Monday, February 25, 2008
The Black Swan
The title of his book comes from the story used to teach the scientific method: if you believe that all swans are white, each white swan that you find substantiates your claim. But seeing a black swan changes everything. It breaks the rule and thus necessitates a new one.
What do you think a swan tastes like? Chicken? They look delicious. I’ve written menus before, and I would LOVE to describe a swan dish. And eat one. You’re not so pretty when you’re in my stomach, are you? You stupid bird.
Taleb’s book focuses on the world-altering potential of the black swan. But think about your life. Unfortunately, your character is measured most by times you step outside it. All of the combined days that you don’t cheat on your spouse will never stand up to the one that you do.
Once in a while, if you’re lucky, a black swan might manifest itself in someone you meet. Someone that changes your assumptions and forces you to reconsider what you thought you knew. Marry that person. Or kill them.
So what the fuck do I do now? Impact of the random and highly improbable? My life is just a string of random events. I’d like to be defined by that clearly angry outburst about swans a few paragraphs above. Nicholas Thayer: hater of swans and author of garbage. If you are truly judged most by the moment you are most outside of your character, then perhaps I am perceived as normal. Yeah right.
If you home school your children, you deserve a slap. I feel sorry for your kids if the only social interaction that they get is with you, someone so afraid of the real world that you keep your child locked up like a zoo animal. One of the many benefits of devout religious followers. Society is bad! God is awesome!
Don’t fear the black swan, you Jesus freak. I am having serious issues with focus right now.
There is a novel in me somewhere. I feel it inside me – fucked by my own saliva-inducing fantasies about writing something that someone might actually pay attention to. Sometimes I have random moments of inspiration that feel worthwhile, but I don’t write them down. And then they’re gone.
Characters jump in and out of my head. And titles. And lines. And paragraphs. Fleeting words mashed together in a dizzying hysteria of verbs and nouns. My head fills itself and purges. Bulimia of the mind. Someday I’ll write some of them down instead of forcing myself to combat insomnia with this unnatural trash.
Then, just maybe, I’ll write something that doesn’t digress to a powerful hatred for water fowl and home schooling. Maybe.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Happy Valentine's Day
I recently gave my class (I’m an Assistant Professor of English at a community college) a writing assignment that is due on February 14th. Valentine’s Day. They gave the melodic “ughhhh” that they tend to unanimously offer when I make them do something that they really hate.
“Happy Valentine’s Day” I said. “But I’m single, so I don’t really care.” Got a few laughs. Apparently, people have a high regard for any excuse to buy overpriced flowers and candy. Guys, if you’re buying flowers and candy, you’re completely unoriginal. Girls, if you’re receiving flowers and candy, you’re extremely lucky. Ordinary is better than solitude, right ladies?
Love thy best friend
Last year on the lover’s holiday, Jay and I had both recently become single after long relationships. We started dating them a week apart, and more than a year later broke up with them a week apart. Jay and I tend to do everything together. I’ll probably send him a Valentine this year, because I think that there is a good chance that we’re soul mates.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating Valentine’s Day with your significant other. If you’re with someone, you might want to celebrate your togetherness everyday, but it never hurts to have an excuse. Valentine’s Day is just a more specific version of Thanksgiving with less turkey and in some cases more chocolate and the color pink.
Love thy bottle
Last year, as a couple of fresh bachelors with the whole world on our platters, we decided to celebrate our singlehood with all the other poor, single freaks at the bar. Of course, we drank a good amount at our house while our taken roommate was out wining and dining his sweetheart. I’m not sure, but I think that our “pregaming” that night consisted of drinking an entire bottle of Three Olives Grape Vodka between Justin, Jay, and myself. If any chefs out there have been seeking out a good recipe for disaster, look no further than: 1 bottle of vodka, Nickel, Jay, Justin, Valentine’s Day.
This part gets a bit blurry. I’m not sure where we went first. Justin somehow detached himself from the group. Jay and I ended up in Sunny’s (no other place like it – the ‘club’ in Fredonia known for underage patrons, hookups, and general douchebaggery), of course talking to all the lonely, single girls desperately seeking Valentine’s Day attention.
There is no better feeling than making out with a random sorority girl on the stage in front of everyone else at the bar. Oh wait… actually, there are several better feelings than that. For example, eating a pine cone. I didn’t care that I despise people that do that kind of thing. I even remember her name … a Valentine’s Day miracle! Amanda.
Jay and I staggered out of Sunny’s, not ready to be done with our rampage quite yet. But it was two o’clock. Last call is two o’clock. What to do?! Luckily, I was employed by one of the fine drinking establishments in Fredonia. They welcomed us with open arms and pint glasses full of gin with a lime and splash of tonic. Too much.
Love thy Queen
It was quarter to three by now. We stumbled into our apartment and undoubtedly disturbed the sweet, sweet lovemaking occurring in our roommate’s bedroom. We both tried to go to bed, but the alcohol needed to get some revenge. Time for vomiting. Jay is naked by now. I don’t know why. He crawled into the bathroom from his bedroom, still nude, and sat on the toilet, needing to poop and puke at the same time. What a horrible combination! But he pulled it off… the skillful and naked drunken Jay, sitting on the toilet, taking a shit and vomiting in between his legs.
But I had to puke too! I was at least partially naked by now as well – I think my pants were MIA. I tried to dethrone him, physically, from my tactical position on the bathroom floor (I, too, had crawled into the porcelain Queen’s chamber from my sleeping quarters).
What a scene. Two naked full-grown (at least physically) men, nude and fighting over the rights to the toilet. I’m pretty sure that everything that I drank that evening found a new home in the bathroom sink. And I found a new bed for the evening – the bathmat. Jay managed to get up and go back to bed after the battle royal… but I didn’t fair as well. Goodnight, sink. Goodnight, shampoo. Goodnight, pile of towels.
Sadly enough, this was my favorite Valentine’s Day in 23. But there is no greater love than that between best friends, bottles, and toilets.
Every writer that has ever touched a pen to a piece of paper writes about love. Maybe not all the time, and maybe not directly. But they all do. It is extremely trite to try and write some insanely insightful, deep look into what ‘love’ is. I’d even call it insulting to the actual experience. Fuck you, Nicholas Sparks! Drivel. Nonetheless, writing about love really tells you about yourself and your experiences with the L word. Try it. I’ll make a very typical and unoriginal attempt at it:
Adam left work and entered the rainstorm that he had watched mindlessly out of his office window all day. He felt down and lonely. He had forgotten his umbrella. Of course, as soon as Adam began his six-block journey to his studio apartment, the rain intensified. It was driving rain, the kind that stings when it hits your forehead. He tried his best to cover his head with his expensive leather briefcase, but the rain was too clever, dodging his best efforts as the wind changed directions frequently.
Three blocks from home, Adam ducked into a tiny theater that he was sure he had never noticed before in countless trips back and forth. He heard music coming from behind the big oak doors that separated the lobby from the actual theater. Soaking wet and shivering, he opened the giant door just enough to fit through and slid into a seat in the back row.
He sat, at first, wringing out his shirtsleeves, pants, and tie, hoping to dry off a bit in the dry stale air he was now immersed in. But his attention quickly drifted away from his wet clothing as he caught her out of the corner of his eye.
She floated across the stage, imitating the wind. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. The stinging sensation that had been caused by the cold and wet was replaced by warmth and longing. Adam felt something new; the general boredom he had come to know was suddenly replaced with intrigue. He watched intently as she glided back and forth, her feet absolutely silent.
The performance ended and the few people peppered throughout the small theater clapped half-heartedly. But Adam wasn’t finished watching her. He left work early the next night and watched her again. And again the next night. He kept going back to the tiny theater, sitting in the same seat in the back row, and watching the wind. More light, silent feet. More intrigue.
Adam watched her at the same time every night for seven straight days before deciding that he wanted to introduce himself to her. The night of the seventh performance, he walked around back and waited on a step in the alley near the rear exit.
It was a half an hour before she finally emerged. Like he had for the last seven nights, he sat and watched her.
But this time, he watched her as she slid off her tiny slippers and threw them into a big duffel bag. She put on sneakers, let her hair down, and pulled an oversized hooded sweatshirt over her head. She sighed as she heaved the duffel bag up onto her shoulder and raised her cell phone to her ear to check her voicemail.
She walked down the steps, passed Adam, and continued on down the street. He didn’t say a word. Neither did she. He just watched her with a strange sense of horror coming over him. Adam was in love with the wind, not the girl.
He sat there for a few more minutes before getting up, his boredom returning, and began walking back to his small, lonely apartment. Just then, he felt a stray raindrop find its way through the maze of buildings and signs to his right cheek. Cold, boring rain.
Aww, how delightfully sappy I can be. If any pretty girls suddenly feel impelled to go out on a date with me, please e-mail me. Every girl in the world must want Nicholas Sparks, and it makes absolutely no difference what he looks like. Exercising your brain will make you just as attractive as exercising your body. What is the real love muscle: the brain or the labia?
My middle name is Adam. Any time I write about love, it always ends with disappointment. What does that mean? I’m not a pessimist; I think I’m just taking my own route. I wouldn’t even consider any of my relationships as disappointments. As long as you learn something, it is a success. Or at very least, my failed relationships have afforded me material for my future trite, sappy love novel. Drivel.
I’m a sexual optimist. I’m not even sure what that means, but I love to say it.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Friday, February 1, 2008
It Is All Relative
Scott: “I think I’m going to go with this burgundy shirt tonight.”
Me: “…Do you even know what burgundy is?”
Scott: “Yeah, it’s this dark reddish color.”
(Points to the shirt he was now wearing)
Me: “That shirt is dark gray, man.”
Turns out he had been wearing a dark gray Rooster Fish Brewing shirt I had given him for weeks thinking it was some dark shade of red. It was his favorite shirt!
You can imagine what followed. A couple days’ worth of us harassing him about how he saw things differently than everyone else. Failed online colorblindness tests. Teasing him for the fact that when he is driving and the road is wet it looks red to him (he thought it was some sort of strange chemical reaction).
His world of colors is different than ours. Not knowing he was colorblind, he learned that a banana is yellow. But the “yellow” he sees might actually be purple. So he sees purple and his brain says “yellow.”
My insanity (or randomness) leads me to believe that I have a similar disorder where I see common things that trigger my brain to spew random thoughts that have little to no association with those things. I could probably entertain a shrink for hours that wants to play a word association game with me. She says “love,” I say “garden weasel.” She says “childhood,” I say “gravy helmet.” She says “This is costing you $300 per hour,” I say “Apple Jacks.”
I immediately had a strange fantasy where Scott exists in a psychedelic world where the colors are all fucked up and there are unicorns prancing about offering him snacks and insider trading tips. Oh, what I would give to live in Scott’s world of purple bananas.
What we experience is completely relative to what we are. We all know what pain is. But we don’t all experience it in the same way. Some would say that we all have a different tolerance for pain… and that’s bullshit. That’s a scientific-sounding way of saying that “pain” is a general term for a bunch of unique experiences.
What we feel depends so much upon what we are and what we’ve been. Imagine three bowls of water. One is icy cold. One is room temperature. One is near boiling. If you stick your hand in the cold bowl first and then the room temperature bowl, it feels hot. But if you start with the hot bowl and move to the room temperature bowl, it feels cold.
What the fuck? I guess I have no idea what is hot and what isn’t. Which is a bad quality to have when alcohol and unattractive girls are lurking. Right Rocks?
That middle bowl of water feels like a different temperature depending on what precedes it. The same holds true for any other sensation you’ve ever had. That’s the entire theory behind comic relief. “Relief” implies a means to give you a break from all the tragic ones. But it is also making the tragic ones feel much more tragic.
Think of the ramifications! Your mood or the five minutes immediately before meeting someone could completely alter your relationship with them. Maybe you’ve met the girl/boy of your dreams already. But two minutes before meeting them you dropped a piece of toast on the floor butter-side down. Fuck toast for destroying your one true chance at happiness. Perhaps the person you’re with now isn’t ideal for you but you were in a good mood when you met him/her because you found $20 in a random pair of pants that you usually don’t wear. The most significant thing in your love life could be toast or pants. It’s all relative.
All your experiences are just yours. No matter how much someone tried to recreate your experience, it would not and could not be the same.
I envy Scott, because at least he knows one of the things that makes his experience unique. Purple banana unicorn land. For me it’s just a complete guessing game. I’m random, but no more unique than you are.
How does gay sex work with unicorns, anyway, what with the horns and all?
It’s all relative.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Love and Skunks
It’s like letting a hamster run around in one of those clear plastic balls in a room full of cats. No matter how much those cats want to eat that delicious hamster, no amount of pawing at it will afford the snack. The petrarchan hamster. Or maybe our ideal lives are running around in an impenetrable plastic bubble.
Maybe that’s why I write. Just one less degree of separation between my actual and petrarchan lives. Maybe I can’t eat the hamster, but writing gives me the opportunity to at least smell it. And it smells good.
I have a hard time thinking of the ideal woman that would be perfect for me. Apparently Shakespeare did too, since he was writing about someone. He needed inspiration. Any attempt at a relationship I’ve ever endeavored has just been an attempt to define the petrarchan woman, not to capture one. So my love life is like playing the lottery. No winners yet, just a lot of wasted dollars.
But petrarchanism is not limited to love or life plans. In fact, I think that it’s more appropriate for the little everyday expectations that we all experience.
Let’s make up a word! Micropetrachanism. Definition: ideal expectations for everyday, trite events. But that seems too long and difficult to spell / read, so let’s shorten it to “micro-p.” Yeah, that’s got a nice ring and suggestive tone to it.
Think sandwiches. I’m not sure if I’ve ever gotten a sandwich that lived up to my expectations. It never looks like the picture on the menu or in my head. Has society ruined my sandwich experience by creating an image of sandwiches that is unfair or unattainable? It’s just like the media making teenage girls anorexic because toilets like Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton get so much coverage. Only I’m talking about sandwiches. Irony.
You know what vastly alters your micro-p? Alcohol. Expectations tend to be exaggerated or modified. Beer goggles, beer muscles, liquor haze. I like to self-medicate with alcohol to overcome my severe social anxieties.
Jay literally thinks that nothing can harm him when he’s had enough to drink. He eats Christmas ornaments and jumps off of balconies into bushes. Jump is the wrong word – it was more of a tuck-and-roll situation. Rocks’s only expectation for climbing a telephone pole as quickly as possible was applause from the crowd of people outside of a bar.
But the next morning is a shocking return to clear-thinking and more realistic expectations. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Eating glass leads to an odd prickly stomachache. Rolling off of a balcony results in the inability to lift your right arm in the morning and questions from your landlord about why his landscaping is destroyed. Pole climbs often result in a night in jail.
Have you ever made a drunken decision that you expected to turn out significantly different than what actually happened? Drunken micro-p.
Monday night. Jay and I are absolutely hammered. We stagger home from the bar and on the way in hear an animal surveying our garbage cans, which were right outside of Jay’s window and the front door. The smell indicated that our visitor was a skunk and our drunken micro-p led us to have a “good” idea. Let’s catch the skunk and let him loose in our neighbor’s apartment.
Drunk and giggly, Jay armed himself with some sort of box to trap our new friend in while I prepared to swing the door open. On three. 1. 2. 3! I swung the door open, but our curious little pet had been wise to our plan. There was the business end of the skunk, pointed directly at us, and he let us have it.
You know in cartoons when a skunk sprays and there is a giant green plume of smelly gas that fires out of his ass? That’s not so far from what happens in real life. It all happened in slow motion. A thick, greenish cloud of the stinkiest substance known to man released into the house and all over us. Astoundingly potent.
This may have been the hardest I’ve ever laughed. It smelled so terrible that it made our eyes water and the smell woke up our neighbors. We quickly scampered through the house to the back door, stripping our clothes off, laughing hysterically, and crying. It probably wouldn’t have been as funny if we were sober.
Our pants and shoes were never the same after that.
Micro-p. What you think is not ever what is. But idealism is a fucked up thing. Think of your patrarchan man or woman or hamster. Has it changed since you were younger? Is it possible without experience? How boring would life be if ideals and reality were the same? The difference between the two is the fun part of being alive. Adventure, drama, surprises, and skunks.
Learn what you can from the discrepancy and move forward. Don’t be the asshole that throws a fit on the waiter because your sandwich doesn’t look exactly like the one on the menu. When you buy a case of beer, lay out a change of clothes. And keep playing the lottery. Because hey, you never know.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The Beach
Western New York weather is like a firm kick in the balls. Some days you can take it in stride, but other days it takes you down hard and brings you to the cusp of vomiting.
Usually, the first few warm days after the long winter make people act like it’s July. By “warm,” I mean 45ish. But I swear, it feels so good after so much snow and wind that no Western New Yorker can tell the difference. It’s like a disease. Or a developmental disorder, rather. Climatic retardation. Out come the shorts, away go the jackets, and every typical college skank rejoices in the first opportunity to let the bottom of her ass hang out of a clearly inappropriate skirt. Flip-flops are also a must for this celebration of the end of winter. It doesn’t matter how cold you actually are as long as you look cute, right girls?!
But everyone suffers from climatic retardation here. Not just the skanks.
When my former roommate, Jay, and I moved into our first apartment together, we had access to a small balcony on the front of our house. In the world of balconies, this was a sickly little fellow. If balconies were American Gladiators, ours would have been a cancer patient amongst the muscle-bound. ‘Now let’s meet the gladiators you’ll be facing off against today: Nitro! Titan! Viper! And Chemo!’ It looked as if it was ready to fall off at any moment. My landlords knew that it was on its last leg – they were sure to instruct us that no more than two people were allowed on it at any one time.
It was late March. 45 degrees. Another former roommate, Keywork, happened to be there that weekend visiting me. The three of us, already moronic and impulsive enough, were struggling through a tough instance of climatic retardation. We were spending a lazy Friday afternoon watching TV and having a few beers.
And that’s when the Corona commercial came on.
You know what I’m talking about. I can wrap up every Corona commercial ever made in a few words. Perfect beach. Palm trees. Lounging. Coronas. I’m not sure who actually uttered the idea first, or how the already incredibly dangerous balcony got involved, but before long we were discussing the logistics of transforming little Chemo into the perfect beach. Simply enough, our climatic retardation led us to believe that we should live like the Corona commercial. After all, the winter was over. Who could blame us?
Jay and Keywork departed to get sand and tropical plants. They paid for one 20 pound bag of sand at the local Home Depot. Poor Home Depot. They have a self-loading policy on larger landscaping items like sand. They stole 49 additional bags. 1,000 pounds seemed like it would be enough. With the addition of a couple of potted tropical plants, some mini lawn chairs, a grill, a case of Corona, and a couple limes, we were in business.
Two bags of sand per trip up the stairs meant 25 trips up the stairs lugging 40 pounds of sand. This beach was hard work. But eventually the work ended, and the beach party began.
Friends arrived. Kathryn. Dan-O. Nicole. Shaylah. Adam. Joe. Sarah. Denny. All great people that wanted to enjoy the beach with us. The Coronas were on ice. Limes sliced. Hot dogs cooking away on the grill. Paradise across the street from a Sonoco. What more could anyone want? Winter was a thing of the past and we had our own personal beach.
I’m not sure about the validity of this statement, but I’m also fairly positive that Keywork talked some girl into having sex with him out there. Nothing screams “I had an awesome time last night” like a little sand in your crevasses.
Let’s take a moment to think about the overall weight of this little project. Our landlord didn’t want more than two people on the balcony at any one time. I weigh 180. Jay comes in at an impressive 160. So let’s round up and assume that a “person” means 200 pounds. We had at least eight people enjoying the beach all simultaneously. And let’s not discount the 1,000 pounds of sand. That’s another five “people.” 13 altogether.
I don’t care if we extended our landlord’s balcony person limit by 11. We were living the dream.
But the thing about climatic retardation is that it’s always premature. The first few warm days in Western New York are always followed by snow. It’s science. A week of enjoying the beach was followed by the harsh realization that 1,000 pounds of sand weighs a lot more when it gets wet. A lot more. And of course, another winter storm arrived to alleviate our climatic retardation and dampen our masterpiece.
Now, standing on the beach was accompanied by the house making noises. Bad noises. Like that creaking noise in movies that you always hear before a roof flies off or someone falls through the floor. Our climatic retardation a thing of the past, we began to think clearly and realize some of the more poorly planned parts of the project.
The sand was wet. And heavy. And once out of the bags much more difficult to transport. Chemo was screaming in pain. We were legitimately concerned that our actions were going to lead to the entire front of the house being ripped off when the old girl finally couldn’t take it anymore and collapsed.
Apparently our landlord felt the same way. One late night at the library, I got an angry voicemail from him. Simply enough, it said, “Hey this is Mark. Either the sand is gone by tomorrow or you are. And you’d better not just shovel it off into the front yard.” Damn. That would have been easy.
It was about one in the morning. Cold. Snowy. With the threat of eviction hanging over our heads, we had to think quickly. A couple of snow shovels, a borrowed pick-up truck, and a sheet of plastic later, we were in business. We constructed a slide of sorts and shoveled the sand down the slide into the truck. It actually didn’t work too poorly. Only a couple hundred pounds escaped to the front lawn, I’d say.
By four o’clock or so the beach was gone, reduced to nothing but a memory and some severely weakened property. Poor Chemo. But she's still hanging on. I don't think that I would tempt fate by actually walking on it ever again though.
In the end, it turns out that we aren’t that much different than the inappropriately dressed skank that, upon re-wintering, reverts back to her low-rider jeans that show off the top of her ass crack instead of the bottom of it. Climatic retardation brings out an exaggerated aspect of our warm-weather personalities. For the skank, her best weapons are her apparently over-used body parts. For people like us, it’s being a moron in a somewhat intelligent way. Outdoors.
I’m not sure if you could blame any of us. But now I live in an apartment with a much larger porch. And what’s life unless you constantly outdo yourself?