In 2008...

• I earned a 20% pay raise at work.
• I bought a car.
• I was accepted into a master's program at Villanova.
• I fell in love and watched her break my heart with an ice-cold shoulder.
• I saw a classic '70s band in concert.
• I went to a Corvette show to see 700 models spanning 70 years.
• I began investing in the stock market.
• I had a scathing argument with my brother that left me shaking with anger.
• I reconnected, in a small way, with my first girlfriend, whom I hadn't seen in 15 years.
• I watched the greatest fireworks show I'd ever seen over the Philly art museum.
• I went on two remarkably awkward dates.
• I got drunker than I've ever been, only to feel shame the next day.
• I went on vacation to Bethany Beach, Delaware, for the first time in nearly a decade.
• I trained for a 5k race, only to have the weather keep me from running it.
• I made hot wings for the first time that were so hot our lips hurt eating them.
• I fell victim to a Rock Band 2 addiction.
• I watched the Phillies win an improbable World Series championship.
• I crammed myself into a crowed of a million to watch the subsequent World Series parade.
• I break danced at my friends' wedding and won a $20 bet in the process.
• I stayed up to watch the first black man become president of the United States.
• I watched Michael Phelps sneak away with a record 8 Olympic gold medals.
• I witnessed my dad perform a circus golf swing, inadvertently striking the ball twice and sending it backward over his shoulder.
• I have lost some friends, while gaining some others.
• I lost, then regained, then lost my faith.

And likely, so much more has happened this year that I simply can't remember right now. I consider 2008 a year of growth. I learned how to live on my own, decided to enter graduate school, felt the joy of love and the sting of a broken heart. I learned how to think of myself as a man, rather than as a kid. The year gave me days of happiness, of sadness, of anger and regret. But this is what shapes us.

I hope 2009 brings more for me, for you, and for all those you care about. Happy New Year, everyone.

Graduate School

It has been a long time since I posted here. My apologies to my loyal legion of fans....

The news of the day: I have been accepted into the M.A. in English Literature program at Villanova University. Some of you may know that I decided early this year that I wanted to pursue a master's degree, then a doctorate, and eventually start a career as an English professor. This is step one.

I put everything on Villanova, the only place I applied to. I didn't have a back-up plan, had Villanova said no. Good thing it didn't matter.

Initially, I planned to begin in fall 2009, but if I can secure financing, I've decided to start in the spring, which would mean mid-January. So soon! Hopefully I'll be able to finish the program in two years, taking classes at night while continuing to work full time at my current job. My boss has been very supportive and told me in no uncertain terms that he would be flexible with my schedule, if the need arises, so that I can go to school.

I feel lucky. I have a good job with a boss who work with me to ensure that my education plans can proceed freely, even though my chosen direction will necessarily take me away from this job in a few years. I got into the school I wanted. I've already been happy lately, and now I'm even happier.

While at Messiah, I never thought I'd enter an English literature program, but things change. I feel confident that I can do well, but I know it'll take a lot out of me. It'll be a challenge, but I'm up for it.

At the moment, my top choice for a doctorate is Cornell University, which has the third-ranked literary theory curriculum in the country (behind only Duke and UC-Berkeley). I don't know if Ivy League is dreaming too big, but I think I have no reason to discredit the notion right now.

I don't know what will happen in the coming years. All I can do is take chances, believe in myself, and hope for the best.

A word about experience

I hate to suggest that experience is overrated, but I will suggest that very sentiment right now. I don't mean to say that experience doesn't matter. But experience and good direction are not necessarily bedfellows. I could blindly hike through a forest 10 times, but that doesn't mean I know the best way to get through. In other words, I don't want to hear about how much experience someone has. I want to hear what ideas you have for getting this country through difficult times. What I haven't heard from the "experienced" candidate in this election cycle is decent, tangible ideas about getting us through. What I hear is how he knows how to do this or that, how to win wars, how to fix social security, how to fix the economy. And yet, the ideas I've heard are either puffy fluffy pep rally rhetoric or comparable to the "naive" candidate, who also happens to be more focused, intelligent, creative, and unifying than the wandering nursing-home resident with "experience."

Let us not forget that no president is perfectly knowledgeable about every facet of governing. The president has a cadre of advisors and a cabinet for this very reason. Experience doesn't necessarily give someone a leg-up on choosing the best candidates to fill these positions. More important is a worldview consistent with things that matter to the average citizen: affordable and available healthcare, tax relief, a return to policies that encourage disciplined economic growth rather than the free-for-all that created insatiable and unimpeded greed, a commitment to GOOD educational policy (and, no, Bush's brainchild (left behind) is not good educational policy). I'm sorry, folks, but for all of his experience, the wandering old man candidate does not share my worldview. It has been many years since the "maverick" has truly been a maverick. And besides, Bush's cowboy attitude was, indeed, "mavericky." Is that actually what we need? Perhaps a unifier is more in order at this point.

P.S., even scarier than experience with poor worldview is no experience with equally poor worldview. Into this category, I pitch Ms. Hockey Mom. I don't want to live in a country led by President Palin. Come on McCain... really? Sarah Palin?

Play Nice

On the train this morning, I glanced over at my neighbor's magazine and saw an article titled "Play Nice." I suddenly noticed that a certain semantic nuance exists between what is surely meant by this phrase, and what its grammar actually means. No doubt, parents the world over who lob this part-time plea, part-time threat at their children, mean what is properly worded as "play nicely," that is, be nice to others when you play. "Play nice," though, at least to my mind, denotes something just slightly different. It tells children to play (or act out) the quality of niceness -- as if playing the attribute of niceness on stage. It's the difference between telling children how to act, and telling them how to be. Not "be nice to others," but "pretend that you're nice when interacting with others." We might even put the word "nice" in quotation marks itself: "play 'nice,' children." Rather than a quality to embody, it is something to mimic.

Still, go forth and say "play nice," because everyone knows what you mean. I tend to complicate things.

Running Man

As some of you know, I have taken up running. Sometime in May, I decided I wanted to get back into an exercise routine, get fit, continue the weight loss I started last year, and challenge myself while doing it. I decided on running because I honestly couldn't think of any activity I found more challenging. I'm a big man, one who has weighed as much as 354 lbs., and one who still weighs close to 300. That's a tremendous amount of body weight to come crashing down on my knees with each step, but I decided to try it anyway. And I thought it would be fun to set a goal for myself that I never thought I could reach: a 5k race (3.1 miles).

My friend Holly told me about this program she had started called "Couch to 5k in 9 weeks." It started me off slowly, jogging for 60 seconds, then walking for 90 seconds, and continuing to alternate like that for 20 minutes. That was enough for me, at first. I hadn't run for even 60 seconds in probably close to 10 years, not since I had to run for high school gym class.

Gradually, the program increased the length of time spent jogging until finally, I was jogging for 7 or 8 minutes at a shot. Eventually, the alternation of jogging and walking was actually counterproductive for my legs. Frankly, my legs hurt when I run. But if I keep running, they start to get used to it, and it's not so bad. Always stopping to walk only made my legs hurt worse, to the point that I couldn't keep up the running portions. So, around the middle of July, I scrapped the program altogether and decided to just run, listen to my music and run as far as I can, then gradually increase the distance.

I am now running 1.75 miles, and I plan to increase it to 2 miles starting next week. I still run at a slow pace, about 4 miles an hour, which is really more of a brisk walk, or a really, painfully slow jog. But it's what I can do right now. If I try to run any faster, I can't go as far, and the goal is 3.1 miles, not any certain time. If it takes me 45 minutes to run a 5k, then so be it. The 1.75 miles right now takes me 26 minutes. Just 2-1/2 months ago, running for 60 seconds made me tired. Now I'm running for 26 minutes. Again, it's not a good pace, only going 1.75 miles, but I'm proud of it. I've never run that far, or for that long, in my life. Every progression is new territory for me, a step closer to a goal that for has long seemed impossible.

Today I registered for the race -- my first ever 5k race. It'll take place on September 28 in Center City, down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Sunday morning. I'll get a number and join as many as 2,000 runners, along with another 4,000 walkers (it's a run plus "family fun walk").

Accomplishing these seemingly simple goals has invigorated me, I must say. Now I have other athletic endeavors in mind. I was thinking that maybe I'd spring for some swimming lessons, actually learn good technique, and start training for a triathlon -- running, swimming, and cycling.

It's amazing what your body is capable of doing if you work at it, stay motivated, take it slowly. If I hadn't told some friends, right at the beginning, that I was starting to run and train for a 5k, I may not have kept with it. But a few friends immediately jumped on the idea and volunteered to run with me. That was motivation. That was accountability. But now I don't even need it. The activity has become its own reward. Doing what I didn't think I could do has changed my outlook on life. I'm becoming more willing to take some risks. It's like a personal evolution.

I'd encourage everyone to try something they don't think they can do. Maybe you're right, and you'll fail. But maybe you're not giving yourself enough credit, either. In any case, it's better to try.

Rittenhouse or Home

Rittenhouse Square has been all over the news recently, particularly for the sizable population of homeless people bedding down for the night in the park (or, as one newspaper report noted, having sex) this summer. Surely this is not the first occurrence of homeless park-sleepers, but it has been used as an example of the failure, due to slowness of action, of the new mayor's homelessness plan.

Is it coincidence that the problem at Rittenhouse gets front-page coverage in the Inquirer while also being one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the city?

And realistically, as M. Night Shyamalan has shown us, the real danger in Rittenhouse is not the homelessness, but the sudden suicide epidemic among park-goers that will happen when the plants consider us threats and chemically "reverse" the brain's self-preservation mechanism. Beware.

...unless you are born again...

This is a rebirth of this site.

I had a conversation with my brother today. Actually, it became a conversation, after beginning as a semi-contained shouting match. He had the right to confront me on some things I had written, and I had the right to respond. Ultimately, I'm glad we talked. I think we both finally said things (I, especially) that should have been said for years. I hope this is a turning point.

The sorry fact is that my brother and I have never communicated well. Shit, we both agreed that my entire family doesn't communicate well... or at all, for that matter. And when you build years of history onto an absence of communication, misperceptions and misunderstandings seem inevitable. Both my brother and I had held onto ideas about each other that are not true; or, if they were true at one point, are no longer. I wrote some things that were both miscommunicated on my end and misunderstood on his end, and it built up for a few days before finally exploding over the phone.

He asked that I remove certain posts from my blog (for very good reason... I am too often thoughtless in my ways), but I have decided to remove them all. Some people don't like this practice, but I do, actually. I won't miss my previous posts. Truth be told, I probably don't even know what I've written. To me, this is symbolic. It says that nothing I have written in the past is more important to me than what I can obtain in the future. I will not sacrifice reconciliation with my brother to maintain words that, more often than not, were written the instant I thought them. I want to start this blog anew. I want to commence (again) with my refreshed perspective.

The other night, I mentioned to a good friend that I had received some upsetting comments on this blog (though didn't offer details), and she asked why I enjoy blogging in the first place. She didn't like the idea of her private thoughts being cast out into the Web. I didn't really know how to answer her. I agree it doesn't make much sense. Why, if I struggle so much to open up to people, would I do it through a medium that anyone can read, in the most public forum available? I really don't know. Why does anyone? This type of blog may be more popular than the "real" type -- a log of websites (thus "weblog," and then "blog") about a certain topic. Look at most Blogger sites, or Xanga sites, or MySpace sites, or what have you, and you see, by and large, public diaries disguised as blogs. Why do we do this? Perhaps we find it cathartic, to a degree. Perhaps it's a means of fooling ourselves into thinking we're "connecting." What I can't tell my friends, I tell a blog. Makes no sense.

It's humbling when you're asked to account for your behavior, and you're not sure you can. The more I reflect on it, the more I agree that I needed a dose of humility. Even as I am the first to beat on myself, the first to be eternally hard on myself, the first to criticize or undervalue my abilities and contributions, I am also, I'm sure, plagued by an inflated self-image, paradoxically. But I think it's really more of a self-defense maneuver, a way to remain guarded, self-preservation. That doesn't excuse it, but it may explain it.

I don't know how many people have taken exception to what I say or write. I don't know how many people I've hurt by isolating myself or speaking (or writing) reactively, rather than thoughtfully. All I can say is that I'm sorry. Deep down, what I want, is to help people, to develop good relationships, to give of myself. But wanting and doing are two very different things. So I'm taking this opportunity to try moving forward, not forgetting the past, but re-evaluating its impact on the present. I am not above admitting my wrongs and asking for others to forgive me. I am not above addressing parts of myself that I need to better. I would hope none of us are.