joyeux anniversaire!

another year under my belt - the 35th to be exact. to celebrate, i'm going against the snake plissken grain and escaping to new york to kick it with some of my best friends in the world and to see radiohead at liberty state park at the all points west festival. tomorrow night i'll be scaling their wall of sound, man crushing on thom yorke. it won't be the first time, or the last.

i had all of these reflections stirring in my head last night, big plans for my 35th birthday blog post. alas, my friend rebecca, the world's coolest bartender who runs the scene at buck's fishing and camping, set us up very generously last night. in other words, my head is full of clouds. not to mention, i need to pack and hit the road toute de suite.

here's to another year. each time i hit this benchmark i'm pleased and sort of surprised. nyc, here i come...

we can't all be friends?

my friend adam in brooklyn, who i really hope is there when i'm in nyc for radiohead soon, impresses the hell out of me with the video treats he exhumes every day. on my first watch, i just laughed at the surface of this one. when i watched again, it made me think of the term "friend" as it's used in the social network context. which is less meaningful - friends online or friends made on a reality television show?

personality disorder

so lately i'm getting lost in the shuffle of my own life. you could call it living. that's how i prefer to look at it. i know one scary day, devices might be fused with our bodies so that reflections, streams of consciousness, fleeting lapses of genius, and general thoughts will be poured into files and edited to become content. instantaneous blogging, twittering, facebooking, and whoring ourselves out! the good thing about now is you can get lost in life and actually consider it a good thing.

bullshit, man. i'm trying to justify ignoring this blog again, covering up for my general apathy and a case of writer's block. whatever...

as you might know, my wife is in the web 2.0/social media space. we have terrific conversations, usually over a bottle (maybe 2) of wine and a few sneaky cigarettes after the kids are in bed, about this new frontier and its population, growing at a rate that you might as well strike the "new" label there. i am fascinated by the sociological aspects of all this. what really grabs me at the moment is how it enables split personality disorders across the globe.

alert: generalizations dead ahead.

when you read a blog (or other media), do you assume the person behind the curtain is consistent with what you glean from the content or the brand? when i got into this, i assumed as much. then i began to know or know about other bloggers, and it occurred to me that so many out there are really nailing it with the smoke and mirrors, promoting their brands that don't seem to match up with the real mccoy. for instance, there's this social media god at my wife's firm who has his virtual feet kissed 24/7 in the world of web 2.0 these days. to everyone out there buying in, he's fantastic, wonderful. in real life he's a prick. then there's a woman who i really like in person when i see her on occasion, but i borderline loathe her social media persona. i can cite several other examples of inconsistency, but you get the point.

much of it's in the name of self promotion, which sometimes frightens me. i am so curious about people who devote so much time and energy to putting themselves out there, endlessly in search of new friends or networks. "star fuckers" is what my wife calls them. to me it's exhausting and makes me wonder about whether the real world of flesh and blood has become that much of a drag. can our true selves be so boring that we need virtual alter egos to feel alive? it's possible, really.

i have to acknowledge a bit of jealousy on my part. it's like when i drive down rock creek parkway and see joggers or bikers everywhere within eye sight, i sort of assume they are all young, maybe single, getting their workout on before a night on the town, and i have a fleeting "grass is greener" moment. so when i see how active and dialed in star fuckers are in the new media world, you could say i wish i had that much time on my hands to flex my mind and soul.

maybe i'm just in the midst of an online identity crisis. or is the crisis in my real life? i guess i should send out an SOS via twitter and see if my "friends" can throw me a lifeline. those venues do seem to be where the answers are coming from lately, yes?

facebooked

so i finally stepped to the plate and set up a facebook account. i have struggled with the concept for as long as i can remember for a number of reasons. the paramount reason is that there are certain people in this world i wish to hide from. as you see, this blog is anonymous. some of you know who i am; others never will.

almost immediately, a close friend in nyc sent the first message to my facebook inbox that gave me a serious case of cognitive dissonance:

part of me was really hoping that you would never join FB so that i could forever duck the shame one of my true friends seeing that i have more than one self serving profile picture, over 300 FB friends and other shameful social networking acts. welcome to FB sucker...be prepared for the zombies and ghosts of past that lurk in the shadows waiting to poke, comment on your wall and generally disgust you with who they've become.

meet me in st. louis

We're headed to my hometown, St. Louis, tomorrow where everyone asks everyone where they went to school, and they don't mean college; they mean high school. I decided somewhere along the line that the reason behind this is that most St. Lunatics do not live outside the shadow of the Arch. If you are roaming the streets or sitting on a bar stool, the assumption is that you must be from here, which means I can make a snap judgment about you based on where you attended high school.

Forget that you might have graduated 15 years ago and could have extended yourself outside the particular stereotype married to your high school, which did not necessarily apply to you in the first place. I don't care; I'm still assuming things about you regardless.

Private same-sex high schools abound in this town. I happened to attend an all guys Jesuit school. In that deep private school pool the guys' schools tend to intermingle more with the girls' schools. This tends to perpetuate stereotypes and rumors, especially about the girls.

So back to that bar stool.

Oh, you went to Ursuline? (Whore.)
...Visitation? (High brow whore)
...Cor Jesu? (catholic white t)
...St. Elizabeth (inner city t)
...St. Joe (alright, fine)


Of course I no longer subscribe to any of the above, but those are a few samples that floated around in the early 90s. I have no clue what applies these days. Mental note to do some research this weekend.

In any case, here are a few hometown favorites - usual suspects - I will be crossing off the mental checklist over the next 5 days:

• Cardinals vs. Cubs, July 4th


• Lion's Choice :2 sammies, fries, large Dr. Pepper


• toasted ravioli : early and often


• Ted Drewes : hot fudge concrete


• Imo's Pizza : large pizza, house salad


• Niche : date night...picked one of Food & Wine's top new chefs from the grab bag of amazing restaurants in town

unfortunately not overheard this morning

at 6:30 this morning i went through a hateful ritual of putting on a suit and driving to tysons corner for a networking breakfast. long story short, our firm is a member of a business development community called the breakfast club (read: pyramid scheme) that hosts events to draw together professionals (read: whores) to build networks and business. the breakfast is once a month. i have managed to weasel my way out of representing the firm at these glad hand shows for a solid span of 8 months. my arsenal of excuses is exhausted, so there i idled along chain bridge road soaking up some jose gonzalez and practicing my canned responses and intimations of placation.

instead of mixing it up in the crowd, i tend to shuffle my feet in one place in the corner hoping i can make it through the coffee and chitchat hour in the banquet room without having to press my card into a single hand. this is clearly impossible, but i am proud to say i managed to walk out of there with only one card in my pocket. it turned out to be a woman, a guest, who seemed to hate these things as much as i do. in a way we were the greasers at the party of socs, maybe kindred spirits. in any case, i usually survive and should admit that occasionally i have a good conversation.

in these situations, voices in my head, possibly from a darker comedy side of myself, mutter things that i'd dare not literally speak in a social situation. there have been times when i've had to put forth a concerted effort to suppress the urge to blurt one out. these impulses, banal and childish as they may be, put a smile on my face, so i thought i'd share a few with you.

scene 1:

ron: hello, i'm ron pella. good to meet you. (extends limp fish handshake)

me: hi, ron. say, how's your wife doing?

ron:

see, that wouldn't work out so well. raises lots of questions, gets someone hot under the collar pretty quickly. it assumes so much. still, wouldn't you love to say it just once? no?

scene 2:

subtle grunts followed by explosive shit sounds come from the single stall in the country club men's room. snickers come from men in suits pissing at the urinals or picking their noses in front of the mirrors. i'm waiting to enter said stall due to case of stage fright and inability to piss at these particular types of urinals lacking any edge or partition. eventually i give up and decide i'm bailing early on this thing anyway and can make it. before i go, i rap my knuckles on the stall door a couple of times.

poor bastard: what, it's occupied!

me: i know...i just wanted to see if i could get your business card when you're done.

poor bastard: what?!?

me: it's okay, i'll wait out here for you. i'm just going to slide mine under the door now.

scene 3:

a guest speaker, the cliche chest thumper, rants on and on over his slide show presentation. he's so into it. it reminds me of tom cruise's character, frank mackey, in magnolia - the self help sex book author and motivational speaker who coaches guys on getting laid. in a zone out moment i almost expect today's speaker to start chanting "respect the cock!" like frank mackey. when he wraps up his diatribe, he asks if there are any questions.

at this point, i wonder how the crowd, a mixed bag of generations, perceives the breakfast club film reference in the title of this quasi club. each and every time i've been to one of these, the speaker offers to take questions, and the obvious question, which judd nelson framed perfectly, just had to be asked.

yeah, i got a question. does barry manilow know that you raid his wardrobe?

alas i survived and made my exit during the follow-up speakers bit, telling a colleague i was headed to the restroom. he knew i was ghost and whispered me out as i passed with a "keyser soze."

leave it to cleavage

earlier this week human resources informed my wife, through one of her female colleagues, that she is showcasing too much cleavage at the office. apparently some guy went to HR and said he was unable to concentrate in a meeting because he could not stop staring at my wife's breasts. this prompted the HR woman to enlist one of my wife's peers ,who is not her supervisor, to deliver the news.

the ripples of this have not completely settled yet, as my wife is naturally flustered and annoyed for a number of reasons, and i don't blame her. there are a few things about this matter that are not sitting well.

her chest happens to be pronounced these days due to the fact that she's breast feeding. (i enjoy this aspect, of course, but that's another story for my erotica blog.) still, she has not changed her style - classy and elegant - one bit since she joined the firm over a year ago and is suddenly being asked to do so because some guy can't keep his eyes off her breasts and goes so far as to dispense what can be construed as a lewd comment about her. by the way, they were gigantic during her pregnancy, but no one had concentration issues then. does my wife work in a bible camp or a religious setting? ummm, no.

the fact that the HR woman sent one of my wife's colleagues to deliver the news strikes me as inappropriate. this might add up if the HR director was a man. i am not knowledgeable in the ream of HR laws and policies, but i think any HR issue, especially one like this, should be handled with sensitivity and confidence. she should have approached my wife directly instead of threading someone else into this.

the whole thing seems circuitous and messy. some guy - the poor victim - makes a comment, so HR sends another woman to deliver the news and handle it. to me it's almost a watered down version of those terrible rape stories you hear about or see depicted in court dramas on television: well, she shouldn't have worn that sexy outfit. how could i restrain myself from tossing that roofie into her drink? i'm a man after all.

it's hard enough for her being a working mother in a global pr firm where the reward for hard work is more hard work, so, as you might imagine, to be billing in the neighborhood of 60 hours per week, getting thrown under the bus by people covering their own asses (life in a pr firm), catching this kind of hell from HR has found her near the end of her rope.

the situation will obviously not boil down to this, but one of our close friends is a partner in a big law firm's employment law practice. he makes a living raking large corporations over the coals for gigantic settlements. in jest, to lighten the mood of all this, i suggested that she contact him so we can score an early retirement in the name of her boobs. we could buy a place in the BVI, get a yacht, and name it "cleavage." how fantastic would that be?

yes, far fetched, but that won't stop me from rolling down the street to barneys to buy a few low cut items for her on my way home tonight.