not quite sure what to talk about this morning, what thoughts to entertain my own mind with since we came back from the coastal sands of barcelona, what ideas may spring from a head largely overcrowded and eyes still full of stars. the truth is, i came back to my house on the banks of new york's lovely hudson river less than ...
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we are prisoners.

not of any penal institution in particular but of self-perception. stuck there by what i would begrudgingly admit to resembling obvious, lazy, predictable comfort. lucky or unlucky to have been dropped off by the holy vagina in a land that we grow to alternatively love or hate, a lot of us seem to willingly glue our own feet to the ground in the name of patriotism, xenophobia or transportation angst and, in so doing, forego what is, in my opinion, a tremendous opportunity to unveil and understand the connections between the microcosmic world of our little lives and the macrocosmic world of everything else: foreign-soiled experiences. mere traveling, in comparison, pales to the aforementioned for it pre-supposes a journey unstoppable, bursting with tours along the way, photos in front of leaning towers and guide-recommended cafés. but i believe that our current set of circumstances, chiefly technological and financial, affords us the luxury, unheralded for the most part, to care more for the globe and less about the trotting.

nothing helps us predictable species to step out of ourselves to make considered choices better than stepping out of the over-valued, over-flattered and over-sung country in which we were born. escaping our familiar contexts seems to me one of the better and most tangible reset buttons that life, in its wise wisdom, has seen fit to make us believe was our idea. better than movies, better than meth, better than the internet. it was instrumental in my, and probably every immigrant’s, path to take the opportunity to restart, to re-consider not only mere causes and consequences of a self unborn or gone astray but notions of citizenry and how they might affect identity. such migrations do not necessarily have to mean visa-stamping and language-learning, they can start within the hallowed boundaries of a single ...
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from a very young age, and much against the will and patience of their easily-satisfied ears, i have tried to challenge my children’s aural appreciation of the world with equal parts monk, bartok and d’angelo; not just to teach them the varied values of a note but also to gauge what their reaction might be to each and more ways to dispense harmony. presumed as-of-yet uncontaminated by the muddled cacophony of the daily racket that plagues the modern human, my thinking was that they might be, in some way, purer than us in their ability to, perhaps, recognize good as opposed to fashionable music. i always believed that there existed a possibility that children may listen to music as it is meant, as a language, whereas we adults lay on top of our melodious experiences a number of layers, be they of taste, opinion, influence or inherited arbitrary classifications, inevitable when comparing and contrasting the works of joy division with that of ...
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my disbelief in mankind's perfectibility took a turn for the irreparable on tuesday june 15th 2010 when i found myself unable to put through an order for apple's latest revolution due to miraculously unforeseen traffic on at&t's servers. i should have stopped there had i known what was in store for me...

sure, i'm an early adopter, the earliest kind there is actually. but on that day, i felt lazy. why indeed should i leave the comfort of my compound for the city whose big lights might inspire me but whose noisy and nerd-crowded streets are lately doing little for my peace-seeking brain. so came wednesday and since, ever the loyal subject, i purchased the iPhone 3GS on this same date last year, i was ineligible for the deep discount myself. my wife, ever the loyal object, pitched in and bought me the phone from her account, eligible since nary a purchase had been made in the past 3 years. i had been assured by an at&t representative that the switch from one number (hers) to another (mine) would be an easy one, all done remotely, all within 24 hours at the most... happy, i gladly overpaid for a dock and a bumper and i was on my way to feverishly waiting!

as the first wave of black glass noisily started to make its way from the world's factory floor, i kept my cool seeing that my particular handset would not, due to unforeseeable high order volume, land in my hands the first week the quick would undoubtedly broadcast breathtaking unboxing videos displaying their "i'm better than you" faces whereas the dead would cower in shame, pretending none of this shit was actually important. right? right.

finally, after totally forgetting about it for a while, i received, on friday july 2nd, an electronic notice that my golden ticket had left the flowered alleyways of the foxconn factory ...
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happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday the apartment... happy birthday to you!

that's right, as some of you who follow my tweets will already know, the apartment passed the award-worthy age of 10 this past weekend. i think that you already know from two posts down from this one, where we began, on july 3rd 2000 and where we now find ourselves; so i wanted to dedicate today's column to the aptly-named good people at the apartment without which no such adventure might have been possible. an enterprise as strong and entertaining as this one seems to be can only stand on the diverse foundation provided by the strangers one finds along the way. these are the strangers upon whose shoulders the apartment built its name:

alex levine
adam patrizia
aida villa
alain boublil
alex roberts
alexa kurneikis
alice cho
alison fonte
anching huang
andrew kenney
andrew kuo
andrew lim
anne mcclain
anthony castro
ariko
becka citron
belmont ...
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because my children were conscientiously kidnapped last saturday by their benevolent grandparents, gina and i found ourselves alone, spread over the 500-counts of our sleeping platform, confused and disoriented for lack of orders to give lifeforms smaller than us, and ended up flipping through the channels of the idiot box, large and looming above us, finally settling on the windy world's episode of natgeo's how the earth changed history series. sure, you might think, what a missed opportunity to give way to our loudest sexual fetishes given that the house lays empty and far from the nearest sugar-borrowing neighbor. and you'd be right albeit for the complete and utter lack of desire my beautiful wife feels for the slowly yet inevitably melting stack of butter my body resembles. regardless, there we were, watching handsome-ish professor iain stewart take us from the far reaches of the sahara desert to the great wall of china by way columbus' discoveries, explaining to us lowlives the impact of mere wind on the evolution of human civilizations. and it got me thinking, don't you know...

neither of any grand realization about the importance of pushed air nor about macrocosmic appreciation of nature over our over-inflated egos mind you, but about the fact that i've been nowhere! sure, i've been a tourist aplenty but, really, i've been nowhere... i've come to a point in my life where nature documentaries are starting to get on my nerves because they keep showing off places on earth that i have not seen for myself and all i can think about is how the sought-out comfort of my past 40 years seems to have replaced the taste for adventure that got me here in the first place. so i turned to gina, my equally sated life-companion, and asked, naively: would we ever be the kind of family that takes a year off with the kids to travel the world, say, pick a country a month as ...
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i don’t believe. nay, i refuse to believe. in anything. not that i am unmoved by powder’s school-mates when they ask the adults to indulge in such a procedure but i find utterly unnecessary the action of accepting as true what one cannot empirically verify. i do not stand, however, against the romantic appeal of faith, i too want to feel the force, i too want to believe in magic. but i think there is so ...
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this won't be long, i promise. i just have a bit of a bone to pick with superlatives... i know it might sound weird coming from verbose lil' ole me but there are few things in life that bother me more than the apparently innocuous answer of "great" to the largely un-meant question of "how you doing?" are we talking about the same thing? great? |grāt| adjective - of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above the normal or average? is this really how you're doing? i didn't think so, nobody is great! apart from brian austin green, naturally. but this is yet another example of the oral viruses quickly gaining ground across all manners of members of the human race. un-aided ...
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please don't expect me to deal with anything of any depth today. last night was the lost finale and my head is still spinning from all the confusion... i won't go into detail out of respect for those with the still-unplayed 2.5 dvr hours but i am still wrestling with the capping of a 6-year investment. i was really quite happy with the first 2 hours and 20 minutes, minus the incredible frequency of commercial time but then, out of nowhere, nothing. nothing, no explanation but a ...
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i am mentally exhausted this morning and unable to probe much of any depth i'm afraid. lucky you! that's because that last week presented me with the hardest professional dilemma of my career and my fragile noggin' is still reeling from the implications...

having dully signed an nda, i can unfortunately not share with you the details of the matter formerly at hand but i can tell you that the aforementioned conundrum tested every fiber of my sense of morality. as broadly as i can paint this picture, it went a little something like this:

last ...
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as an unlikely father of two in so-called modern society, i am, mostly against my will, in constant contact with objects of childhood. from diapers, co-sleepers and placenta under-the-bed storage bins to begin with; to, inevitably, primary colored toys, midget-sized blazers and sadly interactive books, the ones with built-in finger puppets. little by little, you whittle down your selections to the aesthetics that perturb least your sense of right and wrong and hope for the best. but at some point, and i'm afraid i may have reached that juncture, you turn around to look over your thoughtfullly-erected domain and bear witness to the fact that you are but the proud king to a pile of crap. and not just any crap but crap that was once in a perfectly engineered package which tried its best to convince you that said crap, if anything, would elevate your child's brain to unforetold heights. fact is, when you look around in any store where plastic is celebrated as a god, you see that everything marketed to kids is supposedly "educational." very few packaged toys are ever specifically designed or sold ...
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so it was earth day last week, i'm told. truth is, if sting isn't singing fragile somewhere, i'm less than interested in helping... there really wasn't much activity around the yearly consciousness drive this time, i guess saving the planet has become a bit of a hobby at this point, nothing much more than that. and, actually, why does it always have to be "the planet" that we save? why are we always being asked to save the world in order to make a difference? it’s a shame that every time somebody feels that a change is necessary in their lives, it has to be about making a difference, not just in their life, but in everybody’s. as scary a topic as the environment is, i’m with george carlin on ...
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