And one more thing...

There's this book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink. It's about how you can learn a lot about something even if you have just encountered it. This applies to people, too.

The key example of these successful snap judgments was given by a marriage counselor who could correctly guess the health of a marriage just by watching a short tape of a husband and wife interacting.

Apparently, there are certain behavioral clues that an observer can pick up that give hints to the larger picture.

I totally buy it.

(Blink is by the same guy who wrote Tipping Point, which is one of the best non-fiction books I have read recently. It discusses how trends become, well, trendy.

Gladwell focuses on three types of people who make and break trends: the maven, who knows a lot about a product; the seller, who could sell a toupee to a gorilla (figuratively, but it'd be funny to see); and the connector, who knows a lot of people and brings them together.

One of the things I liked about the book was that it gave me an unofficial title for something I already do. See, I'm a connector. Not officially, but I feel like I know a lot of people who live in a lot of different places and do a lot of different things, and though none of them are famous or important or even read my stupid blog, if I needed a kidney or a bunch of petition signatures or something, I'm sure I could find it after making a few calls or sending a few e-mails. So according to this author, the one thing I'm good at (see the blog entry called "Mediocre bad guys") may one day pay off. )

But back to Blink and finishing up the posting from yesterday.

Every girl I have ever really liked, I've known it within the first few minutes of meeting them. (If you think you are one of these girls and are reading this right now and are confused about this statement, either I didn't really like you or I hid it well that I really did. But probably the latter.)

So I wasn't so disappointed when a girl I went out with a few couples weeks ago called me (the day I got my wisdom teeth out!) said she wasn't interested.

When we were "talking," as all failed relationshipees do, I thought that--for sure--she would have a lot to say. But she was quiet most of the time, and I led the conversation from place to place, even on the date night.

So when we were at sushi having our little dateroo, I was expecting to learn more about her, have a nice conversation, say goodnight and maybe even see her for drinks the next week.

But, no. Instead, she was quiet and kept looking at her watch. I felt like I was at a job interview and my time for making a good impression had expired before the sushi even got to the table.

After years of not giving the girls I "eh...kinda like" a chance, I was given that very treatment.

(There's lots of girls who don't even want to go out with me to begin with. I could list them now, but I don't want to get into any deeper poo than I probably am now for writing about someone specific in my blog. But for girls who agree to go out to dinner with me, I think she's the first who's been totally against even trying to make something work. And I probably deserve it.)

The funny thing is that at the start, when I had just met her, I fully thought that she snap-judged me positively, thinking to herself that I was worth giving a shot.

But I never even got the (fill in the cliche) benefit of the doubt. Maybe she read Blink too and realized it wasn't worth putting in the effort.

So in football, it's three downs and out. In dating, it's three dates (or three months if you're Cara or Katie) and out. All I got was three minutes out.

And I was having an off night.

Throw that idea out the window

At first, I thought "an effort to write something funny and witty without angering or annoying a single person" would be a good idea (see the blog's header).

But I've changed my mind. That's getting kind of boring. There are so many people out there who have done bone-headed things who need to be remind that they have done bone-headed things, and what better place to do that than the Internet, where, if I write about you, you're going to find out about it one day or another and get mad.

So we'll start with the most unsuspecting of characters: the food services employees at Northwestern and the girl I went on a date with last week.

Today (now yesterday) was a crappy day to begin with on a number of reasons, none of which are important, all of which are petty, but I wasn't happy regardless. I get my work for the morning done, something about the Canadian general election (that was oddly interesting and not conducive to north-of-the-border jokes), and go to the cafeteria for lunch.

I want a quesadilla--possibly the easiest food item to make besides pasta or hot cereal--so I order a cheese one. Fine. It says it comes with salsa and sour cream. Great.

I ask the person making the quesadilla to put lettuce and tomato inside of it. He says no. I point out that a big bucket of shredded lettuced and a big bucked of diced tomatoes are sitting one foot to the left of the quesadilla, and he could make me really happy on a crappy day with a handful or two of veggies, but he doesn't comply.

I say, "If you put the lettuce and tomato in the quesadilla real quick and then fold the tortilla . . . no one's going to know!" He says no.

I say, "So my meal will only consist of just stinky cheese and a small flour tortilla?" He says he'll put the lettuce and tomato on the side. Wonderful.

The sign hanging above Mr. Quesadilla Maker says that the the quesadilla comes with salsa and sour cream. I say great, but I don't want him to put the sour cream and salsa directly on the quesadilla because I'm not going to eat it right away, and I don't want my meal to get soggy in the meantime. He puts the salsa and sour cream in little plastic containers and hands it all to me to go pay. I go to pay for my meal, and the cashier says that I have to pay extra for my salsa.

I say that this is ridiculous and walk halfway across the food court to point to the place on the sign where it says that the food comes with the sour cream salsa for no charge. She calls in the manager, who takes my quesadilla away and brings it to Mr. Quesadilla Maker shaking his head. The manager tells the Maker that he has done wrong--the "included" sour cream and salsa does not go in containers but it should be drizzled on the quesadilla itself.

I say I don't want my quesadilla to become soggy. The manager says I have to pay to have the condiments in containers. He takes the containers away, and I get two condimental drizzles--one red, one white. Not even dollops.

So at the cafeteria, it's $5.10 for a soggy, veggie-less single folded flour tortilla with a shred of cheese. It's $5.85 without the sog.

I return to the cashier, muttering, and I pay.

(Since I began writing this yesterday, two of my friends have gotten engaged. So congrats, Amy and Becca! [But which Becca and which Amy?!])

I forgot to post this in the fall

After Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma hit the Southeastern U.S., I was primed for a huge tribute concert whose proceeds would go to the Bayou and South Florida. Like another "Live 8" or "FarmAid"--or even a "Bonaroo" or "Boombamela."

But it never happened; instead, there was just a smattering of relatively small shows.

More realistically, though, I expected a song to come out that would reflect our collective grief at the tragedy, or at least a song overlaid with reports of the hurricane.

Remember the Oklahoma City bombing back in 1995? Remember how Live's song "Lightning Crashes" was No. 1 at the time? And remember how soundbytes relating to the bombing were inserted into the song?

It was like, "Lightning crashes / an old mother dies ... 'There's been a bombing here at the Federal Building' .... Her intentions fall to the floor. . . . 'We don't know how many are still inside' " and so on.

The same thing happened after Sept. 11. Live profitted off the tragedy, as their song "Overcome" simarly overlaid with newscasters' comments.

But after Katrina, I just heard the song "Golddigger" a little more. That's it.

We used to be so opportunistic. . . . What happened?

Indoor Voices

Growing up, I really liked sports. When I got the newspaper from the front lawn in the morning, I read the sports page first. I played half a dozen sports at my ultra-masculine all-dude high school. I raced home from Sunday school each weekend to watch pro football games in the the fall and pro basketball in the winter. Sports Night and Sportscenter are pretty much my favorite television shows. (They have never jumped the shark.)

Sports rule. But sports are not life.

I don't own a single jersey. I own maybe a dozen baseball hats (but hundreds of those little plastic ones that ice cream used to come in at ball games). Before this past New Year's Eve, I had attended exactly zero pro basketball games. There's a time for sports and a time for other important things, like music or beer or friends.

So picture this scene: You're at a bar to meet friends to celebrate someone's birthday. You're on time; your friends are late. (10:30 apparently means sometime after 11 for people under 25.) But it's bowl season, so you don't really care that much. You sit down at the bar and watch the game.

To your left are two Penn State fans, wearing Penn State hats and Penn State jerseys. To be sure, they are not in State College, Penn. They are in Roscoe Village, Chicago, Ill.--a neighborhood of artists. No one in a five block radius even knows what a Nittany Lion is and no one in a ten block radius can name more than three schools in the Big Ten.

There are no more than six people in the bar, but your ears think you're at a Strokes concert.

Why? Because these kids are idiots.

They yell. They shout. They throw their hats on the bar in disgust when Michael Robinson (the QB) loses yardage.

Every play is critical to their survival. Every yard Penn State gains, it's like these two guys won the lottery. Like they heard their best friend has just gotten out of prison. Like the girl they kept asking out in college finally said yes.

Guess what, kids? College is over. It's a Tuesday. See, in the real world, we use our indoor voices.

Remember first grade? Remember when Ms. Berlove had three circles on the board (one red, one yellow, one green) that indicated if we were to be silent, whisper, or use our indoor voices, respectively, in class?

Remember how there was no ciricle for "scream your head off"? These guys didn't.

Eventually my friends showed up. Henry, the birthday boy who was getting drinks left and right from all of us, started yelling along with them for no reason, or to egg them on.

"I love sports!" he yelled, knowing full well that it's the Orange Bowl going on and not just some random game. "Yeah, sports! Go, team!"

A quiet bar on a Tuesday is not a stadium on the weekend. It's a place to celebrate Henry's 24th birthday, no more.

What a headache.

At least these guys weren't smoking. Don't even get me started on that.

The Jewel of Piso Mojado

Has it ever occurred to you that everwhere else in the world, people speak more than one language?

In the United States, we speak English, and only English, unless you have recently immigrated from Mexico or went to private school.

Go anywhere else in the world, and you'll find that "everwhere else in the world" knows English. And French. And they can comprehend two Spanish dialects.

So a nation of immigrants decided not to pass on their bilingual abilities (with their Queen's English or Yiddish, if you're WASPish or Jewish, respectively). Or we don't have good public school teachers.

Spanish has become really popular recently--even more than English--in this country. And English used to be pretty popular.

In Chicago there are nearly more Hispanics than whites. Two wards in my city are vying for the title of "Little Mexico." No wards in my city are vying for the title of "Little Connecticut."

Growing up, I learned French because the Spanish teachers at my school were scary, but I do know a few words of Spanish. This weekend's "Simpsons" episode had two, and I could laugh along when the cartoon family began searching for the "Jewel of 'Wet Floor'" (see the blog's title).

I still know French because I had a great set of French teachers. But I'm one of the lucky ones. And my French is not so great, as I'd be lucky to be able to hold a conversation with someone half my age in French for five minutes.

There is no emphasis in this country on being multi-lingual. Our president is not multi-lingual. (Hold your "But he can speak stupid" jokes.)

Our representatives probably studied Latin and Greek but that won't help us until the Vatican and the lost city of Troy get in a tiff.

You've heard the terms "global economy," "integration," "information age" and "I-bankers have no souls." (I just threw the last one in for good measure.) All of them mean that we need to know more than we used to, and foreign languages are a good place to start.

I'm not saying that everyone should learn Chinese. (Everyone should learn Japanese, though, so they could understand what those guys were thinking when they got millions of American addicted to stupid games involving squares and the digits 0-9.)

But it may not be such a bad idea. It'd give you a billion more possible "Friendster" friends instantly.

We all should have done a better job learning foreign languages when we were younger. I don't know about you, but I feel pretty dumb when I hear a little French kid say something on TV (not that there are a lot of them on TV) that I don't understand.

It reminds me that as much as we harp on other countries for being inferior to ours, at least they can understand us when we denegrate them.

So I should have kept up with French. And eeeeeveryone else...with Spanish.

Because if that little French kids from two paragraphs ago comes to my country and takes my job because he can perform it in 16 languages, and I can't, then I could at least be able to swear at him in his native tongue.







Sale morceau de merde.

I'm back

Like Phil Bredesen and Minnie Minoso (who?), I'm making a triumphant return.

After putting my blog on hiatus following a lack of creativity and, let's face it, interest (on both mine and my six readers' parts), I've decided to return to the world of Matt Drudge, Twenty Nothing and Brian Williams, bloggers all.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to enjoy it.

Speaking of things I'm not going to enjoy, I have to buy make-up to be on television. (In case you didn't know, I'm in graduate school at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism learning broadcast.)

This means three things. First, that my face isn't perfect. I've known this for a while. I have a few moles here and there and a few scars from a chicken pock or two (one pock, two pox?) and a fall down the stairs or two. So some concealer would help, though they have yet to come out with concealer that conceals the size of ears.

Second, this means that I have to suck up my masculinity and blot my face with liquids and powders of different shades. That sucks. It worse than when a girl asks you to hold her purse/bag and worse than shopping for hours on end and worse than going to see "Divine Pants of the Secret Travelling Ya-Ya Sisterhood" sitting in between Oprah and Martha Stewart who are giving you a manicure and pedicure, respectively.

Maybe not worse than the last one. Especially since my toes could probably use a scrub and my hands an exfoliation.

Third, I now notice when news anchors--and people on the street--are using make-up to hide their blemishes. I wanted to shout to the girl sitting across from me on the bus today, "Your cheekbones are not that high! You're not fooling anyone!" But that would not have been nice.

But other than that, I have no complaints. I spent all winter break in fun places--New York, Israel and D.C.--seeing family and friends and meeting new people who I may even keep in touch with and may even be reading this blog this very minute...

More to follow,
Gabe