"Acres, Visible Horizon..."

I thought the clouds in the winter sky over the Pacific would make for a good CA sunset today.  While nothing like what it looks like in the summer, I still thought it was worth taking some time to document.  Sorry for the iPhone.  I'm not a girl > I don't own a purse > I don't own a decent camera.  Linear.  I hope you still like it.

Onward,

-I Heart Palindromes

I'm Short Volatility

It is like the first day I learned that gravity wasn't real.
As in gravity - the concept I had previously learned - didn't exist.
I learned. 

There is no force that pulls us down.
Apologies to Newton, we know that apple was convincing.
Take solace, you will forever place second in the big derby of apple-trickery
history.

We aren't pulled at all, rather pushed
and not by a friendly mathematical constant
but instead by the planet, or at least the forces upon it,
as it spirals through space
& time.

It is time that fixes you to the place that you are;
which makes sense when you think about it.
Ok, it makes sense when I think about it.
I do think about it.

The concept of time already seems to push many to their freezing point,
I'm talking absolute zero on a particularly windy day,
when it is hard to tell which way is north
and you run aground.  Grounded.
Left to thaw only in time to reflect
on what was, as opposed to what will be.

Does being pushed instead of pulled change things?
It certainly does for me.

I am pulled in a million directions,
pulled back to reality,
pulled up by my boot-straps,
pulled through a storm,
pulled into love.
I am not pushed anywhere.

It is not the surface of Earth but the surface of
time that I am attached to.
I can handle that - time is optionality after all.
I have always been good with the valuation of options.
Just ask Mr. Market.

Word(s)

Words are not created equal.  Neither are ideas, principles or motives.  The former can often skew the perception and acceptance of the latter.  No major newspaper is published above a 5th grade reading level, you know, just to be safe.  The premium placed on brevity is often just laziness all decked-out in efficiency's clothing.  Simplicity is not a virture, it's a complex world out there and Occam's Razor (at least as applied now) was a made up concept.  Sometimes the complex and ugly solution is better than the simple, clean, pretty and - and oh it just happens to be wrong - one. 

Speaking of which, when did all those khaki-wearing Harvard MBAs get control of common parlance?  When did efficiency and synergy devolve into Pavlovian cliches for use in 360 "just tell me the damn bonus figure" reviews?  When did those and their contemporaneously valuable ilk get placed squarely within the ever-expanding box that those HBS kids are so good at thinking outside of?  Well, you know, at least in the exact same way that all the other HBS kids learned how to - in their case studies course, of course.

Is that an unalterable side-effect of all of this Google'ing that college educated masses use to ascertain a rapid defition to every question regardless of complexity?  Good concepts spread so quickly and so completely among those interested enough to evaluate their goodness that they are trampled, stretched, extended and finally over-used, all before they have a chance to ever be great concepts?  That's awfully efficient.  Google is a number you know, well - more a characterization or representation of a number.  At least those kids were Stanford MBAs; they think outside of a different, more colorful box.  It must be all the sun.

Good and great are just fine.  They are decent, much more professional then tremendous or his eccentric cousin stupendous.  I prefer apt; born out of a pragmatic resistance to being uniformly positive of any intellectual exercise.  The heart can never be wrong but the brain is a whole different story.  Apt has context, it possesses reserve, it can go away just as quickly as it showed up.  Apt is also contingently useful, nothing can be absolutely good or always the best tool.  Too much of a good thing, right?  No.  If it is too much it is no longer a good thing.  All things in moderation.  Yes, that's always a good idea.

I like the way the word wasps sounds but it has fairly limited application in my average day.  I really like the word word; something Boondock loved to mock me over.  I use the word fantastic with regularity; which would seem to call into question whether it is always apt.  Perhaps I just encounter that high of a frequency of things that successfully defy disbelief.  Commitment, that's a personal favorite.  Steady, constant, loyal - full of respect and willful adherence.  I don't have a commitment, I make a commitment.  I am not committed to something but rather commit myself to it.  See, those words, they can sneak up on you.

Word,

-I Heart Palindromes

Constant

Good evening, to the sun as it breaks

the plane of the Pacific.  Large and burning like during a harvest

when the optical illusion paints everything

bigger.

That's just dust you know.

It's no bigger or

smaller.

Stable, with gravity playing mason.

The sun is the sun,

foolish to fight it.

Dust is just that, dust.

One Goal

Yes, that is a picture of the back of Coach Q's head.  Yes, my seats were close enough to smell the budding puberty of Patrick Kane.  Yes, you can still tell that Coach Q isn't smiling even when his back is turned to you.

After coming out as flat as Carrot Top's career (yes, there was just a Carrot Top reference, it's still early out here), the Hawks traded goals with the Kings until taking the definitive lead with their 4th goal with about 5:30 to go in the 3rd.  Great game, decent company with Ducatti, CFA and Indy Filmmaker in attendance.  Also, the group of Chicago fans in our section were tremendous.  There is nothing like hearing a south-side Irish accent screaming at a referee that his mother would be embarrassed of that last call while simultaneously teaching his seven year old son when it is appropriate to raise your middle finger and when it isn't, to remind a guy of home.

Always good to get to see the Hawks, even better to see them win, even better-er to see them win in front of loud LA "fans" who pretend to care about a sport that Kobe Bryant doesn't play.

Ed Belfour,

-I Heart Palindromes

"He's got longer arms than I thought..."

Yes, yes he does.  So the Hawks are two for two against the Kings so far this year.  This is much more important than it initially sounds because, as a displaced Chicago sports fan, I can generally only watch Blackhawks Hockey when they play the L.A. Kings.  National television will get me the Cubs, Bears and Bulls once in a while but not the Hawks.  In fact, unless you're in Canada you're not going to get to see any hockey without also having to endure Sidney Crosby's face which is annoying at best and has also been undeniably linked to some forms of personality disorder at worst.

With that said, the Hawks and Kings meet at the Staples Center (aka: the house that Kobe and gang riots built).  I was planning to meet up with Ducatti to watch the game at our favorite Chicago-esque bar in Hollywood.  As an aside, I know what you're thinking, and no there is nothing about this bar or its patrons that remind me of Chicago.  You can't have anything Chicago-esque in Los Angeles, the time-space continuum would collapse in on itself if anyone ever succeeded at that.  In any event, that was all before Uncle 3 of 5 (who has made other appearances in this space for being generally awesome) came through with his four Kings season tickets for me and the three LA based but Chicago-born Hawks fans I met during the course of the Stanley Cup run last year.

This is probably the perfect place to pause and remind everyone that the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup last year.  Oh, and that 2 million people showed up to the victory parade.  Did I mention that they managed not to riot or burn any taxi cabs during said celebration?  Amazeballs.

I digress, back to the real point of all of this:  I am the beneficiary of fortune a lot in life and I should probably be more constantly aware of that.  Uncle 3 of 5 got a leg up early in his adult life due to some brotherly charity from The Legend and now feels the need to repay me for something that I had absolutely no hand in.  I trounce around LA Country Club playing free rounds of golf and sit six rows behind the Blackhawks bench without any real effort on my part.  I am allowed all of these things because I happened to be lucky enough to grow up the son of The Legend.  Now that doesn't mean for a second I'm not going to be putting on my Bobby Hull signed B'Hawks hat (thank you Boondock) and rooting for John Scott to break an LA Kings' jaw, but it does mean that I will know I don't inherently deserve to be there.  I will be toasting to The Legend for the rest of my life, I just hope he's lifting his drink in return.

Slainte.

Da na na na na na...

-I Heart Palindromes

Was that Wesley Snipes?

144,400.  A nice even number that happens to be the number of miles I travelled in an airplane in 2010.  To put that in perspective, that is the equivalent of flying around the world via the equator six times.  Word.  This is why when people tell me that they like to travel I am always a skeptical.  I think most people mean they like to take vacations, which is a little redundant given the inherent nature of a vacation.  I don't like to travel -- I need to travel.  If I have spent three consecutive weekends at home I get nervous, at least I think I did, the one time that happened. 

United Airlines appreciates this affliction.  On my first flight of 2011 (LAS-LAX, if you're curious) the pilot came back before takeoff to shake my hand and thank me for my "loyalty", whatever that means.  He asked me if I was in management consulting, I have to answer that question a lot with United employees.  No, I am not, I work in finance and a good 80% of that first number in this post was logged on weekends, no work travel there.  In fact, outside of at the temptation of seeing Boondock, I rarely use vacation days.  Friday night red-eyes after work are the most common.

I get a lot of odd looks when I try to explain this to people.  Specifically, the people that I work with and for when they realize that I am travelling most weekends, even after travelling during the week.  Why, they ask, do I feel such a need to fly other places when I live three blocks off the beach in a place that a lot of other people (read: Europeans) spend a lot of money to travel to?  I usually try to gloss over that question with something about being young and doing it while I can.  The real reason is both much more simple and much more complicated.  The real reason is that there are people at the other end of those flights that I frankly don't care to replicate.  I don't think I could ever let proximity determine who my best friends are or who I can fall in love with.  Those people are irreplaceable to me and a few hours (or, you know, twelve) on an overnight flight is a small price to pay to see them.  I am lucky enough to live in the first generation that has entered adulthood in a world where global communication, travel and mobility is not just possible, it's almost cheap.  Well, not cheap, I could make the car payments on a V12 Vanquish with what I spend in a year on plane tickets but I can't imagine not doing it.

Yeah, I know, the person who really likes to take vacations and has trouble with jet-lag when they're traversing three time zones domestically is the one who is skeptical now.  I think about this a great deal; what do you get for 144,400 miles in the air in a year?  Should I just stay at home and play more golf on weekends?  What did all of that moving around get me in 2010?

Here goes:

- Getting to see what The Hammer looks like before the sun comes up as he picks me up at IAD after a LAX-IAD red-eye.  There is something particularly priceless about getting to wake up your friends who live a life of leisure at the hours you rise for Mr. Market from the west coast.
- A life-altering relationship with Boondock.  Worth all those miles and then some if you ask me and I'm certainly not asking you.
- A picture of me with a stuffed koala in Sydney, AU.
- An understanding of just how bad modern art is in AU and how lacking in talent the homogeneous island is via their version of Australian Idol.  Painful.
- Dinners with Boondock in Chicago, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, London, Palermo.  Some of the best hours of my life and the conversations that keep me sane.
- Making it back to Chicago for holidays with The Dancing Orange and The Sky is Falling
- Discovering that I heart crumpets -- seriously.
- Getting to tailgate for an MLS soccer game in DC and learn how to swear at other players in Spanish.
- The ability to render The General's 1970's vintage BMW inoperable and then participate in having to lift it into a parking spot for safe-keeping.
- My first ever SEC football game (USC vs. Arkansas) in Columbia, SC (along with the new parlance of "legit nineteen")
- Not nearly enough time on a couch or in bed with a book, The Office & Boondock.
- A round of golf on an ocean-bordered course in Italy.
- Sunday night dinners at the bar
- Watching The Hammer fall into the James River.  Priceless.
- Drinking champagne in New Hampshire with Jr. Investment Banker.
- Cubs games at Wrigley, an irreplaceable part of my life.
- Have I mentioned more time with Boondock yet?
- A disturbing knowledge of booking codes, elite levels, upgrade probabilities.  Also, the ability to make plane travel actually comfortable and enjoyable for those that I love.
...

A fraction, yes, but already more than I could live without.  Sorry Santa Monica, you may be gorgeous, but you aren't all of those things.  Not even close.

We've got the muscle -- We've got the hustle,

-I Heart Palindromes