Gravitational Bull

Putting the 'family values' in 'horrendous, unstoppable nuclear apocalypse'

A funny thing happens when you get more than 120 miles outside of New York City....you stop giving a shit if you ever go back.

This is not to say I don't love it here, cause I absolutely do. I'm usually the first to jump all over out of towners, pointing out that we have culture and shopping and taxis and comedy and theater and a park. I love bragging about how I don't need to leave the block to find every single thing I need to survive and how I can have pizza, laundry, and a questionable Craigslist masseuse delivered to my front door without even having to put on pants. Practice note - Dear Lonely Planet does not condone eating pizza without wearing pants: mangia at your own risk.

But this past weekend, I broke free of NYC's gravitational tether and took a road trip with the 'rents down to the University of Virginia. My lil bro was graduating, so I went to go support him and yell inaudibly as Pomp And Circumtance blared through hastily assembled towers of speakers. Truth be told I also went down cause I knew I was gonna get in a night of college-style fun, but ostensibly it was cause I'm an awesome brother. During my hours of down time, strolling through Monticello and learning from my father what ginko biloba leaves look like, the wash of calm that exists in nearly every non-gotham washed over me. Stress melted like so many shreds of mozzarella on the slices I wouldn't be eating at 4 a.m. that night; anxiety flowed down like the trash water I wouldn't have to jump over to cross the street.

What was this strange sensation I was experiencing? Could it be...peace? Could I actually live in a place outside of the East Village of Manhattan and not go crazy with boredom, finding instead the simple pleasure of, oh, I dunno, dog ownership? Might the two grand a month I was spending on rent be put towards an actual house that has a yard and a bbq out back that will most likely not be peed on by a homeless person someday? Good lord, I thought to myself, New York is killing me!

Don't start hatin' on me or say "oh Eric, now that you're thirty you're slowing down." I'm just as ridiculous as I ever was! I've attacked the work hard / play hard dichotomy with aggressive zeal ever since I found out you could drink and still get good grades my Freshman year of college. Well, Bs, at any rate. But it was once again made clear to me that I really don't have to do that! Sure, the Onion covered this territory a while back with their aptly titled "8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live" but I needed to see the forest for the trees for my eyes to open.

I'm sure after a few days I'll start thinking about how I'm happy I don't have to drive places, knocking out my current thought that I wish I had a car with a/c to get around town. After two weeks I'll tell myself I couldn't live without walking to a comedy show, a burlesque show, three happy hours, a Cuban sandwich place, and an all night diner without turning off of Avenue A, but for now I'm just annoyed that I have to pay 7 bucks for a beer while I'm doing it.

In a month, I'll probably regret ever claiming I wanted to leave this place. NYC is my home and I do love it, but I gotta wonder if it's only cause I'm not living more than 120 miles away.

The Circle Is Now (Somewhat) Complete

Tell me about it...my boss is a real ball buster too.

Fear not, friends and well wishers, for this is not the end...just another step along the way in an ever expanding path that's taking a lot longer to traverse than I originally planned. The good news is that after 10 months of living off of tax returns and quarterly dividends I'm working again. Temp job baby! We're in the black!

Well, for the week anyway. Over the past few months I've been keeping myself pretty busy with such fun activities as 1) desperately drafting cover letters, 2) quietly sobbing when reviewing my checking account balance, and 3) telling myself that this is progress towards my ultimate goal of transitioning permanently into human rights advocacy. Having yet to score even a single interview to show for my efforts is teeth-clenchingly scary, and now I find myself back in a law firm setting doing some lawyering stuff just like I used to back in the dizzle. My friends being the ever-supportive cast and crew that they are have said fun things to me like, "back to your old unhappy self, huh?" and "you realize you're never going to leave there now, right?"

Thanks guys. Powerful, uplifting messages.

So while it may be progress, I'm still not quite there yet. When I took a hammer to my life last Fall, I set out to accomplish a bunch of things, and I'm still working at that whole career transition one nearly a year later.

But I also set out to start writing more, and my goal was to start getting stuff published. And as of Sunday night, I did it! Thanks to some great editorial guidance and a slightly more serious platform than I normally operate on, I put together a pretty kick-ass article about my experience in Peru during the 2006 presidential elections. It's got humor, drama, politics, pisco sours, you name it...you can check it out here:

Everyone Cheats, by Eric Noah Feldman, at The Hypocrite Reader

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go clean up and get ready for bed, cause (sigh) I have a big day at the firm tomorrow.

The Grift That Keeps On Giving

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

~ The rental insurance agent, when asked about replacing my stolen iphone ~

Friends of the blog may recall that earlier this year, my iphone was stolen. Well, stolen is such an ugly word - really it was more that a security guard in an upscale Malaysian hotel rifled through my bags while they were in "locked" storage, removing my laptop and iphone, then ultimately returned my laptop to me after he uploaded to it pictures of himself and a short pornographic film of him nailing his girlfriend.

Sadly, the iphone was never recovered.

Along with my good pal Shwa "Player Hater" Losben, I spent my last hours in Asia running around Kuala Lumpur filling out police reports and bitching to various hotel officials in the hopes that I would get some kind of reimbursement for the value of my glorious smart phone. The unrequested acquisition of a homemade sex tape on my desktop bothered me less than the sudden loss of all my Plants Versus Zombies accomplishments, but in either case I wanted justice. I wanted to be made whole for my troubles. And as of this past weekend, the wrong is righted.

A few months of cross-border negotiations led finally to the filing of an insurance claim by the hotel for their little ooops-my-bad, and they wired me the value of my stolen phone. All in all, they were actually pretty helpful throughout the process, even if it did take a few months of back and forth. This fortuitous cash infusion coincided with me FINALLY getting my old Samsung P.O.S. exchanged for a shiny iphone 4. I thought I could never love a piece of technology as much as I loved my old iphone, but I was wrong. New iphone is like getting a second puppy who can fetch the paper and bark the alphabet while the first puppy suffers from arthritic pains and needs to be held upright while defecating. Old phone, replaced and forgotten.

Needless to say, I rushed to get my phone set up right when I got it Sunday evening, so I plugged that bad boy in to my laptop (complete with the homemade Malaysian videos as evidence, should it ever be needed), and to my surprise it offered to restore my old phone settings for me. Could it be? With the press of a button, could all my settings be restored, pictures recovered, contacts replaced, Plants Versus Zombies cheats re-unlocked? It absolutely could have been... had not that damn security guard already updated my laptop with his stupid iphone settings.

My first clue that something was amiss came when iphoto popped up on my computer displaying 9 pictures of the thief himself, staring at the phone in an attempt to customize my gear. I knew I was really in trouble though when I saw the 10 hours of phone calls this guy made to any number of his 85 contacts that he added. Among the dozens of hotel employees and managers, some of whom helped me fix up this whole mess, one named popped off the page and caught my eye - "My Lover Sha". Finally! A name to the...well, I would say face but you never actually see her face in the video.

I had to chuckle as I plugged my phone back in and wiped it clean of the security guard's evidence-stockpile that he left behind. This whole ordeal was so ridiculous and drawn out that when it finally ended, I was just happy to bury it and move on...especially given my new "never-have-I-ever"trump card, "never have I ever seen a Malaysian homemade dirty movie".