bradydale

I won the story slam, check it out.

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:22:47 GMT

13 lbs gone

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:31:32 GMT

So, I weighed myself this morning and I came in at 198. This is very exciting news. I've averaged probably 193 or 194 ever since I left college, and it sucks to be up over that. Last night, I went for really, really the best run of my life last night with a college buddy named Ben who's about my size and build but happens to be a marathon runner. We did 6.7 miles in a little over an hour (which, I know, is real slow) and we didn't take any walking breaks. I was amazed I did it but at a certain point it felt really natural and almost easy. I have never ever run more than 20 min or so without taking a walking break. This is the virtue of running with someone else. It pushes you. I let Ben take the lead for the whole thing and just did what he did, so I couldn't slow down. Tho I was tempted to ask for it a number of times.

So I knew that I would peel some weight off after a big (for me) run like that and it seems to have lost me a pound. I was 199 yesterday. I've also been eating in a much more controlled fashion (and sticking to my vow of no cookies, candies or cake tvery well).

Anyway, I couldn't quite remember just how fat I'd gotten but I knew I emailed these things to a good friend of mine from time to time so I did a search and I found an email that said I'd weighed 211 in June.

So from 211 then to 198 now, that's a pretty reasonable weight loss pace, tho it has honestly sped up a lot recently as in the last month I have really felt like I was "fit" again, and could do serious workouts without feeling like I was going to die. That's always the point where I am able to lose more, just because I have the capacity to work harder.

If I can peel off another four or five I'll be pretty happy. As long as I maintain something like my present mentality, it should be no problem. Of course the Winter is coming and in about 6 to 8 weeks I'll quit biking every day, which will lose me a low-level calorie burn, but I should be able to cover it with harder gym time.

And you know I'm not joking.

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:42:51 GMT

Liquid soap

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:50:32 GMT

I've been using liquid soap in the shower exclusively for about 6 years now. I only use bar soap when I am at a hotel. Did you know it's made from animals (usually, anyway)? That's so gross. We're all washing our bodies with dead animals. Look on your ingredients. If it includes "tallow" or anything that sounds like "tallow," then you've got a corpse in your soap.
Awesome.
Tho, if your barsoap says "glycerin," or anything like that, then there's no corpse. FYI.
So, my point... my liquid soap (which also doesn't seem to leave very much soap scum, btw... I don't know why they don't market this fact) and my shampoo look much alike. I mean, obviously, if I actually think about it they are totally different, but there's really no definitive shampoo versus liquid soap bottle. And, come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the chemical differences between the two were, in practical terms, non-existent (shampoo is just formulated to lather more, I'd suspect).
That said, I still prefer to use each in the prescribed way. And there is no aspect of my life that's more automatic, more totally mindless, than showering. I swear that if a scientist recorded me showering, he'd find that I did it in almost the exact same length of time every single time. I do almost the exact same movements. But since I don't really think, these two bottles often confuse me.
I shampoo first. Not infrequently, I fetch up some liquid soap rather than shampoo when I go to do it.
Today I did this and caught myself.
I'm willing to bet that I've washed my hair dozens of times with liquid soap, tho.
Am I alone in this little dilemma?

One hundred miles

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:43:23 GMT

Ever since I moved to Philadelphia, there have been two things I have really wanted to do: see the Phillies play the Brewers here in our fair city and ride the Scenic Schuylkill Century, a one hundred mile bike ride throughout the Schuylkill Watershed. 4 years on, I have done the latter. Looks like I'll have to wait till next season before I get another crack at the other one.

Last Saturday, a friend from Madison and her husband joined me here in Philadelphia to do the ride. We got up early and biked the four miles down to the ride's starting point Then we rode all 100 miles. We saw geese, ducks, strange cows, goats, sheep and of course lots of dogs. We saw suburbs and we saw farms. There were many more hills up there than I would have thought. We shot down hills at 30 miles per hour and often had another hill right at the bottom to go back up, but sometimes the speed and wind and grade were right that we could shoot back up the next hill at 20 miles per hour, at least part way.

I didn't take many photos. There were plenty of things to take photos of, but it turned out to be a very cold and wet and occasionally rainy day. I didn't like to get my camera out much, tho I did have it with me.

The first 50 miles were fun and easy. The next 20 were tougher and the last 25 were outright miserable, but we did all of them. I have ridden my bike home a thousand times in this city, but no ride has ever been more painful than that ride. I really did not want to finish the 100 miles and then do 4 more, but we didn't have much in the way of a choice. Public transit would have made it a longer wait to get to the shower.

Miraculously, two days later, all my soreness was gone.

So there you go: I've done it. I hope to do a similar ride in Chester County next weekend, if I possibly can. Sadly, tho, this morning, I was not able to motivate myself to leave the house and go do Spinning class before I go off and do some work today. That does really disappoint me in myself, but I have gotten in four wourkouts this week already and my weight is finially down to about 200, which is significant progress (eight more pounds to go).

The thing that surprised me the most about the Century was how few riders actually did it. There were shorter options that people could do, and I think most folks did those. It could have been the gross weather, too, but I thought i'd get to know a lot more people out there and actually it got pretty lonely at the end. My friends and I think we were in the last little crew to bring it home, and we came in solo, a few minutes behind one other small group that sprinted the last 5 miles.

Is Listening a Man thing or a Woman thing???

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:40:46 GMT

So, I think I'm a pretty okay listener. There's times when I get excited and talk over people, but on balance I know what you've said to me and I engage with it critically. It's part of the job of an Organizer.

Over the years, I've been a guy who's friends with girls and a lot of them have gone on and on to me about how men don't listen. How you go out with a man, and he rambles on about himself the whole time, he doesn't ask any questions, he doesn't listen.

I internalized this pretty well and made a really conscious effort to start listening to women even more and really focus in on asking them questions and engaging with what they have to say. I will state, for the record, that while I think I do this pretty well it never made one bit of difference in my romantic success or lack thereof, I must say. But I do it.

Anyway, eventually I got kindo curious about the whole idea that men aren't listeners. I mean, I have to say, when I hang out with dudes, they seem to be paying attention and engaging in a pretty awesome way. So is it true? Is it different communication styles? Is it something else?

Of course, I don't have an answer for a question that general, but I can tell you about the game I play sometimes. Here's the game: I meet people all the time. I have one-on-one conversations with lots of women that I barely know or don't know at all. Not necessarily dates... just people I find myself spending some time with. Sometimes, I decide to test this notion that women engage and men don't. Here's what I do: I ask questions. I state very little in the way of opinions and (critically) I say almost nothing about myself. I just ask questions. Usually, the questions themselves reveal something, but I don't offer anything outright.

Do the ladies ask questions? Do they try to find out more? I have to be honest with you: almost never.

Once my women friends made me aware of this idea that women listen and men don't, I have started watching for it more. I'd say that with women I know pretty well, it's true: they engage a lot. With women I've just met, tho, I have to say: they are pretty content to ramble on and on about themselves and not ask anything back if they are given permission to.

Now, there are other potential explanations for this. Maybe I don't give anything like a clue that it would be okay to ask? Maybe I'm just so uninteresting to them that they really don't care to know more (even when I'm not playing the game, I find that the results stay pretty mucht he same)? Maybe I'm instinctively only paying attention when the woman strikes me as sort of haughty?

I don't know. All I can say is that (and I suppose this is true with most generalizations), the idea that wome are really open and interested and engaging with people while men are oafish self-involved ones hasn't stood up too well, for me, once I started putting the idea under scrutiny.

Francais

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:06:27 GMT

I'm hanging out with my French friend this weekend. A good friend from college married him. She's a polyglot, so she picked up French after marrying him in a minute and half. So they speak French around the house and I have always been able to kind of follow what they are saying, so long as they don't speak too quickly.
As it happens, he's written a book recently, and he several copies on his book shelf. Being the attentive person that I am, I opened it up and started looking through it. It's written for the French market, so it's all in French. I was surprised to find that I was able to follow a great deal of it. Now, of course, he had intentionally written it to be as easy to read as possible. As he told me: he wrote it for people who read on airplanes.
So then I picked up a slender French political mystery that he recommended to me, and so far this weekend I've read three chapters. I'm missing a lot of subtleties, but I am following the big picture of the story. I feel that I need to pursue this somewhat. If I could have French down, to some degree, that would be a better way to go out from this planet.
So I think I might pursue this a bit more.

Here's what I like to remember about you

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:54:14 GMT

When I get to work in the morning and I open up my Gmail and there's no new email since I left the house, that's the time I most often remember you. Back then, I usually had something from you when I showed up at work, because I would usually email you in the morning while you were making your way to your office and then you would email me back while I was making my way to my office.
It never stopped being a little thrill, hearing from you.
You were an old style emailer, an emailer from the late 90s days of e-letter-writing. Days that are long, long gone. We wrote each other real messages. We had real arguments. We had real discussions. It wasn't just quick, "You're right" or "Ha ha!" replies that we sent each other. We really replied.
I miss that. I don't have that with anyone else and haven't for a long time.
And that's what I like to remember about you, and the thing that I remember most often.
In the mornings when there's no new email, or, even if there is, it's just a superficial note or some junk from some company that wants me to buy from them, that's when I find your absence in my Inbox. You were never superficial. You had something to say and once upon a time it was me that you cared about saying it to and you took the time to say it.
And that's what I like to remember about you.

Suspicious death of a cell phone

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:44:27 GMT

If you're reading this and if we've met in the last two years, I probably don't have your number any more. My Motorola Razr just gave up the ghost. Maybe I should have waited longer to see if it would come back on, because phones are funny like that sometimes, but after a couple hours, it was doing nothing. So, I've switched back to my old crappy Samsung.

Interestingly, my contract with AT&T is up on 8/23. How about that? Doesn't it seem a little suspicious that my Motorola siezes up exactly at the moment that obsolescence would be the most ideally planned. I mean, it's not like the manufacturers don't know that phones tend to come with two year contracts.

Anyway, I was looking forward to buying a new phone, and even planned to upgrade to something Blackberry'ish. Thank goodness that I have this Samsung, though. As long as it lasts this one next month, I can fully assess whether I want to switch to T-Mobile and get a G1 or if I want to stay with AT&T and buy the new HTC Android Phone that they are supposed to have coming any minute.

It would really, really suck if the Samsung died and I had to pay full price for a phone to last me a few weeks. Let's just hope the HTC Lancaster really does get released next month and that it runs under $200. If not, I'm getting a G1 and switching to T-Mobile.

You heard it here first, SBC.

This scribe of fire

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:46:33 GMT

I like to think that my blogging has stopped because I am doing so much more of my fiction writing, but it's not true. I'm doing more, but not so much more that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the odd post online. No, if I had to be honest, I guess the truth is that I have to blame the incompatibility between Google's Chrome Browser and ScribeFire, the Firefox Add-on.

I love Chrome. I've come to really not love Firefox much, because it burns so darn much memory to use. So I switched. The only problem is that Chrome doesn't take add-ons, so I can't use Scribefire with it.

And Scribefire makes blogging so very, very much easier. Oh, dear... dear... Scribefire. Please kiss and make up with Chrome. Pleeeeassse? I need to start impulse blogging again!

Getting back online

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:20:49 GMT

I saw this guy speak yesterday and he got me interested in the internet again. He showed a number of case studies of people who'd been moderately successful on-line, and the thing he really emphasized was that they all really focused in on one community or form and worked that very, very hard. Made a lot of connections. Commented on a lot of other people's stuff. That sort of thing.

YouTube still seems to be the choice for me. He showed us this chart that showed it's rank online blowing past the New York Times some years ago and just continuing to go. For now, here's my page. I've not put anything new on for a while.

I think I might actually just start making more videos for my work. Maybe here, too.

Of course, I also need a working blog again, and thistoowillpass.com is just messed up beyond belief. I don't get it at all.

Gratitude

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:50:15 GMT

Nothing all that dramatic has changed about my life recently. I'm settling into a job that I think is good, so that's helpful. Otherwise, everything is still pretty much the same as it's been. That said, I have been able to go from day-to-day with less internal drama lately than I've had for a while. I feel good. I feel normal. Not crazy up but not down either.

I think I simply have the right perspective. Don't ask me to define what that means for you, though, because I can't.

The only real shift I've made in my thinking is how I think about love. I've been the sort of person who longed for romance most of my life, but it's only come in fits and spurts. A little while back I started thinking that maybe it only comes in fits and spurts because that's honestly all the more of it that I can really deal with. That maybe I was choosing this life, if a little unconsciously.

So now I'm just rolling with it. The logic of taking romance (or not taking it, which is what it mostly works out to) in fits and spurts became a lot more compelling to me once I got to considering it. I know it's not for everyone, but there's a certain logic to me.

I think a part of the problem I always had with adopting this approach to life is that I always felt like the only people who said they weren't into commitment were the sort of very hot people who had the option to go from person to person all they wanted. I've never felt like one of those people and would never want to self-identify that way. That said, I don't want commitment. No one is beating down my door to get me to commit, either, but regardless, I don't want it. Nor do I want to hop into a new bed every weekend, either. Nor even every month.

The natural question here is: so what are you looking for? And the answer is: I'm not looking. I wouldn't even say I'm keeping my eyes open.

I just want to coast, and thinking about romance that way has made thinking about everything a lot better.

New synopsis for DEBT & FAITH

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:34:51 GMT

So, I finished my novel all the way back in 2006. It took three years to write it and I guess maybe it took three years to write the synopsis. I've been kicking around versions of this for years. I wrote a new one this morning after hanging out with a writer friend on Tuesday and revisiting some of this stuff in my head. Tell me what you think. Here it is:

Evan Neverever is on the run. He just isn't sure if anyone is chasing him. So he drives further west from D.C. every day and by night he waits in generic hotel rooms for someone to kick his door in. He kills time by writing out his story on a stolen typewriter. It's the story of unraveling Zoe Calypso's true role in the tragic life of her protege, Lena Pavlovna. Lena's a 22-year-old owner of a resurgent art gallery who saw her father murdered at 14, lost her best friend at 18 and never really had a mother. Evan's running now that he has solved the mysteries of her life by using his otherworldly talent. A talent he's so reluctant to describe that he doesn't even like to do it on paper, alone, in a random East Texas hotel room.

Here's the old version that I had been using:

Since witnessing her father’s murder in their Capitol Hill home at the age of 14, Lena Pavlovna, 22, had only trusted her father’s colleague, Zoe Calypso, and her own best friend, Thena. Then, Thena died, too, in a suspicious car crash, and it was down to Zoe, the famous artist and art purveyor. When the novel begins, Zoe has hired the heavily indebted Evan Neverever to be her errand boy and fence. She introduces him to Lena, and he, in turn, pulls her out of fist fights and reveals his secret talent, a kind of textual ESP, to the younger woman. Her guard lowered for the first time that she can remember, Lena charges him with solving the most vexing mystery of her troubled life: why is her best friend dead? In pursuing an answer, Evan forces her to face a new side of her late father and the real monster behind his death.

Which is more compelling? Very curious what you think.

Sk8 or Die!

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:05:49 GMT

If you've known me a long time, you know there's certain things I stay pretty devoted to and certain things that I never quite seem to fully focus on. I get interested in something, I play around with it a bit, and then I forget about it. Journalism, video-making, screenprinting... all of this is stuff I still think of myself as interested in but don't really commit to. Drawing, biking, writing... those are things that, while maybe I don't do as much as I should, I keep doing over time. They don't seem to go away.

The latest thing I've picked up is skateboarding. This could easily go either way. You could see me being really into it for a few weeks and then watch a few months go by without touching my board. Your guess is as good as mine about what will happen, but it's looking more and more like skating is something that I will keep doing.

I'm getting a little better, too. Yesterday, because I knew snow was coming in the evening, I decided to skate over to the subway for my various activities downtown. I hadn't done this before, and there's a lot of uneven or brokish pavement between my place and the subway, but I gave it a shot. I'm excited to report that it was basically a success. It usually takes me 17 minutes to make the trip to the subway from my house, but last night I did it in 10. That's a big difference! And, that's with me tripping and hopping off the board a bunch of times. When I get better, I will sail over a lot of the spots that stopped me yesterday, so nowhere to go but up.

When I got to town, I went to a play, and then I skated around downtown a little bit. I've never skated downtown before, but, really, the pavement is pretty even and smooth downtown. I was really able to see the advantage of skating around in the city, even if it does bring the pedestrians who think it's okay to walk slow and take up the entire sidewalk into even sharper focus.

I practiced doing the quick and graceful stop a lot, with very little success. Many people downtown saw me make some very ungraceful moves. Still, I dug it. I also like figuring stuff out for myself. Yesterday, I worked out that I can go over bumps more effectively if I put my weight on my back foot before I hit them. For really big bumps, it seems like I need to shift back to my front foot as soon as I go over. I don't have that down yet.

Still, crossing streets can be a bit of a trick. You go down those little sidewalk ramps, hit the street which often has a sort of sharp incline there, cross it and then go back up the other sidewalk ramp, which might not exactly be a gentle transition. I was able to successfully cross several of these, though. Some of them, I didn't think I'd make it up, but I did.

So it was fun, even if I got all sweaty in my dress coat and my legs were shaken up from the very different feeling of all the vibrations of the street beneath me.

I hope to buy a used longboard soon, which should make cruising around much easier. Hopefully, by this summer, I will have learned to do a modest ollie and curbs will no longer daunt me at all. In the meantime, I'm just looking forward to having skating strength in my legs. It shouldn't be long.

Dear Philadelphia Cyclists:

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:47:13 GMT

Dear Philadelphia Cyclists:

I know I'm being condescending, but I have to say it straight. If you see me out there on the streets of Philadelphia, rocking my fixed-gear, you may want to try to pass me. Let me advise you that if you've even gotten close it's because of a light or a stop sign or traffic. Stay behind me. I go as fast as you possibly can without being reckless. No, I don't precisely obey traffic laws, but I don't precisely ignore them, either. The only way you can catch up with me is by endangering yourself and others.

If you see me up ahead, just get behind and try to keep up without shooting past me when I slow at some intersection or assess traffic. I'm doing it as fast as a person can reasonably do it. If you try to pass me when I pause, you may or may not get hit by a car, hit by me or throw off another car alongside you. That's up to chance. But this I can promise you: I'm going to pass you again within the next 45 seconds. Because you're so slow.

So grow up. Chill out. Stay behind me. I'll keep us both safe and you'll learn how to ride like a citizen, not a ruffian.

Thanks.

Rendezvous Lounge

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:46:52 GMT

The first time my D.C. circle of friends ever hung out, we went to Rendezvous Lounge along 18th Street. It was a fun night. Back then, people really used to go there. Over the years, we keep drifting back to the place. There really isn't much of an explanation for it, other than this: at a certain point in life, we stopped liking a bar to be too loud or too crowded, and, eventually, you could count on Rendezvous for one thing: it would be empty.

I've been to Rendezvous a lot of times over the years. The same Ethiopian woman has been serving drinks there in plastic cups for as long as I can remember. Maybe since I first showed up in my new leather pants in late Winter 2000.

Here's an excerpt from a review on WashingtonPost.com:

Like a more intimate (read: considerably smaller) and less pretentious (read: reasonably priced) version of Chi Cha or 18th Street Lounge, Rendezvous beckons with two floors of comfortable retro couches and seductive lighting.

Let's just say they haven't updated this for a while. There's no date on it, but there have been no couches for some time, the prices aren't reasonable and... well, no one goes.

The weirdest thing about Rendezvous is that they don't actually seem to want you there. They will serve you, with some regret. On Saturday, I brought a group of five people in the door. There was no one there except a few other members of the Ethiopian community of Philadelphia, and it's a fair bet that they were long time friends or family of the bar owner's. In about 45 minutes, the rest of my group showed up and that represented another 10 people or so.

They didn't really seem excited to see us. It's like we were horning in on their private place. Except, there was hardly anyone there.

For years my friends have speculated on how this place makes money. One of the people with us that night had never hung out with us before, but had lived in DC for years. Though she'd walked by it 100 times, she'd never even noticed it. The rest of Adams Morgan was hopping and this one little storefront was vacant.

My theory: they run a child slavery ring. People in front just makes handing out the cages difficult.

Really fat, yo

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:17:42 GMT

So, I'm really fat. I don't really look it, but I don't care about fat for looks. I care about being in shape, and carrying around 15 more pounds than I know I reasonably should is not in shape. I know we're in the feel good 00's where no one is ever supposed to sweat fat, but, for myself, I don't even want to do it. When I run, I can feel those extra pounds and I don't like it.

So, I'm getting back on the saddle of hard working out again. It's been going slow. Partly with ennui about exercise and partly because I've had a hard time getting out in the cold to go to the gym, but I finally had a real quality workout tonight. One of the things I really love about my gym is that on most of the gerbil machines, there's a TV you can plug into and watch what you want on your elliptical or stair climber. Once upon a time, the gym had it's own station of JUST music videos. That was pretty awesome. I could get really into them and go, but they've discontinued that.

So I started watching TV shows, but I'd been suspecting that I just didn't work out as hard while watching TV. Today, I intentionally took a machine without TV and I didn't even listen to a This American Life podcast, as I might have preferred. No, I stuck to music. Soundgarden first, and then I went to Sleater-Kinney.

It was the right call.

For the first time in a while, I had an energetic cardio workout without taking a class. I just have to keep my Ipod on music. I may not be learning anything like I would listening to NPR podcasts, but my priority needs to be fitness, and I have a lot of pounds to shed.

Everyone I meet says I look fine, but inside I know it isn't true. All I have to do is ask my jeans. Jeans don't lie. Some of my jeans, that were once kinda loose, are now saying, "Forget it, fatty. Check back in the Spring."

But, by then, no doubt, it will be fine. As long as I give up SCRUBS.

Voice Post

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:28:09 GMT

Unscheduled Time

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:55:58 GMT

I normally think WHYY's Dr. Dan Gottlieb is a big weenie and I hate when they interview him on Monday mornings, but I guess that's in part because I really don't care about family issues. This morning, though, I was 100% with the guy. He was talking about an excess in the present parental anxiety, and how it's creating uncreative kids who don't take risks and don't know how to solve problems.

The issue they focused on was unscheduled play time. Kids today, apparently, have their whole lives scheduled up. Parents completely freak out to make sure they are learning everything they possibly can and achieving all the time. Apparently Dr. Dan and the American Association of Pediatricians think it has gone too far and they are calling for more unstructured, unscheduled time. Time for kids to just play, randomly.

It's so bizarre to think about. I wasn't a kid all that long ago. Just twenty years, right? Which, in historical terms, is nothing. When I was a kid, I did plenty of structured things. I had art classes and I played some sports, but I also just played outside a ton. Well, until the advent of the Nintendo, but up to that point I did lots and lots of random, pointless stuff outside and inside and all over the place. This was totally the norm in Southeast Kansas in the 80s.

What happened since then?

But then, this morning, Dr. Dan went even further and stopped sounding like a weenie at all. He started castigating the whole concept of "Stranger Danger." Stranger Danger was an article of faith when I grew up, and Dr. Dan said the notion made him furious. He said that, while it's true bad things do happen to some kids. The truth is, most bad stuff happens to them by someone they already know. The odds of a stranger hurting a child are pretty slim, but the odds of the notion of Stranger Danger increasing their anxiety and making them less socially functional are virtually guaranteed.

Holy crap.

Those are bold words. It's not quite the same as Clint Eastwood referring to this as "The Pussy Generation," or maybe that's just how PhDs say it.

New Year

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:00:19 GMT

Last night I had this really terrible dream that I was with a ton of people but they were all actually people that I worked with and every year we all had a big gathering in Madison, Wisconsin, but because we were always in a bus the only place that we could go to was this Topless bar because it had a big parking long, which made me feel wicked uncomfortable as there was no way I could properly enjoy a topless bar around people that I work with.

Word.

In fact, I didn't just not enjoy it, I felt totally awkward and bizarre about every move and step that I took.

And, somehow, one of the strippers had mad pickpocket skills and used them to get my pants off of me without me noticing. Though fortunately they weren't stolen. Just folded neatly under the table where I'd been sitting when it happened.

Dear Dan Le Sac, why did you have to ruin a great song?

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:44:30 GMT

Can an off-key song lyric wreck a song for you? Eminem's "Lose Yourself" is probably my all-time favorite motivational song, but there's one lyric that wrecks the momentum for me every time. It's early in the song, so I usually get over it, but when he says,

"There's vomit on his sweater already / mom's spaghetti / he looks nervous..."

It just grosses me out. If not for the image of the actual meal, I think I could deal with it. As an aside, the word "spaghetti" has been a little icky for me for a long time. I stick to rigatoni and penne when I need pasta, thanks.

Em didn't help me, either.

The video posted above is one of big YouTube sensations that launched a career. It's a great video and a great song. The basic concept is that he just rattles off a billion "Thall Shalt Not's" with this great rhythm and beat behind it. If you start thinking about the things he says not to do, some of them seem ridiculous and some of them seem contradictory.

And if you listen to Dan Le Sac talk about it, he reveals that that is precisely his point: that people making pronouncements should be met with skepticism. In fact, there are only two "Thall Shall's" in the song. They come at the end.

"Thou shalt think for yourselves."

&

"Thou shalt always, thou shalt always kill."
(before anyone gets too alarmed, in the performance world, 'to kill' means to rock the house)

Oh, wait, there is one other thing he says you should do. He says,

"Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls pants……use it to get into their heads"

If he'd left it at the first half, it would have been funny and fine, but it's that last half of the lyric. You have to hear it, he's such a self-righteous fuck when he says it. Sure, I know, I know... the point is to make you skeptical of the things he says, but... Crikey.
It's just so obnoxious.

Every time he rocks that b.s. "use it to get into their heads" I want to transmogrify my elemental compilation into whatever time-space mama-jama he's strolling through and kick his ass.

"Use it to get into their heads."

Hey Dan, Thou shalt shut up. Thou shalt get over yourself. Thou shalt be less whipped. Thou shalt step the eff off.

Every time I hear that song that moment just wrecks it for me. It is the sole moment at which he comes back from what you shouldn't do with what you should do and it such a namby pamby little lefty cry baby pronouncement and you just know he means it.

It wrecks the song for me. Every time. Otherwise, I think he's just on fire, but I get stuck there and can't work the funk out.

BradyDale on NPR & Ritual

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:07:33 GMT

A letter I wrote was on NPR a little while back. Check it out!

I went through a ritual yesterday that meant a lot to me and a lot of the people who went through it. At Broad Street Ministry, we did a confession. Of course, we did it in our own Broad Street way. A huge sheet of paper was put up and sharpies were laid all over. Participants wrote their confessions on the paper, and one of us took a brush of thick black paint and covered it up as soon as it was written.

It gave people a chance to put it out there, in a brave way, in the face of the church, and yet to keep it private.

A little nervous about being stable

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:20:40 GMT

I am strangely not depressed.

It is really freaking me out.

Right, right... how healthy is that?

Here's the thing: last week I was a bit of a wreck. Well, I wasn't as bad as I have been at times, but I wasn't good. Then I had a sudden turnabout the weekend before this one that we're finishing up at this moment. I know why it turned around, but almost as soon as it did, things went back where they were.

(I know I'm being obtuse -- this is a blog; I'm allowed).

It's just that even though I was going through the same influences that brought me down the week before, I was still trucking along. As if those things weren't bringing me down.

The week before: got me down.

This week: they didn't.

Frabjous day, right? Well, I'm not so sure. Call me pessimistic (and that's pretty much the definition of pessimistic, right? If you find that you aren't depressed and it turns out that you aren't sure you should be happy that you aren't depressed), but I'm not sure that it's a 100% good sign that things aren't bothering me more.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, right? Well, if you know me well, you know that there is one thing that has always gotten me down. I've been trying to live my life in such a way that I wouldn't let that one thing get to me as much. I'd avoid the situations that really, really brought me down.

So here's the thing: I haven't been avoiding those situations. They have not been going any better. Yet I don't seem to be bothered by that. I am not getting down about it like I have in the past. Which, I fear, could only mean that I am going to set myself up for the mother-load of a bad situation and face the kind of emotional devastation that would surely be some sort of Federal crime if the wreckage were capable of being visualized by anyone. I don't want to go through that.

It's been said that that which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, but I don't know if that's true for emotional strife. I've been getting more thin skinned and wary as I've grown older. It's not helping anything, of course, to lose courage. Well, that's not entirely true.

In a way, I find that I can choose between being not exactly happy, but stable or being very up and very down. The down's get pretty hard to handle, so while it isn't exactly wonderful to live in the midst of a constant semi-dull pain, I might actually be better off.

The fact that I'm not a bit depressed right now suggests that I'm not really learning the lesson that I need to learn. Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe I'll be fine. Maybe everything's getting set to be better. Or maybe I just discovered a reservoir of strength? My skin re-thickened in a way I didn't notice? Maybe I metamorphosed this year? It's pretty fair to say that I spent 2008 in a bit of a coccoon.

A poignant image

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:39:07 GMT

Tonight I was riding my bike home from the gym up North Broad Street. I don't normally take North Broad because there is more traffic, traffic lights and randomness that can frustrate my trip than on North 11th -- my usual route. Tonight, I did. I wanted to go to Qdoba. North Broad has one. North 11th has jack.

As I'm riding home, I hear a voice. It's someone praying aloud in earnest. I look to my right and I see this homeless looking fellow pressed as close as he can to the door of this huge religious institution. It has these enormous, ornate brass doors covered all over with religious symbols. It's one of the most stunning houses of worship in our fair city.

This man is crying out, "Baby Jesus, bring my house back, bring my family back, save me Baby Jesus!" I barely heard more than a second as I was cruising on by, but it was enough to get the idea. This guy was really in earnest and praying to Jesus was really the only option he had left. You could really feel his pain. This city is hurting, but he was saying it out loud. To the only person left that hadn't helped him yet.

Here's the thing, though: he was praying at a Synagogue to Baby Jesus. Just a few blocks in any direction he could have found the doors of a comparably impressive Christian Church to pray at, but of the all the buildings in the area, he screamed out for Baby Jesus at the doors of the biggest, most exclusive Synagogue in Philadelphia.

You feel for the guy, but you also get the feeling in that moment that maybe he's been barking up the wrong trees for a while.

Am I a total puritan?

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:17:38 GMT

Let me know if I'm being totally Puritannical about this.

I think maybe it's a Philadelphia thing, but maybe they do it everywhere. Here in Philadelphia, people knock on the doors of the single stall public restrooms to see if someone is in there. They knock. On single stall restrooms. Now, tell me this: what do single-stall public restrooms all have in common?

Even most private ones have them?

I'll give you a hint: it rhymes with "knock."

Still stumped? It's a lock. They all have locks. Which means that they lock.

I first noticed this with black people here, but lately I've seen pretty much everyone does it. A lot of people never, ever enter a restroom without giving it a knock.

This bothers me. A lot. I hate it.

A) It's making the fact that you're about to enter into a very private moment audible. We don't need that.

B) It's worse if you're in there, because you feel like you should speak back.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be sociable at that particular moment. It's bad enough that there's just one thin door between me and the general public during the 2nd most compromised position a person regularly finds himself in (the first is sleep, incidentally).

Now, I don't respond when someone has knocked on the door of a restroom I'm in. I let the lock speak for me. If the door is locked, then someone is in there. Am I right?

I understand the logic of doing this. Some people don't always remember to lock the doors and sometimes the locks don't work right. Okay. Granted, but it doesn't happen much. Like, almost never. that's why the strategy I employ is to give the door a gentle test. If it opens, I open it slowly to give the person who might (maybe) (but probably not) a chance to slap the door and call out. Fine.

And no one needs to communicate.

I don't want to communicate with strangers while I am so occuppied.

And it just doesn't seem necessary for me to do so. Am I wrong?

Am I a Puritan?