Before that, I followed a recipe from TV’s Bobby Flay. In it he wrote to poach chicken. My friend suggested that poached chicken was gross, and I should grill it instead. If you know Bobby Flay at all through his shows, cookbooks, or restaurants, you’d know that if he had one heating element to cook with for the rest of his life, it’d be a grill. If he had twelve heating elements, they’d all be grills. For him to say a recipe called for poached chicken was to say it through gritted teeth. If there’s one person who wouldn’t want to recommend poaching, it’s Flay. So when he tells me not to grill something, I’m going to listen.

“Will I give up a $200k a year job to potentially make $500k, but if I don’t do it, I’ll go back to 200, or, at worst, 150?”

No, it’s:

“I’m going to Hollywood to wait tables for twenty years in hopes and go on auditions whenever I can in hopes of making it.”

Most of the people I know would never do that. Even the ones who are talented enough to not be ridiculous. It’s because they chances of it working out are terrible, and if it doesn’t, they’ve lost substantial chunks of their lives. Terrible, right?

Not really. When you think about it, it’s actually liberating. If you’re worried about being risky, stop and think: will whatever choice you make in a given situation potentially result in something life-changingly awful? Are you unable to rebound? Is there any significant chance you won’t be able to make it work to your satisfaction?

Chances are the answers to all of these questions are no. You’ll be fine. Once you realize “risk” is an illusion, you get to relax and just have fun.

Ugh, these are too serious. I need to get funnier again.

Please note that Professor ____ does not use e-mail.
Kindly contact her at the office address below:

And then it told me her physical address. I will kindly contact her at the office address below, because I feel that it will do me well, but I can’t decide why she doesn’t do email. Does she simply not like computers? Or does this ensure she only gets communication that really needs her to see it? Either way, there’s no chance I’m giving her the satisfaction of asking.

I think this is good for me. I’ll see how it goes.

The other day, I googled the phrase “naming the waves.” Right now, I’d like you to go to google, copy/paste that in, and click “I’m feeling lucky.”

“19. But some long-duration cosmonauts report that the hardest thing to readjust to about life on Earth is that when you let go of objects, they fall.”

At first I thought it was funny. But as I kept going back to it, it started to unfold into something more. On the one hand, it’s innocent and even a little depressing. These people were so used to a reality unimaginable to the rest of us, they literally forgot what life was like on Earth. They lived somewhere that in some ways seemed magical, then they had to adjust to the way the rest of us live and come to terms with the way life will be until they die.

Yet at the same time, it’s inspiring. When I hear about experiences like that, it makes me happy. I never fully appreciated that people are able to live off our planet for so long now, floating objects become de rigeuer. I like that I’m around to see our collective reach getting longer.  It cancels out things like America’s Next Top Model and makes me feel like we’re making progress as a civilization.

Like any good addict, I still keep a little stash accessible whenever I need a quick fix. This comes in the form of a game called Bejeweled that’s kept and played exclusively on my Treo. (I also downloaded a version for my computer, but found it inferior so I never played it.) When I first played it, I was hooked. Badly. I wasn’t able to go a day without playing it at least a couple of times. Ultimately, I had to delete it, and, with it, my obsession.

A few months later, a very good friend of mine re-installed it on my phone after I told him how hard it was to stop playing it. Pretending I didn’t have a choice, I started playing again, but this time it was different. I didn’t have the same desire to play as I did before. I was getting a lot better, and as a result, I think it was getting boring. It got to the point where I wouldn’t play it for a week or two, and even then, just a short game. I had weaned myself.

The final nail in the coffin came when I upgraded something on my phone that slowed everything down by about 10%. Not a lot, just enough to seem like my phone was saying, “Hey. You there. Why such the hurry? Take a minute and relax. That e-mail will still be there in 30 seconds. In the meantime, why don’t you think about flowers you find pretty?” Also affected was Bejeweled. Just a bit, but enough to get me to write about it. See, my early good scores were in the 20-30,000 range. Sometimes in the 40,000s, but not often. My top five scores were all in the 50,000 range, except for my highest score, which was about 60,000. Considering the amount of times I’ve played (486 since the last time it was installed), I thought I was fairly competent, and that those were pretty good scores.

Not long after I up/downgraded my phone, I found myself bored on my train, so I started a game. When I eventually stopped playing (because I had to go to work), my score was 1.6 million. As I was playing this waste of time, it occurred to me: this was a waste of time. The game is impossible to win. All I could do was beat my prior scores, but how long would that entertain me? (About 8 months, I guess.) Maybe I could break the game and cause it to overflow by getting to 10 or 100 million, but that hardly counts as a victory. It got me thinking about why I was playing in the first place.

Turns out the whole idea of points is a weird incentive that seems stupid and antiquated, yet somehow still works. I don’t think I ever paid attention to how many points I scored in other games; all that mattered was getting to the highest level, or beating the game. But along the way, points were counted for every bullet that hit its mark, every time my sword cut off a tentacle. I don’t think I would have been quite as motivated if I thought my progress wasn’t being monitored in some arbitrary way. It was a form of validation. Always has been.

So maybe playing it isn’t as big a waste of time as I thou- okay, no, it’s a huge waste of time, but at least the game was programmed to give me a bit of an ego boost. 1.6 million, eh? Not bad.

Amount I enjoyed it: surprisingly, a lot.

Who I went with: (null set)

I did, in fact, invite people to join me. Some were considering it, and some actually bought tickets. In the end, no one I invited wound up going, but since I bought my own tickets well in advance, I sort of forgot about it. Or maybe I just figured I’d deal with it later. When I realized I was going by myself, I wasn’t exactly happy about it, but at the same time, I was also kind of excited. It’s always been a lot easier for me to meet new people when I’m out on my own, and I loves to meets me some new peoples.

So with a heart full of hope and a pocketful of truffles bought from a nearby park vendor, I got on the luxury bus to the show. As festivals go, this one was lots of fun. Great music, unbelievably convenient, and shockingly well-organized (especially for a first event). But since I’m not a music festival reviewer, and I’m not about to start pretending I am, that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is this: it turns out I know a lot more people than I ever thought I did. Among 10,000 people, I wound up running into a staggering number of friends, coworkers, and others I simply don’t talk to on a regular basis. And I found out later there were more still I missed. That whole business about meeting new people? Barely got the chance. For the past two years I’ve been in here, I’ve been doing all kinds of random activities and being social the whole time. Never did I think I was building up a portfolio of casual acquaintances to keep me company when I went out in public. I’m not sure if I like being (relatively) well-known, or if I prefer anonymity. I know I don’t like not having a choice, but that doesn’t mean I’m against the idea of popularity of sorts. I suppose this is what naturally happens when you stick around one city long enough and say hi to enough people.

* * *

Oh, and I now have a moustache. The line for rides starts around the corner.  $5.