Freedom from Things

Cold Nights, Warm Blankets

It’s not always sunny in Philadelphia. Often times, it’s cold as hell, even if it was warm during the day. On these bitterly cold winter/spring nights I wrap a blanket around myself and think to my grandmother.

When I moved out of the house to strike out on my own, I knew that times would be tough. Nights in Philly or France get cold - bone-chillingly cold. Money would be tight, and the heat would be set low. As I was getting ready to leave the next, my grandmother asked me what gift I would like.

I said, simply, “A blanket.

My grandmother has been knitting for decades. I remember her making scarves, mittens, blankets, and other goods. They were simple, practical things that fulfilled their singular purpose. Simple and practical were all I needed. Warmth and love were bonuses. So, she knitted me my blankets, and off I went into the world.

There has never been a winter wherein I have regretted that request. Those blankets don’t just keep me warm. They remind me that out there is a kind and loving person who labored to make sure that I was well-cared-for. They are a token of my family, a connection tangible through distance and time.

I am never cold when I sleep beneath my grandmother’s blankets.

Legion

Last week, one of the headline news stories around Drexel was the apprehension of an LSD ring around campus. I and my coworkers got to talking, and I worried a few of them with my somewhat in-depth knowledge of how a drug ring might work and how they got caught.

“Nick, you want to tell us something?”

“I’ve known a lot of interesting people in my time.”

You know what? It’s true. In my time, I have come to know many, many interesting people in places high and low. In many ways, it’s one of the hallmarks of my existence. Yea though I am a deep introvert and avowed misanthrope, I crave entertainment and distraction. Humanity, no matter how much I dislike it, is my prime source of entertainment.

I’d be bored without you people.

758. That’s the number of Facebook friends I have at the time of this writing. Pretty good for someone who hates people, eh? What do I get out of all you people? Life. You see, my Friend List runs the gamut of every race, class, and creed. There are people who could be my veritable twin and people who are my diametric opposite. I embrace this. I know too many people whose community serves as an echo chamber, and their experiences leave them more closed, not open, as they grow older.

So, who are these people? Doctors. Lawyers. Nurses. Teachers. Office workers. Cops. Crooks, thieves, and liars. A politician or two (but I repeat myself!). Soldiers, Marines (they will tell you the difference), pacifists, and pacifiers. Men, women, and  all points in between. Give my friends a call. They can put a bullet in you and pull one out. They can get you paid, get you laid, get you drunk, get you high, get you sober, and help you find your way home.  I know moms who raised an army of kids on their own, dads who lost theirs, and families so normal you’d think they popped out of a 50’s sitcom. I know folks who’ve been through hell and come out the other side, folks going through a darkness so deep that I have no way to help, and people who have yet to see their first major crisis. I know the young. I know the old. I’ve seen an infinite array of snapshots into my future. I’ve seen some long, hard glimpses of my past.

Some of you make me glad you’re still around. Some of you make me wish you weren’t. I’m still grateful for all of you.

If I got all of you together, I could topple a small government and build it back up again. We’d have a nation where every service imaginable could be fulfilled. There are no gaps among you 758. You’re a microcosm of the world.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from the movie Blade Runner. Roy Batty, a replicant, meets Chu, the man who designed one of Roy’s organs: his eyes. Roy, with wonder and menace, says to Chu, “If you could see the things I’ve seen through your eyes!” Roy knows that his time is finite. He also knows that the grand experiment that is his life will end, but he must acknowledge how others have contributed to his brief glory. So must I.

Keep on living, folks. Let’s see what we see through each other’s eyes.

Small Victories

If you read my previous post, you’ll know that I’ve been pushing myself in areas of fitness where I’m weak. Like my core. It’s weak. Sure, I can do my daily crunches and leg lifts, but beyond that? Weak. So, I re-upped with Lucy the Instructor for her Monday night Abs class. This actually works out perfectly for my schedule. Mondays I wake up dog-early so that I can catch the 6 a.m. Dragon Shuttle to Main Campus so that I hit the water immediately at 6:30 for a 90 minute swim. Since I catch the 8:15 back to Center City, I don’t really have the time or wherewithal to do a Core workout after my swim. I do, however, knock off at 6:00 p.m. – perfect for catching the Dragon Shuttle back to the gym for a 6:30 class. That way I do get a Core workout… just half a day later.

Where Cardio’N’Tone is an hour-long endurance test, Abs is 30 minutes of focused Core exercise. C&T focuses on high-intensity burn. I liken Abs to a fast Pilates or Yoga class where the crunches come hard and fast, but you don’t end up a puddle of human misery.

That said, it’s still a lot of change-ups, shifting, balancing, and endurance crunch. If you’re not a kinesthetic learner, it’s going to be rough going at the outset. Guess what I’m not.

Lucy began Monday’s class a bit hoarse, and she announced that we’d be going faster and harder than usual. Quick looks of doubt all around. And then we begin.

Here’s where it starts changing. The balance exercises? Tough. Damn tough. I handled them all. I kept rhythm, not just with the class but with Lucy (who was teaching this class immediately after teaching a C&T class. I’m doubting her humanity again.) All of those whack-ass Pilates poses? Nailed. At first, I was wondering how I was not sucking. By the home stretch I was getting close to glimpsing something vaguely resembling competence. Lucy announces cool-down, and I am amazed. I just took the hardest poses and rocked them.

There is nothing quite so gratifying as realizing success at something foreign to what you’re good at. With the early let-out, I hopped the shuttle back to Center City feeling like a damned superhero – and I don’t mean Aquaman.

Night of the Living Dead – Spandex Edition

I want to be better than I am.

Ever since I decided to get in shape five years ago, I’ve been constantly driven to improve my life and myself. Now, nearly a hundred pounds later, I am looking for ways to refine my workout. Since I work full-time, I can’t do my previous multiple hours in the pool, cardio, and weights seven days a week. I’ve had to subsist on one-hour swims and the variety of cardio machines at the Drexel gym.

With the start of the quarter I decided to try something new: group exercise classes. They’re free. More than that, they’re different. I’m great at simple single movements. I can cycle like the day is long, lift up and down, and bounce off ends of the pool. Cardio’N’Tone class? Circuit training and change-ups? Yeah, I suck. I’m not a kinesthetic learner. Watch someone and repeat their actions? Fail.

So, naturally, I’m going to try it.

Cardio’N’Tone is taught by a woman named Lucy, slight yet strong, constantly giving off an air of perkiness and enthusiasm. You know the stereotype of an aerobics instructor? She fits it to a “T.” First, she begins the warm-up, lots of running in place and quick-change Yoga positions and related calisthenics. Then the fun begins. Lucy directs us through jumps, steps, climbs, stretches, and a whole host of pilates. The catch: You do it all in the space of a minute’s circuit. Can you do planks? No problem. Can you do them after doing pushups on your elbows? Maybe. Can you do all that after squats? Maybe…. Maybe not.

The class is an hour long. I look at the clock. 15 minutes in.

Jesus H. 45 minutes more?

There is no stopping. After the lunges, the squat-thrusts, the warrior-pose turns, and the crunch circuits the class is turning in a limping unison to Lucy’s exhortations. I do a few hours of cardio each day, and I’m dying out there. It’s not a matter of exertion. It’s not a matter of form. It’s not pacing. It’s all of those things combined. 20 minutes in, you stop thinking. Lucy chimes in with a new exercise to follow, and the class follows, each person’s lizard brain attempting to mimic. 25 minutes. Gasp. And then, at 30, we take the half-way break for water and rest. Lucy bends down to check the exercise regimen she’s created for the day, and I am grateful.

There’s a thin layer of sweat on her.

I thank god for that sweat. Lucy’s on point, chatting, still perky as a Chik-Fil-A server. Me? Everyone else? We’re staggered and sucking down water like our Nalgene bottles were the cup of Christ. The fact that Lucy is sweating is the only thing keeping us all from despair. She’s human. We are not a bunch of flabby jackasses. This is actually tough.

I can only imagine how dead I’d be without my prior conditioning.

And then the hard part begins. The previous exercises? Simple. Easy compared to circuits in the second half. The air is thick with fight-or-flight pheromones, and the mirrors show a couple dozen pairs of eyes darting to legs and knees, everyone watching each other’s footwork in an attempt to shrug through the fatigue with some vague sense of dignity.

At 45 minutes, the sheer, raw tiredness hits me as I do huddle-squat-hustles. My quads, powerful enough to propel me across the city in minutes on my Schwinn, are turning to jelly. I don’t want to lie down. I want to sleep like the dead. I refuse. I will not let this fucking class beat me.

Finally, 5:55 rolls around. Lucy leads the cool down. We follow like sheep. We stand. Every last person, even the two veterans in the front row, has a thousand yard stare. Lucy leads us in a round of applause for our efforts. The clapping echoes hollow as sore hands obey arms ready to fall off. We limp out of the room as the Yoga class waits to enter. Their faces betray a question: “What the fuck happened to those people?”

8 more weeks. I will get good at this if it bloody well kills me.

Never Go Home - A Book Review of Stephen Hunter’s Time to Hunt

A few years ago I found a surplus copy of Time to Hunt by Stephen Hunter at a library clearance sale. As a fan of pulp thrillers and a lover of firearms, I snapped it up. Hunter is renowned for his tense plotting and his technical appreciation for guns. Numerous other shooters recommended Hunter’s most famous novel, Point of Impact, which was made into the movie Shooter. Thanks to the press of time, Time to Hunt sat in my Unread Books box until I finally decided to make some headway on that mocking pile. Besides, I needed some brain candy.

Time to Hunt serves as a bookend to the Bob Lee Swagger saga. Swagger, a gallant, laconic Marine sniper investigates a near-fatal attack on his wife by an old foe from his days in the jungles of Viet Nam. Familiarity with Hunter’s previous Bob Lee Swagger novels is not necessary. All you need to know is that Swagger is stoic, reserved, war-weary, and that he is the consummate sniper. No, really. That’s all you need to know, and Hunter reminds you of this. Is he flawed? Only as flawed as a man who suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress can be. His drinking and mood swings serve to show just how noble Swagger is – he earned those mental scars in service to his country. Also, he is the consummate sniper.

The first half of the book is the strongest, mainly because it is told from the nominal point of view of Swagger’s spotter, another Marine whose dutiful earnestness borders on parody. This is perfectly fine for a bag of brain candy where marching through genre conventions is half the fun. Once the story leaves Viet Nam and fast-forwards to the present day, the solid membrane of verisimilitude breaks. Bob Lee Swagger ceases to be the consummate sniper and transitions into a full-on Supreme Badass whose only weaknesses are that his Badass meter sometimes drops to 9 on an 11-point scale. Never fear, though. Our dogged master sniper will win through. Because he’ll take the Badassness up to 12. Roger that. 

That first half of the book – the Viet Nam portion – tells a simple, effective story of cat-and-mouse in the jungle. The second half, however, feels more like Hunter came up with a collection of dramatic set pieces and glued them together with flimsy excuses for logic. Sniper battle in a blizzard? Sounds badass. How do we get there? High-altitude combat drop!

Did I mention that Bob Lee Swagger was a retired vet with multiple disabling war wounds and a fresh surgical wound? Hunter did. Where any other man would have crumpled and bled out, Bob Lee Swagger shrugs off his labors through sheer goddamned dogged gumption. But that sniper battle in the blizzard?

So badass.

Time to Hunt is pleasant bit of fluff, but it falls apart midway through. If you go in expecting it to be soldier porn, you won’t be disappointed. Better yet, quit halfway through. Bob Lee Swagger never got out of Viet Nam, and really, you don’t need to, either.

The Story of Us - How I Got Engaged

As some, or, mayhap, many of you may know I am getting married.

On June 1^st, 2008, I met Danielle for the first time for coffee. The attraction was instant. Three-and-a-half years, a graduate degree, thousands of miles, and a long distance relationship later, we’re finally going to be together. Our relationship has hardly been easy, nor has it been by any reckoning traditional. It has, however, grown deeper by the day.

I moved out to Philly because I no longer wish to live in South Carolina, and I knew that in order to make a better, lasting life and career I would have to go elsewhere. That meant leaving Danielle behind in South Carolina. Would we survive the distance? Who knew?  I gambled that I could find a better place for myself where she, too, could join me.

I had been thinking of proposing to Danielle for a while. Previously, we joked that if I ever found a good job with decent insurance, we’d get married so she’d be covered. After a year-and-a-half of chronic underemployment that was starting to sound less and less possible. I still wanted her to be with me, though. Suddenly last spring I found myself employed at Drexel University. How are the benefits? Excellent. Moreover, I’m happy there. I enjoy this job more than just about any other that I’ve had. I don’t just have a job. I don’t just have benefits. I have a place of security and calm. More and more, I wanted to bring Danielle to this place.

Drexel has a lovely policy: all staff have a paid vacation between Christmas and New Year’s. With that time I visited Danielle. It was time to pop the question.

I wanted to pop the question just after midnight on New Year’s. She and I went down to her mother’s condo in Athens, GA. As we snuggled together, we realized that traffic would be murder in Athens after midnight – college town, lots of drinking, and checkpoints galore. So, we bundled into the car to return to Seneca. It was not as I planned, but at least we were together. I could always ask later.

As we were driving along, I saw that the clock had struck midnight. I held her hand. I explained myself. I had come to a decision.

A few weeks prior I devoted myself to watching The Walking Dead on Netflix Instant while working out. At the end of the week, I got to watch the season one finale. I had my realization.

The Walking Dead isn’t a show about zombies. It’s about people who have lived to see the end of their days, each marking time before their inevitable fall. The finale shows the survivors, faced with fire and oblivion, choosing how they will meet their end. Some rage. Some flee. Some sit and hold hands, acknowledging their need for connection and peace.

When the credits rolled, I knew that I had to ask her to marry me. If I am to see the end of my days, then I don’t want to see them without Danielle.

And so I explained this to her.

And to this she said yes.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution – A Hindsight is 20/20 Review

A decade ago, Warren Spector and Ion Storm Austin took a project titled “Shooter” and pushed almost every boundary they could find around that simple name. Melding FPS and RPG they created Deus Ex, a game that became synonymous with the term “emergent gameplay” and highlighted how player choice could turn a floating gun game into something engaging and extraordinary. A few years later, Deus Ex: Invisible War attempted to capitalize on the good will created by its predecessor, but its bland narrative, mediocre execution, and consequence-free action put the franchise to bed, seemingly forever. As a prequel, Deus Ex: Human Revolution attempts to both resurrect the Deus Ex name while attempting to emerge from the long shadows (both good and ill) of its forbearers.

Player choice lay at the heart of Deus Ex. It was an FPS where guns were an option, not a requirement, and creative problem solving was rewarded. Indeed, Deus Ex could be played without killing a single person. Human Revolution embraces this choice wholeheartedly. You, the player, are offered any number of solutions to a problem. The protagonist, Alex Jensen, lithely skulks his way passed guards, cameras, and turrets just as easily as he pumps them full of lead. It’s a tribute to the game’s design that each of these options is equally satisfying. I focused on stealth and hacking, and I constantly felt like a cyberninja sprung fresh from William Gibson or Neal Stephenson’s pages. Likewise, when I tired of sneaking, my trusty pistol (fully-upgraded, of course) put mooks down like the hand of god. The core gameplay is tight. I logged a total of 33 hours, and several of those play sessions were of the “just a little more; it can’t be 1 a.m…” variety.

More than the gameplay, though, the developers have perfected a world. “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here,” is no winking catchphrase. Every square millimeter of the game breathes and chokes on it. Eidos Montreal has perfected a mood of future shock and millennial distress that informs every interaction and sets the stage for its questions about the direction of humanity’s development and how we, the soft, fleshy, imperfect creatures that we are will react to it. Be it serendipity or prescience, Human Revolution’s narrative of humanity on the brink (of perfection or calamity) as its hidden economic masters pull the strings is especially poignant in 2011. Where Deus Ex’s hodgepodge of conspiracies served as a massive X Files nerd Easter egg, Human Revolution grounds it in humanity and truly details the human cost for both the protagonist and the world.

The game’s greatest missteps, however, come when it forgets its strengths and devolves into merely a first person shooter. Throughout the game, the player is dumped into a series of boss fights where, if they had been playing as anything other than a gun-toting bruiser, slap the player in the face, remove the elements of choice or creative problem solving, and turn Human Revolution into a bullet-ridden slog. These missteps are made even more galling when the game offers dialogue battles where your words and choices (and the care with which you execute them) can affect the rest of the game. Had the rest of the game not been to supremely satisfying, the run-and-gun boss battles would have been mere annoyances. As it stands, they are the black eyes on the Mona Lisa, tainting what could have been 2011’s undisputed game of the year.

That imperfection is maddening, because everything else in Human Revolution is just so right. Playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution is like watching Star Wars or listening to The Velvet Underground and Nico. Despite, or in fact because of the raw skill and excellent use of convention, you can feel the genre being pushed forward.

In the year 2000 Deus Ex showed us where the future of gaming was taking us. Now, Human Revolution is finally paying off the promises made all those years ago.

Occupy Update

I am no longer working with Occupy Philadelphia.

After two months of occupation, Philly PD followed in the footsteps of the other major cities and pushed the occupiers out. Thus began “Phase Two” of the Occupy movement. I, like everyone else, was curious to see where they’d go.

True confession time: I have conflicted feelings about the Occupation process. On the on hand, there are many things wrong with this country, and one of the prime ills of our body politic is the vast inequality in both power and opportunity that exist among the various socio-economic classes in the United States and the world. If Occupy has done one thing right, it has more effectively raised the question of how America has executed its system of political and economic distribution than anyone else in years. This conversation was on the fringes years ago. Now, regular people are beginning to wonder who exactly is in power - and why do they deserve that power, by chance?

On the other hand, though, the movement is hobbled by its directionlessness. General Assemblies last for hours because everyone is so invested in building consensus and making sure everyone’s voice is heard that no one is willing to put their foot down and make the hard, effective decisions.

Sometimes the most important thing you can say is, “That’s fucking stupid. Shut up and let the adults get to work.”

There are a lot of people in the movement who are willing to bleed and sweat for a better, more equitable and sustainable world, people from every ethnicity and walk of life. There are just as many, though, whose political philosophy stems solely from their Che Guevara t-shirt and whose greatest desire is to pat themselves on the back for being Great Souls rather than a desire to get down, get dirty, and do the muck work of getting America back on track. They’re mired in their own self-importance and officiousness. There’s a lot of talk, but precious little “do.”

Everyone imagines themselves as the next JFK. Nobody wants to patrol the damn wall.

I asked my friend Terry how to cope with the frustration. I want to work for a better world, but the frustration with the Occupy process was making me tear my hair out. He laid it on the line:

I don’t have to work for Occupy, but I can support them and try to communicate why I appreciate them. 

So, then, I am taking a break until they figure out what they really want to be. Right now I’m going to work on making myself stronger, better, and more able. I hope that eventually Occupy and I will meet again, and the two of us will be ready to do great - no - good things.

I wish them luck. I wish them well.

P.T.O

I am getting paid to write this.

You read that right. At this moment I am accruing paid hours, and in this leisure time I am writing. What sorcery is this?

PTO.

I am grateful. My employer, an urban university with a mystical creature as its mascot has instituted one of the most generous policies ever: a free week of paid time off from Christmas to New Years.  I am spending this time with my partner in South Carolina. In effect, my job this week is to snuggle with her, play with our cats, and enjoy a week absent of stress.

When I tell people about this, their eyes glaze over either in derision or envy. As someone who only just recent joined the ranks of the fully-employed, I understand the envy. When you’re part-time, every moment you don’t get paid is lost money… money you probably can’t afford to lose.  My manager friends, however, have scoffed a bit. A week of paid time off? What a waste. To them, it’s lost money.

How wrong. How very wrong.

2011 has been a hell of a hard year. I bet the farm on my move back to Philly in the hopes that I’d be able to land a decent job. That meant cashing out IRA’s scrimping, scraping, selling, hustling, and running on fumes as often as with a full tank (literally as well as figuratively). There was a lot of worry, a lot of regret, and too much stress. Know that feeling that something’s behind you that causes you to look over your shoulder? I’d get it at least five times a day. I spent days wishing I could be more productive, and on my non-productive days I’d end up hating myself for the lost time. In many ways, I reminded myself of the Space Shuttle – an amazing piece of machinery that gets pushed past the red line every time it’s used, causing it to need massive repairs before the next use. As a result, the amazing piece of machinery becomes less and less useful and more and more expensive.

If ever there was a better metaphor for American “productivity,” I have not heard it.

So, is my employer just wasting money by giving me this time off? No. If anything, it’s saving money and banking good will. I haven’t had this much refreshing sleep in ages. Rather than limping from my bed to my job, I’m actually healing. For the first time in ages, I am devoid of stress and the guilt of not being productive. My nervous twitch is… gone. I can literally feel the drop in my blood pressure as I stroke the cats. I’m not enjoying this time – I’m goddamned grateful for it. Unlike previous jobs, I’m not dreading the end of this vacation and the return to work. I’m welcoming the fresh start with renewed energy.

One of the great mistakes of many managers is to view any time not devoted to the company purpose as lost or stolen. What they don’t realize is that humans are animals. Treat them well, and you will deal with energetic, motivated, loyal companions. Drive them into the ground, and you will be left with only a dead horse to beat.

Now, time for more tea and cats.

Star Wars: Republic Commando: A Hindsight is 20/20 review

In honor of it going on sale on Steam, I thought I’d pull my review of Republic Commando out of mothballs. Until 2:00pm EST, you can get it for $2.50. It’s a great bit of Star Wars gaming.