A post-race mindset

I was a little choked up by the time I finally crossed the finish line on Saturday night.

To be fair, you would be, too. Apparently it doesn't matter if you've been hardened by years of love and loss, international politics, the monotony of day-to-day life and the soul-crushing process of watching your hairline recede. Disney has a way of getting to you. And so does running.

~~~

Last Saturday my brother and I ran the Disney Wine and Dine Half-Marathon. It’s was a 10,000+ runner shuffle through the Walt Disney World campus just outside of Orlando, starting at the Wide World of Sports complex and winding through both Animal Kingdom and Disney Hollywood Studios before finishing with a gigantic drunkfest at Epcot. I finished in 2:23.20.

The run itself was so masterfully executed that I couldn’t help but spend the entire jog in awe of, well, everything around me. The sidelines were littered with heart-tugging distractions. There were Disney characters in full regalia posing for photo-ops with runners. There were employees, families, volunteers, and drunk revelers all screaming and shouting your name as you nimbly leaned into each turn off the Oceola Parkway.

And while I was in awe, I didn’t really come to appreciate those perks until I was out of Animal Kingdom and entering the seventh mile of the race. It was during that lonely stretch (look between 6 and 7 on the map above) that the nature of my training-- its successes and shortfalls-- became apparent.

Fitness was not the issue. While Orlando itself is a flat sack of swamp not unlike Houston, the course was littered with overpasses and upward inclines through the artificially elevated sections of the parks. In this way I was actually lucky that I spend the past four months training on a treadmill with an incline setting rather than dashing through the sweltering, flat expanses of the Houston Heights. Coupled with the distance-building regiment I followed to reach my goal, I’d say the run itself was fairly painless.

I mean, it hurt. Oh god it hurt. But physically, I never doubted myself throughout the entire race. My lungs were tar-free and my heart was pushing ruby-red, oxygenated life force to my legs. Have you seen these legs?

I had to part ways with my brother around the fifth mile marker because cruel asthma was tightening its icy grip around his airways. That felt like a scene out of a war movie, with him belting out “go on! go on!” between breaths. And barely a mile after that heart-wrenching moment, I looked around at the costumed couples and the families on the sidelines and this place from my childhood and I felt very, very alone.

Crap.

~~~

Now, running and I have a long and somewhat complicated relationship going back decades. No kidding. It all started in kindergarten-- no, wait. It starts with me in a stroller, being pushed by my grandparents up and down paved sand dunes in coastal small town America. They were runners.

Then there I am, in kindergarten, a skinny and slightly blonder version of myself winning mile-long fun runs with my dad. He would coach me to the last 100 yards or so, then “go, Kyle, go!” and I would take off in a sprint to the finish. He was quite the runner, too.

I’ve got a cigar box back home full of blue ribbons from these events. Almost all of the Christmas Morning pictures from my childhood feature this small, blonder, but just-as-white image of young me donning a way-oversized commemorative T-shirt from some fun run that me and my dad ran together.

As I passed from elementary school into middle school, running became less of a thing for all of us. I was focused on computers and games and this new concept of homework and making friends. I became a little more thick and stout and my achievements all shifted toward academic performance. My dad began experiencing some tightness in his knee and after he tore his ACL coaching my 7th grade soccer team, that was about it for him and running.

Then he got cancer, and that was really, really it for running.

At the behest of a therapist and my mom a few months after he died, I tried running again as a way to help deal with it. Instead it only reminded me how out-of-shape I was, and how I had peaked physically in kindergarten and that, above all, I would never really get the chance to run with him again. I would do it from time to time, but usually as a way to placate my mom than for any self-motivated reasons.

During my senior year of high school I was able to start running for myself. Something about the prospect of leaving all of those bad memories behind coupled with fact that, no matter what, my time in Panama City Beach was almost over. I lost a little weight, felt free for the first time ever, started seeing a girl on the weekends, blogged and expressed myself like a madman, etc etc.

My first few years at Rice saw running as a personalized expression of the come-and-go college workout fad. Running definitely wasn’t a regular thing, but I did it from time to time, and I still wore it like it was a big part of my life. In reality it had been a big part of my life, but it wasn’t at the time.

Then in late 2008 I started running a lot. Like, a lot a lot. And I don’t really remember why. At one point my girlfriend at the time had to sit me down and have a serious talk with me about how running twice-a-day in Houston, in the middle of the summer, with little shade around the perimeter of Hermann Park was probably a bad idea.

So I calmed down a bit but ran religiously until the beginning of my senior year of college. It was the best shape I’d been in to date, I could eat whatever I wanted without remorse, and I felt almost as free and confident as the day I left for college.

Now, let’s fast-forward in our story to about a year ago. That’s when my brother completed the Wine and Dine Half-Marathon by himself. At a point in my life when I was feeling less than capable of doing the bare minimum, he had been able to balance his courseload at UCF and train for a half-marathon and finish it. It was exactly the inspiration I needed-- a reminder that there’s potential in my genes-- to get me off my ass and back to pounding pavement.

~~~

So, about that race.

Where was I? Right. I was talking about the shortcomings of my training. Running on a treadmill can only take you so far.

It’s one thing to watch three back-to-back episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives while galloping in place three times a week. It’s one thing to do leg presses with an ear full of Stuff You Should Know. But this first half-marathon was over two hours spent inside my head, navigating a sea of sweaty strangers while facing down every doubt that popped into it.

That’s why I wasn’t prepared for that weird, lonely feeling that overcame me halfway through the race.

I was by myself. There was no one running alongside me to help me keep pace or compliment my form. There was no friend on the sidelines shouting, “go Kyle!” or “nice legs!” There was no girl to impress. No music or distraction to retreat into. I was alone.

And a short time later it hit me. I was doing a hard thing-- a good thing-- by myself, for myself. No distractions. No shortcuts. I was being selfish in the good way, where you do things for yourself because they’re good for you. Not the selfish I was used to, where you take things for yourself because they make you feel good.

As I mentioned earlier, I have felt truly free a few times in my life. Once was that stretch of time before college, when I was younger and felt the infinite possibilities before me. And another time was the last seven or so miles of my first half-marathon. I felt like my own person again, separated from the complex of validation I so often seek.

I kept moving. I smiled and appreciated the encouragement from the random people around me. I laughed at the characters and costumed runners around me. I cheered and pumped my hands up when random Disney songs would suddenly be blaring around me. I let loose.

In that last mile before the finish line, I couldn’t help but feel like the half-marathon was going to be a really cool turning point in my life. A point when I stop taking shortcuts and the means to getting where I want to be are just important as the end to which I’m trying to reach. A point when goals are real, and not just a consequence of a lifestyle I want to live. A point when I start living.

When I did finally cross the finish line, I laughed a little bit and thought to myself “so what’s next?”

We’ll see.

Appreciating the Brent

Without getting too personal or too mushy, I figure the best way to spend this Houston-bound afternoon flight is to reflect on the very reason I’m making this trip: My brother.


This year for my birthday, my brother sent me the following items.

1. 5 lbs of Haribos (gummy bears).
2. Moleskine notebook.
3. DVD copy of The Room.
4. Pair of silvered aviator sunglasses.
5. Texas flag.
6. Gundam Heavyarms scale model, direct from Japan.

I’m not sure whether this list says more about my brother’s creativity or my completely eclectic, crazy personality. Together, they’re the best birthday package I’ve received in a long, long time.

Look. Apparently, siblings can be a complicated thing. I have sweet, innocuous, reasonable friends who constantly battle with their blood relatives. Some of these otherwise reasonable friends of mine won’t even speak to their respective brothers and sisters. More commonly, though, there’s some rift—a lack of common ground or an age difference or an insurmountable distance—that keeps them from enjoying what might otherwise be a very rewarding relationship with the closest thing to a clone that nature and nurture have to offer.

With that in mind, I’m practically the luckiest guy in the world when it comes to siblings. I only have one. We’re separated by an age difference of two years. We see each other at least twice a year. And by some divine providence, we have the same warped, meme-tastic sense of humor, which is something I demand from each and every person I chose to bring into my closest inner circle.

We love YouTube Poop, /b/ memes, the weirdest shit that Adult Swim has to offer, Bret Easton Ellis, cheesy videos by Paul Wall, the collective nothingness of Charles Bukowski, jaded liberalism, trolling our friends, TV shows that haven’t aired since 1998, professional wrestling and, above all, our mother.

Aww.

Now, it would be unfair to keep going without first mentioning that we do have our differences, too. These are things we have learned to set aside in light of everything we have in common. He drinks beer and I chug it, but we both can sit down to a beer and laugh about the latest stupid thing we read on the Internet. That’s what being brothers is all about, I think. I’m hardly the expert on people.

I’m lucky to have a brother like Brent. I’m also incredibly proud that he’s been able to excel at everything he’s put his mind toward: His degree in literature, his relationship with Dina, his out-of-college job, and just about everything but keeping his room clean. Heheh, lol.

So congratulations on making it this far. I'll see you in three weeks.

Bad Things Come

So how are good people supposed to feel when terrible people die?

In the aftermath of Monday’s late-night announcement that Osama Bin Laden was killed in a spectacular firefight, I’ve seen all sides of the argument. My Facebook news feed has been a mishmash of rabble, apathy, opportunistic joking, disgust and celebration. Some of my friends have already penned eloquent responses to the news. Others drop precision-guided cynicism bombs loaded with the potent fact that Bin Laden’s death will not stop America’s continuing military endeavors in the Middle East.

And then you have the sanctimonious humanists. These are your far-left political cartoonist types who only see the world in shades of “do not kill.” My Twitter feed and (to a lesser extent) my Facebook feed were both hit with a deluge of messages reminding me that killing is wrong, no one deserves to die, and that even Osama Bin Laden has a family. Well, they’re less reminding me of those things and more reminding me how bbbbad I am for cracking a smile at the news. Moral posturing might be another name for it.

I miss having a prepackaged moral compass because it makes dealing with these sorts of situations a whole lot easier. Back when I had a head full of Vonnegut, I’d be up on that hill pointing and huffing at anyone who posted this song last night. And on the other side, there was once a time in my life when I’d have been downright ecstatic to hear that Osama had taken one between the eyes. Either way though, I would sleep soundly knowing my position was right.

My experiences throughout the past five years have taught me that the world is a highly complicated place where no canned response is a truly fair response to news of this magnitude.

• Cynicism is an insult to the well-meaning individuals who have died in the past ten years trying to bring an awful man and mass murderer to justice.
• Blind enthusiasm over Bin Laden’s death does nothing to improve the human condition. Obviously, this world isn't going to get better with more death and destruction.
• Pacifistic piety is selfish and, though sometimes well-intentioned is also ignorant to the complexities of a world where crazy people who hear voices are trying to kill innocent families for no reason other than to prove a point.

The only thing I really knew in the wake of the news was that I was unsure about my own feelings. This made me feel unprincipled. Big news tends to do that lately. I can’t jump into a respectful argument and see it through to the end without stopping to second-guess myself or concede to the other guy. But I decided to take this opportunity to really sit down and trace out my feelings, point by point, until I’d actually made a position on this issue.

So then how am I supposed to feel now that this dude is dead? I started by thinking about the dude himself.

Listen: Bin Laden was not promoting a progressive social agenda. He wasn’t fighting for the proletariat or the little guy. He’s no Che Guevara (who maybe kinda arguably had violently-executed good intentions) and he’s no hero. I think anyone who dedicates their life to murdering innocent people and disrupting peace has a place in this world that’s situated about six feet underground. And whether the means to that end is an expensive military raid or a less-expensive missile or maybe an expensive raid followed by an expensive spectacle of a trial, it’s the ultimate justice a man like Osama Bin Laden deserves.

So that’s how I feel about him.

Here’s how I think we’re supposed to feel about his death: Justice was served. Whether you frame that feeling with a smile or an uneasy, suspicious slanty-face is your prerogative. But Osama Bin Laden’s death is not the sort of occasion on which you can build a convincing argument for either pacifism or warmongering. There are millions of people all over the world who deserve your undivided sympathy and compassion more than him, his followers or his family. Conversely, you can’t argue after ten years, billions of dollars and thousands of dead Afgani civilians that the ends justified the means.

A bad man got what was coming to him at a great cost to the world. America did what it said it was going to do ten plus years ago and affirmed that you can’t just murder 3,000 Americans and expect to get away with it. A man once thought to be invincibly illusive is now shark food. Anything else that might be said is just noise or a portent to some bigger issue that is not the death of Osama Bin Laden.

So, he’s dead. And I feel pretty good about that.

Oh, Tonight

I'm having a great week. Today I started reading William Gibson's Neuromancer and, well, things are looking up.

In a very coincidental way, I've been priming myself for this book all week. Monday I had lunch with Davers and we talked about art, culture, Internet, and the catharsis of expression. You know, Davers things. And yesterday, me and Higgy traded witticisms and insight over the process of creating writing.

So-- of course-- today I was sucked into the book that defined cyberspace and inspired a generation of nerds to build a world of their own creation. Tomorrow, I'll probably get visited my Morpheus.

I become entranced by something dark and familiar when I read about cyberpunk power brokering and bleak cityscapes that offer nothing but anonymity. It's the same feeling I get when my old mainstay, Turn on the Bright Lights, kicks through my car stereo at night. The feeling escapes words but it's definitively me. It's nighttime. It's gritty but not vulgar. Carefree but not cruel.

Say what you will about memory biases, but I swear: This feeling has welled up in me since I started listening to Interpol.

Oops. Gibson has totally borked my writing voice. I'm spending way too much time trying to thread together sentences that convey emotional whims with machine-like precision. Time to unjack from this terminal.

Note to self: Figure out how to update Blogger from Lynx.

On a More Positive Note!

I'm really excited to see how much attention The Social Network is garnering from critics in the run-up to the Academy Awards. When I saw the movie with my mom earlier this year, we both left the theater quite impressed with its performance on all the traditional moviemaking benchmarks: Reznor's brilliant but not overbearing soundtrack, the cinematography and Sorkin's trademark wit sharpened by the lens of incredible acting.

More importantly, though, I left the theater feeling downright capable of doing something magnificent on my own. I felt empowered. Not over-empowered, like I could be the next boy billionaire. More like... I dunno. Like I might one day have an idea that could touch a lot of peoples' lives. And that felt good.

Hollywood (and art as a whole) has a social responsibility to warn us-- within reason-- of the dangers and tradeoffs that accompany wealth, fame, and an unchecked hunger for power. But they also have a responsibility to inspire us. The Social Network did both, and I think that's really, really cool.

My New House

I really, really need to get a new camera. After all, how am I supposed to gloat about my awesome new place without any accompanying pictures?

Google Street View, I guess!


View Larger Map

...so fucking creepy.

Anyways. Yes, I am now a proud resident of the lower Montrose/upper University Place. Now I can trade my white-collar Museum District pretension for the tastier, trendier pretension of living in the most liberal part of town.

Birthday Burger Cupcakes!

THIS IS THE BEST BIRTHDAY EVER.

Update: Cristina baked and iced these bad boys for me this afternoon, before treating me to a night of decedent churrasco. Now I'm off to watch Fringe and eat more burgers cupcakes.

Kyle's bad-for-your-body birthday, Pt. III.

Only one week of high-stakes shopping until my birthday

I require sweet, sweet stress relief in the form of bullet-point blogging and nicknack posting.

• Last night's show was interesting but not unfun. No one expected The Faint to take stage until after Ladytron (since the show was billed as "The Faint with Ladytron") so you can imagine the chagrin on the muted faces of all those tween-punkers and tiny, tatted-up scene girls who were still galloping to the show when Todd Fink took the stage. April 20th isn't exactly the best day for a dance-punk band to expect thrashing and skanking from the disaffected stoner youth: Most of the crowd was deathly still until the end of The Faint's set. Despite all this, I had a rip-roaringly good time watching all this musical nonsense unfold. I heard "Destroy Everything You Touch" and "I Disappear" live: That's all I needed. And The Faint's animated backdrops were pretty entertaining to watch.
  
• I got free ice cream today. Okay, fine, not free-- the aroma of baking batter assaulted my smellbuds and forced me to splurge on a $1.50-after-discount Cherry Garcia waffle cone. I figure if you're going to enjoy America's finest ice cream flavor, you might as well commit to a sweet, crisp waffle cone over the cardboard-based sugar cones they were peddling. I work next door to Ben & Jerry's but hardly ever visit. It's part of my "at least do one thing to avoid early onset heart disease" life plan.
• Still no word on a place to live come May. I'm still sticking to the guidelines I set for myself earlier this year, but I'm now open to house designs besides modern-neo-deco-rary. If you're moving out and need a tenant in the Rice Village area come May, give me a shout.
• I'm giving Twitter a chance. There, I said it. When I become incredibly engrossed into the whole idea and give up real-blogging entirely, you'll know why.
  

Finally, the best thing I've seen from SNL in years.

photo c/o Cristina

*YANK* The breakfast burrito says "I'm delicious!"

My family went on a skiing trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, when I was about 14 years old. One dark, early morning, we all woke up and joined a bunch of elderly tourists and snowboarders on a re-purposed school bus bound for one of the state's more remote slopes-- which is totally redundant since I'm pretty sure ten people live in Jackson Hole.

It was still too dark to see anything but the slightly yellowed tips of the early morning mountaintops when we all stopped at the strangest, most remote ski shop ever for a potty break. Inside was a kitschy mix of huge, stuffed bears and elk and nice, expensive ski equipment. And off to the corner was a windowed countertop where a toothless old man was hawking breakfast burritos out of a Rubbermaid cooler for two bucks.

There weren't your soggy, deflated Sonic burritos-- they were the Peter North of elongated breakfast foots. These were Chipotle-size behemoths stuffed full of chorizo, cheddar, eggs, bacon, tomato, onion, peppers, thick salsa, and wrapped in the first whole-wheat flour tortilla I ever remember eating. They were spicy as hell, I recall, and believe me when I say I was raised to endure the pain of spicy food.

They were honestly the best breakfast burritos I've ever had. Nothing since has been able to compare to the wild ratios of egg-to-cheese-to-meat present in this godly morning phallus.

I stumbled upon an article this morning about breakfast burritos being the perfect make-in-bulk food. They really are. I'm off to the store right after work to make about a thousand breakfast burritos, in search of that childhood burrito that has so enticed me.

[The Simple Dollar - Bulk Breakfast Burritos: Convenient, Cheap, Healthy, and Easier Than You Think]

Living on-campus at Rice will ruin your future

With no certain regard for next year's living situation, I let Rice's on-campus housing deadline pass this past week without throwing my name in the hat. Some people will call me crazy; I could have easily scored a lovely little single at the newly-built McMurtry College. They're sticking all of the members of my own residential college and former home-- Will Rice-- at McMurtry while they pull the asbestos out from the air ducts and scrape the green resin off the walls of the 90's. They got pods for bathrooms, grass for roofs, and personal space for all.

See, I love to espouse the benefits of living off-campus. I lived on-campus for two years and off-campus for nearly two years and compiled a laundry list of pros and cons along the way. Generally, living off-campus fosters a sense of independence and adulthood that I found to be markedly lacking while living on-campus. Stumbling out of bed and throwing on a free T-shirt and pajama pants and grumbling about waking up at 10am while you trudge fifty feet to your first class is not a lifestyle I wish to revisit.

There are logistic benefits and detractors, of course, but I think it all boils down to "don't shit where you eat." Your school should be school, your personal life should be your personal life, your job should be some job, and there should never be overlap between them. Your life should be a Swiss-Army knife with separate tools for every facet, not one tool that does everything shittily (read: a spork).

One of my favorite things about living off-campus is seeing the city everyday, particularly the marvelous homes and businesses in the Rice University area. I make a point to drive through the neighborhood west of campus on my way to work every day. The area is interspersed with little parks, two-story brick-and-mortar abodes for the UMC, and the tall, whitewashed walls of the occasional art deco mansion. Basically, I masturbate to the homes along Sunset and the Bissonnet corridor. Stuff white people like, indeed.

But there's no reason to feel guilty about admiring architecture. I think that big houses are a seminal building block of the American Dream-- they're something to want. A goal. A benchmark that might, one day, indicate that you've made it as far as you ever wanted.

That benchmark is sadly lacking from day-to-day on-campus life. Campus architecture isn't lacking, per se, but those buildings do not serve as any sort of motivator. They're not the potential containers of your four-member future family-- they're the dungeons where you toil away, trying to cram yourself with enough knowledge and good work habits to piss further than anyone else in Real World. Living off-campus affords one with daily reminders of what could be, without the jealousy that comes from being 35 and wishing you lived in a bigger place.

You can imagine it on the way to morning classes. You can bring your car to a complete stop at your favorite neighborhood intersection and look and suddenly feel your hand pushing open the ten-foot dark mahogany door to your dream home. You can feel the resilience of the brushed aluminum spiral staircase that leads to an upstairs foyer where you can look back and just barely see down into kitchen with the black marble countertops and matching appliances with the fridge that has a pull-out freezer and... oh Jesus, wait, I just peaked into the master bedroom. There's a small black telescope next to the floor-to-ceiling windows obscured by sliding-panel blinds. The bathroom is a brightly-lit orgy of authentic Mediterranean tile art, five massaging showerheads, this particular jacuzzi, and there are no faucets centered by the dual sinks-- just one knob at each basin that shoots a straight stream of water down from the ceiling. There's a dog in the backyard, barking, but it's hypoallergenic and can speak French. The baby crying down the hall quickly stops when you pull out your BlackBerry and reset his Baby Einstein tapes using the WebUI you developed to control everything on your property, including the turrets which automatically pelt intruders with pepper spray paintballs if they even look at your house crooked. The pepper spray washes out of the carpet easily because the carpet is coated in nano-particles that repel stains and prevent cancer and are worth more than a cinderblock of iridium. There is a sex swing in the master's second walk-in closet which is lined with rose petals and self-cleans in a fashion somewhat similar to today's ovens. Everything in the home is pained either black or white, and you own another one outside San Fransisco.

I think I want to start a business. And I didn't even have to talk about the entertainment system.

See? You're the one holding the steering wheel on this blind drive down the I-10 of life-- so where's the daily nudge to keep you from veering off into the food service industry? Mine is homes. Big, sexy homes that I see every day, because I live off-campus.

I expect to lose 20 friends before noon tomorrow

Burger King has unveiled the most awesome incentive to un-Facebook those kids you met at a music festival three years ago that have been stalking you from afar ever since.

It's called the Whopper Sacrifice application, and it's going to make you carefully consider if your online life is worth a couple dozen free burgers. All the application requires is that you pick ten of your Facebook friends and dump them in return for one free Whopper. Though unlike the normal ritual of booting someone from your online life, it notifies the people you remove that they've been traded for consumer goods. I figured I would stay one step ahead of the app.

So here's to you, those about to be sacrificed. Those random friends of my exes. Those hometown friends of friends. Those kids who went to my high school but were in my brother's class and I don't really know you but I guess you like to see my pictures. Those kids from my grade school classes who haven't seen me since I wore my hair spiky. And yes, even those employment recruiters who I friended just to see if I could find a job.

You've all brought me so much. Application invites, mostly. Some of you may have read my blog once or twice, in which case you're actually cooler than 70% of my close friends. But all&all this hasn't been a fulfilling relationship. So, I'm leaving you for processed flash-cooked meat and vegetable blend on a chewy wad of bread ass.

And to the Kyle Barnhart from Ottowa who got really high one night and decided to friend me: Don't worry, dude, we're friends until the end.

[Unfriend 10 People on Facebook, Get a Free Whopper | A Hamburger Today]

Why I love living contemporary

Okay, so let me get my bearings. This story needs orientation.

Front and center stage. To my left, some short, squat girl in a blue dress was grind-shaking her fists into my side, glancing up to me with some sort of drug-riddled excitement. To my right, some typical Bay Area darkwave kid a few years younger than me was popping his Commie-capped head back and forth to the rhythmic sirens and bass slaps. And in front of me, not twenty feet away, was the culmination of months of waiting. And it came in the form of a big, lighted cross.


There they are. Justice: The French band that took Christianity's symbol of redemption and salvation and twisted it into a beacon of their own design. They've crafted the fast-paced soundtrack of my life for the past year. I haven't been alone since.

This all happened at Treasure Island Music Fest 2008, a Bay Area indie wankfest that rivals Austin City Limits in terms of pretentious 20somethings oozing with cred. I flew out to San Francisco with my girlfriend, Cristina, to see Justice and the other top-billed Saturday acts that I've salivated over for a long time. TV on the Radio was there, performing tracks from their new album Dear Science. And those wacky Brits from Hot Chip were there, too, mixing things up for a spectacular live show.

The festival brought out your typical spectrum of San Francisco hipsters. Every group was represented, from the newest incarnation of goth shoegazers to the bright and flowing, handcrafted hippie culture. Instead of ridiculing them, though, I've lately been able to bottle and swallow my sardonic nature and instead just watch as they enjoy themselves in their own perticular way. Because anyone willing to endure the gauntlet of blinding wind and $7 glasses of Heinekin must have some common string with the rest of the concert-goers: We're all hypocrites, and we're all pretentious, and we all love music. And they all deserved to have fun.

Even if they're cannon fodder for really, really great jokes.

Pretentions aside, the festival crowd was aching by the time Justice took the stage. I was pressed up against the guard rail, grinding my teeth and trying my best to push back to keep my lungs open. Everyone was freezing despite the squeeze; coastal winds plus the semi-predictable nature of cool San Francisco nights equals zipped up black hoodies and frozen toes. I had to throw the concert T I'd picked up earlier over my white oxford. I looked incredibly out-of-place in a sea of pierced, gothed-out heads. A French reporter stuck a microphone in my face and started quizzing me on my thoughts about the band.

And when they did take the stage, hell broke out before a single beat let loose. Glow-sticks, water bottles, and concert schwag flew through the air onto the stage. A unified scream from behind me, then suddenly I felt like I'd been flattened against the guard rail. I yelled, too. My eyes bugged out and I saw them take to their throne.

Then,"Genesis."

I can't recount song-for-song how the entire night went, but they hit all my favorites. "DVNO," the Auto remix of "Stress," a souped-up mix of "Phantom," and a finisher of "One Minute Till Midnight," before an encore of "NY Excuse." Fucking incredible.

The night will be forever dog-eared in my mind. It was not only a spectacular musical experience, but it also possesses a certain personal duality. The concert was a culmination-- a culmination of months of waiting. I bought the tickets back in July and had been marking the days off my calendar like a little kid eager for his birthday to arrive. It was also a beginning of sorts. It was my first visit to the west coast and my first big trip with Cristina.

This past weekend was an awesome reminder that I still have a lot of world to see. And to write about.

Christmas in July

We eagerly dashed across the street, heeding the flashing orange hand and countdown that beckoned us out of the neighborhood and into the lights of the city. The remaining hues of daytime were now gone. They'd been replaced by steady greens and reds and sodium yellows and halogen whites that bled and hovered over the brick and stone and glass pillars of the Medical Center. Behind that lingering urban fog was a was a darkness that begged for illumination.

It was almost nine o'clock by the time we finally reached the METROrail stop. Our northbound journey took us winding alongside the overgrown oaks of Hermann Park, shifting and bumping and jerking as the train held loosely to the metal rails below. We all stared through the windows at the streaks of city as they whizzed past. Our sealed lips held back devilish grins. I took comfort in the fact that spacing out at the beauty of the night is a commonplace on trains.

The doors of the train hissed open to madness as we marched out into the crowds. Neighborhoods stretching from West University to Midtown had all converged on Hermann Park to watch the night's spectacle. We continued our urban migration alongside the area's luxurious high rise apartments, where residents were leaned half-awake on their balconies waiting for the night to begin. A quick-paced current of families and couples pushed against us, headed in the opposite direction.

Finally, we reached the parking garage of my own apartment complex. Our nervous, eager legs knew only acceleration as we pushed our way up the stairs to the roof. We counted the floors-- four, five, and finally an unmarked door that opened to a most spectacular view of Downtown Houston.

I took a deep breath of night air and looked around. There was an overwhelming sense of childhood innocence that jumped from smile to smile between the young and old residents gathered on the roof. The children were armed with small American flags, waving them viciously around as their parents leaned over the edge of the roof, tending their half-full beers with one hand and holding their respective others'. College students like us dangled their legs over the edges of pick-up truck tailgates.

From the roof we could see every inch of the Harris County skyline, from the Galleria to the far-off tower at the University of Houston and even specks of lights coming from Galveston. As the proverbial clock ticked seconds closer to 9:30, we began to hear small cracks and bangs from all over the city. Then one large snap far off in the distance hushed Houston like a deadly shockwave.

An explosion of florescent color sent shards of light bouncing in every direction, shimmering off the sharp edges of the skyline and projecting an eerie chromaticity onto the city below. Fiery specks of light moved through the air and painted it with Day-Glo trails and streaks of smoke. We stood and watched this with our mouths gaped open, our eyes fixed to the north. Patterns of hearts, faces, and planets emerged from the initial blinding flashes. As the intensity of the eruptions increased, as did the choir of oohs and ahhs and deep breaths and shuffling feet around me.

I was ecstatic by the time the bright lights of the finale dimmed against the faces around me-- faces that wore expressions of hope, celebration, bewilderment, reflection, and a lifetime of Fourth of July celebrations past. It truly was Christmas in July.

Houston, I love you but you're bringing me down

Taking the good with the bad-- it's the story of the 20something college student. Taking the city with the traffic. Taking the school with the grades. Taking the money with the work. Taking the friends with the dramatics. Taking the girls with the heartbreak. Taking the hookups with the awkwardness. Taking the drinks with the hangover. Ad infinitum.

Eventually you grow up and start ignoring the bad things, one way or another. Maybe you excuse them away with religion. Maybe you become self-absorbed and narcissistic and surround yourself with people who can ignore their problems in the same way. Maybe you just shell up and become so engrossed in work that you stop taking in either the good or the bad. I've worked with people like that.

There's the hard part about moving from adolescence into adulthood-- you experience all the good things yet haven't stopped noticing the drawbacks. You've still convinced yourself that you're hardCORE enough to take both at once, not realizing that the human brain was never meant to be bombarded with as much information as we're exposed to today. So much bad news.

Adolescence was just all the good with none of the bad. Here's a car and some beer, try not to get any girls pregnant between now and college! I probably should have exploited that more than I did.

Adolescence, of course. Not the girls.

Goddammit, there I go again with one of those lofty diatribes. Third in a week. NEED MOAR LIFE UPDATES.

So let's see. Oh, I shaved my face last night. That's kinda epic. I haven't been clean-shaven since the middle of last summer, and I haven't actually seen my cheeks since the winter. I could probably extrapolate some sort of meaning from the shave but, eh, sometimes you just need a change of scenery. Sometimes a shave is just a shave. Last time I shaved my face I was immediately washed in a caustic sense of regret; this time I backed up from the mirror, smiled a big smile and thought to myself "Wow, I look happier."

I guess we'll see.

General self-improvement rolls onward. I spent all of Sunday outside, even going so far as to walk from my apartment to Rice Village, which was probably... what? Two mile walk? I'm bad with distances, but it feels like fifteen miles when you're in sandals. I kept thinking the entire way to the Village that if I were back in Panama City, it would actually be a shorter walk from my old house to the Pier Park shopping center. Both have a Buffalo Wild Wings!

Where was I? Self improvement, right. Being outside isn't something I get to do regularly during the week. I mean, jogging around Hermann Park at 6PM is one thing, but finding yourself midway through the Rice Stadium parking lot at 2PM on a blazing hot Saturday is an outdoors experience I hadn't felt in quite some time. The thing is-- and I hate to say this-- but I actually like being outside. It's the ongoing body image issues coupled with allergies that fight to keep me indoors and inactive. But if I can overcome them one day, I can overcome them any day.

Ah, there it is. The positive summer mindset. The do-anything attitude that I seem to lose over the course of the school year. Rather than suppress and twist it into a tool for my own disillusion like I did last summer, I'd like to take that positivity and run with it. Be the better person.

But inside...

One way John Locke fucks your shit up

...let me count the ways.

I went into the city

Into the City

Saturday Free for All Op-Ed - Panama City News Herald - 1/5/2008

I got a call this morning from my mommy that my Letter of the Editor made it into the Saturday Free-For-All section of the Panama City News Herald. I haven't seen it yet, but below is the text I penned in one angry night.

The article pretty much explains itself. If you want to read (or even participate!) in the Squall Line and call me a pompous ass (clever!), you can find it at:

http://newsherald.com/squall/

Sitting down to a the News Herald-- the local paper that taught me about the media's role in local and state politics-- has been a breakfast time tradition for me since middle school. With my pancakes stacked high, I work my way through the front page, the national news, and eventually hit the lovable and progressive letters to the editor that Bay County has to offer. And whether I agree with the opinions or not, it has always been a pleasure to know that this town has some highly educated, politically active free thinkers. Yet since I left the Redneck Riviera to study in that oil refinery-lovin', gun-totin', culturally devoid but otherwise lovable city they call Houston, I've come back home at the holidays to find a scenic obstruction in my otherwise clockwork perusing of the paper.

The Squall Line.

I think that most rational people, including those who operate the News Herald, would recognize that the Squall Line is about the most morally and intellectually unproductive way that a print media institution could possibly utilize its page real estate. And that's directed towards a paper that sometimes features local politicians.

See, I spend a lot of time on the Internet. It's a place of uninformed, ridiculous opinions slung like mud back and forth between people hiding behind the anonymity that the Web has to offer. Hey, and half of the time that's why it's entertaining. The Squall Line is an extension of this unproductive mudslinging. It allows the community a public forum to say ridiculous things like "global warming is dumb," and "I sure hate this politician," and "go GATORS!" When granted anonymity, relatively intelligent people will act pretty silly.

If the Squall Line was indeed a joke it might be a funny one. But the News Herald advertises for the Squall Line as if it's an alternative to writing an informed letter to the editor, asking its readers to "sound off!" So rather than research their opinions, back them up with facts abounding and sign their names proudly at the bottom, today's News Herald readership can conduct some seriously brainless arguing using a local number or, even worse, that Internet thing I was talking about earlier.

I come from a school of thought-- an archaic one, perhaps-- that demands a certain amount of accountability from its press institutions. When was the last time any Pulitzer-worthy newspaper was caught printing uninformed one-liners from people too lazy to make a sustained argument to back up their opinions? Don't mistake the Squall Line for "local flair," either. Local flair is something that I've been proud of since I was old enough to recognize it. Local flair is on the Saturday Free-For-All page. Local flair is printed daily, with substance, in the Forty-One Cent Forum and has been (albeit under different names according to the postage rate) since before I could read at all.

In all its grand irony, the Squall Line on page two replaced a feature that was very near and dear to me. Remember reading about what happened on this day in history? I do. I used to soak up the daily history lesson featured on page two of the News Herald. Now that history lesson has been cut down to a few lines sandwiched between the funny pages and the daily Sudoku puzzle. Perhaps that, my local friends, is the best metaphor for the day and age we live in-- the ridiculous one-liners are on page two while the truly educating material is buried next to "Pearls Before Swine" and "Garfield."

Then again, I think Garfield has taught me more than the Squall Line.

Kyle Barnhart
Rice University
Houston, Texas

A Very Domestic Christmas

From left, going in a semi-clockwise to right thing.

• J-Crew Hooded Sweater (sooooooo comfy)
• Reese's Cups
• Pez
• Argyle Socks
• 12" Skillet WITH Teflon coating AND a glass lid!
• Framed Albums: Dire Straits, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Tom Tom Club
• Toolkit
• Asus eeePC 8G (hump hump hump)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Special Edition 2-Disc Set
  
• Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos
• Chocolate Covered Goodness

Another wonderful Christmas, if you ask me. Charlie Wilson's War at four, and Christmas turkey now!

Obligatory Chistmas Eve Junk

Does Bono know he needs a haircut?


Gotta make room for Andy Dick!


The curse of being a man.

From the Barnhart Compound to you, Happy Holidays. HAPPY HOLIDAYS. A very all-inclusive, wonderful, non-commercial, secular holiday season to everyone.

Kyle

360 degrees of auto-fellating power!

This new razor is daunting. But that doesn't mean it's not the coolest little gadget I've ever owned. Happy Birthday to me! Err... On Saturday. Whatever.