Yesterday, I got on a plane immediately after cleaning up a Fourth of July party.  I flew straight to Minneapolis, MN, then (eventually, after 2 delays) on to Anchorage, AK.  Words cannot describe just how strange it is to wake up in New York City (hung over), get on a plane, sleep for a bit, eat for a bit, and then suddenly be touching down in the relative wilderness.  Skyscrapers, bike lanes, and the eccentric/unnecessary artists in the streets have been exchanged for mountains in every direction, bike paths through forests, and everything from “urban moose” to people with actual (not lifestyle) alcohol problems everywhere you look.

I’m already enjoying this place a lot.  Loaner bike, check.  Planned trip into the wilderness tomorrow, check.  M.I.A. and La Roux playing in the internet café I’ve found, check.  People say, “Hi” here, which is one of those things from the Midwest that I never realize I miss while I’m in Brooklyn, but becomes a bit heart-wrenching all too quickly when it catches me off guard in a place where no one needs to be addressing me at all.

I’ll update here once more during the trip, but you can follow much more regularly over at http://listlessintellectual.tumblr.com

The Burg was in full swing this weekend.  Everything from riding in the backs of trucks while helping friends move to witnessing a cab jump the curb and hit a building on Bedford and an extensive amount of hanging out on roofs occurred:

The real fun, however, came on Memorial Day.  Promptly upon waking, my apartment’s crew touched base with my old friend Dustin’s and an entourage took off in separate cars for Riis Park (out in the Far Rockaways).  It’s an area of New York City that is completely not like any other part of the city.  Suburban, beautiful, bridges everywhere, waves, and backyards.  Best of all, we brought my roommate’s dog, Nico:

Here’s Phil and Brett, the other two people in our car.  Phil cowered in the back seat while Brett drove “like an 8-year old who got a hold of some Mountain Dew.”

After crossing “the ugliest bridge in New York,” we showed up to the beach and met up with Dustin, Laura, Celia, Simon, and Abel.  Some of whom are pictured here:

After a few hours of heavy wind, freezing water (which we did swim in), we headed back.  Little did we know, finding our way back to hipster-ville from the “real world” was as easy as following the signs along the road and the track bikes leading the way:

Strangely enough, somewhere in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we found unfortunate historical practices still in full swing… and being propagated by a Reverand, no less!:

Mexico update soon.  I promise.

It’s pretty much the best short story I could ever write.

Certain names have been changed.  Hope no one is offended.

The night begins with coffee.  It is a ritual that I started years ago, back in undergrad.  Back then, we hardly slept.  About one hour after dinner, when I finally worked up the strength to be productive, there was a ritual that surrounded myself and the coffee pot in my room:

1. Rinse coffee pot.

2. Let the pot refill with water quickly, followed by slowly pouring the water into the machine.

3. Fill the machine with the proper amount of beans.  On an average evening, it’s a half-pot, so six scoops is enough.  Not-so-average evenings: 8 or 10 dependent upon both the amount of work that requires being done and the amount of hair-pulling you wish to subject yourself to.

4. Do not – I repeat – do not go back out into the living room.  Do not talk to anyone. Do not walk out to the bathroom, that can wait.  Do not answer your roommates when they ask you where all of the cream cheese went. You will risk getting sucked back into video games, alcohol, and the imitable other rituals: late-night pizza delivery, conversations about faux sexual experiences, and debates on such imperative topics as how to build a self-sustaining island out of 2-liter plastic bottles.  Do not leave the room.

5. Sit.

6. Breath.

7. Sip.

8. Work.

9. Repeat 5-8 until exhaustion.

This worked well because I had a unique setup.  The coffee machine wasn’t just in my room.  I owned a desk large enough that I could keep the coffee pot within reach at all times.  Computer; center.  Book I was reading; left.  Notes for homework; right.  Coffee pot and mug; far right.  Everything I needed was within arm’s reach: accessible, switched-on or held open with bookmarks or pens like paperweights.  Complete access, a microcosm.  Did I mention that the coffee pot was in my room?  Do not go into the living room.

There was also a soft scald of previously-spilt coffee on the hot plate.  It created a caffeinated stench that still reminds me more of morning-afters and watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with whoever had stayed over than its obvious meaning: at some point in the night, my hand had wavered.  I had missed.  There was so much missing that the smell became a part of the universe.

This worked well.  For a long time.  There were always assignments and things to look for meaning in.  If a story wasn’t due, a critique had to be written.  If a book didn’t have to be written about, it had to be read.  The weeknight provided time for all of the things that had nothing to do with the ball-kicking, girl-talking real world.

It was solace.  No matter how boring the work was.  No matter how frustrating.  No matter the caffeine-twitch.  It was solace.

Do not go into the living room.

The bedrooms we return to are no longer the palaces we kept in college.  We now do practical things like pay rent.  Vintage yellow lamps have been replaced by the perfectly-circular fluorescent light bulbs that cast sterile, hospital light across everything we own.  We have learned to live without.

The nights have become dense, too.  Those lavish and vapid openings that one could move about in freely before are crowded, crammed, squished like clowns in subway cars during rush hour.

There are still signs of childhood.  Nightly, before entering my room, my eyes cross paths with a stuffed figurine.  Made of purple yarn and stuffing with a tusk sticking out its front.  It is a narwhal, hand-crafted, a gift.  There is also a Bob Dylan figurine, again, hand-knit.  Plane ticket stubs litter the top of the desk, too.  Mostly to Chicago or back to New York.  The aberrations are the ones that clutter the most, though.  There is a return-flight stub from Paris to Chicago, a mark of a month of strange bewilderment and absolute wonder.  New York to Indianapolis, Indiana.  A 2-day trip to attend a funeral for a friend who passed at age 27.  And who can forget the trip to Las Vegas?  No trip could more properly define depression and profound excitement for life at the same time quite as well as a weekend in Vegas with a person you’ve just started dating who you know will leave you upon your return home.

These things fill up the empty world that once was so comforting.  They are reminders of blonde-haired girls and late-night conversations about how to compost more efficiently in the city.  The thought of that conversation drives eyes over to the desk I currently work at.  There is a stack of envelopes, pieces of paper, notices of credit information, billing statements – far past overdue – loan repayment documentation, and an angrily-scrawled letter from my mother that somehow begins with, “You should be ashamed” and ends with, “Thank you for being our son.”

The desk is unmanageable, a sea of guilt and carbon-printed mistakes so work is done in bed.  A  pile of pillows against my back, my computer delicately balanced on my knees, half-scrunched to my chest.

When it becomes too much, when the cats outside scream out in heat, when all three of us in the apartment have decided enough, we congregate outside of our cluttered, tiny worlds, first in front of the coffee pot again, then eventually in the living room where the lights of the city skyline stream in across our three faces.

“It’s only 2,” Mike tells me.  “Yeah.  I just can’t work anymore.”

He knows the drill and Amanda does, too.  She returns from where the coffee pot is with a bottle of whiskey and three empty glasses and Mike has already cued up a TiVo’d episode of The Office.  The windows are wide open and the cats only scream louder.  This is too predictable a situation, too comforting, to leave.  My only other option is to return to the Amazon-like bedroom at night.  I do not wish to stare at billing statements from collectors and loved ones anymore.

And there is a process for this ritual, too:

1. Pour yourself a few ounces into one of the mugs that Amanda hands you.

2. Lean back on the couch, look at whoever is sitting across from you, and make conversation.

3. Disregard the TV’s picture and the sound of canned laughter coming from the other side of the room.

4. When an awkward pause occurs, comment on what has JUST been said on the TV.  This keeps everyone moving forward.

5. Always.  Always turn the conversation inward.  Change the subject constantly to your current situation.  While you wish to stay informed of everyone’s goings on, the truth is you are drinking.  You are worried about you.  You have escaped from the jungle of your bedroom and you are free but freezing out here without the warmth of affirmation from work being done.

It’s another nightly ritual, the drinking, the talking, the self-involvement.  We are selfish and hungry and our fingers tap the glass of the coffee table with a vehemence that cannot be described as nervous or angst-filled, but rather with surging talent.  Talent that cannot escape because we are, again, doing real things like paying our bills.  And it is this talent that seeps out of the cracks in conversation.  Mike recites lighting setups he’s worked with throughout the day in a language foreign to me.  A born-conversationalist, Amanda talks about coffee as if it is something so much more than stained water, and the way she does so has me convinced she’s right.  But with all of us turning the conversations inward, nothing gets discussed and nothing gets hammered out quite right.  When cups are emptied and we stand up to return to our own drywall-encased jungles, there is the feeling of half-crushed eggs beneath our feet.

We are children in the city.  Very large children.  Very grown up children.  The movement back to those tiny rooms, to prepare for bed, forces the last five years into sharp focus.  It is with a whiskey-soaked brain that I will decide to stay up, to watch cartoons on the internet while laying in bed.  While the usual effects of drunkenness, the lulling of my head, the steadily more sloping posture, are in full force, so is my awareness in this tiny universe.  Somehow, I realize that tomorrow I must go to work.  I must wake up, go to work, come home, and continue writing and working.  There is a commercial on in between cartoons, for Coke, that a girl and I once both decided was incredibly annoying.  And I realize that I have to keep working to prove that she shouldn’t have left.  I have to keep working so that all those thousands of dollars spent on plane tickets mean something.  I have to keep working so that my mother doesn’t have to start letters with “You should be ashamed” anymore.  It’s crowded in here.  Keep working.

Do not go into the living room.  Keep working.

This is a very, very short character sketch I wrote a little while back:

There is a child being held by her mother at the Bedford Avenue subway stop.  She is sucking her thumb and staring staring staring at a man who is playing the violin and singing loudly.  It is the saddest song she has ever heard and it drips out like the cries that the child knows exist.  She understands that there is pain.  She has fallen and scraped knees and watched as her mother’s hand shakes while it pays bills.  She knows that this pain is in the world, but she has not learned about it yet.  The girl somehow understands.  She knows that she is staring into her future, through black locks falling in front of her eyes, past her mother’s ears, into her future.  She has been programmed to know that this is the eventual end of all things.  But she cannot fathom it yet.  All of this sorrow, somehow, is a part of the life that she knows she will be forced to breath through.  She begins to cry.  Then her mother bounces her and and whispers a frail, “Shhhh.”  For the first time, the child stops immediately.  The man finishes his song.  The train arrives.

Upon dropping bags off at a custom framing gallery owned by my partner in travel, we headed back in to downtown Boston.  My Hipster-Sense kicked in immediately (it’s a lot like a Spidey-Sense) and I promptly found the most indie of cafés in a 6-block radius to aid my caffeine-stained brain: the Boston Common Coffee Co.

Left on my own to wander historic, downtown Boston, I made my way over to Boston Common.  I assume it’s only famous because of Anthony Clark’s stunning and cut-short sitcom by the same name.  Who cancels a new TV show that ranked 8th in yearly ratings… and who can resist the stunningly engaging Anthony Clark as a down-home Virginia outsider making his way through the big city in the Northeast?

I then made my way to the Massachusetts State House, whose sole historical significance is that of a symbol for antagonist Collin Sullivan’s ambition in Scorsese’s The Departed.

And what visit to historical Boston wouldn’t be complete without a Ben Franklin impersonator.  While he responded to my question about his syphilis ailment with much guffaw and accuracy, I, much like Dwight Schrute, am 99% sure that it was not the real Ben Franklin… 98.

Later on in my meanderings about town, I walked through most of the (expensive) Beacon Hill neighborhood – where the amount of perfectly-coiffed trees and historical homes were only outnumbered by the number of trust funders wearing Ugg boots and perfectly-bent baseball caps.

Rounding out my day on my train ride out to Wenham, MA (where I was staying in a secluded house in a forest), I partook in a cup of Bean Town’s finest coffee: Dunkin’ Donuts.  Rich, steaming, satisfyingly robust with a hint of burn, it was great to end the day with a coffee that didn’t cost three dollars while utterly lacking any sort of quality (Starbuck’s).

The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing with friends, drinks, Old Fashioneds that I prepared for my hosts, and helping a kid who was tripping on acid out of jail.  All in all, a complete success.

p.s. all photos except the milk bottle taken with my iPhone.  Apologies for the lack of quality.

But even at age twenty-five, something compels me to go out and throw my body around.  I’m coming out of a period where I actively tried to resist skating so that I could concentrate on my studies (grad school), but I now have a modicum of free time.  Again, I find myself drawn to skating.  Somehow, going out and exploring the city I live in while attempting to change the way I view everyday structures (as obstacles, not as objects) still has some sort of hold over me.It sounds infantile.  It feels infantile to say it (write it).  But hell, it’s still fun.  This is all before the amazing traveling situation that skating results in: being able to go to any major city in the world and, as long as you can find an internet connection, you can find a best friend, tour guide, and couch to sleep on.

This picture was recently featured one the ONEMagazine blog and it was taken by Josh Diaz:

And here’s one more recent picture and a few pictures from years past:

The Myers-Briggs test was first given to me during my freshmen year of college.  Approximately 48-hours after returning from an alcohol-induced hospital visit (thanks, big 10 colleges and bigger-10 egos), I found myself filling in an unending amount of bubbles on an 8-page scantron.  The visit to a school therapist was mandatory in order for me to maintain residency in the dorms, so I decided not to voice my displeasure with the idea that this overweight, underworked human being could glean a portrait of my personality based upon a #2 pencil and unending writer’s cramp stemming not from a Kerouac-esque stream of consciousness, but nearly an hour of responding to questions by elementary “coloring inside the lines.”

For those who don’t know, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a tool that is commonly used in psychologically evaluating individuals and is used in situations ranging from medical (my original experience) to business management strategizing (my most recent encounter, a management class in graduate school).  It is a questionnaire that extrapollates the personality preferences defined by Carl Jung in 1921.  Each person, after taking the questionnaire, is assigned one of two of the following dichotomies: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving.  The result is a four-letter acronym (one of 16 types) that supposedly tells you something about the person and how they handle a variety of life’s concerns.

This creeps me out (oh, you haven’t figured that out yet?  It does.)  I have never liked the idea of people knowing things about me until I tell them.  I know that limiting people to only what I directly communicate to them is utterly impossible, but that doesn’t mean I can’t wish for it.

Anyway, six years ago in college, I was told that I was an “INFP” (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving).  One would think that I’d made some changes since then.  Yes, I quit the frat that I was pledging 2 weeks after the aforementioned visit to the doctor.  Yeah, I ended up graduating with honors and getting into graduate school and really shaping my life up.  I even got healthy and started working out, went vegetarian for a bit, wrote a few dissertations, etc etc. By all accounts, I’ve changed.

I took the test again today.  I am an INFP.  Still.

Here’s a link to what being an INFP supposedly means about me.  Personal favorite (most ridiculous) excerpts:

“Every encounter and every piece of knowledge gained gets sifted through the INFP’s value system, and is evaluated to see if it has any potential to help the INFP define or refine their own path in life.”  [translation: paranoia]

“They focus on the way that the conflict makes them feel, and indeed don’t really care whether or not they’re right. They don’t want to feel badly. This trait sometimes makes them appear irrational and illogical in conflict situations.” [I cannot tell you the amount of times I've caught myself doing this.]

“They might go for long periods without noticing a stain on the carpet, but carefully and meticulously brush a speck of dust off of their project booklet.” [Sorry to anyone I've lived with...]

“Under stress, it’s not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst.” [Sorry to anyone I've ever argued with... particularly while drinking or dating]

“INFPs have very high standards and are perfectionists. Consequently, they are usually hard on themselves, and don’t give themselves enough credit… Without resolving this conflict, they will never be happy with themselves, and they may become confused and paralyzed about what to do with their lives.” [sorry, Brain & Heart.]

“INFPs are usually talented writers. They may be awkard and uncomfortable with expressing themselves verbally, but have a wonderful ability to define and express what they’re feeling on paper.” [or blogs?  This is getting just plain weird.]

Take the Myers-Briggs test yourself.  Leave a comment here about what type you are.  It’s actually kind of interesting in the end.

Since I usually can’t catch it when it airs (sorry, I do have slightly more important things to do Saturday nights…) I subscribe to the podcast that updates every Monday with his segment, “News From lake Wobegon.”  Garrison performs this monologue every week by himself without a script and it’s usually one of the most uplifting, honest, and accessible portions of the show.  This week’s was particularly good, ending with the line:

“He says, ‘We’ll think about it…’ that’s all you have to do, is just think about it.  If you think about it you will say ‘yes’ eventually.  We know that.  Life is irresistible.  Love is irrisistible.  If he thinks about it, he’ll go.”

Here’s a link to all the podcasts, the first one is the most recent/the one I’m talking about (like I said, it’s a good one).