Category: Uncategorized

01 Feb

I Bent My Wookie

For years I had a lot of random stuff decorating my bedroom, mainly carryovers from things I had in my college dorm room that really had no meaning.

Now when I look around the room, whether I see something on the walls, on my desk or dresser, I can think of at least one story about that object and a person tied to it. I think I’m going to share some of those stories, though it’s very possible I’ll get distracted and this will be the first in a one-part series.

Today I want to tell you about Chewbacca. Anyone worth any pop culture salt knows who Chewbacca is, but you don’t know this one. He’s much smaller, coming in at about 3 inches in height, but don’t let his size fool you. He’s still a badass.

I got Chewie on Monday, December 29, 1997. Before you get too frightened at my awesome recall skillz, I have to admit that on my own I would have at best guessed the year. I was a freshman in high school, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., had an exhibit called “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth” (note the very 1997ness of that website).

In a word, it was awesome. The exhibit had the suits for Chewie and Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, a Stormtrooper and others, along with the models for all the different spacecraft including the greatest ship ever made: the Millenium Falcon.

December 29 was during our Christmas break at school, and I remember my mom and my Nana picking me up from track practice along with my little brother (a huge Star Wars fan). You needed a ticket to get into the exhibition, and thanks to my penchant for collecting stubs from just about everything I’ve ever been to, I still have that one:

After we made our way through the exhibit, we naturally ended up in the special Smithsonian Star Wars gift shop. I browsed around for a little bit looking at the admittedly cool stuff, but there was nothing I couldn’t live without. Nana, however, insisted that she buy me something, so I went over to a series of bins with the smallest items I could find. They were little figurines of all the major characters, and I settled on Chewie, by far the best character in the series.

For a long time he resided on my various desks, but now has a far better home in my quasi-entertainment center guarding the Blu-ray player.

By cjhannas Nana nostalgia Uncategorized
29 Jan

Delicious Victory

It is only fair that I warn you all in advance — my luck in making random bets appears to be back.

I wrote in September about a streak of bad luck regarding wagers with roommate CA. These were $1 bets on things like the number of points that would be scored in a Susquehanna University football game or whether our other roommate would go for a bike ride within two weeks.

But thanks to a bet with a coworker, I feel things have turned around.

During the Christmas season, one of the people in the newsroom decorated her cubicle with Christmas lights. After the holiday passed and the lights remained, my coworker who sits near the festive workspace said she was sure they would be up until at least March.

That sounded plausible to me, but also kind of crazy. So I suggested we bet on it, initially going with the over-under style and me saying the lights would be gone before March. Winner received the breakfast of their choice. I thought that seemed a little too easy, so we switched to “whoever is closer” — I had roughly February 5, and I think my coworker had March 15.

On January 15, I got an email — “what do you like for breakfast?”

My reply: “VICTORY!!!! Which to me tastes like an Egg McMuffin.”

Victory is delicious.

By cjhannas Uncategorized
27 Jan

To Future Bad Decisions

Four years ago my work days started at 2 a.m., which meant having to think a little differently about my routine.

Instead of flipping on the news or SportsCenter while I was getting ready, I watched Conan. If I wanted to get food on the way to work, there weren’t many options, but I had the ability to roll through the Taco Bell drive-thru for breakfast. Fortunately for my health I only did that a few times.

But it did always seem odd that Taco Bell didn’t serve breakfast on a normal person’s schedule. Countless other places offer breakfast burritos, so why wouldn’t they do it too? The line every morning at the McDonald’s down the street from where I live now shows there’s no shortage of people making poor life decisions (I say as a lover of Egg McMuffins). And yet, at the same time the Taco Bell next door is closed.

That may not last. This morning I saw a tweet that both excited and horrified me:

That’s right, Taco Bell is rolling out breakfast — or keeping with their marketing campaign, “First Meal.”

It’s too early to tell if the test markets will be successful enough to make this a nationwide thing. But just in case it does and I get sucked into a world I know I shouldn’t, I’ll go ahead and start working out more now.

By cjhannas food Taco Bell Uncategorized
24 Jan

High-Five

[Note: For sports haters, scroll down for baby-related content]

Before last weekend, I had only ever seen a team I root for play in an opponent’s stadium once, and even that sort of didn’t count.

Shortly after Major League Baseball began interleague play, my family went to see the Atlanta Braves (my former team) at Baltimore’s Camden Yards. I discount that one both because I have swapped allegiances (let’s go Nats!) and because back then I didn’t mind watching the Orioles too.

On Friday, my brothers and I saw the Washington Capitals play the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh. My older brother lives there, so it doubled as a chance to visit. The Caps played disgracefully, but we still had a great time. It was hard to argue with our view, which was much easier to acquire down there than at the Verizon Center:

The real highlight of the trip though was getting a high-five from my niece. The first night we were there she totally left me hanging, which from a 15-month-old is pretty demoralizing. Fortunately I found her weakness — peek-a-boo.

We played a modified version in which she would bring me her blanket and lie down on the ground, then I would put the blanket on her, declare my inability to find her and finally pull it off to everyone’s delight. Of course then she decided to start lying down farther and farther away each time, to the point where I was throwing the blanket as far as I could just to reach her. She found that hilarious.

She was also pretty entertained by looking out the window at the rain. Notice she is sitting on what looks like a toddler-size ottoman. In fact, that’s exactly what it is. Here’s her Uncle Pat testing out the full chair-ottoman combo:

Some would say he’s too big for that piece of furniture, but I would argue that as the baby of my generation, it’s just right.

By cjhannas family hockey Uncategorized
19 Jan

The Squeaky Shoe Gets Replaced

Walking down the polished floor at work earlier this week, a strange noise filled the hallway.

It was the faint sound of my footsteps — nothing more. That may seem like an obvious observation, but given that I was wearing a pair of brown leather shoes, the near silence was a relief.

I got a new pair shoes last weekend, and the quiet walk came during the first day I wore them. The pair they replaced were similar — a different brand and 12 years older, but from a short distance you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference by looking. But your ears would know.

This older pair, which served me valiantly through the years, had one major flaw. The soles would let off a high squeaking noise on any hard floor with the least bit of polish to it. Imagine submerging your shoes in a puddle and walking inside without wiping your feet. That’s what they sounded like at all times — wet or dry.

So it’s nice to now be able to walk without thinking people are judging me to be a delinquent who can’t wipe his feet and without making everyone start to wonder how it could be raining when the weather’s nice.

Out with the old, in with the new

Buying the new shoes was a fun experience. Since I’ve (still) spent more of my working life in the retail footwear industry than anything else, it’s odd to be on the other side of that experience. Little things like being allowed to actually sit down on the benches feel wrong. I even find myself tucking wayward laces into the display shoes and straightening them on the shelves as I walk by.

I wonder if anyone else in retail, or with that background, catches themselves doing those things without thinking, or is compelled to inform the sales associate of their connection to the business. Of course I found a perfectly normally place in our conversation to slip that in — because I’m smooth like that — and it actually set off a whole round of dorky shoe technology talk that I kind of miss from my selling days.

What I miss more is working just down the hall from a Cinnabon and a Taco Bell. Though for the sake of my health, maybe it’s a good thing I don’t work in that mall anymore.

By cjhannas Cinnabon mall shoes Uncategorized
12 Jan

Gooooooooooooal(s)

I’ve never been the type of person to have a five-year plan or a list of 1,001 things to do before I die.

It’s not that there aren’t some things I’d like to do. Rather, I think seeing the utterly unpredictable way in which life played out as those five-year periods passed has made me less prone to trying to plan out what’s coming next.

To some people, like AV, that makes no sense. She has 387 life goals (and counting) and they’re all good ones. I was talking to her about those one day and she naturally asked for mine, and after a lot of thought I reluctantly named my writing project. I say reluctantly because it’s not like I have ever written down that I want to write a book and get it published. I thought of it more as something that would be cool if it happened someday.

But now, you can count it as an official goal because of something AV told me (which I believe her mom told her): A goal is a dream with a deadline. This may be her new favorite thing to tell me. Repeatedly. But that’s a good thing. I have a dream, it’s getting a deadline, so now it counts as a goal.

There may be some others joining it, because again, the list didn’t exist at all before now. Part of what I like about the writing project is that it’s a creative expression, like what I write here, which is far outside the newswriting I do professionally. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a totally committed journalist, but there are lots of times I think I should be doing something more creative with my career.

Enter Mindy Kaling’s book, “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” If you’re not familiar with her, Kaling plays Kelly Kapoor on the NBC show “The Office” and also serves as one of the show’s writers. She is really funny and one of those people who seem to excel at anything.

In the book, Kaling talks candidly about her childhood and the kinds of kids she spent time with growing up. She describes forming bonds with creative people and the process of realizing the types of personalities she has no interest in being around. This, of course, is something we all do, but a lot of her path felt very similar in that regard to my own trek through high school, college and beyond.

There’s something really fun and inspiring about being around people who are into creating things — in whatever format — those who can be a little less linear in their thinking and indulge in silliness at appropriate times without worrying about being judged.

Kaling got noticed when she and her friend wrote and acted in a play about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon having the script for “Good Will Hunting” literally fall from the ceiling in front of them. That is, the two women played Affleck and Damon themselves, with a story that has no basis in reality. But it was a hit. They sold out shows and eventually she got the offer to write for “The Office.”

I’m always fascinated by how others approach the creative process and encouraged when I read or hear things that sound very familiar. Kaling says she has found her “productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight-hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done.” The rest of the time is taken up by things that are in no way important in a to-do list kind of way, but who knows how vital watching YouTube videos of babies dancing is to her final product.

I’m very much the same way, but my procrastination involves things like reading my old blog posts, thinking about going for a run, deciding not to run, updating my Netflix queue and wondering how many more bowls of Cocoa Puffs I can squeeze out of my current box. But whatever, distractions happen. Kaling is proof that in your spare time you can create something great that takes you in a fulfilling direction.

Other things we share:

-Inability to reliably throw a frisbee with any skill
-History of quoting comedic works to our head-shaking mothers
-Diplomas from small-town colleges — “If you’re a kid who was not especially a star in your high school, I recommend going to a college in the middle of nowhere.”
-(Related) Finding your own way as life progresses –“What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also a big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.”

She even supports my one-time life plans involving Natalie Portman: “That’s nice. You can have that. That’s not hurting anybody.”

Thanks, Mindy.

By cjhannas books Uncategorized
08 Jan

Call Me Aunt Clara

When I was a sophomore in college, I purchased a baby-size bunny suit off eBay.

It cost me $4 and has become a fixture of our family Christmas since that first year when I gave it to my little brother. I wanted to get a full-size suit so that he could be just like Ralphie from “A Christmas Story,” but those proved to be prohibitively expensive, so I settled for the mini version.

It was sufficiently funny.

Since then, whoever got it the previous year has passed it on, giving a certain sense of anticipation to every gift you get with the chance of finding a bonus bunny suit inside. Even those who are new to the family get indoctrinated into the tradition, like my sister-in-law Bethany at her first Christmas with us:

But this year, all of my dreams came true. We finally found someone who could actually put this thing on. My niece Madelyn didn’t make the trip for Christmas last year, but this time around not only came, but happened to be the perfect size. Who knew I would pick correctly back in 2002?

Can’t wait to see who she gives it to next year.

By cjhannas Christmas family Uncategorized video
05 Jan

It Is (Being) Written

For some reason when I promise to write about a certain subject “soon” or “next time” that post either never happens or takes weeks to actually appear. This is one of them.

I first mentioned at the end of January last year that my friend AV and I were going to each write a novel, projects we had picked up and put down many times with no real push to actually complete them. Our goal was simple — to nag and support each other through the process in order to make this time different.

She ended up diverting to another goal, but I kept writing, and while neither of us finished 2011 where we thought we would be, we still managed to accomplish things with our projects we never had before. It wasn’t a perfect year, but I would definitely call it a success.

At the time I wrote this post, Microsoft Word said my story had 52,546 words and the little blinking cursor sat near the top of page 88 (single-spaced). When I work on my laptop I use OpenOffice instead, and oddly enough they disagree on what the meaning of “word” is, giving me numbers that are a few hundred apart. I’ve always been obsessed with checking word counts, whether I was writing my sports column for the school paper, or a research assignment for a political science class. Still, I find these number pretty staggering and borderline unreal. Eventually I think I’m going to end up with around 90,000 words. My characters still have a lot they need to do.

Whenever anyone asks what the book is about I rarely have a good, concise answer. The problem is partially that it’s not actually done yet, but with an entire outline in my head it’s hard to sum up all the major and minor pieces before losing the person’s attention. But here goes.

Caleb, the narrator, has a mind-numbing job he’s vastly overqualified for, yet can’t seem to find anything better. He spends frustrating day after frustrating day wasting his life and knowing he’s wasting it. He goes home to find a letter in his mailbox, one with an envelope covered in hand-drawn circles of different sizes. It’s from Sophie, a girl he never expected to hear from after she moved away with her boyfriend, one who grew up on his street and occupied his idle thoughts while she dated guys he never thought were good enough for her.

The story follows their reconnection and explores the ideas of how people respond when their lives aren’t going well, who we push away in the face of adversity and the battle between the urge to dream and the safety of chasing more realistic expectations. Style-wise, think “High Fidelity” and “500 Days of Summer.”

The notebook I use to write on the Metro

As hard as it has been at times, I find this project fascinating. Except for a few short pieces in a high school creative writing class I’ve never really written any fiction before. My day (or night rather) job is exactly the opposite, so it’s fun to be able to completely control what happens in my little made-up town and have my characters say whatever I want them to say (within reason, or course).

I hit a very rough portion late in the summer when it became clear that the first 50 pages or so needed a major overhaul. Thanks to some excellent advice/cheerleading from AV, I slashed a bunch of stuff that wasn’t working and added back in new sections including two extra characters who have now become pretty vital parts of the story. I’ll have to do a lot to what I’ve written since then, but at least this time I think I’m on a pretty good path already.

Before this project the thing about fiction that scared me the most was the prospect of writing dialogue. Now? It’s my favorite. I could literally write a conversation between Caleb and Sophie all day. Hopefully that’s a good sign about them as characters, but I find myself in some sections telling the two of them to wrap it up so I can move on. The people at Starbucks don’t find that weird at all.

That’s another thing I’ve learned — I write in public places far better than I do at home. I think there’s some aspect of social pressure at work, since if you have a laptop or notebook in front of you people think it’s odd if you just sit there. So I write.

Hopefully I’ll be done in the somewhat near future so I can move onto the editing stages and whatever comes after that. I’ll keep you posted. Though given my track record on this one, that may take a while.

By cjhannas handwriting Uncategorized writing
29 Dec

Elegy for a Deli

This morning on my way home from work I took what can definitely be described as the “scenic route.”

Instead of going to the Metro station a block and a half away, I went to a station much farther down the line, walking down the National Mall past museums, monuments and the White House on the way.

The Mall leading up to the Washington Monument

I used to take walks similar to this all the time. A few years ago both during a period in which I was unemployed and then later when my combination of a part-time job and a freelance gig left me with Fridays off, I made a point to go into DC a few times a month.

I didn’t have any grand objectives, just to see and experience things on my day off that might in some way enrich my life. Having grown up in this area and spent a lot of time at the various museums, I’ve seen pretty much all of the permanent collections at the major spots. So before I left each time, I would browse the various museum websites and find one or two new exhibits that had just opened that seemed somewhat interesting.

Maybe half the time these trips also included lunch with my friend who worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, near the White House. I sent her this picture this morning, and told her that I considered stopping into her favorite lunch spot nearby to see if they served breakfast as well:

The Corcoran Gallery

It was called Heidi’s Brooklyn Deli, and the food and the atmosphere were everything you could ever want from that type of place. My friend could not say enough good things about how nice they were and how she made a point to observe “Heidi’s Fridays.” That’s how I ended up going there so much.

She told me a story once about how she stepped up to order her favorite sandwich — let’s call it the Lewis, since I don’t remember the name — and the guy behind the counter said, “I’m Lewis!”

[I’m now told it was a Cajun turkey with avocado sandwich. “The best!!!!”]

She was so excited to have met the guy who created it, the kind of experience you do not get at Subway. That’s why it was so sad to get her reply message this morning: “Heidi’s has been closed almost a year!”

So long, Heidi.

By cjhannas DC food Uncategorized
27 Dec

Chip of Love

A company comes out with a chip you implant on the inside of your wrist, and when your true love gets a chip as well, a clock on both begins ticking down the time until you first meet.

That’s the premise of the movie “Timer” which examines the struggles of people navigating a world in which a computer is basically telling them whom to love. The results vary widely, from one woman whose clock shows she won’t meet her man until she’s in her 40s to a 14-year-old kid whose chip reports he will meet his future wife almost immediately.

The movie (available on Netflix instant) brought up a lot of questions, mainly would you want to know? How much of that experience is the search, the trials and errors, the hopes and disappointments that make you appreciate someone in a way you wouldn’t without that journey? (Of course speaking entirely hypothetically since as a single guy I can’t actually attest to that.) Those failures shape us, and make us the person we are when new people come into our lives, and when that “one” person shows up, it seems like we should aspire to have been affected in ways that crystallize that self. To quote an Adele song, “Regrets and mistakes, they’re memories made.”

If there’s a display on your wrist that says you have four years until you meet your match, you might be inclined to close yourself off and eschew any relationships. But that’s another question — should you? Is it “cheating” if you carry on a relationship knowing that your true love has been identified and is not that person? Does it matter if the clock says four days instead of four years? The characters in the movie are mixed on this one, but the ones with longer countdowns are more inclined to date other people.

Another issue is that not everyone has a chip. At $79.99 to install plus a monthly fee, it’s not possible for everyone to get one, but there are also plenty of people who willingly choose to do without one. They hate the idea of turning over that bit of humanity to a computer, or don’t trust that the system is actually producing the result it claims. After all, how much of the “success” is that people want to believe it works? If you get a chip then you are predisposed to buying in, so when the chip says the person you just passed in the grocery store is your future mate, you aren’t going to question whether that should actually be the case.

At best, it’s a comfort knowing that there is in fact someone out there who will love you. At worst it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that ultimately alters the entire future of the world by pairing together people who would otherwise never be in a relationship.

For the characters with no reading on their clock, and even some with many years left to wait, the reactions they face are actually much the same as those experienced by people in real life whose friends and family have all gone off and gotten married. There are the platitudes of “it will happen one day” and “they’re out there somewhere.” The main character’s mother can’t help but try to set up her daughter with man after man in hopes he’ll be the one. They are more likely to be the doubters, whether through frustration of seeing no results or not wanting to believe in a system that would make them wait so long to find love. And yet at the same time, they’re faced every day with people close to them espousing the benefits of the same system and showing how happy they are with their love.

Then there are the couples who got married outside of the system — the old-fashioned way, with no technology telling them which person was right for them. What if they get chips? Is it worth the risk of the incredibly low odds that you actually picked the right person, or is it imperative to know whether there’s a more-right person out there?

I guess it just comes down to the original question — would you want to know?

By cjhannas life plans movies Netflix Uncategorized