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When a doctor says the above words, you don’t really believe him. I assumed he was trying to scare me so that the ensuing experience  would seem better in comparison to the nightmarish holocaust of pain my mind inevitably conjured up. Also, being a man, and therefore stupid, I mistakenly believed that I could handle the pain in Rambo-like fashion. After all, he cauterized a wound in his side by filling it with gunpowder, and then lighting it. I think his mouth might have twitched, but that was about it. How bad could a shard of glass in my foot really be?

In fact, a piece of glass, or a foreign body of indeterminate nature as it turned out, isn’t really that painful a thing. Getting it removed is. But maybe I should back up a little bit.

It was two days before Thanksgiving, and the wife was brushing her teeth. I walked into the bathroom and placed a glass of water on the counter. Now, my wife likes to gesticulate (flail her arms wildly) while brushing her teeth. I believe this is an attempt to communicate with me. (Why should valuable time be lost even though one’s mouth is full of toothpaste?) In this particular instance, she communicated the recently deposited glass onto the bathroom floor. We cleaned it all up, or so we thought, and everything seemed fine. Until the next night, when I sliced open the bottom of my foot on a shard of glass that we missed.

So cutting the bottom of your foot is pretty painful for a number of reasons, not least of which is that you then have to walk on said appendage while it’s healing. I did quite a bit of that, and continued to run on it in preparation for a 10k in Central Park. This, perhaps, was not my best idea. It became increasingly obvious, as well as painful, that there was something embedded in my foot. Fast forward a couple weeks and I’m sitting in a doctor’s office listening intently as he explains just how much an injection in the bottom of my foot will hurt.

Since the removal of a foreign body, it turned out not to be glass, basically requires the doctor to spend a bit of time “exploring” the affected area with a scalpel, he gives you a local anesthetic. As it should be obvious that the only way to deliver a local anesthetic is via injection, and the bottom of your foot is home to many, many nerve endings…well, you do the math. How can I describe the feeling? It was something like having a nail, studded with shards of glass, driven into your foot. Then, someone lights your foot on fire.

The doctor didn’t lie though. He said it would be exteremely painful, and he said it would last only a few seconds. He didn’t mention that those few seconds would feel like they went on forever. The experience has taught me two very important things. The first is that the next time something made of glass gets broken in my house I should probably just move. The second is that I’m definitely not Rambo.

My allegiance to Gang Green goes back to when I was six years old. Growing up in Westchester County, I had two teams to choose from: the NY Football Giants or the NY Jets. I can’t really pin down why I chose the Jets but I imaging it had something to do with the following: my father is a die-hard fan of Big Blue and I am something of a contrarian. Also, I think really fast planes are much cooler than really big people.

Unfortunately, my love for the Jets is unrequited. The Jets are an abusive spouse and their fans are the worst kind of enabler. Week after week, season after season, we come back—cheering, screaming, pleading—for glory. In the 20 years that I have been a Jets fan I’ve felt real hope on only three occasions. The first time was in 1998 when they made a legitimate run, going 12-4 in the regular season and making it all the way to the AFC Championship, where they promptly lost to the Denver Broncos. I didn’t expect much in 2002 when they had a 9-7 regular season, but then they beat the Colts 41-0 in the wildcard game and I thought that maybe there was a chance. Of course, they got trounced the following week by the Raiders, the same team that had crushed my playoff hopes the year before.

And then there was the 2006 season: The year of the comeback. It was Eric Mangini’s first year as head coach, the previous season they had been 4-12 and Herm Edwards had left for Kansas City. All I wanted out of the team was a better season. If they had gone 8-8 I would’ve been happy; at least they wouldn’t have been losers. But they surprised everyone with a 10-6 season, winning 5 of their last 6 games, only to lose in the wildcard round to the Patriots. Read more

Apparently, it is very easy to mistake my cell phone number for someone else’s. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Here’s the most recent one:

“Call me when you can. Can Jake go to my sister’s house tonight with Brian and us? Call me. -Nanc”

I don’t know anybody named Jake or Nanc; I don’t even know anybody named Brian. Of course, this is not the oddest text message I’ve ever received. My favorite misdirected text has to be the following:

“I can’t stop thinking about you.”

That’s it. That was the whole message. What was the person thinking about me? Were they thinking, I can’t stop thinking how good looking you are? Maybe they were thinking, I can’t stop thinking how much I’d like to kill you? Was the person threatening me or professing their love? I guess I’ll never know. Plus, it’s kind of hard to explain to your wife.

In college I played club lacrosse and we had this saying, Turf Sniper. We said this whenever someone tripped for no apparent reason. Running down the field, nobody around, all of a sudden you’re laying face first in the grass, Turf Sniper. Taking a shot on goal, trip on your own feet, Turf Sniper. I bring this up because I thought the close of my lacrosse days signaled the end of the Turf Sniper. And I suppose it did, but he didn’t go away completely, he just changed his name. Now he’s the Asphalt Sniper.

In my last post I talked about running. What I didn’t mention was that at the end of September I ran my first Half Marathon; 13.1 miles through Jersey City and Liberty State Park. It was a great day and a terrible day all at the same time. My training had gone well and I felt pretty good before the race started. Unfortunately, it was 80 degrees and 90% humidity. The one saving grace was that it was overcast. But perhaps the worst thing that happened that day was that my old friend the Turf Sniper finally made a reappearance. In the slightly more than a year that I’ve been running, I’ve fallen twice, both times during the Newport Liberty Half Marathon. That damn Asphalt Sniper tagged me twice.

About a half mile from the start, surrounded by about 200 people, I ate it…hard. This wasn’t one of your little rinky dink falls. No, this was a limbs flailing, feet going over your head tumble. I distinctly remember having one thought while my view cartwheeled between sky and pavement: Get up! And so, when I finally came to rest, I popped back up and immediately started running again. If I hadn’t, I would never have finished the race, I would’ve been done right there, at the .5 mile mark. I turned to my running partner, we were still running together at that point in the race so she got to see my fall, and said, “It’ll give me something to focus on later.”

I am a prophet. 3 miles later, when I stumbled again (this time not nearly as spectacularly), it didn’t feel like that big a deal. I trotted over to the side of the course, retied my shoes, and started running again. Then, from mile 4 to mile 9, when I thought I might throw up with every step, I just focused on the pieces of gravel embedded in my right palm and the back of my head. And then a strange thing happened at mile 9: I realized not only that I was going to make it, but that I might reach the finish under my target time of 2 hours.

That elated feeling was crushed 2 miles later when some jackass threw a half mile hill in the course at mile 11. But then, finally, the end was in sight. With a quarter mile to go, I looked at my watch and saw that I had only a couple of minutes left. I started kicking and crossed the line with 29 seconds to spare. I don’t think I could’ve gotten through that middle part of the race, those 5 gruelling miles when the humidity really peaked and the blisters on my feet started making themselves known, had I not fallen so early in the race. After that, everything else seemed kind of trivial, and for that I have the Asphalt Sniper to thank. So, here’s to you, Asphalt Sniper.

About a year ago I had a depressing realization: I was fat. Not in a you’re so disgusting other people see you and don’t eat for a week kind of way, but in more of a you just don’t look fit kind of way. Except for a brief period in my freshman year of college, I’ve never been truly physically fit. In high school I was skinny, but there were no athletic qualities to back it up. I wasn’t a sprinter, long distance runner, or lightweight wrestler; I was just small. I think I can best sum it up by quoting Charles S. Dutton’s character from the movie Rudy, “You’re 5 foot nothin’, 100 and nothin’, and you have barely a speck of athletic ability.” Unfortunately, I can’t lay claim to the line that followed it, “And you hung in there with the best college football players in the land for 2 years.” I did deliver one hell of a pizza though.

So there I was, unhappy with my physical state and not quite sure what to do about it. Fortunately, this realization coincided with my wife’s return to grad school. Not only did I need to get into something resembling a shape other than round, but I needed to figure out a way to do it cost effectively. Gym membership got tossed out the window immediately, too expensive. Cycling required an expensive bike and I would also have to drive somewhere where I stood more than a 50/50 chance of being the victim of vehicular homicide. My condo didn’t come with a pool, so that just left running.

My relationship to running is probably a familiar tale to any serious runner. Some days I hate it, some days I love it, some days I don’t care either way. There are times when I would rather do anything else, and I mean anything else, than run. And there are times when I feel like I need to run so badly that I finally understand what it must be like for people with an addiction. Because that’s what running is, an addiction. Once you’ve got the itch, it’s almost impossible to go more than a couple days without scratching it.

Of course, running is not as cost effective as I thought it would be. There’s shoes, socks, shorts, t-shirts, long sleeve t-shirts, shells, jackets, pants, Body Glide (not what you think it is, get your mind out of the gutter), GU (seriously, out of the gutter), etc. And those are the things you need to be a casual runner. If you want to run races there’s a whole other set of purchases required. I know that there are some people who never have and never will run a race, nor do they have a desire to, and that’s fine, because at the root of it, running is a very personal thing.

Everybody comes to running for different reasons. Mine was a desire to feel good, to be “100 and nothin’” again, although this time with a little bit more athletic ability. After 1 year, 6 races, over 350 miles, and 17 pounds, I know two things for certain: I feel pretty good, and I have no intention of stopping.

I was born in New Jersey. My family moved to New York when I was two. I lived there until I was twenty two. That’s twenty years spent living in the Empire state, right on the edge of the greatest city in the world. It would be a monumental lie to claim that I had anything but contempt for New Jersey for most of that two decade span. But after graduating college, I found myself back in New Jersey for the simple (and expedient) reason that this is where I got a job. In the last five years I’ve come to realize one incontrovertible truth: I was a real jackass when I lived in New York. The corollary that has come with this knowledge is that most people that live in New York (and even some that don’t, you know who you are) are still jackasses.

A New Yorker’s hatred, disdain, outright dismissal, etc. for the Garden state stems from a couple of factors. First, most New Yorker’s have only ever seen one piece of New Jersey: the stretch of New Jersey Turnpike between the George Washington Bridge and exit twelve. This is without doubt one of the ugliest strips of real estate in the known world. Second, New York beaches are disgusting, and the fact that the Jersey shore is superior is galling. Let’s examine these egregious reasons for New Jersey hating.

New Jersey is a small state. However, the “petrochemical and refinery strip” encompasses less than .01% of New Jersey’s almost 9,000 square miles. To make the claim that New Jersey is ugly because of that one small section is the equivalent of saying New York is ugly because you’ve driven on the Cross County Parkway (what it lacks in ugliness it makes up for in crime rates). Anyone whose driven further south than exit twelve knows that most of central and southern New Jersey is comprised of forest, farms, and hills. Quite a bit of it, especially in the southern part of the state, is empty. Areas like Princeton and Red Bank and portions (although certainly not all) of the Jersey shore are even picturesque. And that brings us to the second reason I mentioned above.

The Shore, as it is known in New Jersey, is vastly superior to almost all of New York state’s beaches. Now I know that someone is going to throw out the Hamptons as a rebuttal. Yes, the Hamptons are beautiful, but they are off limits for the vast majority of New Yorkers. Only two kinds of people are welcome in the Hamptons: people that own homes there, and guests of people that own homes. You will notice the conspicuous absence of people that actually live in the Hamptons. That’s not an oversight, those people aren’t welcome in the Hamptons either. So before anyone says something about how great the Hamptons are, remember that unless you fit into one of the aforementioned groups, you’re defending a region of New York that wants nothing to do with you.

Instead, let’s talk about the beach that a large portion of New Yorkers have actually been to: Jones Beach. Jones Beach is a wasteland. I think T.S. Elliot had it in mind for his poem of the same name. (This is called hyperbole. It’s not intended as a statement of fact, so please don’t make a comment to that effect.) It’s not a particularly beautiful beach. In fact, it feels kind of unwelcoming. Perhaps the biggest issue with Jones Beach is the people that frequent it. At least at the Shore I can laugh at the muscle-bound idiots with fake orange tans and hair out of a Dragonball Z episode. At Jones Beach, well, let’s just say I’m happy I’ve had a hepatitis vaccination. On occasion, I’ve felt that I could actually benefit from a bout of temporary blindness. Quite frankly, the Jersey Shore, including Jenkinson’s (many a fun evening has been had at Martells and if someone has the temerity to suggest Water Taxi Beach as an alternative they clearly suffer from brain damage), is superior, at least in comparison to what New York has to offer.

I’m sure that this entire post will be roundly ignored by most New Yorkers and will have zero impact on their opinion of the Garden state. I’ve come to recognize that while New York City may be the greatest city in the world, the people that populate it can be anything but. So, this entry is my apology for all my many years of Jersey hating. The notion that New Jersey is called the Garden state for a reason may have taken me along time to arrive at, but I got there eventually.

It should be readily apparent that the title of this post is a corruption of the old axiom, power perceived is power achieved. It is unfortunate though, that my version is also applicable. Whereas the perception of power can translate into actual power (Learned Helplessness, Stanford Prison Experiment), the same is not true when it comes to the quality of professional services. The key component in this discussion is mode of dress. To put it bluntly, why does a suit, as opposed to a t-shirt, equate to professionalism? The distinction, while not wholly arbitrary, is still false. When one individual makes a value judgment based on another’s clothes, they are participating in what the technology industry would refer to as a “legacy” system. (Legacy systems are pieces of software/hardware that are outdated/outmoded, but that you still have to deal with.) The belief that professionalism is somehow related to clothing is a perfect example of a legacy system.

Where once the cut, color, and quality of a person’s clothes determined their position in complex social hierarchies, no less prevalent in America than in Europe, it now determines status in corporate hierarchies. Presumably, the “better” one’s position, the more it pays, and hence, the higher the quality of one’s clothing. In the professional world, the suit (for men and women) is the garment of choice. The more expensive it is, the more well known (in the appropriate circles) the designer’s name is, the higher ranking its wearer. Whether the person wearing the suit got their job through nepotism or ability, brown-nosing or acumen, is irrelevant. When that individual steps in front of a room to make a presentation, or a sales pitch, or deliver a closing argument, the first judgment the intended audience makes is based on appearance, of which clothing is a major component.

Why do we persist in this fallacy? Some would argue that initially, the only metric by which they can gauge the individual in front of them is appearance. I would ask why any judgment is being formulated at so early a stage. It would be far wiser to take that proverb, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” which is perhaps one of the first such truths that we learn and no less valid for being a cliche, to heart. The only thing that matters, is the final product; whether that’s a good defense or a piece of complex software doesn’t matter. The clothes someone was wearing when they delivered that final product aren’t even worth mentioning. The thing is, many, let’s call them casual professionals, never get that far.

My office, for example, is very, for lack of a better phrase, casual. But to say that is a commentary only on how we dress; to take it any further does an immense disservice to the extremely talented men and women with whom I work. Most of us wear a t-shirt and jeans on a regular basis, yet when we meet with clients, we still have to play the game and dress “professionally.” And although we are being hired for what we produce, not how we look doing it, to get the job in the first place, we have to conform to the accepted mold. And that, quite frankly, is ridiculous. I have serious doubts that humans will ever evolve beyond our propensity for snap judgments and fascination with appearance, but I guess I can still hope.

“That is a big cat,” the vet said.

“Big as in, large, or big as in, fat?” I asked.

“Both,” she replied.

“The other one is just as big.”

“Hmm.”

It was at that moment that I finally accepted the truth, my cats are gargantuan. The vet’s pursed lips and disapproving look said it all. Apparently, I’m not fit to rear cats. I wonder what that says about my ability to raise humans? Make no mistake, I agree that my cats are big boned. When they lay on their sides, they look like beached whales. If they were in cat food commercials, they would be plus size models. But let’s face it, no cat food company wants a nineteen pound animal in their commercials. Who would buy food that makes their cat look swollen? On the flip side, if someone ever opens up a Big and Round apparel store, my pets will clean up at those auditions.

The thing is, I’m pretty attached to my cats, and if something were to happen to one of them, I’d be more than a little upset. (Something already happened to one of them, but he recovered, sort of.) We’ve tried different foods, cutting back on their portions, etc. But every year, when I take them for their annual physical, they’re a pound or so heavier. The vet told me to cut their daily allotment in half. We started that about two weeks ago, now one of them spends most of her day laying next to the bowl and tapping it with her paw. If you go into the kitchen, and she’s not already in there, she follows you, just in case you might be thinking of feeding her. I thought the other one was okay with the whole thing, but this morning I walked into the kitchen and saw him staring at the food bowl. They had already cleaned it out. He didn’t acknowledge me; he just stood there, as if he could will food to appear.

Perhaps they’re right. After all, don’t I have an implied covenant with the cats that I will take care of them, and that in return, they’ll be the embodiment of unadulterated awesome (this is how the wife and I refer to anything that our cats do that is cute, brilliant, of passing interest, not of any importance whatsoever, etc.)? Starvation, which is, I’m sure, how they would describe it if they had vocal chords, and brains capable of higher thought, is not a part of our tacit agreement. And yet, I know that helping them lose weight is more important than their efforts to make me feel bad. It just doesn’t feel that way.

We used to have Roman shades in our living room. You know what Roman shades are even if you don’t know what they’re called. Here’s a picture to help you out. Basically, a Roman shade is a series of pleats that collapse or expand from the bottom up as you raise or lower the shade. They look nice and are neither cheap nor ridiculously expensive, depending of course upon where you purchase them. Unfortunately, I have something else in my living room, two cats. My cats, as felines are wont to do, enjoy chewing on just about anything, paper, plastic, tin cans, and of course, string. Roman shades work on a fairly simple principle, there are n number of strings running vertically up the back of the shade through rings, then across the headrail through eye-hooks, where they are bundled together at one end and form the cord for manipulating the shade. Now imagine what happens when one, or more, of those strings is cut, or in my case, chewed through. Maybe one side of the shade goes up, or maybe both ends but not the middle, there are many possible permutations to this, depending on the number of strings that have been severed and the number that are still whole.

It would be rather stupid to just fix the shades (something that is actually pretty simple to do) and then rehang them because the aforementioned felines would just ruin them again. So, after restringing the shades, I hung them in the bedroom where they are no longer in danger. This means, however, that I need to buy new shades for the living room so that the people in the apartment building across the street can’t see what we’re eating for dinner and watching on TV. Of course, now there are restrictions: the replacement shades cannot contain any exposed string. Last I checked, they don’t make shades out of chain mail. We finally settled on roller shades that have a metal chain for raising and lowering the shade. After I put them up, we enjoyed a solid twenty minutes of watching the cats chew on the metal chain, thankfully to no effect. Round two to the ones with opposable thumbs.

However, the title of this entry contains the word “series,” so obviously there’s something else to talk about. What makes item number two so much more irritating than the shades, is that it was a toilet. Toilets should not break, and in fact, they rarely do. Typically, if there’s something wrong with your toilet, than there has always been something wrong with it. Most toilet issues can be solved easily as they usually involve one of the moving parts inside the tank. It takes about a minute to replace a decaying flap, adjust the length of the chain, or the position of the flushing arm. For something more serious, say replacing the entire flushing mechanism, it takes about twenty minutes. Clogs can be handled with a variety of tools, ranging from drain cleaner to plungers. What you can’t fix, and so of course is the problem I have, is a cracked bowl. We’re not talking something huge, like say, the crack in the Liberty Bell. No, we’re talking about a hairline fracture, not even visible when you look at the toilet. Of course, the bowl being completely empty all the time is a dead giveaway that there’s something wrong with the porcelain throne. This kind of problem is not fixable; you have to replace the toilet.

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, we’ve owned our condo for less than a year and the developer is still doing work in the building. We seem to be playing the game where they stall until I get frustrated enough to take care of the problem on my own. We’ve been playing this game for a couple months now. First, I called over to the management company and told them the issue. They sent their plumber out to take a look. He told me, “The toilet bowl is defective.” I’m ecstatic. Anyway, I then call the management company again (they never call me first, nor do they return phone calls) and ask what they’re going to do about it. “We’ll call the developer and see what they want to do,” is the answer. OK. A couple days go by, I call them again. “Still haven’t heard back from the developer. We’ll call again.” I’m thinking, thank god we have two bathrooms. Finally, they say they’ve ordered a new toilet and they’re going to come over and replace the broken one. When they finally do show up, they don’t have a new toilet with them because they want to check something else. As if it would magically have fixed itself. I’m sure there will be a different excuse next time.

I’m hoping that this time around, I won’t have to pay the expense of a new toilet. But I have no illusions that some other unforeseen issue isn’t right around the corner. After all, we just noticed that the washer fluid reservoir in the car is completely empty, even though I refilled it a week ago. The point is, there will always be something else. The number of “something elses” is proportional to the amount, complexity, and expense (typically, the more complex something is, the more it costs) of stuff you own. Like Murphy’s Law, unexpected expenditures are a fact of life, and sometimes it seems that you go from one issue to the next. Hopefully, you have enough squirreled away to cover whatever crops up next.

I’ve come to the, admittedly, shocking conclusion that I want to be a father, someday. If that statement seems somewhat ambivalent, than it accurately captures how I feel. Five years ago, I would’ve said, no children…ever. However, I’m known for making definitive statements that typically require a retraction at some later date. (One retraction was delivered no more than five minutes after the initial comment. Tasty fruit, anyone?) About three and a half years ago, my fiancee and I had “the talk.” If you are married, engaged, or planning to do either of the former, you know the conversation to which I’m referring. It’s the conversation in which the topic of little ones, religion, and which set of parents get you for which holiday is discussed. I’m kidding about the last one, maybe, but the other two are pretty important. Let me pause here and say this, if you are married and didn’t have that conversation, and don’t plan to, well, best of luck to you.

Where was I? Oh yes, kids and religion. They go hand-in-hand don’t they? People who are not religious have children, and then it suddenly becomes important, for both parties. Religious people, regardless of which religion they practice, already have children on their radar. It’s important to them that their children be raised in the same religion. Either way, the conversation is made easier when the two people involved share some similarities, such as wanting to actually reproduce and practicing the same religion. In my case, it was maybe to the former and yes to the latter, although most people who know me might disagree with the word, “practice” (I’m applying the term extremely loosely). Of course, my desire to not reproduce had been tempered somewhat by my nephew, who had made the concept of tiny humans cool, so long as they weren’t mine. In the end, my fiancee and I concluded our conversation with the agreement that we would revisit the topic of children in the future, where both the topic and the possible offspring should be.

I guess my wife knows me pretty well, because here we are, coming up on our third anniversary, and the thought of having children someday no longer makes me feel like spontaneously puking. When I walk through the park on the way to work every morning, I see a lot of kids playing and laughing and generally having a good time. Sometimes I smile. But I don’t think I’m ready yet. After all, my wife and I still refer to any future progeny as spawn, and the other day, when she used the word baby in the same context as us, I got a little nervous. Then there’s the fact that a friend of mine, recently married with no kids, detailed what I thought was a hilarious method of punishment: Lock a kid in a dark closet with a rubber hose and the sound of a rattlesnake. I think that’s funny, in a purely theoretical way, today. When I stop thinking its funny, I’ll be one step closer to being ready to have kids.

The most telling thing, however, may be how my wife and I seem to be taking these steps toward our very own miniature human (any child my wife and I produce will be lucky to top out at 5′5″) together. We were in a Ski shop recently and I saw the tiniest pair of mittens I’ve ever seen, when I pointed them out to my wife, she said, “Those make my uterus hurt.” My uterus didn’t hurt, probably because I don’t have one, but if I did, I’m sure it would have. Instead, I had all these great mental images of teaching my kids to snowboard, taking them to soccer games, inducting them into the lifelong suffering of being a NY Jets fan, whatever. I thought about watching R rated movies with them after making them swear not to tell their mother (thanks, dad). I think sometime, in the no longer distant future, I’ll have to retract my initial statement on reproducing. What’s more, I’m pretty sure I’ll be happy to do so, but not yet.

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