Things I'm thankful for

My amazing community, the Ravenna Kibbutz, which continues to evolve and grow in challenging, inspiring ways.

My mother, who is endlessly supportive and always willing to give advice, nearly all of which is excellent. :-)

My siblings, with whom I'm trying/hoping to have a closer relationship as the years go by.

The Seattle Times and my boss there, Jane Watson, who calls me first when she needs an extra hand on deck.

The old NWsource crew -- Geoff Carter, Monica Fischer, Jon Palmer, Greg Dunlap, and Sheri Quirt -- for being awesome and a de facto support group for journalists in a post-journalism world.

School, for still being as great as I remember it.

The hope of making 2010 a year of greater physical fitness. I plan to join a gym on Nov. 30 and start a nine-week run/walk regimen, plus hopefully a little weight training. It's time.

All my wonderful friends, who have supported me through tough times and helped me celebrate the good times, this year and every year.

Quality -- or at least entertaining -- television, which has provided me with quasi-necessary relaxation and escape when I needed it this year.

Movies, which even in a subpar year like this one can deliver surprises and make me glad to be alive.

Was I the last person in Seattle to find out?

At Shabbat dinner tonight, someone told me that President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Despite working (for the moment) at a news-gathering organization, I may be the last Seattleite to have heard about this. I had to field several good-natured questions about the size of the rock I live under, etc. Holy mackerel.

Oh, and Rachel Maddow's take on the subject is wonderful:



Thanks to Nancy for posting it on Facebook.

Low-hanging fruit

Corporatespeak: It's the new strychnine -- for your soul.

Class guilt

Today, for the first time in my life, I visited a food bank. I showed a recent piece of mail to prove my current address, presented my driver's license to prove that I'm me, and filled out a brief form. Then I got a laminated card that told me how many cans of fruit, dairy products, grain products, proteins (beans, in my case), and cans of vegetables I could claim. (Fresh veggies were apparently just up for grabs.) While I was shopping, a volunteer started shouting at a tall, skinny woman whom he accused of stealing. She and her boyfriend were running some kind of scam wherein one of them exited out the back door rather than the front one. They were trying to make off with more than their share, the volunteer alleged. The woman was ejected from the food bank and told not to come back. Outside, people in line shook their heads, and another volunteer expressed amazement. Stealing from a food bank!

From my perspective, it's just a sign of the times, like the nervous-looking crowd today at WorkSource, the state-run employment support agency that provides workshops and other resources free of charge to the un- and underemployed. I took a three-hour class today on writing effective résumés and cover letters, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, thanks to the humor and enthusiasm of the teacher. I plan to go back later this month for the workshop on interviewing. I didn't feel particularly guilty taking advantage of WorkSource's free class, since I am unemployed, and my unemployment isn't voluntary. Being at the food bank, on the other hand, made me a little uneasy. Was I taking food from the mouths of people who needed it more? The form I filled out included the question: Are you homeless?

I'm the furthest thing from homeless, and I think my risk of becoming homeless in the immediate future in extremely low. My mother owns a house outside Detroit; worse-case scenario, I'd move back there. I'm also not poor in terms of my upbringing, or my family's current standing. We have money; I have an inheritance fund that I still receive monthly installments of $1,000 from. I just don't have any work-based income right now. Maybe visiting the food bank every week as a way to supplement purchases from Rising Sun, the cheap grocery stand eight blocks from our house, and the occasional PCC or Whole Foods splurge (though I'm trying to avoid those now), isn't causing some truly impoverished local family to go hungry.

Still, texting a friend outside the food bank, I felt like a tourist. Hell, I felt like one when I reached the checkout and the guy bagging my food asked: "No meat?" I didn't want to confess to being a vegetarian; it seemed privileged and precious and not in the spirit of taking as much food as you're allowed, because hey, maybe that's the only food you can afford this week. I didn't feel like figuring out which produce was worth taking home. I didn't want to take an unlabeled can of corn. Some kind of bourgeois instinct kicked in: Unlabeled stuff is sketchy. Don't do it!

As a friend pointed out, I had a day that exposed me to the lives of the poor and unemployed. I may be the latter, but I'm not really the former, and while I'll definitely revisit WorkSource, I'm not sure about the food bank. I'll have to give that some thought.

An explanation

I jest, of course. But not about being unemployed again. If anybody knows of anything remunerative that I might enjoy doing, or not hate doing, please don't be shy about bringing it to my attention. (Unless you want it for yourself, that is.)

Can I hear an "Amen"?

Ads for freelance writing gigs on Craig's List vary greatly. Some are dull, while others -- like a recent ad from a wannabe Mafia memoirist seeking a ghostwriter -- are anything but. And then there's "Editor for Messianic work," which includes the following passage:

Must be open to new truth if that truth is truly from God (which I assure [it] is) and is provable scripturally. Must not be locked into traditions received from the established church, if these traditions can be proven false in the scriptures. These new truths are from the Lord, and will shake things up in the religious world, and will be very powerful in the Messianic movement and in preparing the Church as the bride of the Jewish Messiah.

Presumably, Tom Hanks' Da Vinci Code character has already been notified.

Wanted: Facebook addicts

Stories like this always make me think of a classic, and prescient, Far Side panel:

Wisdom from two DWs

Earlier this afternoon, Steven read me the bulk of the commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005, and it's just beautiful. The following excerpt, about how to see the tedium of adult life with fresh eyes, was exactly what I needed to hear, and it's as good an example as any of what he's up to:

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

I recommend you read the whole thing. The fact that Wallace refers to suicide in the course of the speech makes it all the more poignant. (And if you haven't read the recent New Yorker article about Wallace, please do so.) I'm actually reminded, just now, of some lyrics I particularly like in Dar Williams' song "Mortal City":

He smiled and said, "Sometimes at night I walk out by the river,
The city's one big town, the water turns it upside down
People found this city because they love other people
They want their secretaries, they want their power lunches."

I've always loved that: the (unnamed) male character's willingness, his ability, to view seemingly soulless big-city realities as signs of people's love for others, their overwhelming desire to have them all around. Of course, this conceit has its payoff in another of the song's beautiful moments, when the female character tells him:

"I think I have a special kind of hearing tonight
I hear the neighbors upstairs
I hear my heart beating
I hear one thousand hearts beating at the hospital
And one thousand hearts by their bedsides waiting
Saying, 'That's my love in the white gown.'"

Williams' song is about the same kind of compassion Wallace discusses, the same goal of traveling outside your familiar perspective, received wisdom, and routine to find a more positive way to look at the world, including its maddening aspects. I only wish Wallace had been able to swing that when it really counted. As he says, it's damn hard. From my perspective, having wonderful friends and exercising my creativity are just two of many ways to fight back against the "day in, day out" repetition that can slowly turn you angry, small, and hollow -- already dead, as Wallace sees it.

Wish me luck!

I just applied to the Online Film Critics Society and e-mailed Stranger film editor Annie Wagner to see if she could use a new freelancer, i.e. me. I think it's time I shifted my movie-reviewing career out of neutral and gave it some gas.

On relationships

When I was a kindergartner at University Liggett School, I developed a crush on a blonde girl named Caroline, or maybe Carolyn. Ever since that fateful year, I've pretty much always had at least one active crush. I remember liking a girl named Elke in third grade in Germany; by middle school I was smitten with my classmates Rebecca and Diana, after which high school brought perhaps the most epic of all my crushes, which turned into unrequited love and lasted five whole years. I dated a few women during sophomore year of college and then fell in love midway through my junior year. We dated until December of 2001; the next month, I was on a plane to Seattle. From that point forward, until very recently, I've either been dating someone or wanting desperately to be dating someone. Crushing requires a lot of mental energy, as I noted in a Weekly column several years ago.

Right now, as I tackle a number of challenges at once -- Kibbutz stuff, working, preparing to start another writing workshop, getting the grad-school application process rolling, improving my financial skills, trying to make exercise a part of my life again, attempting to have a social life outside the Kibbutz, and a few other personal projects -- I just don't think I have room for a serious relationship. I've been mentioning this to people because it seems worth mentioning. When people are waist- or even neck-deep in work that's meaningful, even if not too much of it is paid, they're pretty much forced to take their minds off finding true love, and thus they become more likely recipients of its serendipitous blessings. They also seem more interesting to would-be significant others. It's a paradox -- the less you need or even desire a mate, the more likely it is that you're ready for one. I'd like to take the rest of 2009 off when it comes to looking for a girlfriend and resume the search next year.

If I think of finding love as a project, not unlike the other ones I'm working on, I'm likely to be more sensible and systematic about it -- and, ultimately, more successful. And if I put it at the end of my queue for this year, I can focus my energies on other things that will only make me more appealing when it's time to shift back to search mode. Now that spring has sprung and couples walk hand in hand through the parks, I can't pretend it's always easy not to pursue the next big relationship, but I can take some comfort in the knowledge that things will go better for me if I de-emphasize romance this year and start anew in 2010.

After all, it -- romance -- isn't going anywhere. It'll still be around next year. And right now, as I've also told friends, my relationship with the Kibbutz is my primary one. The way some people are, for a while, wedded to their work, I'm married to my desire to make our growing community strong and vital. It may not be paying work, but it's plenty rewarding, as any good relationship should be.

Catnip for grammar nerds

I discovered the archives of the NCSU Online Writing Lab and Grammar Hotline in the course of copyediting a document at work, but I quickly fell in love with it on a personal level. Passages like the following are what won my heart:

It is the Grammar Hotline's opinion that lowercasing brussels sprouts is one tiny step toward popularizing them. Furthermore, it is my considered opinion that Brussels sprouts are so vile that they do not deserve to be popular. In a quixotic attempt to keep them off my dinner plate, I am going to recommend consistent uppercasing of the "B" in Brussels sprouts.

News feed

Since my last post, a bunch has happened. To wit:

• My boss pointed out author-provocateur (provocateuse?) Norah Vincent's newest outrageous, ethically questionable piece of muckraking;
• my former NWsource.com colleague Jon Palmer drew my attention to the Times' new blog, Coffee City;
• Facebook revealed plans for another big facelift;
• and former Seattle Weekly managing editor Chuck Taylor -- aka my former boss -- unveiled his new Seattle Post-Post-Intelligencer wiki, just one of many online responses to the probably imminent demise of the Seattle P-I. Chuck has been interested in the topic of technology and journalism for a long time, so it's good to see him stay ahead of the curve.

In more personal news, I:

• visited my half-sister Lore in Los Angeles and took a lot of pictures (the image above is of a public high school, believe it or not);
• watched The Class, the Heroes pilot, and Atonement, the last of which was better than I thought it would be (The Class and Heroes were, respectively, quite good and just fine);
• saw the Irish band Lunasa perform on a wonderfully warm night;
• read quite a bit of Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, which I'm really enjoying;
• began to realize that my 20 daily milligrams of Celexa aren't, thus far, measuring up to my previous prescription, 10 milligrams of Lexapro;
• visited L.A.'s Central Library;
• consumed various authentic Mexican delicacies, including candied lime skin stuffed with sugared coconut and watermelon, cantaloupe, and mango cut in pieces, tossed in a plastic bag, and seasoned with chili powder, salt, and lime juice;
• and got my beloved car, Gracie, back from the mechanic. She's doing fine.

It's been a busy time, and I'm working full days (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) until St. Patrick's Day. I'm staying in Seattle this weekend rather than going to Vancouver, as I'd planned to do, because I'm in stop-the-world-I-wanna-get-off mode, and I'd like a few work-free days to cool back down.

Metro mayhem

Okay, not actual mayhem. But the threat of mayhem -- the definite possibility thereof.

I took the #71 downtown today instead of the #64, which takes me directly to work. Assorted people stood with me at the #71 stop in Ravenna, including a very nice Australian lady, and we all talked about Seattle's three snowplows and climate change. Despite the unseasonable cold, we had a nice time. At the Westlake station of the transit tunnel, I got out and walked to the #3, doing in reverse what I do every day to get home. I boarded the #3 on First Avenue, and it wasn't unusually full when I got on, but as we moved toward the hillclimb more people crowded in, until it was hard to move, breathe, etc. Then we started to go up the hill. We reached Fifth Avenue before the driver decided we had too many people -- we were too heavy to ascend the slope (this was a trolley bus). Then something happened that reminded me, perversely, of the scene in The Dark Knight wherein Heath Ledger's Joker attempts a nasty little social-psychology experiment, telling the passengers on each of two ferryboats that they have to blow up the other boat in order to survive. Spoiler alert: Human nature isn't quite as dark as the Joker presumes it to be, and everything turns out fine.

On the #3, there was much grumbling after the driver stopped the bus and told us that unless someone got off, none of us would be going anywhere, because we simply couldn't get up that hill with so many bodies crammed into the vehicle. There was swearing among the passengers, and no one, myself included, wanted to hike up Jefferson Street in the cold. We stood there for about ten minutes, and then people finally started to get off the bus. Before that happened, I thought more clearly about class and Metro than I had in some time. I'm scheduled to get my car back Monday evening, but a lot of the people on the #3 probably didn't have cars at all. When you don't have much money and can't afford an alternative, you have to put up with whatever bullshit Metro throws at you.

In this case, the bus driver was scolding us for being stubborn, but a woman at the back of the bus rightly pointed out that the driver, knowing the route, could have kept such a big crowd from accumulating in the first place. (Indeed, it was within her power not to open the back door and to tell people trying to get in the front that they were out of luck.) The woman in back claimed, perhaps a bit cynically, that the driver insisted on packing the bus beyond capacity because Metro hungers for our money. While I doubt this driver's motivation was primarily financial, the angry rider made a good point: Overstuffing a bus and then forcing people out is kind of a raw deal. (Then again, most of the people on the bus had boarded in the free-ride zone, and no one who got off at Fifth and Jefferson had to pay.) Anyway, the bus eventually got moving.

I look forward to having the option of driving again in the near future, but the other day I ran into an acquaintance from Oberlin who lives in South Seattle and doesn't have a car (he works in West Seattle, mostly), and he seemed perfectly happy busing, biking, and walking places. As I said, I'm still glad I have a car, but I plan to drive it to work just a couple days a week after I get it back. And while I wouldn't appreciate such an eventful commute every day, it was certainly an eye-opening experience. A nice balance, in a way: At my first stop, I saw people bond in a way that's unusual in keep-to-yourself Seattle, and on the #3 I witnessed equally uncharacteristic expressions of anger -- more Big Apple than Emerald City.

(By the way, credit for the photo above goes to Seattlest.com, not me.)

Tad Friend strikes again

The New Yorker writer responsible for "The Next Big Bet," one of the magazine's finest arts features of the '00s, is back with a piece about movie marketing, and you know what? I might just read it right now. Can't believe I missed it the first time around. Maybe my new pledge to take the bus to work three times a week (which will be a lot more meaningful once my car is fixed and I actually have the option to drive) will help me get back to my peak New Yorker-reading pace. Believe it or not, there were a couple months in which I wasn't behind. At all. I'd actually be ready for each new issue when it arrived. Brigadoon, I know.

In other news, I've created a Wikipedia article about Childhaven. It's a work in progress (note Wikipedians' request for the citing of references or sources), but I think it's off to a pretty decent start.

Money management and me

Now that I'm thirty, it seems as good a time as any to improve my money-management skills. I'm not great at saving or even scrimping, and my past budgeting efforts have generally lasted about a day. I kept track of my spending for a while in the fall of 2006, primarily because I was making less than $10 an hour at University Book Store (which, by the way, is good pay for a bookseller -- I don't mean to make UBS seem stingy).

Anyway, I've decided that since 2010 is the last year I'll get a check from the inheritance fund my father left me, it would behoove me to commit myself with unprecedented vigor to the fine art of making and following a budget. I wrote a note on Facebook asking for people's advice, and as usual my friends came to my aid, recommending not only the zine pictured above, Punk Rock Finances, but also Mint.com and Quicken Online, both of which seemingly aspire to be the Facebook of Money Management. (That is: Each boasts an easy-to-use, visually pleasing interface, both are free, and both aim to turn something most people would rather die than do into something kinda fun.)

I've given Mint a quick whirl, and I like it so far, but Reed says Quicken is better. As for Punk Rock Finances, kudos to any publication whose goal is "understanding our relationship to money and how we can survive in a capitalist system while making deliberate choices to involve ourselves in it as little as possible."

It's a helluva town

At the beginning of 2005, I knew I wanted to move to New York. I applied for a job at the Village Voice (nothing came of it), and I talked fairly frequently about my intention to check the place out and, if my experience justified my excitement, pick up and go. I visited the city in October of 2005, and it wasn't long before I was smitten. I saw college friends, high school friends, Central Park, Brooklyn, the West Village, and on and on. I called my friend Judith one afternoon and told her: "I'm moving here!" I was very excited.

I left Seattle Weekly in February of 2006, and my immediate plan was to divvy up my stuff into three piles: stuff to sell, stuff to pack, and stuff to ship. I hadn't counted on meeting Emily the month before I quit at the Weekly and starting a relationship that would last into the spring of 2008, but after much soul-searching, I decided to move anyway. I flew from Seattle to New York on April 1, 2006; my half-joking, somewhat superstitious logic was that if it didn't work out, I could always claim the entire move had been an elaborate April Fool's prank.

As it turned out, I took to New York like a bear to honey. I spent the first month in a brownstone with Michael and another guy, and my energy went mostly into looking for a more permanent place to live (after a month, I had to be out of that brownstone) and, of course, a job. The latter came to me via my college friend Miranda, who worked at Global Health Strategies, one of whose principals had recently suffered a herniated disc. I became his personal assistant, and over the next few months I went from fetching vegetable juice and running mundane errands to doing vaccine-related research at the company's Chelsea office. In addition to the job, I joined a softball team, went to a weekly meditation class, worked out at the Y, and had a busy social life. I felt happier than I had in a long time; New York was doing its job.

I was still with Emily, though, and eventually it became clear to us that we didn't want our relationship to end. She wasn't ready to drop her Seattle life and move to New York, and I wasn't willing to lose her, so I made plans to move back in September, right after my friend Jordan's wedding. I remember an August trip to Coney Island that seemed magical: I went alone, rode the Ferris wheel, drove a bumper car, and watched the Friday night fireworks on the beach. I thought to myself: How can I leave this place? My mother used to say that it's a lucky thing when leaving a place hurts, because that means it meant something to you. If that's true, I was a pretty lucky fellow when I left New York.

Readjusting to Seattle took some time. Am I really back here again? was my initial response; I'd wanted to leave so badly that being back seemed sightly surreal. I worked at University Book Store for six months, but retail is decidedly not for me, so when my friend Gary let me know about a copyediting job at NWsource.com, I took immediate action. I ended up working at NWsource for a full year (almost exactly), and I made some wonderful friends there, including my boss and my fellow writers and editors. When I left NWsource in May of 2008, my plan was to move east, either to New York or to an intentional community in Massachusetts.

By now, Emily and I were more or less broken up, but somehow going back to New York didn't feel right. It felt, instead, like a knee-jerk response, a bit of old logic that might no longer hold true. "Well, that didn't work out; guess I'll just go back to New York." That wasn't the spirit in which I wanted to return, and my resolve was accordingly weaker as I began to sell off and pack up my stuff yet again. I'd moved across the country twice in less than half a year in 2006, and all that moving had taken its toll. I only wanted to leave Seattle if there was a very good reason to do so, even though I couldn't articulate that; I still felt trapped here, and convinced that only a geographic fix would help me move on after the breakup. Fate had other plans for me, though: Emily's bike accident in July of 2008 gave me a reason to stick around for a while longer, and while I did I discovered the Ravenna Kibbutz. The rest, as they say, is history.

I mention all of this because my most recent trip to New York, which I returned from less than a week ago, helped clarify things a bit. Visiting in January turned out to be a good idea; it's hard to know what New York in the dead of winter is like unless you experience it firsthand, and I'd only been there in spring, summer, and fall. I went back to my old neighborhood in Brooklyn and didn't feel too much; the magic of the place was closely connected to my state of mind in the spring and summer of 2006, and that time had passed. I liked walking around Manhattan, but I noticed that the hustle and bustle, and the many challenges of life in a giant city like New York, would make a return stressful as well as rewarding.

I never set up a financially sustainable life for myself in 2006, and to do so now, in our dire economy, I'd have to work even harder than I would have had to back then. I do have many friends in New York, including a couple of really good ones, but I have so many friends in Seattle that I'd be losing at least as much as I'd be gaining by moving. It would be a bittersweet trade-off rather than the decidedly joyous experience I had in 2006 (though it would have been less joyous had Emily and I actually broken up when I left Seattle).

When I think of New York today, I don't see it as my inevitable destination. I'm still not sure I want to stay in Seattle for good, but my life here has improved in the last few months. I've settled into Kibbutz life and appreciate both my housemates and the many wonderful members of the community we continue to nurture and expand, and I'm enjoying my new job at Childhaven as well as the freelance writing I'm doing for Jew-ish.com. My 30th birthday is approaching, and while it's hard to completely shake the restlessness of my twenties, I feel a little less troubled by the notion of living in Seattle for a while longer.

When Emily and I dated, we both thought of New York as a rival girlfriend, an entity I loved that could keep us apart. Now I see the city as a former flame I may want to be just friends with. Maybe time and circumstance will rekindle our romance in the future, but I'm not as intent on making that happen as I used to be. Earlier today, an idea popped into my head as I thought about my recent stay in New York and the understanding it imparted: There's what we know and what we can't possibly know, and leveraging the former against the latter might be the key to a fulfilling life. I can't possibly know precisely what my future will entail, or where life will take me, geographically or otherwise, but it's nice to know a little more about what New York means to me, and what it doesn't.

No, I've not dropped off the face of the earth

I've merely been on the East Coast since Jan. 16. For future reference: A ten-day trip is a bit much, even when there are so many friends to see and good places to eat. My article about the Inauguration should go live at Jew-ish.com tomorrow, and once I get home and upload my pictures, I'll post them here. In brief, let it be said that New York has the best vegan food ever; my toes felt as though they'd freeze and fall off as I waited for Obama to swear the oath; and for the first time in a long while, I'm relatively excited about getting back to Seattle, and not as fixated on moving to New York as I used to be. I credit the Kibbutz (which is to say: my fantastic housemates and the wonderful community they've created), my new job at Childhaven, my challenging and rewarding freelance gig at Jew-ish.com, and my upcoming 30th birthday, which I'm much more in the mood to celebrate than pout about.

I should be back soon with Oscar predictions, but for now, here's a Wall Street Journal piece about star ratings for movies brought to my attention, naturally, by Michael.

Childhaven in the news

A recent Seattle Times article made me proud to work where I do.

Um, no

Another hard-hitting MSN Careers article asks the hot-button question: "Should Your Boss Be Your Facebook Friend?"

Particularly ridiculous is this passage:

"If you use Facebook to air political rants, document your wild weekend escapades, post wacky photos or vent about your job, you should obviously have some concerns about letting your boss view this aspect of your life," Rutledge cautions.

Don't use Facebook to vent about your job. That seems like an obvious "don't," unless you're beyond caring about potentially being fired and/or feel confident that there's an airtight seal on your profile. I don't even think I'd use Facebook to "document my wild weekend escapades," if I had any.

That said, I am Facebook friends with prior bosses, and that's working out just fine. Recent focus on Facebook "Netiquette" (sorry) does interest me, since a former work acquaintance posted something not too long ago that I would have thought too personal and weighty to disclose via Facebook. Thing is, it's becoming many people's go-to method for information dissemination, almost regardless of the information's nature.

So MSN's article has its heart sort of in the right place. I just don't think it makes sense to let your boss have daily access to your status updates, much less your decision to post that Lonely Island video whose name I still can't write here -- in case my boss reads this blog.

Distrust any enterprise...

I realized recently that my new job will require me to don "business casual" attire, the definition of which didn't spring swiftly to mind. I had to check the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Really, one glance at their instructive photo of Bill Gates, which appears above, told me everything I needed to know: pants that might be referred to as "slacks" (lose the pleats, though, Bill) plus a collared shirt that wouldn't look out of place if Keira Knightley lounged in it during a GQ photo shoot -- et voilà, business casual! Got it. Thanks, Wikipedia! Thanks, Mr. Gates!

Today I purchased two additional pairs of Dockers brand pants, bringing my total holdings in my size up to three (khaki, weird olive color, and black); I also purchased two dress shirts, one by Ben Sherman and one by some guy named John. (I passed on the $60 Hugo Boss cream shirt, but just barely.) Ladies and gentlemen, I once again have to care about how I look! It's almost like I've moved back to New York. Seriously, though, this is doing me good. A change of pace from jeans and the perennial T-shirt/sweatshirt combo can only boost my self-esteem.