So I just started getting used to living with a “smart” phone. I never thought I’d require a smart phone until I was old and more important.

But i’m here. Already. And now I can post whatever, whenever. It’s liberating, in a way, not being tied down to the desktop like before (the old Alienware finally died [...]]]>

So I just started getting used to living with a “smart” phone. I never thought I’d require a smart phone until I was old and more important.

But i’m here. Already. And now I can post whatever, whenever. It’s liberating, in a way, not being tied down to the desktop like before (the old Alienware finally died after seven years of service  by the way).

This also means a lot less work to maintain this site. Be ready to hear from me a lit more often.

Happy 2012.

So over the years I’ve become more and more laid back. It’s taken long enough.

Really. “I’ve been called the King of Small Talk”, and have been known to issue questions in a very rapid-fire fashion. “So what do you do? What college did you go to? Where’d you grow up? What brought you to San [...]]]>  

So over the years I’ve become more and more laid back. It’s taken long enough.

Really. “I’ve been called the King of Small Talk”, and have been known to issue questions in a very rapid-fire fashion. “So what do you do? What college did you go to? Where’d you grow up? What brought you to San Francisco? Would you like to take a breath now?”

I even used to consider any gap in conversation, no matter how small, an “awkward silence.” Which must be filled. Quickly. Say something. Now. Now!!

So, the people I surrounded myself were the loud ones. We’d be those in the corner of the cafeteria drawing a crowd. Or the bar. Or a public space of your choosing. The noise level kept ratcheting up, higher and higher, and I’d ride the wave. LOOK AT US, WE’RE HAVING FUN. YOU WISH YOU WERE A PART OF THIS. SOMEBODY TAKE A PICTURE.

But as I’ve done so many times over the years, I adjusted. My tendency to want to get along with pretty much everybody, including the quiet ones, made me learn to tone it down. Speak a little slower. Breathe. Chill.

Because it’s kind of nice not to hear myself talking sometimes. Or anyone at all. You just want to relax and be in whatever moment you’re in. And to enjoy your food. Or the view. Or maybe you’re making out (in which case it goes without saying).

My hobbies adjusted, too. As I’ve discussed several times already, I’m not the nightlife guy I used to be. Given the option on a weekend, I’d read or go for a run. Or a drive.  Something that just doesn’t have to involve a crowd of people and alcohol and an outwardly contrived sense of having the best night ever. Even if it really was the best night ever.

Because I’m enjoying myself just the same. Even with the occasional “YEAH DOGG!!!”, I just don’t feel like drawing so much attention to it anymore.

Apparently I have a reputation. Going out quite a lot during & immediately after college and amassing a facebook friend population the size of a Pennsylvania township have made me seem like quite the party guy.

And, like I talked about in a previous post, those times were fun and great, albeit excessive. I [...]]]>

Apparently I have a reputation. Going out quite a lot during & immediately after college and amassing a facebook friend population the size of a Pennsylvania township have made me seem like quite the party guy.

And, like I talked about in a previous post, those times were fun and great, albeit excessive. I took full advantage of what’s considered ‘acceptable behavior’ for a man in his early twenties. The friends and parties. The alcohol and fine dining. The constant uploading of pictures to hammer home the point that, yes, I’m living a very fulfilling and active life.

It’s a bit different these days, however. I’m older, my crazy friends started to settle down a bit and I actually started to appreciate silence on a saturday night. My weekends are now, preferably, spent reading sci-fi or horror while listening to trance & house music. All while using twitter to make snide comments about fellow coffeehouse patrons who irritate me.

[The ones who fidget are the absolute worst, but I digress]

I mean, I still go to the occasional “soiree,” eat out and generally do great and incredible things- I’ve just pulled back a bit. And I don’t need to constantly “check in” or post photos or review places on yelp anymore because, really, who gives a shit?

But I guess that showing some restraint still hasn’t helped shed that ‘party guy’ image, even years after the fact. A facebook profile can only say so much, after all.

So if you’d like to know what I’ve really been up to, we’ll have to actually sit down and have a conversation, won’t we? How about next week?

With the banquet last Sunday, I officially finished my third season of dragon boat racing. To believe it all started with a coworker walking around the office with a “Ripple Effect” logo on his jacket (prompting me to question what it was and eventually join the team) and, so far, for me [...]]]>

With the banquet last Sunday, I officially finished my third season of dragon boat racing. To believe it all started with a coworker walking around the office with a “Ripple Effect” logo on his jacket (prompting me to question what it was and eventually join the team) and, so far, for me anyway, culminated in a gold medal finish in Vancouver last June.

Three seasons ago I was just discovering the value of watersports. More specifically, I was having a rough year, and a kayak trip on Lake Tahoe finally put it all out of mind.

On that facemeltingly hot day in the fall of 2007, I wasn’t dealing with being overworked, or pressured by family, or with mounting drama from that girl I knew from high school who became a lot prettier than I remembered- I was in the middle of a goddamn lake and needed to get to shore. Nothing else mattered besides safely getting through the chop and 5-foot swells. I was suddenly, shockingly numb to anything unrelated.

And so it went as I was introduced to dragon boat, one race after another. In its truly transcendent moments I thought of nothing other than pulling water on time. A few times a week I could get out there and, at least temporarily, make something else my primary concern.

So, three seasons, 700 new friends and a closet full of shiny medals later, we celebrated. There was plenty of crab for the hungry, awards for the endlessly chipper, and a video slideshow for those who wanted to relive it all just one more time.

And as the video played, I took my seat in the back and looked on, content. All this, when all I really needed was an escape.

Their appeal was clear, since shooting at stuff and leading [...]]]>

I grew up on video games, starting with the almighty Atari 2600 and working my way through the various Nintendo iterations. New games were a reward for good behavior. Punishment meant temporary revocation of those privileges.

Their appeal was clear, since shooting at stuff and leading armies to glorious and bloody victory was definitely more fun than, say, finishing that science experiment or book report. I’d often be up into the wee hours of the morning trying to finish one more level, or one more round, whatever was applicable. It was all rewarding just the same.

But in early 2009, I decided I’d had enough.

I can remember the moment very clearly. It was a warm, sunny day in the Richmond district of San Francisco, but I was too busy playing World of Warcraft to notice. Something just unexpectedly clicked, with a few factors coming to a head at exactly the right time to get me out of that apartment and walking, literally and figuratively, back into the light.

A few weeks prior I was still a devotee. In addition being charged $15/month to play, every couple of years or so we’d fork over another $40 for a new set of adventures, and we so eagerly awaited them that I was lining up at midnight in Union Square with a friend to pick up the latest expansion pack.

It was, however, the first real look I had at the very people that I played the game with, and it wasn’t pretty. You know those stereotypes about gamers being ugly, antisocial and generally repulsive? They’re all absolutely true. Though I’d dealt with their types virtually, being in their physical presence took repulsion to an entirely new level. I no longer wanted to associate with the horrifying “gamer” types. Ever again.

I was also beginning to get into what the someone referred to as my “health kick,” with my first year of dragonboat concluding in the months prior. The sport made me start running kind of regularly and eating better. The season ended and I wanted to keep burning calories, so I kept it up.

Naturally, workout time started cutting into game time as my runs got longer and my gaming interest began to wane. Clearly, my priorities were shifting. Getting compliments on losing weight, when I never intended to, was nice as well.

Most importantly, the game didn’t matter much to people I knew in reality. I could talk to my “guildies” for hours about our adventures in Blackrock Mountain and Ahn’Qiraj, but they lived all over the midwest and east coast. In San Francisco, I’d mention Warcraft and I’d be met with blank stares, even derision.

It’s one thing to share a bond with virtual friends, but another to share something with people you see in person on a regular basis. The game only served to distance me from everyone who mattered to me that didn’t play, which was pretty much everybody.

So, on that warm San Francisco day, in the midst of an epic battle in Alterac Valley, I got sick of the weirdos, the lethargy and the isolation that video games never failed to deliver. I turned the damned thing off, walked to the beach and, thankfully, never looked back. On any game.

There was even a group playing the bongos when I arrived at Ocean Beach, giving me a sense of the more rewarding & relatable things I was missing out on in all that time I spent staring at a screen. But I’ll explain those new hobbies another day.

I’m not gonna call it a “break,” since I’d been actively twittering these past three months, but I’ve just kind of been waist-deep in it all, with work and interviews and travel and dragonboat. I’ll take it one subject at a time, with the [...]]]> It’s been a while so let me just get right back to it.

I’m not gonna call it a “break,” since I’d been actively twittering these past three months, but I’ve just kind of been waist-deep in it all, with work and interviews and travel and dragonboat. I’ll take it one subject at a time, with the overall idea that none of this I saw coming, at least a few weeks ago.

I often exult in the passive victory of San Francisco Giants games, and my patience has, for the first time, rewarded me and my hometown with a championship run. I caught a few games at bars, and the clincher at Civic Center, and enjoyed every damned minute of it, except for when I was getting involuntarily splashed with beer.

Of course, you have to catch it on the radio and be somewhere raucous that doesn’t charge $9 a beer. Trips to Underdogs and Pedro’s with weekly resets at The Bitter End were the epitome of being a sports fan, and I’m already beginning to wonder what happens after this. You hope your team is successful, and then what? For now it’s still sinking in, and might not completely until either next season. Or until a heated confrontation with, say, a Dodgers or Phillies fan. But that’s another subject altogether.

Work and interviews took me to Southern California last week, with a stop in Burbank, “LA Live,” Westwood & Malibu. The most interesting part, though, had to be the occupational-safety-hazard-nightmare of a machine shop at UCLA, but it quickly passed.

Maybe it was the oddly frigid weather down there, along with the possibility of a move, but now I’m not so apprehensive about southern California and the chance of a job there. I’ve got homies and relatives right nearby and I can get back into dragonboat if I feel like it.

And speaking of dragonboat, the 2010 season came to a very abrupt, though very successful conclusion. All three boats got medals, everyone went home happy, pretty much. It’s strange to have such a regular part of your routine, especially such a calorie-burning one, get put on hold for 3 or 4 months. I’ll have more to say about it after the upcoming year-end banquet, I’m sure.

I’ll bang out the rest of the details sometime this week, a few more events I missed and pictures people are still somehow excited to receive, despite the time elapsed.

Which brings me to my niece. She turned 2 not [...]]]> Little kids make the world go ’round. It’s not adults, what with our complicated and wanton desires, but the wee ones who gently coax tribute from their parents and families and everyone else who thinks that no cuteness shall go unrewarded.

Which brings me to my niece. She turned 2 not all that long ago, and the occasion called for a party replete with Disney theme and costumes and about 50 mylar balloons that needed to be carried 4 long blocks by your author because there was no room in anyone’s car and because it seemed like a pretty gnarly adventure at least until they got tangled up in some equally gnarly tree branches. But I digress.

She’s smart and can speak clearly beyond the usual grunting and screaming. She eats like there’s no tomorrow, and upon trying to pick her up the first word to come to most people’s minds is “heavy.”

More importantly, though, this little girl finally made me realize that I don’t hate kids, after all.

In college I volunteered for two years at a Vietnamese community center on Geary, doing my best to tutor and teach despite the pushback and brattiness and budding ghetto-ness of the kids that spent their Friday afternoons there. But it didn’t work, and of all things it made me never want to go near kids ever again, though that’s putting it lightly.

All that changed when my niece was born. She was handed to me about a week out of the womb and was roughly the size of a Papalote triple-threat burrito*. And within a split second, I hadn’t even brought her close yet, she pooped.

Feeling that vibration and realizing what happened (and also being unfamiliar with remedial measures) initially horrified me, but at that moment I realized that these kinds of things happen, naturally. Babies poop and cry, because they’re not quite aware of the intricacies of how to run to the bathroom or wipe up or grab a bite to eat just yet.

Extrapolating it a bit, maybe the punkass kids talking back to me at the community center so many years before didn’t know any better, either. They weren’t aware that I was using my free time to help them and that I would’ve appreciated if they shut their yaps for just a few minutes so we can get through their homework, upon whose conclusion the screaming may begin again in earnest.

So that’s why kids do what they do, and, hopefully, cut the crap as they mature. Now I love kids, and have the patience to deal with them. While I won’t be running a daycare anytime soon, having kids in my presence is no longer something I dread.

And it all started with the poop. Maybe it wasn’t the most sanitary epiphany the world has ever seen, but I’ll take it.

So when I get a call from people I haven’t seen in a while, I go. College friends, people I [...]]]> It’s hard to maintain friendships with those you barely see. There really aren’t very many people who you can lose touch with for long periods of time and then suddenly pick up right where you left off.

So when I get a call from people I haven’t seen in a while, I go. College friends, people I could’ve known in high school, people from the east bay, old paddlers, I try to keep everyone relevant.

[These were all kind of a while ago, I'll admit, but a lot happens in a month.]

Pretty much every time you see these kinds of people it goes like “how have you been, it’s been hella long!” So you dig deep to remember everyone’s names, the enormity of the epic adventures you all had previously and whatever you’d recently heard about them on facebook. You string all that into some type of narrative to get past those awkward few minutes of catching up, and then you play it by ear.

When the catching up is officially done, you’re in the present and officially free to act like you’d never parted in the first place. Then you repeat the process when you see them again, months or years later.

And as much as I’d like to see everyone again, it remains impossible, what with budgets and schedules and workloads and babies and stuff. We’ve all grown up and apart, and those of us with the cameras are the only ones observant enough to take notice.

But if you don’t want to lose these people forever, you have to try.