Media Gluttony:

Slow mouse over the links please

Seen: "The Deer Hunter" (1978), "American Movie" (1999), "Happiness", (1998).

Read: Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Molly Ivins's Nothin' but Good Times Ahead

Listened to: An excellent talk on "living the examined life" at Grace Cathedral

I'm here, you're gone...

I have an uncanny knack for returning to someone's site after a long time away, and finding out they've undergone a major life change. I had just sent a few emails to Andre Torrez, who created the super cool FilePile and found out he's quitting writing his personal site, Torrez.org. Last night I dropped by Links.net, the Model T of personal web sites, and found out that its creator, Justin Hall, was moving to Tokyo. I had spotted him around San Francisco a few times, once holding court on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and had always been too shy to say anything. Now I suppose I could do the I-know-people-you-know, thing but it's too late.

*sigh*

The Yom Kippur Speech:

The Yom Kippur Speech

So when I was a kid, Yom Kippur meant no food, insufferable hours in synagouge and wearing a tie. Somewhere around 1995, I was a cub reporter for the Baltimore Jewish Times, my first real adult job. They sent us all home on Yom Kippur and having no place else to go, that's where I spent the day. I was pretty miserable guy at that point, hating my job, wondering why I still lived in the city where I attended college. So I spent that day fasting, in mediation, writing in my diary. I awoke most mornings that fall to "Little Earthquakes", Tori Amos's haunting debut album about sexual abuse, pain and ultimately, redemption. It seemed a perfect soundtrack for Yom Kippur, the most somber of days on the Jewish calendar.

And that's what I've done since, me alone, no phone or computer. I wake up, ask for guidance and wisdom on this day and turn on Tori. When I hear the opening lines of "Crucify", I get a little scared then begin my day.

This year, something a little different happened. My friend Jo called and asked if I wanted to spend the afternoon with her. We took a walk, rented "The Deer Hunter", an appropriate film about loss of innocence and tragedy, themes that hung over this year's Yom Kippur like a scrim. I relit the set of memorial candles I had placed on my window sill. At 6 PM, we talked a bit about attonement, how we would like to have lived better in the past year, Then we each bit into a bagel and broke the fast.

It's the first time since I began my solitary Yom Kippurs that I've let someone in and it got me thinking. Judiasm is a communal religion, meant to practised and celebrated in public. I haven't lived in San Francisco long enough to find my spiritual center and the institutional offering haven't impressed me thus far. But perhaps it's time to start looking. For six months, I've been working for myself, building something I'm very proud of. But I'm starting to feel like life right now is all about work, work I love, but there doesn't feel like room for much else.

So I'm calling this a turning point. I decided on this day of attonement that what I've done the past six years is not enough.

Afterfast:

I had a whole speech prepared about Yom Kippur and what I did, what it meant, how I didn't eat for 24 hours etc. But I'll have to get to that tomorrow. Fasting makes for one tired pup.

Oh Holy (Jewish) Night:

Tonight is Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the Jewish year, the beginning of Yom Kippur.

Tomorrow we fast. We think of who we might have harmed, through action or will, over the last year. We ask for forgiveness. At sundown, the book of life is closed and we begin the year anew.

For the last six years, I've spent Yom Kippur alone, thinking, mediating. I usually write a letter to someone I feel I need to make amends to. I break the fast and eat with friends around 6.
It's a very full and significant day, which I'll talk more about when it's over.

Pud Porn:

Apparently Pud, the lovable weirdo behind FuckedCompany, has been producing Pud Porn for a little while now.

Good for him!

Family Ties:

Can I tell you how happy I am that I can finally see reruns of "Family Ties?"
Oh, I just did.

Counting Flags, Adopted Homes:

Note to self: Don't blog so late.

When I was a kid, my dad would pile my brothers and I into the car on Memorial Day and the 4th of July. We'd drive around greater Ann Arbor, pretending to get lost, and counting American flags. With patriotism booming in the wake of the tragedy of September 11, I decided to take to the streets of my adopted home, get lost and count. But mostly get lost.

Flag total: 194. Wrong turns: 7. Houses painted royal blue with yellow trim: 3.

Number of times I thought how lucky I was to live here: 18.

Geo-whaa?

At 28, I feel past the age where I go out until 4 AM on Friday. Yet by the time my friends Jo and Laura could get ourselves organized, decide what we wanted to do and assemble, it was already past 11. We'd been talking about taking in some Italian schlock film at the Werepad, a uniquely San Francisco space I discovered quite by accident (late night, nothing to do, following hyperlinks all over creation, you know). Yet I had a pathetic vision of myself sitting down to be schlocked and dozing off after 5 minutes I was so zonked.

Before Laura arrived, I'd been poking around at Geocaching.com, site of a worldwide treaure hun I first read about on my friend Jish's weblog, which prompted me to drop a few hundred much-needed bucks on a GPS Device. I found out one such treasure lay somewhere on Bernal Hill, not too far from where we were headed anyway. We spent the next two hours letting this little device about the size of a Hershey bar lead us in the dark and dense fog. When we finally found our "cache," we all howled in joy at the city we couldn't see below.

Geocaching. My new favorite weekend activity. I'll schlock some other time.

Secret Blogging:

Blogging from my temporary office deep within the womb of The Grotto. How rebellious.

Foolish Perfectionism:

I found out earlier this week that John, the editor at MySimon whom hired me, has been laid off. He feels ok about it. Me, I'll miss our excellent editor/writer relationship and the painfully easy money.

Which is how my last assignment, a no-thought Holiday Gift Guide, should have gone. Instead I spent an entire afternoon bickering with myself over whether Nick Hornby will be mad at me because I put How to Be Good as only the 6th best book to give this yuletide.

It was already dark when I finished.

I used to do this sort of foolish perfectionism in high school. It still takes a lot of reminders to keep me from doing it now.

So this is bloging...

So this is bloging. I've been warned but I go anyway.

Mark who runs Riot Hero introduced me to blogging when I met him at South by Southwest 2000. After meeting about 85 other webloggers through running Central Booking,
I've given in to peer pressure.

Look out below!

Reading in Public

Not long ago, I spoke to the novelist Ethan Canin who, after teaching through May at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, moves back to San Francisco with his family for the summer. “One of my favorite things about being back here,” he told me, “is seeing people on the bus reading good books.” I nodded vigorously. Just that week, I had sat across the row from a German tourist reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (as was I at the time), behind a teenager reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (a selection of my last book club) and next to a curly-haired woman balancing a copy of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (which has been recommended to me 837 times at last count) between her knees.

I didn’t say anything to these people but I felt a bond. We’re part of the invisible network of public readers.

There’s something both comforting and subversive about reading in public (on trains, at bus stops, on park benches and street corners), the two main reasons I love doing it. Opening a book on an overcrowded subway train seals you in your own world, mentally switching you being accessible to others to unapologetic time with yourself. “When I open a book on the bus,” a friend once told me, “psychologically, I’m already home.” On the other hand, read in a restaurant and people may think you’re a friendless loser or they may admire your self-reliance. Their curiosity is as delicious as having a secret.

An average week will find me reading in public at least a half-dozen times but the reasons seem to change with my lifestyle. In graduate school, I could spend days in my apartment hacking through required texts and none of my classmates would blink since they all did it too. That drove me batty so I took to reading at a coffee shop near the campus library for some fresh air and a dose of sanity. My best friend arrived late to everything so I began stowing a book in the glove compartment to kill time while waiting outside movie theatres and restaurants. When I began working full time, a small library rested in a desk drawer and so I could read at lunch. I was too tired the end of the day to enjoy it.

Now I live in San Francisco, a dense, frenetic city and I spend most of my time in the whirlwind of it. I work long hours, ride subways and buses to get around and often have dinner with friends or run errands before heading home. The few hours before sleep belong to the dishes, the laundry and returning phone calls. Before I figured out otherwise, that gave me 10 minutes before I close my eyes to read a few pages and waiting until Saturday to give a book the attention it deserved. I hated it.

The answer came when I began slipping the private act of reading into the folds of my now very public life. I worried at first about shutting the world out in this way, beginning and ending my day with a word fog enveloping my head. I didn’t choose to live in a city to ignore it whizzing by. Yet I soon discovered that rather than feeling cut off, I had unconsciously joined a secret network of book lovers. Passersby would look over at my book and nod or squint quizzically. Many pleasant exchanges followed. I once spent about 10 days reading David Sedaris’s Naked in restaurants, the gym and the neighborhood pool. Sixteen people passed by and had something about to say about it (I made a checkmark on the back cover for each one). Many just said “what a funny book” but several others asked me about my favorite essays and had I heard Sedaris’s commentaries on the radio? The book had sent out a beacon to like-minded readers, drawing them in.

A few weeks ago, I confounded Ethan Canin’s theory by sitting on the bus with a thoroughly lousy book. A man one seat in front of me asked if I liked the book. When I told him no, he asked if I always read on the bus and I said yes, that it passed the time and made a hot, crowded ride more bearable. He nodded then saw a Borders Bookstore by the next stop and exited the bus quickly. Just before walking in, he waved at me and laughed. I waved back with my book. For a moment, I’m engaged in the world’s most private act, but don’t feel alone at all.