So, after a haircut yesterday, I came to terms a very difficult problem.  Its a problem that many people take a long time to confront.  No one wants it to happen to them, but when it does, I think the best thing to do is to be open and honest about it.

I'm losing my hair.

There.  I said it.  To be honest, I knew it was coming eventually.  It was only a matter of time.  It was thin to begin with, particularly upfront.  Now its creeping way up there in the corners and trying to circle back around, cutting off the supply lines to the beleaguered troops on the front lines.  By combing it back in my normal style, I only made it more difficult to hide.  People noticed and had been noticing the thinness for some time.  It would show up in a dimly restaurant if I was sitting directly under a light, which would throw back a bit too much shine for someone without a sparsity issue.  Hairspray and gel became a non-starter.  Can't have these guys clumping up on me...  Not enough to go around.  Spread out guys...  Make the place look crowded.  Can't tell people its a slow night.  Once you lose your customers, there's no bringing them back.
     Well, now that I've come to terms with it, pretty early, to my credit, if I might add, what do I do about it?  Without question, there will be no hats, comb arounds, unders, overs or throughs.  There will be no creams, shampoos, pills, or rinses.  No hair will be brought in from the outside, be it from other places on my body, other heads, animals, or from a lab or factory.  No, we built this franchise from inside and we're not going to get into the business of signing high priced free agents that might not pan out.  I will not have my head become the '93 Mets. 
     No, we're going with what we have, and actually even less than that.  Sometime before dodgeball on Sunday, I'm getting a buzzcut.  This way, I won't have to worry about it.  It will be my way of saying, "Hey, we weren't up to this full head of hair business.  We tried... gave it our best shot, but it just wasn't in the cards.  You know, maternal grandfather and all...  There was nothing to be done about it."
     I'm confident about this decision, too.  You never really see anyone with a buzz that anyone says looks bad.  Thinning hair and attempts to hide it, no matter how valiant, however, always look bad.  So that's it.  This is the way its going to be around here from now on, and there are a lot worse things I could be dealing with.  I'm happy, I'm healthy, and come sometime this week, I'm not going to have very much hair.  Problem?  Not at all.  I'm over it.

When I was in the 7th grade, I had a Valentine.  We dated for six months before we really made out...  lots of hand holding.

When it happened, we broke up soon after.  I really don't think the relationship was ready for that level of physical intimacy.

I had a Valentine in my freshman year of high school...  a sophomore.  She was cool.  She liked the Ramones and the Lunachicks, and she could makeout with gum in her mouth.  I could never find where she was hiding it, but I tried.  I bought her perfume and gave it to her at Mimi's pizzeria on the Upper East Side.  She told me, upon acceptance, that she didn't really wear perfume.  Why she couldn't just graciously accept, I have no idea...  that bothered me and we broke up soon after. 

I often wonder what happened to that perfume.

When I was a senior, I was in the middle of a serious two year high school romance.  Valentine's Day was the end of a long string of relationship capex.  November: Anniversary.  December: Christmas.  January: Birthday.  February: Valentine's Day.  Love was an expensive proposition.

She doesn't talk to me anymore, even though she lives about three blocks away from me now, but there's still something that persists from that relationship:  A black Pink Floyd t-shirt.  Its 10 years old now, and there's not a single hole in it.  I wear it to the gym and its been washed a million times.  Its faded, but like Keith Richards, it cannot be killed by conventional weapons.

As a junior in college, Valentine's Day got me back into a relationship with my best college friend.  I was smitten for two years and she was... well...  looking for a boyfriend.  That lasted until I realized that this wasn't the ultimate culmination of three years of emotional friendship...  but instead a boyfriend beartrap that I stumbled into in the hopes of a tuna sandwich.  Tigers are kind of stupid that way.  Growl.

She'll be getting married later this year.

The year after college, I dated a girl who wanted to change the world.  I made her some kind of fake meat tortilla for Valentine's Day, which she didn't really eat, because it still looked like meat.  I threw myself at her for six months, we dated for six months, got dumped, then tried unsuccessfully to prove to her that she'd regret dumped me by being the best guy on the face of the earth.  This included helping her move to Ohio, where she ultimately fell for her Americorps supervisor. 

I guess getting a girl like that to fall for a guy working for the General Motors Corporation was a bit of a longshot.  Perhaps if we oppressed the weak a little less and curbed some of the polluting, and if she hadn't seen Roger & Me things might have gone differently. 

Damn you Michael Moore.

Last year, I dated a girl who seemed to want to be everyone's Valentine...  like in bars and with guys that she had been with before.  Sketchy sketchy.  I did like her cat, though, and I don't even really like cats.

Her actual cat.  Get your mind out of the gutter.

And now?  And now after all that I've been through, I think I know less about love than I ever did before.  Sometimes, I really thought I knew what I want and other times, I really knew what I want and couldn't get my stupid male mind to accept it.  I go after what isn't good for me, and kick and scream when things seem just right.

I'm not real bright and I'm far from as in touch with this part of myself as I need to be.  Regrets?  I have the growing suspicion that I now have them.  Hope?  Yes, everyday.  I hope for clarity of vision...  to see into myself and understand who I want to be, and therefore, who I want to be with.  The search for others really is a search for self and I think things don't work out when you forget that its just as much about you as it is about the other person.  If you don't have all your ducks in a row, forget about the doves. 

Someone should write the "Art of Love" and model it after the "Art of War."  Know thyself.  I hope I figure it all out one day... and soon, before my ducks and doves start pecking away at each other.

Snowy Stang, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Hopefully, its in the 60's all week, b/c I don't feel like shoveling this out.

Never gonna stop me

Never gonna stop.

Scream if you want in, 'cause I want more.

Rob Zombie - Never Gonna Stop

So Fred doesn't want to live forever.  He finds a life span to be comforting and natural end to the story.  As for me, as long as I'm not feebly old and propped up in a chair or hooked up to anything helping me breathe/eat/use the bathroom, I'd be perfectly happy with it.  I love the life I've constructed for myself and I find death to be a completely inconvenient interruption of that.  Now, of course, if no one ever died, we'd have population overcrowding and disproportionate accumulation of wealth, but besides the societal problems it presents, I think living forever would give you fantastic perspective.  I'll bet you'd be less likely to get caught up in hysterias and fads, because you've seen so much of it before.  You'd also have a higher bar for the people around you, because, while most of us can probably only say we know of two or three really great people, if that many, we'd be able to say that the path of our lives has brought us encounters with dozens of great people, all of whom raise your expectation of the next person you'd meet.

Perhaps you'd also take some more time to do not so much of anything, because you wouldn't feel so rushed.  I think 80 or 85 years isn't really enough, considering you pretty much wasted the first 10-15 of them, and the last 5 probably isn't too productive either.  You sleep a third of it away and then you probably spend a good year of your life brushing your teeth or something ridiculous like that, which is important, but isn't terribly productive in the grand scheme of things.  Given all that, that doesn't leave you much time to get everything done you'd like to... you probably need at least twice that much... at least I do.

I wasn't born with the idea that dying is natural...  and I don't think that many of us think that the current lifespan is acceptable, because we never accept when people just make it.  I mean, how long does a person have to live before most people go, "Oh, well, he lived a full life."   At least 85, if not 90.  Who says someone had a full life when someone makes it to 78?  My Deathclock puts me almost making 86, but I'm going to try and stretch it to at least 90 if I can.  In fact, given that I don't smoke, don't drink, have a positive attitude and eat healthy, I'm going to be pretty pissed if I don't make it to 90. 

PS... I didn't know that Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order:SVU was Jayne Mansfield's daughter.  I was wondering who she was referring to during the Golden Globes and Sam brought it up on her new blog.  You learn something new everyday.

PLEASE READ WHY I POSTED THIS VIDEO

On January 14th, I went down to New Orleans with a bunch of other Fordham alumni as part of the school's Global Outreach Program.

We stayed and did most of our work at Project Lazarus. Project Lazarus is a home for people with AIDS in New Orleans.  It was the first residential home in New Orleans to address the need for homeless people living with AIDS.  Unfortunately, none of the residents are back yet, for several reasons:

• Project Lazarus usually puts on one of the most popular Halloween parties in New Orleans as an annual fundraiser.  Typically, they raise about $400,000.  This past year, they obviously couldn't have it.  That money is lost.
• Like many other buildings, they need a new roof.  Total cost: $96,000.  Plus, even if they had the money, its nearly impossible to get a roofer in New Orleans right now.
• 27 of the 30 personal care workers, the mostly minority women who attend to the residents day to day needs like feeding, changing, etc. had their homes completely destroyed. 

Over the next week or so, I'm going to be putting up some more posts about our trip and some videos that I took as well, but first I'd like to share a video about the devastation that still remains there.  While Project Lazarus was lucky enough not to be in an area heavily damaged by the flood, the areas in this video are where many of the homes of the healthcare attendents that worked there were.  I've really never seen anything like it.  Someone said during our trip, "I can't believe this is the United States."  Plus, its really eyeopening to see that its still like that, months later.

As I write these posts, should you be so inclined to help out Project Lazarus, I've added a little tip jar on the sidebar of my blog.  One thing I realized there was that the only way that NOLA gets rebuilt is one house at a time.  Most of the people I spoke to down there didn't see where all of the donations were going from these larger charities, and while I'm sure they will eventually do some good, sometimes, when you can identify an immediate need in a specific area, you can do a lot of good.

All donations will be sent to Project Lazarus to help get the house back in order and get enough funding to open their doors to the AIDS patients that either temporarily or permanently call it home.  This is especially important as at least one of the other similar residences in New Orleans will not be reopening after the hurricane.

If you'd like to give on your own, that's fine, too.  It doesn't need to go through me, of course, but I will be updating the totals each day.  I guess the nice thing about blogging is that a lot of you have been reading long enough, know me, or know enough people who know me that you have  reasonable trust that this isn't a scam.  In addition, they could use gift cards to such places as Home Depot.  They also need refrigerators, kitchenware, bedding, and furniture to replace those items destroyed by water from the roofs.   

Here's their site again.

Last Friday night, my Fordham Global Outreach team spent the night contributing to the local New Orleans economy on Bourbon Street.  It turned out that Anderson Cooper was broadcasting live from one of the balconies above.  After shouting to him for about a half hour, he came down after his show for a quick photo op.  Here's the video of the Fordham group calling out to him and him snapping a few pictures with us: