- things i should have added to my "so i moved washington d.c. list" -

19. I'm somewhat ashamed at how much I enjoy the change in my family's lifestyle now that we've left New York. Washington is practically the exact opposite of the diversity and crush of life in New York that I had fallen in love with.

I always loved Queens, in particular, because it felt like raw, unfiltered Truth. The problems were real. The people were real. Manhattan, on the other hand, seemed like a tiny pocket of excess that was usually funded by inherited or illegitimately-obtained wealth. Brooklyn, at least the parts north of Prospect Park, grew in my mind to the same thing as Manhattan, but with more self-righteousness. People that lived in Queens, by contrast, had usually earned their way there, carving their lives into the harsh landscape. It was to the point that I had to keep myself from blurting out "Whitman lives here!" whenever I was walking under the 7 Train in Jackson Heights or biking my way through the crowds at Flushing's Main Street.

Compared to Queens or even Manhattan and Brooklyn, Washington feels practically fake -- like the set of a movie, complete with moderately attractive extras that are shipped in to quietly chatter in the background. Everything's perfectly manicured. Every garden is lush with flowers. The people are uniformly polite and articulate. There are huge numbers of fit people, running or biking, everywhere I look. Public schools here are not just feasible options, but they're actually fantastic educational opportunities. 

I recognize that this is, in large part, a fiction that working and living in the right parts of town offers. If I were to take the Green line in either direction, I'd imagine that I'd be exposed to a completely different side of the city. But, I suppose the real point of my reflection (and transition) is that maybe I'm ready to lie to myself for a little while.

20. Reverse California couples! Maybe it's just that they stand out more here, but I've seen more Asian men arm-in-arm with white women than any place other than California. 

21. Black nerds! I love it. Unabashed, NASA-scientist, bicycle-spandex wearing nerds. 

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of hyper-smart black guys in New York. But they, like most New Yorkers, have an edge. Raymond McGuire comes to mind when I think of a super-smart NYC black guy. He's radiates intelligence, but also oozes an incredible smoothness and deadly cool. McGuire is a corporate lawyer and banking executive, packaged as a jungle cat on the prowl.

Here, perhaps because of the movie-set fiction that is Washington, you've got incredibly smart black guys with no edge whatsoever. These guys are corporate lawyers, rocket scientists, and policy specialists, packaged in pleated khakis, paisley ties, and Crocs. CROCS. 

22. Washington D.C. Bike Share. Holy shit. The bike share not only exists, but it's been done correctly -- there are enough bikes and stations where you can actually use them as a normal mode of transportation. They're not just some gimmick or press piece. Every day, I see people riding the Bike Share, quite often with their own helmets, which indicates that they had actually planned their day around using the Bike Share at some point. 

23. We have a double-sink in our kitchen, with a garbage disposal. It's like the in-apartment laundry-dryer. I don't know that we can go back to life without them.

24. The staff in my apartment building bake cookies three times a week. They literally bake cookies that you can smell all through the first floor. It's ridiculous.

- excerpt from joshua foer's moonwalking with einstein -

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: a month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.

. . . 

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next -- and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: "In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out," he wrote. "But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse." Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. "If to remember is to be human, the remembering more means being more human," said Ed.

. . . 

I thought of my own self fifteen years ago, and how much I've changed in the same period. The me who exists today and the me who existed then, if put side by side, would look more than vaguely similar. But we are a completely different collection of molecules, with different hairlines and waistlines, and, it sometimes seem, little in common besides our names. What binds that me to this me, and allows me to maintain the illusion that there is continuity from moment to moment and year to year, is some relatively stable but gradually evolving thing at the nucleus of my being. Call it a soul, or a self, or an emergent byproduct of a neural network, but whatever you want to call it, that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory.

2011.05.06

2010.05.09

2009.05.07

2008.04.28

2007.04.23

2006.04.28

2005.05.09

2004.05.09 (Really, it's like it was a different person)

- netflix review -

Okay, it's not art.

Home food hits the spot some times.

Plus, it's Jackson Heights!

(today's special)

So this video made me miss the heck out of New York. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly thankful and happy for the move. My boss gave me an "attaboy" speech today and I nearly teared up, in relief (this job is different from anything I've done before, in that I came specifically to work with one high-level appointee; so i've got a lot riding on my relationship with my boss). 

But I guess the video reminded me that, not only am I not exposed to as much life and art as I was in New York, but I'm certainly not creating any art. This project is so simple that it's something I could have knocked out in an afternoon. But since arriving in DC, I've barely touched any of my camera/audio gear. When I left NYC, though, I was starting to find some kind of stride, creatively. I was starting to get regular requests to shoot charity events; and I had actually reached out to someone about shooting some music videos, which I was incredibly excited about. Here, though, that network is part of what I sacrificed for the new opportunities with my boss.

I can blame part of this on the transition, but that period I think is receding behind me now. Really, it's a matter of finding the art here. It would be trite and spoiled to say that art only exists in New York, or that life only flows on the subways and crowded streets. But I need to see better here and, really, to live a more engaged existence with my new surroundings.

-netflix haiku -

really captured my

imagination. i don't

even like paris!

(midnight in paris)

we get invested

in a protagonist we

don't even like. Wow.

(young adult)

funny, no doubt. but 

they got good press because they

were older women.

(bridesmaids)