Youngest of One

Rory McIlroy Is Making Me Look Bad

In my view, he's making the whole human race look bad, but especially young people. If you haven't been following sports news, which I never ever do but this story was impossible to get away from over the weekend, Rory McIlroy just won his first major tournament, the U.S. Open (see: golf). He is twenty-two years old. Not only did he win this infamous championship, he set a bunch of records doing it, as he probably had the greatest round of golf in recorded history. I didn't pay attention to the game on Sunday very closely, but I'm pretty sure he finished the day with a bajillion under par. Yes, I believe I heard that on ESPN. This soon-to-be-a-great-Trivial-Pursuit-question event came up in a brief elevator conversation the other day with my boss's boss, who it turns out by coincidence used to work at the same company as my dad starting before I was born. "He's only, what, like twenty-two? How old are you?" the boss asks. "Twenty-one," I say. "Right, well, you still got a year to catch up then," he says, or something to that effect. He crystallized what I was already thinking. I just found out that McIlroy's last birthday happened pretty recently. He turned twenty-two less than two months ago. Our births were only about eight months apart. And he just won the U.S. Open better than anyone else has ever done that before. What have I ever done better than everyone else in the world in history? What records do I hold? Besides most times anyone has ever hit their head on an MTA bus or train (happened just a little over an hour ago). OR: Besides most hours logged playing "FallDown!" on my iPod Touch? OR: Besides time, money, and energy spend on Magic the Gathering and video games. They don't give out trophies for any of those things. Also I just made all those records up.

Obviously I don't have a lot of time to strive for any world records or create something that I can enjoy making and be proud of. In almost four weeks of my new internship, I still haven't gotten over how much time so many working people, me being one of them for the time being, spend at their jobs that likely don't fulfill them in any way outside of financially. I know I'm not saying something here that hasn't been figured out by pretty much every adult human being before, but it's been weighing on my mind ever since I heard the strangest thing in my office's mens room last week. I was standing in the stall, because I think urinals are weird, when I overheard a man at the sink on the other side of the wall brushing his teeth. It made me think of all the nutcases (sorry, just calling 'em like I sees 'em) I've ever seen or heard clipping their fingernails on the bus or a subway train, only this was less annoying and yet weirder. Unless you were, I don't know, coming from or leaving on a business trip, why would anyone brush their teeth at work? Maybe he's obsessed with personal hygiene. My understanding of OCD mostly comes from watching Tony Shalhoub on Monk and more recently Emma on Glee, and both those characters seem like they might brush their teeth in an office. I assumed that he must've just eaten something and felt the compulsion to brush immediately, in which case I wanted to tell him about the article I read about how that's actually harmful, because working your teeth that hard just after chewing up a meal will wear away tooth enamel or some such thing, so really the best time to brush is just before each meal. But maybe he read the same article and he was just about to eat, so I didn't say anything.

Back at my desk, though, my overactive imagination kicked in. What if this guy isn't the office Monk at all? What if he lives here at the office? While everyone around him thinks he's the office overachiever, first one in the morning and always working late, secretly he's never going anywhere, just sleeping under his desk like George Costanza and getting all of his meals from the cafeteria downstairs. Maybe he had a huge fight with his wife, stormed out of the house one morning, and hasn't had the nerve to go back ever since. Or maybe he just lost his security badge, can't get back into the building without it, but doesn't want to deal with the consequences of losing it. Or maybe, and this is the alternative I've really accepted as my narrative, he used to have a long commute to and from his home in, let's say, Staten Island, and he got so fed up with the hours and hours spent sitting on buses and ferries only to spend so little time at home that he just said to hell with it and started living at work. And that's an impulse I understand because I now do so much of my living at work as well, about eight hours each day, five days a week. Compare that with how and where I spend the other hours of the day. Approximately three are spent commuting to and from the office, during which time I'm at best reading but more often just listening to a podcast. I often think about how far I could go if I spent all that commute time just traveling in one direction, how close I might get to my girlfriend's house in Pennsylvania if the bus got onto I-80 instead of the expressway. I'd say that, on average, I spend about six waking hours at home on a weekday, and one of them is entirely devoted to getting up and ready in the morning. That's not a favorable ratio.

So that's a numbers breakdown of how I'm spending my weekdays and why I'm not holding up any giant cups like Rory McIlroy. (Yeah, that's why, every sensible person groaned.) I might keep following news about this guy just because, if I'm being very honest, I'd like to hear that he's not happy. Because if he's a record-breaking athelete (well, it's golf, but still), he's almost my age, and he's really happy in his personal life, then there's no denying that he's got me beat. But as long as I'm happier than he is, then that trophy means less than any of my made-up awards. Besides, from what I hear, that was apparently a really dumbed-down U.S. Open anyway. It's like when that first guy won it all on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? because all the questions were way too easy. (Apologies to Rory McIlroy for everything above. Just kidding about the whole wishing unhappiness on you thing, man.)

I Must Belong Everywhere

It dawned on me earlier today just how eclectic and malleable my life is, even more so than the average life, I would think. Take one month ago, for instance. Last month I was still living in a flat in Glasgow, Scotland and touring around European cities whenever I pleased. Right now, I'm living at home with my parents in Queens, New York, and my day-to-day life consists of a full-time paid internship for a big company in or around Wall Street (I wish I could be more specific, maybe someday). And to top it all off, in only about two and a half months, I'll make a long-awaited, triumphant return to a teeny tiny town in Pennsylvania where I'll be taking an introductory level poetry course, a screenwriting workshop, and an independent study on creative nonfiction with a widely respected professor who has published many books and whose son is the guitarist for the band Breaking Benjamin. At this rate, I can only imagine that I will have visited outer space by the age of thirty. Seriously, if you consider each of those three sentences separately, doesn't it sound like they should belong to three different people? The difference in tenses is the only thing hinting at the truth.

So I'm thinking about this on the subway today, which was running at the pace of a leisurely snail with nowhere to be, and the Bright Eyes song "I Must Belong Somewhere" starts on my iPod. You can probably get an idea of the theme of this song just by reading the title. "Everything must belong somewhere," Conor Oberst sings in the refrain, "I know that now, that's why I'm staying here." Now, get me right, I'm not going to begin to tell you that wherever I stay for any period of time, even here at home, I feel like I don't belong. I'm hardly going to give you Zach Braff's speech from Garden State about when the house you grew up in stops being your home or whatever whiny indie monologue he was wistfully delivering that time. (That's not fair, I liked that movie, and I still do. It's just become such a mockable cliche to see Zach Braff making a little speech about home or identity or ourselves.) That's melodramatic and would only serve the purpose of offending my family. If I've had any problem with this shapeshifter of a life, then it's just the opposite of poor Andrew Largeman's woes. I feel like I belong in all of these places!

I sure as hell belong in New York City. I grew up here, most of my family is here, I went to high school on the Upper East Side, I've got a new job here for the summer which may create opportunities in the future, and the list goes on. And yet there's something missing from that list, isn't there? Oh right, friends. Occasionally I keep in touch with friends from high school, and even more rarely I see some of them, but people came from all around the five boroughs and beyond to go to this school, so it's hard to get people together. And nowadays my closest friends are the ones I've made at college, and I'm lucky if I get to see them off campus. Not to mention the fact that I've been a student in some way, shape or form for the vast, huge, overwhelming majority of my life, so of course Academia might be where I feel most comfortable. (I said might. Please remember that, yes, I feel at home at home and I love my family.) And maybe it's just by virtue of the amout of time I spent there, but of course I started to feel at home in Glasgow, too. Talk about independence, having that bedroom with an attached bathroom all to myself, living in an apartment with three roommates who I hardly spoke to outside of the occasional awkward run-in in the shared kitchen. On the one hand, on lonely nights of hours spent sitting in front of the computer, I learned that I never want to live alone ever again. And yet, isn't that the best way to experience a semester abroad? Over five months I came to think of Glasgow as a fine home away from home, a city I could really get used to, a place I hope to return to someday years from now.

I can talk all I want with confidence about the immediate past, the present, and the near future; but what about a year from now? Where am I going to belong then? Never in my life have I had so much uncertainty when presented with that question. "I'll be in third grade," I would've once said with a toothy grin and a crew cut. "Regis High School," I would've answered years later with a pretentious aura that would make your fists clench. "Abroad in Scotland," I would've replied a little over a year ago, trying to prepare a decent answer for when you inevitably ask why. Ask me about a year from now. "I have no clue." I'm going to apply to some graduate schools, but I've yet to research which ones would be a good fit. I've got to take the GREs soon, which I haven't scheduled yet. So far I really don't have anything in the way of a backup plan if I don't get accepted into a single grad school, which, let's face it, there's a good chance of that happening. I've seen way better writers than myself turned away from their choices of grad schools, and it's gone to show me that, even with loads of talent and hard work, you just can't predict how these things will turn out. All this uncertainty about the future worries me a little bit, but reflection on the past gives me hope that, wherever I end up a year from now, I'll learn to feel like I belong there.

The Bystander Effect

Last week I saw something in Manhattan that I've never seen before. That's a statement that could be made any day out of my summer and some years of my life, I suppose, because every time you step into Manhattan you see something you've never seen before. But most of the bizarre is all so unremarkable. The extraordinary becomes the ordinary, such that I'm not going to write a blog entry about the guy in the big rubber chicken suit on the street corner near my work. If I lived in, say, Topeka and saw that, then sure, I might write you a few paragraphs on how strange it was. But when I tell you I saw a giant chicken in Manhattan, of course you should shrug it off or at least ask what happened next (e.g., did the chicken try to sell me drugs or offer me an expired coupon). What makes this one sighting so remarkable was that it replaced something ordinary, a new twist on a sight I come across almost every day. I'm downtown, walking to work, waiting for a stoplight to change, when I see a bus approaching from the left. Out of a habit I couldn't shake if I wanted to, I look up to the sign at the top, a screen that displays the name of the bus and where it's going. Except this time, instead of reading "QM2 via Blah Blah Ave" or what have you, it read "EMERGENCY" in big, urgent letters. "CALL POLICE," it said next, alternating between the two alarming messages. I looked through the front windshield, searching for an explanation, a hijacker or a terrorist on board, but I saw nothing but a calm-looking driver and a few passengers. Maybe I imagined it, I was thinking as it passed, until I could see the smaller screen on the back, switching between "911" and "CALL COPS."

What would you have done? Do you pick up the phone and call 911? What do you tell them when they answer and ask about your emergency? "Hello, I just saw a bus with an emergency." Then they'd ask where you saw it, and if you're like me then you aren't paying attention to where you are, but you could read the street signs and tell them which corner you're on. But then they'll ask which way the bus was headed, and that's the moment I really dreaded when I played out this imaginary phone call in my head, because I don't know north from south from east from west outside of looking at points on a map, my awful sense of direction is overshadowed only by my miserable ignorance regarding geography, so the best I could do in that moment is race in the direction it was going, stop at the next corner, find the street sign, and say, "Toward XYZ Street," or whatever it would be called. But none of that happened, or not to me at least, because maybe someone else had the sense to call 911 instead of standing, watching, thinking, and going about their day. Like I did. Does that make me a bad person? Or does it just make me a bystander? That's my understand of what's meant when people say "the bystander effect." It means, you see something going on, and someone should probably intervene, but everyone is thinking all at once, "Somebody else will probably take care of it," and then no one gets their hands dirty. I remember once, some time in grade school, my class got advice on what to do in an emergency, and the one detail that stuck with me was this: Point at someone and say, "You, call 911." Because if you just yell "Call 911!" at a group of people, no one's going to do it. They're all going to stand around, watching, waiting for someone else to make the call, so you have to single someone out for the job.

If only the bus could've done that. What if the bus had singled me out? Flash back, start over, I'm still standing on the corner waiting for the lit up walking man to replace the red hand, when I look over at the bus and see "EMERGENCY," then "CALL POLICE," except instead of stopping there, next the screen read, "WILLIAM HOFFACKER." Or even "YES, YOU! CALL 911 NOW!" Would that have been enough to get me to pick up the phone? I've never dialed 911 before. I hope that I never have to. But I've wondered about it since I was a kid. If I picked up my cell phone now and put in the numbers 9-1-1, would I have to press the send button? I remember years ago I once heard that you can dial 911 at a pay phone and you don't have to put in any coins. Maybe my idea is like the cell phone equivalent, you don't have to press send because it will just dial automatically. And what could've been going on in that bus to warrant that "EMERGENCY" sign? If they can put "CALL POLICE" up there, they should also broadcast an explanation why if they really want people to help. I bet I would've been way more motivated to pick up my phone if I'd seen "BOMB ON BOARD" or "MAN WITH GUN" or anything to that effect, but maybe that would create widespread panic. But if there is a real emergency on that bus, wouldn't creating some panic be better than the apathy of the bystander effect? Since I saw the endangered bus early last week, I haven't heard any stories in the news about it, so I'm content to believe that it was nothing serious, maybe just a clumsy driver who turned on that message by accident. Now that I know that "EMERGENCY" message exists, though, I'll always be on the lookout for it as MTA buses pass me by dozens of times a day. It's unlikely that I'll ever see it again, but for a while at least I won't be able to get it out of my mind, waiting and watching vigilantly for the next moment I can stand by and do nothing, unknown lives at stake, while potentially real danger rolls by unheeded.

All Work And All Play

Efficiency. Synergy. Enplanement. These are all words that are in my vocabulary now that I'm working a nine to five office job. (Don't ask about that last word; no, I don't work for an airline.) Well, not exactly nine to five, that's just an expression. I've adjusted my schedule to 8:30 - 4:30 instead because it fits my commute better. Still, you get the idea, it's a full time job, five days a week, too. I wish I could tell you loads about my summer internship, but it would be unwise and unprofessional of me to talk about the company I work for, because then someone with authority will see it and fire me. Which is not to say that I don't like the job. So far, in the middle of my second week, I like it fine. But security is tight at the building and they obviously don't want any details getting out, so this is one part of my life that will just have to remain private for the time being, at least. Unfortunately it's made all the more difficult by the fact that it's such a major part of my life now. Until working a few days under these circumstance, I never realized how much a full time job can just consume your whole existence. When you consider how much time I spend commuting, it's about twelve hours or more from the time I wake up to the time I get home again. And then I've got no more than four or five hours of time for myself and all the things that I want to do or should be doing. Thank goodness this is a paid internship, because I could not sacrifice so much of my time just for some work experience and a resume booster. (I hate that word, resume, and the way it depends on those two little accent marks that I can't easily produce with my computer, so the only way I know how to put it in a word processor is to Google it, then copy and paste. Just two little obscure lines separating resume from an almost identical word which is completely unrelated. I have a real love-hate relationship with this language.)

Productivity. Creativity. Time well spent. These are just ideas, mere notions, that will nevermore become reality in my life now that I've bought an XBox 360. Understand that this decision was a long time coming. I think that my cousin Andrew first got his XBox almost two years ago, if I remember correctly, and I've wanted one myself almost ever since. But I've gotten to a point in my life where my still developing brain has really started to hone its capacity for indecision and self-awareness. I like video games a lot, but I know I don't devote that much time to them, not in the past several years at least. I'm much more of a casual gamer, not a hardcore one. It's the reason I've stayed loyal to Nintendo for so long. For many months I wanted a 360 but doubted that I would get so much use out of it that it would be worth the money. Then a couple of months ago a game called Portal 2 came out, and there's no way my PC is good enough to run it. Plus, visits to Andrew's place have gotten me somewhat hooked on Call of Duty. My semester abroad meant that I suffered from some gaming withdrawals, checking stories on IGN more than ever before and getting more use out of my Nintendo DS than I have in years. I've thought for a while that the start of this summer might be the right time for me to get an XBox. During my first two days at work, in the off moments when I was sitting at my desk with little to do, or even in the moments when I was busy, the 360 was extremely prevalent in my thoughts. I couldn't even keep it restrained to the back of my mind. Well-armed Black Ops soldiers kept racing to the forefront of my consciousness, capturing the flag of my attention. On Wednesday night I ordered it online with express shipping so it would arrive by the weekend.

So far the purchase has been worth it. After hours of play during the weekend, I just finished the single-player mode in Portal 2 last night, and it did not disappoint. I already had staggeringly high expectations for this sequel, so I was blown away when the ending managed to exceed them. So good, but if you know anything about video games then this comes as no surprise to you. Returning to the point, I've been home in the United States (of America) for over a week, and I'm only managing to blog now because my time has been largely divided between the new job and the new video games. I started the internship right after Memorial Day, two days after my flight home, which was not the most relaxing way to return from five months abroad. I would definitely be playing Portal 2 instead of writing this if there was any more single-player levels to play or if there was anyone here to play co-op mode with me (that makes my life sound sad, doesn't it?). The one remotely productive thing I've managed to do is keep writing that Dave Eggers book, which took a turn for the not-quite-as-good from pages 250 to 300, approximately, but I'm still enjoying it. I don't regret buying the XBox or getting the new job, but this isn't the best summer for me to be unproductive. I've got a lot of writing classes lined up in the Fall, and a writing drought now could seriously affect my performance then. Not only that, but sooner than I'd like I have to start applying to graduate schools, which means figuring out where to apply, taking the GREs, and I'm honestly not sure what else. And when was the last time I made one of my travel videos for YouTube? I've even been procrastinating on something as simple as editing photos and putting them on Facebook.

Finally I understand that song, "Working for the Weekend," far more than I ever did before. But I know that when Friday (fun, fun, fun, fun) comes all I'll want to do is pick up the XBox controller again and again. Have I found an excellent way to relax, entertain myself, and relieve stress in my downtime? Or have I doomed myself to a whole summer of no time to get anything done? Maybe a little Call of Duty will help me clear my head.