• Everyone — and I mean everyone — between the ages of 25 and 30 used to watch The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air
• The token Asian guy has a fraternal connection with the other token Asian guy in every clique
• Fire has the ability to bring out people’s primal natures, and make them throw their hands in the air and wave them like they just don’t care (or some reasonable facsimile thereof)
• Some people think they’re never too old to get hooched up for a Saturday night
• A good DJ can make you feel like you never left high-school
• Even at 27, I still look like I’m 18, according to the bouncer who carded me

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.
Hey, I’ve got nothing to do today but smile.
Da-n-da-da-n-da-da-n-da-da and here I am
The only living boy in New York

Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where,
And we don’t know here.

—Simon and Garfunkle, The Only Living Boy in New York

Every day, we get caught up in our lives.

We adopt pets to give us a sense of family. We eat breakfast at work or in the car to save ourselves time so we can work some more. We scorn those who express emotion, we avoid eye contact with strangers on the street.

Everything we do — the food we eat, the movies we watch, the home team we cheer for, our coffee shop romances — they’re just trying to fill that hole, that gap that’s missing, the only way we feel alive.

We don’t slow down, we don’t figure things out. We don’t reflect and appreciate what we have.

Like strawberry cheesecake ice cream with a thick graham cracker swirl. Like the serenity of the snow that falls around us, when heaven decides to bless the earth.

Life gets in the way of living.

And now I realize just how guilty I’ve been of this. I’ve been looking for love, but never recognized it when I found it. All I ever wanted to do was lie in bed, look into your eyes, and go through my favourite albums with you. But I never did. And now I wonder. Why can’t we just live? We can’t we just love?

Sometimes you have to stop. You can’t capture everything. You need to throw yourself in.

A thousand kisses deep.

If a woman sleeps alone, it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart but there is one sin he will not forgive: if a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.

—Zorba the Greek

There exists a spot on every woman that needs to be kissed.

It can be as innocuous as the curl of the lip, the web of the hand, or a mark on a landscape of skin.

It’s the responsibility of a man to find this spot. Not as a service to the woman — sometimes the woman isn’t even aware of such a spot — but as a service to the creator of such things.

No, I didn’t learn this meaning of the word from grade school, or even from the ebonics primer at Dolemite Dot Com.

(Actually, I learned it from 2Pac’s Life Goes On)

Yeah.

I only recently had a modern day poseur pointed out to me. This isn’t the same as an intellectual poseur, this is the poseur of personality. The one’s who want to be quirky, eccentric, different.

At first, I didn’t notice; I was just annoyed. Then Loo’s perspicacity put a name to it. I can’t stop catching others now. I find that the one distinguishing behavior is the over-statement of character traits they wish to have, such as, “I did this funny thing because I want you to see me in a certain way, and by telling you this, I will make you believe that I am who I want you to believe”. Or “I like this song too₀ I listen to anything because I have widely varying tastes!”. Over-statement such as this may or may not be based on some kind of insecurity; some do it to hide because they’re uncomfortable with themselves, others just want to be memorable and only end up being remembered for the wrong reasons.

Sometimes it’s even worse on blogs, where people write one line posts that don’t say anything because they think they’re cool and cryptic and that people are interested in what they have to say. Or others who post conversations, and expect everyone else to understand or appreciate the humour behind them. Or even people who actually write about how they’re fucking INTELLIGENT, or GRAMMAR FREAKS, or ATTRACTIVE. Why the fuck do you need to state it? LET THE WORDS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. The key to writing is to SAY not TELL. Telling an audience how someone is feeling is nowhere near as effective as describing direct actions/thoughts/reactions related to those emotions without actually stating the emotions themselves.

In the end, it all makes me even more zealous about being humble, unassertive. I’ve always been one to “speak softly and carry a big stick”, as Teddy once put it. There are tons of great surprises when one doesn’t present all of oneself from the start. And after all, when one is revealed as a true self that doesn’t match the false image that’s projected on others, one ends up being a phony.

And I fucking hate phoneys.

Yesterday I was taking the bus home, sitting in an aisle seat next to someone (the part of the bus where there are four pairs of seats, two pairs facing forward on each side of the aisle). There was a girl in the seats in front of me, with her bag next to her, preventing someone from sitting there, and two people sitting in the seats across the aisle from her. Eventually, she made like she was going to get off at the next stop, and put her bag on her lap. The guy in the aisle seat across from her (at an angle to me) saw, and looked rapaciously at the soon-to-be-vacant window seat. Then he looked back at me, and saw me eying the seat as well, and going through the motions of a Tarantino joke from Desperado (“Dick, glass. Dick, glass. Dick, glass.”), except with me and the empty seat. As soon as he realizes that he might lose the coveted window seat to me, he gets up and sits in the recently vacated space next to the girl to reserve the spot, before she even gets up to leave. Eventually, the next stop comes along, and she doesn’t get off. Instead, the person who was sitting in the window seat next to him before he moved gets up and leaves. The guy looks over to the newly vacated window spot, and, too embarrassed to move back, just stays next to the girl, stewing in the consequences of his error.

I could feel his scalp starting to itch, the way a sudden break of sweat starts to tingle the pores along the back.

And then I walked over to the window seat, and slumped down comfortably. Learning to never make assumptions and never be too anxious was easy. It was learning to live that by those rules that was the hard part.

I also touched some guys leg with my fingers later on, because he rudely shoved his knees into my legs while making his way to a standing spot. Nothing makes a man jump like challenging his heterosexuality.