under the microscope

For the past few years, I’ve had a running joke with my parents: they ask if I’m going to go to business school; I reply, absolutely, as soon as the school has my students ready.

Confirming my long-standing belief that, if you make dumb jokes about something long enough, it has to happen, a team of b-school students from Denver University’s Daniels College of Business (which leapt this year to the top ten in several of the Wall Street Journal’s b-school category rankings) is using the nascent Long Tail as a case study for their business planning class, and helping us flesh out the company’s strategy.

After spending a couple of hours yesterday afternoon giving them a crash-course lecture on the economics of film distribution, I realize I’m yet one step closer to my eventual goal: reconciling my desire for an advanced degree with my distaste for that pesky ‘going to class’ thing, by getting some hapless institution of higher learning to simply grant me an honorary doctorate.

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back to basics

Came up to Boston for the weekend, to see one of my closest friends and his wife and to squeeze in a quick investor meeting. And, on the train up Friday afternoon, I started to write a post about the trip that also obliquely referenced my date the night before. What I started writing was short on detail because, I told myself, I didn’t want to kiss and tell. But, in fact, it was short on detail because I was worried what my date would think if I wrote what I was really thinking, and worried what other people would think if I wrote what I was really thinking.

Realizing that’s a long, long way from the sort of damn-the-torpedoes full-speed-ahead radical honesty I’ve been trying to stumble my way through for the last year, I instead – wisely or not – scrapped that post and decided to just lay it on the line. So:

I went on a drinks date Thursday evening that was good enough to become a breakfast date Friday morning and good enough to justify me totally violating my usual rule for minimum time between first and second dates by asking to see her again this Monday night. I’ve spent the weekend sort of secretly terrified that she’s going to cancel the second date, which, on the one hand, I’m pretty sure she isn’t, but, on the other, probably means I’m far more interested than my commitment-phobic conscious brain would otherwise acknowledge. And while, obviously, after just one date it’s impossible to say where this might go, it’s the first date I’ve been on for a while where I’m at least exceedingly excited to find out.

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butterflies

Usually, I stick closely to the Roadies’ Rule: no heavy drinking on consecutive nights. I seem to have lost sight of that entirely this week, waking up and swearing off liquor each of the past four mornings.

And while that would normally leave me scrapping my evening plans, instead I’m heading out once again tonight, this time to one of my favorite tacky-chic bars, more nervously excited than I should probably admit.

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full of advice

Two nights back, an ex-girlfriend from college came down from Connecticut where she’s now teaching high school French, to join me in taking advantage of Restaurant Week at nearby Vice Versa. And over altogether too much excellent food and wine, after catching up on life and talking through our various angsts and excitements, she somehow roped me into helping her revamp her marathon training plans.

Somewhere between when we dated and now, it seems, she discovered that if she starts running, she can pretty much just keep going. And, as a result, she’s not only completed a number of marathons, but even placed in the top five runners for her age group in a handful of them. With another coming up in April, she was looking to speed up her mile split times, to do something in preparation other than just run as far as she could each day. By the end of dinner, I had somehow agreed to help coach her to that end.

On the one hand, as someone with a long-standing interest in sports medicine and fitness research, I might seem like a good choice. But, on the other, as someone who, after hitting about the one mile mark thinks “well, that’s enough running for this month”, I’m probably not such a good coaching choice after all.

I thought of the same thing last night, when another close friend came to my apartment to, over another bottle of wine, trade gossip and dissect her current dating conundrum. After hearing her full retelling of the sordid tale, I tossed in my guy-perspective analysis, which, it seems, my friend found dead on, and was apparently exceedingly grateful for.

But, here too, I felt a bit suspect in terms of qualifications. Certainly, as Edison once pointed out, the first thousand failed light-bulb prototypes weren’t really failures at all, but discoveries of a thousand ways not to make a light-bulb. And, from that perspective, I’m undoubtedly a relationship pro, having discovered about an equal number of ways not to have a relationship.

But, really, if you’re trying to run a faster marathon, shouldn’t you seek advice from someone who’s actually a marathon runner? And, if you’re trying to figure out if your ongoing relationship has any long-term hope, shouldn’t you talk to someone who’s navigated the pitfalls of New York dating into a long a happy marriage?

Well, yes, you probably should. But, apparently it’s easier and far more entertaining to talk to a smarmy generalist willing to pull elaborate theories about love and life and running long distances out of his ass instead. Which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good explanation of how my life works as a whole.

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scrobbled

People tend to assume that, since I spend much of my life immersed in one genre of pop culture, I must be, at least to some degree, hip to the world of pop culture as a whole.

Which, sadly, is not the case. While I do, obviously, follow the film world closely, I tend to follow it from the making movies side, rather than from the star obsession / People Magazine side, leaving me embarrassingly behind on whether Brad and Jennifer are together or not at any given moment.

Beyond my own industry, things go downhill quickly, leaving me clueless as to new television shows, recently released novels, or hot new indie bands. In the case of TV, I’m somewhat happy not to know the latest reality hit. With books, as most of my friends tend to be serious bibliophiles, simply watching what they’re toting along for subway reading is enough to make sure I catch any fast-spreading paperback meme before I’m too distressingly behind the curve.

But music. That’s a tough one. I do, I believe, know a number of people with really good musical taste. But unlike reading choices, the contents of their iPods aren’t nearly as easily gleaned from casual observation. So, instead, I tend to follow the offhand comments of my most music-savvy friends, snapping up the names of bands and albums they mention like a dog hungrily collecting table scraps. Which works. But in a slow and haphazard way that leaves me to miss entirely bands and musicians I’d really like, and to search through the large number of mentioned groups that aren’t even vaguely up my alley.

Here, as in so many other areas, it seems I may be rescued by technology. Rescued, in fact, by technology I discovered and installed several months back, but then promptly forgot about.

Like with most things in the world of music, I may be one of the very last to discover AudioScrobbler. But, on the off chance that some small number of you readers lag even further behind, I highly, highly recommend that you download the plugin for whichever audio player you use.

In short, AudioScrobbler watches what you listen to, compares it to what other people listen to, and make recommendations based on other artists people with similar tastes are playing frequently. Last night, on AudioScrobbler’s advice, I downloaded a slew of Denison Witmer, Sufjan Stevens and Rufus Wainwright. And, frankly, I was shocked by how much I liked them all.

With those successes, I’ll be checking in on AudioScrobbler’s recommendations every month or two, and acquiring some new CDs. I may not be any hipper or better tied in to the indie music world, but, with a bit of help, it looks like at least I’ll be able to fake it.

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and also:

“Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.”
– Oscar Wilde

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thinking of you

Read Strunk & White, Poynter or Zinsser, and you’ll emerge with at least one common tip for improving your writing: know your audience.

Which, for most documents, is undoubtedly good advice. Penning a Sunday Style article (seriously, Barbara, it’s almost finished), a business proposal or a birthday card, it helps immeasurably to keep the eventual reader firmly in mind.

With this blog, however, audience-focused writing is a much harder trick to pull off. Not solely because I have absolutely no idea who most of the thousand or two people who float through this site daily are, but also because the groups of people who I do know about are all looking for such divergent things.

Based on the posts that get linked on other blogs, or del.iciou.us bookmarked, it’s pretty clear s-a’s readership is composed of several, fairly distinct groups. There are the 43Folders-ites, thrilled by any mention of productivity hacks and Getting Things Done; there are the startup wonks, looking for entrepreneurial insights and tech business ruminations; there are the film folks, hoping to pitch Cyan (and now Long Tail) and looking first to unlock the secret that will get them cast or hired, or launch their screenplay into production; and then there are the large number of generalist voyeurs, the people hoping to live a bit of the disastrous New York dating life through my vicarious misadventures.

Since I know no single thing I write could make them all happy, I essentially don’t even try. I don’t balance out the flow of postings to make sure I cater regularly to each group, or even neatly section off one kind of writing from another. Instead, as they do in my brain, the thoughts all simply jumble up on the front page, intermixed, sometimes even within a single post.

But while I’m able to block from my mind (wisely or not) the varying groups of readers, I occasionally find myself writing to one single reader. I write, in short, knowing that I’m being blog-stalked by a potential date.

In my prior post, I said that I don’t seem to have a type, a regular pattern that emerges from my dating past. Which, in fact, is only partially true. When I last tallied my kissing count, I re-discovered something that I’ve long, at least subconsciously, known: I tend to like writers, especially those that self-reflect mercilessly, that pour their inner life onto paper (or screen). Which makes me, in short, remarkably good at developing crushes on fellow bloggers.

I say this all to preface admission of my own potential-date blog-stalking. In the world of business, I tend to obsessively research investors, clients and hires. Which has carried over to my personal life, where, especially in the case of other bloggers, I tend to follow along with new postings, to pore over bits of the archive, looking less for the what and more for the underlying why.

And, projecting perhaps, I tend to imagine that potential dates are doing the same thing. The contents of my archives are fairly immutable. But new postings – over that I have some control. So I tend to second guess my own ideas, question topics on which I might typically hold forth. I look at potential posts and wonder how they make me sound. Too dorky? Too neurotic? Too excited about the companies I’m trying to build?

Fortunately, I rarely pause long, as, in fact, I’m at least as dorky and neurotic and excited as my writing might imply. That’s just who I am. And while trying to hide that, even in the off chance that I could pull it off, might help me score a first, or even third, date, it certainly wouldn’t bring me to the the thiry-first or seventy-third.

Frankly, that’s a whole lot of work for a rather brief-lived payoff. So much of New York dating – the posing, the game-playing – it only works for that brief stretch when you have the interest and energy to put in the effort. Which is why, even during those stretches that I’m sure (rightly or wrongly) someone I’d really love to impress is reading along, I fall back on the same strategy for writing as I’ve gradually come to for real-world dates: stop trying so damn hard, stick to the truth, and hope for the best.

While, short-term, it’s probably not the most effective strategy (either for keeping readers or for getting laid), in the long run, it’s the only hope I’ve got.

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typifying

Though I may, through this site (or, plausibly, in real life) come off as an insensitive prick, in fact, one of the few things I do well is empathize.

I don’t mean empathize as a synonym for sympathize, as in sharing someone else’s pain, but rather empathize in its purest sense, as in divining what other people are thinking, seeing things from other’s perspectives.

Tailoring a sales pitch on the fly to an audience, or searching out the perfect birthday gift, I’m grateful for this knack of putting myself in other people’s heads. But, like most things in life, it cuts both ways. Given the weight I put on what other people are thinking, I inevitably end up worrying about what other people are thinking of me.

This manifests itself in small, bizarre ways. Hearing female friends mock the wall-eyed guy at the end of the bar, for example, I’ll start to convince myself that perhaps I, too, have some horrible lazy eye and yet have never been told as much, even though it’s been secretly discussed for decades by friends and family behind my back.

I can usually cast aside such fears with a moment of reflection. I’ve seen countless pictures and videos of myself, and I’m sure that in at least the majority of them both of my eyes are looking more or less in the same direction.

Which leaves me to fixate instead on the things I hear and deduce on a regular basis. Some of them (“has anyone ever told you that you look like Matthew Broderick?”) don’t imply much beyond their surface content (I apparently look kind of like Matthew Broderick). But others I can’t keep from analyzing, from tearing apart for their loaded meaning.

One I’ve heard a lot recently is, “I’d be really, really curious to see who you end up marrying.” I’ve gotten this one, even in just the last month, more times than I can count. I think what this actually means is, “you seem like a judgmental asshole with bizarre and inscrutable dating criteria that make it nearly impossible for me to figure out your ‘type'”.

I must give off this impression in spades, because if I comment on liking a girl I’ve just met, friends usually react with, “really? I thought you didn’t go for [taller / shorter / thinner / curvier / blonde / brunette / smart / dumb / etc.] girls.” As I don’t think I say such things directly, I’m curious as to which obliquely snide comments or quirky reactions lead people to those strong impressions. Whatever it is, it’s powerful stuff. When people make such comments, there’s almost an air of helpful reminding. “Actually,” they seem to say, “despite the comment you just made to the contrary, I’m pretty sure you don’t like her after all.”

Hearing this from enough people, I start to suspect they’re right. Maybe I don’t like smart girls. Or stupid girls. Or tall blondes or short brunettes. I have absolutely no idea. Looking back through the wreckage of relationships past, I can’t quite make sensible patterns emerge.

Which is exactly the point. Perhaps the reason people so quickly rule out possibilities for me is that I’m so slow to categorically rule them out myself. My dating life, taken together, is an enigmatic, jumbled mess. Not a clear shape, but a muddy splatter.

Which makes what people tell me I am (or, more frequently, am not) looking for far more interesting, gives me license to listen carefully to friends’ constructive critiques of my crushes. Not because it’s likely to yield clues in my own search, but rather because it might give me a glimpse into theirs. Given the spattered mess of my own love life past, I seem to have inadvertently become a walking relationship Rorschach blotch.

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