Thanksgiving Weekend III

Thanksgiving is the best holiday. Reasons:

-Everyone's invited. Yes, even the Jews can join in on Thanksgiving.

-It doesn't involve religion. Rather, the themes include being grateful for what you have, eating, indulgence, football, family, and friends. What could be better than that? Turkeys in general are also a theme, which is just kind of amusing. (Then again, I asked a British friend of mine if she knew what Thanksgiving was, and she replied, "It's when Americans sit around and binge on food whilst congratulating themselves for wiping out an entire race of people hundreds of years ago, right?")

-There's obviously something special about the "sacredness" of other holidays like Christmas. But Thanksgiving's great with the whole "sure, invite your weird roommate and his weird family, why not?" thing. That said, Anthony Edwards' family once got stuck with me on Christmas Eve (long story), and they were immensely warm and nice about it.

-I love the four-and-a-half day weekend thing. With a week-long holiday, I feel the pressure to do something significant, like travel or lock myself in my apartment for 11 days to write an album (more on that in March). But with the extra-long weekend, everyone just comes home and hangs out for four days. Since high school ended, Thanksgiving has accounted for a large portion of my quality time with high school friends. It's also a good chance to have awkward interactions with random people you went to high school with but haven't talked to in years.

-It's a good time to make a fire. There's nothing I enjoy more than making and watching a fire. And not letting anyone else touch my fire or put a log on it under any circumstances.

-While we're here, there have been Christmas carols on the radio since Halloween. Really? Two months of Christmas spirit? A Jew though I may be, I completely enjoy Christmas spirit-- but wouldn't it be better if we held off until early-mid December and then had two hardcore Christmas weeks leading up to the 25th? Speaking of which, I booked a flight for Christmas morning. Some kind of crowd that'll be at the airport.

Some other thoughts on the week:

-Boston is cold.

-I went to Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game the weekend before Thanksgiving. Harvard-Yale is a silly thing where everyone from the visiting school comes to the hosting school and a ton of grads come back every year. A nerd-fest of sorts. I'd like to say I'm a really passionate Harvard football fan, but I just can't do it. I gave it a real try during college, but when they went 9-0 in 2002 for the first time since 1913 and won a bunch of the games in dramatic fashion-- and it wasn't that exciting-- I said screw it and stopped caring.

-After Harvard-Yale I headed to Richmond to visit my mom's side of the family. My two Richmond cousins are married and have a total of five little kids, ages 0, 3, 5, 5, 7. Some observations:

• Nothing is more fun than hanging around with ridiculously cute little kids when they're not your problem.

• There is a vast difference between a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. I always just kind of assumed that 5-year-olds had no brain yet, but in fact, they do. They're tiny people with miniature little personalities. But they're kind of legit. Like, if I'm acting like a d-bag, the 5-year-olds are gonna be like, "Why is this dude acting like a d-bag?" On the other hand, 3-year-olds have no brain yet-- you can be mad silly and they get really into it.

• Baby heads vary. I tend to be a fan of most baby heads, but some are radder than others. This particular 0-year-old has a ridiculously awesome baby head. Check it out:

-My uncle just got a new Blackberry Storm. It's just like the iPhone. Except 450,000 times worse.

-Back to Thanksgiving, one of my earliest and happiest memories is watching the Macy's Parade every Thanksgiving morning with my dad. Because of this, I still think of watching this parade as an exciting and wonderful experience. However, after years of forgetting about it, I flipped it on on Thursday, and came to a somber realization-- the Macy's Parade...sucks.

-Three shitty football games on Thursday. A shame.

-I saw Slumdog Millionaire yesterday. It's incredibly good. Though very stressful.

-I'm currently on a JetBlue flight and the girl next to me is watching some sitcom and I can't help but be tragically in love with this actress (that's right, I googled around until I found the show and then her name).

-According to the archive numbers, this is my 200th blog post. I'm taking a shot and I expect you to as well.

Wednesday Night

I was just sitting here about to write a blog post and suddenly I was like, "Wait, what the hell am I doing?"

Not in a negative or upsetting way, just in a "Wait, what's going on?" kind of way.

Because what the hell is this blog? Writing in this blog is just something I...do. I just kind of sit down and I'm like, "I'm going to write in this blog now," and then I do it.

But why?

What am I writing, and to whom? You? Who the hell are you? And why are you reading this? Are you procrastinating? Do I know you? Am I procrastinating?

What the hell is going on.

So now I'm still here, and writing in this blog, but I'm suddenly kind of shocked about it.

Let's break this down a little further. Here's what's actually happening:

I'm sitting here in my office. In Santa Monica. Alone.

All day today, this office was a lively place. My old friend and business partner, Andrew, sits across the room from me. Our two employees, Amani and Ashley, work in the office next to ours. The four of us run Launch Education, a tutoring company that Andrew and I own. We work on things. Big things and little things. And we talk, and we procrastinate, and we eat, and sometimes one of us goes outside and paces around the parking lot while talking on the phone.

There are a bunch of other small businesses that work in the same building and there's a constant buzz up and down the hallway.

Now, though, it's 10:50pm and I'm the only person in the building. It's silent here, other than the sound of me typing. I often stay late and work on stuff-- company stuff, writing projects, getting through my inbox. I try to get home with a few hours to spare so I can sit at the piano and work on music stuff, but sometimes if I'm being productive I stay here to ride that wave.

So here I am.

There's an electric tea kettle on the desk in front of me. I bought it three years ago for $24 and still maintain it was the best $24 I've ever spent. I just boiled some water and then decided which tea bag to put in-- black, green, white, or red. Red is my least favorite, but it was closest to me and I haven't had red in awhile. I picked up the can-- Goji Raspberry Green Tea. I noted that what the hell are goji berries and that the word raspberries still has the "p" in it. Screw it, I thought, and I put a tea bag into the cup. Immediately regretting my decision, I peered in and it was clear I could not turn back-- the bag was already a bit wet from the remnants of the previous cup of tea. So I went ahead and poured the water and started sipping at it. It's not bad. But it is still my least favorite of the four options.

All around on the walls are things I like-- maps, timelines, whiteboards. In each case, when we initially put them up they made me very happy. Like almost all happiness, though, it starts out inflated and then deflates down to your default happiness level. So now it's been awhile and I'm very used to all of these things so they no longer provide a boost of happiness above my default level, but I like them nonetheless.

There is a container of cookies on the desk in front of me. Ashley baked the cookies for me and Andrew and brought them in. I had about five of them today, which was too many.

There's a bulletin board on the wall with about 40 business cards tacked to it. Our network of contacts. I'm quite immersed in this thing it seems.

To my left is an assortment of toys that make me happy (though no longer higher than my default level)-- a plastic whale, a hacky sack, a slinky, some silly putty that is too soft now, and a little soft foam red chair with Bank of America's logo on it.

I'm wearing an untucked button down shirt and jeans and I'm barefoot. My feet are freezing. My feet are the primary motivation behind this particular cup of tea.

A girl I know is going to call me soon. This pending call is delaying my decision to leave the office.

And it was in this environment that I decided to sit down and write a blog post.

Which led me to try to figure out what the hell I was doing. So let's continue this investigation.

So the idea is, I think of something I want to get off my chest. Something that has been subconsciously on my mind for days, perhaps for years, and that I want to tell you.

So I dig into my mind for all of the dormant thoughts and opinions that fit into the category of this particular topic and I start writing. Well, not writing exactly-- there's no pen or pencil and no paper. I start thinking and my fingers start moving really quickly. They start dancing around on the keyboard while I watch my exact thoughts appear on the screen of this device in front of me.

(This particular device made me very happy for a few days after purchasing it and this happiness, too, deflated back to the default. You can tell how deep a specific happiness goes by how long it takes before it fails to lift you above your default level. Only the deepest of happiness has the power to alter your default level itself. This happens, but not very often.)

Anyway, technology allows my dancing fingers to transmit my thoughts onto this screen. Eventually, I finish my set of thoughts and I click "Publish Post."

This is when things get even weirder.

So the thing I had to get off my chest-- that thought now exits my device and travels through the air, thousands of feet above the ground (possibly hundreds of miles-- I'm not sure) into another device, which then directs it to another device somewhere on the surface of the Earth, where it hangs out.

This is where you come in.

Then you go over to your device-- maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next month-- and your fingers dance around on your keyboard and you order the device where my thoughts are hanging out to send you my thoughts. So it sends a copy of my thoughts through wires and air and into your device where you use your eyes to transmit the thoughts from the screen to your mind.

Then you go and do something else.

And that's really that.

And frankly, the whole thing is a little weird. Bad? Not at all. Just a little odd.

But then, a lot of things are pretty odd.

And the call has come. Plus my feet are freezing. So I'm going to leave it at that.

I'm going to click "Publish Post," and I'll have done my part.

Birthdays

Yesterday was my birthday. Birthdays are kind of weird.

It's not that I don't enjoy my birthday-- it's just that birthdays have become a little weird.

To begin with, birthdays are such a ridiculously big deal when you're a little kid that they're now completely anti-climactic. And because I still associate the concept of "It's my birthday!" with being 7, it feels like the kind of thing that just should have stopped at some point, like the Easter Bunny or summer camp or Halloween (oh wait, I forgot-- for some twisted reason, Halloween never stops). But "It's my birthday!" doesn't really stop. It just evolves into this bizarre adult version.

So now, every year when November 12th rolls around and everyone is smiling and saying "Happy Birthday" all day, I kind of feel like they're treating me like a 7-year-old.

Which is not to say I don't enjoy the "Happy Birthdays." It's just that the whole thing has become a little weird.

And the weirdness doesn't stop there. There's also the thing where everyone has to be really nice to you all day. Which is just kind of awkward. And the unspoken fact is that when it's your birthday, you really have no choice but to be really nice to everyone else. Because what would be more awkward than being a dick to someone on your birthday. How do they respond to that? You'd be putting them in a hideous situation. So it's a day when you and the world must be immensely friendly to each other all day.

Then there's the whole "everyone who cares about you is supposed to contact you at some point during the day, preferably during the first half of the day" thing. This one stresses me out. At some point American culture decided that it's a huge dick move not to contact someone you care about on their birthday. As a result, I have experienced a handful of "Oh SHIT" moments when I realized that someone I was definitely supposed to call had a birthday yesterday. So I have mixed feelings when people forget my birthday. Half of me is thrilled because it means I can forget theirs and it's okay. And half of me is hurt because America says I should be hurt.

While we're here, there are two types of people in my life. People whose birthdays are ingrained in my brain for some reason, and people whose, for some reason, are not. The ingrained birthdays I just know. It's just a fact that I know and that I'll never forget. With these birthdays, whenever I see or hear those dates, the accompanying birthday people pop into my head. So I never forget to call them on their birthday.

The others are a different story. I not only don't know these people's birthdays-- but I will never know them, no matter how many times I hear the date. Sometimes I know the month, but when someone is in the second category, I simply will never know their exact birthday. And it has little to do with how close someone is to me-- it's pretty arbitrary.

Likewise, there are some people in my life who absolutely know my birthday. Others absolutely do not. And I'm pretty sure I know who's who.

Yesterday, everyone in my extended family (or someone representing them) contacted me. Every girl I'm remotely close to contacted me. About 2/3 of my close guy friends contacted me. This is all expected. Likewise, the birthdays of close girl friends and family members are an immensely stressful part of life (guys don't tend to give as much of a crap).

And there's more. There's Facebook. Facebook is a weird place in general, but it's especially bizarre on your birthday. People from all stretches of life pop up to say Happy Birthday. This is kind of fun because it's a ridiculously random group of people and there's no awkward interaction involved. Just a little hello from a bunch of random humans in (or not in) your life.

Then there are these other formalities, one of which is that you are obligated to "do something" for your birthday. People get very depressed and it's just awkward in general if you tell them you're "not doing anything for your birthday." American culture simply doesn't allow it. When I was 10, I was entirely okay with everyone spending half of their day celebrating me and my birthday. Now, it just feels kind of wrong. The actual event always ends up being fun-- but setting it up is a nightmare. One of the best perks of having a girlfriend or wife is that you can make her set it all up. But planning your own birthday party is pretty icky. The times when this is necessary, I prefer to keep it real simple-- either a low-key dinner with good friends or a bar night with whomever. Last year I went with the bar night and threw up on my shirt. This year, I opted for the dinner.

Finally, there are the aging crises. It's early, but I've already had a few of these.

Until I hit 22, turning a year older was always a purely positive thing (although turning 20 freaked me out a little bit). But 22 is the first time you're maybe not that jazzed to turn that next year older. 22 is like, "This isn't exciting, I'm kind of just moving into the rest of my life." And when you hit 22, officially no one gives a shit about you anymore. You're not cute, your lack of direction isn't cute, your general life failings are no longer cute. They're upsetting.

25 was another mini-crisis for me. You're no longer "coming up from 20," you're now "on your way down to 30."

And now I'm 27. This one's weird too.

First of all, I might suddenly be in my "late 20's." Or there's a chance I'm still in my mid-20's. It's unclear. Is an 87 a B or a B+?

Secondly, 27 is kind of a full adult. There's no other way around it.

When you're 27, it's really not okay to sneak down to better seats at a baseball game and get caught. At 23, it's fine-- just a young dude trying to scrounge around for better seats. At 27, it's like, "Why is that full-grown adult man with a job and a mortgage and kids sneaking into anything? In fact, why is he even at this game? He should be earning money to support his family of 5. And selecting preschools."

A 23-year-old can live in some shithole apartment and eat shit for dinner. No problem. A 27-year-old? He can do that, but he's definitely not that psyched about it (he's still allowed to drive a shitbox for a couple more years though).

A 23-year-old can date a girl he's definitely not going to marry. If a 27-year-old is doing that, something's a little off.

I think this is half the reason people in their mid-20's often head back to school. It slows this shit down for a little. Going back to school is free reign to be retarded for a few more years without self-loathing.

The main people who have these crises tend to be oldest siblings who are old for their grade (me). When you have an older sibling, a new age is softened a bit because you've been exposed to it through your sibling. And when you're born anywhere from March to September, by the time you turn the new age you're used to all your friends being that age so it's no big deal. But as the oldest sibling, born in November, I'm always completely blindsided by the next age.

And quite clearly, the crises don't stop at 27. (45-year-olds reading this are like, "Hey maybe you probably want to shut the hell up about your crisis at hitting 27.")

Anyway, in the old days, November 13th was the worst day of the year. 364 days until the next birthday.

Now-- I think I can handle that.

Obama

Pretty surreal, isn't it?

I spent most of the day forgetting that Obama was the president-elect and then being like, "Holy shit!"

It's pretty surreal and really, really exciting. Even the staunchest liberal-haters have to be in some amount of awe over the magnitude of this moment.

In any case, there are already 85,000 op-eds on the topic, so I'll spare you the rhetoric. But if you haven't re-watched Obama's acceptance speech, you probably should. Watching this, I had to keep reminding myself it wasn't a scene from a Hollywood movie. Frankly, if Hollywood made a movie about the first black president getting elected, and this were the final 20 minutes of the movie, it would be one of those movies where it ends and the credits start rolling and everyone stays in their seats for another minute (you can tell how powerful a movie ending is by how long it takes before people get up once the credits roll).

Here's the speech:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

For fun, compare that acceptance speech to Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 DNC. I remember watching the '04 speech-- it was the first time I had heard of Obama. The speech blew me away. And I remember thinking, "That young black guy might be a senator? Wow, cool!" But watching it again now, he seems kind of mini. He's like a mini version of his current self. He's all green and boyish. And in last night's speech, he's absurdly confident and commanding and powerful-seeming-- like a completely believable commander-in-chief.

The 2004 speech:

Part 1
Part 2

Anyway, this is big. It's ridiculously big. And in 100 years it's going to seem even bigger than it does right now. Apparently President Sarkozy of France wrote to Obama today, "Your election raises in France, in Europe, and beyond throughout the world, immense hope."

I'm getting a little teary-eyed right now.