Look at this F**king Hyundai: Fred Grades Recent Commercials

I watch a lot of TV, and maybe it's because of what I do for a living, maybe it's my deep-down love of "Mad Men," maybe it's something else entirely, but I watch the commercials intently as well.  Usually I do so with a metric ton of snark, because everyone in advertising seems to think they're Don Draper these days when really they're Ted Chaough.  (That's very much an inside joke.)  So I figured I'd bring some of that snark over to this blog-space by rating a few TV commercials and explaining why.

All advertisements are graded using a standard grading scheme, where "A+" is the greatest advertisement ever (never seen it) and "F" is Volkswagen's 1997 "Da Da Da" campaign.

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Advertisement #1: Look at This Fucking Hipster meets Straightforward Korean Engineering

You've definitely seen this commercial during the holiday season; two scarf-wearing, uncleansed hipsters straight out of Park Slope shilling for - you guessed it - Hyundai.  Specifically, in the two commercials I've seen so far, the Hyundai Sonata (a stylish and highly-rated, if somewhat unassuming, $20,000 family sedan) and the Hyundai Genesis Sedan (an upscale, $35,000+ luxury sedan that gets 25 highway mpg and therefore would NEVER be driven by a hipster).

What I don't get about these commercials is the following: virtually nobody likes hipsters.  They're douchey, smelly, pretentious without meaning or purpose, and are unified solely by their complete absence of social grace. (Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: ::exasperated smarmy sigh:: Don't worry, it's some number you've never heard of.)

Most people dislike most car brands as well (if Grandpa was an Oldsmobile man, by definition he wasn't a Ford man or a Chevy man), but sometimes a well-made car commercial can shift this pattern and effectively shift some of the market toward a brand.  Given this possibility, why put hipsters, whom nobody likes, into your car commercial, when you're trying to get people to purchase your car brand?

Look, I will concede that it is borderline acceptable to put hipsters in a car commercial if you're trying to market a car that hipsters would actually consider driving.  (This puts aside the obvious notion that, after spending all their money on organic kale, indie-rock CD's, and locally-sourced vegan tofu, most hipsters are flat broke, but still.)  A Honda Fit commercial featuring hipsters, for instance, would get a far higher grade than this campaign. 

This commercial misses the fundamental point that hipsters don't want family sedans or luxury sedans - they aren't GREEN enough - and those people who would purchase family sedans or luxury sedans don't want to watch a dude with an unkempt beard ring goddamn tambourines.  Thus, these commercials are terrible.  I smite you, Hyundai (although I do like the Genesis sedan).

Grade: D

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Advertisement #2: Can a Bank Be (Legitimately) Metal?

In my never-ending search for authenticity, I'm often extremely surprised at how many commercials fail at simply doing what they were intended to do.  It's like the ad executive or the client (yeah, probably the client) for most companies ends up deciding upon a commercial that attempts to make six different statements - and executes each of them poorly - rather than something that quickly and effectively makes one solid statement and plain sticks with it.

Over the past couple of years, Ally Bank has caught a reasonable amount of flak (entirely from parents of small children, who seem eternally incapable of putting their hormonal changes into context and remembering that kids don't matter to people who don't have kids) for a series of ultra-realistic commercials that involved an adult actor stealing from small children as a metaphor for what other banks do to their customers.  Supposedly the commercials were not even scripted, so the looks on these children's faces when their ice cream was taken from them was indeed real, which resulted in tons of pissed off parents who couldn't bear to see little Madison get her heart broken!  (I always chuckled at these commercials, because I hate kids and feel they should learn about endless disappointment.)

To paraphrase the governor of Pennsylvania, we've become a nation of wussies.  As a result, I appreciate Ally Bank's authenticity, which thankfully hasn't wavered in their latest daring ad campaign.  In it, a metal band wails upon things that they hate (seriously, the first five seconds of this commercial are some of the funniest I've ever seen in a TV commercial), and then ad lib into "But I really love my bank!"  And then hilarity ensues from there.

The best thing about this ad (in my opinion) is that - taking "metal" to its literal, counter-cultural definition - this commercial is legitimately metal.  In the same way that it was metal to love George W. Bush in 2004, it's metal to love your bank in 2010.  This commercial is not for everyone (I could see my parents - and yours - putting the TV on mute whenever it comes on), but for its target audience, it's extremely memorable.  So kudos, Ally Bank, for creating an advertisement that actually does what it intends to do.  However, your savings rates are piss poor, so I will not use you.

Grade: B+

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Advertisement #3: Short but Sweet (Really Sweet...)

Just to prove I have a heart, I've also become a big fan of AT&T's new Samsung Focus cell phone spot.  Only 15 seconds in length, it describes the product, shows the product at work in a way that should make it very clear to the end user how it works and how it can improve their life, and then cuts away to an extremely... well, cute pink cyclops alien that bats its eye and picks a flower.

My fiancee liked this ad so much that she said she wanted a stuffed pink cyclops alien for Christmas.  (This is the same woman who got me a stuffed yeast for Christmas because I've recently started brewing my own beer ... so, yeah.)  I searched the Internet for a while but couldn't find anyone selling a stuffed replica of an alien creature from a cell phone commercial.  But hey, at least I tried!

I think what this commercial proves is that cute will always have the capacity to sell (if, again, it's authentic).  Like any social interaction, a commercial has about ten seconds to bring what we in the research business like to call "emotional rapport" - that immediate sense of, hey, this person/commercial/widget is actually kind of OK and I really want to pay more attention to it.  It's not syrupy, it's actually more informative than anything, and as such it gets the job done.

However, I will stick with Verizon.

Grade: B

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 Advertisement #4: Why I Hate Luxury Car Brands, Especially Lexus

Holy crap... I mean, look.  I get that luxury car brands ONLY exist insofar as they can convince people with disposable income (and just as many people without disposable income) to splurge tens of thousands of extra dollars (compared with a non-luxury car) on what is essentially a means of getting from Point A to Point B.  As a result of this, these brands need to justify their value by essentially appealing to prospective buyers' vanity - that is, you NEED this $40,000 car because you DESERVE the best/you need to SHOW everyone how wealthy you are/you MUST compensate for your small penis/yadda yadda, etc.  

(As you may have already guessed by the tenor of the previous paragraph, I intend to drive my base-model Honda Civic to the ground, on sheer principle.)

However, each holiday season, Lexus seems to push the envelope on this principle to the brink of committing brand seppuku.  This year,  their pitch line on several TV spots has been: "Let's be honest; no one ever wished for a smaller holiday gift."  To disprove this claim, below I've attempted to create a list of perfectly reasonable holiday gifts that are smaller than a Lexus RX350 (curb weight 4,178 lbs):

• Diamond jewelry
• A fruitcake
• A charitable gift in the recipient's behalf
• A Shake Weight
• An iPad
• Scotch of the Month club
• A stuffed microbe
• A mature adult Holstein cattle (~1,000 lb)

Taking my tongue out of my cheek for a second, I understand that the commercial's pitch line is not intended to be taken seriously.  Commercial pitch lines, in general, are not (in a literal sense) serious.  But when Taco Bell tells you to "Think outside the bun," it's OK that it's whimsical and flip because Taco Bell sells $1 tacos.  When you're selling a $40,000 car, you need to hold yourself to a higher standard of seriousness, and Lexus' entire holiday ad campaign completely fails to meet this standard. 

As a result, these commercials have become parodies unto themselves.  (In searching Youtube for "Lexus holiday commercial," I found more Lexus ad spoofs than actual commercials.)  It would not surprise me at all to see Lexus lose ground this holiday season to other luxury brands - Lexus (and its parent company, Toyota) haven't exactly had a banner year in 2010.  If it happens in 2010, expect them to lose ground to Acura, whose "Season of Reason" holiday ad campaign, I feel, elegantly toed the line between "this is a luxury purchase" and "this is nonetheless a perfectly reasonable purchase," doing an excellent job of capturing the current American zeitgeist of purchasing luxury items, where possible, and where practical.

Grade: F------- (Not Edible for Human Consumption)

Political Centrism Will Work. Partisans of all Kinds Are Idiots.

(DISCLAIMER #1: I almost never write about politics, and I think this is with good reason.  When having a conversation about politics with someone, it helps to make it clear exactly WHAT it is you are talking about, and from what frame of reference it is you speak - otherwise, two otherwise intelligent people end up having completely different conversations with each other and pissing each other off.  In the format of a blog post, if something gets lost in translation, it is entirely my fault.  This makes writing about politics risky; however, given what's been in the news lately, and the reactions that folks have had to said news, I think that "the benefits outweigh the risks."  Keep in mind that possible side effects of this blog post include: nodding silently, realizing I am far more eloquent than you originally anticipated, realizing I am a complete idiot, and never wishing to speak to me or read what I've written again.  All are rare.)

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I was one of the more intelligent kids in my high school days.  I wasn't a fantastic student, but I was good enough, and I ended up attending Rutgers (a better-than-average state school) as an undergraduate student. 

For the first three years of college, I worked a work-study job as a front desk attendant at the college gym.  Starting in junior year, a weird thing started to happen: I started to see people I went to high school with, specifically people whose academic abilities in high school I thought should have prohibited them from ever attending any four-year university (let alone a decent one like Rutgers) check in at the gym's front desk as students.

I could have had any number of reactions to this, but the reaction I chose was fairly pragmatic; I realized that (a) these high school classmates, whom I had rashly written off as idiots while in high school, were late bloomers, and likely had a completely valid type of intelligence that I couldn't myself understand because it wasn't my type of intelligence; and (b) more generally speaking, different people can take radically different paths toward the same ideal, or the same solution, and each path can be equally valid.

Taking this analogy one step further, I've come to the conclusion that my worldview (and yours, by the way) is fundamentally skewed toward the biases that have been ingrained in me (and you) since the age of about two.  This doesn't make me stupid; however, if I were to completely ignore this fact, and go about my adult business assuming that - for whatever reason - my worldview is "more correct" than yours, or "more correct" than some huge group of individuals who share a conceptual grouping (e.g., people of a particular race or people of a particular political persuasion)... well, I think that would make me stupid.

I think that most rational adults get this fact, and 95% of the time they implement it wisely.  People who have obtained even modest success in academia/business have undoubtedly encountered many situations where they have been struck by their own narrow-mindedness.  With time, they learn to adapt their actions, almost as if they are "scaffolding" against their own limitations.

But not when it comes to politics.  No, when it comes to politics - just like when it comes to operating a motor vehicle - everyone acts like a goddamned expert.  Even worse, perhaps due to the daunting scope of the problems that politics are supposed to solve, everyone seems to think that the solutions to these problems are obvious.  (As examples, "we just need to cut taxes across the board," or "we need to spend more on governmental services".)  Further, people seem to generally think that politicians of one political party have the "correct" solution, while the plurality of individuals who affiliate with the other party are completely "incorrect" (to be polite).

(If you disagree with the above statement, then you disagree with the basic premise of my argument so there's really no point in reading any further.)

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(DISCLAIMER #2, THE DISCLAIMER WHERE I DO A VERY POOR JOB OF EXPLAINING MY OWN POLITICAL BELIEFS: I am a registered Democrat, and when I vote, about 80% of the time I vote for Democrats.  (The other 20% of the time, I vote Republican.)  I find that this is the case mainly because I align myself with Democrats on social issues that are "must-haves" for me, and also as an athiest, I shudder at the forced values of the modern Republican party.  However, compared with the rest of my immediate family (who happens to skew very much to the left), I have some political views that can be described as conservative.  For instance, I don't believe in many gun control laws - I believe that people should be allowed to arm themselves to the teeth, if they feel like it, to the extent that they abide by the law.  Also, when President Obama compromised with Congress yesterday to pass a bill that included a payroll tax cut, I was so excited that I woke up my fiancee from a nap to tell her that we were likely, as a household, to gain an extra $3,XXX in take home income in 2011.  So I like lower taxes, too.)


To provide a (really terrible) illustration, below is a figure from a completely unscientific "Politics Test" from an online dating site (it's what popped up first when I Google searched "politics test"; leave me alone) called OKcupid.com.  I don't trust it at all, especially since one of the attributes I was asked to rate my agreement with was: "It should be legal for two consenting adults to challenge each other to a duel and fight a Death Match." - my answer on a 4-point scale from "Completely Disagree" to "Completely Agree" was "Agree," by the way - but nonetheless, here it is.  I am a centrist.  Make of this what you will.

Figure 1: I am socially liberal and economically moderate.

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So, getting back to me exposing a rather striking flaw in how most otherwise intelligent adults view the world. 

I don't know about you, but I don't vote for a candidate (especially for President) because I want them to follow an agenda that I agree with.  This is not to say that I don't care about their agenda - I do.  I vote for them because, after making a calculated judgment regarding not only the agenda they represent but also their intellect, psychological disposition, and overall readiness to assume office, my opinion is that they are the most competent choice to move the country forward in a reasonable direction.

This is why, when I hear the President getting so much crap from people on the left regarding selling out his ideals/his "vision"/his progressive agenda, it only takes me about 0.6 seconds to call bullshit.  Last month, Americans voted overwhelmingly in a way that indicates strongly that a progressive-left agenda is not currently viable for this country.  The truth is in the data, and the data - collected in aggregate, with 100 million-plus data points - does not typically lie.

Does this mean that the President needs to become a Republican?  Of course not, and strategically speaking, it makes a great deal of sense for him to point out the reasons why Republican leadership in Congress is presenting "suboptimal solutions" wherever possible over the next two years - politics is essentially a game of marketing, and the President will get re-elected in 2012 if he markets himself as being better than Republicans.  (By the by, I hope he pulls it off: I like the President, I want to see him get re-elected because I think he's a smart dude.)

However, it has become clear to me over the past two years of paying really careful attention that a divided government is itself an optimal solution, in the sense that it allows both parties to carry real weight in passing forth legislation.  I further believe that disagreeing with the previous statement is essentially saying the following: [DEMOCRATS/REPUBLICANS] are more correct than [OTHER PARTY], due to some developmental/dispositional/philosophical attribute(s) that no one has ever been able to determine but I know it exists because I don't think deeply about serious issues and I eat my own poop.  And this, well, I'm sorry, but this makes you an idiot.

Why can't it be that you agree with one political party more than another party, for reasons that you are able to explain rationally, but still have respect for the other party?  Why all the name-calling and generalization?  (More fundamentally, why do we only have two political parties in this country?  Err... that's a topic for a completely different blog post.)

As someone interested in how people behave in groups, I am fascinated by these questions, as I think they provide some really useful insight into how our minds work.  I don't know any of the solutions - I recommend John W. Dean's 2007 book Conservatives Without Conscience, specifically the chapter(s) regarding the study of authoritarian behavior as it relates to modern conservatism, as a useful point of reference for those who are interested - but I imagine insights can be constructed.

For now, I think it would really help America if liberals adopted a wait-and-see attitude and allowed the President to shift naturally toward the middle, because - if you believe, as I do, that everyone is at least "a little correct" - the best way forward is probably somewhere in the middle.  And conservatives, since you're pretty happy right now, if you could go ahead and explain these whole Jesus and family values obsessions to me, I'd really appreciate it, because I don't really get either of these things.  Thanks.

Jersey Shore Half Marathon: A Non-Athlete Attempts to Jog Quickly for Two Hours (Part 2)

NOTE: In Part 1, written about two weeks ago, I described the loveliness that is training for a half marathon road race.  In the post below, I discuss the race itself.)

I studied Social Psychology for a few years, and one of the coolest experiments I ever learned about involved these creatures to the left (i.e., marshmallows).  The experiments were simple and consistent; starting in the late 1950's, Walter Mischel and his colleagues would gather a bunch of four-year-old children in a classroom and offer them a marshmallow, with the promise that they would receive a second marshmallow - under the condition that they waited at least twenty minutes before eating the first.  Naturally, some of the children would diligently wait and receive their reward; others, impatient from the start, would be unable to complete the task and immediately start munching on the first marshmallow they were given.

In the years that followed, the researchers kept in touch with the parents of the participants to observe how they developed.  What Mischel and others found was quite powerful - the children who were able (at age four) to wait twenty minutes for a single marshmallow were rated by their parents as being better students, more well-adjusted socially, more communicative/verbal, and better able to deal with stress.  As they went through high school, their SAT scores were higher; they obtained higher levels of education, and they were less likely to experience drug addictions.  (I'd cite this if I had to, but I'm not an academic.  Trust me though.)

Because I am a bit of an elitist, I'm going to cherry-pick just one implication of this research and run (pardon my pun) with it.  To me, Mischel's findings suggest that the cognitive strength (or whatever you want to call it) required to put the body through just a shit-ton of intellectual-slash-emotional-slash-physical stress must either be ingrained in some of us, or alternatively developed at an extremely early at age through mechanisms I'm not sure anyone understands.  Either way, some of us "have it" and some of us don't, and that's fairly consistent throughout our lives.

Or at least that's what I told myself at mile 12 of Sunday's half-marathon, with the wind at my back only serving to make the day seem ten degrees hotter than it actually was, with the concepts of (a) hydration, (b) a ceasing to the dull ache in my feet, and (c) the finish line nothing but vague thoughts in the back of my mind.  I told myself I was crazy, but at the end of the whole mess I could at least say I finished a badass distance again.  Somehow, I got through - all things considered, about as quickly as I would have liked - and this is my story.


(NOTE: Four-year-old me would have eaten zero marshmallows, by the way; I can't stand them now, and I couldn't stand them then.  Twenty-seven-year-old me still eats 20+ Reese's Peanut Butter cups at a sitting, sometimes, so I'm not sure I would have come out ahead in a Mischel experiment.  Oh well.)

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Race day began partly cloudy, cold, and windy.  It was almost so cold that I considered wearing a long-sleeve throwaway shirt at the beginning (but ultimately, I decided against it).  I'm typically quite nervous the day before a race, but this particular morning I felt psychologically A-OK.

The set-up of the race was rather... prehistoric.  I suppose you get what you pay for when a half-marathon costs $28 to enter - there were no chips to attach to your shoe, so there was no chip time; it was difficult to hear the PA announcer pre-race; and the sweatshirt each participant received was clearly a throwback to 1992.  Seriously, it was practically a track suit (and, by the way, track suits look super comfortable - no wonder organized crime members wear them all the time).  I may purchase a mullet and wear this sweatshirt as my Halloween costume this year.

The course was also a tad boring, consisting of two concentric loops (the first about 2.5 miles longer than the second).  The toughest part of any course set up this way is the monotony; while there were many water stations, and the teams that manned them were full of enthusiasm, their vigor and energy did not make up for the miles in-between which consisted of nothing except scrub pine trees and the occasional road marker.  Particularly in the later miles, I'd wished there were more people on the sidelines cheering us on (but the finish line cluster was exciting to reach nonetheless).

My strategy was to run ten, 8:50 miles and then try to break it wide open into a near-sprint for the remaining 3.1 miles.  Per usual, I ended up feeling extremely strong through the first six (52:10, which was a little too fast in retrospect), but ultimately I slackened my speed to be right on pace at the ten-mile mark (1:28:30).  Again like always, the best laid plans of mice and runners tended to go astray - I bonked a bit toward the end, particularly in between miles 12 and 13, and my final 5k was completed in a decent but somewhat pedestrian 27:15 - my watch had me completing the race in about 1:55:45.  This was a full minute faster than my first half-marathon, and given the consistent 25 mph nor'easterly winds, I'm not about to complain about the improvement.  Still, I had hoped for more.

The music playlist on my iPod - set to shuffle all 33 songs - did not fail me.  The cooler, calmer songs tended toward the first half of the race, while I was able to rock out to the dulcet tones of Van Halen and Metallica in the second half.  This was serendipity, but I noticed it and mentally appreciated it in the heat of the moment.

And I was thrilled to have a greeting party, right next to the PA announcer at the finish (I could hear him at this point), consisting of my fiancee, my mom, and my cousin.  After I chugged about six small cups of Gatorade and water, and after the "oh-wait-am-I-gonna-puke" feeling passed, I was able to take inventory of the ravages my body endured during the race.

Two damaged toenails (one of them black - no worries here, some runners get them all the time), some very sore hamstrings and calves (which started to feel better after my mid-afternoon nap), and let's just say that showering at any temperature required copious amounts of Vaseline and moisturizer for the three days following the race.  All in all, I feel I came away with little damage.

The worst, though, was (and remains, unfortunately) the post-race cold.  Some runners routinely get colds after the race; some research I've read - and I don't completely trust this, but I'm passing it along because I think it makes a decent point - suggests that similar to how runners typically carbo-load before a race, they might also consider zinc- and vitamin-C-loading for a few days after the race.  On race day, I had a bit of a sore throat, but that isolated pain turned into a full-blown cold the day following the race; runny nose, stuffy nose, post-nasal drip, sneezes, coughs, itchy nose, watery eyes, headache, you name it, I've had it.  I'm just getting over it now; it's been the worst.

The night before the race, I made a joke to some friends (who don't run) about buying stock in Vaseline whenever I'm about to run a race... it should have been a joke about NyQuil.

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While I'm taking five days off from running to recover (mainly to recover my black toenail), the gratification that I continue to delay will eventually happen, in December - this will be a full month without any regimented training runs.  I plan to still run a bit, probably cross train a bit as well, but I do intend to take that month off from all structured exercise.  In between now and then is a Thanksgiving Day "Turkey Trot" half-marathon, which is unfairly named as 13.1 miles should never be considered a "trot."  You likely will not hear about the next race in this space... unless I am feeling very frisky about it.

I suppose all bets are off.

Jersey Shore Half Marathon: A Non-Athlete Attempts to Jog Quickly for Two Hours (Part 1)

Less than two weeks from today, I will run 13.1 miles in the Jersey Shore Half-Marathon in Sandy Hook-which-I-think-technically-is-Middletown, NJ. It'll take two posts for me to fully explain the process - the first one, which you're reading now, will concern itself with training for the race. The second post, which I'll write in two or three weeks, will be about the race itself.

This is no ordinary blog post about running, because I'm not your ordinary runner. I like to run, but I am not a natural by any means. I'm going to be brutally honest about what half-marathon training does to the average individual (since my athletic ability can be described charitably as average). And in the end, I will have hopefully explained exactly what this process does to a person in a way that makes sense to runners and non-runners alike. I feel that runners need to do a better job of understanding that not everyone in the world is a runner. Let me repeat that, with emphasis: NOT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS A RUNNER.

So, even if you don't give a shit about running, you might as well keep reading, if only for the references to Van Halen and elementary school kickball.

Most runners who write about running (either training for a road race or the race itself) make it sound like an incredibly soulful and transcendent experience. The miles on the pavement seem to melt away as they "goal-fully" stride their way toward the end of their long runs, or the finish line. They smile, and eat lots of carbs, and spend lots of money on the latest fad training gear, and upon reading the half-marathon training articles that they write, you can easily convince yourself that running 13.1 miles is doable - or, even, easy.

Running can be a lot of fun, and sometimes it can even be "transcendent"... I guess.  (I hate that word.)  However, having been through the process, anyone who tells you that training to race 13.1 miles is easy is a damned liar.

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Preparing to run a half-marathon, if you follow a reasonable training program, takes about ten weeks (from scratch). Each week consists of three running days, two cross-training days, and two rest days.  Rest days are seriously rest days; it's sometimes difficult to walk, depending on the number of miles I've run in the previous week.

The running days are broken down as follows:

Long runs: The weekend "long" run starts at about 3 miles in the first week and, for me, progresses to 12 miles (two weeks before the race itself).  Not all long runs are created equal.  With training, I can get my body to withstand the pounding of running about 10 miles fairly easily.  But somehow, for whatever reason, my internal organs revolt to the mere thought of additional distance with the fire of a thousand suns.  It becomes difficult to breathe; my legs not only ache but also feel as if they weigh a hundred pounds apiece; the skin irritation post-run is almost unbearable, and my mind begins to run wild.

I'm serious when I say that running is more a mental than a physical exercise - at some point, once any individual pounds the pavement for a certain number of minutes, the idea of running 10, 15, 20 minutes more than what they've already accomplished becomes completely irrelevant.  What people refer to commonly as a "Runner's High" is actually (for me) runner's ambivalence.  At some point I say to myself, you know, fuck it - I've been doing this for 45 minutes and I'm going to do this for 45 more.  That's a really long time and it's not going to help me to count the minutes anymore.  Might as well turn up this lovely Steve Winwood compilation on my iPod and get to groovin'.  (Just kidding about the Winwood.)

However, the runner's high/runner's ambivalence starts to break down for me somewhere north of ten miles.  At that point, as I mentioned before, my mind becomes my own worst enemy: I can't help counting down the minutes or landmarks until I am able to stop running, on some days (these are the lucky ones).  On the unlucky days, my mind begins to rationally explain to me why running so many miles is suicidal, and actually provides rational evidence - THROUGH LISTS! - of professional athletes who've died while playing their sport.  When it wants to be, my mind is a Wikipedia of tragic deaths.  I am incredibly morbid.

So that's the bad news about long runs.  The good news is that they work in increasing endurance... and also, they expand my taste in music.  These days it takes me about one hour, forty-five minutes to run 12 miles, and in that time I can listen to almost three entire albums.  Each week I plan my music in advance so that I save the most exhilirating songs for the very end.

By the way, here are songs that I can listen to while running that essentially guarantee I will not stop running for the duration of the song:

• "Right Now" by Van Halen
• "Whiskey in the Jar" by Metallica
• "Run Like Hell" by Pink Floyd
• "Kids" by MGMT
• "The High Road" by Broken Bells
• "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits
• "Long Road to Ruin" by Foo Fighters
• "Running on Empty" by Jackson Browne
• "Land of Confusion" by Genesis, followed by "Land of Confusion" by Disturbed
• "Silvergun Superman" by STP
• "The Ruler's Back" by Jay-Z
• "Roll With It" by Steve Winwood (just kidding... or am I?)

Pace/tempo runs: These are two mid-week runs that combine for roughly the same mileage as the long run.  Not much to add here, except that these can be deceptively tricky.  At least in the long run situation, you know that you're gonna be exercising for a very long time.  It's sometimes a huge tease to be able to say to yourself instead, "This is just four miles, just 36 minutes or so," and then your psyche pulls an Appalachian State on your ass and you end up having a terrible time for the entire run.

A pace run is where you run at "race pace" for the duration of the run.  A tempo run is where you run the first 25% of the run slowly, spend the middle 50% of the run slowly speeding up to slightly faster than "race pace," and then spend the last 25% of the run going slowly again.  I am terrible at slowing down for the last 25% of the run - I spend that time telling my haggard legs to go F- themselves and do the best I can to finish strong.  Someday, after I seriously injure myself, I'll read this and realize that this is probably why.

Cross-training days, for me, are typically spent on a stationary bike next to my fiancee.  That's right; spin class.

Spin class is a very interesting place.  My understanding is that different instructors take different approaches to managing a spin class.  This particular class is an hour long and I'd say only about 80% of the people who show up for this thing manage to finish in any condition whatsoever; maybe 25% of the total are able to ride fast for the full hour.  It's a boot camp-like environment, and what are supposed to be my "easier" days during training turn into situations where I find myself bike-sprinting 53 minutes into an exercise session.  It's hell, but it's the kind of hell where at the end of it you feel pretty damn good about what you accomplished.

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Before 2009 turned to 2010, I'd never raced at a distance beyond 3.1 miles, and before I committed myself to run longer distances, I assumed that I never would.  I've spent some time this year thinking about what changed, and I think what happened was I finally understood that pushing oneself athletically can be useful and illustrative, for a bunch of different reasons.

If you select to judge by the rubric that defines elementary school games of kickball and high school pick-up basketball games, I have never been an athlete.  I've never been quick, nor have I ever been coordinated - my mind can tell my muscles to do something, and by the time my muscles react, it's next Tuesday.  However, I've found that I'm actually decent at running.  It's weird; it's one of the few things in my life where I find that if I put in the effort, the results end up taking care of themselves.  There is no worrying in the middle of a run (or a race) - there's just running, or racing.  There are no obstacles (or, for that matter, clients, although I fail to see the difference between the two).  Anyway, at age 27, I find that I'm in the best physical shape of my life, which is quite cool.

I think also that distance running has taught me a lot about hard work (and vice versa).  At some point in everyone's life, they realize that they can't skate by on talent alone and actually have to put in serious effort to make an impact on whatever they feel like impacting.  I feel like I was able to skate through college and graduate school, with a good deal of objective success, on some combination of moderately-hard work, lots of potential, and my ability to talk/write with very little prompting.  But it also feels good to push yourself to the brink (if you're one of those people who likes it, which is circular logic but really the only good way to explain why some people run full marathons and others eat Bon-Bons).

I can't skate by anymore, because my work demands so much of me intellectually and also it's the kind of work where if my heart's not in it, it would immediately show.  This year, as a New Year's Resolution, I decided to let that can-do attitude filter into taking care of myself physically, through running.  I can't believe it's almost October and I haven't failed on my New Year's resolution - by the end of the calendar year, I'll have run three half-marathons plus a 15K (9.3 miles).

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So this is training for a half-marathon, in short, and hopefully a bit of insight as to why a reasonable person would put themselves through so much.  In two weeks, the race wrap-up - I'll be brutally honest.

A Man's View: Weddings and Gross Consumerism

As a man, there are many manly things that I enjoy. I enjoy watching baseball and football on TV, going to the driving range, shanking tee shots, taking long weekend naps on the couch while watching golf, and going to the movies to see action flicks. I like to play poker and discuss current events. Very recently, I started brewing beer, which is a very fun (and surprisingly inexpensive) manly hobby to undertake. You get to drink beer while you brew beer, which is the kind of cannibalism we all should learn to love.

As observers of my life already know, I'm getting married in about 14 months. I'm typically private about these sorts of things, but I wanted to share a few thoughts I've had about the process. This is mainly for other dudes, no question; however, to the extent my fiancee doesn't kill me for sharing details, hopefully I can keep someone out there from being a stupid freaking idiot about the whole thing.

My first thought is that, while generally awesome, weddings have been spoiled by the same ultra-consumeristic bullshit that continuously pollutes our society. My future wife and I both agree that we want our wedding to be a kick-ass party; unpretentious, free-wheeling, occasionally random and the kind of overall environment where no one has to think twice about having legal (or semi-legal, or illegal-as-long-as-nobody-gets-caught) fun. We also feel like that kind of party does not have to put us into a lifetime of debt to happen. Lots of people that we know agree with this point of view, and good for them, because they're right. But a sucker gets married every minute, to paraphrase the great P.T. Barnum, and a significant minority of folks seem to think that the same principles that apply to their lives apply to their weddings - the gluttonous spending of money.

Now, I'll admit that compared with the average American, I have a very odd relationship with money. I track my spending religiously, I budget so that I can never spend more than I earn, and I'm damn near evangelical about saving being the key to eventual freedom from stuff like having a mortgage, having to go to work, and basically all the stuff that prevents me from spending all day smoking Cuban cigars which I will light with $10 bills. (NOTE: I wouldn't be supporting the Cuban economy; I'd be burning their fields.)

So I suppose I'm being a pretentious asshole by saying that, when it comes to wedding planning, it makes the most perfect kind of sense to not get wrapped up in all that, "But it's a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it's only seven thousand dollars for these incredible, Buddhist monk-created organic pottery centerpieces, and it's my fairytale, magical day!" bullshit.

Oh well, I'm a pretentious asshole. I'm also speaking common sense, and it's unbelievable how rare common sense is in the whole process.

I was watching the (mostly unfunny) humorist Dave Barry on MSNBC's great morning show "Morning Joe" a few months ago, and he mentioned something very funny (surprisingly) about paying for his daughter's wedding - it's like the whole system is designed to tell brides-to-be that their wedding doesn't have to be super-expensive, but if it isn't super-expensive, it'll suck. Thankfully, my fiancee hasn't bought into all that crap yet... but there's still 14 months to go. (I kid.)

My second point: it's amazing the extent to which the cottage industry completely dedicated to the wedding process exists these days. You wouldn't think that America is still in the relatively early stages of recovering from a terrible economic recession - hell, a near-financial meltdown - by reading Brides, the magazine that my fiancee receives each month, which is chock-filled with novel wedding planning advice (like the newest $20,000 dresses!).

In my life, I have the tendency to paraphrase common colloquialisms to prove my points. One of my recent favorites (which no one seems to understand) is: "Weddings are like assholes; everyone has one." What I'm trying, and failing, to say with this very profane comment is that creating a magazine (for instance) that caters to new brides strikes me as a very difficult thing to do.

By analogy, I subscribe to Esquire. By subscribing to Esquire, I'm telling the publisher of the magazine that I am the type of person who reads the magazine. By this, I mean that I am probably aged 25-54, college-educated, and have political views which lean to the left. I earn at or above the median United States income, and I'm at least willing to consider purchasing luxury items and new fashion styles. I care deeply about current events and politics, I enjoy postmodern writing, and I'm not against reading stuff that makes me emotional.

By comparison, the target demographic of Brides is the following: a woman who is getting married.

Lots of women get married, smart or stupid, old or young, rich or poor, conservative or liberal, backwoods-y or cosmopolitan, suburban yuppies and ex-convicts. Yes, that's right, weddings are like assholes - almost everybody has one. So, given the demographic wasteland that the magazine has to cater to, what the hell do you actually write in a magazine like this? How the hell does it make any sort of sense?

Now, I would know the answer to this query if I ever actually read the magazine. I'm just not certain that it's a manly thing to do, however, so I decided to run into the living room and ask the woman who does read it.

Me: "Hey, what do you get out of that Brides magazine?"
April (my fiancee): "What the hell do you mean?"
Me: "Like, if you were to tell me the one thing that reading the magazine does for you, what would it be?"
April: "Oh, I get lots of ideas from reading it. [pause] Why are you asking me this?"
Me: "I'm writing a blog post summarizing all the things that have been annoying me about the wedding planning process, and I just realized that Brides magazine doesn't really have any content at all. You confirmed it for me. It's like the perfect postmodern magazine; it's like Playboy. Nobody reads Playboy for the articles."
April: "Well, it's not like I only read it for the pictures; there are lots of hints about things like cool wedding favors and stuff like that. But in general, it's not about content for me, it's about helping me plan."

Which leads me pretty well, I think, into my third point, which is that the system works remarkably well for people who are discerning enough to know what is BS and what isn't, when it comes to planning a wedding. I'm beginning to realize that even if we adopt a very strict Keep It Simple, Stupid-type approach to wedding planning, there are still about 404* things to plan in advance of the big day. (*NOTE: This is if you believe the standard checklist from TheKnot.com, which seems to believe that every couple intends to have a $100,000, multi-cultural, multi-religious, three-day wedding celebration. I think we come in at about 150 items, given our conservative approach.)

I think that Brides magazine is a stupid magazine not because it isn't helpful (it is), but because it's incredibly homogenized (by necessity), and I'm the kind of jerk who needs popular culture to speak directly to me. This is entirely my problem, and in retrospect it's actually a pretty manly problem to have. (Specifically, the problem of a white male, aged 18-49  - to quote Homer Simpson, "Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are." NUTS AND GUM, TOGETHER AT LAST!)

To digress a little, my personal opinion is that, compared with men, most women are fundamentally decent enough not to care about whether their popular culture speaks directly to them. This is the charitable way to describe womenfolk's fascination not only with Brides, but also with Cosmopolitan, a magazine I actually have bothered to read and find so ridiculously stupid/vapid that it leads me to the uncharitable way to describe it - that what Internet porn is for dudes, Cosmopolitan damned near has to be for some women: that is, an escape fantasy into a world of complete smoothness and lack of social hang-ups.

But to get back to wedding planning: there's something to be said for loving your day-to-day life so very much that you don't need "special" things (or that you only need them when they're financially reasonable to undertake). I am personally so proud of the fact that my fiancee loves me, our present life together, and the idea of spending the rest of our lives together, so very much that we don't need to spend through the teeth just to please a rich uncle or three. I can't help but think that those who choose to do so, do so in order to compensate for something that is lacking - either in their relationship per se, or in their relationships with their families, or in their day-to-day life. Not to be an asshole (OK, to be kind of an asshole), I've got 99 problems but that ain't one.

My perfect vision is hopefully a downright normal one. (I've spoken about it with my fiancee, and she agrees it's pretty cool.) It's a vision of me with my new wife and friends, playing "Rock Band" in a hotel suite at 1 AM, tuxedo undone, drinking an ice-cold beer from the bottle during our after-party. But that's just my plain and simple view of the world, and to get others to agree with it would be just plain evil. Even if I am right.

Why I Left Graduate School (Part 2)

(Author's Note: My original post on this topic, which I wrote in March of 2009, has received a modest bit of Internet traffic. A lot of this traffic comes from Google searches, likely from frustrated academics who wanted to read someone's thoughts at that difficult time. Because it's been a while since I posted in this space, I thought it might be helpful to revisit the debate - one that I know continues in the minds of many academics and post-academics alike - because it touches on many deeper concerns, both philosophical and psychological.)

In the fifteen months since I packed my bags and left academia for a very nice research-related job in industry, I've noticed a few things. The first is that I do not miss the rigors of academic writing; my writing talents (to the extent that they exist at all) lie solely in the realms of spinning the narrative, in the plentiful use of adjectives and in deconstructing the meaning of "stuff" from a big-picture level - they do not thrive in the compartmentalized facilities of academic research writing, with its almost computer-scientist-like attention to detail and linearity.

The second thing, very much related to the first, is that I now know better where my skills lie in general. I'm very much talented as a talker; I talk far better than I write and I love to socialize; on the other hand, I can wade in the analytical waters and I'm able to solve complex problems; I can engineer complex solutions to these problems because I can wrap my mind around complexity; and I severely lack patience but make up for it with overall positive demeanor and a "can-do spirit." We all deserve to know these things about ourselves - the fractal image of your personality as it appears to those around you is likely different from what you assume - and I've found that the best way to understand these things is to change your environment once in a great while.

The third thing I've learned, very much related to the first two that I've mentioned, is that completely changing your environment has consequences. These consequences should and must be weighed against the potential benefits of making such a severe life choice. In my original article on this topic, I walked around an issue that I think I understand better now that I've made the dive into industry - specifically, that in deciding to leave academia for industry, I consciously chose the near-certainty of financial prosperity over the slim chance of notoriety.

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Many people I know, especially the adults, aspire to be famous. I've had my share of fantasies in this regard - until quite recently, I've dreamed of waking up one day armed with a 97-mile-an-hour fastball and the ability to control it with laser-like precision. I would try out and sign with the New York Yankees, of course, and work my way quickly through their minor league system; upon making the big leagues, I would wear number 36 (like my boyhood idol, pitcher David Cone) and quickly make a name for myself as an example of dreams come true, the graduate student-turned-flamethrower.

This was my fantasy until about age 24. (NOTE: Lately, this has been supplanted by a new dream - one of winning millions of dollars at the Main Event at the yearly World Series of Poker. I find this dream only slightly more attainable than the previous one.) But dreams fade as time passes, as the clock very slowly ticks on your own life, and as you start to realize that although you are still young, there is constantly less time than before to make the impact that you wanted to make.

I am nothing if not a realist. This is why, when the inevitable article on NYTimes.com appeared, the one that featured the research that was once in my "academic wheelhouse" - the work of my former adviser, along with a former colleague, in a very specialized topic in which I've earned a master's degree - my major emotional response at that moment was actually one of pure joy. (I ran into the master bedroom, where my fiancee was about to fall asleep, and told her excitedly that I'd stumbled upon a very cool article involving people I knew by first name.)

But this was also the moment where I realized that my last best shot at fame, short of winning the WSOP Main Event or embroilment in a political scandal, had disappeared as a direct function of my own decision making. (NOTE: I should never go into politics; I've written too much. There's too much dirt out there. Even though I could see 50-year-old Fred really wanting to.) This karmic dissonance is something I'd like to explore further, because I think it helps explain why so many intelligent adults - whether they live in academia or in industry - spend so much of their waking time, to paraphrase the Primitive Radio Gods, "letting their money pay for living days awake but half-asleep."

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Regardless of what I wrote above, I love my job and I don't regret for a second my decision to leave graduate school and to move back home to New Jersey. I have a delicious work-life balance, and I do not dread Sunday evenings. I am paid meaningfully for my work, and doing work that I enjoy helps pay for a lifestyle that allows me a great deal of personal and experiential freedom. Simply put, my gamble on finding a job in the midst of a terrible recession worked, and worked swimmingly. (As a concrete example, next year I'm probably going to buy a pretty big and pretty nice house. Probably.)

Academics - and Ph.D. students, in particular - often take an extreme "longview" of life itself. (As I wrote last March, "Graduate students, because they're mostly young and extremely driven, always forget that their hearts will inevitably give out one day.") In retrospect, this is not as terrible of a thought process as I once thought (although I still don't think that way). However, even in exchange for ultimate knowledge, it is an extreme, almost immeasurable, sacrifice to earn almost no money during one's twenties and early thirties. It puts a person at a financial disadvantage that is almost impossible to overcome within the current human lifespan (one in which we retire before age 70), and because so many people out there are concerned about money, it almost self-selects the population of Ph.D's to be either (a) independently wealthy prior to entering a Ph.D. program or (b) completely oblivious to the concept of money in general.

But money, whatever its merits or inherent problems, is important. It's, like, really, really important - so important that as an outside observer, I have to consider whether item (b) is such a serious problem that it might in our lifetimes turn on its side what we've always considered to be "intelligence." For all the talk of grade inflation and the hyper-education of American society, we still live in a society where people (in New Jersey, at least) with only a high school education and skills in a meaningful trade can earn six-figure incomes well before age thirty. A tenure-track academic, if they are lucky, will hit that salary level some time between ages 35 and 40 (assuming a "traditional" academic path). This doesn't strike me as "fair," in its most basic sense, but if you're like me and you believe that people are generally paid what they're worth, it also makes an interesting statement about the value of academia in general.

Right-wing hemming and hawing aside, America is going to remain a capitalist society for the foreseeable future. Given this, money is going to remain important as societal incentive. Given this, I think we need to re-think whether advanced education, as it is presently constituted, is useful. Are Ph.D.'s receiving a lifetime benefit commensurate to their 5-7 years (at least) of low-paying indentured servitude?

(NOTE: If I weren't a lazy person, this would be where I would Google the pay differential between, say, Ph.D.'s in the social sciences vs. those with masters'- and bachelors'-level educations. I'm not going to do this, because I am lazy, but my educated guess is that Ph.D.'s do earn somewhat more per annum, compared with the masters'-level folks in a given field - but not by so much to justify the lost earning potential experienced in their twenties and thirties. These are the times when compound interest builds, so it kind of makes sense to make money right now.)

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This is just my opinion; it's highly analytical, and as a consequence, it's probably quite controversial. Life is not predicated by a 401(k) balance, to the same extent that it is not predicated by one's retirement; after all, if you're like me, you find it pretty pathetic when you hear people talk longingly for their retirement years. Waiting to have fun in retirement is like waiting to relax until Sunday night (if you're one of those people who hates Sunday nights). In fact, if there's one takeaway from this entire post, I hope it's that the frustrated academics who read this article realize that every work situation - academic, industry, the priesthood, whatever - has its pros and its cons, and that your happiness in that work situation is created (constructed, if I may borrow a phrase from the scientific study of emotions) by the extent to which your interaction between you and your work environment is a holistically successful one.

So, if your commute sucks, you're not going to like your job. If your boss sucks, you're not going to like your job. If your pay sucks, or if you find your work dull and boring, or if you're in over your head with work, you're not going to like your job. Do you get my drift? Liking what you do isn't about liking what you do - it's about proactively seeking a work environment where you're challenged, happy, well-paid, and well-liked, all at the same time. So the good news and the bad news, all rolled up in one, is that finding this sort of happiness at work takes exactly the same amount of effort as finding this sort of happiness in a relationship. As I observe other people, it is unsurprising that the exact same people who have little problems in the one realm have few problems in the other, and the converse - that people who can never be happy in love are never happy at work - is completely true as well.

The New Black Sea...

By now most people have heard that there has been a slight, shall we say, leak in one of BP's off shore oil rigs. It is resulting in millions of gallons of oil spilling into the ocean in the past few weeks. That's right, weeks. Not only has it not been fixed, but no one (out of BP, Halliburton
aka the spawn of ------------------------------------>
and Transocean) will own up to the screw up that caused it because of negative publicity and a drop in stock. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?

That's some shameful shit right there. Not only are they not taking blame but they haven't been able to fix it? I can understand with no one being able to assign blame because the site is several leagues (that's right i went nautical on this bitch) under water and few if any companies have the resources to address such an issue. But for goddsakes why don't the three of you team up, hire the best engineers in the world and fix that leak already. The fact that there has been enough time to convene a senate hearing on the matter since it was discovered should tell u they have had a long damn time to fix the leak since they discovered it. If nothing else then you can say it doesn't matter who's fault it was it's fixed now.

But no, the bickering continues and there are still no viable plans to stop the leak. Not even say, taking out the leaking section and replacing it with a new part. Yes a lot of oil would gush for a little while, but at least it would stop. Call Aquaman or someone... someone like ... That's right... Kevin Costner who has a special machine to help with the situation. CNN reports that he boasts his machine will siphon 210,000 gallons of oil from the ocean each day. Granted, he only funded this machine, but at least he's doing something to help the cause. How sad is it that people who have risen to the position of CEO of multi-billion dollar companies can't fund or negotiate a way to solve this, but Kevin Costner, genius that he is?, finds a group of scientists, gives them some money to run and they come up with something more effective than anything proposed by or for those CEOs.

To that I say Bravo Costner, you're not much for acting but your one hell of a humanitarian. For chrissakes I bet if they could profit off of this those 3 companies would have found a solution and implemented it within 2 weeks. Does anyone else think this is a ploy just to validate the re-diculous rise in gas prices during the summer? I don't care if you claim or if liability is assigned... right now... just fix the damn thing and stop being a bunch of retarded ass monkeys (yes the way the geico guy meant it).

You're not even the amusing kind of retarded monkey. See ------->
See also Leopold "Butters" Stotch. You're the kind of monkey that just picks up it's own feces and puts it back down again, as opposed to throwing it at another monkey in order to take his banana or lady monkey friend away from him. You've now replaced Kevin Costner at the bottom of the evolutionary chart, not an easy task mind you. Kevin Costner has learned to trade his bananas in order to get other smarter monkies (chimpanzees) to find a solution. Not only that, but he invested his bananas wisely, this machine was conceived in the wake of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, so a working prototype wouldn't be as far off as say a brand new idea.

In closing, you're all a bunch of cock-biting fucktards and I hope you go to prison, not for having an accident, but for not owning up to it and just sitting around with your thumbs up your asses for a month while it gets worse. And to Kevin Costner, i won't watch your movies, except field of dreams, but i'll nominate you for an award...of some kind... not related to acting.

My Soft Rock iTunes Playlist

A short blog post here to self-flatulate myself on a Soft Rock iTunes playlist that I recently created. I created this playlist for several reasons, which I'll outline below:

1) Soft rock is highly undervalued in the modern framework of "mainstream" music. Somehow, as mainstream tastes have shifted in the past 15 years or so, it's become a requirement that all music - even terrible pop stuff like the feces set to music by Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood - has to be "edgy". Even if the sum product of the artistic effort contains no meaning, musical ingenuity, or vocal talent, there has to be some sort of attempt at expressing a high-intensity emotion.

Soft rock, which I'm not even going to define (as was once said about pornography, you don't need to define it because you know what it is when you see it), almost never possesses an emotional "edge" at all - and even the soft rock which is actually good is marginalized to old-person radio stations as a function of this.

Lots of music that we derisively label as "soft rock" in 2010 was created by some very talented singer-songwriters and rock music groups - groups that were once considered part of the mainstream. Individuals like Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, Elton John, Bruce Hornsby and Boz Scaggs, as well as mainstream rock bands like Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Foreigner, and America, are these days most often heard on radio stations designed for your dentist's waiting room/office cubicles occupied by 56-year-old accounts payable managers.

Why? In my measured opinion, because they're not "cool" enough. I don't mean to knock the ways in which we label music as cool, because in general this is a very accurate long-term process of self-selection. (For instance, we realize now that Led Zeppelin is much cooler than Michael McDonald. If I were the program manager at a large-city classic rock station and I needed ratings, I'm going to fire up the Zepp and play the dulcet tones of Mikey McD, if I play him at all, early on Sunday mornings.)

2) Point #1 doesn't mean that soft rock isn't good. Now, much soft rock isn't that good. (In the soft rock playlist that follows, you won't see anything from Wham! or Celine Dion or anything.) But most people who listen to music do it for a combination of two reasons - they like the music itself, and they like what the music tells them about themselves. It's the second reason that often gets in the way of people understanding that soft rock is often valid.

3) Soft rock tells us something meaningful about ourselves, it's just we often don't want to hear it. Like all forms of art, music helps us understand things - most importantly, ourselves in relation to the world. For instance, if I'm driving in my car and I get cut off by some asshole, I'm going to put on Metallica or something, most likely. I think that I do this because Metallica matches my mood (which is anger), and it also helps me understand (in a weird way) that I am still validly a man.

Soft rock kinda serves the opposite purpose - it's searching, smooth, and often addresses silly topics like love and introspection. Most people - especially dudes - are uncomfortable with this form of musical expression (even though they likely secretly listen to it when they're alone, at least sometimes). I'm sorry; I'm just not that uncomfortable with it, and when you become comfortable with it, you become more willing to accept the fact that at least some soft rock is good music, for all the reasons that music can be good.

And now, on to the list... I'm half-impressed with myself and half embarrassed for putting this together. OK, so maybe it's 20% impressed and 80% embarrassed. But still, I'm posting this on the Internet.

Notes on this list:

• Very important: These songs DO NOT REPRESENT THE WHOLE SPECTRUM OF MUSIC THAT I ENJOY. I also have every Metallica CD ever - even the bad ones like "St. Anger" - on my iPod.
• Songs that I've included unironically are indicated with an asterisk *. (Translation: If you see the cute little star next to the song title, that means that I genuinely like the song. Otherwise, assume that I'm including the song either because I think it fits sonically or because I'm trying to be corny.)
• Comment and make fun of me all you want - but, if making fun of me, also include in your comment an accurate estimate of how many of the 20 songs you actually like. (With few exceptions, I know it's greater than zero.)

1. "Lido Shuffle" - Boz Scaggs*
2. "Sister Golden Hair" - America*
3. "The Way It Is" - Bruce Hornsby & The Range*
4. "Walk of Life" - Dire Straits*
5. "The King of Wishful Thinking" - Go West
6. "Things Can Only Get Better" - Howard Jones*
7. "Power of Love" - Huey Lewis & The News
8. "Your Love" - The Outfield*
9. "Higher Love" - Steve Winwood
10. "St. Elmo's Fire" - John Parr
11. "I Wish it Would Rain Down" - Phil Collins
12. "To Be With You" - Mr. Big*
13. "Graceland" - Paul Simon*
14. "Walking in Memphis" - Marc Cohn*
15. "Another Day in Paradise" - Phil Collins*
16. "In Too Deep" - Genesis
17. "Mandolin Rain" - Bruce Hornsby & The Range*
18. "Waiting for a Girl Like You" - Foreigner*
19. "I Can't Fight This Feeling" - REO Speedwagon*
20. "What a Fool Believes" - The Doobie Brothers

Enjoy...

The Nine New Jerseys

Shortly after I returned home to New Jersey last spring, the low-brow reality TV network MTV released an extremely low-brow reality show named "Jersey Shore." On "Jersey Shore", I'm assuming, a handful of Italian-American kids (mostly from Staten Island, NY) invade a beach house in Seaside Heights, NJ for a summer, go clubbing, get into trouble, engage in a bunch of in-fighting and drama, treat themselves and others with complete disrespect, and do a reasonably good job of setting the legitimate Italian-American culture backwards a decent 15 to 20 years.

I say "I'm assuming" in the paragraph above because I've never seen "Jersey Shore," and I don't really want to. I don't even have to watch the show in order to write the above paragraph -- all I had to do was read a half-dozen articles on the Internet to figure out something I already should have known. Most of the native New Jersey-ans I've spoken with about "Jersey Shore" find the show nauseating, but everyone agrees that the show is not untrue.

This is why I think "Jersey Shore" is destined to fail. It's reality TV that is too real. These people don't have the mystique of a real Guido - say, for instance, the "Dapper Don", John Gotti - because they aren't that interesting. They're the type of obviously narcissistic, attention-grabbing idiots who succeed only in that you look at them a bit longer than usual when you see them at the bar.

But I mentioned something else in the first paragraph of this post that I want to return to - these reality TV show characters are not from New Jersey. They represent a distinct, but very limited sub-culture who sometimes visits New Jersey, and as a result, misinformed people from all over the country now think this is who New Jerseyans, by and large, actually are. This is completely incorrect, and in this blog post I intend to explain to you exactly what I think New Jersey is.

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How am I qualified to do this? Well, I was born some place else. I moved here at the age of nine (ironically, there are Nine New Jerseys, as you'll see) and moved to a relatively typical New Jersey town (an example of the Second New Jersey). 

I went to high school there, and then I went to the New Jersey state school (Rutgers University). RU was a melting pot of the Nine New Jerseys, and I learned a bunch about all of them. Then I worked for a year in the Fourth New Jersey (you'll see).

Then I moved away, to Massachusetts, a place known for its own unique brand of douchebag provincialism (i.e., the "Masshole"). After a couple of years experiencing that, I moved home.

So, to meekly paraphrase Johnny Cash, I know a whole lot about a few places, I know a little about a bunch of different places, and I don't give a damn about anything else. That's why, maybe, I am qualified to explain to you what the Nine New Jerseys are.

Let's get started....

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The First New Jersey - Oil Refinery Country

If you've ever flown into Newark Airport, you know this part of New Jersey. If the only part of New Jersey you've ever seen is the 10 mile radius surrounding Newark Airport, this is all you think New Jersey is.

The good news is, you're wrong about New Jersey. (The bad news is, I may not be able to convince you that the rest of New Jersey is any better, but I'm at least going to try. Honestly, this blog post could be a non-fiction book - but I'm not talented enough nor devoted enough to my hobby to make this happen. Good for all of us.)

There are a bunch of oil refineries in a very tight cluster around Linden and Elizabeth, NJ. This makes Linden and Elizabeth not the most fantastic places to live (although these are actually surprisingly live-able towns - wait until you hit the Ninth Circle of New Jersey to experience places that aren't live-able).

These oil refineries pollute the air (probably) and make driving on the NJ Turnpike between Exits 12 and 13 extremely smelly (definitely). However, they supply hundreds of high-skilled jobs to the state and thousands of middle-class jobs, as well. They also help drive the cheap price of gasoline in the state. Even though New Jerseyans have to let someone else pump their gas (and these gas pump attendants have to get paid by somebody), we routinely enjoy some of the lowest fuel prices in the nation. (*NOTE: In case you were curious, other places with really cheap fuel include Oklahoma and western Texas. The highest fuel is traditionally in Alaska, Hawaii, and parts of California. The more you know...)

 The Second New Jersey - "Jersey Shore" (North)

For purposes of separation, here I'll describe the "northern" part of the Jersey Shore (which is actually in the central part of the state, encompassing Monmouth and northern Ocean counties). 

This is where I grew up, and it's hard for me to be impartial about this part of the state. I'll be honest - this area is pretty damned awesome. There's an excellent demographic mixture of people, there are arts, fine dining, and a considerable amount of high culture - but it's an area that also identifies with working-class guts and toughness and anything else that Bruce Springsteen wrote about between 1973 and 1978.

There is lots of beach, and for three months out of the year, it's warm enough to actually get a suntan there. Most the immediate beachfront area is pretty expensive to live in, but there are still a few free beaches (and even more that will let you in on a Saturday for less than 7-10 bucks). There are lots of bars and clubs in the area; some notable ones are as follows:

• Dublin House in Red Bank - easily my favorite Irish pub in New Jersey. The only bar I've ever been asked to leave (in my defense, we were very drunk and very much in the wrong, and I'll leave it at that), and they still let me in. Thanks for not blacklisting me!
• Ashes in Red Bank - great place to smoke a cigar and drink Scotch. Gets a little too crowded and town-y sometimes, but still one of my favorite places.
• Jenkinson's in Pt. Pleasant Beach - great Jersey Shore cover bands, somehow seems less douche-y than the other places in that area. I've had a few really really good nights there.
• Bar A in The Town That Was Re-Districted to Only Include Bar A - I don't even like Bar A, but I need to tell this story. It used to be that Bar A was located in the town of Belmar, NJ. But Belmar is kind of a nice town, and Bar A is prone to such routine acts of legal/moral/sexual depravity that at some point around 2005, the Belmar town council got together and said, "Wait, we can't have this place advertised as being in our town anymore. Let's create a new little sub-town, put Bar A there, and all our public urination/drunkenness/God knows what else problems will be solved!" Thus, Bar A is now in Lake Como, New Jersey, population: Bar A.

I'm too young to remember the horror stories from the '70s and '80s about syringes and condoms and all kinds of filth washing up on the Jersey Shore. I do feel that in the last ten years are so, the ocean's become a lot cleaner, for whatever reason. Regardless, of all the places I've ever lived, the Second New Jersey is my home, and if I ever become famous in any way, it will always be my home.

The Third New Jersey - "Jersey Shore" (South)

I'll roughly define this area as the southeastern part of Ocean County, as well as the shorelines of Atlantic County and Cape May County south to Cape May Point. (NOTE: I just realized it would be helpful if you read this with a map of New Jersey nearby. If you're not geographically inclined, just Wikipedia "Counties of New Jersey" and you'll get a sense of what I am talking about.)

The Third New Jersey includes Long Beach Island, where I've spent some time every summer since 2005. LBI is a fantastic place that gets a bad rap because so many people who summer there are smug, self-important douchebags who like to put "LBI" stickers on the back of their smug, self-important douchebag hybrids and SUVs. I've posted (poorly) before about how beautiful I think LBI is, so I won't belabor the point, but I do think that if everyone who watched "Jersey Shore" spent a few days on LBI and saw how nice it was... they wouldn't assume that everyone from New Jersey was such a Guido.

Let's move south to another place I love... Atlantic City. (NOTE: AC also marginally qualifies for the Ninth Circle of New Jersey, which I'll describe below. I think it best fits here, though.) People identify Atlantic City nowadays as a poor man's Vegas - cheaper, more easily accessible without having to fly somewhere, definitely seedier, and kind of a scary place to drive through.

Until the 1960's and 1970's, however, Atlantic City was a ridiculously popular resort town. Lots of people know that the streets in "Monopoly" were based there, but AC was also home to Democratic National Conventions and a bunch of other important historical events. The next time you drive through the city, try to look past the boarded-up houses, possible crack dens, and "We Buy Gold" stores and try to find an old building that looks like it used to be really classy. You will most likely find one. It's a city with a really interesting history, and that history becomes more and more faded the more we think of the place as a gambling venue/shithole.

Even further south is Cape May. My girlfriend and I occasionally spend weekends there (at a Bed and Breakfast, where we make awkward small-talk with couples in their fifties while we eat delicious homemade food). There are also lots of cool shops, ghost tours/haunted houses (which are a cool spectacle regardless of whether you believe in ghosts), really nice beaches, and the best lobster in New Jersey.

Now, I eat one lobster every year - that's kind of my thing. I really like lobster, but it's expensive and hard to eat and, partly, it's kind of fun to make myself wait for something. (NOTE: In that same vein, maybe I should start smoking one cigarette every year.) Cape May has a bunch of really good restaurants that are happy to offer lobster (even off-menu), and often this is where I have my annual large marine crustacean.

The Fourth New Jersey - New York's Bedroom Communities

New York City is a fantastic city - as Frank Sinatra sang, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. The problem is, it's really difficult to "make it" in New York City. If you want to own a townhouse in Manhattan, you're more or less paying a million dollars for it. Want a parking spot to go along with it? It's another hundred grand up front, or you can spend almost a thousand dollars a month in "rent". For a parking space!! While the food is fantastic, the overall cost of living in NYC prohibits all but the ultra-rich, financially foolish, or those willing to live in college-like (or worse) situations until middle age from living there.

That's why a lot of people who work in the city choose to live in New Jersey. New York's bedroom communities encompass a half-moon (geographically speaking) surrounding the city of Newark to the north, west, and south. Some of these suburbs are extremely wealthy - here's an interesting New Jersey fact: the town of Essex Fells, which has a ridiculous per capita income of over $77,000 (meaning the average, hypothetical family of four earns over $300,000 a year) is less than ten miles from Newark, one of the country's most impoverished, crime-infested cities. 

The point is, you're never far from anything in New Jersey, and because there are so many New Jerseys, that helps make New Jersey awesome. This point is artistically demonstrated in the final ten seconds of the opening credits of "The Sopranos", where Tony (driving in his SUV) leaves the hard-scrabble, industrialized world of the First New Jersey and pulls up to his McMansion, in the Fourth New Jersey.

The state of New Jersey was always a character in "The Sopranos", and every resident/fan of the show can point out that moment when their neck of the woods was mentioned on the show. Mine was in Season 3, in the episode "University", when a coked-up Ralph Cifaretto screams at Tracee the naive hooker: "We'll get a farm together in Colts Neck", before killing her outside the Bada Bing! and leaving her dead body in the parking lot.

(Sorry if that was too graphic. That was the show, like it or not.)

The Fifth New Jersey - Philadelphia's Bedroom Communities

This area, which is another half-moon, this time surrounding the city of Camden to the north, east, and south, is pretty similar to the Fourth New Jersey except there are lots of Eagles fans near Philadelphia. (NOTE: I really like that "I am drunk" McNabb jersey. It's almost as good as the "Lombardis: 00" Eagles jersey I saw online a few weeks ago.)

I'll admit that I always had kind of a soft spot for this part of New Jersey. I've always done a bunch of driving down there, either for my current job or to visit Philadelphia. There are great radio stations in Philadelphia - better than New York City, consistently for the past 12 years, at least - and there's very little traffic or congestion (NOTE: completely unlike Fourth New Jersey here - the direct NYC suburbs are the most horrendous, constantly congested, annoyingly-designed roads in the entire country. No, seriously, the excellent 2009 book Traffic was inspired by a Pulaski Skyway traffic jam).

Interestingly, people I've met from this area uniformly seem to insist there are only TWO New Jerseys - North and South. I'm not sure what inspires this logic but I obviously could not disagree more. I'm not a South Jersey kid, and there's no way I'm a North Jersey kid. Just no way.

The Sixth New Jersey - "The Dakota Territory" aka An Ambiguous Section of Central New Jersey

The idea for this blog hit me when I overheard some coworkers discuss what in marketing research is known as a "segmentation study". The idea is that a thousand or so people take a survey on their attitudes toward some product, and their responses are then subjected to a statistical analysis that determines the relative "belonging-ness" (sorry, there's no better word for this) to all the other survey respondents. Over hundreds of iterations, the analysis determines how closely alike some people are to some others, and then it's up to the researcher to determine what these groups of individuals mean. (NOTE: Marketing research is an extremely postmodern profession. All we do is construct meaning out of the abstract -- I've never taken an academic course in marketing research, but if I ever taught one, I'd make students read some Chuck Klosterman as an extra credit assignment.)

Anyway, I have no idea where this part of New Jersey fits in to the grand picture of what I'm trying to describe. It's kind of a horizontal belt over the middle of the state, encompassing towns like New Brunswick and Princeton. (I currently live in the Sixth New Jersey.) It's a fun, middle-to-upper class, extremely ethnically diverse region. There's a lot of work to be had, some good-to-excellent places to learn stuff, delicious food and nice housing. I enjoy specifically that heat and hot water is included in my Sixth New Jersey apartment lease.

I will say this, though: people around here definitely identify with where they're from. I live in a town called North Brunswick, for instance, and for many of the people in this town, do not confuse it with South Brunswick. That will get you punched - seriously. (Weirdly, North Brunswick is itself south of New Brunswick, and South Brunswick is south of North Brunswick. Really we should just re-name New Brunswick North-North Brunswick and get on with things in an orderly fashion. But no...)

Oh, and another thing for you House, M.D. fans out there - they are actually building a Princeton-Plainsboro hospital on Route 1 in Plainsboro. As soon as it opens, I am going to slowly develop a tolerance to Sterno (like that old guy in The Andromeda Strain), walk in to the real-life Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital complaining of strange stomach pains, and watch Dr. House go to work. I hope he demeans me; I like it when House demeans people.

The Seventh New Jersey - Rural West Virginia, aka the "Deep South" of New Jersey

I'm now speaking about the extreme southwest and south-central parts of New Jersey.

This is where I may get a little xenophobic. I'm sorry; it's hard for me to write this without getting a little uppity about stuff. And this particular part of New Jersey brings it out of me. So I'd like to make two points now before I get started on describing our friends to the South: (1) I have blood relatives down there; no, seriously, I'm pretty sure I have relatives in like Millville and Vineland. I don't know them, but they're there. I visited them once when I was a kid. Hi, um... Aunt Mary! (I have no idea what their names are.) (2) You can blame me for being a jerk, but you should also blame them for making it so easy to be made fun of.

 

To be generous, I'll begin by saying there's not a whole lot going on in this part of the state. What lots of people who aren't from New Jersey don't understand (double negative alert) is that most of New Jersey serves no purpose at all. With no close proximity to an industrial or commercial center, a highway, river, ocean, or other means of transport, half the state consists of something known as the "Pine Barrens National Reserve". However, this does not prohibit people from choosing to live there.

Economically, politically, and socio-culturally speaking, residents of this part of the state differ from the state as a whole in every meaningful way. Land is cheap, education is scarce, guns and pickup trucks are plentiful, and - besides maybe fishing in a marsh somewhere - I'm not convinced there's anything at all to do.

In my opinion, all those who live in New Jersey should spend a day driving through these parts of the state. (Make sure your car is filled with gas, and if you happen to have progressive/liberal political beliefs, keep them off the outside of your car on that day.) 

It's really interesting because it's the purest demonstration of what an arbitrary construction states are. The '88 Plymouth Duster you're driving behind has New Jersey license plates; the gun shops are New Jersey gun shops; and the general store has to deal with the same food and safety inspections as an Italian bakery in, like, Maplewood. It doesn't feel like New Jersey, though, because it steadfastly isn't.

Keeping all political issues aside (smart people can have any set of political beliefs, and I think it'd be easy to characterize what I just wrote pretty clearly on a left-right spectrum), why would anyone ever choose to live in such a backwards, poor, useless place? The only reason I can think of is because it never struck them to leave. They're fine where they are, and if you don't like it, you can take your high-falutin' ways and git on out of here. Git!

The Eighth New Jersey - Bizarre Vermont, aka the Skylands

The Eighth New Jersey consists of the extreme northwestern part of New Jersey, which is mountainous, rural, and extraordinarily beautiful.

I remember being in fourth-grade Social Studies class and the year-long topic was "The History of New Jersey." I learned about the Native American tribe that settlers gave smallpox blankets to (the Lenni Lenape), the colonial history of the state, and such. But because I was a huge nerd even then, I really liked the map of the four (I think it was) regions of New Jersey. My favorite region was "The Skylands," an area that seemed so far away and so different from where I grew up that I really wanted to move there. I think what I really liked the most was the idea that it got significantly more snow in an average winter than the rest of New Jersey. 

(NOTE: It absolutely does. I haven't mentioned this yet, but different parts of New Jersey have strikingly different climates, especially with regard to winter weather. If you're in the Skylands, you get approximately the same amount of snow per winter as Boston or Hartford, CT. If you're in Region 3 - the South Jersey Shore - you get about as much snow per winter as Richmond, VA. Two people from the same, relatively tiny state can get together and discuss winters from their childhood, and have completely disparate experiences to report. I find this incredibly awesome.)

Anyway, every single one of these New Jerseys is at least a little weird, but this particular one is extremely weird. This is the part of New Jersey, for instance, where a rural couple was recently arrested and had their children taken away from them because they had the terrible idea of naming one of them Hitler. There is (of course) a Weird NJ magazine (and series of books) describing the different oddball houses, trees, and ghost stories surrounding the state of New Jersey. Although the Eighth New Jersey consists of approximately 10% of the land area of New Jersey (and about 2% of its population), about half of Weird NJ's content comes from here.

Strange enough for you? No? Okay, here's some more. The region's congressman is a Ron Paul-esque libertarian (one of five in the country) who serves on something called the "Liberty Caucus" and routinely ranks as the most conservative representative in the entire Northeast. At a "tea party" gathering in 2009, he demanded vocally that President Obama present a birth certificate to indicate he was indeed a native of the United States. (NOTE: Love or hate the Prez all you want; but stake your claim based on policy; the dude is from the U.S., and that's that.)

Finally, I'll leave you with this: Space Farms. Space Farms always struck me as odd, even when I was a kid and my mom would take us up there to pet lions. The place really has lions, bears, jaguars, and all kinds of crazy professional zoo stuff. I remember being scared because the lions were huge and Space Farms didn't strike me as a place with very strong security... or actual cages, for that matter. But at least after getting mauled by a giant feline, we could enjoy the classic cars and doll collection! And the general store!

The Ninth New Jersey - Major Cities to Avoid

For this final New Jersey, I leave you with the state's ultimate paradox. In the most geographically, ethnographically, and economically diverse state in the entire country (I'm serious), the three major cities - Newark, Camden, and Trenton - have all been riddled in abject poverty for at least the past 40 years.

It wasn't always like this. Newark was a bustling sister city of New York City well into the twentieth century. Paul Simon, Philip Roth, Ray Liotta (awesome), Joe Pesci (unsurprising), Ian Ziering (weird), Max Weinberg, and countless other famous people were born/grew up there. (NOTE: Since the above list was extremely white, I should mention that Newark also birthed Whitney Houston, Wyclef Jean, Redman, Shaq, and NBA player Randy Foye.)

Camden and Trenton, too, were bustling port cities until everything got irrevocably fucked up in the 1960's. In Newark's case, it was a bunch of issues that had probably been percolating for a long while; white flight; lots of housing projects being built by a corrupt government looking for a quick payday; the ridiculously-stupid idea (in hindsight) that superhighways could be built through existing, ethnically diverse neighborhoods without tearing them apart.

At present, one of the only places in Newark worth visiting (if only because it's a hidden gem for delicious Portuguese food and culture) is the Ironbound district. As you expect, this region is completely "Iron-bound" in the sense that it's nearly impossible to find on a map, it's surrounded by train tracks, and very few (let's face it) white people have the balls to venture around in order to find it. That's why I think the transportation issue was really important, at least with regard to the devastation of Newark. New Jersey was way too highway-happy, once upon a time, and the net result is a very successful state that doesn't have a single city to be proud of.

All you have to do is look at one of those lists of America's Most Dangerous Cities and you'll find Newark and Camden there, high atop the list. Parts of these cities are not like West Baltimore in "The Wire" - they're worse. There are parts of Camden where people will be pulled over by a police officer for their own safety. Even the relatively OK parts of Newark, like where PatentlyJersey currently lives, are kind of scary at times and don't have much in the way of commerce or ordinary gentrification. He's seen a murder or two over there; he'll tell you.

But maybe there's something to hope for in these cities. In Newark, at least, the murder rate in 2008 dropped 30% from the previous year, down to 65, which is actually 65 too many but at least a good starting point. With the opening of the Prudential Center, people are being drawn to the city at night, are eating there and so on. Maybe things get turned around; if so, it'd be the only city like this in the United States that's ever been saved. It'll make whoever the mayor is at that time a future governor. Or President? Who knows.

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So that's the nine New Jerseys. Each is unique, and some of them definitely suck more than others. But I like where I'm from, and I hope - at the very least - after reading this you've managed to distance yourself from the notion that the state consists of oil refineries and dudes who call their abdomen "The Situation".

Stay classy out there.