’s dulling influence on the company, but I also grudgingly recognized that, without GM’s investment, Saab might’ve disappeared years ago. Still, that knowledge hasn’t made it any less painful to watch GM's recent treatment of Saab, first trying to sell them off like some toxic asset, and later announcing that they would just shut them down.

The American media’s Saab coverage has been spotty, so I’ve been following the story on a Swedish news site called The Local. Multiple articles there have suggested that GM rejected an initial bid from Dutch carmaker Stryker because it was backed by Russian investors, and “GM was reportedly concerned about the transfer of technical know-how to Russia.”

That one really had me scratching my head. Sure, Saabs have always featured some nifty engineering, but does the company really possess some secret technology that simply cannot fall into Russian hands? And if said technology does exist, why hasn’t GM exploited it to, you know, make money?

I'm beginning to suspect that GM is content to let Saab die because they'd rather not see the brand succeed under someone else’s stewardship—a turn of events that would just underline GM's own failure. And perhaps GM doesn't want any of their future vehicles—be they Chevys, Opels or Vauxhalls—to be forced to compete with a reinvigorated Saab, whose owners have always been among the world's most loyal and enthusiastic. Maybe that mysterious Saabist devotion is the real "technology" that GM is hesitant to sell.

As of today, GM has reportedly reopened the door to potential buyers; here's hoping that they can work something out. If not, maybe I'll see if I can track down that 99 Turbo from the donut shop, or an old 900 like Dad's—both cars are still more original and inspiring to me than anything Detroit has produced in the last thirty years.

Free Couch! (cushions not included)

2009-11-23T07:00:00.047-05:00

Two weeks ago, we put our old couch out on the curb. We were actually hesitant to let it go—we'd had it for nearly ten years, and it was still quite comfortable—but we needed the space, and we were sure that someone else would give it a good home.

Within an hour, a couple in a minivan stopped to claim the couch. They said they wanted it for their playroom—they had young children, in addition to a teenage son—but they needed to clear some space in their van before they could haul it away. The plan was that would take the cushions and pillows immediately, and then the man and the teenage son would return shortly for the rest of the couch.

It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. It was two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon; I figured they’d be back before dinner. But while other people stopped to inspect the couch (now looking a little naked), there was no sign of the couple in the minivan, either that day or the next. They just never came back.

And I just keep asking myself, Why?

I can understand changing your mind—maybe they figured out that the couch wouldn’t fit in their playroom. But still, wouldn't you at least return the cushions so that somebody else could use the thing? How much trouble could that possibly be, especially if it meant saving it from a landfill?

Since I don't like to think ill of people, I've been trying to imagine a scenario that would excuse this couple’s behavior. So far, I've only come up with three possibilities, summarized below. Since I never got their real names, I’ve just referred to them as "Regis and Kelly."

1. The 24 Theory.

Regis and Kelly were actually undercover counterterrorism operatives who had just discovered an explosive device hidden in the “Seasonal/Juice/Candy” aisle of our local Star Market. Using our couch cushions to fashion a makeshift blast suit, Kelly had successfully defused the bomb, saving dozens of lives and literally hundreds of dollars in tacky holiday decorations.

As a token of his gratitude, the store manager presented Kelly with a gallon jug of store-brand cranberry juice. Caught up in the excitement of the moment, Kelly attempted a celebratory swig from the unwieldy bottle, but just ended up spilling cranberry juice all over our herself and couch cushions, staining them irreparably.

2. The Memento / Dory Theory.

A tragic trapeze mishap in 1994 left Regis and Kelly afflicted with anteretrograde amnesia, a rare brain disorder that prevents them from being able to store new memories. And so, three minutes after pulling away from our house, Regis and Kelly forgot that they’d ever stopped. Upon arriving home that night, they were stunned to discover that their minivan was packed with couch cushions of every conceivable color and size.

Agreeing that this was probably just another one of Regis Jr.’s teenage pranks—in reality, Regis Jr. is now 30 years old and running for Massachusetts' open U.S. Senate seat—Regis and Kelly stacked all of the cushions on the curb for the morning trash pickup.

3. Raiders of the Lost Couch

Regis and Kelly were actually renegade "recyclers" (aka curb cruisers, dumpster divers, or sidewalk stalkers) who, shortly after leaving our house, were captured by a tyrannical junk cartel. Dragged to the evil trashlord's headquarters/two-car garage, they faced their longtime nemesis—we'll just call her "Kathie Lee"—who had discovered our cushions and correctly identified them as part of a rare late-90s Crate & Barrel Apartment Sleeper. Kathie Lee threatened Regis and Kelly with unspeakable tortures unless they revealed the couch's location.

"I'll never tell," Regis scowled. "You don't scare me anymore, Kathie Lee."

"Oh no?" Kathie Lee said, flicking on a karaoke machine.

Two days and 273 Christmas medleys later, Regis finally snapped and agreed to lead Kathie Lee to the couch. But by the time the trio arrived back at our house, the couch had disappeared...

They wondered: Had it been carted it off by some less-picky trash-picker? Or had it, separated from its beloved cushions, died of a broken heart and ascended directly to furniture heaven?

Or maybe—just maybe—the original owner couldn't leave the fricking couch blocking the sidewalk forever, so he'd had to haul this decushionated behemoth to the garage—by himself, if I had to guess—pivoting, dragging, and flipping the thing end-over-end, its fold-up bed frame periodically springing out at him like some enormous mechanical tongue. And maybe the couch is still sitting in his garage—alongside his old washer and dryer and everything else he can’t bring himself to throw out—waiting for someone to knock on his door and ask for it.

Or maybe we’ll never know what really happened…and maybe it’s better that way.

Teen Wolf Wearing Ray-Bans

2009-11-14T07:00:00.005-05:00

As I've mentioned before, people visit my blog for a variety of reasons, most of which involve looking for someone or something else. They search for "snacks to regulate blood sugar," and Google or Yahoo magically mis-leads them to a post about my diabetic cat.

I feel a twinge of guilt every time I see hits like that in my Google Analytics report—my blog certainly isn't going to help anyone control their blood sugar—but I do enjoy my little glimpse of the things people search for:

best things about working in information technology
lost or corrupted user profile in Vista
how do you say ‘fan club’ in japanese?
use of freeze by dates
derek shortened
queasyness at bedtime
i'm not the man i thought i was
teen wolf wearing raybans

That's all pretty mundane stuff—I mean, who hasn't been gripped by the need to see an adolescent lycanthrope in glamorous eyewear? But every once in a while, I'll encounter a search imbued with such passion that it practically jumps off the screen:

a dog keeps peeing on the grassy strip between the curb and sidewalk who owns it

This one scared me because, very briefly, I worried it might've come from some disgruntled neighbor. Thankfully, Google indicated that this visitor actually lives in Iselin, New Jersey, a place Hugo and I will be sure to steer clear of.

Over time, I've noticed that certain searches seem to transcend geography. For some reason, I see hits like these coming in from all corners of the globe:

blackberry change life
blackberry changes people life
blackberry change my life
blackberry will make my life better
sugar snacks
blood sugar snacks
snacks good for blood sugar
snacks to regulate blood sugar
un gateau
ce n'est pas de gateaux
ceci n'est pas un gateau

The Blackberry hits, which arrived from as far away as Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Africa, just depress me beyond words. And while I totally understand all the blood sugar queries—diabetes is a global issue—it's harder to guess why people everywhere are also searching on "Ceci n'est pas un gateau." Though in a surreal sort of way, one search does answer the other, non?

Snacks good for blood sugar?
This is not a cake!

But by far the most curious search to bring anyone to my blog has to be:

he peeing long moan good

I have no idea what this person was looking for, but I’m pretty sure it was inappropriate, if only grammatically. And for some reason, my blog is the #1 Google result for this phrase.

I've always wanted to be #1 at something; I guess this is it.

My Old, Familiar Friend

2009-09-19T09:00:00.003-04:00

Two weeks ago today, I took my old friend Spalding to the vet, something I'd done so many times over the last sixteen years. Unfortunately, this trip wasn’t like any of the others; this time, I came home with an empty carrier.

I'd known this day was coming, but that didn't make the occasion any less sad. As it turned out, diabetes wasn’t Spalding’s worst problem—he also had a tumor on one of his hind legs. By the time we discovered it, camouflaged within his gray fur and already encroaching on his knee, the only treatment was amputation. Given Spalding’s age and medical resume, we decided to keep him comfortable instead.

He had four good months after that, which I think was more than any of us expected. His limp gradually worsened, but he still hopped up onto the couch every night and sat purring beside me while I watched TV or wrote. And that's how I'll always remember Spald: a warm, happy shape beside me on the couch.

And he actually made an excellent writing partner, except on those rare occasions when I attempted to use a pen. Spalding never met a pen he didn't want to rub his face against, so he would chase it back and forth across the page, purring and lunging and knocking my hand off course. It kinda drove me crazy sometimes. But now, of course, I miss it.

Weapon of Choice

2009-08-30T12:10:00.000-04:00

It’s ten-thirty on Thursday night. Lilah and Alex are asleep, Hugo has been walked, and I’m in the dining room, trying to write.

But now Hugo appears beside me, wide-eyed and whining. I run through the list of things that might be troubling him:

Does he have water?
Yes.

Is there a mouse in the kitchen cabinets?
I find no evidence of this, but much like the existence of God, it's a difficult thing to disprove.

Did the cat die again?
No, Spalding is still breathing..and now he’s meowing at me because I touched him.

Is Hugo about to have explosive diarrhea?
I take him outside again, and he casually attempts to pee on the new Japanese maple. When I snap the leash, he pretends to have been aiming for the fence.

Is Hugo distressed by that new rawhide, resting so tantalizingly atop the china cabinet?
I take the rawhide down and give it to Hugo. He runs off to stash it in his crate with his other rawhides, and then returns to whine at me again.

Would Hugo prefer that I write in the living room?
I relocate myself to the couch, which is far too comfy for productivity at this hour. Hugo is still upset though, pacing back and forth in front of me…

…and that’s when I finally see it, the source of his agitation: there’s a fly in the house.

This is very bad news, perhaps worse than all of the other possibilities combined. Something about a fly’s buzzing tickles the most primal parts of Hugo’s brain. If I don’t banish this thing, Hugo will be barking and chasing it around the house all night, pausing only to chew out his frustrations on unsuspecting shoes and books. And none of us will sleep.

My fly-killing skills are notoriously weak though, a point that was driven home by our cat Theo a few years ago. I'd been chasing this monster fly around the house, flailing and cursing at the thing for a good ten minutes, when it made the mistake of buzzing past Theo, half-asleep on a chair. Without even rising from his reclined position, Theo snatched the fly out of the air, dragged it straight to his mouth, and ate it in front of me.

I'd never been so impressed and revolted at the same time.

But Theo has since passed away, Spalding has no interest in insects, and Hugo is all enthusiasm and no skill. I grab Lilah’s slim paperback of Henry and Mudge from the table and, with little hope of success, begin tracking the fly. It circles just out of reach, resting first on the ceiling, and then on the inside of a lampshade.

When it finally stops on the wall, I strike. The fly lurches back into the air, stunned but alive, and Hugo lunges after it. His snapping jaws knock the fly off course, but it's just another glancing blow.

Seeking a more substantial weapon, I grab a magazine from today’s mail. The fly lights on the blinds and I strike again, knocking it to the windowsill while Hugo barks in near-rabid excitement behind me. One more bash, and the fly is finally dead.

With equal parts pride and relief, I get a tissue to collect the corpse and clean the errant bug-bits off the murder weapon, the Fall 2009 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. I recognize that there will be karmic consequences for what I've done, but at this point, I'm ready to accept a few lifetimes as a dung beetle if I can finally get some fricking work done.

But as soon as I return to the couch and the computer, so does Hugo. He's whining and wedging his head up onto my lap, every bit as agitated as before.

What now? Another bug?

No, it seems that Hugo just doesn’t understand what happened. He never saw the dead fly, so he's convinced that it's just hiding somewhere, waiting to start buzzing again.

Or maybe Hugo knows exactly what happened, and this is just his way of asking, "Aren't you going to eat that?"

Better Life Through Blackberry

2009-06-18T17:30:00.005-04:00

One of the best things about working in information technology is that, even after 15 years, I still learn new things every day.

One afternoon last summer, for example, I learned that you should never answer your cell phone in a bathroom. This might seem like a no-brainer, but I’ve discovered that when something starts buzzing in my pocket, my irrepressible instinct is to make it stop.¹ On this occasion, I also experienced an untimely loss of motor control, and—splash!—I got my first Blackberry the next day.

If I’d known how completely that Blackberry would change my life though, I would’ve tossed my old Motorola RAZR in the toilet much sooner.² So for anyone who might be contemplating Life on Blackberry, here’s an overview of the key benefits:

Always Connected!
Now that I carry my e-mail with me everywhere, I never miss an important message. Whether I’m driving to work, watching my daughter’s dance recital, or just trying to eat my dinner, I get:

BZZT!—Hot deals from Dell!

And then BZZT!—25% off Photo Mugs at Kodak Gallery!

And also BZZT!—Amazon has some exciting products to recommend based items I bought as gifts for other people!

And how could I live without BZZT!—The Gap is having a sale on flirty summer skirts!

And also, BZZT!—Your Amazon order confirmation!

And furthermore BZZT!—Your Amazon shipment notification!

And don’t forget BZZT!—Yet another Amazon shipment notification! Because your electric nose-hair trimmers are coming from a separate warehouse!

And on a related note, receiving separate alerts for every single message³ has revealed how little of my correspondence comes from actual human beings, liberating me from the delusion that I have a lot of friends. (Sure, it hurts a little, but I'm growing from it. And when I get blue, I just order more stuff from Amazon.)

Always Sharing!
My Blackberry’s digital camera and 3G Internet connection has also changed the way I look at the world. Now I can take a low-res photo of anything I see and instantly upload it to Facebook, whose proprietary ImageCrappening™ technology will render it totally unrecognizable even to me. (How did I ever live without this?)

And on a related note, this capability also earned me a smirking reprimand from a supermarket manager, who stopped me from photographing myself in their security camera display.⁴ I'd been thinking that the picture would make a cool Facebook profile photo, but it turns out that I’m just a complete moron. Which is really good to know. (No pain, no gain, right?)

Always Antisocial!
One of the most overlooked Blackberry benefits is the ability it gives you to avoid eye contact with people you don’t want to talk to. Here’s how it works:

The moment you sense someone approaching, take out your Blackberry and stare down at it seriously. As long as you DON'T SMILE, everyone in the area will assume that you’re absorbed in some high-level business activity—maybe destabilizing the credit markets, or shipping American jobs overseas—and they will leave you alone.

If, on the other hand, someone were to see you fiddling with an iPhone, they would know immediately that you were just screwing around. Not only would they interrupt you, they might even ask to play with your iPhone, getting their greasy fingerprints all over it. This is something that I promise will never happen with a Blackberry.

Always Exploring!
The Blackberry’s built-in GPS, combined with VZ Navigator’s turn-by-turn driving directions, has taken me places that I never would've gone without it. On a recent drive to New York City, for example, VZ Navigator lost its GPS fix on us just as we were approaching the George Washington Bridge. This sent VZNav into a Tourette’s-like froth, during which it exhorted us to make a series of impossible turns onto side-streets that we couldn’t even see from the canyon of I-95. “Turn left onto Pinehurst Avenue! Turn left onto Washington Avenue! TRAFFIC INCIDENT AHEAD—5.6 MILES!!!”

It was all very exciting. So exciting, in fact, that we missed the one we turn actually needed—exit route 95 onto route 9A—et voilà: Welcome to New Jersey!

I shudder to think: if we'd been following those silly Google Maps directions, we would've missed out on that magical $8 ride back through the Lincoln Tunnel. I know that sounds expensive for a mere 8,000 feet of roadway, but when you calculate it out on a cost-per-hour basis, you see that the Lincoln Tunnel is actually one of Manhattan’s most affordable attractions. Particularly at rush hour.

Always Learning!
With the Internet always at my fingertips, I never have to wonder about anything anymore. Instead, I just look it up on IMDB or Wikipedia, interrupting the flow of every conversation to answer important questions like, "Who was the guy in that movie with so-and-so?" and “Is tofurkey made from soy or seitan?”

And while the answer to the former question is invariably Charles Durning or Dan Hedaya, the latter answer really depends on whether you’re referring to Turtle Island Foods' Tofurky™ products (capital T, no e), or if you’re using the more general word “tofurkey” to talk about some other turkey-like meat analogue. A word that, coincidentally, also has an extra e when compared to the analog in terms like analog television. And also an extra u, which tofurkey has either way I guess...

Sorry...what were we talking about?

¹I trace this impulse back to the day I inadvertently pushed the lawnmower over a nest of yellow jackets while wearing shorts. It's just a self-preservation thing.
²Note: This technique does not actually make a RAZR stop ringing.
³Yes, I know how to turn the buzzing off. But what would be the point of that?
⁴The supermarket rules as I understand them: they can take as many pictures of me as they want, but self-portraiture is a terrorist act.

Infinity Times Two

2009-05-21T18:59:00.025-04:00

Two girls, aged five and six, take seats at the dinner table.

5: I am so hungry right now.
6: Yeah, me too.
5: I'm so hungry I could eat your whole head off, if I was allowed.
6: But you wouldn't, right? Because I'm your friend.
5: No, I would. I'm serious. I would eat your head off right now.
6: But...would you eat your brother's head?
5: I would if I was allowed.
6: Well, I could eat the whole world and the universe.
5: And I could eat more than that.
6: And I could eat the whole day of school. I could eat the whole year.
5: Actually, I could eat even more than that.
6: Okay, well how about we just eat the same instead of boasting* about it?
5: Okay.

*Recent kindergarten vocabulary word. 6's teacher would be so proud.

I'm not the man you thought I was

2009-04-07T12:00:00.001-04:00

I recently discovered that some of you have come here looking for an entirely different Derek Gentry.

So, just to clarify: I'm not him. I'm me.

I can certainly understand the confusion. In addition to having the same name, this other Derek Gentry and I are roughly the same age, and we both work in IT. The difference between us, it seems, is that he has been accused of defrauding a scented candle company out of $800,000, whereas I...well, my rigorous TV-watching schedule just doesn't allow for projects that ambitious.

I will admit, however, that after visiting the alleged candle company's website, I sorta wanted to bring them down too. I can't really explain or justify this impulse…I guess it’s just a Derek Gentry thing.

According to HowManyOfMe.com, there are thirty-one Derek Gentrys in the US, something that I was blissfully unaware of until recently. But now whenever I come across one of us, I wonder, Is he a better Derek Gentry than I am? Has he more fully realized his Derek Gentry potential than I have? My conclusion: Probably. I’ve always suspected that somebody else could do a better job of being me.

I also wonder: Would I have become a different person if I'd been given a different name? I think I would. A judge in New Zealand actually made a 9-year-old girl a ward of the court because her parents had named her Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii, saying that the name "makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap." I agree, and also I think the same could be said of the other names mentioned in the article, like "Number 16 Bus Shelter." How could you not be affected by growing up with a name like that?

Derek Gentry has been pretty good to me though. It did not lend itself to playground taunting, which is an important test of any name. As a kid, I sometimes wished that I was named “Steve,” but that was only because I also wanted to be The Six Million Dollar Man. At other times, I wished that Derek shortened to something, or that I had a nickname, but I've gotten over that.

I now work at a company where nicknaming is rampant, but unfortunately, these nicknames are often based on your initials. As a result, I get called DAG, DAGman, DAGmar, and DAGnabbit. None of these is exactly music to my ears, but the best one by far is "DAGmaster," which blossoms into "DAGmastah" when pronounced with the propah Massachusetts accent. If I ever pull a Joaquin Phoenix and drop IT for hip-hop, I will adopt the name DagMastah Flash.

Until then, you can just call me Derek. If it's even me you're looking for.

Beauty Is My Business

2009-03-29T08:19:00.001-04:00

My wife had to be at work early on Monday, so I stuck around to get Lilah off to school. When it was time to do something with her hair, Lilah handed me a brush and two elastics.

“Two elastics? Why two?”
“I want pigtails today!”
“Oh, hmmm…I’ve never done pigtails. They'd probably be all lopsided.”
“How about braids?”
“Yeah…I would have no idea how to do braids.”
“Why not?”
“I just never learned. I’ve never had enough hair to do anything like that.”
“Well, maybe you should get one of those big Barbie-head things so you can practice?”

I knew exactly what she was thinking. Two weeks before, I’d taken Lilah to Toys R Us to spend her Tooth Fairy profits, and we’d stumbled into an entire pallet of Barbie-head things. But these weren’t ordinary Barbie heads, they were Barbie Island Princess Rosella Karaoke Styling Heads, a hundred of them stacked in the aisle, all marked down to $19.99, and all pleading, “Try me! I sing!”

Lilah pressed the test button on one of the heads, and its jaw twitched up and down in an unnerving way, chirping, "Let’s get ready for the royal ball!” According to the box, Rosella could sing three songs from the Barbie Island Princess movie, and you could sing along using the included flower microphone.
Now, perhaps Mattel had been convinced that this groundbreaking karaoke feature would reignite the whole Styling Head market, but my guess is that most parents would rather set their own hair on fire than bring home a creepy robotic singing Barbie head with no volume control. (Which is to say that Rosella was clearly aimed at the grandparent market.)

I also had to wonder what the unlucky employees of Rosella's Chinese factory felt about her. What would an entire assembly line of these singing blond heads look like? And how much more disturbing would they seem if they all sang in some unintelligible foreign tongue?

Regardless, Lilah wanted one. Rosella was slightly out of her price range though, and for some reason, I could not be convinced to chip in. Instead, we took home the house-brand “Dream Dazzlers Stylin' School Stylin' Head,” which was smaller, cheaper, and far less likely to start chanting prophecies of doom.

After school on Monday, Lilah sat me down for a hair-doin' lesson on the Stylin' Head. I thought I did pretty well for a first-timer, but Lilah's main comment was that she would give me additional lessons this weekend, "when we have more time." I'll let you judge the results for yourself.

Dentistry for Amateurs

2009-03-16T22:50:00.015-04:00

Despite my numerous protests, my daughter Lilah went ahead and turned six last October.

Around the same time, she also discovered that one of her front teeth was loose, an equally disconcerting development that she never tired of flaunting.

“Daddy look!”
“Oh…wow. That’s, uh…wow.”
“See how much I can wiggle it?”
“Yeah, but let’s not play with it too much, okay? We don’t want it to come out before the new one is ready, right?”

Lilah had already lost two lower teeth, but I just didn’t feel prepared for the front ones to go. The way I saw it, their departure would be the first big step in remaking her adorable little-girl grin into something new, unknown, and far more likely to snarl at me when I asked her how her day was. She was already growing up way too fast…couldn’t we just keep the baby teeth a little longer?

That feeling proved fleeting though—Lilah’s tooth soon became so unhinged that it was actually unsettling to look at. She would be telling my wife and I about something that had happened at school, but I’d find myself transfixed by this errant fang, trying to imagine how it could possibly remain attached while sticking out at a 45° angle. The tooth drove Lilah crazy too, flip-flopping around uncomfortably at every meal. Clearly, the thing had to go.

So every morning at breakfast, we’d give the wonky tooth a once-over, and every morning, we’d reach the same conclusion: “Oh yeah—that thing is coming out today!”

But six weeks later, the tooth was still holding on, and evicting it became a full-fledged hobby for me and Lilah. We’d dedicate an hour to it on Saturday mornings, Lilah testing the tooth in the mirror while I egged her on: How far can you push it back? How much can you pull it forward? How much can you twist it? But despite our efforts, the tooth remained stubbornly attached, gradually acquiring a disturbing bluish cast that even Lilah’s classmates mentioned.

I will admit that it was tempting to reach in and yank the thing out myself, but something made me hesitate. I’d had a similarly maddening tooth when I was a kid, and my maternal grandmother had decided that she would be the one to remove it—her father had been a dentist after all, and she was still in possession of his tools. Retrieving some antique pliers from the collection, Gram reached into my mouth and, with one swift motion, yanked the tooth out of my head.

Or, that was the idea anyway. She’d actually extracted the tooth beside the wobbly one, but you know...close enough.

Strangely, this story only convinced Lilah that we needed some pliers—or at least help from her friend Shanna, the preschool classmate who had inadvertently removed Lilah’s very first tooth. During a momentary lull at circle time, Shanna had asked Lilah if she could try wiggling said tooth, and somehow ended up twisting it right out of Lilah’s jaw. This was very exciting to the rest of their class—apparently bloodshed was rare at circle time—but once order had been restored, there was much joking about Shanna’s bright future as a dentist.

Thankfully, neither the pliers nor Shanna’s help proved necessary. Lilah was at the mirror doing her dental calisthenics one morning when the tooth just popped free. Lilah spat the tiny thing into her hand and we both stared at it, shocked. It seemed impossibly small, hardly bigger than a tic-tac really. How could something so tiny have caused so much trouble?

A second later though, Lilah all smiles, charging downstairs and yelling to my wife, “It came out! It came out! Yaaaay!”

This relief lasted until the next morning, when we discovered that Lilah’s remaining front tooth had tipped itself into the vacant space, essentially leaving Lilah with one very crooked, very central tooth. Thankfully, this configuration didn’t last that long—the leaner popped out two weeks later, opening a spacious, lisp-inducing gap in the front of Lilah’s smile.

So here we are: change has come, and more is coming as the two new front teeth inch their way into view. I still can’t say that I’m happy about all of it, but I’m trying, since I have little choice in the matter. And I know that soon enough, those two lost baby teeth are going to look even smaller than they do now.

My Japanese Fan Club?

2009-03-02T12:00:00.008-05:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the months following your 16th birthday are pretty much the ideal time to go on vacation with your parents.

In my case, it was a trip to San Francisco in 1986, which allowed me to share my special brand of adolescent moodiness—and nerdy fashion sense—with the entire Bay Area, from scenic Carmel-by-the-Sea to the rolling hills of Wine Country.

Or at least I think that’s where we went—I actually spent the whole trip with headphones clamped to my ears, ignoring one breathtaking Pacific vista after another, and insisting that Alcatraz was the only thing that interested me in Northern California.

(And to Mom & Dad, I would just like to say: Sorry...my bad. Thanks for not abandoning me on the side of Highway 1.)

For some reason, my parents declined to spend even three hours of their vacation inside a prison, so the closest I would get to Alcatraz was a cruise around San Francisco Bay. That’s okay though, because it was while we were waiting in line for this ferry that I experienced the most singularly magnificent moment of my life to that point: out of nowhere, five young Japanese women approached us and asked if they could have their pictures taken with me.

To my 16-year-old self, this was as awesome as it was confusing. I regarded any female attention as an intrinsic good, even as I accepted the following very real possibilities:

1.That they had only chosen me because I looked unusually ridiculous, even for an American.
2.That these “Japanese tourists” were actually UC Berkeley students who just enjoyed messing with gullible out-of-towners.

But as the girls giggled through their round-robin camera exchange, taking turns posing beside me, I definitely got the feeling that they'd mistaken me for a celebrity—I just couldn’t imagine who. And between the language barrier and my burgeoning social awkwardness, I wasn’t about to ruin the moment by asking.

And then it was over, and time to board our ferry. From our seats on the upper deck, I got one last glimpse of my new friends, still standing together on the pier as we motored away. I waved to them, and they waved back with an enthusiasm that made me smile, even if it was intended for someone else. (And to these mysterious women, I would just like to say: Thanks. And my parents thank you too—if not for your arrival, I'd still be sulking about Alcatraz.)

I’ve often wondered how long it took them to realize their mistake. At the time, the only celebrity I could think of who even vaguely approximated my age and coloring was Michael J. Fox. But although he was still playing teenagers, he was really nine years older than me, six inches shorter, and (one would think) far less likely to be traveling with his parents. I doubted that anyone could confuse us, even considering the well-documented challenges of identifying people from other ethnic groups wearing enormous Ray-Ban Wayfarers.

Michael J. Fox photo by Alan Light

Come to think of it though, I’d originally acquired those sunglasses in an effort to make myself look more like Huey Lewis—perhaps I’d been more successful than I’d realized? Sure, Mr. Lewis was a full twenty years older than me, but he and the News were based in the Bay Area, after all. Even more telling, they had contributed two hit songs to Michael J. Fox’s biggest movie, Back to the Future. Hmmm...

However, I suspect that the answer might actually be found via one of Mr. Fox’s smaller films, Teen Wolf, in which he had portrayed a basketball-playing teenage werewolf. Those who have seen Teen Wolf understand that the film simply demanded a sequel—Teen Wolf Too—for which the producers turned to Jason Bateman, who was younger and less famous, but who still kind-sorta looked like Fox...and a little like me too?

Jason Bateman photo by Alan Light

Did those women think I was Jason Bateman? Maybe. Although, I have no idea what kind of Japanese fan base Jason enjoyed circa 1986—or for that matter, if my friends from the pier were actually Japanese.

What I do know is that Bateman played a character named “Derek“ on the popular TV show Silver Spoons, which might just seem like an eerie coincidence until you consider the fact that, on Arrested Development, Bateman played the father of Superbad actor Michael Cera, whose current hairdo is clearly an homage to the Chia-shrub that I was rockin' in '86.

Michael Cera photo by eugene

Okay, so maybe it's a stretch to suggest that those women mistook me for Michael Cera, especially when you consider the fact that he wasn’t born until two years after I visited San Francisco. But still, I can’t help feeling like there’s a connection there somewhere...maybe via Doc Brown’s DeLorean? (Or perhaps I’ve just been watching too much Lost.)

So the mystery remains unsolved for the moment, but darn it, I know the truth is out there. If the Internet has any real value (and I’m still not convinced that it does), maybe one of those women will find this post, recognize herself in the pictures, and send me an e-mail explaining what the heck happened that day. That would be pretty cool.

More likely, I'll get an e-mail from some smart-ass teenage boy pretending to be one of the women from that day...but I probably deserve that.

Either way, I just hope that Michael Cera gives me a call when he finally decides to complete the Teen Wolf trilogy. How about Teen Wolf Three: Family Vacation? I have some totally bitchin' ideas for the script.

USE OR FREEZE BY 19FEB2009

2009-02-20T07:20:00.000-05:00

The narrow little pantry off our kitchen has always been a mysterious space, perpetually overflowing with stuff while somehow remaining devoid of anything you’d actually want to eat. Last week, I decided to find out what was really in there. The answer: expired things, and individually wrapped fortune cookies.

I knew we had a few fortune cookies around, saved for my daughter over so many nights of Shing-Yee takeout, but what I found was a full-blown infestation: an entire Easter basket of them on one shelf, a grocery bag of them on another, and families of five huddled behind every box of crackers and cereal. I half-heartedly tried counting them on their way to the trash, but I lost track somewhere around 75.

I threw out a ton of other stuff too, including three different varieties of Teddy Grahams from ‘07, a cup of Split Pea Soup from early ‘05, and a tub of Crisco that supposedly would've been better if used by October of 2006 (I have my doubts).

As I was tossing all this stuff, I started to wonder about the expiration dates themselves. What do they really mean? For example, what sort of line did those Trader Joe's Bagel Chips cross in December of ‘08—was it merely a taste thing, or were they somehow dangerous? I've always suspected that some manufacturers set the dates arbitrarily, mostly as a way to prompt you to buy more.

Once I got into the flow of this purge though, I realized that I didn’t care if I was throwing away perfectly good food—I liked the license that the expiration dates gave me: Yes—I can be free of this accursed box of Triscuits forever! I didn’t even have to apply any judgment—things were either expired or they weren’t.

Which made me think that life would be simpler—or at least less cluttered—if everything bore expiration dates. Hmmm…do I really need to keep this Spin Doctors CD around? Oh look—it expired in 1993! But just as I was getting excited about this idea, I realized that somebody would inevitably start putting expiration dates on clothing, finally giving my wife the leverage she needed to throw out my entire wardrobe. So, you know…nevermind.

No Kindle For Me

2009-02-13T07:22:00.002-05:00

I have always been a gadget-geek. If our house were suddenly buried by a Vesuvius-like volcanic explosion, future archaeologists excavating the site would discover a ridiculous number of battery-powered artifacts: three Blackberry phones, four iPods, four laptops, and no less than SIX digital cameras. (And to these archaeologists I would just say: be sure you find the right chargers for all this stuff, because you’ll be S.O.L. without them.)

This electronics habit, combined with my love of books, would seem to make me the ideal user for Amazon’s new Kindle 2 reading device. I’ve never actually held a Kindle in my hand, but it sounds pretty cool: a ten-ounce tablet capable of storing 1,500 electronic books, which you can purchase 24/7 using the Kindle’s free “Whispernet” wireless service. The Kindle 2 even has a text-to-voice feature that will actually read your books, magazines, and newspapers to you, if you like that sort of thing.

I won’t be getting a Kindle, however, because I just don’t see it meshing with my current program of buying way more books than I will EVER have time to read and letting them accumulate in every corner of the house: some on my nightstand, a few more on the kitchen counter, a small collection in the living room, and several precarious towers on the floor by the bookcase.

On an intellectual level, I recognize that I don’t have as much reading time as I did when I was an English major at UMass, but that doesn’t seem to stop me from walking into bookstores and convincing myself, over and over again, that I will somehow find time to read THIS book. And even when I’m willing to admit that I don’t have time right now, I tell myself that I must have this book at the ready when the rare and miraculous reading moment does arrive (i.e. the next time I can’t sleep).

Until then, I can at least enjoy my books as the beautiful objects that they are, occasionally picking one up to lose myself in its cover art or the pulpy scent of its pages. More often though, I’ll just end up knocking a heavy stack of them onto the floor while feeling around for the TV remote, or I’ll spend an hour looking for something important only to discover that it’s under a pile of stupid fricking books.

Which is just another way of saying that the books’ very physicality exerts a subtle but constant pressure that eventually results in—TA-DAH!—my reading one of them. Okay, so maybe I have to buy sixteen different titles before I reach this point, but still…reading is a good thing no matter how it happens, right? And somebody has to keep the publishers in business.

Clearly, getting a Kindle would upset the delicate balance of my life. If I could download any book at any time of the day or night, I could no longer justify buying them preemptively. And because I wouldn’t be getting a pretty new paperback or hardcover to fondle, I’d have even less desire to acquire anything until the moment I felt moved to read, which might never happen, given that I wouldn’t be tripping on books everywhere I went.

So what would motivate me to read...ever again? My fear is that I would just toss the Kindle in a drawer and go back to watching TV.

However, I think there might be a solution to this problem if Amazon can only find a way to implement it. I’ve written the following skit to dramatize my proposal:

INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT: Derek sits on his couch in front of his big-screen TV. An Amazon Kindle 2 rests on the table beside him.

KINDLE: Dude…didn’t you tell me that you were too busy to read? Why do I hear the TV?
DEREK: I don’t know. Leave me alone.
K: Wait—are you seriously watching Kath & Kim?
D: Well, yeah, but…I’m just waiting for The Office to come on.
K: It’s a rerun this week.
D: Yeah, but 30 Rock is on after that.
K: Dude, you should totally read a book right now.
D: Eh…
K: You liked Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, right?
D: Sure.
K: Well, customers who bought that also enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Oh, and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which Oprah practically soiled herself over. You must know her, right—she’s on the TV too.
D: Yeah, I don’t know…I’m feeling kind of fried.
K: Dude, I can even READ IT TO YOU, you know, since you seem to have forgotten how...
D: Excuse me?

Now, I’m not completely out of my mind; I know that today’s technology wouldn’t allow you to converse with your Kindle. However, we do have the technology to allow some tattooed cube-dweller in Amazon’s Seattle offices to connect via Whispernet—which is really just Sprint’s cell service—and pretend to be your Kindle (thus all the “dudes”). And you know, I think I’d be fine with the pretending. I might even pay a small monthly fee for it, as would a large number of lonely people.

So, please consider it, Amazon. The way I see it, everybody wins: you get to sell me yet another battery-powered hunk of plastic, I keep reading (sort of), and our house is a whole lot tidier.

Ceci n'est pas un gâteau.

2009-02-09T07:22:00.002-05:00

Just a few thoughts of the Monday morning variety (i.e. things that seem interesting until I’ve had enough caffeine to realize how stupid they are):

"Ambiance" is a uniquely human concept that you could never explain to a gorilla, no matter how well it knew sign language. I would even venture to say that when we do discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, they still won’t know crap about ambiance.

At this very moment, it’s looking like Slinky Repair 101 would’ve been more useful than any of the classes I actually took in college (but I’m still holding out hope that my semester devoted to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity will eventually pay off).

Whenever I get stuck behind someone who is driving really badly, they are almost always going to the library.

Most restaurant desserts are obviously designed by people who hate dessert. I keep forgetting this, and so I get tricked into ordering things like the Flourless Chocolate Cake. I take one bite and I’m like, “Mmm, this is really…rich,” by which I actually mean, “Yeah, this isn’t even cake.”

Pissing and Moaning

2009-02-05T07:11:00.006-05:00

Like most New Englanders, I try to dedicate a portion of each day—even if it’s only 20-30 minutes—to complaining about the weather. This winter has already delivered such a wealth of meteorological misery that the only challenge has been deciding where to begin: the forty-bajillion inches of snow, the butt-numbing arctic cold, the skating-rink sidewalks, or maybe even the freakish Wizard-of-Oz winds that tore the gate off our fence.

Even our cold-loving dog Hugo seems ready for spring. I notice this most when I take him outside for the final time each night. This would normally be a two-minute jaunt, but with everything covered in hard, iced-over snow, Hugo and I end up slipping around the neighborhood for a half-hour while he searches for an acceptable place to empty his bladder.

The upside of these nightly trips is that, at least until the hypothermia sets in, I get some quiet time to think. Although, I pretty much always end up thinking the same two things: “Why won’t you just GO already?” followed soon after by, “Seriously…WHAT DOES IT FREAKING MATTER WHERE YOU PEE???”

The rest of the year, this is not a problem. At some point during our walk, Hugo will step into the grassy strip along the curb and start into his “tinkle trot,” which closely resembles a gymnast approaching the vault: his pace quickens, and after a dozen swift strides, he stops and strikes a regal pose while spattering the grass below. When he’s finished, he sniffs the air approvingly, and then steps squarely into his own puddle as he departs the scene.

But there’s no grass to be found now, Hugo WILL NOT pee on the sidewalk itself (it’s a canine thing), and the snow is piled so high everywhere that he can’t even walk through it. He still tries though, starting his trot on the sidewalk and only heaving himself up into the curbside snowbank at the very last second. His momentum carries him forward for a few more awkward steps, his feet crunching down through the snow’s icy crust and sinking him up to his belly. Eventually, he’s just stuck there, limbs ensnared, and he gives up. He looks up at me, and I swear I can hear his thoughts (which are naturally in haiku format):

Winter exhausts me.
Why do we live here again?
I blame you, human.

And so we walk on, with me trailing Hugo and repeating, “Hurry up…hurry up…hurry up,” a command that we started using when he was a puppy. Whenever he peed on his own, we’d whisper “hurry up,” gradually conditioning him to associate the words with the act.

I do worry, however, that I’ve now spent so much time saying “hurry up” when Hugo is merely preparing to pee that I might’ve changed its meaning for him. Maybe Hugo now thinks that “hurry up” means “Browse for a pee-spot, but be extremely selective.” For all I know, he might be desperately trying to hold it the whole time because I won’t give the right command, which he now thinks is something like, “Holy Freaking Crap, it’s about time!”

As it is, I usually have to go pretty badly after about fifteen minutes of this. I think all of the psychic energy that I pour into convincing Hugo to pee ends up backfiring and setting my own bladder off. And so now we’re off in some far corner of the neighborhood, Hugo still hasn’t done his thing, and I’m doing my own version of the tinkle trot to stave off incontinence.

I will admit that I’ve been tempted to go outside somewhere, but the houses in our neighborhood are very close-set, and there’s not much cover to be found (aside from the snowbanks anyway). So far, I’ve never given in to this impulse, but it does make me wonder why people are so weird about this stuff: they don’t think twice about a dog peeing on the street, but if they see another person doing it, they just call the police. I guess humans can be pretty picky about where they go too.

Slobs Like Us

2008-11-07T20:11:00.009-05:00

My daughter Lilah recently had a new friend over for a playdate, which meant that my wife and I spent the preceding two hours frantically cleaning the house. Our goal in any such effort is simple: to deceive our fellow parents into thinking that we are tidy, organized people who are therefore worthy of caring for their child for 2-3 hours. The challenge is that, while we’re trying to clean, Lilah and our dog Hugo play defense against us.

Hugo, a fifty-pound Samoyed, covers most of the house. From the moment I turn on the vacuum, he’s locked to my side, belligerently nosing the carpet-head every 60-90 seconds. Whenever I encounter something that belongs to him—his rope toy, a tennis ball, a mangled scrap of rawhide—I relocate it to his crate, just to get it out of the way. Of course, touching the object immediately makes it fascinating, so Hugo is forced to spend a moment re-familiarizing himself with it in his crate. And then thirty second later, he’s back at my side, dropping the item right where I’d found it.

I’ve developed a theory about why Hugo is so interested in the vacuum:

As far as I can tell, Hugo’s purpose in life is to distribute fluffy tumbleweeds of white fur throughout our house, whereas the vacuum exists solely to remove these tumbleweeds. Over time, I think Hugo glimpsed the yin-and-yang nature of their relationship, but his tiny canine brain gets lost in the interdependent duality of it all. Do I hate the vacuum, or do I love it? If the vacuum ceased to exist, would I disappear as well? And then, just as he’s about to figure it all out, I go and move one of his toys. His brain reboots, and he has to start over from the beginning.

Lilah’s domain is the playroom, which usually resembles the debris field from some horrific Disney Princess plane crash. In theory, Lilah is present to “help” with the cleaning, which means that she spends most of her time lolling on the floor and periodically calling out, “Hey, look what I found!” She also keeps an eye on me to ensure that I don’t attempt to discard something important.

To be honest, “cleaning” is way too strong a word for what we do in the playroom—we’re really just shoveling stuff from the rug into the bins at its perimeter. A recent lab analysis of our playroom clutter revealed that it is composed of the following elements (percentages are by psychic weight):

27%	Dress-up clothes: princess dresses, ballerina gear, and miscellaneous fairy-phernalia.
6%	The Polly Pockets Posse: tiny dolls, tiny clothes, tiny pets, and tiny pet clothes.
2%	Naked Barbies.
2%	Barbies who will soon be naked.
2%	Recently naked Barbies who are now wearing outfits made from Kleenex and Scotch Tape.
3%	Crumpled tissues, Christmas ribbons, smashed Goldfish crackers.
3%	McDonald’s Happy Meal toys (handled once and forgotten).
3%	Lite-Brite pegs, plastic “Don’t Spill The Beans” beans, and loose jigsaw puzzle pieces.
52%	Things that are broken and/or missing essential parts but which are still FAR TOO SPECIAL to be thrown away.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that there’s an inverse relationship between how well we know our visitors and how much we clean for them. In other words: we’ll scour the house the first time someone comes by, but the standard slips with each successive visit.

However, we may adjust our cleanliness standard based on our guests' own tidiness quotient. We don’t want our neat-nick friends to feel uncomfortable, so their visits might warrant extra cleaning for years to come. And yes, it has occurred to me that, like us, these seemingly OCD friends might be faking it. This is a disturbing possibility—so much senseless cleaning—but I also think it’s unlikely. Try as we might, slobs like us can never achieve true cleanliness—it’s always obvious that we’ve made an effort, but equally obvious that the situation is temporary, the clutter and filth already creeping in from every corner.

So if you should visit our house and find dirty socks caught in the couch cushions, a pot of petrified mac & cheese on the stove, and the dog licking something sticky off one of the kitchen chairs, please don’t be alarmed. Just realize that our not cleaning for you is actually a compliment, a sign of how comfortable we are with you. Or I suppose it could mean that we think you’re a slob too. Either way, welcome to our home…just watch where you sit.

Blood Sugar, Snacks, Magic: A Short Biography of Spalding, the Most Expensive Free Cat Ever

2008-10-24T17:26:00.003-04:00

One Sunday morning this August, our daughter Lilah woke us just before dawn saying that she felt like she was going to “make barfies.” This had happened before: Lilah is a skinny five-year-old with minimal body-fat reserves, so if she doesn’t eat well at dinner, her blood sugar drops overnight and she wakes up feeling queasy. The bedtime snack prescribed by our pediatrician had mostly eliminated the problem, but somehow, we’d missed the snack the previous night.

I carried Lilah downstairs, hoping that some crackers, apple juice, and PBS Kids would fend off the barfies. As we passed the kitchen though, I noticed our 15-year-old cat Spalding lying motionless on the floor—not quite dead, but not far from it either.

Unfortunately, this had also happened before. Spalding is diabetic, and if he doesn’t eat enough after his insulin injection, his blood sugar plummets toward unconsciousness and death. This kind of cause-and-effect is hard to explain to a cat though, and Spalding has become finicky in his old age. On two occasions now he has obviously decided that he’d rather die than eat the specially-formulated diabetic yuck that I’ve put down for him.

The first time, I’d come home on my lunch hour to find Spalding lying on his side in the kitchen, unable to use his legs but still howling mournfully. Certain that he was a goner, I’d rushed him to the vet where they’d given him a blast of intravenous glucose. In fifteen minutes, he was back—really pissed-off, but fully functional. The vet said that he would’ve died within the hour.

But this second time, at 5:00 AM on a Sunday, our neighborhood vet’s office was closed. With my wife trying to get some sleep and Lilah battling the barfies, I just wasn’t prepared to haul Spalding to the 24-hour emergency clinic…not yet anyway. I decided that I’d try to coax Spalding back from the brink without professional assistance, and preferably without Lilah noticing what I was doing.

I will admit that money factored into my decision. We’d gotten Spalding as a “free” kitten from a local shelter, but in the nine years since his diabetes diagnosis, we’d spent roughly $15,000 on him. I also knew from experience that, once you enter the emergency clinic, there’s virtually no way to escape without giving them $500, a number that can rise to $2,000 in a blink.

Maybe you’re now wondering how anyone in his right mind could’ve spent $15,000 on a cat in the first place. Or maybe you’re even thinking that I’ve exaggerated the amount for dramatic effect. To that, I say simply: I wish. Each little bottle of insulin costs about $120, and we’ve gone through them every 25-30 days for the last 113 months. The sad truth is that if Spalding had been a non-diabetic cat, I could’ve sent him to UMass Boston (my alma mater) for a full year and still have some cash left for his books and a commuter rail pass (despite countless trips to the vet, Spalding has never adapted to car travel).

I really don’t think of myself as a crazy cat person though. If Spalding had needed a procedure that cost $15,000—or even $5,000—we would’ve said goodbye to him long ago. But feline diabetes isn’t all-or-nothing like that—it’s a medical disaster with a built-in payment plan. In giving us his diagnosis, our vet had told us specifically, “Diabetes in cats is very manageable. This is not something you put a cat down for.”

I’d actually been thinking that this seemed like precisely the kind of thing that you put a cat down for. Shots twice a day? The idea sounded about as plausible as shampooing Spalding in the sink every morning. But I was in no condition to argue with the vet—I just tried to comfort myself with the thought that, no matter how awful it seemed now, it would eventually end. Spalding’s condition sounded so precarious, I couldn’t imagine him hanging on for more than a few years.

As luck would have it though, Spalding is indestructible. I probably should’ve recognized this when, a year before becoming diabetic, Spalding snuck out of our house and disappeared for almost three weeks. We feared the worst—he’d always been an indoor cat and we lived near a very busy intersection—but somehow he survived his walkabout completely unscathed. At this point, Spalding has outlived not only his feline brother Theo, but also his human namesake, Spalding Gray, a truly sad turn of events that I never would’ve predicted.*

But anyway…

With Lilah settled in front of the TV, I prepared a fresh plate of cat food and held it under Spalding’s nose. He just meowed at me though, showing no interest in the food even when I tried lifting him up to get a better angle. Knowing that the food itself might be the problem, I also tried a saucer of milk, but with no better results. As I was doing all this, I kept looking back over my shoulder at Lilah, but she remained oblivious, lost in her TV fog.

Then I had a little flash: Apple juice. Apple juice is pure sugar.

It took me a minute to figure out how to get the juice into Spalding, but then I remembered that we had a stockpile of those little plastic squirt-syringes that come with infant medications. I filled one with apple juice, wedged it into Spalding’s mouth, and gave him a couple quick blasts. He definitely didn’t like it—he shook his head and tried to spit it out—but I knew he must’ve ingested it because there was no juice on the floor. So I kept going, giving him one dose after another, with Spalding getting progressively more and more irritated with me in the process.

What happened next was like something you’d see in a movie:

First I noticed that Spalding was moving his head around a little more, and soon after that, he started trying to prop himself up on his front legs. With his front end righted, he then started pushing up unsteadily with his hind legs. Once he had lifted himself completely off the floor, he started to walk, one wobbling step at a time, toward our coat rack about ten feet away.

I was so happy to see Spalding get up that I didn’t even think about where he was going or why. Once he reached the coat rack though, his purpose became clear: he wedged himself head-first into the shelter of its four-legged base and lay down there, safe from me and my infernal apple juice.

I have to say…I felt pretty darn good about myself, and after two “Dragon Tales” and a “Curious George,” Lilah seemed to have improved as well. She was hungry, so I got her another cup of the magical apple juice and a plain waffle. She ate everything and really seemed to be in much better spirits…right up until she barfed it all back up again.

Spalding was fine though. I’ve stopped trying to feed him the special diabetic food recommended by the vet. It might be better for him in some abstract sense, but I would argue that the supermarket stuff, which he wolfs down without hesitation, saves his life on a daily basis.

I do sometimes daydream about what we could’ve done with the money we’ve invested in Spalding, but part of me suspects that we would’ve just frittered it away, letting it fall between the proverbial couch cushions of our life. And although there are plenty of cool things that you can buy for $15,000—a month in Bhutan, fifty-thousand Twinkees, a 2007 Toyota Corolla with low miles—almost none of them will curl up beside you on the couch and purr while you’re writing. In fact, if somebody offered me $15,000 for Spalding today, I probably wouldn’t take it. (Though please…don’t let that stop you from trying.)

*Epilogue: The Two Spaldings

In 1993, when we first adopted our cats—one gray, one orange—we briefly considered naming them Vincent and Theo, after the brothers Van Gogh. And while we did like the name “Theo” for the orange one, we ultimately decided that “Vincent” wouldn’t do. As much as we appreciated Vincent’s work, it didn’t seem fair to name a kitten after someone who had suffered so much and ultimately killed himself.

For a day or two, we referred to the gray kitten as “Mr. Gray,” but that soon became “Spalding Gray,” in honor of the writer/actor/monologist, whom we’d recently seen perform in Cambridge. Like Van Gogh, Gray had battled depression, but there was no sign of it on stage—he was a hilarious, ecstatic force of nature in a flannel shirt and chinos. And somehow his name seemed to fit this new cat of ours, even if most people assumed that we’d named him after a company that manufactures basketballs.

Just over ten years later, the human Spalding Gray’s family reported him missing. His body was eventually found in New York’s East River, the speculation being that he’d jumped from the Staten Island Ferry. In reading about his disappearance, I learned that he’d been fighting severe depression in the aftermath of a debilitating 2001 car accident. I also learned that he now had a six-year-old son named Theo, who was the last person he’d spoken to.

Our Theo got sick in October of 2006. He’d always been an outgoing cat—the one who greeted visitors at the door, and who snuggled with Lilah every morning while she ate breakfast. But we arrived home late one Tuesday night to find that Theo had peed on the couch and then hidden himself away in the basement, a place where he normally spent little time.

I knew that this wasn’t a good sign, that animals often hide when they get sick. I hung out in the basement with Theo for a while that night, trying to get him to purr. He just tolerated my presence though, eventually walking away and settling down facing the other direction. I planned to take him to the vet the next day, but I also had a feeling that he wouldn’t last the night.

In the morning, I found Theo on the floor near the bottom of the basement stairs. I knew that he was dead, but I couldn’t help thinking how curiously relaxed he looked, lying on his side with his legs stretched out, as if luxuriating in the sun. As I squatted beside him, trying to figure out how I was going to tell Lilah that her breakfast buddy was gone, Spalding emerged from wherever he’d been sleeping. He brushed himself back and forth against my leg and then, stepping directly across Theo’s body, trotted blithely over to his food bowl.

I really didn’t know what to make of that. Spalding had lived with Theo for all of his 13 years, often sleeping side-by-side with him, but now Theo was apparently just an obstacle between Spalding and his breakfast. For a moment, I just sat and watched him eat.

I’ve chosen not to see Spalding’s behavior as callous, partly because doing so would call into question the whole idea of keeping pets in the first place. I prefer to see it as an instructive act—his demonstration that this lifeless body had little to do with the Theo we’d all known, the Theo who had left sometime in the night. I choose to think that Spalding understood exactly what had happened, and that he knew that Theo had been ready to go. Life continues, whether we enjoy it or not.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows Vista

2008-10-09T07:30:00.007-04:00

Being a seasoned IT professional, people often ask me for computer-buying advice. Lately, people have been asking whether or not they should get a system with “that new Vista thing.”

It’s sad, really: Vista has gotten so much bad press that it’s made even lifelong Windows users think about switching to Macs. Not me though. I’ve been using Vista—and its ~~evil~~ fraternal twin, Office 2007—for six months now, and I’m happy to report that the latest version of Windows has dozens of stunning new features* that you will never, ever find on a Mac. Here are just a few:

Impermanence.™
One of the very first things that I noticed about Vista was its improved crash sequence. Earlier versions of Windows crashed with ugly dialog boxes or boring blue screens, but Vista crashes in the most dramatic, cinematic way: the screen is suffused in otherworldly white light, and although you can still see all of your hard work right there on the screen, you can’t touch it (or click “save”). Meanwhile, the mysterious little Vista disc spins before you like a shining halo. It really takes your breath away, which is nice, given how often you end up seeing it. One time, I swear I even saw the ghostly form of my original computer, an IBM PCjr, beckoning me toward the light.

Then it occurred to me: if Microsoft can design such an aesthetically pleasing crash, they could undoubtedly keep Vista from crashing in the first place. So clearly, these are not really “crashes,” but reminders of our own mortality. Microsoft wants us to remember that nothing lasts forever….it could all end at any time. So enjoy your life, spend time with your loved ones, and back up your data frequently.

Take A Minute. Now Take A Few More Minutes.™
In replacing my old Windows XP system, one thing that I was looking forward to was a quicker startup process. So let’s just say that I was “surprised” when my new Vista laptop—which I’d outfitted with a screaming dual-core processor and tons of memory—actually look longer to boot than my old one.

This really puzzled me at first. My new laptop was sooo much more powerful than my old one…how could it be slower? Then I remembered the Microsoft Infallibility Principle (implied above): Microsoft is the largest, most successful software company in the world, and darn-it-all, if they wanted Vista to start quickly, it would.

So why doesn’t it? My theory is that Microsoft wants to give us the gifts of peace and tranquility. We all rush through our lives, obsessed with illusions like "productivity," but here Microsoft is giving us a moment—a whole bunch of them actually—to take some deep cleansing breaths and center ourselves. Yes, it does require a time investment on our parts: I’ve calculated that I will spend roughly 24 hours per year booting my computer, assuming that I only have to do it once a day (which is rare--see Impermanence above). But regardless, I’m sure that all of this lost time will be amply offset by my expanded sense of well-being.

But I’ll admit that, so far, I’ve had trouble waiting through the whole ~~excruciating~~ boot-up process without getting up to do something else.** But at least now I understand that the problem is my own inability to relax, rather than any failing of Vista's. I know I’ll be a better person when I can just sit and breathe…I’m just not there yet.

Everything Old Is New Again.™
When discussing software—particularly the whole Mac vs. Windows thing—the issue of what is or isn’t “intuitive” comes up a lot. Personally, I think this is all a bunch of crap-talk because human beings aren’t born with instincts about computers—what’s “intuitive” is really just what some gigantic corporation has conditioned us to expect.

Which is precisely what makes Vista so revolutionary. Microsoft took the familiar interface of Windows XP—known to hundreds of millions of people around the world—and shuffled everything around so effectively that even seasoned IT professionals like myself were disoriented by it. With Office 2007, Microsoft took this approach a step further, eliminating all of the text menus and hiding the most-used buttons deep within the new Office “ribbon,” whatever that is. Try finding that “Save” button now!

You see, Microsoft recognized that Windows and Office had just become too familiar to us. These products were so successful and ubiquitous that we just weren’t seeing them anymore. We took them for granted, so their only option was to radically rearrange everything. And believe me, I’m not taking anything for granted anymore.

I’ve enjoyed this aspect of Vista so much that I think Microsoft should offer this feature in the real world. You would pay them a nominal fee—say $25,000—and while you’re away on vacation, they would break into your home and rearrange everything: put the kitchen sink in the bedroom closet, move the toilet to the attic, and relocate all of the light switches to the basement freezer. Just imagine the joy of getting to know your own home all over again…the joy that can be yours just by purchasing Windows Vista and Office 2007.

Don’t Touch That. I said, DON’T TOUCH THAT! ™
Okay, so I did encounter a few hiccups when I was setting up my new Vista machine, but as a seasoned IT professional, I knew that these issues could be addressed by downloading software updates for my various programs and peripherals.

So I fired up Internet Explorer, located the software I needed, and started downloading. One of these packages was rather large, so it took about 45 minutes to download over my broadband connection. When IE told me that my download was complete, I went looking for the file, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I searched the whole computer for the filename in question, but…nothing.

Assuming that I’d done something wrong, I started the download again. Forty-five minutes later though, I was back in the same spot: searching for this file that I knew must be somewhere, but just wasn’t.

After doing some online research, I found the answer. A new Windows Vista security feature called “User Account Control” was actually deleting my download immediately upon completion…over and over and over again. Having decided that this download from HP or Canon was clearly unsafe, UAC destroyed it without even notifying me…probably because it sensed that I couldn’t be trusted either.

I have to say, this experience brought me right back to childhood—you’d reach for something really cool or interesting, only to have an adult slap your sticky little hand away. I may not live with my parents anymore, but I do feel better knowing that Vista is there to protect me from myself.

Not Your Best Work™
I had an interesting experience while preparing my first post for this blog. I was typing away in Word 2007 when I saw a little message appear at the bottom of the screen—something about Word saving an AutoRecovery file. I’d seen this message before, but it lingered there longer than usual, and then the whole computer froze for a really long time…like, forever.

In case you’re not familiar with it, AutoRecovery is a feature of Word that automatically saves your work so you don’t lose everything in the event of a crash. Well, in my case, AutoRecovery itself actually crashed the whole computer and didn’t save a word of my work. Ironic? Well, not if you understand what was really going on.

This is what I think happened: Word’s AutoRecovery feature detected that my recent changes were not an improvement to the document. Obviously, I was not in the right place mentally to be writing this post, so Word took evasive action, rendering the whole machine so unresponsive that I had to use the power button to shut it down.

I can't tell you how glad I am that Word was looking out for me. Sure, I was a little disappointed that the crash also corrupted my Vista user profile, which required an additional three hours of digging through the system registry to fix, but I know that it was worth it. I mean, if I’d been able to get right back in, I probably would’ve just continued with whatever substandard crap I’d been writing in the first place. And then the whole exercise would’ve been a waste of time, right?

Make Your Family Appreciate You™
As I said, it took me a few hours to get my computer functioning again after the above Word crash-and-burn. I was in the kitchen with my five-year-old daughter Lilah when Vista finally came back to life. (Apparently she’d been in the house all morning; I’d only just noticed.)

“I got my computer back!” I exclaimed, arms raised in triumph.
“Finally…” Lilah muttered, totally exasperated.
“What was that, sweetie?”
“I said FINALLY…and that’s really a relief for me because now you can play with me more.”

And that’s when it came to me, a new marketing slogan:

“Windows Vista: Bringing families together…right after it rips them apart.”

Finally…the Conclusion
So there they are: Vista features that go way beyond computing as we know it. They aren’t always fun, but neither is life. And frankly, it you don’t like the sound of them, well, maybe you just can’t handle the Vista.

Seriously. Maybe you should just go down to that fancy-schmancy Apple store at the mall and buy that stupid iMac after all. And then give me a call because I might want to come over and check it out.

*Admittedly, these are not “features” in the traditional sense; they’re just things that I’ve observed while using Vista. Windows Vista and Office 2007 are obviously trademarks of Microsoft. All of the other names™ are things that I made up, but which I will gladly license to Microsoft if they ever wise-up and decide to market them.

** My usual Windows Vista startup procedure:

1. Press power button on laptop.
2. Measure out five units of pork insulin in a U-40 syringe.
3. Capture Spalding (gray diabetic cat), pin him to the floor, and give him his evening shot. Dispose of syringe in designated medical waste container.
4. Take a saucer and spoon from the kitchen and head down to the basement, being careful not to trip on the stairs. (Spalding will be underfoot and meowing, and the stairs are very steep. You will likely die if you fall).
5. In the basement, place the saucer in Spalding’s food area, open a can of Friskees Selects, and scoop its contents onto the saucer (try not to breathe while doing this). Pause for a moment to ensure that Spalding is enjoying your choice (once he’s had his shot, he must eat or he will die).
6. Take the dirty saucer from the morning feeding and, using a putty knife, scrape nearby cat barf onto the dirty plate.
7. Back upstairs, rinse the saucer, empty food can, barf scrapings, and spoon into the garbage disposal, and put the empty can in the recycling bin.
8. Return to computer and…it’s almost ready to use!

My Confession

2008-10-01T07:23:00.001-04:00

Okay, so I have a confession to make: I fell off the wagon and saw my friend Matt last night. Yes, my old friend Matt, the one I’d sworn off for the sake of this blog.

I didn’t mean for it to happen, but he read the post about him, and we got to e-mailing. The next thing I knew, we were having dinner…and we even spoke a little French.

Actually, that’s a lie—we didn’t speak any French, because neither of us can remember enough to have a conversation. But we did speak, in English, about how much fun it would be to speak French, if we could remember any.

And while I was there with Matt, I also had a Diet Coke…which I guess is okay, because I never said I was giving that up. Although, it wasn’t really a Diet Coke, because the bar we went to doesn’t sell Coca-Cola products. It was this local micro-brewed diet cola equivalent, which I used to sort of hate, but now I sort of like. Go figure.

Regardless…I’m climbing back on the wagon now, I promise, no matter how fast it’s barreling away from me. And once I’m back up there, I’ll fight my way through the army of bad guys riding on the back of the wagon, tossing them off the sides, one by one. And when I get to the last bad guy up front—the big one who’s holding the reins—I’ll say something like, “Au revoir, Monsieur Bad Guy,” and I’ll kick him right in his big greasy handlebar moustache. And as he falls screaming off the wagon, I’ll grab the reins, drive that wagon straight home, and write another blog post.

Soon. I promise.

Things I Will Never Do

2008-09-20T15:13:00.007-04:00

And so, despite all of the excellent arguments against it, I’m starting a blog.

There will be challenges of course. For starters, I don’t have much useful knowledge to impart, so the content here will be very thin. And like most people with kids and jobs and diabetic cats bent on their owners’ financial ruin, I don’t actually have time to blog. But we could all make excuses not to do our parts, so I won’t play that game.

What I will do—and what I think would be healthy for all of us—is to acknowledge that, as a result of this important new undertaking, certain things just aren’t going to get done, ever. I bet we all have things on our To Do lists that, deep down, we suspect we’re really never going to do anyway. Wouldn’t we be happier if we could just let these things go once and for all?

In that spirit, here are three* things that I will never do:

#1. I will never be fluent in French, Portuguese, or any other foreign language.
I’m awed by people who can speak more than one language, even poorly, but I think it’s time to accept that I will never be one of them. I studied French in high school and Portuguese in college, and when it was all over, I discovered that they’d somehow canceled each other out, leaving me with a useless smattering of each. (So far, my English seems undamaged.)

My Portuguese is particularly embarrassing. Beyond the standard hello/goodbye/thank-you stuff, this is what I’m left with:

“Eu falo português,” which means “I speak Portuguese.” This is obviously just a lie at this point—not a good way to begin any conversation.

“Isto es uma janela,” which means “This is a window.” This phrase actually proved useful when we had our house painted recently, not because our Brazilian painters needed help identifying the windows, but because I think my feeble attempts at Portuguese made them feel better about their command of English. With their morale soaring, they did an excellent job on the house.

And “Os meus pneus são muito bem,” which means, “My tires are very good.” My guess is that no native speaker has ever uttered this exact sentence—it was something I made up early in my studies purely because it sounded funny (to me anyway) when pronounced with the shushing European accent. Give it a try: “Oszh mayoszh panayoszh sow moyeento baym!” Isn’t that fun? And now you can fend off overzealous tire salesmen from Porto to Lisboa.

I’ve always thought that, someday, I’d renew my language studies and build up a useful command of either French or Portuguese. I’m guessing that Portuguese would be more useful, given the number of Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts. But I’ve also wondered if I might be more successful at resurrecting my French, given the junior-high slow-bake method by which I acquired it, versus the college language-microwave treatment Portuguese got.

Plus, if my wife Alex and I ever do return to Paris, I’d love to be ready with phrases like, “Please leave the huge disgusting hunks of liver off my green salad,” or at least to be clued-in enough to order an organ-free entrée in the first place. But I’ve got a blog now, so I’m officially giving up on these daydreams of multilingualism. I will stick with English, and no matter what the waiter brings me, I will say “Merci” or “Obrigado” and choke it down with a smile.

#2. I’m never going to kick caffeine.
I drink an unholy amount of caffeinated diet soda, and I blame it all on Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Ten years ago, I hated diet anything—Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, it didn’t matter…they all just tasted foul to me. Then Pepsi One arrived, ushered onto the market by commercials featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. jumping on desks and doing his hyper-happy Jerry Maguire thing, and I thought to myself—“Hey, I like Cuba—I should try that drink he’s so excited about.”

So I bought a Pepsi One and after the first sip, I was like, “Hey, he’s right—this doesn’t taste quite as rancid as most diet sodas.” Then an hour after that, I was like, “Hey, I feel goooood…like, really happy and awake and happy and talkative and excited….JUST LIKE CUBA!!!”

Because I’d also never developed a taste for coffee, my body was almost totally caffeine-naïve. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, Pepsi One has as much caffeine in it as Mountain Dew.

What I did realize was that Pepsi One was AWESOME. I knew, in a theoretical sense, what the benefits of caffeine were, but I’d never experienced them directly before. “Hey, if I have a Pepsi One, it doesn’t take me a full hour to wake up in the morning!” And then “Hey, if I have a Pepsi One at work, I’m wayyy more productive.” And best of all, “If I drink enough Pepsi One, I can stay up as late as I want!” Within a few weeks, I was completely addicted.

Since then, diet soda has become the one real constant in my life (well, that and all the trips to the bathroom). As the supply of Pepsi One has become unreliable, I’ve even branched into the previously unthinkable territory of Diet Coke, and lately, Coke Zero. (Sorry…Diet Pepsi is still just nasty.)

Part of me would like to kick caffeine completely, and I’ve done it a few times—two or three week periods where I walk into walls and snap at everyone who crosses my path—but at this point, I give. Not only do I not have time to quit, but I predict that increased caffeine consumption will be an integral part of producing this blog.

#3. I will never see Matt again.
I met Matt in elementary school. In the thirty-odd years since, I’ve come to love him like a brother, but I think we both know that it’s time to say it’s over.

This is not easy, given everything that Matt and I have shared. We played on the same baseball team, which is to say that we sat next to each other on the bench, snacking on the Dunkin’ Munchkins that his parents brought for the team. In high school, we ate lunch together every day—me with my cheeseburger, and Matt always searching for the slice of pizza so overcooked that it looked “like a scab.” We tried to start several different rock bands together, and if we’d ever been able to agree upon a really cool name, I’m sure we would’ve been HUGE. We kept in touch throughout college, and after graduation, we searched for jobs together (an activity that always devolved into CD shopping in Harvard Square). Later, when we stumbled into gainful employment, we ended up working at the same company, and Matt even sang at my wedding.

But in the last few years, Matt and I have hardly seen each other. He’s got this great job managing a music club in Cambridge, and I work at my tremendously fulfilling office job, removing viruses and porn from people’s computers. He spends all of his time hanging out with musicians…and I don’t. We’ve been talking about getting together for ages—and by talking, I mean, sending messages through Faceboook—but it just hasn’t happened.

I’m not worried about Matt. Last I checked, he had 819 friends on Facebook, so I know that he will land on his feet. I only have 18 Facebook friends…well, 17 without Matt…so things could be a little touch-and-go here for a while. But I’ll be okay…I have my blog now, and that’s really all I need.**

*One more item for the list: I’ll never write another post quite this long.

**Of course, seeing all of this written out makes me wonder if there isn’t a way to do the blog thing AND still squeeze in some of this other stuff. I mean, not the caffeine-kicking, but maybe I could take some sort of online language classes to save time...maybe even WITH MATT. If you run into him, tell him to give me a call.