Fundraising

“Lack of money is the root of all evil.”
– George Bernard Shaw

DOMS

Most of the time, I no longer really get sore from working out.

Except for from workouts involving walking lunges. Enough of those, and – though they don’t seem too bad at the time – for days after, I can barely walk.

Take the deceptively simple “400m walking lunges for time”: find a track, start a stopwatch, and time how quickly you can walk in lunges around that track – 400 meters.

The last time I did this one, I was so sore the next day that I missed my subway stop. I was literally unable to stand up. I had to wait for the woman next to me to get off so that I could slide along the seat, and hoist myself by the bench-side railing.

The workout cropped up again two days ago. And, indeed, yesterday I was brutally sore. But today, for whatever reason, I’m far, far worse.

That coincided, of course, with the first time this year my office elevator has broken down. So, for a slew of meetings, about ten times so far today, I’ve had to haul myself, slowly, slowly, up and down all six flights.

Normally, I could take those six flights without even losing my breath. But, today, I reach the top (or worse, the bottom, as descending is even more excruciating) bedraggled, sweating through my shirt, and smelling vaguely like wet dog.

I’m sure the bankers I’ve been meeting can’t help but have been impressed.

Fitness

| Fitness

Hairy Situation

I’ve been busy. Exceedingly busy. Which is why, though ‘get a haircut’ has been on my to-do list for weeks, I hadn’t managed to stop in for a trim.

This weekend, however, my brother pointed out that I had started to grow payis. Then, this morning, Jess told me I had ‘lady hair’.

So, at lunch, I headed off to Jean Louis David. Which, while admittedly French for ‘Supercuts’, has normally sheared me well. Today, however, there were only two stylists at work, and a shaggy-haired lineup waiting for them.

So, short on time, and remembering that my intern Jed recently had his hair cut at the nearby Astor Place Barber Shop, I headed there instead.

Located in a dingy basement below the corner of Astor and Broadway, the Astor Place Barber Shop is enormous – apparently about 9,000 square feet – and packed to the rafters with more old Greek and Italian barbers than I could count, each with electric trimmers buzzing.

I was more than a bit worried about plopping down in ‘Einstein’ Enrico’s chair (as his sign proclaimed) – his stooped stance, mildly shaking hands, and thick, thick glasses didn’t inspire much confidence. Nor did I feel much better when he launched into cutting, taking off giant chunks in one fell buzzer swoop.

The entire cut took less than three minutes (which, at $12, is perhaps all the time I had paid for). But, in the end, it looks surprisingly good. A bit short, perhaps, but overall pretty nice.

Nice enough, in fact, that in six weeks, when I next need a trim, I suspect I’d once again live on the edge, and head on back.

Exploits

| Exploits

For the Money

Earlier this week, I headed out to dinner with my brother David, his business partner, and an investor they knew, who was possibly interested in putting some money into Cyan’s next project.

The investor owned some nightclubs, and was therefore an alcoholic. So, after dinner, he suggested we all grab a round of drinks nearby. And then another round. And then another.

My brother and his partner, at that point, wisely bowed out. But I could tell the guy was sizing me up, trying to see if I could, as the kids say, bring it.

So, I kept on drinking. And he kept on drinking. And, when we parted some hours later, it was with much increased mutual respect.

Or so I assume. Actually, by that point, I had totally blacked out.

I’m not entirely sure how I made it home, though Jess tells me I came in the door talking gibberish and laughing hysterically, barely able to stand.

But the next morning, I woke up feeling great. I wasn’t hung over at all!

Instead, I soon discovered, I was still drunk. Still totally, plastered drunk.

It’s a miracle I didn’t fall onto the subway tracks on my way to work. I could barely type once I arrived. But I still felt fine. Until about 11:00am, when I suddenly and violently crossed out of drunk, and into terribly, horribly hung over.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, we have a small ironing board in our office at the moment. Which, it turned out, is precisely the right size and height for use as a pillow when lying on the floor, something I preceded to do for the next hour and a half.

I rallied in time for a business lunch, which I managed without tossing my cookies in the restaurant bathroom (something, unfortunately, I did last year in a similar situation), though I was otherwise utterly worthless the rest of the day – couldn’t write emails, answer the phone, or even focus on a piece of paper well enough to read.

Still, it looks like the investor will be coming through, and may even be bringing the deal around to a couple of his angel investing friends. So, in the end, as I told a friend yesterday afternoon, happy as ever to take one for the proverbial team.

He pointed out that approach, essentially, made me a whore.

To which I replied, no no, given the amount of money we’re talking about, I’m fairly certain I qualify as an ‘escort’.

| Entrepreneurship Exploits

Bus-ted

Yesterday afternoon, I almost got in a fight with a bus driver. It wasn’t an MTA bus driver, but rather the driver of one of the big blue double-decker tour buses, the kind that loop out-of-town visitors past the city’s landmark.

The driver had stopped at a red light, then suddenly lurched forward into the crosswalk, almost killing a group of children crossing the street a few steps ahead of me. So, like any good New Yorker, I banged the bus’ front window with my fist, told the driver he was a fucking moron and that he’d almost killed the kids, and suggested he get his head out of his ass to watch where he was going.

This, apparently, didn’t sit well with the fellow. But as he was well strapped into his seat, I was two-thirds the way down the block before he managed to stick his head out the door to curse me in response.

Fortunately, I was at that point on my way back from brunch with Jess and her visiting sister Nina, and Jess managed to restrain me from returning to take up the driver’s stream of street-fight challenges. Still, I suspect it was largely Nina who gets the credit for defusing the fight. Because later that afternoon, once Nina had boarded the Amtrak back home to Boston, some giant fat lady shoved Jess on the sidewalk in front of a store, and it was all I could do to restrain her from a similar throw-down.

We’re small. But we’re feisty.

City Life

| City Life

Out of the Frying Pan

I lived. My fingers survived. As did my sense of fast-improving cooking prowess. In fact, the teacher – a former professor at Le Cordon Bleu – even pulled me aside with a couple of the other attendees, to assign more advanced homework for the week:

First, find a wine we buy frequently, and create a dish to complement it. Second, roam the Union Square Greenmarket in search of a vegetable we’d never before tasted, then use that as the basis of a second dish to pair with the first.

While reports on both should follow, tonight, according to Jess’ and my Tuesday tradition, we’re taking advantage of the freshest fish day of the week, and heading out for sushi. Not to Mizu (our usual stop, and some of the best bang for the sushi buck in the city), but to Matsuri.

The sushi there is a step down in quality, and a step up in price, but it’s also far closer to the Highline Ballroom, a concert venue where we’ll be catching Julian Velard and the Groove Collective later in the evening.

Tomorrow evening, I’m teaching at CrossFit NYC, my parents come into town, and one of Cyan’s investors is passing through. And the week gets busier from there.

Which makes me, as ever, wonder why – unlike most of Europe – we don’t get to take of the entire month of August. Or, in my case, even part of it. Because I could sure as shit use a break.

| City Life Cooking

Well Done

I’ve loved cooking for most of my life. For my fifteenth birthday, much to my parents concern, I requested a hand-cranked pasta press. But, in the last year or so, I’ve gotten serious.

I’ve read my way through a slew of cookbooks and books on cooking (most recently Bill Buford’s Heat and Tom Colicchio’s How to Think Like a Chef). I’ve started working my way through Jacques Pepin’s seminal La Technique – not as a book, but as an apprenticeship, cooking up a sub-chapter at a time. And I’ve taken to watching Top Chef – to which I also subject poor Jess, who consequently refers to me as Hung when I get too many dishes going at once and start acting a bit manic in the kitchen.

But, like in most spheres of life, I also realize there’s no substitute for live cooking instruction. So, I’d been coveting the Techniques of Fine Cooking course at the Institute of Culinary Education – five five-hour sessions which run the gamut of broad fundamental skills.

The course was way too expensive for me to justify. So I was thrilled and shocked when Jess bought my way in as a birthday gift. In the abstract, that might seems a selfish gift – she being a benefactor of the improved cooking – but I suspect, in truth, it’s a further sacrifice. I already (without meaning to! I swear!) brutally critique everything down to her vegetable peeling skills, and I imagine I’ll be even less tolerable, will functionally drive her from the kitchen, once I make it through the course.

We’ll find out soon enough, though, because the first class is this evening. From 6:00-11:00pm, I’ll be dicing, grilling, channeling Child and Bocuse. Or, at least, trying not to chop off any of my fingers. Bon appetite.