a musing julius…

last weekend i hit up a wedding in wilmington delaware of two college friends. with my senior year roommate, and a another girl from college, we drove up to meet the entire crew from college crew, who decided to fly in saturday to philadelphia international airport. to celebrate our reunion, we decided to head out to the one and only bar the hotel concierege was well aware of, scrimmages. scrimmages is a sports bar, and on saturday we decided to eat and drink to our hearts contents in a place that looked more like your friends basement than a bar. but the food was decent, the beer was cheap, and the entertainment…well, thats your job.

see, karaoke is what scrimmages is known for on saturday’s, and myself, seth and john (the non-jew, jew, and half-jew crew, respectively) hit up the stage to sing Edwin Starr’s ”War.” suffice it to say our motley crew got the entire bar on their feet (one with a lighter) singing and dancing.

seth, john and i were not singers. we were performers, grunting like edwin on his finest day. background vocals were provided by the bar. everyone was in tears laughing and singing. john, seth and i couldn’t keep a straight face by the time the 2nd chorus came around. screams and grunts about war and “what it [was] good for” were the topic of the night. never in my life have a felt like a brought a crowd to their feet than singing that damn song in a random bar in delaware.

so how do i know i made it? well, after the sunday wedding, 30+ of us from the wedding returned sunday night to do more damage to the keg collection. well, believe it when i say when i purchased a pitcher of the world’s finest natty light water, the bartender looked at me and said, “hey, you’re one of the guys that sang war last night.” i responded politely with, “yes, i was one of them,” only to hear, “you guys rocked last night. i won’t forget that for a long time.”

the 30+ of us enjoyed scrimmages so much that plans are in the works to return in the 2009 calendar year. i guarantee scrimmages will be on my agenda for any east coast trips coming in the future.

my alma mater is omniscient. why you ask? let me tell you.

in 2005, my graduation speech was given by a senator by the name of john mccain.
in 2006, the graduation speaker was also a senator, by the name of barack obama.

how neat is that, in that nearly 3 years after i graduated, the two individuals who spoke at northwestern at two consecutive graduations, are running for president.

just a note, in 2008, mayor daley spoke at northwestern’s graduation…now he’d be a pretty sweet president.

um, so i’m watching mythbusters, and i see adam and jamie create a sawdust cannon. holy…effing…sawdust-of-death. insanely hilarious and amazing. it makes me want to create a sawdust cannon and ignite a huge amount of sawdust into a mushroom-cloud-of-crazy.

i would absolutely love their jobs. so incredibly jealous that i can’t do that for a living. although i’d probably hurt myself dramatically, and be missing at least one eyebrow (maybe two)

tonight, while at dinner with brian and naim, talking over hot sake and sushi, i met the most amazing and interesting couple in the world. they restored my faith in love, life and the pursuit of dreams far beyond my wildest.

susan and david, from seattle (one of my favorite cities in the world), are on their honeymoon. but not just any honeymoon. they left on their honeymoon in january….of 2007! they’re on month 21 of a 24 month honeymoon, travelling the world on an excursion they had dreamed of for their entire lives.

they started in hong kong in january of 2007, and spent months travelling to borneo, cambodia, vietnam, indonesia and so forth. eventually they went to nepal and india and spent many months there. from india, they had moved to amsterdam and spent 7 months living there, above a hash bar. aside from their ridiculous stories of treating schipol airport as their homebase travelling across europe, they eventually made a drastic move…

they are spending the rest of their honeymoon travelling from the eastern most part of the world they could reach, and travel on the ground for as long as they could. so starting in south korea, they’ve travelled by train, car and boat across asia, europe, iceland, greenland and canada until reaching the eastern seaboard. they have yet to get onto a plane since starting in south korea.

today, they were in detroit, visiting their cousin (who lives in my building) and while we were eating sushi in detroit, they shared the story of how they met and how their travels brought them together on the trip of a lifetime…of anyone’s life time. to me, it’s amazing a man from london and a woman from seattle could meet under interesting circumstances, get married, travel the world for 21 months and counting, and be just as in love as my parents are (which is saying a lot.)

they did what they wanted to do together. she hasn’t been back to seattle since january of 2007, and she said it was all possible because of dave, who lovingly calls himself “the grinch.” their passion for life and love was eye opening, and made me extraordinarily happy. they were open, honest and invited me to their home in seattle whenever i was next in town.

its proof positive that marriage and passion aren’t mutually exclusive, and being with someone exclusively doesn’t mean your life and passion and adventure end at “i do.” on the contrary, their belief was that their lives were just starting. what better way to continue on their adventure than meeting new people over sushi in a little bar called oslo in downtown detroit.

last week, i recieved a performance rating from my company. our rating system goes as such: outstanding, excellent plus, excellent, satisfactory plus, satisfactory, unsatisfactory. amazingly, not a single person i’ve ever known has recieved something different than an excellent plus or an outstanding (although the outstandings are intended to be few and far between.)

today, my colleagues and i came up with a new performance rating system, based on web 2.0, which we’d combine to create new global rating systems. in order from lowest to highest

• legendary fail (must recieve 5 straight “epic fails” to qualify)
• epic fail
• glorious fail
• FTL
• FTW
• glorious
• epic
• legendary (must recieve 5 ‘epic’ ratings to qualify for this rating)

these would work out a whole lot better, plus theres some serious opporuntity for feedback. legendary fail status is something i’d like to live up to.

each morning, i rise to grab my iphone, and look at any important emails i may have recieved. usually, the most important emails i get are from 1-800-flowers or tiffany and co. (yeah, i bought something there once, now they won’t stop sending me emails), selling their latest wares. but last friday, when i awoke from a slumber that started at 10pm the previous day, i was surprised to see a message from someone via facebook.

this message put a smile on my face, to say the least. it surprised me, shocked me even. it showed me i can be (and am often) wrong with my judgements about people, and that people can, and in fact, do change. we owed nothing more to each other than an occasional “hi” on the off-chance we ever ran into each other. it was a message that showed me civility and mutual respect is more than possible between two people that likely loathed each other for the better part of a year.

but mostly, it showed me that i can change. i didn’t fall into the same emotional response mechanisms. i didn’t close myself off, and didn’t apply the same judgement that i had applied for the last year. for the first time since then, i thought, “this isn’t a person trying to hurt you.” a month ago, i would have said, “this isn’t a person trying to hurt you anymore.”

and to me, THAT distinction shows that i’m learning.

i’ve got a long way to go before i apply that to everyone i know in my life.

while i was working and packing today i decided to upgrade my wordpress installation. best. decision. ever. while i am not a huge blogger, this new version of wordpress lets me post via iphone which is exactly what i am doing now.

i can post anywhere anytime anyplace with a cell phone connection.

so this is me enjoying something i did today. i like fun toys. yay.

its been exactly one year (okay, i’m off a day) since i returned from a vacation in florida and jumped on a treadmill. i ran 5.5 miles that day. it took me an hour exactly, because the treadmills downstairs only let you run for 60 minutes. the sweat stung my eyes, my feet were bloody from my shoes, my legs burned, my lungs gasped and my heart pounded out of my chest. i cried that day. it was an awakening. i felt dead and alive at the same time. it dulled the pain i felt. it fueled my anger. it motivated me to become better at something, anything, whatever.

but returning home this day was different than a year ago. i didn’t feel bad running 5.5 miles, and i did it in a much quicker time, but i didn’t feel better. the pain from a year ago comes back, and a realization floods me that a year ago, running to dull the pain had one side effect; it made me run from the reasons i felt the way i did. i blamed everything and everyone for the pain i felt, but didn’t blame myself. today, i thought long and hard, and realized i’m the reason for the way i feel.

much like a year ago i started the long and slow drive run to making myself physically “better,” today, i start the long and slow process of taking responsibility for my emotions and actions. my mom thinks its about time. i know others that agree with her.

flying through the sky would be a pretty sweet skill to have. walking through walls, bending steel rods, or being invisible, also equally sweet.

but most of these skills, as cool as they are, just don’t cut it for me. i’ve always wondered what superhuman powers would be awesomest (well, i probably stopped wondering when i was 12) but either way, these “ordinary” powers just would cut it for me, personally. so i’ve created my top list of eventually superpowers that i’d like.

• instant temperature hands:i hate when i’m at work and i’m halfway done through my perfect cup of coffee when an ad-hoc meeting drags me away from my forgotton cup, and i come back to learn the coffee is cold. bam, my instant heating hands would be able to reheat food or beverage to an exact temperature as determined by the kelvin scale. all i do is think the digit, and point. also works for cooling warm beer left too close to the grill. pros: hot coffee, ice removal, cold beer. cons: potential catastrophic ice age while cheering for sports teams.
• hands that hum when you rub them together: one of my favorite powers ever, i’d just love to have hands that hum at roughly 60-70 decibels when i rub them together gently. just imagine the party gags. pros: hands that hum when you run them together. cons: awkward moments caused by rubbing my hands together
• speaking with animals: yeah, this would be sweet. i could speak with pigeons, or tigers, or squirrelees
• water into wine: jesus knew how to threw a party. this would work out for me too.

thinking of all these makes me want all of them. just imagine, a dude who can speak with animals, turn water into wine, instantly heat soup from 20 feet away, and can create a humming noise when rubbing his hands together…

oh yeah…

so i went to the tigers game today, and going to today’s game prompted me to think about another one of those things that annoys me about spectators during baseball games: bird-of-prey vision which allows them to call balls and strikes from over 400 feet away, regardless of alcohol consumed in the last 3 hours.

so today, sitting row 10 in section 139 of comerica park (roughly 100 feet past 3rd base) i wasn’t surprised to sit behind two dudes, who happened to have such vision, and also a magical ability to BEND LIGHT. from where we were sitting, all one can tell is the height at which the pitch was when it crosses the plate. even then, the ball is so ridiculously small, i don’t even understand how they can even begin to say, “that pitch was close”

no, listen, you have no idea how close it is. arguing about balls and strikes as a spectator is like randomly walking into a hospital and telling the patients the doctors there are morons and they should listen to you instead. you’re 200 feet away. you’re not even allowed to do that typical male whistle when they’re typically disgusted, but don’t want to express it verbally. you know, the bomb dropping sound condensed into half a second, paired with a head shake.

its even worse when people are in the upper deck, behind home plate. its as if the elevation and the fact that you can “see” the entire field also gives you the ability to see through the umpire obstructing your view of home plate. or the ability to bend light.