The Tin Man » 2006

Monday, April 3, 2006

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts and good wishes.

I’m still in a bit of daze. I have fits of self-loathing and I occasionally feel like throwing up. I went to Washington Square Park yesterday afternoon with a notebook and did some writing in order to process my thoughts of the last few days. I hadn’t done that in so long - write words that nobody else will see but me. I forgot how freeing it is when you don’t have to worry about an audience.

I let my New York bar membership lapse a couple of years ago, since I wasn’t practicing there, and I was worried that I would have to go through a long process to reactivate it and even possibly, God forbid, take the bar exam again. But I spoke to someone today and it turns out it’s easy: they send me a form (I should receive it Wednesday) and I fill it out and send in my back fees and I’m good to go. Whew.

Now that I’ll be looking for new employment, I’m worried about the blog. Thanks to a newspaper article from a few years ago, it’s possible to find out the name of this blog if you Google my name. You need to do another Google search in order to find the blog itself, but I’m sure the curious will think of that. I’ve already removed some identifying information from the site. I’m wondering if I should temporarily move the blog to another URL entirely. I don’t even know if the blog would be a problem or not.

My parents and my brother think I won’t have too much trouble finding a new job, given my credentials. But I don’t know if the types of jobs it would be easiest for me to get are the types of jobs I want. Here I go, making things unnecessarily difficult for myself.

Yesterday I bought the latest edition of What Color is Your Parachute? I bought a copy several years ago and found it mildly helpful. I figure, why not. I’ve also been leafing through my copy of What Can You Do With a Law Degree?: A Lawyer’s Guide to Career Alternatives Inside, Outside & Around the Law, which might or might not be helpful.

At least I’ve still got the gym. I think I’ll need it in the next few weeks. And in addition to helping me deal with stress, it’s been good in other ways. After two and a half months, my pants and underwear fit again. A concavity is developing on each side of my stomach below my ribcage. No visible abs yet. Still a little bit of love handle when the elastic presses against my waist in a particular way (those are hard to get rid of!). I wish my arms were getting bigger more quickly - I feel like I haven’t seen any progress there in a few weeks. I drink a protein powder supplement twice a day - I wonder if I need even more protein. Anyway, the gym is good for me.

The worst part of all this is the high self-doubt and low self-esteem. Had I been better at my job I wouldn’t have been laid off (and this isn’t speculation on my part, but a fact). It just means it wasn’t the right job for me. Is there even a right job for me?

That’s the question that scares me most.

4:41 PM | 6 drops of oil

Wednesday, April 5, 2006

Timeline of CBS history.

3:53 PM | Comments Off

Thursday, April 6, 2006

We’ve seen three Broadway musicals in the past five nights: Tarzan, The Wedding Singer, and The Drowsy Chaperone. That’s the order in which we saw them, and it’s also the order in which I’d rank them from worst to best. Keep in mind that these shows are all in previews.

I hate to bad-mouth a show, especially when I sorta know someone who’s working on it (though not on the creative side). But Tarzan sucked. Plain and simple. It might even have been worse than last season’s Dracula, which, at the time, was one of the worst musicals I’d ever seen. But at least Dracula was visually interesting. Tarzan has a boring set consisting essentially of green streamers. It has incredibly ugly ape costumes. (How did Shuler Hensley get involved in this?) It has long stretches of dialogue with static staging. It has unmemorable songs. The plot is, literally, pure Disney, but Matt says the movie is much better (I haven’t seen it). To make matters worse, we were sitting near a group of teenagers who’d attempted to dress up. Some of the girls in their strapless dresses looked like they were on their way to the prom.

The Wedding Singer, based on the movie of the same name about a wedding singer in 1980’s New Jersey, is a really cute show with an appealing cast, a funny book and catchy songs. (Its big earworm, “It’s Your Wedding Day”, keeps getting stuck in my head.) It also takes advantage of the ongoing ’80s nostalgia. Given all that, and the built-in New Jersey audience, it should do very well.

I can’t say enough good things about The Drowsy Chaperone. It’s really a tribute to musical theater - a show for people who love musicals - and it’s hysterical but poignant. The premise is that we’re in the apartment of a lonely middle-aged man, known as Man in Chair, who’s going to share with us his cast recording of his favorite old musical from the 1920’s, The Drowsy Chaperone (which isn’t a real show, of course). As he begins to play the album, the old musical comes alive before our eyes. Man in Chair constantly interrupts The Drowsy Chaperone with his own commentary on the actors, the songs, and the recording. But this is more than a one-gimmick show; the 1920s musical itself has terrifically witty songs and visuals, and Sutton Foster has a showstopper of a number. The whole cast is impeccable. This deserves to win lots of Tonys.

Coming up are two plays: Festen and The History Boys. I think I’m going to need some new Playbill binders.

12:51 PM | 4 drops of oil

Friday, April 7, 2006

Sometimes I think I’d really like to have my own radio interview show. I’d like to be someone like Terry Gross.

Other times I think I’d really like to do something with my writing.

Occasionally in the past, I’ve thought about becoming a therapist or counselor of some sort.

If there’s such a thing as a mission in life, I think mine has to do with communication, and increasing the amount of understanding in the world.

2:31 PM | 4 drops of oil

Among the changes this week to the New York Times website, I really like the Today’s Paper feature. You can browse the entire day’s articles in every category on one page - everything from politics to arts to editorials to obituaries.

I also like the Times Topics feature, which collects all articles that mention a particular person, area or subject. For example, you can look up Al Gore or homosexuality or blogs and blogging or Lincoln Center. It’s really cool for research nerds like me.

4:05 PM | 2 drops of oil

Sunday, April 9, 2006

Today Matt and I saw Festen with my mom. (Weird, weird, weird.) The weather was awful this afternoon; it was pouring when Matt and I got to the theater to meet my mom. A sea of umbrellas filled the sidewalk and overflowed into the street. In order to have better chance of seeing my mom, Matt and I stood underneath the marquis of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater directly across the street, where The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (with David Schwimmer) has not yet opened for previews.

As we waited, a young woman came up to us and asked if we knew where Chita Rivera’s show was playing. I looked at Matt and then looked back at the young woman. “I thought that had closed?” I said. She walked away, puzzled. Then she hesitated, turned around and walked back. She showed us her ticket. It was, indeed, a ticket for Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, dated April 8, 2006, at the very theater in front of which we were standing.

Indeed, the show closed two months ago. I guess nobody told her.

I felt bad for her. I hope she hadn’t come from very far away.

12:55 AM | 4 drops of oil

Ghosts of Passovers Past: Putting together a seder in modern Berlin. “There is no continuum of Jewish life here; no longstanding local traditions remain. The Jews who now live in Berlin are mostly newcomers like me, making things up as we go along.”

10:09 AM | Comments Off

The Dirty Word in 43 Down: A New York Times crossword gaffe. “Scumbag” means “condom”? Huh. News to me. I’d never actually thought about it.

4:15 PM | 6 drops of oil

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in days. I keep waking up around 4:00 in the morning and lying awake for an hour or so. Right now I need a nap.

I took yesterday off from work because I had some errands to do and because, well, now I can. One of those errands was to buy a recently-published book called The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One. It’s interesting so far, and I answered “yes” to most of the questions in this quiz.

One of the first things I did yesterday was go to the gym, taking advantage of the mid-morning emptiness. It wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t as crowded as it is at peak times. I realized that when I’m unemployed in a few weks, at least I’ll be able to go to the gym when it’s not so crowded.

Later, around noon, before going out to do my errands, I got nervous. I knew my errands wouldn’t take very long, and I wondered what I’d do with the rest of the day. Then I realized that once I’m unemployed, I’ll have a whole series of days like this.

Last week my therapist told me, based on her past experience, that many of her clients in my situation look forward to the idea of having empty days, but that in practice, they get tired of it pretty fast. She suggested I try to line up a new job before my current one ends. That made me feel guilty, because I was sort of looking forward to some empty days, and I felt like I was being judged as lazy. Not that there’s anything wrong with a little laziness. But the fact is, I’m often itching for something to do when I have too much unstructured time.

On the other hand, as one of my readers wrote to me:

Since when is an employer the only one able to provide structure to our lives? You never impressed me, through your writings, as a person still trying to develop self-discipline. Use the whole summer to impose your own structure, with your own (already well thought-out) ambitions as a condition, not some employer’s.

You have your whole life to work for others’ goals; An opportunity like this is fairly infrequent and you’ve been around enough to recognise that. You can do a lot in a whole summer, with just a little motivation and a healthy loss of fear (i.e., courage).

We’ll see.

I have a whole lot of self-assessment ahead of me.

12:14 PM | 3 drops of oil

Andrew Sullivan, in discussing efforts by Christianists (by which I think he means right-wing Christians) to secure a right to express intolerance of gays, states:

[o]bjecting to hate crime laws solely when it comes to protecting gays… is bigoted on its face. Even if you argue - preposterously - that homosexual orientation is a choice, religious affiliations are also included in hate crime laws, and nothing is more of a choice, in legal terms, than faith.

Agreed. While it’s pretty clear that being gay is not a choice (we gay people are the ones who’d know, aren’t we? why don’t they trust us on this?), the issue is irrelevant when it comes to civil rights protection.

However, there are those who still don’t get it. So why not make it easier for everyone by avoiding the issue? We should just make homosexuality a religion. I don’t mean something like the MCC - I mean a brand new religion from scratch. The Church of the Holy Rod or something. Of course, that name is very phallus-oriented, so we’d need something more gender-neutral. But it’s doable.

2:34 PM | 10 drops of oil

Students from Lambda, Harvard Law School’s gay rights organization, convened Saturday at the first annual Gay and Lesbian Legal Advocacy conference to map out the course of gay rights activism following the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the Solomon Amendment.

Whah? The case, FAIR v. Rumsfeld, was not some big setback for gay rights. It wasn’t even a gay rights case at all; it was about whether law schools have the First Amendment right to deny military recruiters equal access to their facilities without losing federal funds. Yes, the reason the law schools wanted to ban military recruiters was because of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but the case wasn’t about the validity of “don’t ask, don’t tell” itself. The Court ruled, in fact, that the law schools could use their free-speech rights to express their opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell” as loudly and as often as they wanted.

Anyway, Congress was the body that passed that legislation, not the military, so it was pointless for law schools to try to pressure the military by banning its recruiters.

There, I’ve wanted to get that off my chest for a while.

4:13 PM | 1 drop of oil

Thursday, April 13, 2006

The Two-Minute Haggadah: A Passover service for the impatient.

(My family does the afikoman differently: the kid(s) hide it and “ransom” it to the host for some money.)

2:36 PM | 2 drops of oil

Friday, April 14, 2006

Today is Good Friday; today is also April 14. Today is also the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which occurred on April 14, 1865, which was also Good Friday. This is only the sixth time since 1865 that Good Friday has coincided with April 14, so today’s anniversary is even more vivid.

Imagine that five days ago, last Sunday, April 9, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, officially ending the Civil War. People have been celebrating all week. Tonight, John Wilkes Booth makes his way into Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater and shoots him in the back of the head.

R.I.P., Abraham Lincoln.

10:16 AM | 1 drop of oil

Monday, April 17, 2006

I’ve been going to the theater a lot lately. There’s a phenomenon in theaters that bothers me.

I’m not usually one to give a standing ovation during curtain calls at the end of a show unless I really, really loved it. But I often find that I have to do so anyway, because people in front of me - perhaps right in front of me or several rows in front of me - stand up and applaud, thereby blocking my view of the actors taking their bows. Which means that I, too, have to stand up while continuing to applaud so that I can see the actors, even though I worry that those around me will think I’m one of those people who lacks taste and would probably even stand up after something like Tarzan. (We stayed seated at the end of Tarzan. A point needed to be made.)

I think this is how theater-wide standing ovations happen: via a sort of reverse-domino effect, a few numbskulls near the front of the theater stand up, forcing everyone behind them to stand up, forcing everyone behind them to stand up, and so on. Finally, the rest of the people in the audience stand up because they don’t want to seem like killjoys.

There needs to be a term for such unintentional standing O’s. Perhaps notwithstanding ovation or misunderstanding ovation.

Note to producers: in order to ensure a standing ovation at the end of every performance of your show, just seed the front rows with tall people.

11:53 AM | 12 drops of oil

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Free access to the OED online this week! That’s it, I’m screwed for the day.

I love looking up really basic words, like the or be.

Or gay.

Or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Or blog. (The Bradlands has been immortalized in the OED - I’m so envious.)

Or Zyrian, apparently the very last word in the OED alphabetically.

Or the origin of letters, like the very interesting J.

The OED website also has some great questions and answers about words.

See you on the other side.

[via Thom]

1:24 PM | 1 drop of oil

Verbix: a free online verb conjugator. For instance, here’s every single conjugation of the French verb être (”to be”).

(I’m on a language kick today.)

2:06 PM | 4 drops of oil

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

My dad has such power over me. I just got off the phone with him. (He’ll probably be reading this at some point.)

I’m not lazy.

He didn’t say I was lazy, but after the phone call, I had an imaginary conversation with him in my head in which he told me I was.

He called me to talk about job-search issues. To check up on me. I’ve sent out my resumé to one place so far. He asked me if I’d sent it to anyplace else, and I said I hadn’t. I flashed back to 16 years old (applying to college) and 25 years old (looking for jobs after law school), feeling guilty and completely incapable and unknowledgeable as a human being. I felt my shoulders tense up as I tried to retreat inside an intangible shell. And he wasn’t even here in person.

I’ve not been as active in the job hunt as I could be. But at my dad’s prompting I just contacted someone at another state agency, whom someone else who works at that agency had told me to contact, about sending them my resumé.

I didn’t feel like arguing with my dad because (1) I never know whether he’s right or not, and (2) I always feel like I’m wrong. (Those two things might not seem to make sense together, but believe me, they do.) And because I didn’t feel like arguing, I essentially clammed up.

Anyway, I might not be lazy, but I don’t know what I am. How about: strongly resistant.

I don’t know if my dad’s right, but I feel completely wrong.

I’m 32 years old and some things never change.

4:47 PM | 8 drops of oil

Thursday, April 20, 2006

I just spent 15 minutes stressing over the proper way to spell “resume” in a cover letter. Accents or no?

Turns out it doesn’t really matter.

4:28 PM | Comments Off

Friday, April 21, 2006

Matt and I have been rehearsing with our chorus (and several other choruses) the past couple of days for a performance at Carnegie Hall tomorrow night of the Fauré Requiem. It’s our chorus conductor’s Carnegie Hall debut.

In the past, I’ve sung both the Fauré Requiem and the Duruflé Requiem, which are often paired together on CDs. (I sung the Fauré with my college Glee Club. We traveled up to Massachusetts and sang it under a conductor we nicknamed “Flanders,” because he looked just like him. (Remember, Tim?))

I’ve usually preferred the Duruflé to the Fauré. The Duruflé is more sophisticated and flowing (and it’s based on Gregorian chant, which gives it extra points in my book). So I’ve often denigrated the Fauré. But this weekend has rehabilitated it. Although it’s a simpler piece of music, it’s still very beautiful in its own right, and it has some thrilling moments.

After today’s rehearsal, a bunch of guys from my chorus went drinking. Either the margaritas were really strong, or Matt and I are both lightweights. Whatever the cause, although I’d planned to go the gym at some point today, it really doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.

Also: when we got home, we chose to watch “Commander in Chief” and “Smallville” on the TiVo. And you know what?

Alcohol doesn’t make either show any better.

9:04 PM | 6 drops of oil

Sunday, April 23, 2006

If I grunted more at the gym, would I be able to lift more weight? This is a rhetorical question (sort of). There are some people at the gym who are completely uninhibited. A couple of weeks ago, there was a grunter who was so loud that I thought he was being tortured by a red-hot needle. It almost made me uncomfortable. As for me, sometimes I grunt, but not very loudly. I don’t feel like grunting more loudly would make me able to lift any more weight. I guess it’s all about the position your throat is in while you’re lifting.

And now I must quote an excerpt from a poem by my friend Aaron Smith, “Working Out with the Boys”:

They could be making love,
these straight boys, judging
from the sounds, their breathing

quick, forced like before orgasm:
the soft strain of men pushing
their bodies, breaking

themselves down while other men watch
or help. Someone saying, Come on,
come on, push it, push: a final

throaty groan, an almost come-
    cry, as a barbell is raised
        one more time, one

more time, then dropped
    or slammed down
        on the mat, muscles

exhausted, trembling, high
fives, a shirt raised to wipe sweat
from a face….

It goes on. Such a great poem.

[grunt]

7:20 PM | 2 drops of oil

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

If you like time-travel movies (and hey, who doesn’t?), you should check out Primer, which we watched on DVD last night. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance two years ago, but I only learned about it from a Netflix recommendation. Yes, Virginia, you can make a sci-fi movie for only $7,000. It’s confounding and opaque, but brilliant. It is by no means an action movie; it’s more of an intellectual mind-fuck. I’m not sure if anyone totally understands the plot - I needed help from this plot diagram (which is equally confounding at first glance) - but the movie is only 77 minutes long, and it has cute actors and compelling cinematography. Totally worth seeing.

1:53 PM | 1 drop of oil

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Gay men don’t read enough, says Christopher Rice.

1:25 PM | 7 drops of oil

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Bravo to Brian, whose blog post about an anti-gay-marriage mailing sent out by Bill Ritter, a Democratic primary candidate for the Ohio House, resulted in that candidate losing a United Auto Workers group’s endorsement. Two other groups who have endorsed him, the Cleveland Teacher’s Union and the Ohio Federation of Teachers, have expressed dismay at the mailing. (Ritter is a history teacher.)

Ritter’s mailing said the following:

Also, during this same interview at the Sun News one of my other opponents Mike Foley was asked if he was “For Gay Marriage?” Mike said “Yes” he supports gay marriage. “UNLIKE MIKE” this concerns me since I DO NOT want this to become a state law. I feel a Marriage is between a MAN and a WOMAN. That is the WAY I WILL VOTE in Columbus!

In FACT Mike Foley has been ENDORSED by the STONEWALL DEMOCRATS, who are a GAY/LESBIAN political action committee. His endorsement is largely because of His Support of Gay Marriage.

Leave aside the awful punctuation and capitalization. (This guy is a teacher?) A blogger called up Ritter (whose phone number is printed on the mailing) and recorded their phone conversation.

What really gets my goat is when Ritter says the following about gay marriage:

“If it’s legal, then in anybody’s church, it would be legal, which could cause, at that point, litigation to say that it has to be done in a place where other people don’t believe in it.”

Is he kidding?

Despite its religious connotations, marriage is a civil act. A governmental act. You don’t have to go to a church to get married. You don’t even have to be religious to get married. All you need to get legally married is a marriage license from the appropriate state government.

If same-sex marriage becomes legal in a particular state, no church will be required to perform same-sex marriage. In fact, based on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, it would be unconstitutional to force any church or religious organization to perform or recognize such a marriage. A lawsuit to force a church to recognize such a marriage would have no chance of success.

Unfortunately, there are so many anti-gay-marriage people who believe Ritter’s fallacy.

As Ritter later told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer: “My lack of support for gay marriage is simply this: I’m trying to also be fair to another segment of our populace who think this may not be religiously proper.” But again, whether or not same-sex marriage is “religiously proper” isn’t something a government official, federal or state, should be concerned with. It’s a civil rights issue. Speaking of civil rights, how about “being fair” to “another segment of [y]our populace” that wants the right to marry a person of one’s choosing, and all the societal benefits this will bring?

I can’t believe this guy is a teacher. Let alone a history teacher. I hope he doesn’t specialize in American history.

2:54 PM | 5 drops of oil

Friday, April 28, 2006

One of our current guilty pleasures is So NoTORIous, VH1’s new half-hour show lampooning the day-to-day life of Tori Spelling, starring… Tori Spelling. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s clever, and Tori’s a good sport. The show makes fun of her reputation as a spoiled scion of a rich family and her attempt to cash in on her past fame despite a lack of any real talent. There are occasional references to 90210, her Donna Martin character, and Shannon Doherty (who’s usually implied to be Tori’s arch-nemesis).

On the show, Tori lives in an apartment in Los Angeles that’s owned by her wacky rich bitch of a neglectful mother, played by icky-lipped Loni Anderson. We never see Aaron Spelling, but whenever Tori visits the family mansion, we hear the Dynasty or Charlie’s Angels theme. We see plenty of flashbacks to Tori’s childhood, when she was perenially (but comically) screwed over by her unloving mom.

The whole point of this post, though, is to mention my favorite character on the show: Tori’s gay Iranian best friend, Sasan, played by the yummy Zachary Quinto. Not only is he good-looking, but I love his character and his line readings.

But he’s not the reason I watch the show, honest…

5:01 PM | 6 drops of oil