The dream I had last night could probably be considered the cliché Steve dream.

I and some friends were at a convention, a mix of Comic-Con and Dragon-Con except it seemed to truly be a convention for independent “content creators.” Robb and Tanya were there, I think, and we were trying to peddle the sitcom to people at the booths. It was, of course, difficult getting anyone to take notice. I visited a booth Robb had already visited, where there was a line of non-TV-related people signing autographs for a large line of people, and I butted in line to a non-busy person to try to give them one of our demo DVDs. (The butting in line came from the movies Friday night, when I cut the line so I could get two water cups.) The person I talked with was nice, but we both realized Robb had already given them a demo DVD, so I was really just making a fool of myself.

There was, as always in these dreams, a huge world surrounding the task of shopping the sitcom. To describe it would take many paragraphs, and that’s not considering how much information I’ve forgotten since waking up this morning.

The end of the dream was, however, the most telling bit of the entire exercise.

In the center of the convention space, which was low-ceilinged like at Dragon-Con, I found racks of toothbrushes. As I always do when I come upon toothbrushes in real life, I searched for the extra soft variety. In the dream, I was expecting failure, as always happens in real life. But no! Lo and behold, the entire bottom of the rack was filled with extra soft toothbrushes!

I was so excited, and I knew I had to buy a bunch to take home, like I did in my parent’s town last Christmas, when I did find some extra softs and took home 5. My dream excitement was tempered when I saw on the toothbrushes that these were special “Limited Edition” extra softs. How annoying. And yet, how lucky I saw them before they were discontinued.

As with anything in my dreams these days, a leisurely pace was not allowed. There was pressure as I shopped for the toothbrushes. I was delaying my friends (I think it was my boss Richard by this time) by stopping for this personal errand. I had a few toothbrushes in hand, but then I started looking at them. They were all different, but not “normal.” In continuing to scour the selection on the racks, I saw that there were nearly infinite varieties of Limited Edition extra soft toothbrushes. Small heads, large heads, narrow heads, fat heads, many bristles, very few bristles, short handles, long handles… but I could not find the kind I wanted.

This part of the dream may sound stupid, but it’s not. In fact, it’s about as correct a reflection of the waking world as you can expect from a dream.

My friends were pressuring me to leave, but I could not find what I wanted. I knew I had to buy something, though, because there was no guarantee I would ever find extra-soft-bristled toothbrushes ever again. Yet the selection and design of the toothbrushes was so over-intellectualized that none of the brushes seemed to be useful.

As far as I can recollect, I ended up grabbing a few random brushes. A couple had tiny heads and long handles, and two had square heads with only four clumps of bristles, once in each corner, like a Lego. I had extra-soft toothbrushes, but at what cost?

I had a good chuckle and head-shake when I woke up from this dream. But I have to ask why? Why, why, why oh why do I have to dream about my real life? Where, after all, is the fun in that?

I have not posted in a while, for which I apologize. I have been tweeting, and I have been writing a post every week over at the LFTI blog and not linking to them here, and for all that, again, I apologize. You see, I have been obsessed.

With what?

With the sitcom, for one. We are shooting our next “episode” this weekend, and we’ve been working very, very hard. I put episode in quotes because it’s not really an episode, it’s a series of shorts introducing our new character. But this is sort of secret, so don’t let anyone know. We’re keeping this new character and shorts series a surprise for our fans. If any of them make it here, then, by golly, they deserve to know this secret! Yeah, not many people read the LFTI blog, but by golly, they should. It is chock full of interesting info about our show, and it’s typically quite the funny read. This is not tooting my own horn, but… Well, yes, it is. It is tooting my own horn. But I am tooting it in tandem with the horns of Robb and Tanya, who also post regularly. They deserve the toots just as well as I, maybe even more so.

So, the sitcom. Yes. It is a beautiful, wonderful time suck. I feel my life is gaining meaning again by working on it. I sat on the floor two nights ago, for instance, cutting and shaping foam rubber to create a cowboy hat. It has to look like the Arby’s hat, you see. Why? That is one secret I shall not divulge here. That secret I will make you wait to discover in good time.

I feel so creative with the sitcom, so rewarded and so proud. These are results that both grow from and grow into obsession.

My second obsession, at least for the past few weeks, has been the iPhone. I have loved my iPhone somehow even before I owned it. I waited in line for hours to get one on June 29th last year. I have used it and, despite its few shortcomings, loved it for over a year now.

Then the 2.0 upgrade was announced, along with the new 3G version of the iPhone. It would be a month-long wait between the announcement at the having. Well, that day of having was last Friday, July 11. Since that day, my happy iPhone has been a completely new device. It’s like the tiny but sunny window you’ve been looking out of for a year was been suddenly replaced with a wall-sized picture window. Really. Just like that. But my old phone did not have three important new features: 3G, GPS, and 16GB of storage. Upgrading was not a necessity, it would be a luxury. I checked up on three stores over the weekend, all with huge lines that scared me away. I went back and forth in my head, knowing that my original iPhone was excellent, fine, perfectly great.

Today, on the way back to the office from a work show at Disneyland, I called the Glendale Apple Store. They had 16GB black iPhone 3Gs in stock, and the line was short. I made a detour, waited maybe 45 minutes in line, then after ten in the store, I had a new iPhone.

There was one thing, one incredibly geeky, ridiculous, silly thing that pushed me over the edge to get a phone now instead of waiting for the next version. I want to keep the original iPhone. I want to be able to pull it out years from now and show it off or even just touch it because it will be a device long-remembered for changing a small tidbit of the world. I much prefer the original iPhone feel and look to the new one. It has a much nicer heft, and the aluminum is so wonderful to hold. I would use it until I ran it into the ground. But that was just it! I did not want it to end up like my Newton, shattered and useless. I wanted a relatively cosmetically excellent specimen to enjoy for much longer. The only way to do that was to sacrifice my everyday enjoyment of it.

I am writing this now because the new phone is loading the backup from my old phone. I will love using the new phone, I will love it’s faster wireless speed and its GPS and its extra space. But it will not be an original iPhone.

I have yet another obsession, which is more long-lived, and that is dealing with rude people. Selfish people, people who do not have any consideration for others, and whose world extends beyond them only so much as it does to support and coddle them.

It was a great posting by a guy named Lance Arthur that, combining this topic of selfishness with an iPhone 3G line, that started me writing this post in the first place. Please go read it now.

I sympathize with this fellow for a few reasons, one being that he waited in a long, long line to upgrade his phone, like I did, and another being that he had a run-in with a schmuck that turned out for him as it would have for me (namely, with an illogical confrontation ending in lingering anger). It also seems he’s gay, which adds a sprig of parsley to the dish.

I have posted before about run-ins with inconsiderate neighbors, and the continuing saga of a majority number of drivers believing themselves to be the only ones on the road has got me flummoxed at record-high levels. New examples arrive in greater numbers every day of people who are so turned inward that I can’t imagine why we’re not all standing about, horrified at having to stare at their glistening innards. My own recent attempts to exact justice on these types only leave me flustered and angry, like Lance. Even the possibility of encountering idiocy and potential intervention create a dull but palpable stress. The very real potential of being kept awake at night by a dolthead next door who thinks talking loudly on their cell phone at three in the morning is acceptable social etiquette is enough to keep me from falling asleep in the first place.

Did I mention that drivers are even more insanely self-absorbed now than they were when I first moved out here? There’s the lady yesterday who, talking illegally on her phone and half-blocking a lane of traffic at a parking garage exit, gave me a look of “fuck you!” when I dared to honk and crowd her back into the garage. There’s the guy who darted from behind me into the lane on my right, which was ending in 100 feet, then shouted mean names at me through my window when I refused to slow down so that he could merge in front of me. Plus numerous other, similar examples. Somehow, these people become indignant when they are at all inconvenienced by having to work with others in their society.

You see how I obsess. Sure, no surprise there to anyone who frequents the Forum. But you see how the past couple weeks have been a double-whammy of obsession for me. I feel fairly overwhelmed with all this, yet I know, really, since my obsessions have kept me from getting sleep (see: right now), it’s less me being overwhelmed than being exhausted. I could use my obsession with the iPhone App Store to find a productivity app to keep me task-oriented and hyper-scheduled, allowing me to get more sleep… but oh so much more fun to download the daylight app that shows day, night, dusk, and dawn times and use that for our shoot this weekend…

This was a great thing to read on a Monday: “How I See Words in My Head” by Douglas Coupland.

This essay got me asking myself if I am a visual person or not. I love words and how they fit together to make sentences, and I get quite a charge when I can write something that I feel is effective. I saw Trumbo on Friday, and his sculpting of words was inspiring. But I also love letter forms, fonts, kerning, leading, and all the things about words and letters that comprise a visual element.

I want to be a visual thinker. I think it’s admirable. But am I such? I love design but am not as good at it as I’d like to be. I’m not as good a writer as I’d like to be, either. Would I become better at both with practice, or would I become better at one and not much better at the other? Can a person be stuck in between? Can I be so egotistical as to assume I’m someone who can straddle the fence?

I think that an inevitable and necessary step for written culture over the next few decades is going to be the introduction of a détente between the visual and literary worlds—at the very least, an agreement to agree that they’re not mutually exclusive and that each feeds the other.

Maybe it is possible to be a little of both. I do know one thing, and that’s I don’t know what font I see in my head when I think of a word. I think it depends on the word itself. I’ll see “icon” in a different font than I would ”fleuve.”Does that make me a non-visual thinker? Or a visual thinker who takes the literary into account?

I am who I am, and I really don’t need to define it. I just wonder if I’m in for some surprising revelation, like the one Douglas received during the interview, were I to think about it in any seriousness.

(Found via Daring Fireball, of course.)

It is finished. My 5,195-piece Millennium Falcon Lego set—which my friends bought me for my birthday in 2007, which I received in November, and which I started building in December—is finally all done. It sat there for months, mostly built, while I lived my life around it, feeling too guilty to spend my precious time finishing it.

Ah, but now it’s all done! I can use my dining room table again!

I took pictures of the whole process. I have a time-lapse movie of me building a small portion. I plan to post all of those in Steve’s Snapshots at some point.

While trying to get the blue “engines” to shine with a Maglight, I discovered some fun effects and got carried away taking lots of funky long-exposure pictures.

Whether I end up posting the rest of the pictures or not, thanks a ton to all the friends who pitched in to buy this ultimate set. You have to see it in person to appreciate its intricacy.

I was awoken this morning around 8 by my dipshit upstairs neighbor, doing her usual banging and clomping and thumping. As I tried to get back to sleep, I realized I could not because there was a helicopter hovering outside, very near.

The sound was not the usual police-helicopter-circling noise. It was a loud, big chopper, something military-sounding.

I decided there must be something interesting to see, so I got out of bed, threw on clothes, grabbed my camera, and ventured into the gray spittle morning. When I rounded the corner down the block, this was going on:

I took all kinds of pictures and movies. The pics are up in my gallery.

The helicopter—a Sikorsky S-58T—was installing a new air conditioning unit at the top of a skyscraper. (It was, of course, also bringing down parts of the old unit.) The helicopter made trips back and forth, picking up and dropping off large parts connected to the chopper from a long cable. The pic above is during one of the helicopter’s refueling landings.

There were not many people around since it was early. We had to stay back, but I was amazed we were allowed to get as close as we did. I stayed around for almost an hour. At one point, as I was taking a movie, I wondered what would happen if the thing crashed there, in the middle of a major artery, between two skyscrapers and a high-rise apartment building. I don’t think the landing would have been this uneventful.

Nothing crashed, nothing came loose and plummeted to the ground. It was just your average, run-of-the-mill big-ass helicopter maintenance call.

We have decided to post regularly on the Life from the Inside blog, so that there is something for people to actually read when they go there. I have put up my first post today, and for those of you who may not know me so well, you may want to read it. You can see the original posting here, but I have also reproduced it below for those of you who, in addition to not knowing me so well, are also incredibly lazy.

* * * * * *

Hello. Steve here. As the newest but oldest producer on the show, I know I am a bit of an unknown quantity. To quell any rumblings regarding my qualification to produce high-quality, hilarious episodes of Life from the Inside, I have decided that my first weekly post to the LFTI blog will be an enlightening, though drastic truncation, of my curriculum vitae. A curriculum vitae, or “CV” for short, is actually a résumé, but fancy people, like me, prefer to call it a CV so that I may claim to be fancy people.

1969: Born in a small town in central Colorado to a set of six socially conservative parents.

1970: Begin preschool early to get a jump on my studies.

1982: Make my first home movie with my friend Sven. The 8mm black-and-white silent film is a 46-minute staging of the epic poem, “Hortense and the Crusted Tide,” by Montgomery Woolworth Sears (1746-). Ran camera and played Mr. Sir Trundle, the Untoward Ecclesiastic.

1984: Miss the Macintosh ad during the Super Bowl. Don’t actually see it until 1988.

1987: Graduate Magnum cum Magma from Arvada Northwest Regional Preparatory School and Ersatz Military Academy with a pre-degree in Film Emulsion Chemistry and Elastodynamic Theory.

1988: Finish a year at Stanford, not realizing they had not accepted me in the first place. My brother Milton had “misplaced” the rejection letter as some kind of prank. Dumbshit.

1990: Create Tilted Equator Productions at Boston Collegiate University with four colleagues. Make six short films and two features during our first semester. One of these features, The Weeping Game, goes on to win accolades worldwide for its emotional portrayal of a woman whose tear ducts are sealed by a Lasik accident and who is therefore unable to cry for her dying sister, thus leading to the downfall of the Sino-Prussian Empire.

1991: Graduate from BCU with Super Über Magnum cum Magnanimous honors. Give all proceeds to the Hurry Up and Make a Wish Already, Will You? You Haven’t Got Much Time! Foundation.

1993: With leftover chums from Tilted Equator, shoot the first-ever 34-part online independent mini-series, An Oratory for All Humanity. Transfered from U-matic to ASCII animation using a proprietary technique I invented on weekends during college, Oratory was meant for distribution on the soon-to-launch Prodigy dial-up service. The series never saw the light of day, however, and even now remains a subject I’d rather not discuss, much less bring up in a CV such as this.

1994: Move to Los Angeles. Learn there is indeed such a thing as bumper-to-bumper traffic at 10:30pm.

2006: Lose all records and files from 1994–2006 in a mutant silverfish infestation. Forgot everything I may have done during those years.

2007: Begin work on Life from the Inside.

2008: Complete my first official posting for the LFTI blog.

I hope this modest listing helps me to earn your trust and assures you that the future of Life from the Inside is in good feet. Hands! Oops. Crap.

I was possessed last night, around midnight, to pull out the collection of letters, faxes, and pictures I have from my time with Byron. I have kept them all together, in a neat stack, in the back of one of my closets. On top of this stack has always sat a little stuffed bear, wearing a sweater knitted with a British flag.

I was looking for one thing in particular, but once I had pulled out the stack, I was sad to see that the silverfish have been at it. Silverfish eat paper, I was told by the last exterminator who’d been to my place to spray, uselessly, for the buggers. The envelopes and papers were covered with silverfish droppings, and I knew I had to go through and try to shake out any insects and clear the dropping off the papers. I was hoping the bugs hadn’t eaten away too much of this history.

As I went through, I opened every envelope, reading some of what was inside. I really wanted to sit and read every single word, but that would have taken hours. Mr. Fear and I were wordy in our missives.

One of the first letters I skimmed through was his last letter to me, after we broke up, over the phone, 5,500 miles apart. I had told him I could not talk to him afterward, that I had to cut him out of my life until I could get over loving him. His letter was pained, discussing how he was deciding to get over his guilt at the breakup being his fault. It wasn’t ever his fault; there should have been no guilt on either side. But there is always guilt.

A couple letters down into the pile was the first letter he wrote to me, when I still lived in Boston, was not out yet, and had really only begun to ponder what it might mean if I were to maybe somehow potentially consider the remote possibility that I liked guys. It was a giddy, happy letter talking about his Boston trip and how he’d pretty much fallen for me during it. He was careful to try to get that across without scaring me away as a potential friend. I had fallen for him, too, but couldn’t admit that yet. It wasn’t until I’d moved to L.A. that one of my letters revealed to him that “my heterosexuality is not set in stone.” Yes, those were my exact words.

The rest of the stack was everything in between the tone of those two letters, blissful and sexual and pining and mournful and hungry and hurtful and silly. Bryon is an artist, so his letters were often illuminated with his trademark black ink drawings, precise and perfect. There was a small stack of sepia photos he’d sent me from one of his L.A. visits, when he and I and Catherine and Steve R. went to El Matador beach. There were stories and scripts he’d written. There were ridiculous but charming faxes both he and I had sent each other. There were comics he’d mailed me that he knew I loved at the time… Calvin and Hobbes and Mutts. There were the “bedtime tales” we wrote each other, from loving to erotic to pornographic, sometimes all within the same page.

By 1:00am, I had made my way through. I had only found two silverfish, but they did seemingly crawl out of nowhere, so I’m sure more are hiding in the stack. There was some damage to the paper, but nothing terrible.

Bryon and I chatted on IM not long ago about what our love was and how it is still, to this day, for both of us, the love to which we compare all others. He’s been with someone now for a couple years. They are in love, but Bryon said it’s very different. It is the same for me, when I have loved others since. None of my other loves have been as hotly passionate or so all-encompassing that I spend days thinking of nothing else but the other person, failing to get work done, failing to fall asleep because the other person haunts my every cell and neuron.

There are some clichés about all this that I sometimes go through in my head, those occasional times I think about Bryon and our love. Sometimes the cichés are brought up by other guys I’ve dated. I always smack each of the clichés down.

Bryon was my first true love, and nothing can match that. So far, this is true, but I know what the love was, and I know I can feel that way again about someone else.

The downy halo around the relationship is a product of time. With this, I completely disagree. I am keenly aware that there were problems, but those problems did not diminish the love itself.

I am clinging to the past. I do have very fond memories of he and I, but I don’t cling. I appreciate.

Carrying a torch for the love I felt for Bryon will taint any new relationships I try to have. I also disagree with this. I am not carrying a torch. I am keeping in touch, on occasion, with my emotional ability to love someone and what that ability has meant to me, as well as what it will mean to me.

I am still in love with him. This one is more difficult. I have seen Bryon in the UK a couple times in the last few years, and we e-mail and chat occasionally. I do still love him, but it is not the passionate love that got kindled in our hearts over a decade ago. It’s a love for someone who I still admire and with whom I’ve shared something amazing.

That final cliché is the most painful to ponder. I moved on from Bryon years ago, now. I knew that would have to happen when we parted ways, despite that knowledge setting everything in me shuddering from grief. Getting over a love like that happens only when you allow the hottest flame of that love to die out. It’s painful and cruel, doubly so because it involves someone else who will have to let that same flame die. The pain today comes from knowing that I have moved on, and the passion of our love is dead, something that I helped to kill out of necessity, but not out of desire.

I will put the letters in a plastic box to keep out the bugs. I do not want them to vanish by vermin. Time alone will eat away at the clarity and brilliancy of my memory, so to keep these physical reminders safe is as important as protecting any history that shapes, steers, grows, transforms, lifts, enlightens, and devastates.

Is it any wonder that countries fight, peoples genocize each other, and couples can’t choose a place to have dinner? Communication is difficult, and sometimes it’s simply impossible.

Take the following exchange between myself and another guy on DList, a sort of gay MySpace.

To set this up, I have to explain that my profile asks people to send me a message and make some contact with me before asking me to be their “friend.” I hate sites where people just add “friends” willy-nilly. I mean, I get why they do that—the more friends, the more likely you are to be seen—but I can’t be bothered to have a huge list of people that I’ve never even talked to. That’s not why I’m on sites like this. My request is acceptable, and it is certainly not out of the ordinary.

So a fried request pops up on my account, after which a message comes to me, both from a guy calling himself BulkingUp. The message has the subject, “why do you have.” The message then goes:

to be one of those who needs a line to add a friend? I always feel awkward when I’m forced to write a message with the request, I mean what are you supposed to say? besides the obvious, that is…

First two warning signs: the subject line was used as the beginning of the message, and the guy calls himself BulkingUp. While the latter is about par for the course on a gay site, the former is inexcusable no matter what one’s sexual alignment. A third warning sign: poor capitalization. Not a deal-breaker, to be sure, but still grating. At least he was using punctuation.

Had the message been fun and cool, I could easily have ignored the warning signs. But the message was, I thought, obnoxious. He’s bitching about my requirement, but is not annoyed enough by it to decide against sending me a friend request. He was even unable to find anything to say aside from the bitching.

I should have ignored the message, but I was annoyed, so I wrote back a simple, “Sorry you don’t like it. Alas!”

To which he replied, “I was trying to be funny, I guess.” (He had no period at the end, however.)

Oops. Okay, so I misread it. It was easy to do, what with the complete lack of humor involved. So I sent back, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t pick up on that! Oops.”

“I was too subtle, I guess.” Hmm. Okay, yes, the humor was a bit subtle… to the point of near nonexistence. However, he seems to not be understanding that I get that, and that I missed his intent. So I shoot back, “Which is funny, because I’m the one who can often be too subtle! Ha! So I’ve tasted my own medicine! ” Every time I use an emoticon, I am ashamed, but sometimes it’s the only way to prove that there is no harm done, no harm meant, and no harm received.

Perhaps his browser turned my :) into a >:P, because his response was:

Dude, all I was trying to do was to add some sort of funny message to my friend request. You didn’t get it. Or it provoked the opposite reaction to the one I expexted. There is no reason to continue this exchange.
Peace.

On a grander scale, this is when the troops would be sent across the border to shoot up some town holding no strategic advantage. Oh, except he said, “Peace.” So maybe the border troop build-up would have been stood down. (Can you say “stood down”?)

I should not have sent anything more, but I did. “And I was genuinely trying to apologize. Sorry it got so botched. TTFN.” And the communication was done. For all I know, he thought “TTFN” stood for “Ta-ta, fuckin’ numbskull.”

There is nothing important at stake here, nothing to worry about, nor anything to lose sleep over. Yet I was, and still am, a bit taken aback by this. How could two random strangers so quickly and completely miscommunicate? Personally, am I really that bad at getting across my own intent? I don’t think I am, yet here is someone who does. I certainly think he’s no good at it. Is it really that easy for written communication to be so misinterpreted? What if he and I had met randomly in person, at a bar (SOOOOO likely!) or a sushi restaurant (SOOOOO likely!)? Would the visual connection have been able to diffuse such a miscommunication, or would something in each other’s demeanors have set us at each other anyway?

Is it personality, language, attitude, or perception that get in the way of being able to talk? Or all of those?

Whatever the cause, the genuine surprise that comes from an unexpected breakdown in dialogue is not really welcome. It gives me a case of the brow-furrows.

I love this. This is fantastic! Some guy bought an Apple IIc on eBay. The thing is that is had never, ever been opened. So he’s got some unboxing pictures up on Flickr.

Apple IIc Unboxing by dansays

While there are any number of unboxing pr0n pages out there, it was Apple’s gorgeous products and packaging that made the practice popular. I can safely say that the unboxing of a re-designed Zune is nothing nearly as exhilarating as the unboxing of something as ground-breaking and beautiful as the iPhone or the MacBook Air. (To aside: The new Zunes look pretty cool, but the instant you pick one up in your hand, you know it’s a piece of garbage.)

Robb, of sitcom fame, has an original 128K Macintosh computer, complete with carrying case. He brought this out at some party or other, and it got me thinking I should find myself one of those. There is nothing as iconic as that machine, what it meant for personal computing and the road it has led us all down. I have cursorily browsed eBay for a 128K Mac, but nothing serious has come of it.

Nothing serious will come of it. At least not for a while, thanks to money. I am, you see, currently awaiting the shipment of my brand new 2.8GHz 8-core Mac Pro. My awesome little 12″ PowerBook is nearly useless now for anything more than the simple things. My God, I bought it 5 years ago. So it was time to upgrade. I was waiting for the next round of laptop upgrades, but when the Air was announced, I decided I should go the other way and buy a machine that could kick some serious boo-tay. My new Mac Pro, when it arrives, will do just that.

I will keep my 12″ PB. Granted, I could get some decent money for it because the 12″ PB is still considered a treasure, it being so small in footprint. But I think I’ll keep it. It still works perfectly enough to take on trips if I need it, and I’m going to want to pull it out 20 years hence and go, “Gosh, this is still a strikingly nice machine!” I have told my mom to keep my blue-and-white G3 in decent shape, because that will be a perfect example of Apple’s translucent color period. I wish I still had my Apple IIe, but that is long, long, long gone. As dansays demonstrates, these old hunks of now-useless computer instill enough nostalgia in those of us who grew up with them that we now are willing to re-buy them just to have them sitting around!

Anyone got an unopened 128K somewhere?

I got to stop by Trader Joe’s yesterday on the way back from getting my hair cut. (It’s short. I should post a picture!) On the way in, I was stopped by these cute little trees outside the store.

I love trees. I have a ficus in my office that has flourished since I bought it at Ikea years ago. I wish I could have one in my apartment, but it’s too dark. These little Trader Joe’s pine trees were so cute, and I wanted to have some kind of Christmas cheer in my office, and I knew what was going to happen later that night, so I bought one to brighten my pre-Christmas days. Today, I bought little glass ornaments and decorated the tree.

How Charlie Brown Christmas is that? It’s so cute. I makes me smile. And since it’s alive, I can keep it in my office year-round. I lived in Boston last time I bought a tiny live pine tree like this, also around Christmas time. I had it for a quite a while. Sadly, it died when I took a trip. Must have been a long trip. This tree, I feel, will be my little Christmas tree for years to come. When it’s the off-season, I won’t even have to disguise the pot; I’ll tell everyone it’s my barber tree.

Wow. From this to this: Fuz and I are no more.

I was going to type, “How does this happen?” But I know all too well how it happens. I’m part of the process when it does happen, and so I have a very keen insight—an insider’s point of view, you might say—into how this happens.

Fuz has been maintaining for months that we have nothing in common. I have maintained that that’s true in certain aspects, but not in others, and that we can end up finding our very own “in common” things. Somehow, this lack of things in common became a seed.

The core issue for me was communication. We didn’t have communication in common. That includes talking about our relationship and our problems, as well as how we act in social situations. On the relationship side of that, I thought he was terrible at communication, he thought I was terrible at communication, both while we each thought of ourselves as being good at communication. We could not even communicate about our communication without messing up the communication.

I’m tired of that word. After this post, I’m retiring it for a year.

And so now, right before the holidays, another relationship ends. I was so excited for this season. Fuz was flying to Denver after Christmas to meet up with me. He was going to spend New Year’s Eve with me. He was going to be part of one of my favorite things to do ever, stay at the house at Grand Lake. He was going to meet my Colorado friends and hopefully find out why they are some of the most important people in my life. And then he was going to drive back with me to L.A., stopping in Grand Junction for the night and meeting my parents. Was. Was, was, was.

I did a quick tally, and Fuz was my 9th relationship. That includes people I dated seriously for any length of time. Some of those relationships were immediately doomed, and I knew from the start. Some of them became doomed over time. Bryon (here and here) didn’t work as a matter of geography. From each relationship, I’ve learned something and I’ve grown. I think I’m better at relationships now than ever. (Fuz would politely disagree.)

Now here was someone smart, funny, cute, sexy, sociable, free of the usual vices (drugs and overdrinking), and I loved him. Somehow, still, despite even wanting it to work, it did not. You’ll have to forgive me if I spend a few weeks pondering the possibility that I’ll never find someone. That’s normal behavior. What does it take? Why hasn’t it worked yet? Is it L.A.? Gay guys in L.A.? It must be L.A. And so on.

One unfortunate side effect of having had “so many” relationships is that, as time goes on, I grow more wary of the “publication” of that new relationship. Though he and I hit it off so quickly, Fuz was someone I didn’t announce to everyone with grand fanfare. News of him trickled out. You see, I have this idea—all in my head, I’m sure—that when I say, “Oh, I’m dating someone and he’s great!” my friends all go, “Uh, right. Okay. You mean, like the last half-dozen times. Call us when it works out.” My friends aren’t so callous. In fact, they loved Fuz. As I said, this is all in my head. I simply don’t want to come off as the blonde bimbo who is in love every fourth week and who falls for everyone she (she???) meets. I know I take every relationship I have very seriously, but, come on, #10? Who is that gonna be? Another mad crush? Another deep love? Another person to ease into my world? Why am I up to #10 in the first place?

I have learned from all of my relationships that staying together out of convenience is the worst thing to do. So is staying together out of embarrassment, or because of travel plans, or out of habit. Fuz’s issues with us are valid, and I hope he thinks mine are, too. When I take into account what we’ve talked about and argued about and gotten moody about, this is the best choice.

I have also learned across the years that making the best choice doesn’t make it hurt any less.

A great talk by Barry Schwartz.

The secret to happiness is low expectations. His example of jeans buying is perfect. When I have to get new jeans, I dread it. I spend a lot of time in various stores looking for what I know I want. If I finally find something I truly like, I may buy a couple pair. But by the time those jeans wear out, the styles have all changed. Then the process starts all over again.

I am in this stage right now. I need some new jeans, but Abercrombie no longer makes the ones I liked. I’ve spent a lot of time in their store trying on new kinds, and don’t like any of them enough. Now I have to try multiple new stores and… and it’s too daunting.

I both love choice and hate it all at the same time.

Yeah, I love the fact that I know I can get the kind of jeans I want since there is a wide variety of choices, but knowing that I can’t fail to get something I love wearing means I put off buying new jeans because I’ll have to waste hours in various shops trying on all kinds of different styles.

I should go back to my junior high days, when I hated jeans and would only wear cords. Cords are back, you know. I’m sure they are only available in one style, too, so I’m safe. I’m sure of it.

My mom is wonderful. She sends me cards on every holiday, and though I don’t return the favor, I always love getting them. I’m not much of a card person. I never have the right kind on hand, and it’s not convenient to go find one when you need to. Cards are all candle and fart jokes now, anyway. Who has an hour to sift through that?

Back when I first moved out to L.A., I was a lowly temp at Disney and I actually had an agent. I actually went out on auditions and even booked a couple of ads… despite my agent, in fact. Then I went through the coming-out process, and I put all that on hold to figure out this big part of myself that had been pretty blank for so long.

Today, I noticed in my bag that I had some old business cards in the card slot, and I pulled them out to replace them. Along with the cards was the following:

I had not forgotten this was there, really, but it was a joy to see it today. A mini-surprise. I have transferred it from bag-to-bag since 1995, which I think is when my mom sent this to me. I have always kept it so that I can look at it and feel that I am not foolish for believing in myself and what I want to do.

I never did get fully back into acting, which is not something I’ve been too terribly happy about. But I’ve eased back in, and I fully intend to keep at it on some level or another. The sitcom is the best thing to happen to me, creatively, in years, and I plan on doing my best with that, put my heart into it.

I put my new business cards in the card slot, and this right behind, to pull out another day.

My mom will be reading this, so I might as well thank her for her little cards and notes and mailings. I may not keep them with me like I’ve kept this one, but I love them all. Thank you, mom!

Thanks to a new round of fee nonsense with my Wells Fargo account, I’m done. I’m through. I have already signed up for a Washington Mutual account and plan to ditch Wells Fargo as soon as the WaMu account is all set up.

To try to make a long story short, here’s what happened this time.

I use ING Direct for most of my banking. I love them, but I still need a way to easily deposit checks without having to mail them in. I also like the ability to be able to go into a bank if I need to. So most of my paycheck goes to ING, with a tiny bit each week going to Wells Fargo to keep it active.

A couple months ago, a cute little $8 began to appear on my Wells Fargo statement. When I called Wells Fargo and asked why, the customer service gal said that my account needed a direct deposit of $100 a month to waive the fee. I asked her if me just upping the weekly deposit amount would work, as long as it gets to $100. She said yes. She refunded the fee.

The next month, my new direct deposit amount hadn’t taken fully, so I was under $100. I let the $8 fee go.

This month, the fee is back, and I had $100 of direct deposit. I call. The lady says, oh, no, you need at least one direct deposit of $100 for the fee to be waived. She apologized for my having been misinformed, the refunded both this month and last month’s fees.

Immediately last night, I researched other banks. All I need is a barely active account! Who could help me without being a complete dick about it? WaMu it is. So this morning, I set up a new account.

The rest of my day (between work chores, of course!) has been spent crafting a letter to Wells Fargo, which is reprinted below. At first, it was to be an e-mail, but all they have on their site is a limited e-mail form to fill in. I called to tell them I was as good as gone and could I please have an e-mail and a physical address so I could send a letter telling them how horrible they are? The woman was nice, and asked if there was anything she could do to help or to keep me as a customer. I said no. After me telling her that the fee thing is terrible at Wells Fargo, she asked if it would help for her to explain the fees. I said,

“You can ‘explain’ the fees all you want, but they are still horrible and suck.”

The nice woman fetched me a mailing address but said there was no e-mail address. She offered to transfer me to the corporate offices line. Wow. Okay.

I spoke with Kathy. She had raspy voice that could easily play the line between friendly or bitch-o-rama, whichever she might need. She was very friendly to me. I explained why I was leaving and she listened attentively. The only thing that got me was when I was detailing to her the silliness of charging me a fee to transfer money from one Wells Fargo account to another, both mine.

“You can transfer the money yourself online for free.” She had a slight hint of “so there” about her, but she was not rude.

“Well, of course, if I know I’m going to overdraft my account, I’d go immediately and transfer the money myself. But life isn’t so predictable. If I forget to enter something into Quicken and then I overdraft, I have no idea it’s about to happen. If I could catch it every time, I wouldn’t need something called ‘overdraft protection.’” That was the gist of my argument.

I realize that overdraft protection is a service, and no matter what happens, it is my fault if I overdraft my account. Well, mostly. Wells Fargo can charge whatever they want. That doesn’t mean they should. And the method of their fee madness is what’s so vexing. The fees are horrible and outrageous, yes, but to try to sell them as some kind of service is ludicrous.

Anyway, here’s the letter. Enjoy it. It felt very good to write and send!

December 5, 2007
Wells Fargo Bank
P.O. Box 6995
Portland, OR 97228-6995

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to tell you that I will soon be closing my Wells Fargo accounts. In fact, by the time this letter arrives, it may have already happened; my new Washington Mutual account will be set up and my remaining funds from Wells Fargo will be transfered either there or to my current ING Direct accounts. I am not what you’d call a “big” customer, since my accounts are never flush with cash. But I am a customer nonetheless, and one who is fed-up with how banks like yours work.

About nine months ago, I started using ING Direct as my main bank. I’d already had a great savings account with them (where I earned actual interest!), and their Orange Checking sounded useful. I moved most of my money and banking activity from Wells Fargo to them. ING has no stultifying fees or Byzantine requirements for minimum balances, minimum monthly direct deposits, minimum blah blah blah. They don’t pile on the fees for overdraft situations; in fact, their overdraft fee structure is sane and logical. Everything about them, so far that I’ve experienced, is good for me, the customer, for whom they are in business in the first place.

Wells Fargo, with whom I’ve banked since 1994, is a mess. For all appearances, you are in business for yourselves, not to help or serve people like me. I am more a minor, annoying necessity in your running a profitable business. A few times a year, for 13 years, I’ve had to call you about weird, unexplained fees or altered account requirements, and though everyone is very friendly on the phone, that mask can not hide your greediness. That your entire system is set up to collect fees from people like myself is infuriating.

I’ll delve into one example, for which I imagine you receive complaints often: your overdraft and transfer fees. They are the worst, jaw-dropping and preposterous. Having to pay an overdraft transfer fee of $10 to protect me from an overdraft charge of $33–$66 per transaction is insane. (Does it not sound a bit Mafia-esque for me to pay you $10 for doing no work to “protect” me from exorbitant fees you yourself charge? Hmm…) Worse, alerting me to the overdraft via snail mail and not having an option to do so via e-mail, in this day and age, can only be your way of assuring I rack up more fees in the days it takes to get that letter.

There is no better way to get your customers to hate you than to punish them for any out-of-the-ordinary banking situation.

Thanks to this and other frustrations, I use ING Direct for 99% my banking. However, as I’m sure you’re well aware, there are some limits to online banking; I still need to have access to a brick-and-mortar institution. I’ve chosen to move to WaMu to fill that role for many reasons. They may not have as many offices and ATMs as you do, and it may be a bit inconvenient for me to switch to a new bank, but Washington Mutual has no fees whatsoever, for any normal banking activity. I can have any minuscule amount in my account there without being punished. They don’t charge that ludicrous “this is not your bank’s ATM and so you will suffer” fee that most of you banks have discovered as a source of ill-gotten income. WaMu has no direct deposit minimum to waive some random fee. And on and on.

I wish I could say I will regret leaving Wells Fargo, but I won’t. I’ve wanted to do so for years, but had little choice, since banks operate in similar ways. It is only now, with some newer sane, logical, customer-friendly banks coming onto the scene, that I can pull this stage coach out of town and give Wells Fargo the lack of my business it so richly deserves.

With pleasure,

Steve Lekowicz

P.S.: I have just called your customer service center to get a mailing address so I can send this letter directly, and I was forwarded to your executive offices line. I spoke with Kathy there and was able to express my above concerns to her. She was friendly and listened to what I had to say (though she did try to use some marketing-speak on me, to which I am impervious). So again, I want you to know that the people I have typically had to deal with at Wells Fargo have been helpful and friendly.

In the end, your product and practices speak louder than your customer service reps.

Finally, here’s a letter I got from Wells Fargo back in 2004. Has nothing to do with this situation, but it makes for a nice funny ending.

The iPhone went on sale Friday in the UK and Germany. I’m so happy for the people in those countries.

I never did post my full impressions of my iPhone, but you can be assured it is now an irreplacable part of my gadget life, along with my 160GB iPod Classic, my Canon G9, and my 12" PowerBook G4.

(If one of those things seems older than the others to you, then your astutity is to be celebrated. My loved 5G iPod and my less-loved SD9000 were stolen at the last sales meeting, so I have brand-new devices to replace those. My little PowerBook, though still in perfect shape and wonderfully behaved, is too slow and old to suit my needs any more. However, Apple will be coming out with some new laptops soon, and I need to keep waiting to see what those are before I buy a replacement.)

I mentioned that Stephen Fry, known for his acting and wit, wrote at length about his iPhone and his own history of mobile communication devices. (See my own personal cell phone/PDA ownership survey.) In Stephens’ new tech column for The Guardian, he summarizes some of my own thoughts and feelings on the iPhone and the swirl of love and vitriol surrounding it. Do read it.

So I’ll tell you what I did…

I sold.

Now I am a couple steps away from happy, blissful freedom. Debt-free for the first time since college. Of course, I’m not poor, but it sure sounded good in the headline.

Please forgive me as I talk of finances. This may be considered uncouth, but I think it’s an interesting tale to tell.

I had a plan middle of last year: sell my Disney stock (gained through the employee stock purchase plan), and buy Apple stock. Take the money that was doing me no good, and put it into a stock that was doing very, very well. After a certain time, sell the stock and pay off all my remaining debts.

It was my Debt-Free Super Plan! (Long-time readers might remember me discussing this plan here and here.)

When I finally got all the arrangements in order—setting up an online account, selling the Disney stock, getting the funds deposited and transferred and ready to go—I’d missed an opportune time. Apple was at $40ish when I’d decided to do this, $50ish when I finally got all the tidbits in order, and then $60ish when I finally made the purchase. I was a bit peeved that I hadn’t acted sooner to get in on that $40ish price.

And now here I am. At the close of yesterday, Apple was above $186. Incredible. I have been patient, through some dips, only to be rewarded with this excellent gain. I had decided to be a little more patient, wait for the holiday season, when Apple is going to kick some retail ass. Then, in January, when the no-doubt very exciting Macworld announcements create some buzz, finally sell. Poof! Debt-free, including any taxes incurred from this experiment.

Then yesterday, Google announced their own mobile phone OS platform, Android, to be executed and sold with the help of 33 other companies. This, I reasoned, is the kind of thing that sets people to panicking. I’d lived through a few of these kinds of seemingly bad-for-Apple announcements, and Apple had bounced back. But why not get out now, when I was way ahead? This was Google. Google can do no wrong. Only Google can kill Apple! I pondered this last night, and came to a conclusion: Sell! Even if Apple takes a dive and then recovers, how much more is there to gain? Why not sell and be happy that I did so well?

I logged into my online trading account, perused the trade trigger options, and then sat. Pondered. Made sure I was doing the right thing. I set a trigger to go off if Apple sank below $183 today. Was this correct? Smart? Foolish? Whatever the answer would prove to be, I did it. Time to finish gambling with my money. I went to bed, assuming by this morning that I’d have no more Apple stock to my name.

My trigger never took. This morning, Aplpe was up almost a dollar. Then as the day came to a close, I watched my Dashboard widget in wonder until, by the close of the trading day, Apple ended up at almost $192. Impossible! Amazing! What happened?

The Google announcement, once analyzed, is of no consequence. As some guy named Steven Frank says, he’s “never seen so much hot air.” The press today has, in fact, been fairly unanimous: This is a nothing announcement from Google. Nothing is coming. Sure, Google will be releasing an SDK for their new open mobile OS, but no products are due until late next year, and there’s no promise that such products will even ship by then. Whereas Apple has, today, a shipping product that is popular, revolutionary, beloved, and bound to be even better by the time anything comes out of the Android camp.

Read that Steven Frank post, linked above. He’s exactly right. “A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite.” Even though I thought last night that Android might be Apple’s Nikon, I thought the touchy markets might not see it that way. Competition is bad for success in some eyes. But this is Apple, and I think people are learning that that means something. Apple can weather competition. It has a strong foothold in the minds of people who love things that just work and look good while doing it. Vaporware from Google can’t challenge Apple. Only later, if or when Android-based product ships, can we judge what might happen.

Tonight I will ponder this: Shall I return to my plan of waiting for the holidays? Or shall I take today’s boost and sell? Is it worth it to me to have some fun finding out how high Apple can go? Or would I be better off on the sidelines, enjoying Apples success while being free of the burden of debt in my own life?

Oh, what will I do?

Yes, this is Fuz. While it would be unfair for me to partially blame him for my lack of posts lately, it’s true. Which, I suppose, means that it would not be unfair at all.Every single time I’ve started a new romance, I’ve forgotten what happens: you lose time! In this case, as I grow to love Fuz more each day, I am losing more time than usual. We are together often, ever since we met in February, and when I’m with him, the last thing I want to be doing is posting to my blog. It simply means that I need to blog more at work. I’m sure they will be amenable to this arrangement.

One thing I like about Fuz is he’s capable of socializing and being fun and silly. It’s hard to find someone like that whom you don’t also want to strangle out of annoyance.

Fuz and I just got back from a weekend in Palm Springs. It was wonderful. I’m used to going away with boyfriends for a weekend and fighting most of the time. This was the complete opposite of that, whatever that means. Oh, I think I know what that means. Er, never mind. None of your business.

These pictures are from a trip we took to Disneyland with friends from Life from the Inside. (What’s Life from the Inside? Oh, you’re just being funny. Ha ha ha.) David Beall is the magnificent picturographer. Thanks to him for letting me steal them!

The power just went out in our entire building. I was on my Mac, but it’s a laptop, so nothing was lost. Thankfully, I finished my laundry a couple hours ago, and not long after that, I stopped building my new Lego Star Destroyer set (a random purchase from Downtown Disney last night to lift my spirits—which is a post for, perhaps, tomorrow). So really, this isn’t terribly inconvenient at all. But I can still post, you see, though the DSL modem is down. How, you (don’t) ask?

I am sitting here in the sexy glow of my iPhone, posting this just because I can.

The power should be back on soon. A transformer in the alley caught fire. But of course no one came and told us this. I had to go out and ask the guys with the big important trucks what happened. I think maybe every emergency crew needs to travel with a PR agent to go door-to-door and explain what’s happening. I mean, the trucks had been in the alleyway for nearly an hour before the power was cut (it must have been a very tiny little fire that did its damage very, very slowly), so a roving PR schmo would have had plenty of time to come around and warn us to shut down any mission-critical computers before the power was cut. My mission-critical sexy gay man underwear merchant browsing could have been properly terminated!

I guess really what I should be doing is getting my contacts out and going to bed. My alarm clock won’t wake me in the morning, and nor will my trusty iPhone if I drain the battery with Wren business.

Oh, well, what timing. There’s the power. So much for ending with a little bit of drama.

That I can recall, I have received two phone calls from my mother that, thanks to surrounding events, had me panicking in the seconds between the “Hello?” and the moment I was finally told what the call was about.

The first call was some years ago. I had just gotten back from Vegas with my boss. We’d been there to do one of our A/V events, and my folks just happened to be staying there. They delayed their departure for one day so they could watch me do my job, which, even to this day, is not easy to explain to people. Upon leaving, my boss and I drove back to L.A., and my folks drove back to Colorado, planning to stop in Mesquite overnight.

Soon after I got back to the office, my cell phone rang. It was my mom, hysterical. Hysterical. This was the first panic.

Days before, my sister’s husband had told her he wanted a divorce. It was horrible. She was sad and depressed, as were we all, I think. I remember getting her call about it. I was driving into work, and when she told me, I almost literally burst into tears. It was a sight, I’m sure, me driving on the 101, crying and talking into my headset, trying to pay attention to traffic, which suddenly was the least important thing in the world.

So I panicked when I got my mom’s hysterical call post-Vegas. My mind went to all kinds of horrible places. Was my sister okay? Had something happened? I couldn’t understand my mom. She was incoherent. Panic. I finally had to yell at my mom to shut up (yes, I think I actually said that!) and tell me what happened, and once she calmed down, she told me some… rather excellent news. Very excellent news, in fact. News that I have promised not to write about on my website. Bummer, because it’s a doozy!

First panic unjustified.

Yesterday, my sister went in for gallbladder surgery. My parents are in Nashville now. They got to spend some time with sis on her boat, then helped her with all the logistics of the surgery. Everything went well, and my sister returned home, out of it thanks to the pain killers.

This morning, not long after 6:00, my iPhone rang with the new old-fashioned phone ringtone I’d just assigned to my family. Odd timing. Fuz had already gotten up to get ready for work, so I was already partly awake.

I poured out of bed to answer the phone, and the second panic was now starting. Had something happened in the night? Was Laura okay? I answered and my mom was shaken. Not hysterical, but shaken, holding back some tragedy. I could not think of any good reason she’d sound this way, but I had been wrong last time. Maybe this was a good call…? No. The only thing it could be was complications with my sister’s surgery. Full panic time.

I did not have to yell at at my mother or tell her to shut up this time, but I did have to ask her what was wrong.

My sister’s townhouse burned down in the night. (More coverage here.)

My sister got up to use the restroom at 4:00 this morning. Or did she subconsciously sense something? Whatever it was, she noticed an orange glow from downstairs, went to see what it was, and saw her back deck on fire.

Man, I don’t know how she did it, but in her post-surgurey state, my sister ran around, yelling and screaming, to get my folks and her dog awake and out of the house. Then she ran to the connecting townhouses and woke her neighbors. Everyone got out okay, and no one was hurt.

My sister’s house is destroyed. What is worse, beyond losing the home, is all the memories that are gone. The pictures and videos and all those things you can never replace. My folks lost all the stuff they’d brought: clothing and glasses and ID and credit cards and teeth. The things you kind of need.

On the second call this morning, just as I was getting on the 405 to go to work, my mom told me that the hydrant water pressure was so bad, the firemen could not get the fire hoses working properly. Upsetting. But she also got teary telling me about the Red Cross’ help. They gave my family care baskets, a hotel room and car rental for three days, and vouchers to go buy clothing and necessities. I actually get teary thinking about that because I thought we were beyond that kind of aid in today’s America.

At 6 this morning, because my mind was turning to the worst, hearing that everyone was okay actually made me calm. My absolute worst fears had not materialized, and I was immediately relieved for that, even though a different and very surprising tragedy had taken place.

Second panic justified, but, thankfully, not fully.