A Town Under Siege: Watertown Residents Describe Life Under Lockdown

Reblogged from U.S.:

The sleepy Boston suburb of Watertown woke up in a state of panic in the wee hours of Friday morning, after the two alleged Boston Marathon bombers, now determined to be brothers, drove a stolen Mercedes into the town of 30,000 just west of Boston. Trailed by a convoy of police cars, the brothers in the car, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, reportedly engaged in a shootout with authorities in which they also allegedly hurled "explosive devices." Tamerlan, 26, was killed in the firefight, but Dzhokhar, 19, remains on the run, triggering a massive manhunt around Watertown that has left many residents barricaded in their homes.

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When terror hides in the neighborhood.

Who screams for coffee ice cream?

Reblogged from random tangents:

Who likes Coffee Ice Cream?
Besides Teddy, Crystal thinks no one. Does Coffee Ice Cream get a seat at the Ice Cream Security Council or is it relegated to the Axis of Evil? We want you to decide. But wait! You don't get dessert first! We talk about Rand Paul's visit to Howard and Teddy does another bad impersonation of a southern gentleman/mechanic - it's so authentic that it's possibly Scottish!

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Here's a side project I'm doing with Boston TV's Crystal Haynes. Check out our podcast!

002 – Barbara Streisand

Check out this latest podcast….

002 – Barbara Streisand

Two Dimensional

I awake another morning surrounded by a haze, scratching my head and something else, wondering why I have woken up again so early in the morning, and whether I can actually fall asleep again.  The firmness, the slight stiffness of my back and the unforgiving nature of the carpet pushes up against me. I remember watching Netflix before falling asleep.  My computer still hums because it’s so old that it fails to shut down.  I wonder if any of this contributes to my general haze and lack of energy that I’ll have to fight throughout the morning with protein and caffeine.  I rustle under the hideous yellow sheet imprinted with white flowers, cue the next episode on the streamer and slowly pass out again.

This is a very impersonal point in my life where I feel equally disempowered and progressing on a course I don’t want to take.  I am a sellout and this I’m convinced of.  In order to continue receiving my barely living wage, I basically have to apply to three specific jobs every week and must contact them.  It’s a bit weird, not that I don’t want to work, but that I often find myself looking at jobs which are either too specific in their demands or in industries I have no clue about.  Cloud based programming database management software – uh, what? Six years of marketing experience with at least two years in river barge shipping – uh, what?  There are lots of jobs and the main point I always come away with is that nobody would ever want to do most of these things.

Career counselors will suggest that networking is the way to go.  This networking thing, it’s hilarious.  It’s great to be social, but highly unlikely that a random stranger will help out another stranger.  I attend these events, and swim through a sea of financial advisors and other self-seekers.  It’s like straying through a school of jellyfish after being told that swimming in the ocean is good for you.  Many of these people are there looking to find new clients, find the perfect hire or use one of these excuses to find someone to have dinner with.  There are some recruiters, but these are people struggling to fill the jobs that I’ve already seen on the internet.  Occasionally, there is a “send me your resume,” which is followed ten minutes later by the same person ignoring me, or not having the decency to say goodnight.  It’s very hollow and do I really care?  These events, so far, seem two dimensional with loud people chattering on about how they’ve replaced their personalities with job functions.  I’m utterly bored and run outside to catch some fresh air.

I wonder how to simplify this, and whether anything will come about from the stack of cards I got and the countless other connections that I missed because of distractions.  This has me waking up wondering what will catch my attention apart from the endless job listings.  It’s in these moments I miss driving an hour to the Angeles National Forest to clear my head and get my focus, amongst the ravines and peaks overlooking the San Gabriel Valley.  The Blue Hills, a collection of two or three anthills south of Boston, just don’t do it for me.

There’s so much that could distract me.  Right now there is Euro 2012 and later this month there will be Wimbledon.  I’m neither a real tennis nor football fan.  Actually, I find watching sports on TV sometimes boring, but it’s a road I take to escape and later only find myself escaping to other things.  While there is competition, the energy and the nuance lacks – especially when watching it alone.  It’s just too-two dimensional.  My mind finds itself wanting to escape this boredom and there isn’t much there except to turn it all off, put on some of the latest tunes and start to lose myself in myself.  What will I write?  Will I write myself an expert in dating?  Will I draft a piece where I express myself and my indecision and disconnection to society?  Or in this case, the job search society.

I wrestle the sheet and finally decide to lift myself off the floor and momentarily feel my aching body, which results from not hitting the bed.  It’s the second straight night on the floor and I haven’t decided if this is really good or bad for me.  Maybe tonight I’ll take the plunge into my bed and try to enjoy a restful night on a mattress which is too small for me.  My mind runs through the tasks I will have to do tonight.  There are a couple of emails I must write up and a couple of follow ups to some of the people I met.  I must call a law firm which I had a trouble with filling out their online job application.  It’s a clearly fruitless call because I can only imagine that they have enough candidates, a couple of internal referrals, and they’re not very concerned for my difficulties.  Still, I will make the great effort as I have throughout this entire process.

At the end, I miss my old friend money, and the advantages that go along with it.  This is why I pursue this end.  My wish list grows with earning less than three hundred dollars a week from unemployment.  The new car, the new computer, the new phone – all give me certain difficulties.  My phone is such a pain in itself that it often crashes when I’m about to answer a call and takes ten minutes to reset.  There are new clothes I can’t afford and events I pass on, all because of the sacrifices I’ve made.  Even my dating life has suffered because I’m generally careful about money, as have my visits to local coffee shops – which in general are lacking in this suburban town I’m a prisoner in.

Starting from scratch again this morning, I realize I feel very two dimensional.  But unlike the world surrounding me lacking depth, I feel that I’m lacking width.  There are tasks that have to be done and without a normal schedule I have the hardest time doing them.  I feel like I almost must keep a to-do list and put alarms on my phone (if only it wouldn’t crash it).  I shouldn’t have to do this because I am hungry, and when I’m hungry I have to eat…or apply for work.

Trust

I recently wrote about a friend who alienated another friend by saying weird, awkward jokes around her.  If you believe I’m better than this, I definitely have been known to say something inappropriate, even if it wasn’t directed at my friends.  I used to believe this was a result of some people being a little bit more proper or having a wider pole in their butt.  Some people definitely are more accepting while others are less forgiving.  Some people act in a certain manner around certain people to win favor or be amenable.  Recently, my focus has shifted to the question of trust in all relationships.  Certain people find inappropriate behavior as a breach of trust and what’s more in question is what is inappropriate.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I drove up near Santa Barbara to watch a friend’s boyfriend perform a one-man show.  When I arrived, I bumped into Katia and Steve.  We hung out for a bit and had a friendly lunch.  After the performance, we were invited out for dinner by the theatre owners along with their friends and it was nothing more than a boring but polite meal with older California liberal hippies.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t like these California liberal hippies, as they were well-intentioned.

The theatre owners were writing and producing a play characterizing their marriage, which I found quite odd.  It wasn’t that they were writing a play, but how they were going to have live cows marched out during the performance.  I can’t remember exactly what it was and it’s at these moments where I wish I actually wrote a journal or diary of my experiences.  It definitely had to do with cows in the performance.  They proudly basked in the warm sunlight of their uniqueness, and so I made up how I witnessed a similar thing.  I created a town in Vermont where they parade cows and dress them up every year.  What I said was complete bullshit, but funny to me.  I didn’t even care whether our hosts believed it, I was entertaining myself.  Steve, meanwhile, gave me a disgusted look and at one point asked, “What are you talking about?”  He canceled plans for later and from that moment on, I always sensed he didn’t care much for me.

I often find myself complaining that people think far too often about themselves.  I log onto Facebook and, especially having a lot of LA friends in the entertainment biz, see a lot of “mom, look at me” posts.  What I dislike about the entertainment business is the lack of community.  There’s no interest in expanding their worldview of the world, about helping your brother and sister out, or simply thinking about other people – except when it’s someone’s birthday.  There are times where people help out others but it’s in a self-serving manner.  They want to be seen as a helpful person.  It’s not simply a Hollywood thing, even though it’s blatant there, but it’s everywhere today.  It’s not Facebook, but it comes out in Facebook, where people are far too often all about themselves and proving themselves to others.  Actually, if I were developing the next generation Facebook, I’d title it “MyLifeDoesntSuck.com”.

When I think like this, when I see people as being self-centered, my train of thought is too self-absorbed.  I’m too self-absorbed.  With Katia and Steve, it wasn’t my place to either entertain myself or indirectly have fun at these people’s expenses.  They had hired Steve, and although it would be a very remote situation, I could have hurt his chances of being rehired.  On one hand, I really care about how others perceive me, but am also a bit ignorant and careless when they’re people I hold little value in.  I have no easy answers to this, but it’s simply the discord and conflict I have with myself.  I see how at times I can be a difficult person to trust and therefore form a relationship with.

There is something about not putting friends out with their friends.  As I write about relationships and dating, I had a similar situation break out within my circle in LA related to dating last year.  The worst thing that can happen is when one friend gives me bad news about another friend.  Two friends had met up with each other.  The girl, Pilar, was in a long-term relationship.  Ralph, who was perpetually single and on the prowl, was a decent person to hang out with at bars.  He was very intense and stubbornly ignorant of others.  He was all about himself and I had in fact privately nicknamed him, “One Way Ralph.”  They had met through me, and had met her’s boyfriend in a number of different social situations – one being Pilar’s birthday.

One day, I received a call from Pilar saying she wanted to know what was up with Ralph.  She goes into this story about accepting a friendly happy hour invitation from him.  It didn’t go well.  Where she was thinking a friendly drink, he was suddenly making pass after pass at her and making her feel extremely uncomfortable.  He hadn’t really flirted with her before, so what he was doing was quite unexpected.  Where she had tried to balance honesty and politeness, making it clear she wasn’t interested, he was now texting for a second date.  She asked if I knew about this, and I spoke frankly of how I had no idea they had hung out, nor of him liking her in the first place.  She was clearly not interested and as her disinterest progressed, he was responding by sending her texts like, “Is everything alright?”

I’m all for friends dating friends.  I think it’s very adult if they couple on their own and don’t involve me.  I would have simply laughed it off had Pilar been single.  It’s none of my business what two single adults do between them.  But when Ralph went behind my back and put another friend in a truly uncomfortable situation, a surprise date with someone in a long-term relationship with a boyfriend he had met, he eroded my trust.  Is there anything I can truly say? No.  Can I trust him to not act like this in the future? No.  With my knowledge of him and what he did, I basically had to cut Ralph off.

Before I leave you, I’d like to examine surprises, especially surprise dating.  Maybe with teens, who haven’t quite worked their emotions out, this might be acceptable, but an adult should have more control of their feelings.  If you see a photo of someone and seriously profess your love for them, you’ve got to check yourself before you wreck yourself.  Every interaction must involve the other person.  Your feelings must develop from these interactions.  You can be attracted to people you haven’t met or be infatuated with people you don’t know, but you shouldn’t be acting on these desires and crushes.

With Ralph and Pilar, he had developed feelings without actually establishing a real connection with her.  He liked her physical beauty and her mannerisms, but didn’t get a feel for her interest before progressing things.  It was a bit socially awkward and I wonder if this is a result of watching too much TV or movies where writers create realities.  We might see in a movie a guy that makes a suddenly brash pass at a woman and from this she falls hopelessly in love with him.  This is fiction – seriously it is.  In reality, screenwriters aren’t getting girls, but dreaming of leaving their writers rooms or their dark solitary apartments.  In reality, people do meet and fall in love, but it isn’t forced.  People do find themselves together and suddenly drawn.  Many times it’s nothing more than chemistry.  Other times, there’s a progression based on extenuating circumstances.  Minutes or months, basically don’t surprise date people.

Friendship starts with trust.  Trust starts with considering others first when it matters the most.  Whether it’s maintaining your friends, making new friends, or even developing a business, you have to develop trust by connecting with what other people want and not what you want to give them, nor your expectations.  Promoting your artistry requires true selflessness, thinking beyond yourself and what you can gain and giving to others what you would always want.  Brilliance begins with trust.

When Should You Call?

You met someone last night and the question is when should you call.  You may wonder, as a woman, should you call or text?  How much interest you have is the nerve-racking subject.  The classic question and answer of when should you call is completely irrelevant.  If you get a level of commitment when you first met, she’s going to find herself free of nothing to do and she’s going to WANT to hear from you.  I’m not saying she’s going to call you, or text you asking why you haven’t called yet, but she may.  The simplest answer is: a guy should call a girl when he has free time (before 10pm, after 10am).  Now this could be the next day or this could be five days later.  The point is you should have free time at some point within five days.  Even if you don’t connect and leave voicemail, you’ll have made the effort and making the effort counts even weeks later.  A girl can text a guy whenever.

The most important thing is to keep messages simple.  You enjoyed meeting them and look forward to chatting again.

The Football Move

You had an amazing conversation with a girl and she found your verbal skato hilarious.  You had an interesting conversation in general, you suggested meeting up and she gave you her number. Will she answer the phone?  If she does, will she agree to a date – whether it’s just a romantic dinner or just drinks?  Will you recapture the energy of the first date, or will you wonder why it’s all really awkward and weird?  I was having a conversation weeks back about relationships and dating and concluded that I knew exactly when and why a girl wouldn’t answer the phone, and knew when she would.  The reason is partly because you haven’t advanced the interaction far enough and this shows a lack of commitment to her.  I’ll explain.

To use a football analogy, you are the quarterback winding up to make a pass, the girl is the receiver waiting to catch and the football is the conversation.  In football, there is a simple rule which at times is quite complicated.  When the receiver catches the pass, they need to get two feet down and then make a football move.  The football move can be taking another step, falling down and maintaining possession of the ball, or falling out of bounds and maintaining possession.  Failure to make the football move results in an incomplete pass – even though I caught the ball and got two feet down.

Let me explain.  A couple of weeks ago, I ran into a very attractive girl at church who I had met weeks earlier.  This time, she laughed at my jokes, we had fun conversation and I even joked with the priest.  When she was leaving, I suggested that we exchange numbers as I’m new again in town and would enjoy hanging out with her at some point.  When I called, I expected her to never answer the call.  I dropped her a text weeks later with very little hope that she’d return it.  Why?  What I’m basically describing here is what I described to begin the blog: funny conversation, laughter, interest and phone number exchange.  I’ve done nothing more than throw the ball to the receiver and she’s caught it.  Where is the football move?

Women, many times, find themselves politely cornered or having no one else to talk with.  They’ll engage you in a polite conversation, laugh at your jokes and find you interesting.  Still maybe she’s not available in any sense of the word or maybe she’s unsure of where you want to take things.  When you meet someone, you must progress the interaction beyond where you’re at.  She must make a football move.  If we’re at the club, it’s saying to the girl, “Hey, let’s grab a drink!”  If she physically comes with you, she’s making a commitment for at least a free drink.  A better example would be telling her you want her help finding your friends. “It could be a great adventure finding them because they like to hide.”  If she accompanies you, she’s making a commitment to the interaction.

All relationships need levels of commitment, whether they are fleeting, longer term, platonic, business, long-term romantic, or a one night stand.  You don’t believe me.  Even making out with someone at the club requires a basic, yet unspoken, level of commitment to the short-term relationship.  The level of commitment should be led by the guy and it’s getting the girl to take up a small activity.  In my case, to this girl at church, it’s a suggestion, “Hey, I want to get some fresh air and I’d like you to come with me. ” Or, “There’s my buddy, come with me and say hi.”  If she comes with, she’s making a physical commitment (the football move) to being with me and therefore we’ve got a completed pass.  She’s made a small commitment and has made an investment, a small one, in the budding relationship.

Now, the naysayers out there are saying this is an unnecessary risk.  Maybe, she gets uncomfortable from your request.  Maybe she thinks it’s weird and now is convinced you’re a serial killer.  Maybe she thinks you’re a something or other and says no.  First, you can’t control what other people will think.  An awkward and weird guy is one hanging around a girl, yet never progressing the relationship.  I had a friend in college who would chat with a girl, for hours sometimes, never talk about himself and never lead his conversation anywhere.  That sounded awkward and weird to me, and when I heard this, I’d chuckle to myself.  Maybe it would be better simply to allow her to progress the interaction in her comfort zone and play the numbers (less than 5% to my calculations).  What a waste of time.

Take the risk and if she says no, tell her it was great meeting her and found her very fascinating. Then leave her and DO WHAT YOU SAID YOU WERE GOING TO DO!  Again, go do it.  If she’s interested, she’ll find you.  Better to hang out with your friends, or get fresh air, smoke cigarettes – whatever, than hanging out with a girl who is being polite.  Making a move and walking away is the most powerful action a guy can take.  It says that you know how to lead, you know what you want, you are willing to commit and you’re willing to walk away if you’re not going to get it.  And what you’re trying to get is her time.

Getting away from the advanced lesson, simply answering the phone is a form of commitment.  If you want to know why she didn’t pick up the phone, ask yourself did she make any action to commit to the interaction when you were together?  If she never committed when you were having fun together, how days later is she going to commit to answering the phone.  She’s going to drop the ball.

Ladies, what do you think?  Why don’t you answer the phone when a guy you just met calls you?  I also understand from some of my lady-friends they dislike giving out numbers to guys they like who will never call them back.  I’m unsure about factoring this into the conversation.  Guys can go along with whatever many times, lead a girl on and then never call.  It happens enough where I know it’s frustrating.  I have no easy solutions for creating a tell-tale sign about getting a guy to commit to something where he doesn’t want to lead.  The one thing I believe, the traditionalist in me, says that a guy has to lead. Are you trying to push the interaction?  Are you getting an authentic interaction with him?  I’d love to hear some of your thoughts… Contact me.  I think I can figure this out eventually.