The Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

If you're American, you'll know today as Veterans Day. You'll also notice it's one of those national holidays that doesn't conveniently fall on a Monday or Friday to make a three-day weekend. There's a reason for that.

Polish people celebrate today as well. Not as Veterans Day, but as their Independence Day. Latvians call today Lāčplēsis Day. The British, Canadians, Aussies, Barbadians, Bermudans, and South Africans call today Remembrance Day. The French, Belgians, and Kiwis call today Armistice Day. So did we, until 1954.

Other than Christmas, New Year's, and the Olympics, it's the only time Americans celebrate something that non-Americans do.

Germans don't celebrate today.

At 11am on this day in 1918, the Allies signed the Armistice with Germany. This ended World War One. Of course, they didn't call it World War One back then, since they had no reason to think it would have a sequel. They knew it as the Great War or—more poetically—as the War to End All Wars. That second name wasn't bullshit either. People really believed it. Anyone who lived through the horrors of trench warfare would have had a hard time believing that men would develop an appetite for total war again less than two decades later.

When it became clear to the boys in the trenches—and they were literally boys—that they weren't gaining territory or liberating villages, and that their trenches hadn't moved for years, even though millions had died in them, the only reason they could find for their wholesale deaths was that somehow their suffering would mean their children and grandchildren would never have to.

However, nothing brings out the fighting spirit in men more than decades of peace. The three decades of peace before World War One culminated with French and German schoolkids being taught to dream of the glorious day when they could bayonet another kid's guts out. In 1914, this is was standard curriculum. In 1918, not so much. By 1938, however, this was back on the agenda.

So where do we stand today? The Toms (Brokaw and Hanks) have chosen to ignore World War One's Lost Generation. Instead, they elevated the subsequent Greatest Generation to such cinematic heights that boys today are given an inferiority complex for not having invaded Normandy. One such boy compensated for this by invading two distant countries (vicariously through other much younger boys, of course). That was in response to an attack in which 3,000 Americans were killed. In the ensuing invasions, 250 times as many people have been killed, both among us and them. Victory is still elusive, as is the definition of them.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice was signed ending all wars. It was a gift given to us by 16 and a half million people who died so we wouldn't have to. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to get a refund.

New Rules for Raksha Bandhan

For those unfamiliar with Raksha Bandhan, here's my explanation in less than twenty words: Sister ties thread on brother and feeds him a sweet. Brother promises to protect sister, then coughs up cash.

If you still feel in the dark, read more here: Raksha Bandhan

Every family celebrates Raksha Bandhan a little differently, but I think it's time to lay down some ground rules we can all agree on.

1. The stronger the knot, the higher the pay: I'm tired of rakris (rakhis, for you Hindi speakers), falling off after two days. This is supposed to be a symbol of the bond between brothers and sisters. So from now on, I'm going to pay 25¢ for each day last year's rakri stayed on. Ladies, if your knotsmanship is good enough to last the entire year, next year I will gladly pay you 25¢ times 365 days plus one dollar for good luck. That's a whopping $92.25. Shilpa, I'm sorry, but this year your rakri fell off after a week. I love you, but next year you won't get a penny more than $2.75.

2. All are welcome: Normally, I only get rakris from my sister, my fois (paternal aunts), and my female first cousins. But really any woman foolish enough to seek my protection is welcome to have it. The two most famous events in Raksha Bandhan history didn't even involve blood relatives. I'm speaking, first, about Draupadi tying part of her sari around Krishna's wrist to stop his bleeding.

The second event involved Rani Karnavati. When she was under attack, she sent a rakri to Mughal Emperor Humayun to ask for his help. He was so touched by this symbolic gesture of the brother-sister bond that he stopped what he was doing (fighting a war) to come to her rescue. Of course he came a bit too late, but it's the thought that counts.

My point though, is that if a Rajasthani queen can give a rakri to a foreign emperor, and the wife of five brothers can give a rakri to God, then Salma Hayek should be allowed to give one to me.

3. Choose your prasad wisely: Enough with the dry Indian sweets. This is a day for sisters to express their love for their brothers. I truly believe India has the best food in the world. I also believe they have the worst dessert. Ladies, pick up some pastry from a German or French bake shop, or at least something from the supermarket candy aisle. Shilpa, your rakri might have fallen off too soon, but you get extra credit for your choice of chocolate. Teenaben, your rakris always last the longest, but c'mon: Cocoa Puffs?!

4. Guys, keep up your end of the deal: First, this means stop at a freakin' ATM the day of Raksha Bandhan. There's no excuse not to have cash in your pockets today. They do so much for us. The least you can do is send a few twenties back their way. And make sure you have plenty of good luck singles to go around.

Second, look out for your sisters, whether they are blood or not. The point to today is that sometimes a brother or friend can help in ways that a husband or boyfriend cannot. If they're having a tough time at home, be a shoulder to cry on. If they're having a tough time at work, visit their boss with a baseball bat.

How to Ride First Class on Greyhound

Greyhound is the only form of transportation on the planet that makes coach air travel seem humane. But, if you can snag two seats all to yourself, you just got yourself a free upgrade. I take Greyhound's casino bus every weekend. I've gotten pretty good at this. Here's what I do.

1. Sit near the front. People are gamblers by nature, and not just on the casino bus. When they first walk on, they're looking for that two-seat paradise. They see my annoying face taking up half of that dream, and they assume there's got to be something better near the back. When they realize there isn't, they sit their ass down in back of the bus, instead of working their way back up to me. Incidentally, the farther you place yourself from that bathroom in the back, the better. That septic tank might not smell like anything now, but let it slosh around for a few hours.

2. Grab that aisle seat. Personally, I prefer the aisle. More leg room, since you can sprawl out into the walkway. Since I sit near the front, I don't have to deal with too many people walking to and from that glorious septic tank. But the real reason to grab the aisle seat is that people always choose the path of least resistance. When someone realizes that they're gonna have to deal with a neighbor for the next two and a half hours, they'd rather plop down in an empty aisle seat than drag their ass or genitals across my face en route to the window seat.

3. Play dead. People hate sitting next to corpses. If you can't pull off dead, at least play asleep. While people are generally unpleasant to strangers, they are inherently good and—more important—meek. They really don't want to wake you up to say, "Hey, I need to ruin your little two-seat fantasy here, but before I do that, I'm going to give you a faceful of crotch". I'll be honest though. It's hard to pretend to be asleep when you have people hovering over you discussing whether or not to ruin your trip. To help with this, I put on my headphones. If I can't hear them speaking, their conversations can't make me break my poker face.

4. Look scary. For me, this is easy. I'm naturally an ornery-looking dude. On top of that, I learned early in my MTA career that every train car and bus in New York has a crazy guy in it. Be that crazy guy. Years of honing that character now help me in my Greyhound life. For starters, I don't shave that day. Leave the good clothes in your luggage. Since I'm already pretending to be asleep, I up the ante by sleeping with my mouth open. I take it even further by actually leaning over and turning my face toward the empty seat. If you can drool on demand, even better. C'mon. Who wants to sit next to a drooling, homeless-looking, mouth-breather with questionable ideas about personal space?

5. Put your bag on your lap. If your Weekend at Bernie's impression isn't enough of a deterrent, maybe that 20-pound backpack is. That's just another obstacle for them to deal with. In my situation, it just adds to the whole Al-Qaeda vibe I send out. Would you want to sit next to someone who may or may not be strapped to something "interesting"?

6. Lean back. But not your own seat. I'm talking about the seat in front of your empty neighbor. Basically, you need to not only find two empty seats, but you need to find two empty seats behind an empty window seat. When you do, just recline the hell out of the first empty window seat. New Yorkers can tolerate a lot, but if the whole homeless jihadi thing doesn't faze them, the zero leg room will.

7. Get wet. Everything up to now has been Bush League. This is Friday night and Port Authority is coming apart at the seams with casino-goers just ready to pull you down off your first-class high horse. Now it's time to pull out the big guns: your water bottle. You know what you have to do. Do not hesitate. The next two and a half hours of your life depend on this. Just a little bit of water on the front corner of the empty seat is all it takes. Make that spot visible. If the upholstery still hides it, call their attention to it. "That seat's wet for some reason." Trust me. You will not be asked to elaborate. Just don't overdo it. Remember that you're going to take that seat over once we get moving.

8. Do not jump the gun. You've done it. The bus has started moving and that window seat is still open. So now what? You lie down and go to sleep the way God intended: horizontally. Wrong! Next thing you know, some dude rolls up, tells you to put your feet down, and then takes your aisle seat. That-just-happened. My advice to you is to just chill ten minutes or so before breaking your zombie impression. In the first ten minutes, people haven't quite settled into their seats and they'd just as likely grab your aisle seat as stay in their own, especially if their seat mate is particularly rotund and in the process of gorging himself on a pungent, laptop, fast food picnic. After ten minutes, inertia sets in, and people are more likely to tolerate their unfortunate seating arrangement than get their lazy ass up and do something about it.

You are now equipped with tools of unspeakable power. Go Greyhound!

Why Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay Suck Ass

1. Pearl Harbor.

2. Shia pissed on Marlon Brando's grave by pretending to be him in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Something.

3. Armageddon.

4. In Surf's Up, Shia defiled two of my favorite things (surfing and penguins) with his...himness.

5. Transformers.

Items 1–4 are self-explanatory. They suck ass. If you disagree, you suck ass. Item 5, however, is a divisive topic that warrants discussion.

Transformers sucks. If you liked the cartoon, AND you liked the movie, you are heartless and you're selling out your own childhood. If you didn't like the cartoon, you don't matter.

While I feel I've made my point, I'm surprised by the number of movie aficionados out there who have otherwise good taste in films but believe, for some reason, that Transformers didn't make them want to stick a ball-point pen through their left temple.

So, why do I think Transformers sucked so bad?

I don't think it sucked. It DID suck. What follows is simply a statement of the facts that are:

1. Two hours too long. Michael Bay turned one of the coolest intergalactic wars of good versus evil into another teen movie. I gave Michael Bay 140 minutes of my life. He gave me 20 minutes of Autobots fighting Decepticons, and 120 minutes of Shia LaBoeuf trying to get with Megan Fox. If he was going for realism, Shia would have needed a lot more than 120 minutes.

2. Michael Bay turned Starscream into a little bitch. Starscream is the coolest robot-cum-fighter-jet ever to grace the small screen. He was subversive, always talking back, and always trying to overthrow Megatron. Now, it's freaking ridiculous that a children's cartoon has more nuance, character development, and political intrigue than a feature-length film. Let me remind you that this film is 140 minutes long! Not only does that put it in the ballpark of The Godfather (which decidedly did not lack depth or development), but it's also practically as long as half a season of the Transformers Animated Series when you factor in commercials. Michael Bay, you suck. Starscream was awesome, he was a badass, and you gave him two lines in the whole movie, neither of which was awesome or badass.

3. No Shockwave! Are you fucking kidding me?

4. Too much CG. Too much CG. Too much CG. At a distance, the Transformers seem OK. Some of the action scenes were pretty well done. Don't mistake that for "they were awesome" because NOTHING in Transformers even approaches any of the physical-model fight scenes in Empire or Jedi. Michael Bay, you had $151 million dollars to work with. I'm sure you could have bought some pretty badass physical models. Instead, you squandered it on hyper-cluttered CG robots that look good from a distance but are confusing as hell up close. I mean, really: fifty-faceted lips? I prefer Optimus' classic, two-faceted, immobile underbite from the cartoon.

5. Shia LaBeouf sucks. We've gone through this already.

Transformers II: The Suckfest Continues comes out tomorrow. I haven't heard anything about it. I also haven't heard anything about drinking drain cleaner with a straw. I'm going to go out on a limb and say "Thanks, but no thanks" to both.

You might be tempted to check it out. But let me remind you of two things:

1. Michael Bay is the same man that turned the bombing of Pearl Harbor into a three-hour music video with a cast so annoying that you found yourself secretly pulling for the Japanese.

2. Shia LaBeouf is this ass clown...


...who seriously tried to pull off being this guy...

SoHo Versus Soho

New York has SoHo (capital S, capital H). It's short for South of Houston. New Yorkers and Americans—yes, they are mutually exclusive—can argue till they're blue in the face about how to pronounce Houston (HOW-stin or HYOO-stin). The New Yorkers are right.

Houston Street (and Houston County, GA incidentally) is named for Georgian lawyer William Houstoun who pronounced his name HOW-stin. Don't ask why the second u got dropped. That's the type of stuff the English language does every now and then, which is why no one can read Chaucer anymore.

Houston, TX was named for Sam Houston, who pronounced his name HYOO-stin. If you want to say HYOO-stin Street, go back to Texas.

Soho in London, however, has nothing to do with Houstoun or Houston or whomever. It was originally a hunting ground. Soho was a popular hunting cry, kind of like tallyho. I don't know what either word means, but any sport where an entire armed cavalry battalion and their dogs are deployed to take down a fox is bound not to make too much sense.

Anyway, that's why SoHo in Manhattan is spelled with a capital H and Soho in London is not.

Oversight

So when you want to make sure something goes according to plan, you oversee it. You provide oversight, as it were. That way you can look over what's going on.

But when something goes wrong, it was an oversight. You must have overlooked something.

I can see why English puts out some confusion.

Now, does that mean that English generates confusion, or that it extinguishes it?

A Cup of Java(nese)

This is perhaps the most elegant alphabet (technically, it's a syllabary) in existence. It's the Javanese alphabet, also called carakan. It's a relative of the Brahmic writing systems of India, such as Devanagari, Gujarati, Tamil, etc.

Carakan was used in pre-colonial days to write the Javanese language. The Dutch supplanted it with Roman script. When the Japanese invaded in WWII, they officially banned Carakan during their occupation. Today, it's used primarily for decoration. Very few Javanese can read or write this script. The ability to do so is highly regarded.

What makes this script elegant is the fact that pronouncing the characters in the correct order creates a short poem:

Hana caraka
data sawala
padha jayanya
maga bathanga

A very rough translation of this is:

There were two emissaries.
Their strength was equal.
They had an argument.
Here are the corpses.

Instant Wilderness

Fins are freaking scary!

Every surfer will tell you those first few seconds before you identify whether it's a shark or dolphin feel like an eternity. Is it triangular or crescent-shaped? Is it moving up-and-down or side-to-side? If the fin disappears, your eyes are glued to the water's surface to see if it reappears, hoping to God it's one of those animals that need air to survive!

So there I am, alone in the line up. The water's gray and South Jersey murky. A storm just passed, but that creepy feeling hangs around. My high shark alert is making me line up wrong for the few waves that do make it through the wind chop.

Then I see the fin come at me from upcurrent. As always, everything else disappears, and I'm hyper-focused on that swatch of ocean where I last saw the fin. Then I see three more. Definitely a good sign (I think). Dolphins travel in schools, and sharks don't...right? When I finally see one of them drop down the face of a wave, I'm sure I'm in mammalian company.

But I still can't shake that sharky feeling. Those fins are still coming at me, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Dolphin or not, these things outweigh me like three-to-one, each! Being caught in a dolphin migration while I'm the only shark bait in a wetsuit isn't a good feeling. My brain keeps replaying all that Discovery Channel footage of dolphins swimming at the surface being accompanied by large sharks a few yards below. Something makes me feel like the stand-in for the schools of tropical fish being corralled to their premature deaths.

If just one other person were nearby, this would be a really cool experience. I'm not sure why having someone within earshot makes you feel at ease, but it does. A couple of summers ago, an eight-foot shark crept into a crowded line-up. No one panicked. There was almost a party atmosphere, and people were ambivalent about whether to paddle in or not. Any of those people wouldn't have thought twice if they were alone.

I try to catch a wave in, but these fuckers keep dropping in on me. I swear they're worse than shoobies. I wait a couple of minutes for these tourists to move along, but this caravan is miles deep. I'm still not entirely sure if I'm really scared there are sharks down below, or if I think these dolphins are going to use me as a beach ball the way they do with small sea mammals (again, thanks for the regrettable footage, Discovery Channel).

I catch a wave. If I gash one of these assholes with my fin, that's a fight I'll have to face when the time comes. (The prospect of fighting a 500-pound creature and thirty of his closest friends in their natural environment for which they've been engineered for millions of years isn't particularly appealing.) The wave is amazing, and thankfully fish- and mammal-free.

As I chill on the beach, watching the rest of the procession go by, I admit to being a little embarased for my momentary cetaceaphobia. I usually like seeing those sons of bitches in the water, but being close enough to hear them breathe all Vader-like through the tops of their heads did unsettle me. And I don't entirely buy their perma-smiles. There's evil lurking in those skulls, I know it.

But when you're on dry land, it's easy to shake that sharky feeling and laugh at it, the way you and others I've told laugh at me for being scared of Flipper.

As I regain my composure, I realize something: in the middle of crowded South Jersey, I have instant wilderness. I'm not saying that I'm an hour's drive from the great outdoors. I'm saying that one moment I could be in Wawa buying a pepperoni bagel melt, and a two-block walk and five-minute paddle later, I've suddenly dropped a few spots on the food chain. Even residents of Anchorage, Alaska who shoot wolves from helicopters can't say that (mainly because Wawas are a Mid-Atlantic thing).

So to all my friends from the "real America" that give me a hard time for being a city-slicker, I say the best way to commune with nature is to take up a sport where "being eaten" is one of the hazards.

I paddle back out, with my shark alert downgraded to kind-of-high.

How Come Everyone Doesn't Skate to Work?

Recently, I forgot my skateboard in Jersey. For two weeks I had to get around like every other New Yorker, i.e. by walking forever to a subway station, waiting for said subway, and then walking forever from said subway station.

Now I get why New Yorkers are always late!

There's one project site I go to in Alphabet City, way east in Alphabet City. It's practically Brooklyn. I'm not sure if the locals there even know that New York has a subway system since there isn't a station for about a mile radius of this place.

Normally, I can get there in eight minutes on a skateboard. But having been clipped of my wings, my choices were wait for a bus that comes twice an hour and stops every block, or walk.

So I walk. Fucking twenty-two minutes...each way! That's an extra half-hour commuting time I'll never get back for each day I was board-free.

Now, occasionally, I have to travel places beyond reasonable skating range. So I take the subway. But New York isn't London or Paris. There isn't a station every thirty feet. Yes, by US standards, it's a robust network.

But come on, there are definite chinks in the armor: like all points east of Lex and west of Eighth. That's fifty percent of Manhattan.

And even for "short" trips between points within the subway zone, you still have a five- to ten-minute walk from the station at either end of your trip. That's twenty minutes of walking on top of the five-minute wait for the train and the ten-minute—if you're lucky—train ride itself. There's something wrong with having to give yourself forty minutes to travel from SoHo to the Upper West Side. With a skateboard, that commute gets shaved to sub-thirty.

I know a lot of people bike and rollerblade, but they're not as convenient as skateboards. For lunch, are you gonna cart the bike in and out of your building or spend a couple of minutes donning your blades to go to that really good sandwich place six blocks away? No, you're gonna do what most New Yorkers do: pack a crappy lunch or settle for what's on your block.

There are, of course, downsides to the skateboard. I don't get to see much of the city, except for the five feet of asphalt directly in front of me; those pebbles and potholes warrant one's undivided attention.

Every now and then, however, I do get distracted, which brings me to another downside: I officially no longer have any pants without holes in the knees. And I'm talking dress pants here. It's hard for me to get away with torn pin-striped slacks at client meetings. I also no longer have a future in the knee modeling industry.

It's also hard for me to pull off bringing the skateboard to client meetings. But after consistently running ten minutes late, I say "Do you want a presentable but late architect, or do you want a presentable and punctual architect, who happens to have checked a kid's toy at the door?" I usually go sans board for initial meetings and first impressions. Once I hit a certain comfort zone with the team, I then let them know they're dealing with Doogie Houser, RA.

Another downside is that I can't buy nice gloves, ever. It's one thing to tear a pair of jeans every couple of months. I can work with those and make them look a lot more expensive than the $30 I spent on them. But when my gloves double as wrist-guards, I pretty much look at them as disposable hand condoms.

But these are minor inconveniences in a culture that's growing mega-casual anyway. In fact, recently I went to Katie Ford's loft for a Christmas party. I decided to leave the board and skate shoes at home, only to find half the room wearing Chuck Taylors or—more likely—some overpriced derivative thereof. Sure, none of them had ollie wear, but mine would have had street-cred in a part of society that romanticizes the poor.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that office workers in New York need to skateboard to work en masse. No Razors, no Blades, nor any other wheeled cutlery. Just plain old skateboards.

Hopefully, then, the maître d' at Gramercy Tavern will stop looking at me like I'm an asshole.

Ground Zero...And Then Some

So as the years go by, I guess the 9/11 anniversary grabs people's attention less and less. The same is true for me. Apathy's a good sign of recovery.

Now when 9/11 comes, I find myself thinking more about failed foreign policy and how shitty it is that my brother's in Iraq...again. It's becoming harder to remember that the whole thing began with a very specific tragedy, and that our first reactions were good ones. That there was a time when you had to wait in line for hours to give blood. A time when firehouse sidewalks were littered with flowers and candles that never went out. That for a brief while red or blue didn't matter. Nor did black, white, or Hispanic for that matter (brown was still an issue, I'm not gonna lie).

But the battle lines formed again, and the relative political apathy of the '90s gave way to the polarization of the...'00s (did we ever agree on a word for this decade yet?).

However, every year, they put up those lights (The Tribute of Light), and we try to put aside our differences and remember the very tragedy itself, i.e. the loss of 3000 people, even if arguably it would appear the architectural loss is the one being commemorated.

In 2002, I wasn't impressed with the lights. Maybe because the air was clear and the beams of light themselves weren't too visible when I looked. Over the years, though, they've grown on me. And maybe air quality is decreasing thereby yielding much more reflective airborne particulates, but the beams really seem to glow these days.

This year, though, in conjunction with my recent return to running, I decide to commemorate 9/11 by jogging to the lights, roughly two miles each way from my apartment. As I'm still rebuilding my endurance, a four-mile run at fast pace seems like more than enough physical exertion.

I get tired even before I hit Canal Street.

The westward jog on Walker from Bowery to Church Street seems about twenty times longer than how it's drawn on my cognitive map.

But once I turn left on Church, it's a brisk straight-away to Ground Zero. Game on.

My sprinting power decreased over the years. Whether it's age or Doritos, I can't say. But once I hit the crowds of tourists, I get my second wind. Maybe it's that I think that running fast will somehow impress total strangers. The veracity of that is laughable in comparison to the practicality of even bothering to do so in a city where no one even knows their neighbors. But whatever: I know I'm not far from the finish.

So after an all-out sprint down the final stretch, I get to Ground Zero on a empty tank and the closest I've ever gotten to runner's high. When I regain my eyesight, I look up to take in the lights. I'd never seen them up close before, in all six years they've put them up.

And you know what? I'm not seeing them up close now either.

Why the f--k are these lights still really far downtown from me? In all the years I've caught glimpses of them in SoHo's narrow streets, I just assumed they were at Ground Zero? Why would anyone assume otherwise?

So you mean to tell me I still have to keep running? The word "f--k" comes to mind, in its full spectrum of definitions.

How much farther? One block? Wall Street? Don't tell me Battery Park?!

!!!

I somehow will my deflated corpse through the Financial District's intestinal mishmash of non-numbered streets. Gotta love those Dutch.

Normally empty at night, the Financial District is now littered with tourists who themselves can't make up their minds whether they should be walking towards the lights or towards where they know Ground Zero is. I don't know anymore what address I'm looking for, but I do know there'll be two big blue lights there.

Half a mile and many lefts and rights later, I eventually arrive at the base of the lights. Actually, I arrive about fifty feet below the base of the lights. Those damn things are unromantically perched atop a four-story parking garage. I'm too tired to voice the expletives in my head.

But I do concede they are pretty. What I thought were two giant spotlights, are actually many (a subsequent wiki-ing establishes the number to be 88) lights. The drama of seeing them strike the high cloud cover from such a fore-shortened angle would be more intense if there were any blood left in my brain. Instead, I take in the sights and head home.

Of course, I pass by Ground Zero again, now running on fumes. I don't have the energy to formulate a eulogy in my head. The best I can pull off is a slight nod, imperceptable to the naked eye.

So anyway, even if you've seen the Tribute of Lights from afar, make the journey to see them up close. Definitely worth the journey, even if it's a mile longer round-trip than it should be.