I saw this Donald Margulies play last night at the Geffen Theater. I've linked to the LA Times review, but don't read it if you're going to see the play, because it's got spoilers -- I'm glad I didn't read it before seeing the show. I really like Margulies -- his plays very directly deal with interesting life issues in thought-provoking ways. This one's about a photojournalist who returns from Iraq with war injuries, and there's some stuff about the merits of photojournalism (taking pictures of suffering as opposed to working more directly to stop the suffering) but the big issue the play deals with is ambition and seeking an "important" life versus finding contentment in routine and stability. So, definitely touched on some of the career-related angsty stuff I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.
Quick question -- anyone ever been to St. Lucia? My fiancee and I are thinking about honeymoon ideas and have enough airline points to cover the Caribbean and places like that, but not Europe. Wondering if anyone's ever been to St. Lucia and has any recommendations/warnings about it.
Michael Lewis's article about basketball player Shane Battier is really excellent. I don't really watch basketball, and have only barely heard of Shane Battier, but the article's still awesome.
This really neat fantasy baseball league I'm in has an opening, and I figured I'd post and see if anyone reading this is interested in joining... it's an auction keeper league -- every year you get 4 one-year and 2 two-year contracts to assign to players, based on their auction price, and the stats are computed using a points formula that tries to mimic actual real-world baseball value. 30 players per team, 10 teams, we each pay $125 and the top 4 split the money at the end, I can't remember exactly the formula. Weekly transactions. It's pretty competitive, the owners are all pretty knowledgeable, Nate Silver from Baseball Prospectus was in the league the first year (this is year 5), it's a lot of fun. The auction on April 4 will eat up your entire day (either in person in New York or via Skype/cell phone/etc from elsewhere) but after that it's not really any sort of time commitment except keeping up with your team, replacing injured players, responding to trade offers. If you're already in other fantasy baseball leagues you know the drill. This one is more fun than the others though, because the auction and the other owners all know what they're doing. E-mail me if you want more info. The team that's available has Delmon Young and Joey Votto already under contract, and Mariano Rivera, Joakim Soria, Brandon Phillips, and Jermaine Dye all up for being contracted at very reasonable values given their stats.
A couple of people have e-mailed to ask, since I haven't posted about her in a while.
My fiancee and I are looking for wedding invitations. She met with a local dealer yesterday, found a few she liked, wrote down the serial numbers and got the prices. I searched online and found a site with much lower prices for the same invitations. Which made enough sense, since things can be much cheaper online, sure. So I called the site up today, to find out how the online process works -- do we get a proof, etc. The woman was very friendly, seemed very nice. I told her I found her site because my fiancee got some prices from a local dealer and hers are much lower.
My birthday's on Wednesday. I'll be 30. That sounds so much older than I feel like I am. That's like really stop being able to pretend I'm not an adult age. I mean, the wedding in about a hundred days does that too, or at least it should, but, I don't know. I'm not feeling particularly bad about turning 30, even though it sounds old -- I feel like I've accomplished a decent amount and it's not like I feel some sense of regret or unfulfilled childhood promise that could bum me out about it, the upcoming wedding feels pretty good in that respect too. Yet I haven't actually planned anything to do for my birthday, which will sort of suck when it's actually my birthday and I have nothing to do, but at the same time I feel like I've been reasonably social the past couple of weeks and have also been fighting a cold I can't completely shake, and so even though most of me is like, yeah, I should send out an e-mail to some people and say we should grab dinner or something, I haven't actually sent that e-mail. Maybe after this post. Indeed, I'm going to force myself to do that right after I post this, because I really should not force future-me to have nothing at all to do on my birthday if there's no good reason for it.
I'm going to celebrate my birthday on this blog by finally posting the post I started in draft form about a month ago. It was going to be my New Years resolution post, but I got cold post-feet about it, so we'll call it my birthday post. Because a birthday is just as good a time as the New Year to take stock and force some thoughts out of my head and onto the Internet. Blogging is weird that way -- it's like I've become conditioned to not be able to really let go of something I'm thinking until I type it into a box on my computer screen and press post, even if no one's out there reading. In any case:
I'm asking the universe for a favor. I figure this is a good place to start.
I feel like during law school I was putting an absurd amount of pressure on myself to figure out how to not end up miserable, and how to not feel like I was wasting my life. And the fact that I got amazingly lucky with Anonymous Lawyer -- luck I did a lot to create, and luck over a creation I will stand by and say I'm honestly proud of, but still lucky compared to what all sorts of other much more likely outcomes look like -- and got to see that process through, I think has actually taken away some of my ambition. Having a book published, getting to write a TV pilot, a lot of cool stuff happened with Anonymous Lawyer... but, honestly, it didn't make me any happier than I was before, it didn't change anything about the kinds of things I think about or the kinds of things I worry about. A lot of the process was neat enough to do once but did not make me terribly hungry to do it again, if I'm being honest with myself.
These previews of his new Comedy Central show are very funny. I think he's really funny. I'm excited for his show.
Just wanted to plug a new play written and directed by my friend Eric, called "The Protestants" playing at The Brick theater in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), Thurs-Sat each weekend until February 14th.
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