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When I woke up this morning, it was pleasantly cool in my apartment, with a cool ocean breeze bringing the temperature in my place to the low 60s. The kind of air that makes you wanna curl up under the blanket. Deeeee-lightful.

But I had to get out of the blanket, because the office is not inside there. Stupid office. Anyway, so I got up and started getting dress and as I considered my wardrobe options, I looked forward to a motorcycle ride taking this cool air at 80 miles per hour. Naturally, I put on a sweater to help me carry that snuggled-under-the-blanket feeling with me.

The ride in was also delightful. I was nice and warm.

Then I got to work, and all day I've gotten comments on the sweater. Mostly playful ridicule, which is completely welcome. Mind you, we're not talking one of those my-gramma-knitted-this sweaters, but rather a Club Monaco, thin wool type.

Anyway, just thought I'd share that Californians seem to react to The Sweater with confusion, fear, and ridicule, the way the rest of us may react to the Okapi.

This was a crazy, wonderful weekend, starting with that old tradition, the Office Picnic. Ours involved way too much beer and ended with joy rides in a director's borrowed Porche 911 Carrera. Until someone clipped the curb, completely detaching the front right wheel from the car.

Then yesterday was a couple hours of tailgating before the Padres game, only to find out that our 11 tickets were, in fact, for the Friday's game.

Last night was a great cap to the weekend - Green Day at Coors Amphitheater. This band has really grown into being rock superstars, and they put on a hard-rockin', fireworks-supported show featuring plenty of crowd-chanting. They've become one of those bands where you see them and realize you know a lot of their songs. So there was plenty of singing-along.

That combined with the dozen cigarettes I had at the show should combine for some interesting throat dynamics over the next day or two.

Isn't the "this is what I did today!" aspect of the blog world just assiduously tedious?

Another thing I noticed coming back West is the police presence back East seems designed to stress you out on the road. As if I wasn't on-edge enough with seeing someone pulled over every 10 miles, I learned that the New Jersey police force recently purchases a bunch of vehicles of every make so that they can hide in traffic and POP OUT just when you're least expecting it. Fuckers.

So I'm back from a week that was equal parts confusing, tiring, drunken, and fantastic. It was so incredibly good to see old friends that I've known for more than the seven months I've been in San Diego, and of course it's always good to see family.

But a strange thing happened, something I was not looking for. When I got back to DC, everything felt familiar, yet not. That's sensible enough, and akin to the reactions I've had to Pittsburgh and New Jersey - other fine locations left in the dust. After a few days in DC, I went back 'home' to New Jersey. And I started to realize that New Jersey felt kinda like DC. It wasn't home anymore. So if DC doesn't feel like home, and NJ doesn't feel like home, that leaves me with San Diego. But San Diego doesn't feel like home - hell, I've only been here a few months.

So I'm rootless now. This was a bit of a foundation-destabilizer. There's something very sub-concious, quite deepy buried, that is calming about having 'home'. This root-searching, home-defining issue feels like a familiar concept, one people wrestle when they go off to college, or perhaps when they leave college and move somewhere new (unless, of course, you stay put through all these phases and just ignore this part of your psyche). But this was different.

Going to college, you have '1. Home', and you have '2. Here'. It's a nice, neat dichotomy. We are of a mind natrually attuned to dichotomies - hot or cold, relative or absolute, subjective or objective, even such gradiented concepts as 'fat or not' or 'art or rubbish'. But we're not so good at dealing with triads.

So anyway, I was trying to sort all of this out. Does this mean that I'm developing a freedom from reliance on 'home', such that I'll be able to try living in all sorts of mind-expanding places? Or does this mean that I'm identifying a void that needs to be filled - I need to find this 'home' and I'm going to struggle until I do?

Then I hung out with an ex. She got married a few months ago, to the guy she left me for (the same guy she broke up with shortly before dating me). It was good to see her, but I left feeling a bit ... displaced. (I should mention here that the dating scene here in San Diego, and over the last year in general, has been far less than kind, so it's been an all-too-solitary existence). So here was this girl, newly married, moved into a new house with a dog and a new job and all. So settled. So figured out. And here I am swirling. This was Friday.

Saturday morning it was up early to head to Pennsylvania and sit in a black wool suit in 103 degree heat with 95% humidity, watching my college ex get married. Fortunately, I never really foresaw us getting married, and I've been earnestly ecstatic for her since I first heard the news. The way I see it, I'm just happy I didn't screw her up so bad that she became a hermit seamstress living in a tree with her cats. But everything I mentioned above was forcefully inflamed by the vibrant demonstration of her settled happiness and progress being played out before me.

Anyway, now I'm back and swirling, looking forward to the product of facing some interior crevices I didn't know existed. And despite any of this, it was truly rewarding seeing old friends and feeling like I hadn't been gone longer than a three day weekend.

This should be all the whining you hear from me on this.

Does anyone else feel like 2005 has been going on for long enough, and it's high time for 2006 to start?

Hey all ... I'm out the rest of this week, so there'll be no fun new posts until Monday. Got the parentals in town. Happy July 16, everyone!

Southern California. All sunshine, all the time, right? After sunny April and pretty-sunny-May, I thought so. But nu-uh. Turns out there's a meteorological phenomena commonly referred to as "May Gray" and/or "June Gloom". Some sort of noise about the marine layer not burning off like it normally does or something. So pretty much every day for the last two or three weeks it's been in the low 70s and cloudy. Pretty lame. But July through April are faaantastic.

The highlight of my weekend lasted for about .4 seconds. I caught a wave, stood up, carved right (I carved?!) and ran my right hand along the face of the wave ... like a surfer! Then I was summarily ejected from my board, ribs-first into the wave. Again.

I'm going to leave this up for one more day ... getting some good comments (and one or two assinine ones). I'll resume normal wackiness tomorrow...

After one of Lee's famous "hour showers", where I tend to philosophize ad nauseum, until the towel wipes clear my memory...

So I've recently been coming to terms with my lack of exception. I'm 27 years old now, and while "there's plenty of time left" and I'm "still young" (and I should "keep my chin up"), I can come to some pretty safe conclusions based on my current trajectory.

I'm never going to own a mansion in the hills. But I'll also probably never live in a train car. I'll never drive a Lamborghini, but then again my days of driving cars that shut down at idle are probably done. I'll never run a major corporation. But I'll never again scoop mashed potatoes for hungry families hurrying to get the kids back home in front of the television. I'll never be known as a prodigious ladies' man, but I'd argue that the women who have shared their time with me are of the finest sort.

This late-20s period is an interesting one. The "infinite potential" period that lasts from birth fades, and a more realistic picture of one's life coagulates. And for many, this is a feeling of failure - after all, "infinite potential" is tough to live up to - leading to depression, guilt, anger, sadness. I've considered those options, dabbled in them for sure, but decided against that.

Those measurements of success I prattled on about - the house you own, the car you drive, the job you hold, the salary you earn, the partners you bed - these are the ways we commonly attribute life success. And before you balk at that with an assertive "No, no ... those are so superficial!", consider what you would think about if I was to describe a friend of mine as "very successful", or counter to that if I was to describe this friend as "struggling" or, worse, "not making it."

I'm sure there's already a perfectly appropriate term for this approach, but for my purposes here I'd like to term this Ostensibalism. That is, a philosophy by which we measure success but that which is concrete, tangible, ostensible. So the friend I mentioned would be ostensibly (or "Ostensiballistically") successful.

Living with Ostensaballistic metrics of success is stressful, to say the least, and doomed, to be more accurate. Clearly, I'm not going to have the riches of Bill Gates, the cars of Shaq (or Jay Leno), the superficial adoration of Tom (yak) Cruise, the celebrated professional life of Donald Trump, or the sexual prowess of John Holmes.

You know what? I desire not a single one of those things. Financial success all too often leaves a person without humility. Celebrity attention seems to leave these stars in search of true affection, and with a feeling of emptiness that leads to many strange behaviors. Strangely, sexual formidability seems to have the same effects. Professional success, as I've seen, seems to result in a personal vacuum - "I'm so good at this, why am I so bad at that?" or "Working harder fixes this, but what fixes that? And cars? Why did I even bring that up?

So I've settled into a new philosophy of success, which I'd like to call Reltionism. For those of you that know me well, you'll know this is something I've prattled on about for years, as I've codified it in my mind. And this philosophy, as with all of my approaches, is dynamic. But after a few years, I'm feeling good about this one.

You see, all those things above tend to leave a person feeling empty because something is missing. And once you get past the Maslow level of needs ("Hey, I can afford a cheeseburger, no problem!"), these Ostensaballistic measures are superfluous. They don't truly add to a sense of reward, a true sense of accomplishment. Perhaps this is because none of this matters if you don't have whom to share it with. A bachelor executive with no friends and a family that no longer speaks to him has no one with whom to share the joy of a successful third quarter hostile takeover that boosts slumping sales by 8.3%.

And so ... Relationism. I measure my success by the Relationships I cultivate. Quite simply, I'll know I'm successful if people who know me would speak well of the time we've spent together. An evening spent sipping a cheap bottle of wine, spent in a bar, restaurant, or apartment not worthy of note, with someone who would gladly inconvenience themselves to make me happier because they know I would do the same is rewarding enough to carry me through a week. Conversely, receiving a 3% (or 33%, as happened) raise leaves me with a feeling of fulfillment for about as long as it takes to read the number, and sharing a thing like that with those people who care leaves me no more fulfilled.

Give me some quiet, unimportant conversation with someone who genuinely wants to listen to my triviality. Fortunately, it is because I'm a Relationist that I find happiness in my place.

"So how you been, Lee?" Well let me tell you about yesterday. And I WILL make you squirm by the end of this.

It all actually starts late last week when I learned that I was probably going to be shipped off to another project in another town (bad project, don't want to travel, etc). This is reminscent of another time at work, one that was very bad. And because of that bad time, I'm sorta trapped in this one. Whatever, I won't get into it. Suffice it to say that people around here have called me a "ghost", because I don't really exist on any team or in any place (I was told I'll be booted from my desk).

Anyway, so all that just made waking up Monday a slow, sad event. And Monday was just no fun at work either. But the fun part is when I went to the doctor. This is where I get to make you squirm!

Firstly, we talked about my foot. See, my toe has healed to the point I can walk on it, and I have like 90% mobility bending it up, but like 10% mobility bending it down. He looked at it, told me my plantar flexibility was really bad but my dorsal flexibility looks good (that's what *I* said!), and said I needed to get into physical therapy. Then he told me that physical therapy is "basically a torture chamber" and it is "incredibly painful" but "they know what they're doing". Sign me up!

Finally, the squirming. I'm going the Howard Stern, talk about it all, disarm it sort of approach here. So Sunday I noticed ... well let's not dance around it ... something that looked like a real bad zit. On ... my ... well, you'll get it if you don't already. So I had to say this to the doc, and he had to say "So you say you have something on your penis you want me to look at?" and I had to say yes, and stand up and show him. Good times. Turns out it basically was a zit - sort of just some dirt got into a gland or something. But the fun thing - I had two options - lance it or freeze it. After some short discussion, I went with "lance it", laid back, "whipped it out" (to use his joking terminology), and he poked it FOUR times with the point of a scalpel. Oh and he accidentally poked my finger once in the middle there. I was sweating and shaking badly by the end of the ordeal. I actually got quite nauseous in the moments afterward, thinking back. I have my medical write-up here: "lesion on penis, small abscess on foreskin [i thought i was jewish!]. lanced and drained with scalpel blade."