Monday, January 29, 2007

Back In the Day

Oh, and as an addendum to my previous post, said 7ARTS student showed me that particular clip becuase I was "probably around when people did this kind of stuff."

Sunday, January 28, 2007

B-Boy Stance

One of my students at 7ARTS showed me this, its fucking great.
"Thats hip hop, thats the struggle. Hip hop is basically the struggle to bring beverages to your mouth."


Saturday, January 27, 2007

Back That Ass Up...











I'm blogging from the Apple store right now killing some time. Its a long story.


My Treo 650 crashed on Thursday.

I'm not sure what happened, but it ended up in an endless loop of resetting itself never reaching the main page. I did a soft reset which stopped the endless looping, but froze me out of my applications. Anytime I tried to get into my applications it would go into looping re-set mode again. I tried a system reset and a warm reset (basically I didn't want to do a hard reset and delete all my data), neither of those worked.

Ok, hard reset it was going to be.

Only problem, I hadn't backed up my treo in like two months because it takes so damn long (I have to hold the cable just right for it to start, like resetting the old 8-bit nintendo, I think I even blew dust off the cables). I thought, even though I can't get to my applications I can still hot sync my phone, back up my shit then do a hard re-set and restore all my data from my iMac right? I tried to sync and it actually started up, but then cut me off becuse I needed to delete files to continue. My smart phone was so bloated it wouldn't sync. But I couldn't get to any of my applications and delete the pics and movies that were probably clogging my phone.

Hmm...I deleted my entire call log and all my text messages ands tried again. No luck, still too fat a phone. And I couldn't figure out how to get to a delete-files option without going through apps which would just reset me again. I thought about e-mailing Palm, but every time I've asked them shit like this in the past they've told me just do a hard reset and I didn't want to wait a day. Maybe there was something else I could have done, but whatever. At this point I needed my phone working again so I just bit the bullet and went through my calendar and contacts and manually made sure anything important on my phone was also on my computer so I could do the hard reset and restore my information. God, I've got to be better about backing up. So I resolve to move my shit permanently to my new MacBook so I can just sync by Bluetooth and not have to pray for my USB cables to work.

I start looking at Missing Sync so I can move over to my MacBook and use iCal and stuff (I'm getting tired of Palm Desktop, its clunky and I hate Entourage, which we use at work) and then all of a sudden my MacBook freezes and I get ordererd to do a hard reset of my computer. I restart and the same shit happens at different intervals. Sometimes I get to log into my user account, other times I launch an app but same shit,it freezes and I have to restart. Now I'm shitting bricks, I never had my jobs' IT guy put my MacBook on our back up schedule (we use Retrospect) thinking I'd be fine. I've got all my work filed on there not backed up and I’m going through crazy job transition so if I lost my files I’d have been fucked. I didn’t know how long my computer would be working for so I looked for something to back up to. I lent my iPod to a friend so I couldn’t use that, I burned some CDs, but my work folder is too big for CDs so I ended up running to Radio Shack and buying a way-overpriced 4GB USB drive and backing everthing up onto that. I plugged it in and I prayed my MacBook would stay on long enough for the files to transfer, which it did.

I’m an idiot, I knew that some of the earlier MaBooks had had shutdown problems (including a couple of my co-workers) and even though I got mine recently from my job they had actually purchased it much earlier. Once I backed everything up I started reading online and found out what a widespread problem it is. It looks like its probably has to do with the heat sink. I even found another guy's blog who highlighted a numerical range of MacBook serial numbers that this problems is likely to affect. Of course mine was smack in the middle.

I'm lucky, I'm at the tail end of the warranty period so hopefully I can get this shit fixed and the genises at Apple won't give me any bullshit. This has all been quite scary. Back up baby, back up.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Manhattan Half Marathon


Just got this picture e-mailed to me by the race photographer.

In the annals of athletic follies, I think me trying to run the
Manhattan half marathon in a flimsy pair of shorts (some 2-year old, 10-dollar Modells joints) and no gloves in something like 20-degree weather has gotta be up (or down) there. I ran the worst time ever for a half of the five I've done so far. I walked chunks of it and got passed by all forms of human life. It was so cold my hands and belly became so numb it felt like local anesthetic. I pinched a chunk of my gut hard just because it felt so absurd. It was like holding really cold soft clay. I stopped a couple of times in a porto-potty for like 10 minutes just to try and get some feeling in my extremities. Some 8,000 people entered this race and I think I noticed one person not wearing gloves, me. But, I finished, so I guess I'm happy with that. And I think I had enough of a final kick to pass a couple of old ladies at the end.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

I'm Just Raising Money For My...

Riding the subways in New York City I’ve for years seen tons of kids selling candy bars at all hours of the day. At first, they claimed to be raising money for their basketball teams. Then that got ridiculous, so some kids started to come with the real and just say that they weren’t raising any money for their team just trying to make some money for themselves. As it evolved, some more kids tried to put more of a public service spin on it, saying “we’re trying to do something productive with ourselves and not be out there robbing and stealing”, a plea that always seems to imply a threat. Keep me off the streets and out of your pockets. The kids are invariably “urban” (hip hop dress, black and Latino) and nine times out of ten speak in a dull robotic monotone that makes their pitch especially creepy. Other kids claim to be raising money for a senior class trip though I would think that wandering the subways between 9 AM and 3 PM on school days might jeopardize their chance of even being allowed on that trip. My favorite was the kid who departed from the script and told me that this was my “opportunity to transform an entire generation.” Who knew some overpriced Snickers could do all that? I almost bought a piece of his candy out of sheer admiration for his theatrics.

But I never buy candy from those kids, not because I think that they’re untrustworthy, but mainly it pains me to see young kids using their time in what seems like such a colossally wasteful way. They sell candy for a $1.00 apiece and probably get it 50 cents wholesale (I have no idea who their suppliers are), I think they average selling 1 piece of candy per subway car I see them in (this is actually generous because a lot of their cars are zeroes) and their whole pitch takes about 2.5 minutes (30-second spiel then walking up and down the car), assuming maximum efficiency they can hit about 24 cars in an hour and maybe make $24 in gross sales, $12 net split among two kids (its always two-man teams) I figure 6 bucks an hour. Admittedly, this is better than flipping burgers for minimum wage and this is all take home (something tells me this income doesn’t get reported to Uncle Sam). But this doesn’t the factor dead time waiting for subways. (I’d love to interview one of these kids as an economics study, this sounds like some shit that Stephen Levitt would do, maybe someone did, if so let me know-I didn’t find anything when I Googled it).

I also wouldn’t be surprised if all my numbers are pretty off and this is actually even more profitable, especially if they do what any good salesperson does and play law of averages and pitch to as many people as possible to get to those yes faster. When I did door-to-door sales, it was all about getting through nos. Every no brought me closer to the next yes, I just had to keep it moving to get paid.

But it’s the opportunity cost of their time that gets to me. Even this is profitable from an accounting standpoint (cost of candy versus price of candy) the cost of their time away from school and other meaningful learning pains me. Getting back to money it’s a pretty negative impact on their future earnings. So while I its cash now, judging by the gear the kids are wearing I think that the money is being invested in stuff that depreciates pretty quickly in value.

If that wasn’t bad enough, because the scripts are so cookie cutter I wonder who the central brains behind this are. It reminds me of the deaf Mexican women selling key chains in the subways in the 90s. It ended up being some slave ring and the sweet women trying to sell us pencils and key chains were immigrant slaves being abused and beaten. Incredibly, when the ring was first busted, I read that each person was supposed to sell 100 pieces a day or face a beating. Selling a 100 of those little shit trinkets in one day on the subways is a fucking insane workload; I figured you’d have to put in 15-hour days to find all those sales. I was horrified when I realized how centralized and organized it was, for the benefit of a few. While I don’t think some candy kingpin is abusing these kids (though who knows?) a centralized system for this probably means big profits for that one person (or people) running this shit and peanuts for these kids.


Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Difficult Conversations-or Rather, Head Meets Sand

“Chicken enchiladas”
“Chicken enchiladas?”
“Uh…yeah… chicken enchiladas”

Our order complete we waited for our food. Dennis’ steak came first, followed by Thomas’ two tacos (pork and tongue). I eagerly awaited my enchiladas. When my plate came out I looked down and it didn’t look like chicken enchiladas. It was also missing the rice and beans that were supposed to accompany it. Instead I had sliced grilled chicken on a bed of lettuce surrounded by a circle of sliced avocado wedges. Clearly, this was the wrong dish.
“She though you ordered chicken EN SALADA” said D. “Now that I think about it, I wasn’t sure what you were saying either.”
“Shit, that’s why she asked me twice. Damn it, why didn’t I just point?”
“Well what are you going to do?
“I guess I’ll ask if they can switch it.” But I felt horrible because this was clearly not either person’s fault. I had probably mumbled my order just as possibly as the waitress misheard me. The waitress came over and I asked her I could switch my salad with enchiladas. She apologized saying she thought I had ordered the salad. She then left to tell the cook to prepare my order and everything seemed fine. One problem. She left the salad on the table.
“Yo why’d they leave the salad? Aren’t they going to take it back?” I asked.
“Haha they’re going to charge you for both!”
“No c’mon, they have to take it back. This salad will be gross by tomorrow and I don’t want to eat them both right now.”
“They’re testing you-you take one bite of that it will be on your check,” said D.
“Well I’m not touching it. I know it’s not their fault that the order went wrong but they should still take it back.” I said this confidently, but I felt wracked with guilt. Shouldn’t I just pay for both dishes? This was a small restaurant, the waitress’ English was far from perfect and my mumbling probably was the reason they screwed up the order. Of course the customer is always right and good restaurant service, I imagine, would dictate that they eat the mistake and keep me happy as a patron, but this wasn’t some four-star restaurant, it was actually just a few steps above a hole in the wall. What if they took it out of her pay? I’ve got a good job, I’m well educated, pretty privileged. Why don’t I just pay for the fucking salad? NO! This isn’t fair-I shouldn’t have to pay twice. Why are they doing this to me? Why don’t they just take the salad back? I wanted enchiladas, not a morel dilemma. They’ll have to take it back I told myself. They’ll take it back when they bring out the enchiladas right?
I convinced myself of this and sat back and waited. When the enchiladas came out I thanked the waitress for her understanding and accepted the order. She quickly turned and returned to the kitchen without so much as even looking at the salad.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I asked Thomas and Dennis.
“They’re going to charge you for it.” D said.
“How am I supposed to confront this situation-I don’t even know if I should pay for this or not?” First, I wanted to avoid the difficult conversation and second, my privileged bleeding heart liberal guilt screamed at me to just pay for the damn salad and suck it up. I couldn’t even decide on a course of action. I just prayed they would take the damn thing back and not force things to a head. I ate the enchiladas, guilt-ridden, sweating, as I stared at the grilled chicken on the lettuce bed. I pushed it away and didn’t even so much as breathe on it. I was hoping they would get the hint. The three of us quickly cleaned off our plates and the only thing left on our table was the still pristine salad. It looked pretty ridiculous. “It looks pretty good, don’t you want some?” Dennis said.
“Shut up man, I’m not touching it.” We sat and waited for what seemed like an eternity for the check. A bus boy came and cleared our plates and we sat at a bare table save for that damn salad. Finally, the waitress came over and looked at me and asked,
“Do you want to eat that now or do you want to wrap that up?” The moment of truth had arrived. I could strap on a pair of balls and tell her I wasn’t paying for the salad or just give in and acknowledge my mistake and just eat (literally) the cost. I mustered up my courage and said.
“I don’t want to pay for the salad, I know it was a mistake but I do not want to pay for it.”
“I’m sorry, my English is not so good.” Ok, now my guilt was starting to lessen, she was trying to play me. She wasn’t a native English speaker and she clearly didn’t understand my mumbling of “enchiladas”, but she knew damn well what I was saying. So I said it again, slower.
“I am not paying for this.”
“Oh, ok.” She walked away to the back and talked to the cook and then she went to the front. The salad remained. 15 minutes went by as the three of us and the grilled chicken salad sat in awkward silence. Thomas and Dennis dropped their heads as if they wanted to fall off the face of the earth and never be associated with me again.
“We can never come here again, thanks Jason.” Dennis said.
“Can we just pay for our own stuff and leave you here?” Thomas asked.
“Why is this taking so long? Oh geez, am I going to get my ass kicked by the manager?” I started to actually worry. Finally, another waitress came over and looked at me, pointed at the salad and asked, “Was this a mistake?” I nodded sheepishly, barely making eye contact and she took the salad back to the kitchen. After nearly an hour of its undesired companionship the salad had finally left our table. “Well, we’re in the clear now right?” I asked. “They took the salad back, they said it was a mistake.” All that was left was to receive our corrected check and we could sail out free men.
Another fifteen minutes dragged by as we waited for our check. None of the servers came near our table and when they walked by fetching orders for other customers no one even glanced in our direction. Short of physically grabbing someone we couldn’t get anyone’s attention to give us our check. “Are they going to keep us here until I pay for the salad?” I asked. The awkwardness had reached a boiling point. We shuffled our feet, made bullshit small talk and watched as they seated new patrons, took orders and moved back and forth from the kitchen. Finally, one of the servers presented us with our check (the same woman who had taken my salad). We quickly looked at it to see if they had charged us for the salad and we saw a crossed out line that clearly said “chicken enchiladas” and appeared to formerly had said “chicken en salada. Success! They were not billing me for the mistake. We could pay and leave all this ugliness behind us. Or so we thought. The three of us each threw in our share of the check and we found that we were still about six bucks short. Confused, we each recited the amount we had thrown in against the prices of what we had ordered and each of us were comfortably covering our tax and tip. This was an odd situation because when any of us are out in our circle of friends we’re never short, always over. No one wants to be the guy short changing the group so this was weird. Then Dennis caught what they had done: “Shit, they included the salad in the total price even though they took it out of the list of items.” Now this was fucked up. What were we supposed to do? If we shorted the total, we were technically skipping on the bill Thomas pointed out. But the math clearly did not add up (“What the hell were they thinking? We’re Asian, of course we were going to add this shit up.” Dennis cracked) and they were still sticking us with the salad charge despite what they told us and even though they had crossed out the salad on the check. After some discussion, we arrived at a compromise, we’d throw in a couple extra bucks so that we’d come very close to the total written on the check (34 bucks instead of 34.70) but we didn’t throw in a cent more than that so that we were comfortably covering tax and tip for what we had ordered (not counting the salad) but were coming very respectably close to the total they listed on the check (which included the salad). We stuck the cash in the leather case, quickly gathered our things and filed out, not daring to look at anyone and hustled to the subway.
This dumb shit could only happen to my dumb ass. Why didn’t I just point at the item on the damn menu? Why didn’t I say something right away instead of sitting in awkward silence with a damn salad staring me in the face? Ironically, I’m hosting a brown bag reading at work on Difficult Conversations and I couldn’t even confront a grilled chicken salad. I’m still trying to figure out what my take aways from this scenario are. On the subway, Dennis and I joked about writing a business school case study about this entire encounter as a way to look at communication and decision-making. HBR, here we come! Maybe we could get funding to work on this and interview all the key stakeholders. The joking lightened my mood a little.

But I was still hungry; maybe I should have taken the salad to go.

Monday, January 15, 2007

What is the What

I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, everyday until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people that will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.

Valentino Achak Deng and Dave Eggers



This is the close of "What is the What" which is at once a beautiful and inspiring passage, but also a challenge. As impossible as it may be for the reader to pretend that the narrator Valentino does not exist, the reader llkely has. That I, and numerous others, have pretended other people do not exist is the reason that Valentino has to fill the air with his words.

I just finished this book, which I'm still processing. Its an incredible achievement and I will need to read this a few more times to really digest it. Immediately, I thought to other books I've read and am reading: 1) We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda , 2) Che, what cost rebellion/revolution? 3) Shake Hands with the Devil and the film Men With Guns (aren't they all just men with guns...?)

The narrator has a website with background information on Sudan and ways to take action. For more information on the book, check out McSweeneys, the publisher's home page.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Am I supposed to be a grown up now?

God, my procrastinating ways haven't changed. I have a grant report due to a foundation funder due tomorrow for my job and instead of finishing it I'm goofing off at 2 in the morning.

I'm thinking I need a "tweener" social networking site. Friendster seems like that bar that nobody goes to anymore, but I'm not quite young enough to be on MySpace (I feel really creepy there. Maybe its just all the really garrish design unleashed by a horrible combination of the sad state of art education in America and the power of the internet). Blue says MySpace picture is horrifying and that no one will ever approve me as their friend. I like it. Either way, soon I'll be old enough for eHarmony and Eons.




Tuesday, January 02, 2007

So You Think You Can Dance?

A pretty significant move I made recently was leaving the dance troupe I had been a member of over 3 plus years, La Tormenta Oriental (“The Eastern Storm”).

Tormenta, right before the NY Salsa Congress

It was a very tough decision, dancing, performing and my dance teammates were a very big part of my life. I even stayed on the team while going to school full-time at Wagner, working part time at Explore, and running 7ARTS. It was fucking insane. But after three years with one dance team and one director I felt like I needed to learn more from other instructors and dancers. New York City is arguably the world’s capital for salsa/mambo dance (if not dance in general)
and to not be taking advantage of all of the great instructors here just didn’t make sense anymore and I needed time away from rehearsing and performing to do that.

Winsome is a great dancer, teacher, choreographer and director and I recommend her to anyone learning to dance salsa, but no one gets really good at anything listening to only one voice and I was feeling a little boxed in by the time committment of rehearsals and shows.


So I took the leap. I’ve been taking Delille Thomas' Mens Styling Class. One of the areas I had always felt really weak as a salsa dancer was my upper-body styling. My partner work is solid (though I could definitely push the complexity of my turn patterns much more, and the strength of my connection with my partner tends wig in and out) but as a solo dancer doing shines (open footwork) I look really awkward. It seemed like everyone I talked to said Delile was the guy to go to for mens styling in salsa and its been a very interesting experience. As a dancer he has a background in jazz and afro-cuban dance so I’ve been learning how much work I have to do in strengthening my core (ass, abs, lower back) to generate the kind of movements that really flavor salsa beyond just being a social/ballroom/partner dance. Its great because its less a "salsa class" but more just a dancer's technique class which is exactly what I want right now. The overall curriculum is a little haphazard and not quite as organized as Winsome's classes are, but whatever Delille teaches he breaks down to its very most fundamental movements so what he's doing is actually very accessible.

Axel (my high school and middle school classmate, former co-worker and former dance teammate) and I have also been kicking around the idea of taking a jazz class. There is a basic jazz class at Broadway Dance taught by Sue Samuels that Delile recommended. I hear jazz classes in NYC are fucking insane even at the beginner levels because everyone is a pro of some type, but I say fuck it. I spent years making an ass of myself to learn salsa, what’s one more dance style? Seriously though, the exercises are supposed to strengthen your core, improve your balance, spins and lengthen your muscles so I think it will be a cool new experience.

I also checked out a beginner African Dance class at the Djoniba studio taught by the man, Djoniba himself. The class was fucking insane. The ab workout was bananas and the routine he taught us was really long. I really liked the class and I came pretty close to learning the routine which wasn't bad for my first time ever doing this type of dance. I think I’m going to try to keep going, even though it was mad embarrassing that he learned my name in the first ten minutes and kept calling me out whenever I fucked up a move (often). After class he did tell Axel and I that we looked "pretty coordinated" and that if we stuck around he needed some male dancers for a show in June. But I think he just needs guys in his classes in general, the class was pretty heavily female, not that I had a problem with that.

Oh, and for you Astoria (or greater Queens) heads, Michelle "The Dancing Machine" Fei is teaching a beginner salsa class at Astoria Dance Centre starting January 9th on Tuesday evenings. Check out her MySpace page or her flyer for more information.