I Wish That I Could Go To Just One Party That Didn’t Have The Word “Birthday” In It.

Wait, did I ever say that I would actually post here on a regular basis? Is that really what people do when they have blogs – post things regularly?

They do?

Really?

Oh.

My bad. So anyway, Sarah turns three today – three! – and as you would expect we’re all pretty excited. Admittedly, the significance of this particular day might be stronger felt if we hadn’t been celebrating her birthday for a whole week already, but who am I to complain? The more parties the better, right?

Believe it or not, we’re the kind of parents who fully intend to keep these annual ceremonies small-ish and manageable. I’m looking for a word here – dignified doesn’t really work, not with children…tasteful, no… free of clowns, jugglers, balloon animals and bounce houses, too wordy…how about…underwhelming. Yes, that’s the word. We’d like to keep all of these parties underwhelming. The idea is that Sarah will grow up having learned the value of a nice, quiet evening spent with a small group of well-chosen, and ethnically diverse, friends. I’m thinking tapas. She’ll thank us, I’m sure.

Well, okay, so I’m kind of kidding. Bounce houses and jugglers are actually awesome, and Sarah has already shown an affinity for balloon animals (at least, those not attempted by me), so of course we’d never deny her the pleasures of a normal , whimsical childhood. We do still prefer to keep things small, however (and if a clown dares to come within 50 yards of us I will call the cops), but as any parent knows, what we’d prefer to do and what winds up happening are often two different things. Particularly when one factors in the needs of one’s extended family members, Sarah’s current schoolmates, and the kids and parents from her past “mommies” group – many of whom have already had you over to their kid’s birthdays so you know what that means.  Well I don’t know about you, but there’s no way that we’re fitting all these people under one roof in one day, so it looks like we’ll have more than one party – in this case, make that four parties.

We had our first party last Saturday, and I have to admit it went swimmingly. And no, it wasn’t at a pool, smart guy, it was at a gym, specifically the “Kidnastics” in Los Alamitos. Kidnastics, as the name implies, is a pretty straight-forward and self-explanitory concept, and if you need any advice or guidance as to what it entails then for you I feel only pity.  We have been going to this gym weekly, and it’s an absolutely fabulous time for all involved. This was actually a duel birthday party, an old playmate of hers having turned three a week prior, and was a co-production of the respective parents. You would think that that would lessen the workload, especially taking into account that both we and the other parents wanted to eschew all excessive elements (no gifts please, no decorations, and no party favors), but that would only have been the case if one parent hadn’t offered to make the cakes at home rather than buy one fully decorated, as is customary. That parent was a fool.

That parent was me.

I do all of the cooking around here, but baking cakes is not my thing. Oh, I’ve tried – I remember struggling two years ago on Lizzy’s birthday, hovering over a large mixing bowl with my cheap, Target-bought hand mixer, waiting what seemed like hours for the damned butter and sugar to cream. Well, I had no intention of doing that again, and vowed early on to use only store-bought cake mix, but I still wanted to do something nice. I knew there would be at least 15 kids so I decided to make a double-layer sheet cake, which I could then frost decoratively. Both kids’ names would be written, in perfect script, with icing.

Figuring out how many boxes of cake mix would be needed for the sheet cakes was a trick – it turns out two boxes will fill one sheet tray with a bit left over, which means that I would need to mix up four boxes, eyeball how much to put into each sheet tray and then bake either a small cake or several cupcakes with the leftovers. There was also the matter of adjusting the cooking time (since most boxes include directions for a smaller cake), baking them without overcooking the sides or undercooking the middle, and then – if I were lucky enough to get this far – inverting the cakes out of the trays cleanly without destroying them.

And yes, ultimately I had to run back to the store for more ingredients – not only because I wrecked one cake by undercooking it but because I realized, after staring at the sheet trays and going over the numbers in my increasingly panicky head, that I would not have enough to feed all the kids and the parents. So two sheets of cake turned into four (plus the one that I had to redo), and the amount of icing I had planned to make doubled.

[On a side note – if you’ve made cakes from a mix you know that you still need some ingredients – the first mix I bought required lots of butter, eggs and milk; the second (when I went back the store was out of the original stuff, natch) needed oil, eggs and water. Add to that the ingredients required to make the icing – 10x sugar, Margerine, shortening, milk, vanilla and food coloring – and you suddenly know with absolute certainty that anyone who says it’s cheaper to make your cakes at home rather than buy them fully baked and decorated is a complete ass.]

So ten boxes of cake mix, two dozen eggs, a bottle of vegetable oil, one pound of butter, a half pound of Margerine, six pounds of powdered sugar, a half gallon of milk and an immeasurable amount of shortening later, and I had my two cakes. Each cake was decorated in light blue and dusty-rose pink (initially designed to be gender-neutral but ultimately looking very pastel), and each read Happy Birthday!!! Isaac and Sarah in purple icing. A large candle in the shape of the number “3,” purchased at the local Ralph’s, would top off the ensemble.

As I said, the party went off without a hitch – the kids played happily while the parents chatted, we didn’t run out of pizza or drinks, and the wonderful staff at Kidnastics not only entertained and monitored the children while the parents gabbed, but also cleaned everything up at the end.

And, of course, we didn’t even touch the second cake.

So that’s one down and three to go. Sarah’s classroom is having a little thing today (another joint venture with a classmate), we’ll do something just the three of us this coming Saturday, and then we’re heading out to New England to visit the family where yet another party, this time with lots of alcohol and seafood on the menu (finally!),  awaits us. At this rate I figure we’ll be done celebrating some time this coming August.

Oh yeah – anyone need a cake?

Juiced! or: How I Made it Through Eight Days Without Solid Food.

I’ve always been someone who loves food a little too much, and, like many a Miller before me, I don’t need the holidays as an excuse for over-eating or heavy drinking.  I’ve always known my limits and had the metabolism to keep me relatively healthy despite my appetites, but I’m rapidly leaving my thirties now and I’m beginning to think that the aforementioned metabolism is pulling the old bait-and-switch. After gorging myself this holiday season on, among other things, roast turkey, shrimp scampi, goose, lobster and clams with butter, pounds and pounds of pasta and endless pies – washed down with plenty of beer, wine, vodka, whiskey, champagne and, on one regrettable occasion, a combination of all five – it became pretty clear to me that I was starting to look a little on the heavy side. As in fat.

A quick trip to the closet to try on some old pants confirmed my fears. It was time for some detoxification, and I’m not talking about any old diet, either – my gastric excesses required something much more significant. Over the years I’ve learned to listen to my body, and what my body was telling me this time was that it needed at least a week of staying away from the solids all together.

The solution? An eight-day juice fast.

I had fasted before some years ago, if two and a half days of consuming nothing but water and herbal tea can be called fasting. I did this on a whim, and I must say I managed it quite well, though I ultimately decided to break the fast prematurely after realizing, with no little degree of clarity, that I was really rather hungry. I’ll never forget the first meal I had that day: a Chicken Caesar Salad. There’s no easy way to describe the effects that first bite of crispy romaine, cheesy croutons and baked poultry had on me.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of those sculptures by the Italian Baroque master Bernini, where there’s a person – usually a saint or some biblical character like St. Theresa or the Profit Daniel – who’s in the throws of a sort of spiritual ecstasy, hand clutching the heart and face lifted upward towards the heavens.  Well, that was me after the first bite. A pleasant warmth enveloped my body, my mind cleared instantly, and I was nearly overcome by a general sense of goodwill toward all. My memory is foggy, but I can’t say for sure that I didn’t hear angels singing.

So yeah, I broke that fast rather early, but one thing that I took from that experience was the realization that I could go that long without food – I mean, two and a half days! – and without much difficulty. Let’s face it – most of us would either collapse from low blood-sugar levels or go into a ravenous rampage if we missed even one meal. Add to that the abstention from alcohol and caffeine, and for a food-and-drink lover like myself the task would seem positively Sisyphean.

I did a little research and found pretty quickly that with a juice fast you simply run whatever vegetables (and some fruit) you can find through a juicer and drink about eight ounces of the swill down with an equal amount of water whenever you’d normally be eating. That means that I’d be getting a constant source of raw vegetable nutrition – enough to keep me humming along for days – just no solids or animal bits.  The idea is that denying your system all the junk it’s been forced to manage over the years will give it time to take a breather, look around, and refocus its energy on other, more important tasks.

As far as side effects go, there didn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Sure, my research indicated that headaches, bad breath, oily skin, general irritability and the frequent and rapid exodus of whatever lurks in my intestines from my body would await me, but let’s face it – that sounds like a normal Saturday morning for me. In fact, higher energy levels and clarity of mind seemed to be in the cards as well, along with some serious weight loss (estimated at an average of a pound a day). So I wasn’t worried about feeling weak.

Fortunately we have a juicer; all I needed was the produce, and a trip to the Sunday farmer’s market here in Long Beach provided all the veggies I would need. Pounds of carrots, cukes, celery, beets, tomatoes, kale – you name it, I loaded up on it. In retrospect there are several vegetables I now know to avoid in the future – I’m talking to you, turnips and cabbage – but for the most part any common vegetable combination turned out to make a rather tasty, if unfamiliar, concoction.

The first day was tough, as you might imagine, but take away the foul mood, the pounding headache and all the retching and it really wasn’t that bad. Simply avoiding each of the regular meals and replacing them with a cup of juice wasn’t really much of a problem –  what surprised me was how often I caught myself almost putting something in my mouth. I came out here to Southern California to work in the film industry as a Producer, which means that when I work – which is infrequently – I’m so busy that I never even see my family, much less hang around the kitchen. When I’m between jobs, however, I’m at home pretty much all day.  Add to that scenario the presence of a constantly snacking three year-old (and all of her accompanying food-based detritus), and you can begin to imagine how often table scraps find their way into the gaping maw.  I am also a bit of a gourmand (having spent several years in the culinary industry) and do all the cooking at home – a habit I had no intention of breaking, despite my wife’s assurances that she and Sarah would be just fine on a diet of cereal and Annie’s macaroni and cheese. So I had to stop myself on a number of occasions from unconscious grazing, as well as soldier through breakfast, lunch, and dinner preparations for the family without ingesting even a crumb. Not ideal conditions for any extended fast, you’ll agree.

But if there was one thing that surprised me over the subsequent eight days it was how not hungry I was.  I desired real food, of course – desired it like crazy – but it became clear to me that it was just that: desire.  The constant intake of juice kept my hunger at bay, and left me to face the real problem I had with food – I was attached to it. I mean, we all are, right? If you could go for as long as you wanted without any hunger at all, you’d probably still crave your mother’s meatballs, your dad’s famous barbecued chicken, your grandmother’s killer martinis. I know I did. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Food isn’t just for sustenance, it’s for our pleasure and comfort – but it’s this very attachment to past pleasures and comforts that is at the core of many of our issues with food. It’s one of the things those Buddhist types are always saying: take away your attachments to things and you’ll be fine, even if the things you were attached to are still around, making faces and holding their extended index fingers a centimeter from your face.

When I woke up the morning of day two (after a restless night), the bathroom scale indicated I had lost five pounds. Five pounds. In one day. This should have alarmed me, but I have to admit I was thrilled. My elation, however, was premature; after that first precipitous drop my weight went back up the next morning, bounced around a bit for a couple days and then leveled off, ending the week right on target: eight pounds lost for eight days fasting.

And so I made it through the juice fast without much incident. My energy level was fine throughout the week, and I never experienced any negative side effects, unless you count being grumpy about everyone else enjoying home-cooked meals in my presence as a negative. I learned which veggies worked best (carrots, celery, beets and fennel), that throwing an apple or some grapes into every batch made the juice more palatable, and that I could enjoy a little bit of green tea each day without too much guilt. I also learned that, after each successful day of avoiding solid foods, managing my attachments to them, and honestly addressing my issues with food and alcohol, I will still lay in bed at night and think, “Fuck it – I’m getting some meatloaf and a bottle of Jack Daniels.”

But I never did cheat, and I have to admit I was even a bit disappointed when the eight days had ended. I really thought that I could keep going, and even felt some guilt after carefully consuming my first post-fast salad. True, I felt and looked better, but shouldn’t I have experienced something more intense? Maybe some visions, a glimpse of Nirvana, perhaps a moment of unity with the universe?  Something, you know, transcendent?

Wait – what’s this I’m reading…you mean there’s a thirty-day juice fast? A whole month?  No fried chicken products, buttery pastas, greasy burgers or rich desserts for thirty days? I mean, for the love of God, no cheese? I couldn’t, could I?

When’s that farmer’s market again?

Oh yeah, that’s right, I have a blog….

Hey there. Let me say right out of the gate that I’m embarrassed that I haven’t posted anything in a while. I’ve found it difficult to sit down and write anything of substance this last week or so, though not for lack of material. In fact, we’ve had a number of blog-worthy things going around here, not least of which is our recent trip to Mexico (from which we returned with a new appreciation of, of all things, Cuban food). For me the problem is that I’m incapable of just jotting down observations or updates without trying to make a big thing of them.

You know how it is – you’ve got a few minutes to kill so you decide to jump on your blog. After a few keystrokes you’ve posted something like “Sup…not much happening here…check back latr.” Done. But just before clicking on “publish” you figure you’ll give that little posting a second glance. You start, innocently enough, by checking for punctuation and spelling errors. It then becomes clear that the grammar needs tweaking.  After about ten minutes of that you think maybe adding a joke or two would help. The next thing you know you’re off on a furious tangent about how absolutely horrible every single brand of frozen, precooked Italian Meatballs is, and before you’re done you’ve incorporated your personal thoughts on the care and maintenance of backyard citrus trees; openly question the character and parentage of Representative John Boehner (R – OH); name-dropped a nineteenth-century German philosopher; confessed to making up a story, when young, about hitting a cow on your bike; included a recipe for flan; and mentioned, with no little degree of forcefulness, how much you hate Ethan Hawke. Suddenly your little “update” is looking like something Ted Kaczynski may have excised from his manifesto in the interest of brevity. It is this way for me, and it’s why I’m not as prolific as I’d like to be. I mean, this stuff takes time!

Well, as I say, things have been going on around here, and I promise to get to them directly. In fact, there may even be something this very afternoon! What luck!!!

25 Things You May Not Know About Me

Recently I’ve been “tagged” as a recipient of a couple of my friends’ and relations’ “25 things about me, myself and I” Facebook postings. I don’t know if you’ve seen these – the idea is, you write down 25 things about yourself that others may find interesting, then send it off to 25 of your friends with the request that they also compile their own list of 25 things, then send it to 25 of their friends, and on and on. Now, I’m not against people getting to know each other better, but I have to say that I’m physically and morally unable to respond to any, any on-line request to do something and then send it to several of my unsuspecting cyberpeers. I don’t care if the e-mail reads, “Hey Jason, this is your cousin. Grandma’s dead  – please forward this the rest of the family.” Sorry, I ain’t sending it.

But, as I say, I do like the idea. So here, in blog form, are 25 things that you may not know about me. I promise that you are not required to send anyone anything after you read it.

1. I hate it when people with unique names complain about others misspelling or mispronouncing them. I mean, what do you expect? Your name is Krintinw, for God’s sake. Get over it.

2. Every now and then I slip the word “anus” into conversations with mixed company just to get a laugh.

3. If I were a multi-millionaire and didn’t have to work and could choose one thing to do with my time, every day for the rest of my life, I would choose to make soup.

4. I once struck a very large, muscular man over the head with an empty beer bottle because he had tossed my Sunday paper all over the kitchen floor.

5.  I find “America’s Funniest Home Videos” to be truly disturbing. I fear that some day an advanced species of aliens will find these tapes and mistake them for historical records of our race. They would think that the thousands of grainy, poorly-lit video clips of overweight men getting hit in the crotch by small boys with whiffle bats and grooms passing out at their weddings represent everything that humankind had accomplished. They would think that. And they’d be right.

6. I came up with a really funny line for a movie: “With friends like that, who needs Yemenis?” (Insert laughter here.) I don’t have the context yet, but mark my words – I will slip that into a screenplay one day if it’s the last thing I do.

7. I love being around people, but only if nobody knows me and I don’t have to chat. Y’know, like at the mall or at a funeral.

8. The longest I’ve ever spent in jail cell was under three hours. I mean, seriously, does that even count?

9. I always wished that I had one glass eye. Back in high school – I guarantee that I would have gotten more chicks.

10. Sometimes, when in a crowded room, I look out over all the faces around me, each with a different story to tell, different life experiences, different loves. And I think: in a hundred and twenty years, everyone in this room will be dead.

11. I am often overcome with the desire to hug little children. And by “hug,” I mean, “push down and laugh at.”

12. Once, when I was managing a kitchen at a Baptist Camp and Conference Center, I let all of my teenaged staff blow off steam by throwing pudding at me out back by the dumpster. Later I found out that that was illegal in Utah.

13. I don’t know how to throw a punch. This genuinely bothers me – how am I supposed to defend my family? By falling on the floor and curling up in the fetal position? Sure, that may have worked back in college, but it’s not going to cut it if my home is ever set upon by fricken’ zombies, now is it?

14. I’m really bad at pretending to be on the phone. All I can think of to say is “Mmm-hmm…..yep….sure….really?….mmm-hmmm….” It’s really embarrassing, and I’m almost always caught.

15. I will never, ever bungee jump. And if you have – I think you’re a jerk.

16. I really loved that show “Friends.” One day I remember thinking, this is the perfect show – everyone here is so funny! It’s like getting to hang out with your best, wackiest and most attractive friends every week! I felt truly happy to be around them. And then I thought, hey…that’s why they call this show “Friends!” That was a profound day.

17. Some days, when I need inspiration, I pick up one of my favorite books, “Critique of Judgement” by the German (then Prussian) philosopher Immanuel Kant. There’s one part that always makes me smile: “It is then one thing to say, ‘the production of certain things of nature or that of collective nature is only possible through a cause which determines itself to action according to design’; and quite another to say, ‘I can according to the peculiar constitution of my cognitive faculties judge concerning the possibility of these things and their production, in no other fashion than by conceiving for this a cause working according to design, i.e. a Being which is productive in a way analogous to the causality of an intelligence.’ In the former case I wish to establish something concerning the Object, and am bound to establish the objective reality of an assumed concept; in the latter, Reason only determines the use of my cognitive faculties, conformably to their peculiarities and to the essential conditions of their range and their limits. Thus the former principle is an objective proposition for the determinant Judgement, the latter merely a subjective proposition for the reflective Judgement, i.e. a maxim which Reason prescribes to it.”  I read that and I’m like, OMG! That is SO how I’ve been feeling lately!!!

18. Once when I was late for work I pushed over an older, handicapped woman using a walker to get through the turnstile in the lobby of my building.

19.  I think that those boxy Scion cars are the dumbest-looking things on earth. The fact that people didn’t roundly laugh this embarrassment off the streets and into the land of the Edsel, Gremlin and Pinto ranks, for me, as the second biggest mass failure of judgment in the history of mankind. Right behind the reelection of George W. Bush.

20. When I’m alone at home eating dinner, I usually lick my plate clean of every last trace of food. Then, after I’ve finished my wine, leaned back in my chair, exhaled and patted my belly with content, I get up and put some pants on.

21. My wife and I once had an argument: she said that if she had to make a choice between saving the last two members of a near-extinct species of animal or a random human being from perishing in a burning building, she’d save the animals. I thought that was ludicrous, though I had to concede that given the ultimatum of saving either a human from a burning building or the last known copies of all of Shakespeare’s works (sonnets included), I would chose the latter. What did we learn from this? That we’re both assholes.

22. It just recently occurred to me that Marvin, the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and A.A Milne’s Eeyore are the same character.

23. Sometimes I look at all the infrastructure around me – the buildings, the highways, the industry – and I think, if it were up to me to do all this stuff it would never exist. We’d still be living in freaking tents.

24. Once I looked around the room and experienced a moment of complete, all-knowing clarity about the universe. I knew in that one moment that everything that had ever happened to me had led to that moment; that everything was as it should and will be, that everything around me had a meaning and a purpose, and that no matter what happened – even the darkest of tragedies and ugliest of horrors – everything was going to be okay. And I’m sure it had nothing to do with all that Ecstasy I took.

25. I cry during the scene in Jurassic Park when the Tyrannosaurus Rex is attacking the kids in the overturned Jeep. I mean, really, Spielberg, give those poor kids a break.  They’re just kids – they don’t need this kind of shit.

Let’s see…yep, that’s twenty five!  Toodles!

Flying to Mexico…

Well this time tomorrow I’ll be relaxing comfortably in our hotel room in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We’ll be spending a week there, which I hear is plenty of time to put back on all that weight that I so carefully lost after Christmas. Local folklore has it that there’s a restaurant nearby that serves pretty much nothing but shrimp, shrimp, and shrimp – so it looks like I’ll be eating a lot of shrimp, then. That is, if I’m able to put down the tequila long enough to shovel some solid food down the hatch – a contingency I’m fully prepared for, since I’m sure shrimp and tequila are not, in any given dish, mutually exclusive.

We leave LAX tomorrow at 11-ish in the morning, which, if I get up at nine-ish, should give me just enough time to pack before heading out the door. This is, of course, in stark contrast to my wife Lizzy, who finished her packing sometime back in the late 90’s.  We’re different like that. I’ve even gotten the impression – however vague – these last few days that my refusal to pack early has been making her a bit uncomfortable. I mean, it’s probably just in my head, but we’d be having a conversation about something, and I’d be mid-way through a brilliant verbal treatise on, say, why I believe that Jiffy Lube should have more home and garden-related magazines in their waiting room, and when I’d look away from the mirror to face her she’d be gnawing nervously at the skin around her thumb-nails and tapping her feet, her eyes darting back and forth to the empty suitcase on the floor by the bed.

I try to tell her that she should be happy about my procrastination. As any man worth his salt knows, there are three specific qualities that render any member of the male sex suspicious, and they are: if he doesn’t curse like a sailor after a few drinks, if he actually wants to have kids, and if he packs earlier than the morning of a trip. If the first is true of your man than something’s wrong, if the second is true he can not be trusted under any circumstances, and if the third is true – well then, all I can say is I warned you.

So anyway, I’m off tomorrow morning and won’t be online for the week. I know, I know, but dry your eyes – I’ll be back on the 20th of Jan, and I’m sure I’ll be bursting at the seams to write all about our trip.  Until then!

Jason

Winter is Bad, But Spring is Worse

If you’re an old friend or family member, chances are you’re reading this from somewhere in beautiful, frozen New England. In Fact, it’s January, and thousands of people just like you are sitting on their floor in the corner, rocking back and forth with their heads in their hands and muttering something along the lines of “…m-m-make it stop…please no more…” Okay, so maybe I’m doing that too, but for me it’s just a natural reaction to watching cable news. For you and anyone else unfortunate enough to live in a Northern or Midwestern state it’s most likely a desperate act of prayer – and let’s face it, you ain’t praying for peace in Darfur. You’re praying that winter would just go away. You’re sick of shoveling snow. Sick of helping your hitherto ignored neighbors get their cars out of the snow. If you’re a male – and I dare you to prove me wrong on this one – you’re sick of getting yelled at by the women in your lives for tracking said snow throughout the house.  It’s okay, you can admit it. I’ve been there myself.

Lizzy and I live in Southern California now, so let’s face it – I’ve got nothing to complain about. Sure, we have our share of problems out here – the 98% chance that a major earthquake will kill us all in the next 27 minutes, for example – but snow is not one of them. Still, I’ve never been known to let “having nothing to complain about” get in the way of complaining like a freakin’ banshee, and I’ve taken to griping loudly, and often, about the fact that some days the temperature dares to fall below 60 degrees. I mean to say, 60 degrees, for God’s sake!

The funny thing is I’m not such a big fan of spring, either. While most of you are practically itching for the inevitable warming trend to turn all that cold, white stuff back into the liquid it used to be before it got all uppity, it might help to know that there are a few things about the warm weather that aren’t all fun and games. So rather than dwell on all the “why I love the spring” clichés, I thought I would provide a short list of what there is to dislike about the dreaded season of pastels. Y’know, just to make you feel better.

First of all, there are flowers everywhere. And I don’t just mean in those vast, rural fields that we’re always reading about in children’s books and Nursing Home catalogues. I mean everywhere. You’ll be walking along the street, perhaps on your way to that surprisingly inexpensive Asian massage you saw in the back of the newspaper or otherwise minding your own business, and hello!  The damn things are all around you, coming out of the ground, being thrown at you by street people, beckoning you from stores, and pretty much guilting you into buying or picking some for your wife, your mother, your girlfriend, or all three. It’s a wonder any of us get out of this season with our sinuses intact. And I don’t even have allergies (unless you count my visceral aversion to movies starring Ethan Hawke.)

My second complaint is all that daylight. Seriously overrated. The end of Daylight Saving (leave the last “s” off, people) Time doesn’t come quickly enough, as far as I’m concerned. I love knowing that by dinner the last, faint glimmer of light will be fading from the sky, dissolving slowly yet inexorably into darkness, like Jim Carrey’s career. I just like the dark, and frankly I don’t think I should have to see other human beings after six o’clock PM.  Most people disagree with me on this one, but it’s really quite simple, if a little bit solipsistic: when I can’t see other people, they don’t exist.  And while there may still be large mobs of neighbors, palm tree pruners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, FBI agents, and angry members of the girl’s high school swim team jumping around out there just itching to bother me after nightfall, the point is that without all that sunlight I can’t see them bothering me. Listen – if I want other things to be visible I’ll turn on the lights. That’s what they’re there for.

Another thing that bothers me is the candy. I’ve never had much of a taste for sweets, a semi-annual craving for a pint of Phish Food notwithstanding, but occasionally, after a long summer of eating only cheeseburgers, corn on the cob and freshly grilled salmonella, even I’m excited for the coming holiday sugar-fest. Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pie, Christmas cookies – bring it on, I say. By Valentine’s Day, however, I’m sorta’ done with the whole candy thing. And come Easter – well, I do not exaggerate when I tell you that even the distant scent of the tiniest chocolate bunny will send me running to the bathroom, clutching my abdomen and generally suffering through what Poe, in his brilliant though under-read seafaring novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, called “manifest rebellion of stomach.” The fact that much of this spring candy has been painstakingly crafted to resemble some small, defenseless newborn field animal only intensifies the revulsion.

So there you go. Add to the above the incessant cacophony of bird chatter, the profusion of psychopathic bunny rabbits leaping out from around every corner and the fact that the biggest spring holiday is celebrated not with perfunctory gift-giving or mindless binge drinking (yeah!) but by going to church, and it’s a no-brainer. Keep winter here, please, and I for one will be happier.

Just as long as I live in Los Angeles County.

A Confession…

A couple of weeks ago I had an idea.  Okay, so that’s nothing to write home about, I know, but this wasn’t just any idea.  This was the kind of idea that makes one call one’s wife up from work and tell her to get on a train. And no, I’m not talking about a train out of town, either, wise guy – I’m talking about having her actually come to me. It was that kind of an idea. It came out of nowhere, changing my mood from so-so to amazing in the blink of an eye and setting my heart a’beatin’. And if, when dialing my wife’s cell number, I wasn’t actually quivering with childlike excitement, it would not be too much to say that was filled to the gills with the stuff.

“Honey, I have an idea,” I said, and these next words were like pure joy: “Drop what you’re doing. We’re going to the mall.”

The mall. My wife, Lizzy, has never been one for malls. Her indifference and occasional aversion to the world of mass indoor retail defies some stereotypes, sure, but perhaps I’m the real anomaly here. I don’t just enjoy malls. I love them, and as we all know, guys aren’t supposed to do that. We’re supposed to look upon malls as we would a trip to the proctologist, or, even worse, to our first hypno-birthing class. Well not me. And no, I’m not gay (why would you even think that?), but then I’ve never really fit in with all the typical straight-guy stereotypes anyway: I like sports but hate competitive machismo. I like going to the gym but can’t stand the sweaty tank-topped guys there, grunting violently and lugging comically large containers of water from bench to bench (I’ve started seeing them with whole gallon jugs, and really now, that’s just silly). I love cooking, decorating the house and hosting dinner parties. Hell, I often find myself up alone in the middle of the night, drinking Skyy vodka and listening to Rufus Wainwright through my headphones while my wife is asleep in the next room.

Okay, so that last one is pretty gay. But how am I to explain an otherwise straight guy loving the mall? I hardly ever actually buy much when I’m there, but am instead content to wander from store to store, browsing products I never plan on purchasing, and watching people I’d never want to interact with, all while being bombarded with music I can’t stand. Perhaps this inclination is an old vestige of my youth, of teen years spent roaming the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, NH where my friends and I would stalk girls, deliberately annoy and embarrass adults (the timeless “sneezing swear words” trick is a hoot, isn’t it?), and otherwise make asses of ourselves. Twenty years later things are of course different; I never follow girls into stores and only occasionally swear loudly at strangers, but still I wonder. Why do I find this environment entertaining?

Perhaps I should clarify: I do occasionally buy things. There’s always some ghastly birthday card to be bought, some votives that only Yankee Candle can supply, and let’s face it, that Express card isn’t going to max itself out, is it? And don’t forget the bookstore, where I’ve been known to loiter for hours around the Photography section (it’s not porn if it’s in black and white, right?), only to move on to Cooking (Hello, Nigella Lawson!) before finally taking home some random hardcover. And while the content of said New Release would most likely be of no discernible interest to me, you can bet your ass the cover art would be really, really cool.

Plus, let’s not forget the dining – well, maybe dining isn’t quite the right word for it. There’s “dining” and there’s just plain eating. The difference? Well, if you’re doing it under a big neon sign that reads FOOD COURT, then chances are you’re just eating. And if you’ve seen some of the regular mall denizens waddling around with their equally rotund brood in tow, then you know that there’s a whole lotta’ eatin’ going on. But that, too, is only part of it.

I remember a time about eight years ago, when I was living a bit west of Boston (“a bit” being about 50 miles) in a small, $300 dollar-a-month studio apartment. Suffice to say I lived alone, and suffice to say that by “alone” I mean with my cat. Her name, not that it should matter, was Egg Sandwich. Well then, as now, I loved to go to the grocery store almost every day to gather ingredients for dinner. My fridge was only a bit bigger than those dorm-sized ones, so I wouldn’t have been able to buy more than a couple of day’s worth of groceries, but I probably would have shopped daily anyway.

Anyway this one afternoon I found myself at Market Basket wandering the aisles. Up and down I zigzagged, basket in hand, waiting for the right product to jump out at me. Nothing, however, inspired me. What did I want for dinner? What hadn’t I had in a while? What did I need?

After almost a half-hour it hit me: I didn’t need a thing. I had no desire to buy anything there. I didn’t care about dinner that night; in fact, I wasn’t even hungry. I just liked to hang around the grocery store because I WAS A LOSER WITH NO FRIENDS. And that, in nutshell, is most likely why I like to go to the mall, and it’s the oldest reason there is: I have nothing better to do. Being married surely doesn’t change that, nor does being a father. And neither do the dozens of attractive, intelligent, witty and well-employed friends currently beating a path to my door just to say hi. Well, that is, they wouldn’t if they existed.

Which, I guess, they don’t.

Sigh. Now where are my keys…

Hello there…

Hey there  – I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while now, and after seeing many of my friends jump on this bandwagon I’ve decided it’s about damned time to give it a go. I’m not yet sure what I plan to contribute to this, but I expect it’ll take on several forms: a way to keep distant family members up to date about my (and my immediate family’s) life, a venue to rant about everything from politics to everyday annoyances, and, especially, a means to get my writing going. I do hope you come along, and please feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts!