fast talkin’

The problem is, my brain moves faster than my mouth. So I speak quickly, trying to keep words at pace with thoughts.

It doesn’t help that my parents are New Yorkers. I may have grown up in laid-back California, but I came home to fast talking every afternoon.

These days, living in Manhattan, I often completely forget that quick talkers aren’t the norm. Then I’ll get on the phone with someone off this frantic little island – say, someone at the Kentucky State Film Commission – and remember again what it feels like to speak with someone who makes each. Word. Into. Its. Own. Sentence.

Or, conversely, I’ll have people similarly irked by my fast speaking speed. A few months ago, I went out to LA to pitch a group of investors for Cyan’s film fund. Granted, in that case, I backed myself into a bit of a corner – I had ten minutes to give a PowerPoint presentation initially meant to have lasted fifteen. I made good time, though, and was nearly through when the time-keeper shouted out, “one more minute.”

“No problem,” I replied. “I’ll just talk faster.”

“Faster? Is that possible? God help us!” the investors chorused. And I got an extra three minutes.

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meeting up

As post-graduation celebration, my parents are now en route to Ischia, Italy, the site of their engagement some thirty-three years back.

And, certainly, engagements are important – particularly now, when “how did he do it?” supercedes even “can I see the ring?” But meeting stories, I’ve always felt, are what really count.

My grandparents, for example, met at a baseball game – my grandfather, who played catcher, had forgotten his lunch. My grandmother, a cheerleader for the other team, offered to share hers. With that beginning, how could they have weathered less than their seventy years of happy marriage?

My parents, on the other hand, ended up in Ischia in a more round-about way. Both were students at New York City’s Queens College. My mother ran the college newspaper, my father the radio station. He appeared on my mother’s doorstep two hours early for a joint media meeting being held at her house. He was on his way back from Jones Beach, wearing a tank top and short cutoffs. Depending on whose version you rely upon, he may also have had some nameless girl in tow.

My father, apparently, was instantly smitten. My mother, on the other hand, was instantly convinced my father was a jackass. Still, with a bit of persistence, he managed to drag her out on a date, and then another. He was serious. She continued to see other guys. But they dated, on-again, off-again, from that point.

Towards the end of their senior year (during, I believe, an ‘off’ rather than an ‘on’), my father asked my mother if she had any post-graduation plans. Actually, she did: having never traveled abroad, she was setting off for the summer to tour Europe and Israel. My father, with absolutely no summer plans, jumped on the chance: he was intending to do exactly the same thing – perhaps they could go together?

Somewhere in the extensive pre-trip planning, off became on, and when their flight left JFK, my father’s mother famously turned to my mother’s mother to ask if she had renewed her passport. Renewed her passport? Yes, just in case their children decided to hold the marriage abroad. After all, my father had decided that they were getting engaged, and he was particularly good at getting what he wanted.

And, in fact, he did get what he wanted – though the wedding wasn’t until the following fall, they sent back news of the engagement via telegram.

My brother and I, to this day, give my mother a hard time about their story. Growing up, nearly every pet we ever owned, we bought on the trip back from ski weekends up in Bear Valley. Take her out of her environment, we knew, and she’d come back with all kinds of housemates she’d never have agreed to back at home. My father, it seems, new exactly the same trick.

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falling behind

Despite cumulative travel time for the New York to DC and DC to New York trips passing the twenty hour mark, the trek was absolutely worthwhile – I’m exceedingly proud to say I’m now the child of two doctors, one of medicine, the other of education policy.

As my brother just sent me a copy of his biz-school application essay, it seems I’m well on my way to becoming the family underachiever.

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filmic wisdom

I’m in the Newark Airport. I have been here for the past eight hours and, according to the most recent departure time update, I should be here for at least two more.

With each passing minute, I’m increasingly cursing myself for having not yet seen The Terminal, as I’m pretty sure that, if I had, I’d know how to use this stretch of airport time to bed Catherine Zeta-Jones.

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uprooted

Over the past few years, I’ve been spending an increasing percentage of my time on the road – a trend that looks likely to continue, as, just in the next month, I’m slated to head out to Washington (D.C.), San Francisco, Israel and Bermuda. (Rough, I know.)

Through all my traveling thus far, I’ve made a few discoveries. The first, that I don’t need that much ‘stuff’ to be happy, is immensely pleasing in a Walden-esque sort of way. Living out of suitcases, I find I rarely miss the things I’ve left behind. Which has inspired me, already a ruthless reducer of possessions, to further clean out my closets.

Another thing I’ve noticed, however, is that trips of different lengths seem to have different feels to them. For vacations, very short trips (three to five days) seem to work best for me. After that, any additional relaxation I gain from pulling myself out of real life accrues increasingly slowly with each added day – a textbook case of diminishing returns. Worse, I start to find that all of the work I managed to push completely out of my head for the first few days begins to creep back in, preventing me from fully enjoying my escape.

As a result, I’ve realized I’m better breaking two weeks of yearly vacation into three or four shorter trips, spread through the year. Each one, then, is just long enough for me to pull myself completely out of my fast-paced life, and comes frequently enough that I rarely have to go for extended stretches without an upcoming escape in sight.

Five days, I’ve found, is also long enough to do the tourist thing in a city I’ve never before visited – long enough to see the sites, wander through a few museums, browse thorough kitschy knick-knacks I fortunately never purchase. Even doubling that to ten days, I’ve found, makes very little difference. Sure, I get to see a few more sights, perhaps wander more slowly through the museums. But, by the end, I still feel like a tourist – with a vague sense of the city, perhaps, but certainly not like I really know it.

At the one month, mark, however, I’ve found that I start to feel like I really own a city – I have a sense of the neighborhoods, have found a few off-the-beaten-path secret spots, get some sort of feel for the city as a whole. It’s a completely different feeling from the touristy shorter trips, and I find that when I return to a city I’ve lived in – even lived in for just a one month stretch – it feels slightly more like a homecoming than an outbound visit.

I really like that homecoming feeling, and, as I’m lucky enough have jobs (both on the film and tech sides) that can be done pretty much anywhere, it’s something I’ve recently resolved to experience more often. So, along with my business trips, along with my frequent short vacations, I’ll also be trying to take a month a year to live and work someplace I’ve never lived and worked before. With Manhattan rents so ridiculously high, I suspect I can sublet my apartment, and use the income to cover not only rent in another city, but even the cost of a flight to get there.

I can’t relocate for a month immediately, as I’ll be all over the place for the next three (mostly related to two tech consulting gigs and a documentary we’re getting ready to shoot in Israel and Europe). But my schedule should calm down by November, and I’m hoping to use that eye in the work storm to test out the one month move plan. So, after that exceedingly long-winded introduction, I should now admit that the entire point of this post is to ask for help in determining exactly where I should relocate.

Currently, at the top of my list are Vancouver, the French Quarter of New Orleans, and possibly Paris. My roommate James is lobbying hard for Asheville, NC (‘the Paris of the South’). But it’s still pretty much up in the air. So, if you have ideas, throw ’em in the fray (ideally with some explanation of why I should choose that locale). If you convince me, I’ll even break from tradition, finally buying one of those kitschy knick-knacks to send back as thanks.

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ambushed

I have officially become the first rube in the history of the world to actually be surprised by a surprise birthday party.

Special thanks to my brother for masterminding the wonderful evening, to Tova, Joe, Colin and Yoav for helping him pull it off, to all of my friends who showed up, and to Mikhail Baryshnikov for walking in to Russian Samovar as we were all there drinking, shaking his head, and walking upstairs to get away from us.

Also, you know you’re already rather drunk when you stagger into a surprise party being thrown for you and initially think, “that’s funny, there are a lot of people I know in this bar tonight.”

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twenty-five

On July 16th, 1979, at 2:27pm in the Stanford Hospital, I popped my head into this world. And, from that moment, I couldn’t get enough of it.

In California, right after a baby is born, the nurse is required to put sliver nitrate drops into its eyes, to guard against infection. But those drops temporarily blur the baby’s vision, and the nurse, telling my mother that she didn’t remember ever seeing such an observant newborn, couldn’t remember a baby who was trying so hard and so instantly to take it all in, waited until the last legal minute to put those drops in my eyes.

That’s pretty much been the story of my first twenty-five years: cramming in as much as possible, trying to fit it all in. Take, for example, just this last year:

I got some excellent work done, and realized how very much more I have to do.

My heart broke, then mended into something more full and whole.

I made a mess of things by being constantly full of shit, and have been working on cleaning up the mess day by radically honest day.

I had some wonderful times and some horrible times.

I had some trying times and some rewarding times.

And as much as there were some things I’d do differently on a second pass, I wouldn’t possibly want to give up any of it.

Looking back, I can’t see how it all fit into just one year, or, really, how it all fit in to just twenty-five of them. Which, frankly, is sort of a relief, because I have at least that much to cram into the next twenty-five.

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resurfacing

Sorry for disappearing, kids. But after months and months of salary-lessness (due, in short, to rather severe naivetÈ on my part; we initially pushed Cyan’s projects one by one, rather than multiple projects all at the same time – something we eventually learned was the requisite approach in an industry where the schedule on any given film is likely to slip and slip and then slip some more), bling-bling beckoned me out to fair San Francisco to kick off the more tightly re-focused Paradigm Blue with a pair of techno-wunderkind consulting gigs.

And, apparently, if I’m getting paid to crank out overly verbose, snarkily cynical critiques of a company or nonprofit’s products, services and strategies, it’s tough for me to muster that same snarky verbosity on the home front. (I imagine this same effect must be murderous on the sex lives of gynecologists: “honey, please, put that away”.

Lucky for you, though, I’m now back in NYC, back to balancing tech dorkery with movie ‘glamour’, leaving me plenty of time to write the rambling, inane content you’ve come to love. (Or, at least, to mildly tolerate).

Before I get on with my life, however, a few highlights from the trip:

1. Brunch with the lovely, smart, funny, articulate, and – sadly – just married Nara Nayar, an online friend I’d been corresponding with since my short Blind Date Blog stint a few years back (if you missed that – consider yourself lucky) but had not previously had the pleasure of meeting in real life.
2. Playing Alternative Lifestyle Life with Helen Jane and Hilary and James and James’ friend Cary; laughing, more or less nonstop, for eight or nine hours, to the point where my cheeks were literally sore from the muscular exertion of it by the next day.

3. In celebration of my father’s 54th birthday (yesterday) and my 25th (tomorrow), heading to Raging Waters, a water park about a half hour south of my parents home, for an afternoon of riding water slide after water slide. Take that, maturity!

4. A very, very excellent date that I’m not going to talk about because it appeared to have actual potential – something that totally freaks out my inner commitment-phobe if I actually think about it too much.

Still, despite all the excitement: NYC, it’s good to be home.

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