On an expanding audience.

Huh. So apparently, more people are reading this thing than I thought. My brother and sister-in-law have been keeping up with me for a while, and now I've got coworkers newly friended on the Bookface perusing the annals.

I don't really know what I expected, to be honest. Maybe I've been laboring under the delusion that no one in my real life would be reading this stupid thing except you jagweeds up in New York and Pavel and Harriet down the street. And the coterie of interweb friends I've acquired by riding on Lauren's coattails.

I actually have to think about the material I put up now. I can't just liberally talk shit about my cohorts at work (not that I have, except you, Layney), I probably shouldn't be detailing the true extent of my devious past in front of my niece's parents. I guess all bloggers get to this point at one time or another, but it's still a little jarring.

Then again, in the four months this thing's been active, I'm already hot on the heels of I Hate This Cat in terms of pageviews. So there's that.

So, uh, hi, everybody. This is, uh... my blog. Nice to see you. Hope you enjoy yourselves.

(Layney, if you want some reading to do, I suggest the stretch I did for the Scintilla Project back in March. That's as good as my writing gets; everything before and after is pretty much garbage.)

On the service industry regimen.

I wouldn't say I'm fit.

Still, considering how much I eat and how little I work out in the traditional sense, there's seriously no reason I should have the body I have. Not that it's a particularly good specimen, mind you, but I should be much heavier and significantly weaker than I actually am.

And I imagine a good chunk of that is good genes; if my brothers are any indication, we come from fairly good stock. But I believe the fact that I've been in the service industry pretty much my entire adult life plays a fairly major role in this, too. I've worked primarily jobs where I sit from 0-5% of the time that I'm on shift. Instead of the treadmill, I'm moving almost constantly from one place to another. I don't lift weights, but I pick shit up and move it, using my entire body, every single day. Nowadays it's sacks of flour and boxes of coffee; I miss the days when it was cases of pork and brisket, or a dozen half-kegs of beer and thirty cases of bottles.

Isn't this how people got fit in the days before gyms? Didn't people just do physical labor and naturally burned calories and built muscle and developed a natural consciousness of their bodies? We, as a whole, seem to have gotten away from that. I can't help but look at the rising gym memberships like when we stopped filtering our tap water and started marketing bottles.

We are the service industry. The floor, the kitchen is our gym. Forgetting to eat on shift is our diet. We know what it means to really wash our hands, and we are genuinely tired at the end of our days.

Those of y'all who own a Bowflex can suck it.

On skinny jeans.

You know what? I'm gonna outright say it. Don't like 'em. Don't understand the appeal, don't enjoy how they make any shoe larger than a ballet flat look like a clown shoe. And they look as difficult to remove as a rip-resistant DVD cover.

On visiting family and the service industry.

Hands down, the worst part about being in the service industry is never having two weekend days to rub together to visit friends and family that aren't in the field.

Thank fuck I managed to weasel out of work today to catch my aunt's choral concert and to duck up to CT to see my brother, my sister-in-law, and my adorable, rapidly-growing niece. Even after the epic shit-ton of driving I've had to do in the last two days (thanks, Ku, for picking up the trip from NJ to CT), it's been worth it just to hear the new weird noises Anya makes.

And with that, I'm going to relax away my last hour or two before I have to hit the hay for the shitstorm that is the Sunday morning rush and leave you with a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Because I recently had it sung to me by a women's choir, and I remembered how much I love it. Ripped from Legal Language Services.

The Chambered Nautilus

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,–
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,–
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn;
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:–

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

On what love is (an opinion).

So one of the questions Peter and Lauren covered on their podcast was "What is love?" And after the requisite "Don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more"s, Laur was quick to state that she believed that love was a biological imperative, something I've always believed - that the concept of love and marriage arose from the necessity of both parents being present to protect and raise a child to adulthood.

Of course, as civilization obviated that need and separated the two (see: single parents and childless couples), the need for love has dissolved. Nevertheless, it remains in all its messy, heartrending glory to be written about in legend and song and to be exploited by capitalism.

Nowadays, I've come to believe that romantic love is composed of two distinct, but equally important parts: to be in love, and to love. There's an important distinction here: according to the rules of grammar, the former is a passive verb and the latter is active. To be in love is a compulsion, something that's usually out of one's control. This is the passion, the neverending daydreaming and fantasizing, the infatuation and oftentimes lust. It burns hot, and it burns quick. This is what the poets speak of, this is what movie plots and subplots are based on. This is what sells lingerie and candles and OKC A-List accounts.

To love, however, is a choice. To love is to understand someone, to assess their assets and faults, and to make the decision to care about them as you would yourself. To me, this is the far more poignant half of romance - to love someone is to know that they can and likely will hurt you, to know that things they do will annoy the shit out of you, to know that their shortcomings are yours to compensate for, and you fucking do it anyway. To be in love makes for a great story, but to love is what makes the happily ever after.

Some might say that this takes the romance out of love, that applying logic and reasoning to the concept of love drains it of its mysterious magic. I couldn't disagree more. To me, to make a choice that guarantees you pain on the chance that the joy it will bring you will make it worth it is as brave, stupid, and beautiful a decision as you ever can make. To fall in love? Shit, that just happens to you. To love, you have to suck it up and do something.

On slipping.

So three times in the last two weeks, I outright blanked on my Blog Every Day initiative. I've been wondering if this exercise is actually helping my writing or stifling it by forcing output each day, and I've debated dropping down to a less rigorous schedule. There's a shit ton of shit going on in my life, and time always feels like it's in short supply. Hell, I'm pre-dating this one for continuity's sake. I've got one in the chamber today based on todays's Petecast that I'll try to rattle off between the many hours of driving I have ahead of me.

Then again, Ms. the Animal says it's still improving my writing, and I tend to trust her opinion over my own. So what say ye, readers? Do I keep on keeping on, or drop a gear? Lemme know.

On clothes shopping.

This is how I know I'm failing as an adult.

I need new pants, since I've lost two in the last year or so to rippage, and I need a swimsuit for BiSC. And my knee-jerk reaction, because I've been a broke-ass motherfucker for all of my adult life, is to go to Old Navy.

Seriously. I have no other ideas as to where to shop for these things. Maybe Target, since the one near me has a Chipotle close to it and I've been jonesing for some carnitas. If I needed dress shirts, I'd be boned. As it is, I buy t-shirts off of the interwebs, and ask for socks for my birthday and Christmas.

How did I get to this point? How am I a thirty-something who dresses like he's still in college? How do all of my non-jeans pant solutions have extra pockets at the sides of the knee? How do I crave Bioware shirts because for some reason, they're soft like a hug from an aunt?

Fuck this adulting shit. I want my money back.