ninaherenorthere.com

If you wake up at 5 am and leave your house in San Francisco, carrying boots and a snowboard and holding umbrella over your head, you will look out of place near the Civic Center BART station.

If a friend picks you up and together you drive East, the sun will rise before you reach Davis and by Colfax a white sheen will glaze the ground.

If you head up into the foothills of the Sierras, you will not notice the the branches of evergreen trees buckling under the weight of the snow. Because there is no blizzard and the windshield is clear and the tires grip the road, it will take a moment for you to notice that the tourist information signs are almost completely buried in the snow, and that prison-high ice walls guide the cars, as if a huge canon ball was shot through a glacier to make the road.

If you turn off the highway and pick up a hitchhiker, she will work at the local ski resort and give you a free ticket that saves you $60. And you won’t feel bad about not reading the newspaper that morning and forgetting about crime, destruction and hate.

If you arrive at Sugarbowl by 9:30 am, you will get a prime parking spot because it is a Monday. On a Monday, someone in a lift line will shout, “Who’s supposed to be at work?” And someone will yell “Yahoo,” and another “Woohoo.”

If for days the weather forecast has said “dumping,” the chutes will be padded and the cliffs covered, and there will powder fields the size of Greenland, and freshies for all. There will be tree runs and face shots and the whole surfing the earth, lost in the enchanted white forest fairy tale.

If there are no lift lines, you can do powder laps all day and the wind, poor visibility, and temperatures in the teens will not deter you.

If you ride until 3:30 pm, the sun will throw off its muslin sheath and trigger one last burst of adrenaline before the Tiger Balm turns to mercury in your muscles.

If you are on the road by 4 pm, chasing the the pink horizon, the sky will be black by the time you hit Davis. And again, at Civic Center BART station, you will be the only one with a snowboard, boots and an umbrella.

If you experience such a sublime day, you will find escape from the dreariness of the urban rain, the responsibilities of the to-do list, and the nagging necessity of finding a job.

If you reach a state of euphoria, you will have a hard time returning to your actual life. You might even end up writing about yourself in the second-person while using a bizarre unnecessary conditional repetition structure.

I am dying for a job. Which is why I lied. These weren’t even white lies, but gray ones, with thick black stripes. And yes, there were several. Lies are like tattoos; it’s hard to stop after one.

See, I already dropped a lie in this post. I’m not actually dying for a job. But I’ve been told that employers seek out voracious candidates. They want their prospective employees to be like dogs, drooling and ready to rip into a spreadsheet steak. I’ve been told “half of having is wanting,” and still my job desires emerge in timid squeaks. Just the other afternoon, delirious from lack of mental stimulation, I pretended a genie had emerged from a bottle to grant me wishes. “Well, I guess I’d like to have a job that doesn’t suck,” I said. “With a boss and co-workers who aren’t lame. And it’d be nice if I made enough money to pay my rent and health insurance and school loans.”

“Are you kidding me,” Kristina said. “You’re going to waste a genie with that weak wish.”

Now I’m a blood thirsty pit bull. I pounce on any job post that appeals to my Interest Of The Week, which is currently literary agencies. You can only imagine my excitement when I saw the Craigslist ad for an “Executive Assistant to a Literary Agent.” So, I pretended I was “proficient with QuickBooks.” It took me a week to figure out QuickBooks wasn’t Quicken, another software program I’ve never used. But I can wing anything on a computer, especially involving numbers. And besides, in aggressive job search mode, I block out all second-guesses and let no obstacles stand in my way. Certainly not the job requirement, “Must have car.”

I could borrow a friend’s car for an interview. If the job turned out to be PERFECT, I could buy a car. I blocked out all the negative signs, like the pay and the location. The placement agency hiring for the position called me within two hours of receiving my resume. They couldn’t give me the name of the agent, but they said she represented “self-help authors.” I adjusted my blinders and accepted an introductory interview at the placement agency.

This morning, I took public transportation to my friend’s house, borrowed her car and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to an office park in Larkspur. I filled out reference forms and application forms. I lied only once, stating I would take a drug test if necessary. I waited for the recruiter to invite me into her office. She wore vinyl boots with stiletto heels, the kind of shoes only appropriate for kinky sex. Her office chair was leopard spotted. She looked at my forms. “You’re only interested in direct hire?” she asked.

“I’m only interested in the Executive Assistant to the Literary Agent position I applied for,” I said.

“I’m sorry. That’s been filled.”

She apologized for not calling to let me know. She referred to it as an “oversight.” She apologized for my long journey from San Francisco. She didn’t sound sincere, especially when inquiring as to whether I might be interested in another “clerical/administrative” position that would most likely require a car. She was like a Stepford Professional, an automaton.

I’m a non-confrontational person (except with customer service reps). Even in bad employment situations, I don’t burn bridges. I didn’t yell at the recruiter or raise my voice. Instead, I asked her for $5 for my toll. Her face flushed. “To compensate for your oversight,” I said. “It’s only fair. I’m not even asking for gas money.” She reached over to zebra striped purse, dug out her wallet and handed me $5.

Okay, okay. I didn’t ask her for toll money. That’s the last lie I could sneak in. Because now I learned my lesson: liars never prosper.

I am a New Yorker and a sports fan. I am a fan of New York teams. But just to be clear, I am not a New York sports fan. That would be a person who reads the Daily News before the New York Times, a person who likes either the Mets or the Yankees because without baseball there would be no New York team to watch in the summer, a person who currently follows the Knicks even though the have a cellar dwelling record of 13-28.

A New York sports fan would’ve stuck around for the overtime of last week’s Giants win against the Packers. I did not. I spent most of the game screaming at the TV, things like “you fool” and “hit him you bastard” and “go, go, go, no, no,” but overtime crept into my prior commitment. I had told Kristina (the g-friend) that I’d go to a bar to watch the L Word with her. When I asked her if she could go alone (and meet her roommate at the bar), first she said she would be “angry” then lowered her charges to “disappointed.” Although I went with her, I was still in some trouble for enacting a dated gender stereotype whereby I was the loutish husband watching a stupid game while she cooked dinner. The real problem wasn’t me, but a potato chip commercial we had seen in which the women huddle, high-five, and call out plays as part of their game-time snack preparations. It gave her the chills.

The reason I bailed on the overtime was simple. After two missed game-winning field goals, the Giants didn’t deserve my support. After two missed game-winning field goals, the Giants deserved to lose. I’ve spent too much of my life rooting and caring for New York teams only to be disappointed. Taping Knicks games and sitting in restaurants, ears covered and hymning “La-La-La-La” to avoid the score, only to go home and see John Starks shoot 3 for 18. I remember Patrick Ewing’s last second finger roll miss like it was yesterday. And Charles Smith’s bricks. And Superbowl XXXV, when the Giants lost 34-7 to the Ravens in a game that only appeared winnable to Giants’ fans: suckers.

A New York sports fan believes the Giants will win the Superbowl. A fan of New York sports wants desperately for the Giants to win the Superbowl, but knows they won’t. I do not say this because the Giants are 13.5 point underdogs up against the undefeated Patriots. No, no, the Giants have played so well in the past few weeks that it’s about time they blow it all by themselves with no help from their opponents.

New Yorkers know that only bad things happen, that the man approaching you on the street will not ask for the time, or some change, or directions, but will mug you. And a New Yorker knows that there are no honest mistakes, only rip-offs. A New Yorker knows to avoid sugar coating the truth. And a New Yorker and a sports fan knows that there is only one way for Eli Manning to end a streak of no turnovers. With a fumble and an interception.

Go Giants!

No hate mail, please.

Disclaimer: I live in San Francisco.

I recently became obsessed with Details magazine. As a teenager and young adult, I never looked at it, knowing that the women’s counterparts, like Vogue and Cosmo, were meant for me. I ignored those as well and lived my life in jeans and t-shirts, bereft of style and clueless to fashion. When I started to identify as more of a man than a woman, I was able to find at least a small portion of mass-market media that appealed to me, most of it targeted to males. And, to my shock, Details is not a trashy, low-brow, guilty pleasure; it’s actually a good magazine.

The covers of Details rule (Zac Efron pictured here). There is always a ridiculously attractive man piercing you with a glare, his eyes coy, solemn, and earnest. A Rod Steward song picks up in my head: If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, buy this magazine.

Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (as well as the books, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys), writes a monthly column. Augusten Burroughs writes a monthly column. Unlike other mainstream mags, Details acknowledges and includes its gay audience (Gay or Straight?), which I think of as a no-brainer, considering the cover and the contents.

Details also acts as an instructional manual on men’s fashion. Sadly, due my ill-fitting female body, articles about choosing the right suit or vest don’t work for me, as I’m often relegated to any suit or vest that fits. But those on choosing a cologne or working with neckware–scarves, bow ties, and ties–help immensely. Everyone has secrets, great embarrassing shames, like being unable to read or drive a stick shift. Mine (other than the stick shift one), is that I cannot tie a tie. A few weeks ago, on the BART platform, a comedy performer in costume asked  if anyone could tie her tie for her. She turned directly to me and said, “I’m sure you can.” I looked down at my running shoes and nodded my head no. I watched on as someone else did it, deflated and feeling sorry for myself and my pathetic masculinity. But perusing Details’ online content, I came across this godsend of a video, amongst many others. If this is too simple for you, check out the bow tie instructional.

Gay or Straight? Gay, for sure.

Unable to stop procrastinating, I came across the following Details video, a Craigslist personal ad turned into a music video. Seriously. The lyrics are taken from a real post. This is for everyone who has lost days of their lives obsessed with finding the most bizarre Craigslist personals.

I didn’t intend to spend my morning at a creative staffing agency. I filled out half of the online registration form last week, but stopped when I realized that if you diagrammed the agency’s needs and clients with my skills and interests, the overlap would resemble the new moon. Despite my incomplete application, the recruiter asked me to come in for an interview. She didn’t look closely at my resume, or else she would’ve understood that I’m not a “marketing/advertising” professional. Or, and I believe this is the case, she is new, eager and weeding through duds like me to build up her candidate base. I decided to visit her, and in order to maintain my advantage, I reminded myself that the meeting was a bigger waste of her time than mine. Words from a successful business man lingered in my ears, “You will find a job because you are smart and pretty. You are BEAUTIFUL.” Maybe if the recruiter sees me, she’ll find me a job.

I’m not going to insult the recruiter. Her smile was just a response to to my desperate rambling. And I felt bad for her, forced to wear a suit from the discount rack of a department store, stuck in an office reminiscent of an airport lounge and marinating in the disappointments of unemployed middle managers. She did say one valuable thing this morning, “We don’t have writers in here often,” and at that moment I finally understood the seismic chasm between copywriter and writer, and decided I can no longer pursue the former.

While at the agency, I had to do this exercise providing a “Commercial for Me.” While the recruiter left to find a co-worker to interview me (as it turned out everyone was “too busy”) I re-wrote my commercial, using the exact same format and even employing some of the same phrases (feel free to guess which ones) that I used in the original.

A Commercial for Nina

Nina can write about anything: kitty litter, adult diapers, vaginal anti-itch cream, home bidets, and pharmacy-bought douche kits. She writes killer instructional copy, and has a proven track record with applicators and suppositories. She specializes in the delicate handling of unmentionable products and the magic of her soothing copy will have even the most embarrassed customers running through supermarkets screaming, “BUY! BUY! BUY!”

Nina is professional and for a wordsmith, she is excellent with numbers. She demonstrates these skills with her greatest achievement: rotating 10 “business casual” outfits using only 3 tops, 2 sweaters, 3 pairs of pants, 2 belts and pairs of brown and black shoes.

The complete package of ideal employee, Nina comes with this intangible bonus: she is a pleasure to be around. The celebration of her birthday will draw more crowds to the 34th floor conference room than ever before. This means more cookies, ice cream, and cake. Afternoon sugar highs for all! Her personality is so engaging that each day in windowless rooms under fluorescent lights is a bit more bearable. References will attest to her congeniality, but the comments, which filled the inside and the back of her last company’s going-away card, provide the best testimonial: “Nina, it is great to work with you!”

I feel like I’m stuck in bad game of Duck, Duck, Goose. And the kid tapping heads is one of those attention-starved rascals who teases with false alarms and circles endlessly until a supervisor puts a cap on the number of laps allowed. At which point, the kid shouts “Goose” at his best friend, a popular kid who has been called upon so many times that the sweat dripping down from his temples has left dirt-streaks. Meanwhile, I haven’t been pronounced a Goose at all, and most of the kids are so indifferent to me that hands barely make contact with the top of my head.

I’m talking about rejection, mostly rejection from places I send my writing. I could be talking about jobs, too, but to be more accurate, that would be called “non-responses.” The few resumes I’ve sent out have disappeared into the universally recognized black hole of cyberspace, and about five hours after my sole interview, the company reposted the job description, a somewhat passive-aggressive rejection. Oh, and I’m about to be rejected for an unpaid “internship” assisting a freelance copywriter. Maybe we should all keep our fingers crossed for that rejection based on the unpaid aspect.

For the most part, when I receive a response from a magazine, journal, radio show, or whatever, I consider that an accomplishment. When I see that SASE in my own handwriting or an email subject “RE: Submission” I think, “Wow, this did not get lost in the junk mail folder, or underneath a desk, or in a stack of papers left for an intern not-yet-hired.” My spirits perk up as I can’t help but believe that someone pretended to read my submission.

I’ve received so many rejections in January it’s as if editors across the nation made New Years Resolutions to get through their slush piles. I have enough rejection letters that I can (and will, now that I think of it) critique and rate the quality of the various letters. Since that might take awhile, for now I’ll just tell you about some of the rejections:

I was REJECTED from an all female writer’s colony in Washington State. Judging by the name, Hedgebrook, there’s a good chance I saved myself from voluntary commitment to a sanitarium. Hedgebrook told me the notification letters would go out at the end of December, but I, an extra special rejectee, received mine in November. I probably never made it to the second round of consideration, which would mean only my “Why do you deserve to be here?” essays were rejected and my writing samples never looked at. Not so bad since I probably don’t deserve to be there.

I was REJECTED from This American Life, but who hasn’t been. I was also REJECTED from a magazine called make/shift, but the editor said I could submit again, probably because the submission numbers are low, or because that is simply part of that magazine’s form letter. I should point out that in all the rejection letters I’ve received none of them have even a quick hand-jotted, “entertaining.” We all should have goals and mine is a personal comment on a rejection letter.

I was REJECTED from reading at not one, but two local literary series. These hurt my feelings, one more than the other. The call for submissions asked for humor writers to read short personal narratives like those of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs at a first-time unestablished event. This is what I do. This is all I can do. Write and read funny shit aloud. That rejection hurt. A blast of mace to the heart. And I’d be a jerk to call the other event that rejected me dinky, because it isn’t, but is there anyone who wants me to read anything anywhere?

“Writing is Rejection,” teachers say. That is when they aren’t saying, “Writing is Revising.” (It was disappointing to find out I have to do all this revising only to be rejected.) Today I arrived at Chapter 5: The Rejection Section in the book I’m reading called Putting Your Passion Into Print. (PYPIP is a pretty decent guide to publishing, proposals, the book business, despite having what I consider to be a tacky title but according to what I’m learning in the book, exactly the kind of marketable title appropriate to the content.

There was one thing I expected to read a lot of in this section: anecdotes of success stories and a list of the many famous writers who have been rejected, or as the punk who scribbled in my library copy wrote about the rejected: “The whole wide world of writers!” The chapter opens with John Kennedy Toole and the Confederacy of Dunces, an anecdote with the lesson that you should not to kill yourself before winning the Pulitzer Prize. There are also quotes regarding famous books once rejected as manuscripts, and statistics, which I like, specifically, “Joe Quirk wrote five novels and received 375 rejection letters” before publishing a bestseller. Just when I started to feel inspired, I realized that the PYPIP authors did not include the multitudes of people who write and submit and write and submit and write and then die. Rejected. And, the rejections the authors are talking about refer to book-length manuscripts, one hell of an accomplishment to complete such a thing. I’m getting rejected over twenty pages tops. I don’t even have a manuscript available for rejection. And, the authors are talking about manuscripts that are rejected for a variety of reasons usually regarding marketability, and not the most common problem I see at the literary agency where I intern, which is the quality of writing just isn’t good enough. I know this is often a problem with my work, too.

Things I try to remember: collect as many rejections as possible in order to find the elusive acceptance. This is why I used the word rejection so many times in this post, to get all the rejections out of the system. Unfortunately, I had an essay that a respectable website wanted to publish and pay me for, but because the essay had previously won a contest, I couldn’t offer the magazine first time rights and they wouldn’t take sloppy seconds. And that same essay is being considered for an anthology, but will most likely be rejected since the reader said it was “overwritten,” cliched and had too many adverbs, even though she still put it in the “maybe” pile. (Assume it is rejected until I tell you otherwise.) My point and the problem is that this one essay that editors have expressed some interest in is ruining my accumulation of rejections statistically necessary for an acceptance somewhere down the line.

I hope I didn’t get too depressing with this post. I’m not depressed. I’ve been rubbing sandpaper on my body and now I have calluses and a lizard-like exterior made up of super thick skin. And get this, I asked a few former co-workers and supervisors if I could use their names as references in my job search. None of them rejected me. None. They might even say something nice about me. How cool is that.

Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, rain pummeled San Francisco. The water cascaded down hills, power outages darkened the city, umbrellas broke and trees almost did. The rain in the city turned to snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. A winter storm warning went into effect through Sunday evening: blizzard like conditions, stay off the road. Depending on the elevation and location, anywhere from 3 to 6 feet of snow had fallen in the Lake Tahoe area. Another foot was expected on Saturday night.

At 8pm on Saturday night, several hours after Interstate 80 re-opened, I ate a pound of roasted brussels sprouts, lightly salted, and got in the passenger seat of Josie’s Grand Cherokee to start what in good weather is a 3-4 hour journey to Tahoe. Our plan was to stop short of the foothills, or stop when the snow became too heavy. We promised loved ones we would be smart, and we would have been if not for Elena. While others had bailed on the trip because of the storm, Elena had rented a monstrous Chevy Blazer. She threw four just-in-case snow chains into the trunk and led our two-car caravan into the white out.

By the time we hit 2,000 feet, we were driving head-on into a snowflake fusillade. It was disorienting, like trying to see in the pitch-black while being doused with confetti. Then there was the fallen snow, piles of it, and it was this that demarcated the highway. The road snow was so fresh and deep, you could hear the tires crunch down on it. The numerous plows we passed could not keep up. I called Elena and told her that Josie and I would be pulling off the road to find a motel. “What?” Elena said, naturally cheery. “Why would you do that?” I mentioned some stuff about not wanting to die. “This is what you do,” she said. “You drive slow, fall into a line and follow the red lights. The banks are too high, you can’t fly off a cliff. I’m not going to lie. It’s much further. But we’ll get there.”

Her soothing words carried us at 25 mph the next 1,000 vertical feet. And by then it was too late for a different course of action. The unlit, unplowed off-ramps looked more dangerous than the road.

The brussels sprouts in my stomach weren’t sitting too well. My hands shook too much to select music. I couldn’t concentrate on playing a game. Josie hunched forward, bent her head and tried to find a square of vision through the icy windshield. Occasionally, she would open the window, time a quick break between the wipers and use her left hand to grab a piece of ice from the windshield.

“Can you see?” I asked. “Because I can’t see. Do you want me to do anything with the defroster?” I asked. “Are you tired?” I asked. “How are you feeling? Are you doing okay? I prefer it when you go slower. Keep a large braking distance. Two hands on the wheel. Always. Really, you can see? Stop checking your phone. Should I call road conditions again. 25, that’s good, that makes me happy. Maybe we should stop. We can sleep in the car. Remember, we promised our loved ones we wouldn’t do anything crazy.”

Josie doesn’t hear very well. She couldn’t hear the number of times I asked if she could see. Following everything she pseudo-heard, she said, “What?” and looked at my lips. This prompted me to repeatedly say, “Eyes on the road,” and eventually I gave up on conversation altogether.

We passed car after SUV after car, immobile on the side of what appeared to be the road, headlights on, wheels spinning in the snow. Should this happen to us, I imagined we’d sleep in the car. At midnight, close to the 7,085 foot mountain pass, we were forced to a complete stop. Highway closed. People took this opportunity to step outside their vehicles and relieve themselves or stretch their legs. Some were wearing t-shirts and sneakers, others hats and jeans. I’m not sure what I expected, some sign of a death-wish across the forehead, or a visible, irrefutable reason to be on the road blazing in the eyes, but everyone I saw looked hum-drum regular.

Yet, everyone around me was nuts. I’m comfortable with neurotic nuts, people like Woody Allen, Seinfeld, Ellen, people like me, people whose crazy is best kept in check by a city. But stuck on Donner Pass at midnight in the middle of a blizzard, I realized I had a different kind of crazy in me. The kind of crazy willing to leave safety and reason behind in search of perfect powder.

I’d been around this type of wacko before. A few years ago, I spent the winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Guys self-dubbed the dawn patrol would walk through my living room at 6 a.m, rousting my roommate to wait in line a couple hours before the mountain opened to ride “first tram.” I had friends who hiked into the back country in questionable conditions, and one who found himself lost and alone, waist-deep in a canyon. People died in avalanches; someone always does. That winter, I’d considered myself a cautious visitor to such a lifestyle, thankful for my freshies, but not willing to fight Mother Nature for the rights to her property.

I met people in Jackson who wanted little more in life than to carve tight lines through trees and leave open faces with their territorial tracks. I met people who followed the weather radar like those around me now are following the presidential primaries. I didn’t notice it at the time, but that powder lust, the obsession, it got into my blood. The spray of a face shot, the float of a turn, those memories stayed with me like opportunistic viruses awaiting a storm. I never planned to be like this, but my body understood why people go to such great lengths to find an untouched snow field.

I would’ve gotten off the road if I were on my own or I never would’ve started to begin with, and although I didn’t enjoy one second of the 6 hour driving adventure, if I was honest with myself, I was mostly thankful that someone crazier than me, like Josie, was willing to drive, and that someone like Elena, even crazier than both of us, was willing to lead.

An accident was cleared, and the road opened again, and shortly thereafter, I stopped looking through my small square of visibility in the windshield. I didn’t need to see because I wasn’t driving.

Josie and Elena drove us on and on and on. There are many places to stay near the ski mountains of Tahoe, but we drove across the goddamn Nevada State line for a free place to stay in Incline Village. We never made it up the hill to the house. The unplowed road was too steep, and after several attempts up and much out-of-control tobogganing back down, we found a motel. It was 2 a.m. Adrenaline was too high for sleep and poor Josie kept waking herself up to focus her eyes on the road.

The next two days of riding were some of the sickest of my life. There was so much snow, more snow than I’ve ever had for myself inbounds on a mountain. I went so hard and my muscles, my quads and my calves, are so tight I can barely walk now, days later. I’m still not sure if that drive was worth it, if it is worth it to make poor decisions that sometimes result in amazing experiences. But I’m almost positive I would do it again.

I knew this post was coming eventually, the one where I tell you I lost many hours and about three whole days this fall discovering and catching up on season 1 of Friday Night Lights. Days when the tears rolled down my cheeks episode after episode, my heart falling with each dropped pass and rising on the arc of a Hail Mary or launch over an end line, as I watched the Dillon Panthers battle the obstacles that only television dramas can create in their quest for one of the greatest accomplishments in sports, to become high school Texas state football champions.

I have many a good thing to say about the first season and a few bad things about the second—namely the lovable and lust-worthy wife of Coach Taylor acting nuts after having a child, the ludicrous and soporific murder plot, and the cheerleader, Layla, becoming a born again Christian, as if being a regular Texas Christian isn’t bad enough. But it always has been and always will be Tim Riggins that keeps me watching.

For it is Tim who comes onto Lyla with “I feel closer to God if I’m with you,” and Tim who seduces the new neighborhood MILF, and Tim who will save you from undergoing a shark transplant to fix your busted spine. He may be a raging alcoholic and dumb as only a football player with a rally girl to do all his homework can be, but he knows enough to step out of the crystal meth lab and run from that trailer.

There comes a moment in the life of every bisexual boy-dyke when s/he cannot ignore the cock throbbing in hir fag fantasy. Mine came the first time I saw #33 on the tiny square of NBC’s streaming video. He spoke few words those first few episodes, and it seemed as if all he could do was take off a shirt or put it on, swig beer, run, hit and catch. And then he showed us he could fix gutters, cars, cable TV. Better than most men, I think. He’s the kind of guy who you want to save, an example of paternal abandonment grown into a boy-man-child-Michelangelo’s David.

While the other characters look too old for high school, Tim looks and acts too old for it. He is an adult, the kind of adult who picks bar fights and knows his glory days are behind him. He is the kind of man who conveys the burden of his being with a handshake, a nod of the head, and a simple “Thank You.”

I want Tim by my side at a girly bar, the wingman to inspire a thousand lap dances with one smirk of those plush red lips. I want to use his old button-down shirts as rags and shine his rifle from the back of his pickup truck. I want to put mascara on his pretty boy eyes and run my rugged hands along his polished cheeks. I want to watch the water ride the roller coaster of his abs while he is in the shower, his head tilted back, Adam’s Apple rippling in the steam, and those biceps popped as he strokes the grease from his locks, sheaves of bowed wheat in the fading sun. A toss of his head and a V-neck shirt, or a football uniform, or those sleeveless Underarmour shirts he wears, or… Forget it, a toss of his head, and I might even bottom for him, but only if he asked nice and called me “sir.” Then I’d lick those cowboy boots.

That’s my ode to you, big guy. I love you, Riggins.

Boners, anyone?

A relative of mine said this to me a few days ago, referring to my job search. He said it in front of my father, and although my relative wasn’t prodded or cajoled into three days of a recurring career pep talk, I could tell my dad enjoyed hearing the speeches and advice without having to do the dirty work himself. My relative also has power, the power that comes from being rich (a word I don’t use lightly), successful and well-connected in the business world. We had this conversation in his Russian Hill apartment, a tony place with two balconies and views of both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, not to mention most of the ocean in between. He seemed to be saying, “You too could have all this, if only you weren’t derelict of desire,” or as I came to understand his braggadocio, “I could help you have all this, if only you weren’t aimless.” My father nodded a silent Amen as my relative left me with those final words, “Half of having is wanting.”

I easily forgot the other things my relative said, the untrue, sexist comment, “women don’t mentor each other like men do” in the workplace, and the one where he disclosed, and perhaps regretted later, that he doesn’t particularly like people and is “not interested in their stories.” But I couldn’t shake his aphorism, which I imagined came from either a children’s book or a book by Bill Gates or Steve Jobs titled something like Ten Tips for Success. After Googling the phrase and finding little, I decided to look for job openings at Google, since after all, he mentioned the possibility of helping me get an interview there. When I had expressed interest in Google, my dad’s eyes looked like they wanted to cry and the car heated up, not just from the seat warmers, but from my mother’s love. Later, the thought of working for a corporate entity, even one that offers a high quality of life, made me kind of nauseous.

I’m more confused now than ever about what to do about this job/future muck. It’s not that I’m old, but as I like to say, I’m old for me. Which means, I’m too old to be living off a dwindling savings account with an awful lot of graduate school debt, and I’m old enough to know that I need health insurance, that if I ever want to have a child or a car or a dog or property, or travel and stay in a hostel that is not roach infested, I need some type of sustainable employment. And I’m old enough to know that as much as I’m interested in working for a company like Google, or maybe even Wells Fargo (the company I most recently left), I’m not sure I *want* to.

I’m not entirely convinced that wanting is a good thing. I have this problem where I interpret and twist complex philosophies to my own ends, and I have this habit of thinking of the Buddhist concept of non-attachment as the antithesis of wanting. That most people walk around grasping after things and they never end up with what they want, or rather what they want comes from the least expected of places. Which is why this is the plot of many movies and is recycled endlessly in the romantic comedy. The human inability to accurately imagine how what we want will affect us is the basis of the growing popularity of a branch of social psychology explored in best-sellers like Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

Some people are all about knowing what they want. And isn’t this the time of year for stating it. On New Year’s Eve, I opened up the dialog by asking some friends if they would be doing resolutions this year. My one friend either misheard the question or ignored it, quickly providing his resolutions. I’m not sure if I’ll have goals this year. Usually, when I do, I like to give myself some time to seriously consider easy and hard ones, those for short term and long term, and I give myself until the Chinese New Year to come up with them.

In the meantime I’m going to do a couple things. One is to read Beth Lisick’s new book, Helping Me Help Myself. I’ve been sort of obsessed with it, ever since it came out on Jan 2. I read the first two chapters in the store, (also reserved it at my library), and heard her read from it last night at City Lights. There is nothing extraordinary about her writing (maybe that’s my jealousy talking), but she is very funny–hilarious actually–irreverent but not breezy, self-deprecating and generally my kind of person. When I read her I feel as if I’m hanging out and shooting the shit with a good buddy. The premise of the book in summary and without as much of her humor is this: She wakes up New Years Day 2006 covered in bruises from her annual New Year’s Eve party/talent show. Her husband pulls out the digital camera and together they discover that her injuries are from repeatedly performing splits, but only on one side. She vows to learn how to do splits on both sides and gets caught up in this fantasy before realizing that she is in her mid-thirties and her only real resolution to date is a party trick. So, she decides to spend the next year looking into and working with the big ones, the mainstream gurus of the self-help industry, to see what she might get out of trying to improve her life, following the tried and true methods of millions of Americans before her. Maybe the timing is right, but I seem to think that reading about her pursuit of personal goals and quest for self- fulfillment might give me insights into what the hell to do with myself.

The other thing I’m going to do is to read over my graduate thesis. Every time someone asks me what I want to do, somewhere in the fifteen minute ramble of an answer, I say, write books. I have the seedling of one in my closet now and it’s been sleeping for about six months, which is about as much distance as I said I’d take from the project. After I read it, and assuming I can stomach it, then I’ll think about if I *want* to keep working on it. And I’ll re-evaluate the want every few seconds for as long as it takes to figure this out: How many sixteenths of wanting does it take to arrive at half of having?