Annualized

As a San Francisco kid, borne of moderate temperatures and low humidity, I spend New York winters shivering violently, wishing for summer to arrive, and New York summers sweating through the sweltering heat, wishing for the return of winter cold.

But, for about a month of spring, and a month of fall, the weather is perfect, absolutely beautiful. During that month of fall I think, there’s no better place in the world to live than right here. And then during that month of spring I think, holy shit my eyes and ears and nose are itching so much that I should probably just shoot myself in the head.

I’m not sure what personally hugely allergenic tree, grass, or shrub it is that exists here on the East Coast yet remains blissfully absent on the West. But, whatever it is, I grew up without it, and therefore without any real seasonal allergies.

So, each year, at the start of April, as the pollen count climbs, hay fever catches me completely and totally off guard. Even this year, when I bought NasalCrom months in advance, and swore to start actually taking it a few weeks in advance of allergy season as the box presribes, I wasn’t ready. Because, this weekend, as my eyes started to redden, my nose began to itch and run, it still took me a few days to realize that, wait, I’ve seen these symptoms before!

So, NasalCrom it is. Plus whatever left-over allergy pills I can dig up from the back of our medicine cabinet. And maybe some of those anti-histamine eye-drops because, let’s face it, I’m a total pansy about all of this, and will drive everyone nuts with the complaining otherwise.

Wish me luck. And, if you have any drug recommendations, lifestyle tips, or other thoughts for a still relative allergy retard, certainly send them my way.

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Search Me

I’ve had a slew of meetings over the past month or two with people on the job hunt – either newly laid off, afraid of being so, or just looking to start their post-college careers.

And, in every case, I’ve highly recommended Orville Pierson’s The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search.

Unlike most other job search books, which focus on resume writing, interview techniques, or how to apply online, Pierson instead mainly addresses how people actually find jobs, and on how to plan, pursue, and measure along the way a search based on that reality.

Seriously, definitely worth reading. Besides, if you’re unemployed, what the hell else do you have to do with your time?

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Or, Why I’m Behind on Blogging

“A very simple truth is that if we have more work than we are capable of processing then we won’t be able to do it all properly. Unfortunately, like most simple truths, this tends to escape many people.”
– Mark Forster, Do it Tomorrow

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6 Months

Nicknames Jess regularly calls me:

  • Jorshie
  • Joshula
  • Yoshington

Things Jess has woken me up to say at 4:00 in the morning, before falling back to sleep:

  • “Time to make the donuts!”
  • “You smell like a ferret.”
  • “Let’s do drinks.”
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Bringing Down the House

CrossFit NYC’s first location was on the fourth floor of a building in the Garment District. The building was old, with rickety construction, so perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising when, after months of our jumping around and dropping weights and generally pounding the floor, the ceiling fell down onto our downstairs neighbors.

I don’t mean the entire ceiling, and – fortunately – I don’t mean that we actually knocked a hole through our floor and fell down to the level below. Instead, it was just a piece of the ceiling, a six by ten foot chunk of plaster that had shaken loose as much due to age and poor construction as from reverberation.

Still, from our downstairs neighbors’ perspective, we had knocked down their ceiling, and they weren’t thrilled about it. And they made that pretty clear.

Despite the death threats and the law suits, when we eventually moved out it had more to do with running out of space than with them. Still, we certainly weren’t sad to leave them behind.

Because it wasn’t just the ceiling. These guys came up to yell at us several times a day, saying they could hear every step we took across our thickly rubberized floor, saying we made it impossible for them to hold meetings.

Which I always found to be slightly funny. The guys downstairs were a messenger company. And I could never quite imagine what sort of critical meetings they might be holding, in our shithole of a building, all morning and afternoon long.

CrossFit NYC’s latest location is only ten blocks down from that first home, but it’s a world apart. The space is five times as large, clean, with showers and changing rooms, in a much newer, much nicer building. And, this time, when we moved in to the third floor, the second was still unoccupied. Which meant that whoever moved in below us would have a chance to hear whatever noise we might make beforehand, would know exactly what they were getting themselves into.

And, in this economy, with New York’s commercial real estate market collapsing, we reasoned, we might go neighborless for months or years before the space was filled.

Or not. We were in our new digs for less than a month before we discovered that a company had just leased the second floor.

It turns out, they’re a messenger company. And they’ve already visited us a few times about the noise.

Let’s hope their ceilings are screwed in tight.

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Greasing the Groove, Redux

Remember when I used to write a blog?

Me too.

Sorry, things have been insane of late – though, fortunately, in a good way – as Cyan has been getting a number of initiatives up to speed.

That said, a year and a half ago, when I similarly fell off the blogging bandwagon, I posted a commitment to shitty first drafts that got me writing regularly again.

I’m reposting it below, in the hopes it will work similarly a second time through:

As Anne Lamott observed, the best cure for writer’s block is a shitty first draft. Convince yourself you don’t have to write something good – just that you have to write something – and it becomes far easier to get words flowing.

Which makes sense in the world of novels, where authors iterate months or years between first draft and final product. But not in blogs, where the first draft usually is the final product.

That puts the pressure back on a blogger with writer’s block. And as the length of time from one post to the next mounts, the pressure worsens. Drop posting frequency from near-daily to at-best-monthly (as I have of late), and each entry need be Pulitzer-worthy to justify itself.

Yet experience dictates that I blog best as habit – post regularly, day in and day out, and, intermittently, excellence emerges.

So, for the balance of this year, it’s consistency over quality. In other words, I’ll be doing my best to accept shitty first drafts. And I hope you will, too.

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