While at Yale, I ended up playing the pit of one of Sondheim’s musicals, which featured a number in which the two leads pretend to be Jackie and JFK, accents and all.
Following a run through at the pit band’s first rehearsal with the performers, I couldn’t help but shout out “Chowdah! Chowdah!”. Onstage, the female lead responded ‘Chow-dehr! Chow-dehr!”, and I fairly leapt to my feet. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to love at first sight.
Today, after fight practice, a bunch of the guys I train with crossed over to the other side of the gym to spar for a bit with the New York Russian Sambo Team – Sambo being the former USSR’s version of Judo.
I ended up paired with a guy named (I kid you not) Vlad, a large Russian who seemed to think it would be an easy couple of matches. Much to his (and his coach’s) surprise, however, I went 2-1 in the three rounds against him, tapping him out with a choke and then an armbar in the first two before getting sloppy and tired in the third and opening myself up to a an ankle lock that left me hobbling the rest of the way home.
Still, there’s nothing like testing your fight skills against a large and uncooperative opponent to see that your training is actually paying off. Vlad seemed impressed and vowed to drop in for a couple of our classes; if he does, I’m pretty sure I deserve a cut of his training fee.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the personalities that people project through their blogs, about how, when meeting bloggers in real life, I invariably either think “this person is exactly like their website,” or “this person isn’t anything like their website,” though rarely anything in between. And, in the case of that second group, those bloggers whose real and digital selves diverge, I wonder how intentional that difference is. Are they recreating online who they secretly wish they could be in real life? Or are they simply unaware that their web-message and their in-flesh medium somehow don’t line up?
In my own case, I’m fairly sure the real me and the digital me are, for better or for worse, rather similar. By and large, I suspect any readers meeting me in real life for the first time are likely to leave the encounter thinking, ‘yep, that’s pretty much what I expected.’ The only exception, however, might be the same lament often whispered behind the backs of famed actors seen for the first time in person: “he seems much shorter in real life.”
Which is to say, at 5’6″, I’m certainly not tall. For years, in fact, I’ve joked that I should change this site’s tagline to: “the dangerous result of a serious Napoleon Complex run for decades unchecked.” But, in truth, I don’t think of height as a big issue, nor have I for most of my life.
Certainly, through most of elementary school, I didn’t give it too much thought; though small, I was still extremely fast, and therefore an asset on dodgeball and kickball teams, as well as uncatchable enough to survive even the roughest games of ‘kill the pill’ – the consummate test of schoolyard masculinity. It wasn’t until I hit middle school, as the girls began to sprout up faster than us guys, that I even began to notice my own small size. Even then, I quickly discovered upsides – at middle school dances, for example, I was invariably boob-level on the taller girls I asked to slow dance. (“Put on End of the Road again! Put on End of the Road again!)
By high school, as we guys caught back up, however, I started worrying – in typical insecure ninth grader style – that girls might not be interested in me because of my height. So, in a solution that, in retrospect, was both extremely inane and admirably ballsy, I set about trying to prove otherwise to myself by hooking up with the tallest girls that I could. I don’t mean to sound as though I was obsessed with the idea – most of the girls I dated in high school were of average height – but, given the chance, I’d try and steal kisses from any cute, tall, lanky girl I could find.
As a result, after my Freshman year of college, I ended up making out with a UCLA volleyball player at a barbecue on a beach in Half Moon Bay. She was 6’2″. I declared victory, gave up on the tall girl search, and went back to not thinking much about height – mine or that of the girls I was interested in.
Though, to be fair, if someone were to call Everything I Do (I Do It For You) up on a bar jukebox, I’m not sure I could resist reverting, full circle, to my middle school self breast-level eyeline self, searching out the tallest girl in the bar, and asking her to dance. Old habits die hard.
I receive a fairly insane number of emails a day, and have always been rather slow in responding to them. I’ve recently started getting much better, however, and wanted to quickly share what works for me in case it helps anyone else.
1. Get a good spam filter. I use Knowspam.net – as I check email on both my computer and phone, I wanted something server-side. It’s a challenge/response system, so literally no spam gets through. I loaded up my address book when I joined, and it scans my outgoing mail for new addresses, so only people who have never emailed me before and have never received an email from me are hit with an authentication request, and then only the first time. Having something automatically separate the wheat from the chaff makes wading through all the email I receive merely extremely tough, rather absolutely impossible.
2. Read the emails you receive. If any require less than two sentences of response, or absolutely require immediate attention, reply as soon as you read them. Doing so guarantees you respond to the time-sensitive messages in a timely manner, and it keeps easy ones from piling up.
3. Make a ‘reply’ folder, and move everything else there. Your inbox then stays clean, making it easy to triage incoming mail.
4. When you have some free time, pull up the reply folder and start working through the messages one by one, bottom up. That is, open the oldest email, and reply to it before going on to the next. This keeps you from saving the hard-to-write ones, saving them even longer, and then realizing you’ve gone weeks or months without replying to them.
5. If you find the reply box is getting particularly full, and you have a laptop, I find it helps immensely to get out of the office (or home workspace) and head to a coffee shop or restaurant instead, as it reduces all the possible procrastination-friendly distractions to a bare minimum. Plop down somewhere, and do nothing but chip away at the reply folder.
6. Another quick time saver: don’t save old emails in specific folders or categorize them or whatever else. Just delete everything, but set Outlook (or whichever program you’re using) to archive rather than delete the mail in your ‘deleted items’ folder, and set the archive date out eight or twelve months. This way, you can sort by sender and quickly find specific exchanges by skimming the list of emails from that sender; or, if you can’t remember who sent it, you can always search for the content the email contained. Either way, it’s likely faster than devising and sticking to an elaborate system of folder categorization.
Between these six things, I’m starting to feel like I’m no longer drowning in emails – now I’m only, say, neck deep. Still, that’s a big improvement. Try it out, and see if it works for you.
I’m walking back from the Easter concert, decked out in my nattiest pinstripe suit, gig bag slung over my shoulder. I’m looking down as I walk, smiling to myself about the surprisingly smooth performance. I look up – just in time to catch the eye of Jane Krakowski, heading the other way down 9th. She smiles, demurely looks away. I float the rest of the way home, harboring a new celebrity crush.
Over the years, I’ve read many times that Miles Davis, when asked by young trumpeters how they might improve their own playing, would invariably respond: buy a piano. And certainly, Miles wasn’t the only trumpeter thinking along those lines; two of my other favorite jazz players, Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie, doubled on piano well enough to release recordings featuring them at the keys. Even a world apart, in the arena of classical playing, William Vacchiano, a long-time fixture of the New York Philharmonic’s extraodinary trumpet section, once famously remarked that, had he spent half his trumpet practice time at the piano, he would have been not only a better piano player, but a better trumpet player as well. When it comes to understanding functional harmony, there’s nothing quite like the piano, with no other instrument so linearly and visually laying out melodies, harmonies, and the relationships between them.
So, it is with serious embarassment that I must admit I am an exceedingly remedial pianist. I have a mean ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, and that’s about it. Yesterday, however, as I passed by Sam Ash, I noticed a handful of electric keyboards on clearance sale in the window. Years of accumulated non-piano-playing guilt sent me through the doors, and I came home last afternoon with a full-size Yamaha PSR-273 electric keyboard. Sadly, despite it possessing literally hundreds of other features I will never conceivably use, this model appears to lack the occasionally found karaoke add-on, dashing my hopes of making money on the side by inviting Asian tourists from nearby Time Square into my apartment for rousing rounds of song and drink. Still, karaoke or no, armed with a textbook (John Valerio’s Jazz Piano Concepts), I yesterday butchered my way through a first short practice stint. While it will be a long, long time before I’m ready to play in public, with the music theory I already possess, after several years of hard work I honestly believe I could even push my playing skills all the way up to somewhere just below mediocre.
This is slightly discouraging, considering how blazingly quickly I picked up my other back-up instrument, the upright bass, though it’s also a good reminder that I picked up the bass quickly not because I’m some sort of musical genius, but rather because the bass is really, really, really easy. Consider this classic jazz joke:
A young boy comes home one day and tells his father he’d like to learn to play the bass. Glad that his son is taking an interest in music, the father heads to the local music store, picks out a bass, and signs his son up for a week of lessons to get him off on the right foot.
The next evening, the father asks his son what he learned in his first lesson.
“Well,” his son replies, “I learned the first four notes on the fourth string.”
The following evening, after the same question, the son answers “I learned the first four notes on the third string.”
On night three, it’s “I learned the first four notes on the second string.”
The fourth night, the father again asks his son how his lesson went.
“Actually,” says the kid, “I couldn’t make the lesson today. I had a gig.”
In my estimation, this joke is only slightly hyperbolic, as after about two years of playing the bass I’m now occassionally called in to sub gigs, whereas after two years of trumpet playing I still basically sounded like a slowly and painfully dying cow.
By now, even after nearly seventeen years of trumpet playing, I still occassionally feel like I’m in dying cow territory, and I’m especially concerned about a relapse in that direction tomorrow. I’ve been hired in as trumpet soloist for St. Luke’s Easter service, where I’ll be playing a Baroque suite, and descant lines on most hymns. The pieces, requiring delicate, highly exposed and spritely playing throughought, would be a stretch even when at my best, and may prove altogether impossible when performed at a morning hour early enough that my eyes are still to bleary to read the music. Wish me luck.
Aside from occasional lapses in house-care, my roommates are two excellent guys to live with. Fun, considerate, willing (at least most of the time) to pitch in on collective housework. And, most importantly, amenable to us all living parallel, yet rather separate, lives. Which isn’t to say we don’t hang out regularly. Just that, when we aren’t doing something collectively, we each more or less let the other two do their own thing. The large size of our apartment (large, at least, by New York standards, having both two separate living rooms and a sizable eat-in kitchen) certainly helps, as we rarely end up all piled up in the same tight space.
Increasingly, however, that ‘separate lives’ philosophy seems to be yielding unintentional results. Throughout the last month, for example, a half-eaten slice of cake in a plastic takeout box has been sitting on the top shelf of our refrigerator. And though, to me, a month of refrigerator time would place most pastry well beyond the realm of edibility, I’ve left the thing sitting there out of consideration, assuming that whichever roommate it belonged to was saving it for some specific (elbeit hopefully non-gustatory) reason. Apparently, however, my roommates had been leaving the cake untouched for the same reason, each of us assuming it must belong to one of the other two. In fact, while we still don’t know who the cake belongs to (or how it materialized in our refrigerator), we at least determined that it was safe to finally toss. Still, had one of my roommates not broached the subject in a joke about it while all three of us were in the same room, I’m completely convinced the thing would have sat ensconced on the top shelf for at least another four or five months.
Similarly, despite there being only three of us in the apartment, our shower rack now contains eight separate bottles of face wash. I’m entirely certain that only one is mine, and I’m also fairly sure that, even in their most metrosexual moments, neither of my roommates would purchase two kinds of face wash simultaneously, much less the four or five required to reach our grand count. Where did the extras come from? Can we get rid of them? Occasionally, while showering, I think of asking both roommates. But, really, why bother? We’re happy living our separate lives, and we certainly have plenty of space.
Sure, there are thousands of inane social networks popping up on the web, riding the tail of the Friendster craze. And, frankly, most of them are a complete and total waste of time. After the initial Pokemon-like thrill of collecting all your friends, you quickly realize you have no reason to actually use the network. Because, honestly, your friend’s friend’s friend and you likely have absolutely nothing in common. And you don’t really need another way to email your actual friends – almost by definition, you already have their contact information.
Even so, I’m exceedingly impressed by the new dodgeball.social, as it adds a real-world component to social networking. Here’s how it work: say I’m at a bar downtown grabbing drinks. I send a quick text message to the Dodgeball server saying ‘I’m at Luna Lounge’. Then, if any of the friends in my network are within a ten block radius, they get a quick text message saying ‘Joshua is at Luna Lounge’ and can pop on by. At least in my life, where I’m increasingly forced to schedule time to see friends weeks in advance, anything that promotes serendipity in relationships seems like an excellent idea.
So if we’re friends in real life, or if you simply think we would be if we actually met, join up, add me to your network, and let serendipity run its course.
Quiet start of spring
Brings morning larks and green buds
Outside my window
Though only Jewish readers are likely to be amused, here’s my favorite Passover joke, mined from the archives.