So I don't know if it was kosher or not, but seeing how no one was instructed to put away their cameras and NPR was apparently there taping the event, I shot some video of the event for my brother-in-law. He wasn't willing to make the 5 hour drive from Dallas to see Hodgman in Austin. Maybe this will entice him to haul ass down to Austin now.

Intro & Theme Song

We went and saw John Hodgman (of NPR, Daily Show, This American Life, and Apple's commercial fame) last night at the warehouse theater.


There was an excellent reading by F.W Thomas about a boy's allowance and the correspondence between him and his father that was very funny. David Rees rants on the ABCs, Thomas Friedman, and his comic presentations were classic. Everything was pretty informal except for Hodgman's introduction. Accompanied by Jonathan Coulton on guitar, it was quite a hilarious send up for all that is Hodgman. If you can catch a reading, by all means, get yourself there.

Twas definitely a good time and made me glad I lived 4 metro stops away rather than an hour's drive away from the city.

We stayed and got our books signed and chatted briefly with him. Seems like a really nice guy, very funy, and very down to earth. He is an expert on all hobo matters indeed.

Brian was there and took a bunch of photos, you can swim over to flickr and take a look.

Update: Just posted some video of the evening (intro and theme song) as well.

"Do you want to come over and play?"

"Me? What would we do?"

"Yeah. I dunno, we could play with LEGOs, or maybe you can bring your Transformers over. If its nice, we can take our bikes out."

"Ok, sure."

And that was it. It was simple. What happened to those days? I used to have what I thought was a small (read 2) close knit group of friends that we vowed to keep that tone even as we grew up. We graduated college, got jobs, and we still said that ambiance wouldn't be corrupted. We went out of our way to preserve it. One of my friends came up with the idea of "Friends Night Out." Which I thought was the dorkiest thing ever.

"Here me out," he said, "I'm trying to carve out a little time where we can keep things like how they were. We can get together, hang out, shoot the shit. It'll be great."

Of course, great ideas are usually only great in theory.

We had scheduled it on thursday night to 1) Not interfere with any potential plans for the weekend and 2) because we'd like to pretend like we started the weekend early.

The first few "FNOs" were chill, but somehow we started scheduling them at fancier and fancier restaurants much to the chagrin of one my friends girlfriend, since she was pissed he wasn't saving his money and spending it on her. Also, scheduling them after work was not conducive to hanging out. Everyone is just reeling from the stress of the week and none of us got our dream jobs out of college, so there was a lot of "welcome to the real world" angst/rage. Things started to begin to unravel after that.

First, they wanted to bring their girlfriends, which I was fine with, except, one of them could give a rats ass she was there. The only reason she was there was because she was completely dependant and couldn't have my friend out of her sight. The other, she couldn't even be bothered to hang out with us because it was Thursday NIGHT! MUST SEE TV! She was a big Friends fan, so yes, she'd rather stay at home and watch a group of actors on tv pretend to be friends rather than go out and make friends.


Thinking back now, why the hell were the girlfriends even there? Both my friends had girlfriends that had nothing more than superficial relationship with their friends. They didn't respect what we were trying to preserve and all they saw was just more reasons to piss away time and money.

I realized though, we were trying to preserve something that passed its expiration date. Hanging out required NO schedules, and here we were trying to fit it into our workdays and responsibilities that have suddenly sprouted now that we had fend for ourselves. Hanging out also didn't require a happy hour, it didn't require a cute girl asking if you would be needing a table for dinner, and it didn't require to leave tip after all was said and done.

I saw this line whilst blog surfing yesterday:

I had one of my first real "grown up" moments the day I realized that there really are only 24 hours in a day, and I had to choose very carefully how I wanted to spend them. - Wil Wheaton

And he's right. We didn't realize it at the time but we were trying to have our cakes and eat it too. You can't be a kid when you're grown up because that just essentially makes you a bum. But we wanted to be kids and still be adults too.

So life was kicking me in the ass to tell me we were growing out of having all the time the world and we were growing out of each other. We had became different people, with different goals, and yet we still clung to the past. It was something we thought was real and not muddled like our lives were at the time. But with every "FNO," was another nail in the coffin with our friendship. For some reason, it accelerated the death of my childhood friendships. We were grasping at sand, and we knew it was a matter of time that it would all slip away.

I don't have a close knit circle of friends these days, I guess they fall by the wayside once you grow up and have too many responsibilities to attend to.

Hanging out has become a rarity to me these days. Sure there are dinner parties, dinners out, happy hours, but that's the thing. Hanging out is based on not having anything to do at all and enjoying it. Having to create an activity to facilitate it, somewhat kills the purity of it. At the same time, trying to enjoy boredom now is like trying to watch old school Transformer cartoons now and thinking it that it does have an incredible story arch and amazing special effects. I guess I grew out of it.

I'm lucky though, because I am able to still experience it sometimes with the few friends I have that get it, with my wife, and sometimes with my family when we're not driving each other nuts.

So I'm not ready to write my essay to NPR for their "This I Believe" series, but today's essay was a good one. Written in the idea that you should fail to learn and grow, because really, what do you learn if you succeed at everything?

“Success is boring. Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do… Failure is how we learn.”

Its strange to think back though and realize that most of my failures frustrated the hell out of me. If its true that failures are a good thing why do they have to be like vegetables? You know, they're good for me but given the choice, I'm sure I'd rather just have big bowl of ice cream.

Also, what about successes where you're not sure you can do it? I mean, after failing a million times at not doing something correctly and then finally getting it. Think about the gratification you would get afterwards? Then again, maybe all those preceding trials only making success that much sweeter afterwards and that's what he's talking about.

Jon Carroll wrote the essay and from his picture on NPR's website, he looks like a pretty old dude. Maybe that's why I believe him more because he's probably had a lot more failures than I have had.

So lately I've been becoming a little paranoid about eating junk food/processed food/fast food. I mean my parents for year have been telling me that its not good to eat such filth but I didn't listen. But now as I scrutinize the package labels these days, what the hell am I putting in my body? I picked up a bottle of Nestea "Peach-flavored" Green Tea with my lunch today because we all know Green Tea is good for you. But what's this? Potassium sorbate? Sodium Benzoate? And EDTA (to preserve that artificial peach taste) along with phosphoric acid?! So along with the phosphoric acid providing me that tangy taste, it can also remove any rust that seems to be lying around my stomach and maybe make my bones a little brittle.

I still drank it though, because I am a pawn in the consumer game of life and I like my junk food, but then the whole mortality question comes into play. I wonder how many chemicals are being pumped through my body right now with all the artificial colors/flavors and preservatives that were added to my tasty but somewhat toxic food?

I've also been thinking about this because we just got into season 4 of Northern Exposure on DVD. There's a character named Mike Monroe, which is played by Anthony Edwards of ER and Top Gun fame, where his body has completely gone haywire due to all the chemicals that we have introduced into the environment. It makes me wonder if one day that I too could start just breaking out and vomiting from OD-ing on "natural tea essence?"