That song sa song song song

Pretty accidentally, all of my post titles have been song titles. (I had to tweak a few, if you've noticed.)

So maybe that'll be another incentive to check the blog--you can guess from what song the blog's title came from and who sang it.

You're still not going to respond, are you? Great.

At least don't do that whole anonymous thing. Personally, I hate guessing games.

A SIDE NOTE:

The inspiration for today's blog (the whole song thing) is Drew. I'd be in his car somewhere in the southeastern U.S., and we'd be listening to some crappy country station on the radio.

I'd get annoyed because, no, I don't like country music. (Which, by the way, is the same response I give to people when they ask me things about being from Tennessee. You're from Tennessee, well do you...? Really creative, people. While you're at it, why don't you ask me about Elvis, too, especially since he lived four hours away! That's like asking someone from Dallas is he's an Astros fan or someone from New York if they've been to Boston Harbor. Buy a map and learn some geography.)

So Drew and I are driving and listening to Travis Tritt or Tanya Tucker or John Michael Montgomery (I could go on), and I want to change the channel.

Drew does not like this idea. He wants to keep it on Faith Hill or Deanna Carter or Mindy McCreedy.

We make a deal. If a song comes on the radio that he knows the chorus to, then the country station stays on. If not, I get to change the channel.

That was like making a pact with the devil. I could never win.

As well as being a Comm/Law student at UF, having a cameo on Fahrenheit 911 and wasting 1000 summers at summer camp, Drew knows an inordinately large number of country music song choruses.

And on songs in which he didn't know the chorus, he' d be clever about it. He'd talk to me during the first chorus, and by the time the second chorus rolled around, he'd have remember enough from the first chorus to b.s. his way through the second one. Way to go, Drew.

But does Drew know the Sisqo, Rolling Stones, Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams, Alice Cooper, and Beastie Boys references in past post titles?

Did you?

Ch-ch-ch-check check check check check it out

With three weeks off from school (thank you, quarter system), I decided that I was going to spend some time getting back in touch with people I haven't talked to in a while.

That didn't mean stupid little IMs. It meant e-mails (I'm backed up from March), and it meant phone calls. Or at least it did.

Somewhere between finishing an Israeli sketch comedy DVD and looking at a website that made me realize that my campers are far more computer- and blog-savvy than I, I figured it out. I have been keeping in touch with people, dozens of people, in the simplest, most obvious way possible for years.

I've been checking away messages.

It first, back in like 2003, it was just a curiosity. I wondered where Jon was on a Tuesday night, or what Becca was doing after class.

Then, it spread to checking up on people who weren't even "away" from their computers. They were sitting right there, but instead of writing them an IM, I checked not their away messages (since they didn't have one up) but their profile. Maybe I could figure out if Susan got the job or if Paul moved with just one right-click? Oh, yes I could.

I’ve learned about engagements, births, new jobs, new girlfriends, new boyfriends, etc., by being sneaky and doing what everyone else does while procrastinating from their work.

I even got excited one day when I saw that this cute girl I knew had removed the "I love you" from the end of her profile. When I checked a few days later, the phrase was back up. It turns out I probably didn't scroll down far enough the first time.

E-mail used to be okay. But now everyone has six e-mail addresses, and who wants to deal with all that spam? (I think I'm switching to GabeR4@gmail.com. That's the best I can do.) Hell, letter-writing was the thing camp and youth group friends and I used to do. Like with a pen and paper.

But now, with buddy lists burgeoning, you don’t have to do peripheral-friend triage and trim your buddy list whenever you meet someone new. You can keep everyone you’ve ever met (everyone who signed up for AOL in 1994, got hooked on AIM, got annoyed with AOL, then sent out a mass e-mail reminding everyone that they are changing their screen name because they are so done with AOL, since AOL mail sucks, then they got Yahoo or Hotmail, but now they have Gmail) on your buddy list.
You can keep people you don’t like on your buddy list. And with one right click know exactly where he/she is with whom and why. Why do you care what that person is doing? You don’t like him! But he’s still on your buddy list. And you’re checking his away message!

The only drawback to the system is that people write boring away messages. You know the ones. They are not funny and not informative. “Here” is not acceptable. Neither is “I am away from my computer right now.” Earlier tonight, Sam said, “I’m out—gotta take a shower.” Okay, that’s good to know Sam has a real excuse about why he’s leaving the conversation.

His away message? “Shower.” Lame, Sam. Lame.

Looking at my saved away messages, mine are not so much better. I’ve got what looks like three promoting the blog, two about loving Chicago, two about doing work, a bunch of dated ones in which I’m trying to be funny (got to erase a few of those), and one rap lyric.

But I’m trying. If someone checked my away messages over the course of the week, one would likely know that I’m enjoying the city, was busy with work, and will be going home to visit my family soon. Not a play-by-play, but you get the gist of what I’m up to.

You know, I’d really like to get in touch with everyone over the next three weeks, but now I’m thinking of maybe doing some more reading. I need to catch up on a few books and such.

For my part, I know that if anything important happens to any one of you, you’re just a right-click away.

Summer's out for school

So summer is over.

In addition to cooler temperatures and football, that means fewer beach days, barbecues, and going-out-on-Monday nights. And no more camp.

For those of us in Northwestern grad school, that means we have three weeks to do nothing. You want to kick us in the face right now, don't you?

Besides going home for Labor Day/birthday celebrations, I'm thinking of having a Chicago renaissance. (Not that Chicago was down in the dumps before I decided to do many touristy things in a short amount of time, I just like the ring that phrase has. And I just saw a Sports Night episode in which Dan had a "New York renaissance," and I've already posted my pro-New York blog for the week. So I'm going with Chicago renaissance.)

If you're at the planetarium or aquarium or any other museum ending in "-arium," I'll see you there.

This summer is the first since 1985 that I didn't spend some time in a summer camp and the first since 1992 that it wasn't sleep-away camp.

Needless to say, I miss it. The camping trips, the bonfires, the stupid programs. It was all pretty wonderful.

I still have dreams every now and then during which I'm at camp. They are both pretty realistic and scary.

But none were as vivid as this one:

Once, while at camp (the one in which I was a staff member), I got knocked in the head and lay unconscious for about 30 seconds. When I woke up, I vaguely remember wondering where I was, and upon seeing the dining hall towering above me said, "What am I doing back at camp?" (I’m still trying to figure that one out) and "Have the kids come yet?" (They hadn’t; it was staff week)

It felt like a dream, but it really happened.

I had a really great summer that summer and even went back one more time.

Every now and then I run into friends from camp (the one in which I was a camper) in Chicago. At bars, on the beach, in synagogue--they are everywhere I go. The nice thing about running into them now is that with six years of growing up behind us, all the grudges we had and the annoying things we did are behind us.

I can see one and say something like "Jump on it" or "Slavo and Maria" and they'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

So as the summer ends, as you pack up your grills and go back to school/work (What? The working world doesn’t have three months over during the summer?), it’s nice to think back on all the dumb inside jokes that have stayed with you all those years.

If I still remember them now, they can’t be that dumb, can they?

It's a good thing we had the summers. And the inside jokes.

It's beginning to feel like fall here, so it's a good thing I remeber some of the jokes.

It's up to you, New York, New York

This is what I was thinking, more or less, when Spiwak called me yet again while hanging out with my/our friends on a Saturday night in New York:

Everyone should live in New York for at least one year of his or her life. It's not such a scary place, all you need is the crosstown bus and the 1/9, maybe a Zagat's, and it's a city where you can be an overnight success. How could anyone not want to live there?

Take Ryan Adams, for example.

Ryan Adams recorded a music video on September 8, 2001, near the Brooklyn Bridge with the Twin Towers as a backdrop. Besides visualizing the planes crashing into the towers three days later, my Sept. 11 memories actually consist of that music video more than anything else.

The timely coincidence led to a lot of airplay for Adams' music video and propelled his career. Not everyone gets as lucky in New York--I guess only he and Rudy Giulliani, who I like, though he's not of my party, benefited from the tragedy. But the fact that I see Ryan Adams and the towers in tact more often in my head than the real human face of tragedy makes me believe that we, four years later, have recovered and are stronger for having lived through that tough time.

In spite of everything that's happened there (or, if you have the Israeli mentally, because of everything that's happened there), everyone should spend one year of there life--at least--in New York. It's one of the greatest cities in the world (Rudy, it's not the greatest; it's too young--where's your Pantheon, Colossus, or pyramids?), and you should go there. For a year. Capice? Heivantem? Gabachoow? (Extra points for anyone who knows what language the last one is.)

It might be tough for some. Sept. 11 was our JFK assassination: Everyone in our generation will remember where he was when he heard the news, and none of us will ever forget that day.

I think about it every now and then, the tragedy of it all. It happened during my sophomore year of college, and I lived in a suite of six guys. Among my five roommates, I had one whose uncle was in the second tower when the first tower was hit and one whose mother was at the Pentagon when that plane went down (and another who had experienced the Oklahoma City bombing firsthand, for that matter). It was a rough morning. Once everyone's family was located, things didn't return to normal, as candlelight vigils and memorial services followed for days. We collectively mourned for weeks.

But four years later, it looks like the mourning may be over. So you can spend your year in New York now.

We really have beengetting better and better every year. Like this year. Less "God Bless America" and more "Family Guy."

That's right. It's kind of ironic, but this Sept. 11 marks the first official day of the fall TV season, with season premieres of "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" slated for that day.

Having spent a year in a country that continues to "keep on keepin' on" in the face of terrorism, it's nice that our country, mired in two shitty overseas wars, is getting back to normal with a little comedy on Sept. 11. (If I ever run for political office, it's this paragraph that's going to screw me.)

With animated comedy as a reference or backdrop, remember New York is not that scary, that one day out of millions is no big deal, and that though it was sad, life goes on.

And you should live there for a year. Or so I've been told.

On the road again

Moving to a new city is not the easiest thing one can do. Having lived in seven different cities in four states and two countries over the past year and a half, it's something I've become accustomed to doing.

In some sick twist of my borderline OCD, I like packing, but having moved all my stuff over a dozen times in the past two years, I've reached my limit.

The thing that irks me about moving, though, is not the physical process of moving but the leaving people whom I care about. I haven't seen my best friend in almost a year a half. I can't think of the last time I've seen some home/camp/youth group/college/Israel friends. And I never get to see my parents (whose 34th anniversary is tomorrow) or sister (whose 18th birthday was Thursday).

To cope with the moving, it's important, I've learned, to take good pictures, which I didn't really do until sophomore year. All we have left, said Melissa Joan Hart in some bad teen movie, are the memories, right?

Thanks, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, for making me feel crappy about not snapping some shots. I loved freshman year of college, but my album's got about three rolls from Halloween (people I don't recognize), three rolls from spring break (mostly Disneyland with Disney characters I don't recognize), and random pictures, mostly of people who I don't talk to anymore. Awesome.

I lost all my camp pictures and can't seem to find any from elementary school or high school, save from youth group events, in which I'm dancing around dressed up like a superhero for a skit or "have my arm around another girl," as my dad likes to say.

Luckily, I have a lot of pictures from my trips abroad, but they're mostly pictures of cathedrals in Europe. You can't put your arm around one of those.

A few weeks ago, I showed the college pics to a new friend who I'll probably being seeing for a while--one of these people who you can tell pretty much off the bat that although you just met him/her, he/she is a keeper--and whom I wanted to give faces with names, so when I tell another Spiwak story she'll know who the hell I'm talking about.

What I was realizing as I was showing her these pictures is that at the end of every year, there are some Nashville pictures at the end. I keep coming back to the same place.

So the ironic thing about my moving around so much the past couple of years is that I have only moved once in real life--from East Windsor, N.J., to Nashville, Tennessee--at age 2 1/2.

Everyone else moved. All my best friends. All my nearly best friends who would have been best friends if we were older than 8 and thought that girls were cool and not say, cootie-ridden and obnoxious. (I think I have relapsed. Okay, I know I have relapsed.)

Jared moved after first grade. He and I were not so much alike. He had an imagination; I didn't. He liked to "play Ghostbuster" or "play LaserTag" or whatever TV/lunchbox adornment was popular at the time. Case in point: For his going away party, we started the night off by going to Blockbuster and taking our picture with a guy dressed as Batman. (I do still have that picture.) He wasn't a fan of reading the box scores in the morning paper like I was, but we spent a lot of time at school and camp together. I did spend a lot of time on his house and can still remember the layout. A great sleep-over house.

David moved to Nashville the summer that Jared moved away. David, who also had a kick-ass sleep-over house, also had a pool and a basketball court. We'd spend every weekend lowering the goal and having slam-dunk contests. (I avoided the pool; I can't swim so well.) David was the first person I knew to get a PC (this was 1993), and he taught me how to play Wolfenstein. He drank milk and called it "melk." I hated milk and still do. No one is perfect. During the ice storm of 1994, David and his family spent a whole week at my house because they didn't have power at theirs. It was by far the coolest sleep-over ever.

David moved during the summer before 7th grade. Around that time, Josh B., Josh G., Tamar and Jessica moved. I was pretty annoyed, to say the least. If even two of the six good friends had stayed, how different would my high school experience have been?

Though I saw all of them after they moved away from Nashville, it was for brief weekends or summers and it wasn't the same.

Some friends you can see whenever or wherever and it doesn't matter--you can pick up where you left off. Not so withfriends who left at age 11 or 12. There's only so much of the baseball card trading or running around the playground that you did back then that you can do at age 23. (I round up.)

People did move to Nashville, but fewer people than moved away. I've learned that that's why the IM was invented. Nearly all of the people I've mentioned are still on the buddy list, though I never talk to most of them.

My parents still keep in touch with friends from New Jersey, and I've even met some people from my old central Jersey town while in New York or Israel. And Chicago is a great place to meet up with people, as I've been running into camp/college kids on buses and laudromats throughout the city.

Unfortunately, I won't have too many of those chance meetings in the Midwest anymore.

In six months, I'm moving to D.C.

Dumbing it down

I tend not to think before I speak, so this blog as much as anything is an exercise in thinking before I type, which I will be doing for a living starting in 10 months. Typing, not blogging.

One of my goals in writing this blog is being funny all the time and not offending anyone.

Not any idiot could do that. Wish me luck.

Speaking about being being dumb, I feel like ever since coming back to the U.S. (I was in Israel for 10 months), every day is a new opportunity to reacquaint myself with the English language. My mom told me that when I talked to her on the phone last year, I sounded less intelligent.

For my grad school professor that would be good news (Read on.)

There's this great West Wing episode in which Martin Sheen, who plays the president, is about to give a speech and two camps within his staff are arguing about the speech's wording. One camp, his campaign strategists, say he should use simple words that the masses will understand; the second group, his senior staff, believe that he should play to lowest common denominator, so to speak, by dumbing down his language.

In the end, he uses the $100 dollar word instead of the $.50 one. (Not the 50 Cent one; West Wing is a family show.)

I don't even remember what this word was, and I remember being embarrassed the first time I saw the episode because I didn't know what it meant off the top of my head. How did I not know that the word meant? (Okay, I'm going to Google right now to find out what the word was.)

The word was "torpor." And it's Latin. And I took Latin. For two years. (It least I knew it was Latin?) That stung. It's a word like that that's going to make me lose Final Jeopardy in a few years. "Torpor."

I was reminded of the episode the other day when I was sitting in a conference with my two newswriting professors at grad school. (That's what I'm doing now, in case you didn't know. Oh, and I'm in Chicago.)

In addition to saying, "Gabe, you're great in the newsroom because you're an asshole, and that's what we need in the newsroom," they told me that I should dumb down my language a little bit in my articles. I was astonished. I haven't been using big English words consistently for over a year (I was in Israel last year, in case you missed that, too), and now I'm being asked to write, as they said, "so a seventh grader would understand."

What if every paper I had written since seventh grade had been on a seventh grade level? Surely I wouldn't have graduated from high school or college. But apparently, I'd be at the head of my class in journalism grad school.

I'm not saying that it's smart to use big words for the sake of using big words. I hate when people do that: "Would you be so kind as to convey the sweetened tomato paste?"

Dude: pass the friggin' ketchup.

But sometimes big words work well if they are the right words. I learned a lesson daily during my sophomore year of high school. In Haywood Moxley's English classroom, a sign hung on the wall, right in between a photo of Walt Whitman and a sheet of paper noting the exact second the Atlanta Braves won their only World Series title. It was a quote from Mark Twain (much to the chagrin of Texas fans, his middle name was actually "Langhorne," not "Longhorn"):

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Pretty cool, huh? If I'd have written "pretty groovy" instead just there, you would have thought I was lame and dreaming about decades past instead of writing like a seventh grader as I should be.

Mark Twain was right. I shouldn't write like a seventh grader, but write like a guy who knows what he's talking about.

Which works well for me because I act like I know everything, even though that's far from the case.

In a world that's going too fast to catch up most of the time (the following things happened without my noticing: RSS feeds, hybrid cars, and pizza that are really small but when you put them in the microwave they become normal size, like 16" and edible, and I think only one of those three things came from "Back to the Future II"), it's important to be succint and use the right words.

So if I write about something in this blog that confuses you, trust me, it confuses me too. Just look it up and amaze me with what you have learned.

Though I may not be as smart as I was in high school or before I left for Israel, I'm still learning new things every day.

Which, of course, help me write like a really smart seventh grader.

To me, words are like the kids you met freshman year of college in your friend's dorm who came up to you and said "hi" when passing you in the hall even though you don't know their name and they don't know yours, so you don't want to say "hi" back but if you don't it's awkward, so you say "hi" anyway: the more you learn about them (words/awkward people), the less dumb you're going to feel.

I'm working towards that goal and even saying "hi" to the awkward-looking people in my building while I'm at it.

And by the way, "torpor" means "apathy."

It's like this and that and like this, and uh

I needed a title for my blog.

After much deliberation--at least 10 seconds--I decided that the word blog was weird enough that I could do a play on words for the title.

In regards to that, I would like to spend the rest of the blog discussing how much Sisqo for the "Thong Song" of spring 2000 suck buttocks.

In the spring of 2000, I was a senior in high school. I had been accepted to my safety school for college, was enjoying weekends once a month in Florida with my regional youth group, and had the lead in the senior play. Things were going pretty well. I no longer had a bowl cut, and girls would talk to me now and then.

Senior prom was around the corner, and I couldn't go to mine because I had to fly up to Wash U just so they could tell me that I wasn't qualified enough for some scholarship I was nominated for. But, going to an all-dudes high school, there was an all-girls high school around the corner whose prom I would go to. And I was determined to get this girl I had a crush on for like at least two weeks to ask me.

She did.

Her name was, and probably still is, Erica. She had been dating my friend Ben for a while but broke up with him about a month before prom.

And then the phone rang. It was Erica. Score.

Or so I thought. Pretty soon, my friends and I made plans for the big night. We rented a limo bus/van thing that could seat six couples comfortably, along with the bags we had packed with clothes for the post-prom party. Oh, and one more thing: Ben and Erika (now her name is with a "k"; as you can see, we were really close--don't even ask me what her last name was) got back together.

So I was going to prom with Erika, who was going out with Ben, but Ben was going to the prom with Katie, who was going out with Cal, who was going to prom with Jesse. I didn't know Jesse.

It turns out, I should have gotten to know Jesse. It would have made things a lot less awkward, especially at the end of the night, when you can guess what happened. Everyone else got drunk, and I, who didn't really drink much in high school, hung out with two friends from pre-school (because Nashville is that small), and went home at 2 a.m.

The night was memorable, though, for the party bus that we toured around Nashville in. About every 20 minutes, brilliant one-liners, such as "Dumps like a truck, truck truck" and clever quips like, "Baby move your butt, butt butt" played on 107.5, which was either really lame "Y107" or even lamer "107.5 the River" back then.

We heard Sisqo no less than seven times in the two hours we drove around the city that night. I knew the lyrics by heart.

"Guys like what, what what?"

"That thoooong...."

And I don't think at that point in my 17-year-old life I had ever seen a girl in a thong.

So while my date with flirting with this other guy whose date was flirting with this third guy, whose date was the disinterested Jesse, I just sat there and enjoyed Sisqo.

That night has stayed with me for a number of reasons because of what happened in the end.

In the end, I went to prom with a great girl, had a good time at an after-party, and got home safely at the end of the night. I didn't get wasted, get anyone pregnant, fuck up my car or my face or my life. And a lot of people can't say all that.

I got this crappy song stuck on my head, but whenever I hear it, I think of how much fun it was to be a senior in high school, have no cares, ride around town in a freakin' limo, and get over the fact that I had spent the past six years at a school where being left-wing would give you a detention, which I finally did.

Sisquo would be proud.

Especially now that I've got my own blog blah blog blog stupid blog.

And by the way, Erika's last name is Wilkerson.

Time is on my side

So this is my first attempt at writing a blog.

I've started this for a number of reasons.

One is that I have a lot of time on my hands right now. Tons. I could read, or go to the beach, or go to museums or respond to e-mails, but instead I'm doing this. (Because being a student, I get to do all of the other things, too.)

Another reason is that Debbie Rosenbaum writes a good blog, one that has inspired me to follow her lead. She's somewhat competititve, so it'll make her feel good when Debbie reads my blog and realizes that hers is better than mine, and I'm the journalism student.

That's another reason to start one. I need to write all I can so I can live up to my parents' friends expectations that I will be the next Thomas Friedman (they all think I'm doing print, not broadcast) or Brian Williams (it was Tom Brokaw, but he's gone, in case you didn't know).

So instead of writing mass e-mails, which I have tried to update people on my life, I'm going to do this. Hope you pop on by every now and then.

Ever since I can remember, I have been writing something. In kindergarten Yoni, Sarah, and I wrote and illustrated a book on dinosaurs. In first grade I wrote a book of poems called "A Man on the Moon."

It had my school picture on the back and included poems about baseball, my dad, and playing outside. The memorable opening line was, "There's a man on the moon and he looks like a goon."

Call in Drs. Dre and Seuss: I have a knack for rhyming.

I haven't been published since, but that hasn't deterred me in my determination to keep writing and keep getting better at this funny craft, though my current newswriting teachers would probably prefer if I reverted to the succintness of my first-grade literary attempts.

You're more than welcome to comment on this page, tell me when I'm not funny or not interesting or too left- or right-wing, depending on the day. Hopefully, I'll offend most of you who read this. If not, then I'm not doing my job.

Wish me luck.

Gabe