During the summers after 4th and 5th grade, I spent most of my days at the Lemire house. I would wake up around 8, eat a bowl of cereal, and then hop on my bike with a baseball mit in tow and ride (.2 miles according to Google Maps) over to hang out with my friend, John. We would play different sports until lunch, where I’d bike back home to eat, and then I’d head back over for more. We would mimic different batting stances and we’d try to perfect how to throw a curve ball. We were totally geeking out over sports from 9-5 every day. When my family moved from Brooklyn Park to San Diego, John and I tried to keep in touch. Unfortunately the internet wasn’t widely available yet, so we didn’t have the luxury of e-mail, or chat, or many of the other services that the internet now provides. Since we were 11 year old boys, we weren’t going to write each other long thought out letters about our personal lives. The way we tried to keep in touch was via making our own Fantasy Football League.
I don’t think our league lasted a whole season, there were just too many logistical things that we needed to take care of. John actually made a valiant effort to calculate the scores (remember no internet and no espn.com so he had to use the newspaper and a calculator), but eventually we stopped writing. It was just too difficult of a discipline to maintain (we had to mail each other at least once a week) and eventually we lost touch and he moved and forgot to send me his new address. With the rise of the internet, I joined some fantasy leagues with my friend Jeremy in high school but eventually those petered out as well. (I blame Fantasy Baseball and it’s grueling 162 game schedule.) I took a hiatus from fantasy sports for a while until I currently got in to my current league on accident.
It probably sounds odd that I still read the online version of the Minneapolis Star Tribune but since I’m still a big fan of the Minnesota sports scene, it’s the best place to get my information. Oh a whim, I started posting comments on a sportswriter’s blog. He wasn’t a beat writer for any of the teams, he was known for kind of mixing pop culture and sports culture, much like ESPN’s Bill Simmons (fun to read, for sure). After making some references to The Royal Tenenbaums, I was given the opportunity to write a guest post on his blog. (so technically, I’ve written for the online edition of a major publication) I continued to comment and post on that blog for a while and then eventually I was invited to play Fantasy Football with the regulars and with the proprietor himself.
Unfortunately for me, most people that comment on the Minneapolis Star Tribune site are indeed people that actually still live in Minnesota, so that makes having a fantasy draft tricky. If I work until 5pm on a weekday, and I don’t get home until 5:30pm (approximately), that means that the soonest I will be ready for a live draft (to pick our teams) is at 7:30pm Central Standard Time. While 7:30pm isn’t considered particularly late, a draft does take a while, and since the drafts usually happen on a weekday and the local Minnesotans try to meet up, this can be inconvenient and it’s 100% my fault. We’ve gone through 2 seasons already, and obviously the internet has aided us well in this long distance partnership. For all I know the guys despise me for causing their drafts to run later since I’ve never met them . I haven’t even seen a picture of the majority of the guys but they all seem like pleasant enough chaps.
We’re on Year 3 of this Fantasy Football league and I’ve been mediocre at best. I don’t watch as much football as I used to when I was a kid but I still keep up with what’s going on. I probably wouldn’t put the effort in to finding another league if this one dissolved. I don’t blame John or Jeremy for the dissolution of the leagues we had when I was younger. I blame it on just being kids. I really appreciate that these guys, who I’ve never met in person, accommodate me and make sure that I’m not forgotten. It’s both touching and sad that these guys who are definitely closer to the “stranger” end of the spectrum versus the “friend” end of the spectrum are more thoughtful and accommodating than a lot of the people that I think that I’m close to. I guess it’s one of the more redeeming factors of being a sports geek; the blinding loyalty you have to your fellow geeks. When your team is terrible, you will still defend them to the very end and together you’ll find a silver lining amongst the sadness and when that one guy from California whom you’ve never met still wants to play even though he never wins, you let him, because of that same unexplainable loyalty.
So, near the end of high school (I think), and definitely during college, my friend Mike and I got into the habit of buying each other gifts for Christmas and our birthdays. With our tight college student budgets, it was quite an accomplishment to do this consistently. I don’t know if we had set a price ceiling, but I’m pretty sure no gift ever exceeded $30 after tax, but it didn’t matter. We knew each other well so that it was easy to get something meaningful AND affordable. Our gifts were often of the geeky variety so to the non-geek, it seemed like we were giving each other random junk. What is one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, I suppose.
My mom was bemused by these gift exchanges because my mom is not a nerd, or at least not a nerd of our generation, so when Mike would buy me a sock monkey or a poster version of Jay and Silent Bob’s blueprints from the movie Mallrats, my mom would complain at the lack of quality gifts that Mike would give me. I, on the other-hand, would buy Mike books, and while these books were kind of geeky (David Sedaris – though Mike thought I was using this book to out him since Sedaris is also gay), my mom thought books were more practical. She didn’t mean it to be critical, and when I told Mike about her criticisms, he was really amused and not offended at all. In fact, for my 21st birthday, inspired to prove my mother wrong, Mike bought me a martini set, complete with a shaker. Not only was it a practical gift, it was kind of classy. My mom really thought Mike had finally come around and what took the cake was the fact that my mom doesn’t actually know what a martini is; she thought that he bought me really cute dessert cups for ice cream.
I don’t think my gift exchanges with Mike back then have taught me any lessons about gift giving that I use today. I’ve always tried to avoid the gift giving faux pas of thoughtless gift card giving and have avoided the other major no-no of gift giving (buying girls clothes/clothing accessories without them picking it out and trying it on). Gift giving isn’t particularly a science, but I take a certain pride in getting people original gifts that they would really like. If I can’t figure out something that’s perfect for someone, I prefer to take them out for a good meal so I can assure them some sort of satisfaction.
Charis and Allison perform for the local community theater a few times year outside of the duties with the Technicolor show. I haven’t been able to see them in all their different performances, and I’ve only seen them once since our last show, but I made sure that they remembered I was there. I came out to watch them on opening night as part of a sold out crowd. I missed them walking down the red carpet because I had to stop by the Fullerton Farmer’s Market so I could pick up some gifts for the girls. I couldn’t just stop anywhere to get the gifts, it had to be the Farmer’s Market. There’s a man who comes down from Gillroy to the Market every Thursday, and I needed to buy some garlic for Charis.
Charis is a very unique 10 year old child. For one, she’s a leap year baby (2/29), and two, she loves garlic, raw garlic. One of my first conversations with Charis consisted of her asking me two questions: Do I like raw garlic? (yes) and How much can you eat at one time? (I have no idea). She then proceeded to tell me how much she can eat at one time, and the fact that the number was greater than 0 was pretty surprising to me. So, I decided that as her gift for opening night, I was only going to get Allison flowers and I was going to get Charis a braid of famous Gillroy garlic.
I had asked her about this possibility before and she told me that she would rather have garlic than flowers, so it wasn’t a total surprise when I gave it to her, but she was still kind of shocked that I followed through with my plan. She wasn’t at all embarrassed to be walking around the courtyard of the theater carrying around a bag of garlic. She even stopped to smell it a couple of times. Allison seemed perfectly content with the more traditional gift of flowers and complained that the garlic made the bottom of her bouquet stink.
I’m sure that if I had pitched this plan to my mom, she would’ve told me that I was being foolish for wanting to buy a kid a bag of garlic, and I’m sure other people would’ve told me the same thing as well, but when a gift is given, (as I knew back in college with Mike) as long as it makes sense to the giver and the receiver, that’s all that matters.
“As you sleep with electric guitars / Range rovin’ with the cinema stars” - Elevate Me Later (Ell Ess Two)
Irvine is a planned community. It is a city owned by the Irvine Company and takes great pride in being considered the “Safest City in America”. It’s located in sunny Southern California and borders Newport Beach in Orange County, widely recognized as one of the richest counties in America. For some reason, they decided to stick a public university there and didn’t build a “college town” around it (if I’m not mistaken, the college was one of the first things built there). I went to said college and stuck around for about a decade. At first I enjoyed being there because things were so convenient. There was almost literally a Target on every corner (or at least off of each major street), which was a drastic change from living in North County San Diego, which is still somewhat still under development.
Unfortunately, we missed out on the college town atmosphere and we didn’t have a football team. The only thing that my roommate Phil and I could really find redeeming about the place (other than it being Will Ferrel’s original stomping grounds) was realizing that Pavement shot one of their music videos not only in the city of Irvine, but at the University shopping center across the street. Sure it is kind of an irrelevant detail in the grand scheme of life, but we took any victory that could. Besides, Pavement, and perhaps the Replacements are the only bands that I can confidently say, shaped my personality as we know it.
My friends, especially Phil, always wondered why I stuck around for so long. I really don’t have an answer. At first, I think I stuck around because I really liked my church, then it was because I still had some close friends around from college, and then eventually I guess I stuck around out of convenience. I’d be foolish to say that Irvine hasn’t shaped me in some way or another but I can’t say how at this point. Some people probably assume that it’s shaped my appetite for fashion, but that was actually caused by my trip to New York a couple of years back. I do feel compelled to at least look decent when I go to the malls here, but that also might be because I’m 28 and single.
“So drunk in the August sun and you’re the kind of girl I like because you’re empty and I’m empty” – Gold Soundz
I’ve always assumed that the longer you date someone, the bigger the fallout becomes when you break up. Sadly, the girl that did the most damage to me… I can’t even say that we actually dated. There was some stringing along, some mixed messages, some feelings shared including the dreaded “I like you but…” In hindsight, I should’ve bolted instead of sticking around for the drama, so I will be fair and assume my share of the blame. She was a couple of years older, so maybe I thought she would be above these shenanigans (naive move on my end). It was a situation that ugly. People got involved (no retraining orders or violence, just a lot of politics, I guess), and right when I thought things were going to calm down, she told me she had started dating someone else with one minute left to go on my lunch break, which led to a pretty ugly breakdown at work. For some reason she kept telling me that she wanted to be friends and I believed her. Then on my birthday, she apparently had forgotten that she “had a date” and that she couldn’t tell me personally, so she sent me the message through our unassuming mutual friend, who I basically yelled at. It was the beginning of the end for me, both at that job and to be honestly, at church as well. It was the first time in my life where I understood what “needing a change of scenery” really meant.
” Was a distant voice/ Made me make a choice/ That I had to get the fuck out of this town” – Box Elder
One day I had left my laptop at my friend’s apartment and I needed it to do some work. I called him but he wasn’t home but he told to swing by and pick it up because his roommate was home so I shouldn’t have a problem. So I knocked on the door and after waiting a few seconds, I turned the knob and walked in and grabbed my laptop from the living room. As I turned to leave, I heard a gun cock back and then saw it pointed at me. I guess my friend didn’t tell his roommate I was on my way over to get the laptop, so I explained to him why I was there and calmly told him “you can put your gun away”. He disarmed the gun, stopped pointing it at me and gave me some sort of explanation about how he was training to be a cop and some people in the complex knew about it and he was paranoid about them or something that didn’t exactly make any sense. (I don’t think he passed his psychological exam – true story) While he didn’t actually fire the gun at me, it was an experience that has definitely stuck with me. I never felt like I was in any inherent danger, but my friend’s apartment in the “safest city in America” was the last place that I ever imagined having a civilian pull a gun on me. While I’m pretty sure this happened before the fiasco with the girl, perhaps I should’ve taken this moment as a realization that I didn’t belong here. It was a moment that didn’t make sense on so many different levels, and usually when this happens in a dream, I wake up because I know I’m in a dream. It was a moment where I should’ve realized that me being in Irvine didn’t make sense, and that I just needed to “get the fuck out of this town”.
Last week my parents brought some framed pictures from their house. Included in this group of pictures were a couple of family pictures (none taken after 1993) a couple of sports related info sheets and a picture of a fighter jet. I can’t tell what model of fighter jet it is because I don’t remember ever being into fighter jets. I’m not even sure why I have a framed picture of one, but now I’m in possession of it, and it’s up to me to find a place for it (in the trash, though I’ll keep the frame). I won’t trash the family photos though I probably won’t put them out where they can be prominently seen. I’m not ashamed of my family but I am just a little embarrassed by a photo of me when I’m 8 and sporting a clip-on tie. I’m confused why my dad didn’t bring me a more recent family photo, but perhaps after the age of 8, my parents thought I stopped being cute.
I think our most recent family photo was taken sometime between 2001 and 2002 and I haven’t heard any chatter of taking another one anytime soon. It’s hard to get all 5 of us kids in one location, especially now that 3 of the kids have kids of their own (and we’re spread out on both coasts). In our last family photo, my hair was still growing back from when I shaved my head (I had dyed my hair blue) so it’s probably not even a very accurate depiction of me, but I’m not holding my breath for a reshoot. I don’t take a lot of pictures of myself, I don’t really take a lot of pictures in general. I don’t even own a a camera, I just have my phone (which I guess at this point is just as good as a camera). I guess it’s pretty ironic, as a person with a film degree, that I don’t take a lot of pictures. Even with film projects, I always tried to take as little footage as possible.
I think if I had an actual camera, I would probably often forget that I have a camera on hand or that I would forget it at home. I think in general, taking a camera out and lining up a shot disrupts the moment when you’re in the middle of an experience. Since I’m so light on photos, I’m probably fortunate that I have such a vivid memory so I can therefore recount experiences and events that I have no visual evidence of. While there are no photos, I remember the first time that I met Bruce as his mom carted him around on a Radio Flyer wagon. I actually remember a lot of Minneapolis better than my sisters who lived there longer than me and learned to drive there. I’ve remembered a lot of things whether good or bad, both recent and from way back. I wouldn’t say I have a photographic memory or that I remember everything that has ever happened to me, but I remember quite a bit.
Unfortunately I often need these memories triggered, so it’s not like I can pull every memory out on a whim. I was recently friend requested by an old high school classmate on Facebook. I recognized him in his picture, knew his name, but couldn’t recount exactly how I knew him in high school. I knew that we didn’t hang out outside of school, but I didn’t remember if I had classes with him or if I was in a couple of clubs with him, or if we just knew each other through mutual friends. I had no idea what we talked about back in the day, I just knew that I thought he was a nice guy. I felt kind of bad. I know that it’s Facebook, but he obviously remembered me better than I remembered him, so I felt like a fraud. It’s like if I had run into him on the street and he said “Hey Ryan!” and I replied back with “Hey you!” while racing through my memory to figure out why I recognized him and what his name was.
I know that I could probably go to my parents’ house and dig up my old high school year book to find out if he had written anything to me to try to find clues on how exactly we were friends. I could also message him on Facebook and just bluntly ask him. I’ll probably do neither. Not as a sign as a disrespect to my classmate but as just a fact of reality. I can’t be friends with everyone that wants to be friends with me and vice versa. There’s only so many hours in a day, days in a week, and so on. Even though it’s entirely possible that this guy would be a better friend to me than current people in my life, I won’t know that now. It’s possible that I will someday decide to reconnect with the guy and remember that I enjoyed hanging out with him, but for now, with the lack of time in my life, and the lack of memories I have, that friendship is just going to have to wait.
In college, I started to get a lot of offers to film weddings. I took the offers back then since I figured I could use the money, but I never thought about filming weddings as a full-time profession. Even though the money was nice, it was a lot of work and there was a lot of stress to the job. For one, there are no reshoots at a wedding, so that is an unbelievably huge amount of pressure to get things right from the beginning. This is made extremely difficult by poor planning. I don’t mean to rail against wedding planners, but I think they should all have a basic background in how video cameras work (and how wind and dark lighting affect them) so they can take that into account at weddings. Needless to say, it’s not a profession that suits me and the gray hairs on my head can attest to that. It’s also weird to be at a wedding of a couple you don’t know. It ‘s even worse, and extremely lonely, when you’re sitting by yourself or next to a stranger (the photographer) with no friends in sight.
After filming a couple of weddings after college, I got out of the business entirely. It took me awhile to readjust myself to being a guest at wedding. I wasn’t thinking about how I would shoot a wedding when I was invited to one, but I needed to readjust to enjoy weddings again. It was a gradual process and after going to a couple of friend’s weddings, I stopped feeling bad about leaving when I wanted to or having more than enough to drink, and most importantly, I was happy for the couples again, instead of fearing what kind of crazy demands they would have post-honeymoon.
I spent my 28th birthday at my friend’s wedding. Some people asked me if I was bitter that my friend had his wedding on “my day”, but I was fine with it. (I know how much insane planning goes into a wedding, so if my friend had to choose that day, I’m sure it’s because it was the best deal or he didn’t really have much of a choice.) People are always out of town around my birthday anyways because it’s the day before the 4th of July and a lot of the people who were invited to his wedding were people that I would’ve invited to my birthday party, so either way, I would be spending the day with friends. Plus, there’s nothing noble in saying “I’m not going to your wedding because it’s my birthday, and I’m going to fight you for our friends.”
People wished me a happy birthday at the reception and there was good food, cake, and an open wine/beer bar. I spent a part of the night talking to two pastor’s wives about the intellectual value of Sponge Bob Square Pants and why I respected the girl from iCarly (she’s the teacher’s pet in School of Rock) until I found out she wanted a singing career but that she’s still better than Hannah Montana (who is the spawn of the man who wrote “Achy Breaky Heart”). So basically, I acted much like I would have if it was my birthday dinner.
The past couple of years have been very transitional for me, so while I enjoyed the weddings I was invited to, those weddings also brought up a host of issues that I’ve had to deal with either because of the people I ran into or because what was going on in my life in general. Starting last year, with the wedding of my friends Ed and Nicole, I’ve been able to enjoy these special days out of sight, out of mind, and while I’m not advocating that my friends constantly get married on the weekend of my birthday, I don’t harbor any feelings of resentment, because honestly, in my early to mid 20s, there wasn’t a whole lot to celebrate anyways and the fact that I’m enjoying the things I’m supposed to again is hopefully a sign that I’ve survived a lot of the volatility that I’ve had to experience in my 20s. An older friend of mine told me that around 30 is when people really figure themselves out (with exceptions of course). I didn’t really know what that meant and at one point of my life I wanted to be 25 forever. Professional athletes tend to peak around 27-29 and now that I think about that, it makes sense. It’s a time where people are physically, mentally, and emotionally in good shape, and hopefully I’m also at my peak.
Perhaps I’ll never be #1 at anything, but I hope at this point, I can let the game of life come to me and that I can put myself in the best position for success. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a paid writer, or paid to do my show, but at least I can be happy on my own b-day and happy for my friends when they find happiness, and while that sounds petty, I sure feel like I’ve come a long way.